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Boethius, Burnt Norton, eternity, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, 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.
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.
We now move from a description of this place where opposites are present – and not, the still place. Rather than examining this place, Eliot turns to consider the effect of this place upon the human being. This portion of the poem considers: what does this still point do to the one who enters it.
Working backwards, we can see a parallel here with the line in the first section “human kind/cannot bear very much reality.” Here, something has been interposed which
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
There may be an allusion here to Paul’s statement in the great 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians on the resurrection of the body that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” The idea of Paul is that the human body must undergo a renovation to participate in the life to come.
Here, Eliot speaks of something which protects human flesh from experiencing a too real world. In making this world too real (I am borrowing from the language of the first stanza), it seems we are in a Platonic realm with this world of ideas and forms is more real than the physical world. Lewis plays on this idea in The Great Divorce.
Continuing to work backward from this protection
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.
The present, which is neither the past nor the future is “enchained” (a fascinating word here) and “woven” in the human body. Notice how he describes the human body, it is “changing.” I believe this must be a reference to the fact that the present is constantly new as this still point between the past and future changes.
It is a quite literal statement that our human body can be nowhere but in the present. I must admit that I am not certain as to what is the reference to “heaven and damnation.” I suspect this is a merism for the entirety of Platonic reality. We cannot move outside the present and thus the powerful currents around us cannot touch us here.
The movement in the first section to the phantoms would be a movement into this Platonic realm.
And this leads to a question: is this still place something which is there, something which is there and we do not notice it, or is it a place to which we must enter? Is it a psychological relationship to this place?
The beginning of this line of thought reads
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion,
This reads very much like a Buddhist idea of enlightenment and being freed from an illusory relationship to “reality” – which is really an illusion. As such we are discussing a psychological/spiritual relationship which is the result of a different understanding of such things.
But the poem complicates this conception with a contrast, “yet”
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.
It is not just the state of detachment, he adds here “a grace of sense.” This is quite different than the dissolution of the “I”. He is moving into something perhaps more similar to a Christian Platonism where eternity is an eternal now. (And at this point, perhaps he has Boethius in mind). Quoting the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy:
In Boethius, the contrast is between timeless eternity, which only God enjoys, and everlastingness, which (following Plato) the world itself possesses.
It is the common judgement, then, of all creatures that live by reason that God is eternal. So let us consider the nature of eternity, for this will make clear to us both the nature of God and his manner of knowing. Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time.
…for it is one thing to progress like the world in Plato’s theory through everlasting life, and another thing to have embraced the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present. (Boethius Consolation, V.VI., transl. V. E. Watts 1969)
Boethius uses his view of eternity to address the problem of divine foreknowledge (see section 6.2). If God knows beforehand what we will do then how can we act freely? His answer is that this problem dissolves in the face of the fact that God does not know anything beforehand but has an immediate, atemporal knowledge of all things. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eternity/
I think this conception answers more nearly to Eliot’s thought at this point. It is as if one has moved into a realization where everything is frozen in an eternal now. Scenes in a movie where there is an explosion and than a freeze frame where the character looks around and see the matter in motion perfectly still might be a good idea here.
If so, then this is a realization of what is already there. It has just been lost. Our enchainment to the present protects us in a movement from seeing the eternity about it – and eternity as a place of heaven and hell.
Erhebung without motion
The precise meaing of the German here is beyond me because the word refers to a movement up so it could be an uprising or a physical rising or a metaphorical use of the conception. There is a rising without a motion.
both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
The old and new worlds could be past and future, or perhaps mundane and Platonic. Our relationship to them is “understood.” And that understanding is both an ecstasy and a horror, which would return us to the idea that reality is simply something which we cannot bear. Hence we are protected from the full experience of this place.
memoirandremains 