1)
<<Having read for the first time ASG, I
have to say I'm rather shocked.
And I do not refer to the famous anti-Semitic content, which is very
small and could be read in several ways.>>
Note on Eliot’s term “free thinking Jews” in the first session of
_After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy_
Eliot’s lectures entitled “after strange gods” were delivered and
were (are) meant to be understood as from the voice of Old
New England. (TSE: “I speak as a New Englander,” ASG, p.16)
That is, they carry the whole baggage of the
high New England Mind, the Puritan Mind, in their wake (per Perry
Miller, Edmund Morgan, et al), and as distinct from merely “Brahmin
Boston,” “reformism,” &c, and are meant as a contribution to the
revivification of the (as seen by Eliot) distinctly & uniquely American tradition,
and which, out of equal measures of ignorance and indulgence, is
fading. This is the necessary point of departure for grasping their whole
conception and intent (as well as for appreciating the irony of their being
delivered in Tidewater, Virginia, the very citadel itself [with South Carolina] of fundamental
opposition to that whole American idea and tradition).
As such, they are an attempt at blending something like, say, the
late John Gardner’s work on morality (including public or civic morality)
and literature, on the one hand, and, say, Philip
Wylie’s 1942 _Generation of Vipers_ (=Jesus at Matt.3:7; 12:34; 23:33), on
contemporary American socio-cultural conditions, on the other.
The phrase “strange [=alien, foreign] gods” that provides the
title occurs once in an unrelated context in the NT (Acts), but it occurs
throughout the OT (at least Gen; Deut; Joshua; Judges; I Sam; 2 Chron; Psalms;
Isaiah; Jeremiah; Daniel; Malachi), where it is thematic, and whence it gets its
deep resonance in whole the Puritan vision of the “City set on the Hill,”the
“New Jerusalem,” and so forth. Hence the Chosen People who, in analogy with
the children of Israel on certain occasions, or with certain ones of
them always, are implicitly now following or beginning to follow after strange
gods are “us Americans,” once descended from the Pilgrim
Fathers. We (the new Israel) are become (or are in danger of becoming) like
the Hebrews blasted by Jeremiah and Amos.
Anyone wishing to establish or maintain New Canaan successfully
cannot have a proliferation of free thinking Jews. The same theme is developed
in the OT under the rubric of adultery (which violates the peoples’
marriage covenant with Jehovah) and the offspring of such adultery (e.g.,
Hosea, Proverbs, &c).
The phrase “free thinking Jews” specifically is itself somewhat
more interesting than this general meaning. It seems to be a familiar kind
of Eliotism--yoking two completely unkindred things together with a
certain bite. Nowadays, of course, this makes no sense (or even bad sense), for
we liberals have largely forgotten what “Jews” used to mean. Used to be, they were
the people of the Law and lived in accordance with the Law or at any
rate amid traditions immediately dictated by the Law. Now, of course, they are a
people like any other, and as likely (or not) to include free thinkers,
free spirits, and freedom-loving individuals as anyone
else. (We can all think of many such, say, a “high culture” figure like Marcel
Proust, whom Eliot claimed pride in having introduced to the English speaking world, and
more “mass culture” figures, like Groucho Marx, with whom he carried on an
epistolary friendship.) And so Eliot’s pointed neologism may
well look suspect to us today. Any insinuation that the two
parts of the phrase are other than synonymous seems illiberal.
We would defend the Jews’ constitutional or anyway civil right to have and to follow
all the strange gods they want to, and whose business is it, anyway?
This last has been the tenor if not the meaning of many of the
remarks about this phrase on the list--along the lines of “what the phrase
‘FTJs’ means to me,” or more street-wise quips about what we know _that_ phrase
means, &c.
Apart from what I have already said, I believe Eliot meant
something else entirely in yoking these specific--and, to him at that
time, incompatible--terms. The term “freethinker”--”free thought”--emerged in the 17-18th
century in England among opponents to organized religion (viz., the
Christian church) around John Locke, author of the _Essay on Human Understanding_
and _The Reasonableness of Christianity_, specifically, among those who wished to
keep the “reasonableness” and do away with the “Christianity.” This is what “free
thought” originally means: the development of what will be called the “social
gospel” (or “Kingdom of God” gospel) without the divinity--but celebrating
increasingly the “humanity” of Christ as the great “moral teacher.” It is the
root specifically and explicitly of Unitarianism, and more generally of “post-
Christian” secular humanism: the core of universal liberal commercial
democracy--which Eliot saw not as Christian but as post-Christian through and
through, and as incompetent to found a stable human“community,” in the
fullness of those terms.
(It is in connection with this last that he appeals to the Southern Fugitive-
Agrarians in ASG. They had leveled a similar social critique in 1930 in
_I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian [=noncapitalist,
noncommunist] Tradition_; Lanier’s essay “A Critique of the Philosophy of
Progress” is a good introduction to Eliot’s larger, non-New England
orientation).
“Freethinker” was a term popularized in Anthony Collins’_The
Discourse of Free Thinking_ (1713) and a newsletter, “The Free-Thinker,”
published by a weekly coffee-house club in London of “Free-Thinkers.” Eliot came across
this in his preparation for his lectures on metaphysical poetry, if not before.
“Free thought” is explicitly offered as an alternative to “superstition” and
“tradition” and the “kingdom of darkness.” Each human mind is as a tabula
rasa, &c, and to bind and crush this thing under the weight of superstition
and tradition is a terrible evil &c&c. The freethinking movement, an active
anticlerical, anti-Christian (except as the Sermon on the Mount
can be secularized &c) develops also into what came to be called “deism.”
