The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939

T. S. Eliot’s Notes on the Way [I]. To the Editor of Time and Tide

Time and Tide, 16 (19 Jan 1935) 95

Sir, – There is one point in Miss Rebecca West’s letter in your issue of January 12th, which seems to me to call for an answer. ¹ I feel that Miss West fails to represent accurately the attitude of Father Herbert Thurston; so that the uninformed reader might imagine that Fr. Thurston’s interest in “supernormal manifestations” was of exactly the same kind as that of Messrs. Huxley or Mr. Gerald Heard. ² One does not even need to readFr. Thurston’s books to be made aware of the difference. On the jacket of one that I have at hand are the words: “The Church has forbidden spiritualistic practices to her children, and that her prohibition is just and wise can be seen from evidence.” And if the reader gets only as far as the Author’s Preface, he will read that the three contentions of the book are as follows:

The first is that genuine and inexplicable phenomena, even of the physical order, do occur in the presence of certain exceptionally constituted persons called ‘mediums’; secondly, that for the mass of mankind, and notably for Catholics, spiritualistic practices, quite apart from the Church’s prohibition, are dangerous and altogether undesirable; and thirdly, that people have learned nothing from their attempted intercourse with the spirits of the departed – an almost inevitable result when the fact is borne in mind that the identity of the supposed communicator can never be established with certainty. ³

I am, etc., t. s. eliot 24, russell square, w.c.1