2. Kearns, Cleo McNelly, ‘Religion, Literature and Society in the Work of T.S. Eliot’. in A. David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 77–93 (91).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Eliot, T.S., ‘Four Quartets’, in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950. (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 138–145 (139). All references to Eliot's poetry are from this edition.Google Scholar

4. Eliot, T.S., ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’, The Little Review, IV. 1. (1917), pp. 7–11 (8).Google Scholar

5. William Force Stead, ‘Mr. Stead Presents an Old Friend’, p. 6, Beinecke Library, Yale University.Google Scholar

6. Eliot, T.S., ‘Preface’, For Lancelot Andrews (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 11. In contrast with the pre-Vatican II official Roman Catholic teaching that the English Church was established at the Reformation, for Eliot the Eastern Church, the Roman Church and the Church of England were three branches of the Universal Catholic Church. Indicating that commentators on Eliot's faith often confuse Anglo-Catholicism with Roman Catholicism, or present it as if it were another term for High Church Anglicanism, Barry Spurr writes that ‘the three branches sprang from the common root of apostolic Christianity’. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), p. 67.Google Scholar

7. T.S. Eliot letter to Paul Elmer More, 3 August 1929, Princeton University Library, Rare Book Room.Google Scholar

8. While Eliot occasionally used the word ‘conversion’ to describe his own experience, noting however that no one ever tried to convert him, as Barry Spurr suggests the term ‘conversion’ can be misleading in Eliot's case because it ‘tends to diminish the importance of all the diverse elements that lead up to his baptism and confirmation over so many years and, by implying certitude and finality, contradicts Eliot's conception of the individual Christian's experience … as a much more complex phenomenon, shot through with doubts and backslidings, throughout one's earthly pilgrimage’. ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’, pp. 112–13. I use the term instead as Eliot used it in 1948 when he spoke of ‘the convert – and I think not only of conversion from one form of Christianity to another, but indeed primarily of conversion from indifference to Christian belief and practice ….’ Eliot, T.S., Notes toward the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), p. 80.Google Scholar

9. Eliot, T.S., ‘The “Pensées” of Pascal’ in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, new edn, 1950), p. 363. Eliot was attracted to Christian conversion stories, especially that of Pascal, a prominent mathematician who was converted in 1654.Google Scholar

10. T.S. Eliot in The Listener, 9 January 1947. In his review of Russell's, Bertrand, What I Believe (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), (written in 1927) Eliot wrote: ‘I am amazed at Mr. Russell's capacity for believing … within limits … I cannot subscribe with that conviction to any belief …’ T.S. Eliot, ‘Literature, Science, and Dogma’, review of Science and Poetry by I.A. Richards, pp. 239–243 (242).Google Scholar

11. Raymond Preston, ‘T.S. Eliot as a Contemplative Poet’ in T.S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday (2nd Series; ed. Nevill Braybrooke; New York: Farrar, 1963), pp. 161–69 (161–162).Google Scholar

12. Fowlie, Wallace, Journal of Rehearsals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977), p. 138.Google Scholar

13. Thomas Merton distinguishes two ways in which the word ‘contemplative’ is used: (1) juridical (synonymous with ‘clustered life’), and (2) mystical (individual, interior realization and practice). Merton writes that contemplation simply cannot be institutionalized. See Contemplation in a World of Action (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971), p. 207. Along these lines, interreligious dialogian Raimundo Panikkar suggests that ‘monkhood (i.e., the archetype of which the monk is an expression) corresponds to one-dimension of the humanum, so that every human being has potentially the possibility of realizing this dimension’. See Blessed Simplicity: The Monk as Universal Archetype (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), pp. 5–25.Google Scholar

14. Some material in this section appears in a slightly different form in my book, Kenneth Paul Kramer, Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Lanham, MD: Cowley/Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 4–5, 10–11.Google Scholar

15. Eliot, Selected Essays, new edn, pp. 302–303.Google Scholar

16. George Every in a recorded conversation with the author at Oscott College, Sutton Coldfield, England, 27 May 1989.Google Scholar

17. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 138–145 (138).Google Scholar

18. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, p. 144.Google Scholar

19. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, p. 139.Google Scholar

20. Kirk, Russell, Eliot and his Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the 20th Century (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2nd edn, 2008), p. 56.Google Scholar

21. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, pp. 123–129 (126).Google Scholar

22. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, p. 126.Google Scholar

23. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, p. 120.Google Scholar

24. W.S. Merwin, ‘Turning’, The New Yorker, 16 May 2011, p. 49.Google Scholar

25. Quoted in Affectionately, T.S Eliot, by William Levy and Victor Scherle (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1968), pp. 41–42.Google Scholar

26. Ware, Kallistos Timothy, ‘ “Pray without Ceasing”: The Ideal of Communal Prayer in Eastern Monasticism’, Eastern Churches Review, II 3 (1969), p. 258.Google Scholar

27. Eliot, Selected Essays, new edn, pp. 308–309.Google Scholar

28. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, pp. 138–45 (144).Google Scholar

29. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, p. 145.Google Scholar

30. Buber, Martin, The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy of the Interhuman, (trans. Maurice Friedman; New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 107.Google Scholar

31. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, p. 106.Google Scholar

32. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’, pp. 138–45 (145).Google Scholar