The prophet Habakkuk  warned against false gods and prophets – who were worthless 

‘What use is an idol once its maker has shaped it – a cast image, a teacher of lies?

For its maker trusts in what has been made,/though the product is only an idol that cannot speak!

Alas for you who say to the wood. “Wake up!” to silent stone, “Rouse yourself!” Can it teach?

See, it is plated with gold and silver, and there is no breath in it at all.

But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!’

Habakkuk 218-20.

In the Old Testament the prophets frequently chide Israel for going after false gods. Some of these were gods embodied in statues, trees, rivers, rocks, the prophets too were subject to this form of worship from others and presumably also sometimes inwardly. The message of the prophets was one of purification of themselves, and also of Israel of an embodied god – and instead to substitute a pure spiritual reality.

Neville Symington, psychoanalyst who had previously been a priest, writes that God cannot be cleansed from all human characteristics, and so in that sense is ready for embodiment, and inevitably to become part of what Symington calls ‘the narcissistic structure’. One example linked to this is that the false god described is hurt by the slightest criticism or neglect – a god deeply wounded by an insult, or a god offended by Israel’s infidelities, and in the New Testament Jesus, is seen as deeply wounded by every sin that we commit.

This view of God is easy to understand as it’s something we all experience, such as when we are deeply wounded by the smallest slight and hold onto it perhaps even for years. Here’s an example:

‘A man met a friend who said to him: “Good Lord, John, you are looking well today. When I saw you last week, I thought you were a bit off colour …” John was deeply offended that his friend should have said he was off-colour. “Me … off colour” – what an insult. He was so insulted by it that it entirely wiped out the encouraging statement that he was looking well on this particular day.’

Sometimes the wound is tended and nursed as if it were the greatest treasure. Symington comments that although Adam’s sin was quite a long time ago now … ‘but I still hear people beating their breasts about it’. Worth noting is Jesus’ teaching to let go of grudges and try to love those who upset us.

This is an example from the analytic world:

‘Analyst A said to Analyst B: “Oh you were analyzed by Hans Sachs, were you …” and then looking down his nose, said: “You know, I was analyzed by Freud.” Analyst B was still offended thirty years later and took revenge on Analyst A quite regularly year after year.’

 The hurt only makes sense if you put it in the idea of a godlike ego: “Do you not realize that you are insulting a royal personage? Did you not know that you are insulting the Lord Himself?’

Winnicott working with children playing

Both Winnicott and Merton wrote about the true self and the contrast with the false self. There are clear similarities, as both were interested in how we discover our true identity –Merton saw this as sanctity and Winnicott as health. The search was similar but the context different: Merton was writing as a religious based in a monastery, Winnicott as an analyst in the clinic and consulting room.

Merton thought that the essential aspect of the spiritual journey was the search for our true or real self. Eight years into his monastic journey he wrote:

‘For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore, the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.’

For Winnicott, the true self involves a sense of personal aliveness that includes an awareness of being or feeling real and genuine wholeness. This means a lived recognition of being the self that one is, and that this felt presence is one’s true being. ‘Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.’ Ultimately Winnicott defined this self as ‘always personal, isolated and unaffected by experience.’

For Merton the true self is ultimately ‘my own subjectivity united to the subjectivity of God … When we know God, we know ourselves, when we know ourselves, we know God.’ Merton’s emphasis is that at depth the True Self is united with God.

For Winnicott the false self often served as a self-protective defence, and so helped the true self to stay safe. He explains that initially the mother identifies with the baby, and from this repeated recognition there is security – what he calls ‘the spontaneous gesture’ then emerges which is the true self in action. However, if the mothering person is not good-enough and fails to response to the gesture and instead substituting her own, the baby will instead of responding spontaneously react with compliance – it is this compliance that is the start of the false self existence. In one paper he describes an actress patient whose ‘nothingness at the centre’ is a representation of her true self: empty, hungry and waiting.

For Merton the false self lacks substantiality – it’s not false in the moral sense, but rather lacks any fullness of being – here quite like Winnicott’s lack of being and feeling ‘real’. Merton goes deeper though seeing that the false self is our impermanent self – not enduring. ‘…it is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its existence both end together at death.’ The false self has a history but its joys and fears are mostly superficial – at a very limited level of reality. In later writings Merton thought this false self, whilst exterior, also included unconsciousness. He thought one of life’s most pressing tasks was to unmask this false, illusory self and become ‘aware of the presence within us of a disturbing stranger, the self that is both “I” and someone else.’

