Heraclitean logos and flux in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: “cosmic

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Heraclitean logos and flux in T.S. Eliot’s

Four Quartets: “cosmic consciousness”

and “the still point of the turning world”

Andries Wessels

Department of English

University of Pretoria

PRETORIA

E-mail: awessels@postino.up.ac.za

Abstract

Heraclitean logos and flux in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “cosmic consciousness”

and “the still point of the turning world”

T.S. Eliot prefaces “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets, with two

quotations from the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. By means of these

epigrams, Eliot points us to the Heraclitean opposition and paradoxical

interdependence between logos and flux as a paradigm in the poem, a

paradigm that he uses for an investigation and articulation of a number of

philosophical contemplations. In this paper, I discuss Eliot’s different

configurations of the logos/flux paradigm in the poem, firstly to illuminate

the relationship between temporality and eternity, secondly, to elaborate

the relationship between God and humanity, and thirdly to express the

relationship between structured art and chaotic experience. In each

instance it is not only the opposition between the two elements that is

important, but also the point of contact, the intersection. There is some

evidence that Eliot’s depiction of this intersection as, for example, the

“moment in and out of time”, is based on personal experience of a

transcendent, mystical nature. His expression of this experience is also

investigated by comparing it to similar experiences described by others,

notably by a Canadian psychiatrist, Richard Maurice Bucke. A comparison

of Bucke’s description in his evolutionist text of 1901 and Eliot’s poetic

rendering reveals not only surprising similarities but also essential

differences which highlights Eliot’s purely Christian interpretation in the

face of Bucke’s more universalist approach. For T.S. Eliot, eternity or

timelessness can only be accessed through the temporal experience of

human consciousness, in fleeting moments of exaltation in daily life, in the

charged, timeless configurations of art as an imitation of divine creation,

and finally in Christ, who embodies the love of God and is for Eliot the

ultimate transection of the temporal and eternal, the flux and the logos.

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572 Koers 66(4) 2001:571-584

1. Introduction: Heraclitus’s notions of logos and flux

T.S. Eliot prefaces “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets, with two

quotations from the 6th to 5th century B.C. Greek philosopher, Heraclitus

and most commentators agree that the epigrams are as applicable to the

work as a whole as to the first quartet (e.g. Smith, 1974:255). These

epigrams have been translated in many ways, among which “Although

the logos is universal, most people live as if they had an understanding

of their own” and secondly, “The way up and the way down are one and

the same” (cf. Barnes, 1987:101, 103) are fairly standard renderings. By

means of these epigrams, Eliot points us to the Heraclitean opposition

and paradoxical interdependence between logos and flux as a paradigm

in the poem, a paradigm that he uses for an investigation and articulation

of a number of philosophical contemplations in the work. This article

focuses on Eliot’s different configurations of the logos/flux paradigm in

the poem.

For Heraclitus, although flux or constant change characterizes existence,

there is nevertheless a universal, identifiable logos, a form, or harmony,

or pattern, imminent in existence. In his Outlines of the History of Greek

Philosophy, Zeller (1963: 45-6) explains the Heraclitean notion of flux:

... it was the unceasing change of things, the instability of all individual

things that made so strong an impression on Heraclitus, that he saw in

this the general law of the universe and could only regard the world as

something in incessant change and ever subject to new modifications.

Everything flows and nothing is permanent: one cannot step twice into

the same river (Fr 91) ... everything passes into something else and is

thus seen to be something that assumes different shapes and passes

through the most varied states.

Heraclitus nevertheless perceives the world – in its condition of flux – as

being held together in a state of balance, in “opposite tension which

holds the world together” (Burnet, 1978[1914]:49). According to

Heraclitus the world is generated by fire and consumed by fire,

alternating in fixed patterns throughout the whole of time (Barnes,

1987:107), so that there is an ultimate order or pattern or harmony (the

logos) which transcends the continuous change within existence.

2. The first configuration: eternity and sequential time

Four Quartets has often been described as a meditation on time. The

first configuration of the logos/flux paradigm in the poem involves the

relationship between time and eternity. Eliot identifies the human

experience of sequential time, which he effectively illustrates by the

metaphor of an underground train (in “Burnt Norton”") or a flowing river

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(in “The Dry Salvages”), with flux, constant change, as one second ticks

over into the next, while he equates the logos, which literally means

“word”, but is usually taken to suggest “reason” or “science”, or as we

have seen, transcendent “order” or “pattern”", with eternity or time-

lessness.