In this connection, Jefferson (among many others) edits out the parts of
the Bible that do not bear immediately upon or support good _philosophe_
humanism, &c.
For the case at hand, however, we cannot leave it at this. It must be
noted that the freethinking frontal attack on the superstitions and
traditions of unreasonable Christianity gradually worked its way also toward the
_most_superstitious, the _most_ tradition-bound, the _most_ benighted,
generally and in every way, and the least moral or ethical of all things ever
associated with Christianity, &c: “Judaism.” Judaism is purely obsolete and
retrograde, everything that is crude and primitive. In Germany, a lengthy work by
Semler (_Free Investigation of the Canon_) investigated what was moral
and what retrograde in the Bible, especially the NT, and concluded, among
other deletions, that the Book of Revelation should be dropped altogether as “too
Jewish.”
The” freethinking Jew” of Eliot is not a true “Jew,”whatever the orientation
of his thought. In this sense, the “freethinking Jew” is a perfect
nondescript, a hollow man: a “race” (i.e., increasingly“us”) Faulkner will
independently describe under the increasingly proliferating rubric “Snopes.”
This is more or less how Eliot discusses his use of the term in
an unpublished letter that someone has previously posted on the list.
When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein said that he believed in
Spinoza’s god, viz., a version of deism. Spinoza can be looked upon--perhaps
must be, although I do not think Eliot has this in mind--as a “free thinking Jew.”
Following Grotius’ manner of annotating the NT, in Amsterdam Spinoza
introduced free thought and deism in his sensational _Treatise_,
in which he presented and discussed the Bible as merely crude and primitivist.
The_Treatise_ became especially popular among freethinkers in England. As
for his freethinking method in Amsterdam, he was excommunicated by the
Amsterdam synagogue as an abomination and an excoriation of all Jewry. (Think of
the reception in certain quarters--today the version of semite regarded by
liberals as most retrograde--of Salman Rushdie’s sensational novel.)
In Eliot’s day, Herman Cohen--the leading Jewish professor of
philosophy in Germany at and after the turn of the century and whom Eliot
studied at Marburg and later referred to in his lectures on metaphysical poetry
at Cambridge--still said (i.e., in _this_ century, not 20 years before Eliot’s
lectures in Virginia) that Spinoza’s freethinking attitude toward Judaism
represents “a betrayal that surpasses human understanding.”
In any case, it is in this “freethinking Jew” that the fight to abolish
religion generally, but including above all the universal
religion of Christianity, becomes and expresses, specifically and pointedly,
the determination to abolish Judaism--by encouraging the proliferation of “free
thought.” Spinoza’s new _Ethics_ may provide an admirable, desacralized
Christian ethic for a commercial republic in a world of sacralized matter,
they will not provide the mores of a full human community or (“people”) in the
world we live in.
For Eliot, the whole problem he is addressing in _After Strange Gods: A Primer
of Modern Heresy_ lies in the Western intellectual tradition of “freethought,” not
in the faith tradition of the Jews.
Please always excusing the typos.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
2)
<<Thank you for much illumination on the two halves of the phrase
"free-thinking Jews." I still get stuck, though when I try to apply
your reading of the entire phrase to Eliot's complete statement.
Eliot wrote, "reasons of race and religion combine to make any
large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.">>
The term Eliot uses, as you quote, is "undesirable"--the circumstance in
question is not the best case (the general point about homogeneity is a
commonplace from Plato's _Laws_ on, to say nothing of the OT itself from
beginning to end)--not "unacceptable," not "unallowable," etc.
I apologize for my somewhat mushy response to part of your post. To go
to the heart of it, just put the sentence you quote from “ASG”into the mouths of
the Amsterdam synagogue elders when describing the same situation
as Eliot has in mind. If anything it is too wimpy for them. They are, in any case,
much stricter on all things socio-political (or, to echo Spinoza’s effort, which
they rejected any part of, root and branch: all things “theologico-political”)
than Eliot, if not than the original Puritans. This is what I was trying to
point to in saying that “a "freethinking Jew" _sit venia verbo_,
would not have returned with Ezra and Nehemiah from the Persian
"capitivity" to Jerusalem, or, anyway, not for reasons having anything to do with
Judaism. And Ezra and Nehemiah doubtless would not have let one try, or
had anything to do with such a thing. When thinking of Eliot’s conception of Hebrews
(i.e., “Israel,” Hebrews, the heirs of Abraham) think of the gathering
of the people before Joshua in the closing chapters of that book.This is also
familiar Puritan doctrine. In any case, Eliot begins here.
<<One clarification of my previous post. My reference to
irreligion wasn't intended to imply that Eliot had a problem with the Jewish
faith or that he equated Judaism with atheism. Of course he didn't. I
meant that he had a problem with *free-thinking* Jews because
they were irreligious. His problem with Jews on the whole was not,
I agree, with their religion. It was with their cultural difference,
which I fear he equated with their race.>>
As I say, I don't think Eliot believed Jews were/are a "race." And I
don't think he had what you call a "problem with Jews on the whole," as
his comments about Proust and his relation with G. Marx are perhaps sufficient
to indicate.
His problem in the "ASG" lectures, like that of the Amsterdam synagogue, and
as he later said about this sentence, is with "free thinking," which, as I
indicated, is more than atheism but active anti-religion.
