Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Written in 1942, it essentially signaled the end of Eliot’s public career as a poet. Little Gidding is actually a village in Huntingdonshire. In that village, there is a chapel that serves as the geographical focus of the poem. Whereas Burnt Norton emphasized the element of air, East Coker emphasized earth, and The Dry Salvages emphasized water, here in Little Gidding the element that is emphasized is fire—both the fire of the inferno, as well as the purifying, Pentecostal fire of the Holy Spirit.
Part 1
The poem begins in Part 1 with a visit to the chapel at Little Gidding in the middle of winter, yet at a time when it is unusually warm and spring-like. Eliot characterizes this “Midwinter spring” as a season unto itself, containing both the frost of the snow and ice and the fire of the sun’s rays—what Eliot calls the pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year. Eliot then points out, ironically, that if you “came this way” (to the church yard in Little Gidding) in May, during the day, you would find “the hedges white again…with voluptuary sweetness.” In May, the whiteness would be the flowers in bloom, whereas in the “Midwinter spring” the whiteness would be the frost in the hedges.
By contrast, Eliot says, if you came at night “like a broken king” and stumbled upon the churchyard, the scene of the flowers in bloom would still be the same, the only difference being the intention and purpose of the travelers. The traveler by day comes with the purpose of viewing the flowers, and that purpose is fulfilled. The traveler by night happens upon it by chance, without any purpose, yet beholds the same flowers. Both arrive at the same place, regardless of their own purposes.
Eliot paints this arrival at the garden in the churchyard, be it in the Midwinter spring or in May, as illustrative of the Still Point. It is the intersection of the timeless moment—a blooming garden in a churchyard full of tombs. It is the Still Point of salvation that requires the renunciation of one’s desires. It is not to be analyzed or verified. It is to be experienced in a perpetual state of prayer. When we experience the timeless moment within time, the only proper response is prayer. Of course, Eliot stresses that true prayer goes beyond the saying certain words or any conscious prayer of the mind. True prayer goes beyond speech. And that is what the transcendent moment in the churchyard illustrates. As Eliot writes:
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
The new life of the Spirit comes only once one has sacrificed oneself and died to oneself, so that the garden full of tombs becomes at the same time (in the timeless moment) the re-experience of the spiritual life in a new pattern, and the laughter of the children in the garden (Burnt Norton).
Part 2
Part 2 begins with a look back at the elemental images from all four poems: The death of air (Burnt Norton), the death of earth (East Coker), and the death of both water (Dry Salvages) and fire (Little Gidding). Combined, the death of these elements signals the end of the world, for it is only through the death of this creation that the re-emergence and birth of a new creation comes.
The rest of Part 2 entails Eliot’s “encounter” with a mysterious figure at dusk. The setting is that of Eliot’s walking the night patrol in London during WWII. Yet at the same time, this encounter with Christ in time is nevertheless a timeless moment of the Still Point. The encounter resembles the two disciples’ encounter with Christ on the road to Emmaus, the day of his resurrection. They think Christ to be dead, yet they heard reports of an empty tomb and do not know what to think. Lo and behold they encounter the resurrected Christ, but they do not recognize him.
When Eliot asks Christ to speak about (and perhaps explain) the wondrous feeling Eliot was experiencing in that “Still Point encounter,” Christ actually refuses, for to put an explanation into words that crystallizes comprehension is not desirable, for language can never fully comprehend the timeless—as soon as they are spoken, they belong to the past and cannot fully grasp the present and future: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice.” Instead of seeking explanation, what is desirable is simply to experience the wonder.
Christ then speaks of the “gifts” that age brings us: senility, bitterness, and regret. All of these point to the hopeless state of mankind. Indeed, it seems a never-ending cycle for humanity, yet the procession “from wrong to wrong” can be broken if one allows oneself to be “restored by that refining fire/Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” Clinging to the self brings misery but dying to self and allowing the Holy Spirit to refine and redeem you through fire brings about a restored relationship with God as well as others.
Part 3
In Part 3, Eliot begins by contemplating three conditions that may look alike, but differ completely: Attachment to oneself, things, and other people; Detachment from oneself, things, and other people; and the Indifference between the two—that is the Still Point. It is the point in which you are no longer clinging and yet are not pushing away. It is the point in which memory brings liberation—the remembrance of those timeless moments in time, and allowing them the freedom “To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.”