He introduces the theme of time in the familiar opening lines of “Burnt

Norton”:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:189)

In this passage, Eliot depicts the interrelatedness of our conventional

concepts of present, past and future, to the point of dissolving the

traditional divisions between them, but instead of arriving at a state of

grace in spiritual timelessness, he is confronted by a problem, that

redemption – which in its Christian sense is a process of confession,

forgiveness and consequent salvation – is not possible outside of

sequential time which is a requirement for progressive actions: “If all time

is eternally present, all time is unredeemable”; if all sin is eternally

present, all sin remains unredeemable. He thus suggests that even

spiritually, mortal mankind needs the “enchainment” of sequential time in

order to enjoy the possibility of redemption from the constriction of time,

which is mortal life. The level of complexity of this issue is raised by

bringing the “might have been” past, the road not taken – which,

according to the orthodox notion of time as succession, can only be an

abstraction (as the sequential moment of possible fulfilment passes for

ever more) – also into the equation. If divisions of time are dissolved, the

“might have been” also remains an eternal possibility. His conclusion that

“What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is

always present” may not suggest, as many readers have concluded (cf.

Klein, 1994:28), that the present is the only inevitable reality or outcome

of all real or possible pasts since it is actual, but instead that the actual

past and the potential past stand in the same perpetual relationship to a

deeper, ever-present reality, in other words, to eternity “which is always

present”. This is Eliot’s equivalent to the logos.

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The flux/logos sequential time/eternity parallel is extremely effective as

Heraclitus suggests that the logos can only be detected through the flux

(being is intelligible only in terms of becoming), and Eliot makes the point

that for humanity eternity can only be perceived from the vantage point of

sequential time: “Only through time time is conquered”. Ronald Tamplin

(1987: 155) elucidates, “Time is necessary as the place of access but is

otherwise only a distraction”.

The central image introduced in “Burnt Norton” II for this interrelationship

between flux and logos, time and eternity, is that of the wheel or spinning

world (implying sequential time or flux or constant change) which moves

around a central point or infinitesimal axis (the logos or timelessness),

which though part of the spinning mechanism, is nevertheless still,

motionless, at the very heart of the movement, reconciling change into

stillness, sequential time into eternity:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:191)

The still point of the turning world, the centre, is thus outside of move-

ment but is also the core of the movement.

Eliot uses “the dance” as a symbol for the “unmoving motion of the

timeless” (Bergsten, 1973:90) and this image of dancing implies pattern,

harmony and therefore correlates neatly with the classical concept of the

logos, with which Eliot equates it. Klein (1994:27) relates the dance

image to the movement of dancers around a maypole, commenting that

“the sensual ritual of motion is the only tangible way in which the

existence of the still point can be expressed”.

As Eliot elaborates the basic logos/flux paradigm in its different con-

figurations, he consistently suggests that the intersection or link between

the two is significant. This intersection is represented in the time/eternity

configuration by what Eliot calls “the moment in and out of time” (Eliot,

1974[1963]:213). From what appears to be personal experience (cf.

Murray, 1991:9

; Spencer, 1999:259), Eliot sketches in the poem a

number of timeless moments, where eternity and temporality intersect

within the temporal existence of the individual. The first such moment is

1 Eliot remarked that in the composition of Four Quartets he was “seeking the verbal

equivalents for small experiences he had had and for knowledge derived from

reading” (Murray, 1991:9).

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described metaphorically in the opening movement of “Burnt Norton”.

The extract deals with a visit of a man and a woman to the rose-garden

of the manor house of Burnt Norton in Gloucestershire (Gordon,

1998:266), where a dry pool is miraculously or symbolically filled with

water in a moment of transcendent exaltation:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:190)

In the second movement of “Burnt Norton”, Eliot ponders this experience

of the intersection of time and eternity in the rose garden:

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:191-192)

Eliot consistently depicts these moments in terms of the reconciliation of

opposites, which is in accordance with Heraclitus’s notion that the

underlying connection between opposites is a significant manifestation of

the logos. It also correlates to St. John of the Cross’s mystic meditations,

which also describe the achievement of union with God in terms of an

accumulation of paradoxes (Lobb, 1993:30, Brooker, 1993:96).