Along these lines in your earlier post you
wrote:
<<it still seems to me, that freethinking Jews instantly have two strikes
against them: their race, because Jews, as "metics," as outsiders, are less
desirable than native races; and their (ir)religion, because free-thinkers are
less desirable than orthodox believers.>>
Is this commentary not completely the perspective of the immigrant or
"minority" in a majority-rule mass? (Of--in principle--any immigrant or
non-majority group?) It is shot through with familiar (though unstated)
presuppositions and--really quite distinctly “American”--concerns
about ease of assimilation and liberalism and interest-group theory, and the
“civil rights” supposedly equal to all groups in liberal civil society. It could
be Korean or Brahmin or Moslem, or other group. It is liberal--which is
what Eliot is arguing against and which argument you are responding to
as a liberal.
It has nothing to do with “Judaism” as such (whether or not that is what you
may be otherwise interested in): on the contrary, everything about it is
entirely _foreign_ to the Amsterdam synagogue that anathematized and
excommunicated Spinoza and to everything it represents. That synagogue
and Eliot are ultimately _much_ closer together than _any_ liberal
freethinkers or “moderns” (or “assimilationists” or civil rights activists of any
kind) and Eliot. Eliot’s position may not seem sympathetic, but it is one
he essentially shares with the Amsterdam synagogue. (I’m here using the
Amsterdam synagogue that adamantly cursed and disfellowshipped Spinoza to
represent concretely-- as what you call “actual, live” people--what I had said
abstractly in the earlier post about what “Jews” used to mean.)
Recall that the classic identification of "culture" is with "polity" or"community,"
and by definition a genuine "cultural difference" (your term,whether accurate or not)
is an explicit division of the house. What's theproblem?
It's precisely the principle exercised with much more force
and effect in determining who owns what and lives where in Israel
today.
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3)
<<I'm not sure why you believe that Eliot was "not worried
about metics." He was worried about them for exactly the reason you
suggest others were worried: outsiders always pose a problem for the
unified, organic community that he favored.>>
Sorry to have divided my response inadvertently. What you are referring to in
"ASG" here is not "worry," but a familiar truism. It is true Eliot in theory
favored a "unified, organic community," but the USA in the 1930s--indeed, for
Eliot, since about the time of the administrations of Jackson--is not unified
or organic (fully constitutional). And, as an extended republic (Madison's
term), it had always been intended to effectively absorb any number of
factional parts, including immigrant groups. My comments about metics as
problematic were explicitly in the context of small communities. In "ASG,"
neither the audience nor the speaker are particularly concerned about threats
from the outside, but about an internal falling away: "We" are in danger of
following after strange gods, &c.
<<The fact that Eliot described himself as a metic does not mean that he
thought metics were OK; rather, he was being (as so often on the subject of
his nationality) self-deprecating. In fact, one of the things that intrigued
me in your first post on "Burbank" was your equation of Bleistein with Eliot.
The notion made sense to me precisely because they were both
metics--though Eliot, I believe, is struggling against this aspect of himself
and is displacing his anxiety onto the Jewish figure.>>
Eliot has no "anxiety" or "displaced anxiety" about his nationality, does he?
Where is all this ersatz Freudianism coming from?
More importantly, I don't think the association of Eliot and Bleistein is as
"metics" (except maybe as "metic-ulous"). Burbank is a traveller, it seems:
Bleistein just _is_. The way of Bleistein (as you know) is formulated in the
first line of the 4th quatrain as an allusion to the "eagle-eyed" (or even
almost Sherlock Holmes-type observer) and _contemporary_ poet of Browning's
"How it strikes a contemporary." Eliot follows the way of Bleistein in his
poetry, and specifically in this poem. This is what I suggested in my first post.
But Eliot is not Browning and his way is not the way of Browning. The last
line of the quatrain (l.16) is about the history and character of his poetry.
It begins with reference to the city of Chicago, where historically (as you
know) Eliot's first mature and "breakthrough" poems were published. In its
character, however, Eliot's fully conscious and self-conscious poetic way is
_like_ the new language (semite) of Freudianism (Viennese), where nothing is
really what it first seems, like, say a cigar, but everything stands for something
else, as so many symptoms or expressions of subconscious love and
desire, yearning for wholeness. And in the middle lines (14-15), Christ
crucified and Christ inviting ("Come unto me" [i.e., "ye who are heavy laden":
answers to him who is left with heavy labors or burdens after Hercules has
departed in line 7--or maybe, as you say, "...ye who are over-anxious about
your nationality"]), is given the object and ultimate substance
of that non-Browningian and non-Freudian but meticulous and love-driven poetry.
Note to Freudians: all typos were not slips of any kind but consciously unintended.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
4)
<<Thanks for the several points in clarification.
Your argument concerning the "Amsterdam synagogue elders" reminds me
of a footnote on the "freethinking Jews" passage by my old teacher,
Jeffrey Perl, in his _Skepticism and Modern Enmity Before and After
Eliot_: "Here I would add only that, with a brisk change of setting,
most Orthodox Jews in diaspora and most secular Israelis would greet
the argument that Eliot makes as an unobjectionable commonplace"
(200n.120). That is your point, is it not?>>
Yes, Sir, that is my point, or a large part of it. It should clear up most of
any reasonable concern with the offending sentence in ASG. I am glad to
see it more widely noted.