He then goes on to say, “Sin is Behovely, but/All shall be well, and/All manner of thing shall be well.” Sin is necessary because it unites us all in a fellowship of the wounded, it brings us all together in death. And yet, that isn’t the end of the story, for it is in death—the death of self—that the purifying fires of the Spirit redeem us. For that reason, there is little reason to memorialize or celebrate dead heroes any more than the rest of those who die—for all of them, and us, leave behind us “a symbol perfected in death.” That symbol is silence. Again, Eliot says, “And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well/By the purification of the motive/In the ground of our beseeching.” That recurring phrase of “All shall be well…” is taken from Julian of Norwich. The reason it is so, despite sin and death in the world, is that it is in the “ground” of death we are purified. It is there where our prayers of union with Christ are answered.
Part 4
The main theme in this short lyric is that of love. Its focus is on the work of the Spirit in both the form of a dove and in the form of the Pentecostal tongues of fire. Eliot writes, “The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre/To be redeemed from fire by fire.” Simply put, the purifying fire of the Spirit redeems us from the devouring fire of hell.
Yet the purification by the Spirit is torment—it means nothing less than the death of our selves. And it is God who devised this means of purification. He both created our bodies, which Eliot calls, “The intolerable shirt of flame.” He calls it this because it represents the flames of passion that often torment and consume us. We are not strong enough to remove it. Only God, who is Love, has the power to redeem us from it. The choice is ours: “We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.” If we choose to cling to our own selfish desires, we will be consumed in this “shirt of flame.” If we choose to seek Christ at the Still Point, God, who is Love, will redeem us with Pentecostal fire.
Part 5
Part 5 begins with an echo, and transformation, of a line in East Coker: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning/The end is where we start from.” We start in Eden and we end in a transformed Eden in the New Jerusalem, in the New Heaven and Earth. Thus, every birth is a beginning that leads to death, and that death is leads to a new beginning. Hence, as Eliot says, “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree/Are of equal duration.” –The rose garden of Burnt Norton can never be recovered, for it dies with every moment, but at the same time, in the timeless moment of the Still Point, the yew-tree in the church yard, representing resurrection, redeems the times of death and transforms them into new patterns of life. This is the necessity of history: “A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments.”
Eliot begins the ending of Little Gidding with these lines:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.”
His point is that although we may only reach the Still Point in isolated moments within time and experience momentary union with the divine, complete union with the Still Point is the product of a lifetime effort, a lifetime’s march. When we achieve that, when we arrive “at the source of the longest river,” we will arrive at the center, the Still Point, where we will hear “The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple-tree” …“in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea.”
Eliot ends with these lines:
“Quick now, here, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
The simplicity and stillness of union with Christ costs everything. The price for resurrection is death. Yet all will be well when the purifying fire of the Spirit not only transforms us and reconciles us to God but purifies the rose in the rose-garden of Burnt Norton to where, if we may say, the rose of Eden is set aflame with the fire of God.
Indeed, a kind of burning bush, only in a new, redeemed pattern of experience.
Dear Dr. Anderson,
I hope you and your family are well and safe.
I hope you can answer my question. You can tolerate again tolerate Ark and answer all of his questions so I hop you can answer some of my questions. I would also say please don’t stop doing this for your conversations that you have with him are complete and pure comedy gold XD. I get a good laugh whenever the two of you dialogue.
On a serious note, I love your blog and have been a reader for a while.
My question is what do you think about the theory that the Gospel writers moved events dyschronologically and added (by John) the “I am” statements for theological reasons? This theory is pushed by NT scholars Drs. Craig Keener and Mike Licona.
Yours Sincerely,
The Programming Nerd
I don’t think there is any question that the various Gospel writers switched events around for their own purposes, and therefore are not STRICTLY chronological. Still, when one looks at all four Gospels, I think one can conclude that Jesus’ ministry was mostly in Galilee, but that he occasionally went down to Judea/Jerusalem during certain feasts.