The moment “in and out of time” is a moment that occurs in the ordinary

life of some ordinary people – in a lecture Eliot referred to it as “a

crystallization of the mind” accessible to many people who are not

mystics (Kwan-Terry, 1992:161) – in which such people experience

eternity, the absolute, the sublime. William Klein (1994:27) describes it

as personal time and eternal time becoming one, while Denis Donoghue

(1993:7) characterizes it as a moment in which “existence and essence

seem to be one and the same” and call it “an epitome, a sample of the

ultimate experience, beatitude, the Heaven of God’s presence”. In the

next few lines in the poem, Eliot continues his contemplation of the

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moment of illumination, of true “consciousness” and explains the need for

temporal existence as a platform of access to eternity in our mortal state:

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future

Allow but little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future

Only through time time is conquered.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:192)

2.1 The first configuration and Bucke’s “cosmic consciousness”

The use of the term “consciousness” to describe the intersection of the

temporal and eternal, the momentary experience of the divine by mortal

man, is significant. I have stated that Eliot’s depiction of the “moment in

and out of time” appears to be rooted in an actual experience of spiritual

exaltation, rather than being merely a philosophical elaboration of a

theoretical paradigm. This is supported by the evidence that a number of

people – some very privately and others more publicly – have described

such personal experiences of a glimpse of eternity within the boundaries

of common existence, and in very similar terms to those of Eliot’s poetic

configuration in Four Quartets. One such person is the Canadian

psychiatrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, who in 1901 published a book that

soon overcame its initial obscurity to acquire something of a cult interest,

going through many editions in its first fifty years. (Despite the initial

popularity of his book, Bucke is in himself not a very significant figure, but

his writing serves as a very useful foil to highlight certain aspects of

Eliot’s elaboration of the logos/flux paradigm in Four Quartets.) Bucke’s

book is called Cosmic Consciousness and in it, Bucke, a strong

evolutionist, posits the theory that mankind is about to evolve to a higher

level of consciousness (Bucke, 1946[1901]:3), which has so far been

experienced only briefly by a small selection of people, all of whom,

however, describe the experience in surprisingly similar terms. The

experience, or higher level of consciousness, involves a sense of the

oneness of the universe and of the presence of the Creator, an

“intellectual enlightenment” and “moral exaltation”, feelings of “elevation,

elation, joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense”, a “sense of

immortality” and a “consciousness of eternal life” (Bucke, 1946[1901]:3).

This is further accompanied by an awareness that love is at the centre of

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the universe (Bucke, 1946[1901]:10) and that all things, including that

which in our normal state of consciousness would appear to us to be evil,

inevitably work to the eventual good, which is the essential quality of the

universe and its Creator, of which we are all part (Bucke, 1946[1901]:5).

It is clear that the experience of spiritual exaltation that Bucke cites as his

own, and which he then further explores in the lives and writings of other

figures whom he deems to have had the same experience of spiritual

exaltation (like Buddha, Christ, St. Paul, Mohammed, Dante, Bacon,

Blake and Whitman, as well as contemporaries whom he had personally

interviewed on the experience) correspond in surprising detail with Eliot’s

description of the “moment in and out of time”. (What is interesting to

South Africans is that Field Marshall Jan Smuts also confessed to a

similar experience in his private correspondence and confirmed his

solidarity with Whitman in this respect [Wagener, 1995:211-212; Beukes:

1994:66-68].) As far as the similarity between Eliot’s writing and Bucke’s

experience is concerned, Bucke’s “intellectual enlightenment” corres-

ponds to Eliot’s “... concentration without elimination, both a new world/

And the old made explicit, understood”, while Bucke’s “elevation, elation,

joyousness” is echoed by Eliot’s “Erhebung (i.e. elevation or exaltation)

without motion” and “the completion of its [the world’s] partial ecstasy,/

the resolution of its partial horror”; so, also, the whole temporal/ eternal

paradigm in Four Quartets relates to Bucke’s “sense of immortality”,

“consciousness of eternal life” and “Brahmic bliss, leaving thenceforward

for always an aftertaste of heaven” (Bucke, 1946[1901]: 10). Even

Bucke’s more controversial assertion that this experience is cha-

racterized by an awareness that all things – including that which in our

normal state would appear to us to be evil – inevitably work to the

eventual good, which is the essential quality of the universe and its

Creator, is echoed in Eliot’s references in “Little Gidding” to the writings

of the Medieval mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich,

Sin is behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of things shall be well

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:219)

which he takes up again in the conclusion of the final Quartet:

All shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:223)

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Bergsten (1973:239) comments on these lines from “Little Gidding”:

The transfiguration of human life and history in the timeless pattern

[logos] must also involve a resolution of the antithesis of good and evil

... This quotation from the Revelations of Julian of Norwich is the

answer she received to the question how the existence of sin was to be

reconciled with a good and righteous God .... [In] quoting Dame Julian

he indicates that in the divine order of things there is a place even for

that which appears evil.