<<Anthony Julius attacks Perl pretty fiercely, claiming that he'strying to
whitewash Eliot and use his Jewishness to gain the authority to do so. I
find this an irritating aspect of Julius's work, though I don't entirely agree
with Perl's treatment of Eliot's anti-Semitism. It's irritating not only because
it misses the thrust of Perl's brilliant book, but because Julius so openly uses his
own Jewishness as a cudgel with which to beat Eliot!>>
First, sans harshness, there is no anti-semitism in Eliot. Secondly, so far as
I’m aware of it, Julius’ “work” seems merely a Zionist reading of something, like a
Freudian reading or a Marxist reading or a feminist reading, all modes which have
enjoyed sensational runs and none of which have proven useful for understanding
anything. (I do not mean to say Lukacs, e.g., or others did/do not say some
useful things, but they were/are not the result of his Marxism/&c and are
perfectly graspable apart from any idea of Marxism,& c.) It is not really
interested in understanding the object for its own sake but only in
assimilating parts of it to itself and as an occasion for expressing itself
and perhaps for the author’s own exhibition. Pretty soon, Julius will find
Perl a more sinister enemy, if possible, even than Eliot,& c. We’ve been
through all this before. Did you ever read a Soviet literary critique of,
say, Mark Twain? Or hear one Marxist faction against another on such a thing:
Bersteinite! Revisionist! Betrayers of the revolution and the proletariat! &c
Kalt Kaffee...
<<I should mention, though, that even (even?) Perl grants that ASG
exhibits "intolerance" and "repression" (103). And he associates ASG
with Eliot's later comment that "such expressions in extremis served
'to relieve the feelings of the writer,'" which would lend credence
to a characterization of ASG as a rant.>>
I don’t think this characterization is credible. Eliot’s later comments must
be interpreted in the light of his own interpretations of stoicism, the
genteel tradition (Santayana) and Xian charity. In the early 1930s, when
the intellectual choice throughout Europe seemed to be either Communism or --
what? Fascism? (?) Nazism? -- and Popular Fronts along with anarchists
were here and there, and revolution, &c., ASG hardly qualifies as a “rant.”
Is Benda’s “Trahaison des clercs” a rant? Is _I’ll Take My Stand_ a rant?
How one answers these questions answers much about the responder, as well.
ASG_is_ a little awkward for Eliot, and strong. Certainly, he doesn’t give
Lawrence any slack, &c. I think this stems from a too ambitious attempt to
carry the old Armory sermon mode into the lectures (and in Virginia!),
although those who profess themselves so shocked by them are innocent of any
of their New England origins. (Upon the increasing discovery of these
origins, shock will duly follow about them.)
<<To one point that I raised, Guy, you responded:
“It is shot through with familiar (though unstated) presuppositions
and--really quite distinctly *American*...”
<<The first bit (about unstated presuppositions) I think a trifle
harsh, given that I was only trying to sum up my understanding of
Eliot's views. And Eliot was just as American as I am--more so by
some measures--so I'm not sure that his presuppositions would have
been all that different from mine. What presuppositions, by the way?>>
I only meant that your formulation in the paragraph I cited seemed essentially
liberal in all or most of its aspects & roots: sort of fish-not-noticing-the-
water contemporary USA. Eliot is American, too, yes, but of the Old
Republic (& especially up through Jackson). This is some of what he is trying
to provide voice for in ASG. And, part of his conversion is the adoption of a
new country, which is also willy-nilly a rejection of the USA not
as heir of the Pilgrim City on the HIll but as merely the (increasingly vulgar)
vanguard of mass modernity and interest-group (and interest-rate) theory. If
you follow that vanguard all the way out to the (rather Kantian or Hegelian) end,
you will find yourself in a place not unlike that addressed by Dante in _De
Monarchia_, and I think Eliot followed this suit.
<<Also perhaps on the harsh side:
“Eliot has no "anxiety" or "displaced anxiety" about his nationality,
does he? Where is all this ersatz Freudianism coming from?”
<<If I can answer these questions without admitting to "ersatz
Freudianism" (sticks and stones, Guy!)> >
The terms you are using are technical psychoanalytic terms, and
they imply a (perhaps loose or informal) psychoanalytic
framework. That is all I meant to draw attention to.
“Gnothi seauton” (sp) does not resolve itself into psychoanalysis.
<<my assertion that Eliot is anxious about his nationality
comes from a close reading of his letters and early poems.>>
Eliot is always self-conscious and living the examined life. This is
not “anxiety.”
<<To me it doesn't seem like such a shocking suggestion. The further notion
that Eliot may have been "displacing his anxiety onto the Jewish figure" is
more conjectural, but it makes sense to me--which is all I've asserted.>>
It’s not a shocking suggestion, certainly. It’s part of Eliot’s whole bearing.
Note how“Burbank” winds up going global (i.e., truly “catholic”) at
the highest level at the “end." However, Eliot is not “displacing his anxiety
onto the Jewish figure," as you have asserted, rather, he is _identifying_
himself and his poetry with the way of the figure, Bleistein's way. This is
different.
In any case, to return once more to the beginning: one needs to
_recognize_ (for any ultimate reading) that the colon in the title of
“Burbank” already ultimately somehow means “equals” or “is.”
Also, let me recite something I said in an unrelated context in a different
post that may be of some bearing here. Long after ASG, when Eliot later
[Arwin just reposted the letter, I think] speaks of the very sentence in the
lectures that we have been discussing, he says that the traditional
assimilated Jews are about like Unitarians, that is a "social gospel" sort
that promotes the morality and humanitarianism of Christianity without
acknowledging the divinity of Christ. What is important--and I think what
he means for his listener there to hear--is of course that Eliot's own family
was Unitarian: i.e., he associates the assimilated Jews with the assimilated
Christians (="post-Christians") and his own family. More or less liberal, &c.
(Look at the epigraph of “Hippopotamus.”) Eliot is not (in my opinion)
a “post-Christian” in any of his poetry, but the association and closeness just
referred to needs to be appreciated beyond what has seemed the
tendency of many on the list.
I have enjoyed this thread, and I appreciate your heads up about Perl. Maybe
I will come across his work.
Forgive typos--unproofed...