Dear Dr. Anderson,
I hope you won’t mind if I ask this but if the Gospel writers switched events around for their own purposes, doesn’t this sort of make them to be untrustworthy. The authors of the Gospel seem to be ‘playing with’ Jesus. It is a point that Dr. Lydia McGrew rebuts in her book the mirror or the mask.
Yours Sincerely,
The Programming Nerd
No, I don’t think so. If one expects them to essentially be a “blow by blow” chronological documentary, then that will create a problem because they clearly aren’t. The key is to read and understand them on their own terms. That is why I always use the analogy of a movie like “Hacksaw Ridge.” It is about an actual person (Private Doss) and his heroic actions in WWII. That movie TELLS THE STORY of his actions in history. Still, the director felt free to shift a few aspects of the history around in order to fit better into a clear 2-hour long narrative. Just because he does that doesn’t mean the movie is historically untrustworthy.
We have to let the Gospel writers be BOTH historians, in that they are telling of actual things Jesus did in history, as well as literary artists, in that they are shaping the historical details of Jesus’ life into a clear narrative and story format.
Programming Nerd, the idea that the gospel authors rearrange the chronology of Jesus isn’t a secret, nor controversial, but has been taken for granted by conservative scholars for literally centuries.
Scholars have long known that ancient tradents (story-tellers) were free to edit and rearrange their material yet *weren’t* free to simply make stuff up or drop/add anything significant.
It isn’t only the gospel authors who rearrange their chronology. Biographers and historians have been doing this for centuries. For example–I’m reading a history of Jonestown and the Peoples’ Temple.which begins in 1978 just before the mass murder-sucide in Guyana of November, 1978 instead of in the 1950s as it should if it were strictly chronological. The author Mark Lane does this for a reason. If modern historians and biographers do it, how much more ancient historians and biographers.
Or another example would be a biography of JFK which started with his assassination.
Prof. Ben Witherington III compares the four gospels to four interpretive paintings by different artists of the same cathedral; obviously you have four different paintings by four different artists, but all of the same building. That’s how the gospels approach Jesus. What practical use would it be to even have four identical, carbon copies of the same material about Jesus, anyway?
That’s one serious problem I’ve noted among skeptics–they often attempt to read the ancient texts of the gospels through a modern, 21st century lens, then criticize these ancient texts for not adhering to modern standards of biography/historiography.
Pax.
Lee.
Dear Mr. Freeman,
I hope you do not mind me referring to you as Mr. Freeman. Also, I hope you are well and that your family is safe.
I personally have no issue in admitting that the Gospels can be written in the manner that Dr. Anderson and you propose. The issue is how can scholars support this writing method.
Analytic philosopher Dr. Lydia McGrew has written a book called the mirror or the mask: Liberating the Gospels from literary devices. In this book, she proposes that rather than proposing that the Gospel writers had to “move” certain events in accordance with their theological beliefs, NT scholars, or at least the Christian kind, should accept that the Gospels are eyewitness testimonies that function like normal eye witness testimonies.
Imagine a car crash, different eyewitnesses will give their understanding of the car crash without having to “move” certain aspects of the crash to a particular time because it fits with their certain agenda. In the car crash scenario, someone who saw the car crash at close range will give more details than someone who saw the car crash from a long distance but both individuals are still eyewitnesses. It’s just that one had more access to the scene than the other. Therefore, we should accept that the contradictions that arise from the Gospels can be reconciled by realizing that there are some parts of the Gospels that contain incomplete information.
That’s the method that Dr. McGrew proposes for NT scholars to approach the Gospels.
In short, Dr. McGrew proposes that Christian scholars should not go with the method that Drs. Michael Licona, Craig Keener, Joel Anderson (not trying to offend you sir), Craig Evans, etc. propose and instead other methods that can help bring out the Gospels as reliable eyewitness statements.
Yours Sincerely,
The Programming Nerd
Her book can be accessed here: https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Mask-Liberating-Gospels-Literary/dp/1947929070
For a short analysis on how Dr. McGrew views the Gospels, see here: https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Unbelievable-blog/The-Right-Way-to-Debate-Bart-Ehrman
Programming Nerd, call me Lee. My dad was “Mr. Freeman.” : )
I don’t see the gospels as either/or. Either all artfully crafted, edited stories, or all disjointed eyewitness memories. I think there’s a lot of the former and a little of the latter involved.
