biographical studies and some illuminating personal recollectionsnabout the man — including Herbert Howarth’snFigures Behind T.S. Eliot, T.S. Matthews’ Great Tom, and,nmost recently, Peter Ackroyd’s T.S. Eliot: A Life. But suchnbooks are “unauthorized,” written without the assistancenof—and without the information possessed by — Eliot’snwidow, Valerie; hence, there is still the nagging suspicionnthat Old Possum indeed had a scandal to hide — one not yetnreally revealed by any of the literary snoops.nLiterary jealousy, political irritation, wounded nationalnvanity, and the human propensity to gossip fuel much ofnthis tongue-clucking. But what this kind of pruriencenobscures is the real scandal of Eliot’s life, the scandal thatnunderlies so much of the effort to reduce his literarynachievement to middling proportions. And that scandal wasnEliot’s conversion to Christianity. While some of his mostnintimate friends knew of his baptism at the Finstock Churchnin the Cotswolds on 29 June 1927, Eliot’s announcementnin the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) thatnhenceforth his point of view would be “classicist in literature,nroyalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” hadnthe effect of a bombshell. It is a complicated statement, withnmany ramifications. But it is the religious scandal that needsnto be understood, and understood in the literary context ofnEliot’s time, if the biographical speculation, still current, isnto be grasped in the fullness of its motivation.nEliot of course was reared in a bland New EnglandnUnitarianism, whose principal feature, according to HenrynAdams in The Education, was the clergy’s refusal to insistnon any doctrine, believing as they did that “leading anvirtuous, useful, unselfish life” was “sufficient for salvation.”nSince Unitarianism was to Eliot but an amorphousnhumanism claiming the status of a religion, it is hardly ansurprise that he felt himself to have been brought upn”outside the Christian Fold,” as he told Bertrand Russell inna letter of 22 June 1927. For someone, like Eliot, outsidenthe Christian Fold, there were at least three serious availablenalternatives: (1) a world view based on naturalistic scientism,nwhich seems to have been the dominant literary viewpointnafter 1890 — a perspective alien to Eliot’s temperament andnwithout adequate intellectual authority for him; (2) Orientalnthought, in which Eliot immersed himself for two years,nwhile studying Sanskrit at Harvard—an experience that leftnhim, he said, more mystified than enlightened; and (3) thensecular tradition of Western reflective philosophy in whichnEliot immersed himself as a graduate student at Harvard,nleading, finally, to a doctoral dissertation he called Knowledgenand Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley.nGiven his formal education and his systematic reading andnstudy, his conversion was not an act of ignorance, superstition,nor some merely personal guilt. He was one of the mostnlearned, widely inclusive thinkers of the Anglo-Americannliterary milieu. But none of the approaches listed abovencould make a permanent claim on his intellectual allegiancenduring the formative years when Eliot was struggling to findna ground for being and a guide for conduct that transcendednthe skepticism and the ethical relativism espoused by hisncontemporaries.nEliot’s conversion to Christianity, in retrospect, was anclear line of development more than a decade in thenmaking. Early fugitive poems like “Silence,” “Easter,”n”The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” and “The Death of St.nNarcissus,” written between 1910 and 1915, reflect hisnintense preoccupation with ultimate questions. Reflectionnon the nature of God, the longing for the divine, thenconflict between the body and soul, the aspiration tonsainthood, even the ecstasies of martyrdom as a redemptionnfor the horror of life in a godless, desacralized universe—nthemes expressed in all these poems — he suppressed asnincomprehensible in the literary climate of the time, or asnotherwise youthful embarrassments to a proper Harvardnman. But what he did express, on the intellectual plane,nduring these years, was a continuous philosophical argument,nculminating in the scandal of his conversion, aboutnwhether morals can be grounded on human thought alone,nor whether divine revelation, in the form of the Scripturesnand the Church, was the necessary foundation.nIn reaction to the skeptical scientism of the age, some ofnhis contemporaries had posited a New Humanism derivednfrom what Irving Babbitt, Eliot’s Harvard teacher, calledn”the wisdom of the ages” — a central core of “normalnhuman experience” which found its highest expression,naccording to Babbitt, in the thought and conduct ofnBuddha, Christ, Confucius, and Aristotie. The person whonembraces such a wisdom, Babbitt argued in Literature andnthe American College, does “inner obeisance to somethingnhigher than his ordinary self, whether he calls this somethingnGod, or, like the man of the Far East, calls it his highernSelf, or simply the Law.” As a substitute for “religiousnobligation” and “religious restraint,” this wisdom constitutednan “inner check” on the various lusts that afflict man’snnatural will. “To be modern,” Babbitt observed, means “tonrefuse to receive anything on an authority ‘anterior, exterior,nand superior’ to the individual.” John Middleton Murrynlikewise remarked in “Romanticism and Tradition” thatn”The foundation of the modern consciousness is this, thatnthe individual man takes his stand apart and alone, withoutnthe support of any authority.”nBut for Eliot any humanism that relied on individualnauthority or this “inner check” was entirely too optimistic innnnIn the forthcoming issue of Chronicles:nEthnic Conflictn”The Swiss do not believe in deficit financing, and theyndo believe in maintaining the value of the Swiss franc.nWhen foreigners, despite horribly high real estate prices,nstart buying too much land, the Swiss yell “Ueberfremdung”n(overalienation) and prohibit it. They believenin the free market, and have relatively free trade, but theyndo not believe in allowing themselves to be put out ofnbusiness or bought out by foreigners.”n— from “Pluralism in Miniature”nby Harold O.J. BrownnAPRIL 19881 15n