Both Winnicott and Merton saw that the way to move out of and beyond the false self was through a form of rebirth. For Merton this was through prayer and contemplation. Merton believed this involved:

‘a deepening of the new life, a continuous rebirth, in which the exterior and superficial life of the ego-self is discarded like an old snake skin and the mysterious, invisible self of the Spirit becomes more present and active.’

Through this rebirth we become ourselves: the true self that God willed us to be.

For Winnicott the emergence of the true self from the care-taking false self could happen when the person was able to open to their creativity – Winnicott called it ‘playing’. In the therapeutic setting the true self of the person could ‘be’ and be ‘found’. Loosening the compliance and strictures of the false self the person opens to experiential existence, and to the chance of a new beginning.

Donald Winnicott’s work with children is characterized by an openness and the nonconformity mentioned in an earlier post. This allowed him to be curious and interested in what children experienced and wanted to share with him. Rather than a set way of seeing child development he allowed himself to be surprised.

In one paper he contrasts two brothers. The younger brother he calls Y and describes his typical use of a transitional object. After being breast fed for four months and weaned without difficulty, Y sucked his thumb in the early weeks. After being weaned:

‘.. he adopted the end of the blanket where the stitching finished. He was pleased if a little bit of the wool stuck out at the corner and with this, he would tickle his nose. This very early on became his “Baa” … From the time when he was about a year old, he was able to substitute for the end of the blanket a soft green jersey with a red tie.’

This became an object that soothed the little boy, and helped him fall easily asleep. Sucking the material he lost anxiety.

Y’s older brother X had in contrast, to fight his way to maturity. It was a time when the mother was quite anxious and felt lonely. X was fed for longer and never sucked his thumb or finger so after being weaned with difficulty he had ‘nothing to fall back on’. Instead, it was the actual person of the mother he needed as he had such a strong attachment to her. From one year he adopted a rabbit which he would cuddle and this affection later transferred to real rabbits. Winnicott saw this toy rabbit as a comforter, but not as a transitional object: ‘…it was never, as a true transitional object would have been, more important than the mother, an almost inseparable part of the infant.’

X’s anxieties led to asthma and this was only gradually managed. Winnicott comments that as an adult, it was important to X to find work away from the town where he grew up, but his attachment to his mother ‘is still very powerful’, and it was difficult to form other  relationships. In contrast Y is busy with his own children, who are also keen on thumb-sucking!

For Winnicott, this transitional area of experiencing is central to spirituality and faith. The idea of the representation of God as a transitional object involves creating and finding God, and this continues throughout life, as it involves our connection to our sense of self and of the meaning and purpose of existence and ultimate destiny. Unlike the eventually discarded blanket or teddy, Meissner writes that this,

‘God-representation, whether dormant or active, remains available for continuing psychic integration … the process is an authentic dialogue insofar as the God-representation transcends the subjective realm.’

In the same way religious symbols become vehicles for the expression of meaning and values that transcend their physical characteristics. The meaning and significance of for example the crucifix is achieved only through being received into the transitional realm of experience of each believer, who brings their own creativity attached to their belief and faith into their perception and experience of the cross.

Donald Winnicott, child and adult psychoanalyst didn’t write as a religious person, but many think that his work opened up psychoanalysis to a recognition of a spiritual dimension. Winnicott’s work – greatly influenced by his work as a paediatrician, especially with mothers and babies (he saw over 60,000!), is all about relationships: within our psyche and with one another.

Winnicott grew up in a devout Wesleyan Methodist family, converting to Anglicanism in his 20s – perhaps as a way of distinguishing himself from his father. Hugely influenced by the idea of nonconformism, this trait was repeated in his relationship with all the various factions – including the orthodox in the psychoanalytic world. He saw himself as a believing sceptic, remaining openminded about the existence of a transcendent God.