Regards,
Guy Brown
<<Having read for the first time ASG, I
have to say I'm rather shocked.
And I do not refer to the famous anti-Semitic content, which is very
small and could be read in several ways.>>
Note on Eliot’s term “free thinking Jews” in the first session of
_After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy_
Eliot’s lectures entitled “after strange gods” were delivered and
were (are) meant to be understood as from the voice of Old
New England. (TSE: “I speak as a New Englander,” ASG, p.16)
That is, they carry the whole baggage of the
high New England Mind, the Puritan Mind, in their wake (per Perry
Miller, Edmund Morgan, et al), and as distinct from merely “Brahmin
Boston,” “reformism,” &c, and are meant as a contribution to the
revivification of the (as seen by Eliot) distinctly & uniquely American tradition,
and which, out of equal measures of ignorance and indulgence, is
fading. This is the necessary point of departure for grasping their whole
conception and intent (as well as for appreciating the irony of their being
delivered in Tidewater, Virginia, the very citadel itself [with South Carolina] of fundamental
opposition to that whole American idea and tradition).
As such, they are an attempt at blending something like, say, the
late John Gardner’s work on morality (including public or civic morality)
and literature, on the one hand, and, say, Philip
Wylie’s 1942 _Generation of Vipers_ (=Jesus at Matt.3:7; 12:34; 23:33), on
contemporary American socio-cultural conditions, on the other.
The phrase “strange [=alien, foreign] gods” that provides the
title occurs once in an unrelated context in the NT (Acts), but it occurs
throughout the OT (at least Gen; Deut; Joshua; Judges; I Sam; 2 Chron; Psalms;
Isaiah; Jeremiah; Daniel; Malachi), where it is thematic, and whence it gets its
deep resonance in whole the Puritan vision of the “City set on the Hill,”the
“New Jerusalem,” and so forth. Hence the Chosen People who, in analogy with
the children of Israel on certain occasions, or with certain ones of
them always, are implicitly now following or beginning to follow after strange
gods are “us Americans,” once descended from the Pilgrim
Fathers. We (the new Israel) are become (or are in danger of becoming) like
the Hebrews blasted by Jeremiah and Amos.
Anyone wishing to establish or maintain New Canaan successfully
cannot have a proliferation of free thinking Jews. The same theme is developed
in the OT under the rubric of adultery (which violates the peoples’
marriage covenant with Jehovah) and the offspring of such adultery (e.g.,
Hosea, Proverbs, &c).
The phrase “free thinking Jews” specifically is itself somewhat
more interesting than this general meaning. It seems to be a familiar kind
of Eliotism--yoking two completely unkindred things together with a
certain bite. Nowadays, of course, this makes no sense (or even bad sense), for
we liberals have largely forgotten what “Jews” used to mean. Used to be, they were
the people of the Law and lived in accordance with the Law or at any
rate amid traditions immediately dictated by the Law. Now, of course, they are a
people like any other, and as likely (or not) to include free thinkers,
free spirits, and freedom-loving individuals as anyone
else. (We can all think of many such, say, a “high culture” figure like Marcel
Proust, whom Eliot claimed pride in having introduced to the English speaking world, and
more “mass culture” figures, like Groucho Marx, with whom he carried on an
epistolary friendship.) And so Eliot’s pointed neologism may
well look suspect to us today. Any insinuation that the two
parts of the phrase are other than synonymous seems illiberal.
We would defend the Jews’ constitutional or anyway civil right to have and to follow
all the strange gods they want to, and whose business is it, anyway?
This last has been the tenor if not the meaning of many of the
remarks about this phrase on the list--along the lines of “what the phrase
‘FTJs’ means to me,” or more street-wise quips about what we know _that_ phrase
means, &c.
Apart from what I have already said, I believe Eliot meant
something else entirely in yoking these specific--and, to him at that
time, incompatible--terms. The term “freethinker”--”free thought”--emerged in the 17-18th
century in England among opponents to organized religion (viz., the
Christian church) around John Locke, author of the _Essay on Human Understanding_
and _The Reasonableness of Christianity_, specifically, among those who wished to
keep the “reasonableness” and do away with the “Christianity.” This is what “free
thought” originally means: the development of what will be called the “social
gospel” (or “Kingdom of God” gospel) without the divinity--but celebrating
increasingly the “humanity” of Christ as the great “moral teacher.” It is the
root specifically and explicitly of Unitarianism, and more generally of “post-
Christian” secular humanism: the core of universal liberal commercial
democracy--which Eliot saw not as Christian but as post-Christian through and
through, and as incompetent to found a stable human“community,” in the
fullness of those terms.
(It is in connection with this last that he appeals to the Southern Fugitive-
Agrarians in ASG. They had leveled a similar social critique in 1930 in
_I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian [=noncapitalist,
noncommunist] Tradition_; Lanier’s essay “A Critique of the Philosophy of
Progress” is a good introduction to Eliot’s larger, non-New England
orientation).
“Freethinker” was a term popularized in Anthony Collins’_The
Discourse of Free Thinking_ (1713) and a newsletter, “The Free-Thinker,”
published by a weekly coffee-house club in London of “Free-Thinkers.” Eliot came across
this in his preparation for his lectures on metaphysical poetry, if not before.
“Free thought” is explicitly offered as an alternative to “superstition” and
“tradition” and the “kingdom of darkness.” Each human mind is as a tabula
rasa, &c, and to bind and crush this thing under the weight of superstition
and tradition is a terrible evil &c&c. The freethinking movement, an active
anticlerical, anti-Christian (except as the Sermon on the Mount
can be secularized &c) develops also into what came to be called “deism.”
