John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Poetic Dogma: The Dream of Gerontius as Source and Spring of Modern Poetry

In the cocktail party, one of T. S. Eliot’s later verse dramas produced in 1949, a minor character named Peter, confused by estrangement from his sweetheart Celia, remarks, “what is the reality / Of experience between two unreal people?” The play goes on to explore the limitations of relationship and communion between people who are sinful, vapid, and less than themselves, who must learn to admit the reality of sin and moral failure. Only in humble repentance are the characters able to secure any kind of shared and lasting experience, to no longer be “unreal people.” The potential for a human person to be real or “unreal” is a concern underwriting all of T. S. Eliot’s work, rooted in motifs of virtue and vice, salvation and sin, the one inclining toward fully real personhood, the other declining from fully real personhood. In other words, Eliot, much like John Henry Newman, relies on Revelation, and on what may be called dogmatic realism, in order to articulate the fulness of human ontology and anthropology. Further, observing the close parallels between Eliot’s criticism and Newman’s writings, in addition to Eliot’s poetry and Newman’s poetry, reveals the strong likelihood that Newman’s work was an important source for Eliot. This is made apparent not only through explicit references in Eliot’s writings, but also in the deeper structure of dogmatic realism: Eliot, like Newman, views the reality of the human person, and poetics, relative to Christian Revelation.

It is obvious that both Eliot and Newman, minimally, share a biblical vision of the human person; the full reality of man is “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)¹ and “it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Therefore, Eliot’s language about personhood is really about the communion of saints, the full reality of the righteous eternally saved in heaven. Anything less than this is no mere quibble over doctrinal semantics, but is a loss of reality, a chaotic vortex of failed philosophy. This notion is also integral to Newman’s thought, wherein the final reality of the Church Triumphant orders, as of first importance, concerns of human society and anthropology. Thus, both Eliot and Newman see true personhood, hidden with Christ in heaven, as grounded in the dogmatic reality of the communion of saints, or, for present philosophical purposes, what may be called the communion of real persons. This is no happy thematic coincidence. Rather, Newman’s works, judging from Eliot’s own, were an essential source to Eliot’s writings.

Although Eliot never gives direct attention to John Henry Newman’s works, his criticism alludes to him with familiarity. For example, in an essay on philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose works formed the subject of Eliot’s Harvard dissertation, Eliot compares Bradley’s style to Ruskin’s: “One feels that the emotional intensity of Ruskin is partly a deflection of something that was baffled in life, whereas Bradley, like Newman, is directly and wholly that which he is.”² This brief stroke of deft erudition belies a reading of Newman both deep and broad. Eliot was steeped in English religious literature. He compared the “preaching of Newman” to Andrewes’s “contemplative” homiletics,³ and concluded this essay with another passing comparison: “Yet [Andrewes’s] prose is not inferior to that of any sermons in the language, unless it be to some of Newman’s.”⁴ Further, Newman appears more substantially in Eliot’s comments on Pascal’s Pensées. Newman wrote that Pascal’s “completed book was to have been a carefully constructed defense of Christianity, a true Apology, and a kind of Grammar of Assent.”⁵ Eliot appears to have covertly qualified Pascal’s project as similar in form to Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and Grammar of Assent. This becomes explicit on the next page. Eliot quoted directly from the...