One of the main ideas that links to faith is Winnicott’s thinking about what he called ‘the transitional object’ and the ‘transitional space’. Initially when we’re babies, we have no idea of anything separate from us, gradually we begin to differentiate what Winnicott calls ‘me’ from what feels like ‘not me’ as we gradually experience ourselves as ‘other’ from the maternal person. Winnicott saw that this hypothetical space affects us physically and psychically in both our inner and outer world. He describes this as ‘the place where we live’ – an ‘intermediate zone … a potential space …’ where play and creativity can take place. William Meissner, Jesuit priest and psychoanalyst, took Winnicott’s concept of the transitional experience when he writes about faith:

‘The believer does not regard their* faith as a matter of wishful hallucination or of purely subjective implications. Rather, their faith speaks to them of the nature of the world in which they live, of the meaning and purpose of their existence there, and in most religious traditions, of the relationship of that world and themselves to a divine being who creates, loves, guides, and judges. At the same time that faith asserts, however, it cannot demonstrate the independent reality of the spiritual world and to which it lays claim. Consequently, the experience of faith is not totally subjective, nor is it totally objective. Rather, it represents a realm in which the subjective and objective interpenetrate … in which both the subjective and objective poles of experience contribute to the substance of belief.’

The experience of God is located, in Winnicott’s terms, ‘outside, inside, at the border’, where the focus of mysticism on the inner world, ‘the centre of the self’, is balanced by the outer world of infinity ‘reaching out’.

Winnicott’s concept of illusion is helpful too. A baby’s experience of an idealized mother created through the baby’s illusion of omnipotence, is gradually replaced through disillusionment by a good-enough mother. This leads to a capacity in the baby to be alone, both in the presence and absence of a mother, and thus able to create and play. The teddy bear, a piece of material, or a hard toy is the classic ‘transitional object’ used by the small child to deal with separation and offer a creative relationship. This renewed capacity to use illusion as a creative aspect of being finds echoes in myth, art, and religion. Winnicott thought that illusions and transitional space link to our later use of religious symbols, rituals, beliefs, and practices.

(* Am changing the quote into inclusive language).

William Meissner – Jesuit priest and analyst 

There are increasing numbers of accounts and research studies about the interactions between religion and psychoanalysis – differences, similarities, influences and so on. This is a huge change from when I trained in the mid-1980s, when psychoanalysis still operated along the lines put forward by Freud and Freudians that religion was somehow infantile, something you should/would grow out of, and thus was disrespected and seen as irrelevant to the ‘pure’ teachings of analytic theory. It’s largely thanks to the work of Wilfred Bion on ‘O’ [as in the last few posts], and the work of Donald Winnicott on creativity and the capacity to imagine that this change has happened. Both Bion and Winnicott believed in transformation and their work shows they had faith in the possibility that transformation could occur:

Bion observed,

‘Psychoanalysts have been peculiarly blind to this topic of religion. Anyone, recalling what they know about the history of the human race, can recognize the activities which can be called religion are at least as obtrusive as activities which can be called sexual.’

There are now analysts and therapists who are ‘owning’ and writing about their own experiences of ‘being religious’ and working analytically. Alistair Ross – Baptist minister, academic, and psychotherapist uses the term ‘sacred psychoanalysis’ to cover the growing interest in religion and spirituality in clinical work in the last few decades. Thus, there is a recognition of the limits of the Freudian approach to religion that has been so dominant, and, increasing respect for the experiences of practitioners working with their own and their patients spiritual and religious issues.

Reading some of these accounts, there seem three central issues that affect the analyst who owns both their interest and experiences of spirituality and religion. The first is that there can be an openness to a transcendent dimension which means that there is a belief in the possibility of ‘something more’ in existence. These experiences of the transcendent reinforce conscious beliefs in the possibility that ‘something more’ exists, and fosters openness to dimensions of experience and meaning that transcend what is perceptually apparent.

Secondly, a spiritual or religious perspective also offers the possibilities of ultimate meaning. Humans search for meaning – about life’s origins, purpose, suffering, and what happens to us after we die, and all these are hugely enriched by religious symbolism, religious books, and the idea of the transcendent. Religion itself, offers a setting of for communal expression of life’s meaning.

The third central issue is the idea of hope and compassion which constitutes general care and concern. William Meissner who was a Jesuit psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, reflected,

‘Hope directs the traveller’s footsteps neither in the path of despair nor into the presumptive quiet of overconfidence. It rests not on its being or its possession of being, but on it’s beginning to be. … Christian hope rests on a revelation of promise and directs itself toward a reality not yet realized. … Thus, hope is rooted in confidence about God’s promises, a confidence that assumes a dynamic ontology of history in which the future-orientation of [a person’s] existence makes the horizon of new possibilities real.’

Fog on moorland

While reading about Grotstein’s work quoted in last week’s post, I came across this interesting dream that he had – a dream that changed the course of his life, and opened him to an interest in mysticism and psychoanalysis, and to the work of Wilfred Bion.

