A super essay from Eliot on Lancelot Andrewes: a lesson
in devotion and the discipline needed to write it out. Anyone with an appetite for the best use and lift in writing, clear-sightedness over confusion, might learn from these notes on a stalwart of the early Anglican Church. “Intellect and sensibility were in harmony and
hence arise the particular qualities of his style.”
It is beyond me to take Andrewes' work head-on: Latin ungrasped, allusions pitched in knowledge ancient, not familiar. But I perceive a word squeezed for its essence… [as] each new word or phrase represents a new
development, he assimilates his material and advances by means of it, his
quotation is not decoration or irrelevance, but the matter in which he expresses
what he wants to say. If he repeats, it
is because the repetition has a real force of expression.
Andrewes tried to confine himself to the
elucidation of what he considered essential in the dogma. He was drilling down, digging in, “purifying a
disturbed or cryptic lecture-note into lucid profundity.” In this regard, and often with the constructions of his time:
I
am two fools, I know,
For
loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry;
he offers more and better than the often vague - if intentionally so - somewhat distracted Donne. As for
the rest of us, Eliot's eye sweeps the auditorium:
To persons whose minds are habituated to feed on the vague
jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas
about nothing – when a word half understood, torn from its place in some alien
or half-formed science… conceals from both writer and reader the
meaninglessness of a statement, when all dogma is in doubt except the dogmas of
science of which we have read in the newspapers, when the language of theology
itself, under the influence of an undisciplined mysticism of popular
philosophy, tends to become a language
of tergiversation – Andrewes may seem pedantic and verbal. It is only when we have saturated ourselves
in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his
examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent…
Andrewes forces a concrete presence upon us.
Of the wise men come from the East:
It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at
this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and
specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short,
the sun farthest off, in solstitio
brumali, ‘the very dead of winter’.
And I am prompted to return to Introduction to the Devout Life, by Francois de Sales, first suggested by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy, and pick up again that comparable contributor to the discovery of humility's iron.
