Eliot and the Orphic Way

Abstract

HE German martyr of 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is not today the powerfully influential presence in theology that he was in the two decades that came to a close at the end of the 1960's. Yet the pressure of the legacy preserved in his Letters and Papers from Prison is still deeply felt, most especially in the mandate that Bonhoeffer there laid upon his contemporaries to search for 'a non-religious way of conceiving the ultimate pattern of life and for a new method of speaking 'in secular fashion of God.' Indeed, the impulse that is almost everywhere controlling the theological imagination in our period is one that prompts a very profound reformation of religious sensibility-in the direction of a relinquishment of all those supernaturalist postulates of classical theism that have tended, in effect, to locate human existence at a point of intersection between the two spheres of Nature and Supernature. The whole framework of the theologia perennis, it would seem, has at last been quite thoroughly emptied of cogency, and its grammar is no longer felt to be conformable with the natural assumptions of modern intelligence which give us no good reason for supposing the universe to have a second story or some realm ... over and above or behind the processes of nature and history which perforates this world or breaks it by supranatural intervention.2 Fundamental reflection on human experience does, of course, still inevitably entail the pondering of questions that are of an essentially religious order. For