Smuts (quoted in Beukes, 1994:68), without any reference to Eliot’s

poem, expresses the same notion, derived, it seems, from the same

experience, very clearly, and integrates it into his holistic philosophy of

life:

Evil becomes an ingredient in the final good which we attain on the

higher synthesis or integration of life. Holism seems to imply this deeper

spiritual view of the universe. Evil is not extrinsic to it, but, in some way

difficult to comprehend, natural to it and a constituent element in it. The

great lesson of experience is to absorb, transmute and sublimate evil

and make it an element to enrich, rather than a dominant factor to

dominate life.

The central position of love that Bucke accords this state of heightened

consciousness, is endorsed by Eliot in “Burnt Norton” V when he closely

associates love with “the moment in and out of time” and “the still point of

the turning world”: “Love is itself unmoving,/ Only the cause and end of

movement” (Eliot, 1974[1963]: 195) and in “East Coker” V: “Love is most

nearly itself/ When here and now cease to matter” (Eliot, 1974[1963]:

203), which clearly identifies divine love with timelessness, stillness, the

logos, the Absolute or God. Marianne Thormählen (1994:128) com-

ments,

Much that is said in the Quartets is tentative ... But love is the central,

immutable power, the heart of the still point, the heart of light; nothing

temporal can touch it, but it touches us everywhere, in and out of time.

3. The second configuration: God and humanity

It is thus clear that from the time/eternity representation of the flux/logos

paradigm, it is only a short step to its next configuration in which the

logos is identified with eternal God, flux with mortal man and the

intersection between them with Christ, God as man. This second

configuration of the paradigm is suggested by the charged image of the

axle-tree in “Burnt Norton” II (“Garlic and sapphires in the mud/ Clot the

bedded axle-tree”) which clearly refers to the cross as well as to the “still

point of the turning world” further on in the same movement (cf. Klein,

1994:28), and is confirmed in “The Dry Salvages” V, where, in discussing

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“the moment in and out of time” (Eliot, 1974[1963]:212-213), the poet

elaborates:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:213)

This configuration of the logos/flux paradigm is already anticipated in

Eliot’s 1934 work, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”, in which Christ’s incarna-

tion – the ultimate transection of the temporal and the eternal – is

described in very similar terms, also suggesting the equivalence of the

divine Incarnation to the “moment in and out of time” as intersections of

the temporal and eternal:

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of

time,

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:

transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but

not like a moment of time,

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for

without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time

gave the meaning.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:177)

This configuration is of course also endorsed or perhaps inspired by the

opening lines of the Gospel according to St. John: “"In the beginning was

the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”,

in which Christ is conceived of as the logos within the flux of life and

existence.

3.1 The second configuration and Bucke’s “cosmic conscious-

ness”

In 1937, between the publication of “The Choruses from ‘The Rock’” and

the third Quartet from which the above two passages are quoted, Eliot

wrote about the centrality of the Incarnation in his personal theology:

I take it for granted that Christian revelation is the only full revelation;

and that the fullness of Christian revelation resides in the essential fact

of the Incarnation, in relation to which all Christian revelation is to be

understood (quoted in Bergsten, 1973:47).

This statement brings us to the essential difference between Eliot’s

treatment of “the moment in and out of time”, the phenomenon of

incarnation, and Bucke’s experience of the same thing, which he calls

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580 Koers 66(4) 2001:571-584

“cosmic consciousness”. Both agree that love is central to the

experience. Bucke (1946[1901]:10) states that “cosmic consciousness”

brings about the certainty that “the foundation principle of the world is

what we call love and that the happiness of everyone is in the long run

absolutely certain”, which, as I have indicated, comes close to Dame

Julian of Norwich and Eliot’s “All shall be well and/ All manner of things

shall be well”(Eliot, 1974[1963]:223), but with the essential difference that

for Bucke the universal advent of “cosmic consciousness” will herald the

end of religion as we know it and of religious differences (even though

there will be ubiquitous certainty about the existence of God and eternal

life (Bucke, 1946[1901]:5)), while Eliot interprets the experience in purely

Christian terms. For him the love at the centre of these experiences is

“Love” with a capital “l”, Love as Christ, or Christ as Love, in the meta-

physical tradition of Herbert’s poetry, as he makes clear in “Little

Gidding” IV:

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre

To be redeemed from fire by fire,

Who then devises the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]: 221)

While the love that dominates the intersection of time with the timeless is

thus clearly perceived in a spiritual context by Eliot, it is interesting that

these moments of illumination are not divorced from human, perhaps

even sexual love. As I have indicated, the first “moment in and out of

time” described in the Quartets is set in the rose garden of the manor

house of Burnt Norton,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:190).

