161 CHRONICLESnAutumn Daynby Rainer Maria Rilken(translated by Alban Coventry)nLord! It is time. The summer days were full;nNow lay thy shadows on the warm sundials,nAnd loose the wind upon these grassy isles;nBid the unfallen fruits ripen and swell;nGrant them just two more days of sunny clime;nUrge them to their perfection and instillnThe final sweet into the heavy wine.nWhoever has no house and is alone,nNow builds no more and will alone remain.nWill wake and read and write with tired brain,nAnd when the last brown leaves are earthward blown.nWill wander, restless, in the falling rain.nits view of human nature. Babbitt and Murry, like Emersonnand Arnold, “had not seen the silhouette / of Sweeney [thennatural man] straddled in the sun.” The simple fact ofnhuman fallibility logically negated the authority of any suchnan “inner check” and deconstructed every argument for annadequate ethics grounded on human nature alone. Henagreed, moreover, with the Speculations of T.E. Hulmenthat man — “essentially limited and imperfect” and “endowednwith Original Sin” — can “never himself fee perfect”nbecause he “is essentially bad” and can only “accomplishnanything of value by discipline — ethical and political.”nHulme’s account of human experience had convinced Eliotnthat “Order is thus not merely negative, but creative andnliberating” and that “Institutions are necessary.” And deepnimmersion in Bradley’s Ethical Studies — with its empiricalneffort “to determine how much of morality could benfounded securely without entering into religious questionsnat all” — had taught Eliot (as he observed in “FrancisnHerbert Bradley”) that reflection on morality leads us ton”the necessity of a religious point of view.” For Eliot, onlynthe Church provided the necessary structure for the institutionalizationnof religion; the ground of an adequate ethicsncould be nothing but divine revelation.nIn the Criterion, which he had begun to edit in 1922,nEliot sponsored an ongoing public debate about the adequacynof humanism, enlisting the arguments of Allen Tate,nG.K. Chesterton, and others against the positions of Babbitt,nMurry, and Norman Foerster. He was in substantial agreementnwith Tate, who argued that the New Humanists hadnno means of validating their values and that, if their valuesnwere to be made rational, “the prior condition of annobjective religion is necessary.” Religion, Tate observed, “isnthe sole technique for the validating of values.” Eliotnlikewise found the New Humanism “too ethical to bentruth.” He remarked that he could not “understand ansystem of morals which seems to be founded on nothing butnitself,” and he rightly observed that the New Humanist’snmorals were mostly derived from their own rejected Christiannbackground. For Eliot, a truth outside ourselves had tonbe the foundation of belief and conduct. This truth, he toldnnnBonamy Dobree in a letter of 1927, was contained in “thenconception of an immutable object or Reality the knowledgenof which shall be the final object of the will.” Thus henwas irresistibly led toward the Christian conception of Godnand the necessity of conversion.nThat Eliot’s conversion sent shock waves through thenAnglo-American intellectual and literary community isnclearly revealed in the general reaction at the time. A TLSnreviewer of For Lancelot Andrewes complained that byn”accepting a higher spiritual authority based not upon thendeepest personal experience” but rather upon “the anteriornand exterior authority of revealed religion,” Eliot hadnabdicated from his intellectual leadership and rejectedn”modernism for medievalism.” Reflecting later on thisnreview, which had called him “if not a lost leader” perhapsn”a kind of traitor,” Eliot denied that his Catholicism wasn”merely an escape or an evasion,” or that he viewed hisnconversion as “a defeat.” Eliot told Paul Elmer More thatnhe knew “the difficulty of a positive Christianity nowadays,”nbut he accepted the burden of supernatural belief withoutnequivocation and with a genuine humility, living its preceptsnthroughout his lifetime. Nothing galled his skeptical criticsn(and some fellow churchmen) more than his words thatn”Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notionsnas these that should be impressed upon the young. . . . Younwill never attract the young by making Christianity easy; butna good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficultnboth to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions”n(“Thoughts After Lambeth”).nThat the most brilliant poet and learned writer of his timenshould have submitted himself to the spiritual authority ofnan institution called anachronistic by his avant-garde contemporariesnwas indeed the scandal of the time. And it is stillnthe stumbling block to many intellectuals reading his latenverse. But whenever has it been otherwise? We have it onnthe highest authority that Christian belief is foolishness tonthe world and that faith is a scandal to merely rationalnthought. But since, as Eliot observed in “Lancelot Andrewes,”na Church is to be judged in part by “its intellectualnfruits” and by “its monuments of artistic merit,” we cannotnconveniently ignore the positive role Christianity played innhis verse as well as in his life. His conversion, in kindling thenfaith, thought, and imagination of his mature years, isnmanifest in those majestic poems and plays like AshnWednesday, “The Gift of the Magi,” Murder in thenCathedral, and Four Quartets. These memorable worksngive expression to a sensibility wholly delivered from thenchaos of ethical subjectivism, on the private level, and, onnthe public level, from that “immense panorama of futilitynand anarchy” that Eliot had called secular history. Togethernwith The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and NotesnToward the Definition of Culture (1948), they testify tonEliot’s culminating belief that “a Christian world-order, thenChristian world-order, is ultimately the only one which,nfrom any point of view, will work.” Certainly if wencontemplate the horrific events of the 20th century — twonworld wars, innumerable revolutions, terrorism, thenholocausts — the old or the New Humanist idea that man isnthe adequate measure of things seems a cruel piece ofnromantic folly. But such folly seems more tolerable, tonmany, than the scandal of faith.n