Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In T. S. Eliot's pageant-play The Rock (1934), the Chorus retells the biblical story of the creation of the world and the incarnation of Christ, and then pauses: But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. ( Eliot 1952 : 108) Eliot bemoaned the rise of atheism, but also the replacement of the Christian God with new “gods,” the abstract intellectual forces like Dialectic and the earthly values like Money that seemed to him to have replaced religion for the modern age. Eliot's conversion to Christianity and baptism in the Church of England in 1927 offer the most famous example of the modernists' quest for religious alternatives to what Eliot himself had called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history” ( Eliot 1975 : 177). Many modernists, like Eliot, adhered to traditional religious beliefs; among those who did not, the problem of what would replace revealed religion remained a pressing concern. Wallace Stevens, a Lutheran who is said to have converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, wrote in 1940, “It is a habit of mind ... log in or subscribe to read full text