These lines were inspired by a visit that Eliot made in 1934 or 1935 to

Burnt Norton with a former beloved, the first love of his youth, Emily Hale

(Gordon, 1998:265-70; Williamson, 1991:160-161), during which the

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former lovers experienced such harmony and fulfilment, that, we can only

gather, it precipitated Eliot’s glimpse of eternity. Lyndall Gordon (1998:

268) comments: “The rapport is so acute that the ghosts of their former

selves seem to walk towards a moment that transcends love with a

glimpse of eternal ‘Love’, the still point of the turning world ...”. As

sequential time provides an essential platform of access to glimpses of

eternity, so, it seems, romantic love provides a platform of access to

eternal “Love” as embodied in Christ. (It is interesting that Bucke

(1946[1901]:9-10) likewise describes his experience of cosmic con-

sciousness as occurring after a particularly heart-warming night of

amicable congeniality.) The term “heart of light” which Eliot uses in his

rendering of the moment in and out of time, also occurs in The Waste

Land, written thirteen years before, to describe an earlier romantic en-

counter in a hyacinth garden:

Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:64)

These lines were likewise inspired by Emily Hale (Gordon, 1998:82), and

the earlier encounter forms a nostalgic moment of emotional relief in the

otherwise grim quest for spiritual meaning, described in The Waste Land.

It thus appears that though Eliot spiritualizes the sense of love that

attends the moment of illumination in a more radical way than Bucke

does, it is not divorced from, but rather precipitated by an intense

experience of human or romantic love.

4. The third configuration: art and sequential human

experience

The third configuration of the logos/flux paradigm in the poem pertains to

art. This configuration forms another clear equivalent to the time/eternity

relationship, taking up the idea that a work of art – as notably exemplified

in Keats’s Grecian urn – can also represent an overcoming of the

ravages of sequential time. Steve Ellis (1991:15) has pointed out that

Eliot was influenced by the “prevailing aesthetic of abstraction” in

England during the 1930s, and quotes the artist Ben Nicholson as stating

in 1934, “painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what

we are all searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity”

(Ellis, 1991:16). Art becomes another manifestation of the logos, of

infinity or eternity, of the still point of the turning world. Eliot explicates

this idea in the last movement of “Burnt Norton”:

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Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is living

Can only die. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.

(Eliot, 1974[1963]:194)

Eliot suggests that words and notes, like everything in our world, are

subject to time and extinction, and that only by imposing or retrieving a

pattern, i.e. logos, can this “mortality” be overcome. When notes or

words or designs are cast into an artistic mould by the artist, the process

of artistic creation wrests the words or music from transience and the

work becomes eternal or immortal, so that even when the notes are not

physically played, or the words read, the work of art exists, conceptually,

aesthetically, and is not subject to passing seconds, so that “the end

precedes the beginning,/ And the end and the beginning were always

there/ Before the beginning and after the end”. Art then becomes another

emblematic representation of the eternal, of the “still point of the turning

world”. Ellis (1991:50) comments,

It is true that in ‘Burnt Norton’ we have the still and moving paradox, as

in the Chinese jar itself, but here it seems to me that the idea of

movement is much more easily accommodated within an overall

stability of form; the motion of the jar inscribes a harmonious circle, so

to speak, which can thus be equated with stillness ...

and adds that the jar “represents metaphysical presence, rather than

absence, at the still centre” (Ellis, 1991:86). He thus suggests the work of

art as a parallel to the “dance” at the still point of the turning world, or

what Eliot calls “consciousness”: “To be conscious is not to be in time”

(Eliot, 1974[963]:192).

5. Conclusion: “The still point of the turning world”

The flux/logos paradigm is elaborated in Four Quartets in three major

configurations, transient human experience which can be immortalized in

art through the process of artistic creation, sequential time and eternity

which intersect in the fleeting but significant moments “in and out of

time”, and ultimately in human/mortal existence versus divine/immortal

existence, intersected in the incarnation of Christ, God as man, the

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essentially eternal in human and temporal form. For T.S. Eliot the centre

can only be located through the periphery, the axis “at the still point of

the turning world” can only be reached through the spinning wheel;

eternity or timelessness can only be accessed through the temporal

experience of human consciousness, in fleeting moments of exaltation in

daily life, in the charged, timeless configurations of art as an imitation of

divine creation, and finally in Christ, who embodies the love of God and

is for Eliot the ultimate transection of the temporal and eternal.

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Key concepts:

cosmic consciousness

Four Quartets

Heraclitus; mysticism

T.S Eliot

Kernbegrippe:

Four Quartets

Herakleitos; mistiek

kosmiese bewussyn

T.S. Eliot