“After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?” T. S. Eliot’s Search for Salvation

Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. [1]

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. [2]

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, the last of seven children in a transplanted Bostonian/English immigrant family. [3] Among his esteemed ancestors were a missionary preacher, a Harvard University president, and the founder/chancellor of Washington University. His father was a prosperous brick-maker. His mother, a poet and deeply religious, raised him to practice self-denial to the point that he felt guilty for enjoying any pleasure, harmless as it may be, for the rest of his life. Suffering from a congenital hernia, young Tom turned his attention to his books instead of social sports and games. From the beginning, Eliot was painfully aware of his own sinfulness and the need for atonement. Yet it would take him years of battling the angst, skepticism, and disillusionment prevalent in the early twentieth century to find the peace that had eluded him.

O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint. If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it?

Time for you and time for me,
And yet time for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. [4]

Eliot attended Harvard, completing his bachelor’s degree in 1909 and his master’s in English literature in 1910. In 1911, he visited London, Munich, and Italy, finishing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady.” After a year at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Eliot returned to Harvard as a philosophy graduate student, completing his PhD coursework and beginning his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley. In 1914, he attended Marburg University in Germany. And then the Great War began. The world as Eliot knew it was about to be shattered.

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images [5]

Forced out of Germany, Eliot moved to England and continued his doctoral studies at Merton College, Oxford University. In 1915, quiet Tom Eliot married flamboyant Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who refused to travel across the war zone of the Atlantic to meet his family, creating a gulf between them as wide as the ocean itself. She became his “muse,” and he published several key poems during this time. After he settled permanently in England, news reached him that his friend Jean Verdenal had been killed at the Dardanelles. By the end of the war, ten million would be dead and millions more traumatically affected. The philosophy, religion, and art of the nineteenth century—with its triumphalism and near glorification of European high culture—were trampled in the mud and blood of frontline trenches. All that remained was a “heap of broken images” for those who survived the war, who were left to pick up the shattered fragments of what was thought as unbreakable.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? [6]

In the midst of life, we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour?

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many […].
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” [7]

Eliot successfully submitted his doctoral thesis to Harvard, but his voyage back to Boston was cancelled at the last minute. Taking this as “a sign,” he never returned to give his oral defense. Leaving his doctorate uncompleted (although he would be awarded many honorary doctorates), he turned to lecturing. Short on money, newlyweds Tom and Vivienne moved in with philosopher Bertrand Russell. While living under the same roof, Russell had an affair with Vivienne who, always nervous and suffering from ill health, is said to have become increasingly unstable and hysterical. Russell wrote, “She is a person who lives on a knife’s edge, and will end as a criminal or a saint; I don’t know which yet.” Eliot, however, continued to be devoted to his wife.

For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared. I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him: and in his word is my trust.

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with
me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking?
What?”

In 1917, due to financial necessity, Eliot began work in London at Lloyd’s Bank and became an assistant editor of The Egoist, while continuing to lecture. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published his Poems 1919 and became friends with the Eliots. In 1918, Eliot tried unsuccessfully (due to his hernia) to enlist in the US armed forces. To add to his sorrows, his father maintained his disapproval of Tom’s literary career, his move to England, and even his marriage to Vivienne; and upon the elder Eliot’s death in 1919, they remained estranged. What little part of the estate the will awarded to Tom was put into a trust that reverted back to the estate after Tom’s death. In essence, his father left him nothing.

The war ended, but a sickness of soul pervaded the hearts and minds of all who survived. In 1920–21, Eliot published more poems, began working on “The Waste Land,” and launched a new literary review, The Criterion—all while continuing to work at the bank. Vivienne grew worse. Following the physical war without and the ongoing war of disillusionment and skepticism within, searching but not yet able to recognize the risen Christ on his own road to Emmaus, Tom Eliot was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.

My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you

Per doctor’s orders, Eliot retreated to the seaside town of Margate—though, against doctor’s orders, Vivienne accompanied him. Not finding the rest he needed, Tom left Vivienne at a sanatorium in Paris and traveled on to Lausanne, Switzerland. With the help of fellow poet Ezra Pound, Eliot managed to finish “The Waste Land,” and with this poem became a predominant voice of the postwar “lost” generation.

O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy.

“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing. […]
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

In 1925, Eliot joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), publishing “The Hollow Men”—inspired by Joseph Conrad’s psychological novel of depraved humanity, Heart of Darkness. Eliot accepted the doctrine of original sin (the truth of which had become painfully clear to him), but he still stumbled at the conclusion of the prayer that would cost him “not less than everything.”

Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Christ have mercy. Christe eleison.

Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom



For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the



This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Christ have mercy. Christe eleison.

After searching and struggling all his life, Eliot finally surrendered to the “peace which passeth all understanding.” In 1927 (at the age of thirty-nine), he became a Christian and was baptized at the parish church in Finstock, a village near Oxford. Soon afterward, he became a British citizen and “Journey of the Magi” was published. Virginia Woolf would later write to her sister, albeit tongue-in-cheek: “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. . . . [He] believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.”

And with him is plenteous redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his sins.

This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and
Death,
But had thought they were different.

“Ash Wednesday,” the public proclamation of his Christianity, was published in 1930, followed two years later with the first edition of Selected Essays. He returned to the United States to lecture and, unable to bear the relationship any longer, separated from Vivienne. She died in 1947 in a mental asylum; he remarried ten years later.

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget […]



Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. […]
Our peace in His will […]
Suffer me not to be separated



And let my cry come unto Thee.

Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice.

After a lifetime of poetry, critical essays, and plays, T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Between 1949 and 1959, he finished his career with Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and three more plays. He died in 1965 at the age of seventy-seven and was memorialized in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. The one who had survived “the waste land” of his own pain and questioning among the vast suffering of humanity, searching for that living water out of the rock, found forgiveness “after such knowledge” and died at peace with the God who had “plucked him out,” with the hope of “blooming” into life everlasting.

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of
light.
Light invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great
glory! [8]

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Patricia Anders (BA, University of Southern California; MA and MFA, Chapman University) is the editorial director of Hendrickson Publishers and managing editor of Modern Reformation. This article is an abbreviated version from the March/April 2004 issue of the magazine.