In this connection, Jefferson (among many others) edits out the parts of
the Bible that do not bear immediately upon or support good _philosophe_
humanism, &c.
For the case at hand, however, we cannot leave it at this. It must be
noted that the freethinking frontal attack on the superstitions and
traditions of unreasonable Christianity gradually worked its way also toward the
_most_superstitious, the _most_ tradition-bound, the _most_ benighted,
generally and in every way, and the least moral or ethical of all things ever
associated with Christianity, &c: “Judaism.” Judaism is purely obsolete and
retrograde, everything that is crude and primitive. In Germany, a lengthy work by
Semler (_Free Investigation of the Canon_) investigated what was moral
and what retrograde in the Bible, especially the NT, and concluded, among
other deletions, that the Book of Revelation should be dropped altogether as “too
Jewish.”
The” freethinking Jew” of Eliot is not a true “Jew,”whatever the orientation
of his thought. In this sense, the “freethinking Jew” is a perfect
nondescript, a hollow man: a “race” (i.e., increasingly“us”) Faulkner will
independently describe under the increasingly proliferating rubric “Snopes.”
This is more or less how Eliot discusses his use of the term in
an unpublished letter that someone has previously posted on the list.
When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein said that he believed in
Spinoza’s god, viz., a version of deism. Spinoza can be looked upon--perhaps
must be, although I do not think Eliot has this in mind--as a “free thinking Jew.”
Following Grotius’ manner of annotating the NT, in Amsterdam Spinoza
introduced free thought and deism in his sensational _Treatise_,
in which he presented and discussed the Bible as merely crude and primitivist.
The_Treatise_ became especially popular among freethinkers in England. As
for his freethinking method in Amsterdam, he was excommunicated by the
Amsterdam synagogue as an abomination and an excoriation of all Jewry. (Think of
the reception in certain quarters--today the version of semite regarded by
liberals as most retrograde--of Salman Rushdie’s sensational novel.)
In Eliot’s day, Herman Cohen--the leading Jewish professor of
philosophy in Germany at and after the turn of the century and whom Eliot
studied at Marburg and later referred to in his lectures on metaphysical poetry
at Cambridge--still said (i.e., in _this_ century, not 20 years before Eliot’s
lectures in Virginia) that Spinoza’s freethinking attitude toward Judaism
represents “a betrayal that surpasses human understanding.”
In any case, it is in this “freethinking Jew” that the fight to abolish
religion generally, but including above all the universal
religion of Christianity, becomes and expresses, specifically and pointedly,
the determination to abolish Judaism--by encouraging the proliferation of “free
thought.” Spinoza’s new _Ethics_ may provide an admirable, desacralized
Christian ethic for a commercial republic in a world of sacralized matter,
they will not provide the mores of a full human community or (“people”) in the
world we live in.
For Eliot, the whole problem he is addressing in _After Strange Gods: A Primer
of Modern Heresy_ lies in the Western intellectual tradition of “freethought,” not
in the faith tradition of the Jews.
Please always excusing the typos.
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2)
<<Thank you for much illumination on the two halves of the phrase
"free-thinking Jews." I still get stuck, though when I try to apply
your reading of the entire phrase to Eliot's complete statement.
Eliot wrote, "reasons of race and religion combine to make any
large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.">>
The term Eliot uses, as you quote, is "undesirable"--the circumstance in
question is not the best case (the general point about homogeneity is a
commonplace from Plato's _Laws_ on, to say nothing of the OT itself from
beginning to end)--not "unacceptable," not "unallowable," etc.
I apologize for my somewhat mushy response to part of your post. To go
to the heart of it, just put the sentence you quote from “ASG”into the mouths of
the Amsterdam synagogue elders when describing the same situation
as Eliot has in mind. If anything it is too wimpy for them. They are, in any case,
much stricter on all things socio-political (or, to echo Spinoza’s effort, which
they rejected any part of, root and branch: all things “theologico-political”)
than Eliot, if not than the original Puritans. This is what I was trying to
point to in saying that “a "freethinking Jew" _sit venia verbo_,
would not have returned with Ezra and Nehemiah from the Persian
"capitivity" to Jerusalem, or, anyway, not for reasons having anything to do with
Judaism. And Ezra and Nehemiah doubtless would not have let one try, or
had anything to do with such a thing. When thinking of Eliot’s conception of Hebrews
(i.e., “Israel,” Hebrews, the heirs of Abraham) think of the gathering
of the people before Joshua in the closing chapters of that book.This is also
familiar Puritan doctrine. In any case, Eliot begins here.
<<One clarification of my previous post. My reference to
irreligion wasn't intended to imply that Eliot had a problem with the Jewish
faith or that he equated Judaism with atheism. Of course he didn't. I
meant that he had a problem with *free-thinking* Jews because
they were irreligious. His problem with Jews on the whole was not,
I agree, with their religion. It was with their cultural difference,
which I fear he equated with their race.>>
As I say, I don't think Eliot believed Jews were/are a "race." And I
don't think he had what you call a "problem with Jews on the whole," as
his comments about Proust and his relation with G. Marx are perhaps sufficient
to indicate.
His problem in the "ASG" lectures, like that of the Amsterdam synagogue, and
as he later said about this sentence, is with "free thinking," which, as I
indicated, is more than atheism but active anti-religion.