Anyone who has studied ancient writing even a little will see that ancient authors used what we’d call “artistic license” when crafting their biographies and histories. Sure they edit and arrange the material according to a pre-planned theme but that in itself doesn’t make them a-historical. Every author past or present edits and arranges their material. So do the gospels. They wouldn’t even understand the kind of objective, dispassionate, “just the facts ma’am” approach to history we moderns seem obsessed with (but don’t ever really practice despite what we tell ourselves). Dispassionate history for its own sake would be an anachronism to them.
Plus we know that the stories in the NT gospels originally circulated as oral tradition for 20-30 years before the stories began to be written down in the late 60s AD–although some scholars such as NT Wright and Richard Bauckham have postulated that some of the Jesus material in the gospels might have been recorded by one or more of Jesus’ literate disciples, such as Levi/Matthew, who as a tax official would’ve been both bilingual and literate. So some of, say, the Sermon on the Mount might have been recorded “live” by Matthew as Jesus gave the teaching.
And as Dr. Ben Witherington III argues, the eyewitness traditions handed down by Matthew were recorded by whoever it was who finally wrote the gospel of Matthew, making the gospel technically “anonymous” but not really, as it carefully preserved the oral tradition passed down by Mathew and/or his tradents.
At the same time, some of the so-called “contradictions” in the gospels can probably be chalked up to different eyewitnesses remembering some of the peripheral details of stories slightly differently. In my opinion, the resurrection narratives are a prime example of this; they read less as carefully crafted, edited, accounts written 30 years later upon much sober theological reflection and more like the immediate, confused, puzzled narratives of people who’d just been witnesses to some bizarre stuff and hadn’t had a chance to sort it all out yet.
So I think most mainstream conservative scholars would have no trouble seeing elements of both at work in the gospels, though they’d probably argue that literary/theological editing/crafting accounts for most of the supposed differences, certainly in the synoptics, but also John, too.
Pax.
Lee.
I read Prof. McGrew’s assessment of the debate and pretty much agree with most of it.
I haven’t read her book (I’m going to order it) however two mainstream NT scholars I have read (Moreland and Blomberg) endorse it. I trust the opinions of both.
Again, I haven’t read the book but from what I have read about it I don’t think she’s arguing that there’s no literary crafting in the gospels, just not wholesale invention of material. As JP Moreland states at the end of his review:
“However, three clarifications are essential: (1) This book is not about literary devices in general but about fictionalizing devices. (2) The approaches most criticized are not common among inerrantist Gospel scholars. (3) The evangelical scholars criticized, both inerrantist and non-inerrantist, have overall been significant defenders of Gospel reliability and of the Christian faith more generally.”
Pax.
Lee.
My bad, that Craig Blomberg’s qualification, not JP Moreland’s.
Pax.
Lee.
Dear Lee,
Thank you your input. I really appreciate it.
As a layman who is just a mere software programmer, which resources can you point to me so that I go and read them and become more better informed in these kind of discussions
Yours Sincerely,
The Programming Nerd
Ha! A “mere” software programmer, as if there’s any such thing! My hat’s off to all the IT people out there.I can’t do what you guys do.
But some titles:
1. Michael Bird’s *The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus.*
2. Richard Bauckham’s *Jesus and the Eyewitnesses*
3. Richard Bauckham’s *The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences.*
4. Craig L.Blomberg’s *The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs.*
5. Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory Boyd’s *The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition.*
6. Larry Hurtado’s *How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus.*
7. Larry Hurtado’s *Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.*
8. Nicholas Perrin’s *Lost In Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus.*
9. Michael J., Wilkins and JP Moreland, eds. *Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus.*
10. NT Wright’s *Jesus and the Victory of God.*
11. NT Wright’s *The Resurrection of the Son of God.*
12. NT Wright’s *The New Testament and the People of God.*
Pax.
Lee.
Dear Dr. Anderson,
Thank you for answering my questions.
I sincerely do not want to offend you but of curiosity, is Ark still allowed to comment? Some of the conversations that you have held with him are pure comedy gold and I honestly think they deserve an Oscar XD
Yours Sincerely,
The Programming Nerd
When he comments, it goes to a special folder that I screen and decide to allow it or not. He hasn’t written anything in over 2 weeks.