When Grotstein was a second-year medical student he had a dream the night before his final exam in pharmacology. The setting was a bleak moorland in the Scottish Highlands and there was a dense fog.

‘A small portion of the fog slowly cleared and an angel appeared surrealistically asking “where is James Grotstein?” The voice was solemn and litanical. The fog slowly re-enveloped her form as if she had never existed or spoken. Then, as if part of a pre-arranged pageant, the fog cleared again, but now some distance away, at a higher promontory where a rocky crag appeared from the cloud bank revealing another angel who, in response to the first angel’s question, answered as follows: “He is aloft, contemplating the dosage of sorrow upon the Earth”.

Grotstein, like others who have had similar powerful spiritual dreams, knew that the experience came from beyond him. He wrote:

‘I was deeply impressed, mystified and bewildered. I knew that I had experienced the dream, but I did not know who wrote it. I wanted desperately to be introduced to the writer who could write those lines.’

He saw the dream as a revelation – an expression of creative intelligence, and choose to see it as a messenger offering guidance. Years later, having become an analyst he thought:

‘The task of psychoanalysis is not the attainment of insight, but rather, the use of insight to attain transcendence over oneself, one’s masks and disguises, to become one’s supraordinate* subject. This task involves a transcendent reunion with one’s ineffable subject.’

Grotstein used the word ‘numinous’ to describe experiences like his dream. He’s using the term given by the German philosopher Rudolf Otto, who defined the encounter with the numinous as a unique, non-rational and ‘wholly other’ mystery that is both terrifying and fascinating. Otto thought this awe-inspiring feeling lay at the heart of all true religion.

For Grotstein it was a ‘sense of awe and wonder and inward journey (into the self) associated with the mystical and meditative contact with this ineffable’. For him, God as a supreme Being, and, the Godhead as the essence or divine nature working in unity, is ineffable and inscrutable. The experience of the ineffable as numinous is both an internal presence apart from oneself (in analytic jargon an internal object), and also oneself (an internal subject).

Grotstein turned to the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and to the work of Bion to further his thinking. In his own work on ‘Bion’s concept of ‘O’, Grotstein came to distinguish one form of O as nearer to the essence/Godhead and so as something ultimately unknowable, and that was different from a more knowable essence of O based on human experiences.

Interestingly when Bion spent time in the US, Grotstein sought out Bion as a supervisor for his work with patients, but found that didn’t seem to work, so instead Grotstein entered into analysis with Bion.

* Here supraordinate sometimes spelt superordinate means a higher part of ourself – in Jungian psychology it is an aspect of the psyche that transcends the ego.

Over the years of working as an analyst, Bion saw something beyond the prevalent theories and usual range of clinical practice: ‘something’ that led to a transformative insight. This ‘something’ was not discernible, rather a psychic reality that couldn’t be seen, or touched, or easily put into words. It was not to do with knowing about it, but rather a becoming, something ineffable, and of a non-verbal nature. Perhaps in that way, similar to a spiritual reality, also felt in the psyche as an experience of peace or Presence. Bion was not ‘religious’ in the traditional sense, but he certainly read about Western and Eastern mystical experiences.

Bion thought that to reach this state of O in therapy, he needed an open mind and to sit with ‘not knowing’. Bion saw this as negative capability and a letting go of theories and assumptions. O could not be looked for or planned, but might manifest if both people were open to raw emotion, and so emerge as a flash of insight, a shared emotional ‘impact,’ or a non-verbal realization bringing a sudden, new sense of reality. A glimpse or a moment of O transformed both the analyst and the patient leading to a new authenticity that was previously inaccessible to conscious thought. The truth revealed was an emotional truth, rather than a factual one.

This example is taken from the work of another analyst James Grotstein who was influenced by Bion’s work. Grotstein describes analysis with a young depressed woman, who had recently emigrated from a central European country to the US. They were about 4 months into their meetings when one day she appeared in the session almost as if in a trance. Grotstein describes her demeanour as ominous and uncanny, and she was silent; he became increasingly anxious – then terrified without knowing why.

‘I then began to feel that I was dying! I knew that I wasn’t, but I really felt that I was. When the feeling became almost unbearable, she broke the silence and uttered, ‘You’re dead!’ What emerged was a significant part of her past history and the emotional truths she had been evading.’

Her parents divorced when she was 3, and her father took her to live with his parents until she was 7, when she was to be sent away to school.

