T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral

Almost no critical study of T.S. Eliot’s religious drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), can fail to account for the link between its author and its protagonist, St. Thomas á Becket. Indeed, the religious experience at the center of the play represents all those elements with which Eliot was deeply concerned: “the crisis of doubt, the sense of guilt, the necessity of suffering, the experience of purgation, the subjection to the divine will and the immanent destiny.” However, few readers and critics direct their attention to the play’s social and political analogues, especially in relation to contemporary events, most significant of which was the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. In 1939, five years after Murder in the Cathedral was produced, and only months before Europe entered a second world war, Eliot gave a series of lectures on “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in which he examined the state of Christianity in the modern age, while envisioning a new Christian social order.

The play’s relationship to its author’s historical context—a religiously orthodox vision in an ideologically heterodox climate—is remarkable, anticipating ideas advanced in Eliot’s lecture, particularly regarding the division between church and state. These considerations all have a basis in one of Eliot’s most pressing questions, namely, whether modern liberal democracy or fascism poses the greater danger to religious orthodoxy. In answering this question, though, we inevitably uncover the poet’s own ideological prejudices.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, Eliot’s reputation as a cultural authority changed dramatically. Until that year, he had maintained the image of a poetic revolutionary, vindicating poetry like one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Subsequently, though, in his essays, lectures, plays, and meditative poetry, Eliot came to be identified with religious restoration and right-wing politics, a transition aptly summed up in his self-proclamation as “a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” His conversion astonished readers and friends alike, who hailed him as one of the leading proponents of the avant-garde, the cult of the new. But the seeds for religious transformation were present long before, as far back as his undergraduate years in Harvard, when the young Eliot pondered the relationship between body and soul, struggled against the distractions of physicality, and yearned for spiritual perfection through ascetic labor. His sense of sin and guilt, in particular, drew him to a stronger, more dogmatic theological structure than his Unitarian background could provide. Thus in a note that he scribbled around 1923 or 1924: “There are only 2 things—Puritanism and Catholicism. You are one or the other. You either believe in the reality of sin or you don’t—that is the important moral distinction—not whether you are good or bad. Puritanism does not believe in sin: it merely believes that certain things must not be done.” Eliot needed spiritual discipline, even self-abnegation, because he recognized the power of evil in human hearts. His conception of sin, severe and obsessive, braced him against the moral decadence, the death-in-life he perceived around him. According to biographer Lyndall Gordon, Eliot “felt the devil not so much in social wrongs, but within, and believed that the chief purpose of civilization was to cope with the notion of original sin. Lust seemed to him the most corrupting of all sins and, as a young man, he wished the flesh could be denied, burnt away by the refining fire.” Like Augustine, Eliot knew he was setting out on a path of no return, for it was a path remarkably similar to that of a saint.