T.S. Eliot and the Benedict Option

Rod Dreher recently asked his readers what T.S. Eliot might think of the so called “Benedict Option.” Few things written about T.S. Eliot escape my attention for very long, and when Dreher’s article crossed my screen I happened to be reading Modern Education and the Classics, from which I tweeted a photo to Dreher of a passage where Eliot says a revival of monasticism is the only hope for the continued study of Latin and Greek, which are of course essential to understanding Christianity and the Western canon. Dreher posted that photo along with an excerpt from Thoughts After Lambeth.

After posting the photo on a whim, further reflection led me to believe Eliot might not be in favor of the Benedict Option after all. First, it is important to realize that Eliot was sympathetic with the Porcher cause, as I think, no true Englishman or Southerner can help. For the Southerner, whom Eliot I think would agree is most like the Englishman among Americans, the Agrarian and Porcher ideal have always been much closer to reality. Eliot offered praise for the Southern Agrarians in his lecture, After Strange Gods.

Despite this, we must remember that by all accounts Eliot is a Burkean, devoted to tradition and principle, but seeking how we may better the world we find ourselves in. Eliot often strikes a seeming extremist stance. After all, who in the 21^st, or even the 20^th century, can take seriously a man who thinks contraceptives are not a matter of individual choice, that equality and democracy are harmful while class, rank, and aristocracy are necessary, and who goes about saying he is an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a Royalist in politics, and Classicist in literature? Yet Eliot, like a good Burkean, was devoted to practically ministering in our world. He later expressed regret that too many people were under the impression that Catholicism, Royalism, and Classicism were equal and inextricable to his thought.

On the contrary, Eliot knew that in many “public causes to which we may devote ourselves, we are always likely to find ourselves allied with non-Catholics of good will.” And, he said, that “there is a certain saving egotism…. Which prevents us from despair so long as we believe that there is anything that we can do which may possibly help to improve matters… I hope that I have not failed to affirm that there may always be schemes, initiated by non-Christians and non-Catholic minds with purely temporal aims, to which we can give unqualified support; and by supporting them give them a firmer justification and inform them with Christian truth… we recognize this possibility in every work of slum clearance and housing reform.”

Eliot was no doubt a radical anti-liberal. Were he alive today, his critiques of bourgeoisie society, the excesses of democracy and capitalism, and his defense of the medieval world would land him on a short list of illiberal Catholics. Yet as much as he hoped we would return to a world long gone, he recognized we must find a way to practice virtue in this world with hope.