‘When the analysand told me that I was dead, she then related this story: she recalled the railway train, the station platform, and both her and her grandparents tearfully waving goodbye. She never saw them again. She claimed that they both died soon after of broken hearts. The date of this analytic session was an anniversary of that fateful train departure.’

Once the woman spoke, Grotstein regained his composure and found himself unexpectedly saying

‘I believe that, when you waved goodbye to your beloved grandparents on that fateful day, you “died” as a self and have remained emotionally dead up until this time. The anniversary of its happening seems to have brought the event back to life for you. You gave to me your intolerable feelings of your emotional death and the loss of your grandparents because you could not bear to experience the truth about your separating from them, but now hoped that I could bear it for you and ultimately with you’. She then exclaimed, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ and cried. This session became a turning point in her treatment.’

For Grotstein the powerful experience they shared was O – the Truth. The repressed truth of the trauma was dramatically freed up, and allowed to become owned as personal truth.

The relationship between traditional psychoanalysis and religion/ spirituality has been somewhat fraught, and often seen as a distraction or derided by analysts. (This is in contrast to Jungians, often called analytical psychologists, who are like Jung, more open minded about explorations about God and the inner world.) The psychoanalytic position still broadly reflects Freud’s attitude. Freud saw psychoanalysis as an approach committed to scientific atheism, and religion either as an outdated stage of cultural history and a relic of past civilisations, or, as an illusion to overcome resulting from the human capacity to repress or sublimate feelings, in other words a human pathology.

However, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion moved away from Freud’s strict scientific atheism by taking inspiration from religion and mysticism in order to understand what could very occasionally happen in his work with patients. Bion described a depth dimension expressed in psychic processes that he designated by the sign O. This depth dimension was a spirit of mysticism he saw as a fundamental dimension of human psychic experience in relation to others, and to the world.

‘I shall use the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself. O does not fall in the domain of knowledge or learning save incidentally; it can be “become”, but it cannot be “known”.’

Such an experience of the senses can only become known once it can be somehow formulated into words. It’s been noted that Bion was influenced by the writings of John of the Cross, and the concept of O links to John of the Cross’ writing where he says that to know God we have to let go of all preconceptions, any memories, or expectations: instead becoming open to uncertainty. In the same way, Bion thought that the analyst must relinquish their knowledge of past material, assumptions, and past insights so that in openness O can emerge. Like John of the Cross, Bion views the suspension of both memory and desire as a prerequisite for a transformation in O, which, for Bion, depends on the “at-one-ment” of analyst and analysand. This means that both the God-seeking person described by John of the Cross and the analyst together with the analysand in the therapeutic situation can only undergo a profound experience and transformation by an emptying of the mind.

As in mysticism coming into contact with O requires something a bit like an act of faith, a vulnerability, and the ability to not-know: negative capability. The ‘at-one-ment’ that Bion describes is a dynamic process that transforms one’s view of the world and causes it to appear in a new light. An example of O (ultimate reality or absolute truth) involves a moment of sudden, ineffable insight that transcends all pre-existing theories, beliefs, and expectations. This change is in the psychic landscape of both the analyst and the patient, leading to a profound sense of the truth of the moment.

Perhaps the person in therapy is dealing with a deep sense of dread that they cannot find the words to describe. Instead of rushing in with an explanation to fix the unhappiness, the analyst sits with the not-knowing bearing the feeling of disintegration within themselves. In this shared endurance of feeling so dreadful, a moment of transformation in O can occur, where the sheer reality of the patient’s internal experience is met and contained, potentially allowing a new thought or capacity for symbolization to emerge. An experience of being utterly understood: ‘face to face’ … ‘I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Perhaps all imaginative writing is an attempt to make sense of one’s life. What T. S. Eliot tells us repeatedly is that there are feelings that are beyond the nameable:

‘… the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves …’

Eliot believed that the single force of life is contained in what one biographer Lyndall Gordon calls the awful daring of a moment’s surrender. And from Eliot: ‘By this and this only, we have existed.’ The only mystery that really matters in our lives, he writes, is the meaning of existence under the cloud of unknowing. The single aim in life is to recover the divine.

Eliot wanted to express feelings that were strange and wild, determined to expose the people who read his work to feelings they had not experienced before. He said that the difference between:

‘a madman and an effective writer is that the former has feelings which are unique but cannot be shared, and are therefore useless; the latter discovers new variations of feelings which can be appropriated by others.’