Along these lines in your earlier post you
wrote:
<<it still seems to me, that freethinking Jews instantly have two strikes
against them: their race, because Jews, as "metics," as outsiders, are less
desirable than native races; and their (ir)religion, because free-thinkers are
less desirable than orthodox believers.>>
Is this commentary not completely the perspective of the immigrant or
"minority" in a majority-rule mass? (Of--in principle--any immigrant or
non-majority group?) It is shot through with familiar (though unstated)
presuppositions and--really quite distinctly “American”--concerns
about ease of assimilation and liberalism and interest-group theory, and the
“civil rights” supposedly equal to all groups in liberal civil society. It could
be Korean or Brahmin or Moslem, or other group. It is liberal--which is
what Eliot is arguing against and which argument you are responding to
as a liberal.
It has nothing to do with “Judaism” as such (whether or not that is what you
may be otherwise interested in): on the contrary, everything about it is
entirely _foreign_ to the Amsterdam synagogue that anathematized and
excommunicated Spinoza and to everything it represents. That synagogue
and Eliot are ultimately _much_ closer together than _any_ liberal
freethinkers or “moderns” (or “assimilationists” or civil rights activists of any
kind) and Eliot. Eliot’s position may not seem sympathetic, but it is one
he essentially shares with the Amsterdam synagogue. (I’m here using the
Amsterdam synagogue that adamantly cursed and disfellowshipped Spinoza to
represent concretely-- as what you call “actual, live” people--what I had said
abstractly in the earlier post about what “Jews” used to mean.)
Recall that the classic identification of "culture" is with "polity" or"community,"
and by definition a genuine "cultural difference" (your term,whether accurate or not)
is an explicit division of the house. What's theproblem?
It's precisely the principle exercised with much more force
and effect in determining who owns what and lives where in Israel
today.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
3)
<<I'm not sure why you believe that Eliot was "not worried
about metics." He was worried about them for exactly the reason you
suggest others were worried: outsiders always pose a problem for the
unified, organic community that he favored.>>
Sorry to have divided my response inadvertently. What you are referring to in
"ASG" here is not "worry," but a familiar truism. It is true Eliot in theory
favored a "unified, organic community," but the USA in the 1930s--indeed, for
Eliot, since about the time of the administrations of Jackson--is not unified
or organic (fully constitutional). And, as an extended republic (Madison's
term), it had always been intended to effectively absorb any number of
factional parts, including immigrant groups. My comments about metics as
problematic were explicitly in the context of small communities. In "ASG,"
neither the audience nor the speaker are particularly concerned about threats
from the outside, but about an internal falling away: "We" are in danger of
following after strange gods, &c.
<<The fact that Eliot described himself as a metic does not mean that he
thought metics were OK; rather, he was being (as so often on the subject of
his nationality) self-deprecating. In fact, one of the things that intrigued
me in your first post on "Burbank" was your equation of Bleistein with Eliot.
The notion made sense to me precisely because they were both
metics--though Eliot, I believe, is struggling against this aspect of himself
and is displacing his anxiety onto the Jewish figure.>>
Eliot has no "anxiety" or "displaced anxiety" about his nationality, does he?
Where is all this ersatz Freudianism coming from?
More importantly, I don't think the association of Eliot and Bleistein is as
"metics" (except maybe as "metic-ulous"). Burbank is a traveller, it seems:
Bleistein just _is_. The way of Bleistein (as you know) is formulated in the
first line of the 4th quatrain as an allusion to the "eagle-eyed" (or even
almost Sherlock Holmes-type observer) and _contemporary_ poet of Browning's
"How it strikes a contemporary." Eliot follows the way of Bleistein in his
poetry, and specifically in this poem. This is what I suggested in my first post.
But Eliot is not Browning and his way is not the way of Browning. The last
line of the quatrain (l.16) is about the history and character of his poetry.
It begins with reference to the city of Chicago, where historically (as you
know) Eliot's first mature and "breakthrough" poems were published. In its
character, however, Eliot's fully conscious and self-conscious poetic way is
_like_ the new language (semite) of Freudianism (Viennese), where nothing is
really what it first seems, like, say a cigar, but everything stands for something
else, as so many symptoms or expressions of subconscious love and
desire, yearning for wholeness. And in the middle lines (14-15), Christ
crucified and Christ inviting ("Come unto me" [i.e., "ye who are heavy laden":
answers to him who is left with heavy labors or burdens after Hercules has
departed in line 7--or maybe, as you say, "...ye who are over-anxious about
your nationality"]), is given the object and ultimate substance
of that non-Browningian and non-Freudian but meticulous and love-driven poetry.
Note to Freudians: all typos were not slips of any kind but consciously unintended.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
4)
<<Thanks for the several points in clarification.
Your argument concerning the "Amsterdam synagogue elders" reminds me
of a footnote on the "freethinking Jews" passage by my old teacher,
Jeffrey Perl, in his _Skepticism and Modern Enmity Before and After
Eliot_: "Here I would add only that, with a brisk change of setting,
most Orthodox Jews in diaspora and most secular Israelis would greet
the argument that Eliot makes as an unobjectionable commonplace"
(200n.120). That is your point, is it not?>>
Yes, Sir, that is my point, or a large part of it. It should clear up most of
any reasonable concern with the offending sentence in ASG. I am glad to
see it more widely noted.
