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Tag Archives: Determinism

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.7

19 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, T.S. Eliot

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Burnt Norton, Determinism, Freedom, Imagination, reality, T.S. Eliot, Time

Finally, the poem moves to a loss of the phantoms and the perpetual possibility and a recapitulation of the first movement:

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
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.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.


Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

With these spectres, the “we” of the poem moves in “formal pattern” (the dance perhaps, some sort of joint enterprise).

This dream scene moves into “the empty alley”. And with this movement, it seems we have moved into the world of Eliot’s earlier poems, Prufrock, Preludes, and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, the grim modern city rather than the still garden with unheard music.

The imagery at this point becomes deathly (I had not thought death an undone so many):

                        into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

A “box circle”: using google n-gram, I believe that Eliot has coined a phrase. This is perhaps a paradox: a circle cannot be squared. The impossible “squaring a circle”. A trap, a box canyon? I take it for an impossible place.

And in this into this impossible place we have a scene of death: the pool is drained, dry, rotting (brown edged). In his poem The Waste Land in the section, “What the Thunder Said” the dry rock is the image of a dead land. And so the ghostly band has come into a city-scape, and to an impossible place of death. Where there should be water (a pool) there is none.

At this point, we come to a series of images which I cannot help but relate to Wallace Stevens. In “The Glass of Water” we read the lines

                                    Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eye and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws.

I am not saying that Eliot was thinking of Stevens (Eliot’s poem was earlier than Parts of the World), just that it resonates. The lines of Eliot read:

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.

Photo by Marné Lierman

Here in the midst of a dead land (a dry pool) sunlight entered and produced light. Living in a very sunny place all year round, sunlight would make me think of a dry land, but living in England, I imagine sunlight would be associated with the production of life. A lotus would be exotic to one in England. The whole scene then seems like a wonder of life exploding.

This spectral world is becoming quite real and full: the “they” are there looking into the world, too. It seems that the whole is on the verge of becoming not merely a possibility but real. And then

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

The cloud interrupts the revelry. It is whatever prevents the imagination from persisting. I don’t know that it has any particular “outside” reference: if the sunlight is the imaginative work of creating the scene, then the cloud is that which interrupts.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

This is curious: the bird says go! Why? Because the leaves are full of children (just as the shrubs were filled with music). Are the children dangerous in some way? Why? It seems the children are again the intrusion of something more intense. In the parallel lines it is reality. By means of the parallelism I take the children to be the intrusion of reality.

Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality

This speculation and possibility of the past is on the verge of becoming real. 

Or is it that this revelry is disclosing something about reality which has not yet known? What is the reality which we cannot bear?

Having comes to this point, we return to the inevitable present:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

There is a greater will of some sort which always bears upon reality and which determines the present.

When I come to this point, I wonder if more than a meditation upon time and imagination and regret, it is also a meditation upon freedom and what must be.

He has brought me to think about these things, but not as in an essay or argument. Rather than telling me about them, as a poet, he is calling me to look at them. Whether he receives a clearer resolution will depend upon what comes next.

How May a Beloved Lust be Discovered and Mortified? (Part 1)

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Matthew, Mortification, Sanctification

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Benjamin Needler, Biblical Counseling, Conditioning, Determinism, Discipleship, How May Beloved Lusts be Discovered and Mortified, L.A. Times, Matthew 5, Matthew 5:29-30, Mortification, Psychology, Puritan Sermons, Sermon on the Mount, Sin

How May Beloved Lusts Be Discovered and Mortified

Benjamin Needler’s sermon How May Beloved Lusts be Discovered and Mortified? Considers the text of Matthew 5:29-30:

29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. Matthew 5:29–30 (ESV)

We Must Kill Our Sin

He first makes a series of observations on the text. He principally takes the text as referring to the need to stop all beloved lusts which draw us unto sin. He explains that mortification is a synergistic act of human and God:

(i.) That we ourselves must engage in the mortifying of our lusts.—Sinners, with their own hands, must pull out their own eyes. It is not enough to cry unto God for help, and, in the mean time, to be careless and idle, as if nothing were to be done on our part. Mortification is a work incumbent upon us, although we are empowered thereunto by the Spirit: “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. 8:13.) We must mortify, although by the Spirit. The duty is ours, though the strength be God’s. So here: “If thy right eye offend thee, thou thyself pluck it out, and cast it from thee.”

(ii.) That we must be a willing people in this, as in all other duties.—A Christian dieth to sin, is not put to death.

(2.) It is not said, “If thine eye offend thee, observe it more than ordinarily, look narrowly to it,” but, “pluck it out;” to note, that nothing less is like to do our souls good, than the mortifying, the killing, the cutting off of our corruptions.—

James Nichols, Puritan Sermons, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1981), 52. The degree of this break must be absolute, a death:

It is not only said, “Pluck it out,” but, “Cast it from thee;” to note, that it is not enough for a man to leave his sin for the present, but he must renounce it for ever.—We must not part with sin, as with a friend, with a purpose to see it again, and to have the same familiarity with it as before, or possibly greater. Amantium irœ amoris redintegratio est: “The falling-out of lovers is the renewing of love.” We must not only shake hands with it, but shake our hands of it, as Paul did shake the viper off his hand into the fire: “Pluck it out, and cast it from thee.”

James Nichols, Puritan Sermons, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1981), 53.

Our Particular Life Will Affect Our Particular Sins

After a discussion as to why sin is often denoted by terms for the body, he asks the question of why some people have inclinations toward particular sin. He gives four reasons: First, there are differences in our bodies. Second, there are sins which are which are most common for those of certain stages of life: children have different temptations than old men. Third, there are differences in our circumstances. Fourth, there are differences in our upbringing.

Notice the subtle difference between Needler’s understanding of sin and our general contemporary understanding of behavior. We might say that one’s circumstance (body, education, age, et cetera) somehow causes  the life we see manifested. A man’s childhood caused him to be a criminal. Needler does not discount a contribution of circumstance. However, the circumstances conditioned rather than cause the adult life.

The sin exists in the God-ward relationship (or lack thereof). The circumstances affect how that sin is expressed.

This is a particular nuance which Christians must realize when looking at various sinful actions; many of which are being normalized on the basis  of circumstance (If one has a question as to whether this line of argument goes, consider this: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/01/many-experts-now-view-pedophilia-as-a-sexual-orientation-google-hangout.html). For the person who experiences the inclination toward a particular sin, the experience may very well seem automatic. Temptation is not a rational process, but rather the process of a lust (which is a broader word than sexual desire).

Part of the difficulty Christians have had when considering the relationship between sin, temptation & circumstance lies a failure to take seriously the biblical instruction on heart desires, lust, sin & the ability of one’s circumstances to affect the temptation. Moreover, the argument “God made me this way” need not be immediately dismissed as irrelevant. Romans 1 portrays strong inclinations towards sin as judgment themselves (God gave them over) which ends in a mind which cannot rightly think.

The difficulty is so great that only the supernatural invention of God can disrupt the experience and behavior.

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