In his attitudes to others, Eliot seems to have veered between an elitism and disdain for those he could not align himself with. Alongside the mystical poetry he expressed racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Some of this can be explained by traditional attitudes and cultural assumptions of the time, and on misogyny from Eliot’s personal trauma around his first marriage, but Eliot, although deeply reflective, had disturbing blind spots that now leave the reader uncomfortable and alienated. For example, people pursuing ordinary lives he saw as ‘provincial’, and the pursuit of normality he saw as an adjustment to a ‘deranged society’ instead of what he described as the fundamental Order of Things. He wanted to find a way to use what he knew of ‘the perfect life of the spiritual elite to improve the life of ordinary people’ suggesting ‘prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.’ He wanted to rescue others from an ordinary life that he saw as ‘worthless banality’, and that an ordinary life can be transfigured

Perhaps some of Eliot’s disdain for others is in part a projection of his own self-dislike and judgement. He wrote of how when we cannot understand another person there is the ‘unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something we can understand’. Eliot is writing of the human fear of not understanding something or someone that is human; that when we cannot understand another person, we put pressure on them, one way or another, to become something we can understand; this pressure is the sort of influence that represses and distorts. There can be an anxiety about not understanding those people – including oneself – that one cannot ignore. And not being able to ignore someone – or not being able to ignore something about oneself – is itself a kind of revelation of character. In a sense, we are what we are unable to ignore. And what we do with what we cannot ignore is at the heart of what Eliot referred to as ‘the dubious science of psychoanalysis’. Sceptical of psychoanalysis, he sought treatment from a psychiatrist, whose methods involved a variety of interventions focused on regaining control of thought and behaviour.

Weighed down for many years by guilt, linked to wrongs done to others: ‘the rending pain’ of recall, ‘the motives late revealed’ and ‘things ill done and done to others’ harm’, Eliot appears an isolated figure, but, aged 68, he married for the second time. Rejoicing in new found happiness, Eliot held on to life tenaciously in the face of chronic physical illness. In an interview after his death his wife Valerie Eliot stated: ‘He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He couldn’t die until he had had it. There was… a little boy in him that had never been released.’

It seems that much of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and plays were spiritual autobiography, and description of the slow painful transformation of a flawed self – what Eliot called the way down. This was as distinct from bliss – the way up.

According to one biographer, Lyndall Gordon, Eliot saw ‘the way up’ as a life directed by a visionary moment – an epiphany – where in an instant the mind perceives a timeless ‘reality’. Long before his move to live in England and the writing of ‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot, aged 21, had an experience which he said, many have once or twice in their lives and are unable to put into words: ‘You may call it communion with the Divine or you may call it temporary crystallization of the mind’ he later said. It took place while he was walking one day in Boston, where he plunged into a strange silence like a parting of the sea. He wrote a poem called ‘Silence’ about this experience which he never published.

This attempt to put an epiphany into words is from the last line of the first verse and the second verse of ‘Silence’:

This is the hour for which we waited –

This is the ultimate hour

When life is justified.

The seas of experience

That were so broad and deep

So immediate and steep,

Are suddenly still.

You may say what you will,

At such peace I am terrified.

                    There is nothing else beside.

The memory was to remain as a tantalizing reminder of an experience beyond his grasp. Twenty-four years later Eliot had a further epiphany when walking with Emily Hale through the rose garden at Burnt Norton, when he felt momentarily awakened to ‘the heart of light’ (see previous post).

Following this, it seems Eliot perceived that rather than a striving for ‘the way up’ there was an alternative course through which we can transcend our imperfect existence – this is ‘the way down’. Eliot believed that ‘the otherness of the divine spirit’ means that the person seeking has to divest themselves of all the attributes that are most precious to them so that there’s a chance to know what lies beyond. ‘The idea is that if divinity is unutterably other, remote, and hidden beneath a cloud of unknowing, it is necessary to strip oneself of everything one knows in order to encounter it’.

For Eliot the way down is like ‘the dark night of the soul; a conscious stripping away of what props us up – even our very identity. This comes through in the next two of ‘The Four Quarters’ where the poet tries to answer how do we live in time so as to conquer time. ‘In my beginning is my end’ … but for the Christian this is more than just our lifespan where death is the beginning of eternal life: ‘In my end is my beginning’ and a longing for a fullness of being that lies outside the round of the seasons, outside time’s scheme.

‘I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God …

So the darkness shall be the light …

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

… In my end is my beginning.’