<<Anthony Julius attacks Perl pretty fiercely, claiming that he'strying to
whitewash Eliot and use his Jewishness to gain the authority to do so. I
find this an irritating aspect of Julius's work, though I don't entirely agree
with Perl's treatment of Eliot's anti-Semitism. It's irritating not only because
it misses the thrust of Perl's brilliant book, but because Julius so openly uses his
own Jewishness as a cudgel with which to beat Eliot!>>
First, sans harshness, there is no anti-semitism in Eliot. Secondly, so far as
I’m aware of it, Julius’ “work” seems merely a Zionist reading of something, like a
Freudian reading or a Marxist reading or a feminist reading, all modes which have
enjoyed sensational runs and none of which have proven useful for understanding
anything. (I do not mean to say Lukacs, e.g., or others did/do not say some
useful things, but they were/are not the result of his Marxism/&c and are
perfectly graspable apart from any idea of Marxism,& c.) It is not really
interested in understanding the object for its own sake but only in
assimilating parts of it to itself and as an occasion for expressing itself
and perhaps for the author’s own exhibition. Pretty soon, Julius will find
Perl a more sinister enemy, if possible, even than Eliot,& c. We’ve been
through all this before. Did you ever read a Soviet literary critique of,
say, Mark Twain? Or hear one Marxist faction against another on such a thing:
Bersteinite! Revisionist! Betrayers of the revolution and the proletariat! &c
Kalt Kaffee...
<<I should mention, though, that even (even?) Perl grants that ASG
exhibits "intolerance" and "repression" (103). And he associates ASG
with Eliot's later comment that "such expressions in extremis served
'to relieve the feelings of the writer,'" which would lend credence
to a characterization of ASG as a rant.>>
I don’t think this characterization is credible. Eliot’s later comments must
be interpreted in the light of his own interpretations of stoicism, the
genteel tradition (Santayana) and Xian charity. In the early 1930s, when
the intellectual choice throughout Europe seemed to be either Communism or --
what? Fascism? (?) Nazism? -- and Popular Fronts along with anarchists
were here and there, and revolution, &c., ASG hardly qualifies as a “rant.”
Is Benda’s “Trahaison des clercs” a rant? Is _I’ll Take My Stand_ a rant?
How one answers these questions answers much about the responder, as well.
ASG_is_ a little awkward for Eliot, and strong. Certainly, he doesn’t give
Lawrence any slack, &c. I think this stems from a too ambitious attempt to
carry the old Armory sermon mode into the lectures (and in Virginia!),
although those who profess themselves so shocked by them are innocent of any
of their New England origins. (Upon the increasing discovery of these
origins, shock will duly follow about them.)
<<To one point that I raised, Guy, you responded:
“It is shot through with familiar (though unstated) presuppositions
and--really quite distinctly *American*...”
<<The first bit (about unstated presuppositions) I think a trifle
harsh, given that I was only trying to sum up my understanding of
Eliot's views. And Eliot was just as American as I am--more so by
some measures--so I'm not sure that his presuppositions would have
been all that different from mine. What presuppositions, by the way?>>
I only meant that your formulation in the paragraph I cited seemed essentially
liberal in all or most of its aspects & roots: sort of fish-not-noticing-the-
water contemporary USA. Eliot is American, too, yes, but of the Old
Republic (& especially up through Jackson). This is some of what he is trying
to provide voice for in ASG. And, part of his conversion is the adoption of a
new country, which is also willy-nilly a rejection of the USA not
as heir of the Pilgrim City on the HIll but as merely the (increasingly vulgar)
vanguard of mass modernity and interest-group (and interest-rate) theory. If
you follow that vanguard all the way out to the (rather Kantian or Hegelian) end,
you will find yourself in a place not unlike that addressed by Dante in _De
Monarchia_, and I think Eliot followed this suit.
<<Also perhaps on the harsh side:
“Eliot has no "anxiety" or "displaced anxiety" about his nationality,
does he? Where is all this ersatz Freudianism coming from?”
<<If I can answer these questions without admitting to "ersatz
Freudianism" (sticks and stones, Guy!)> >
The terms you are using are technical psychoanalytic terms, and
they imply a (perhaps loose or informal) psychoanalytic
framework. That is all I meant to draw attention to.
“Gnothi seauton” (sp) does not resolve itself into psychoanalysis.
<<my assertion that Eliot is anxious about his nationality
comes from a close reading of his letters and early poems.>>
Eliot is always self-conscious and living the examined life. This is
not “anxiety.”
<<To me it doesn't seem like such a shocking suggestion. The further notion
that Eliot may have been "displacing his anxiety onto the Jewish figure" is
more conjectural, but it makes sense to me--which is all I've asserted.>>
It’s not a shocking suggestion, certainly. It’s part of Eliot’s whole bearing.
Note how“Burbank” winds up going global (i.e., truly “catholic”) at
the highest level at the “end." However, Eliot is not “displacing his anxiety
onto the Jewish figure," as you have asserted, rather, he is _identifying_
himself and his poetry with the way of the figure, Bleistein's way. This is
different.
In any case, to return once more to the beginning: one needs to
_recognize_ (for any ultimate reading) that the colon in the title of
“Burbank” already ultimately somehow means “equals” or “is.”
Also, let me recite something I said in an unrelated context in a different
post that may be of some bearing here. Long after ASG, when Eliot later
[Arwin just reposted the letter, I think] speaks of the very sentence in the
lectures that we have been discussing, he says that the traditional
assimilated Jews are about like Unitarians, that is a "social gospel" sort
that promotes the morality and humanitarianism of Christianity without
acknowledging the divinity of Christ. What is important--and I think what
he means for his listener there to hear--is of course that Eliot's own family
was Unitarian: i.e., he associates the assimilated Jews with the assimilated
Christians (="post-Christians") and his own family. More or less liberal, &c.
(Look at the epigraph of “Hippopotamus.”) Eliot is not (in my opinion)
a “post-Christian” in any of his poetry, but the association and closeness just
referred to needs to be appreciated beyond what has seemed the
tendency of many on the list.
I have enjoyed this thread, and I appreciate your heads up about Perl. Maybe
I will come across his work.
Forgive typos--unproofed...
Regards,
Guy Brown
