T. S. Eliot's Review of the New English Bible NT (1962)

I just posted an audio reading of T. S. Eliot's review of the New English Bible NT which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on December 16, 1962 (p. 7).  Listen to it here.  Read it here.

Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot (1888-1965) was an essayist, poet, play-write, publisher, and literary critic, perhaps best known for his poems like The Waste Land (1922). Though born in the US he became a naturalized British citizen in 1927.  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.  Eliot also converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism in 1927.  Whatever his spiritual beliefs might have been, Eliot was an admirer of the Authorized Version (King James Version) for its religious, liturgical, and, especially, literary merits.

In this essay he bemoans the fact that the NEB does not even rise to the level of "dignified mediocrity."  In general he questions whether the English language has undergone such drastic changes as advocates for modern translations assume and argues that some changes might just be for the worse, noting, "it is as much our business to attempt to arrest deterioration and combat corruption of our language, as to accept it."  To use the NEB liturgically, he suggests, will only make it "an active agent of decadence."

JTR 

Eliot: Machinery, Society, and Man's End

Image:  T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

I just finished T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Idea of a Christian Society.” It includes a broadcast talk Eliot did in 1937 as an Appendix. His closing thoughts in the talk on “machinery,” society, and man’s end, brought to mind how this might be applied to contemporary technological advancements (e.g., the internet, etc.).

Any machinery, however beautiful to look at and however wonderful a product of brains and skill, can be used for bad purposes as well as good:  and this is as true of social machinery as of constructions of steel.  I think that, more important than the invention of a new machine, is the creation of a temper of mind in people such that they can learn to use a new machine rightly.  More important still at the moment would be the diffusion of knowledge of what is wrong—morally wrong—and of why it is wrong.  We are all dissatisfied with the way in which the world is conducted:  some believe it is a misconduct in which we all have some complicity; some believe that if we trust ourselves entirely to politics, sociology or economics we shall only shuffle from one makeshift to another.  And here is the perpetual message to the Church:  to affirm, to teach and apply, true theology.  We cannot be satisfied to be Christians at our devotions and merely secular reformers all the rest of the week, for there is one question that we need to ask ourselves every day and about whatever business.  The Church has perpetually to answer this question: to what purpose were we born?  What is the end of Man?

T. S. Eliot on Religious Liberalism

Image:  T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

In March 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot gave three lectures at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, later published as the essay “The Idea of a Christian Society.”

In the opening chapter of the essay, Eliot offers this description of religious liberalism:

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized as a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack.  But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and nowhere to go.

JTR