Recent surveys indicate the decades-long ebb in religious observance has finally bottomed out. Last month, Pew Research released data indicating that the declining share of self-identified Christians in America has stabilized around 62 percent. Other surveys have found that young men especially are taking up more seats in the pews, with many seeking out the more traditional practices of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communions.
Why are Americans suddenly returning to tradition? Explaining her own conversion to Christianity, former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently asserted that the metaphysical and spiritual assumptions of secular liberalism seem too weak in this age of crisis. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question,” she wrote, “what is the meaning and purpose of life?” Christianity provides an account of the permanent things and humanity’s relationship to them that actually strengthens Ali and believers like her in struggles great and small.
The Church is a unique source of strength in the face of this modern boredom and despair for her ability to remake believers in the image of Christ’s life. Belief is not a cheap solution to life’s problems; as He told His disciples, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” The season of Lent, which begins today with Ash Wednesday, is meant to prepare new converts and renew the faith of those already in the congregation “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and alms-giving; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” More than anything, it is these practices that converts, reverts, and indeed all Christians need for sustenance in these desiccated times.
A century ago, T.S. Eliot put this Lenten faith into poetry. Raised in a Unitarian home and educated at elite institutions where liberalism was fashionable, he nevertheless felt a gnawing hunger deep in his soul. After WWI, his modernist poetry used an experimental style to capture his disenchantment with the modern world. The Waste Land, the long poem which made Eliot into a literary celebrity in 1922, is nothing less than a cry of despair over the ruins of European civilization left in the wake of WWI.
In the following years, Eliot came to understand that the crisis of modernity he sought to articulate was not only cultural and civilizational, but also deeply spiritual. In 1925 – exactly one hundred years ago – he published a poem titled “The Hollow Men” expressing this dimension of the all-encompassing crisis. Although not yet a believer when it was written, “The Hollow Men” reveals the deep longings of Eliot and his generation that only Christianity could satisfy.
The poem begins with striking lines:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
In his magisterial biography of Eliot, Russell Kirk argued that “‘The Hollow Men’ describes the spiritual vacuity of the modern age – and the vacuity not merely of ordinary people who have ceased to attend church services.” Christianity provided the West with a set of principles, ideas, and images that bound communities together and gave them a source of history – but something about modernity undermined all this. It is the rejection of God that has made men hollow.
To some extent, Eliot was certainly taking aim at modern thinkers. The ideas of H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and especially Bertrand Russell can be detected throughout the poem in the phrases of the Hollow Men. Kirk wrote that Eliot considered these skeptics and ideologues to be “the intellectual enemies of the permanent things, those who wander amusingly into contrived corridors of the spirit – and beguile others, less gifted, after them.” Their doubt metastasized into a kind of cultural cancer, eating away at the life-giving roots of tradition.
Human hollowness, however, besides being a cultural phenomenon, is perhaps even more fundamentally a personal experience. Throughout the poem, Eliot writes of the intense loneliness of life in “death’s twilight kingdom.” It is a powerful evocation of the finitude that all human flesh is heir to, an almost-Lenten reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Human nature is cursed, and we hollow men desperately need rescue.
Understanding the context of Eliot’s private life makes “The Hollow Men” even more painful to read. In 1915, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood; the couple was never happy – Eliot later wrote that to him the marriage “brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” She was plagued by a variety of physical and mental health issues, and he kept up a lingering and deeply unhealthy relationship with an American lady named Emily Hale. The Eliots separated in the 1930s, and Vivienne eventually was committed to a mental hospital where she died in 1947. Distressing as it is to admit for an admirer of his poetry, T.S. Eliot was a sinner struggling with the same hollowness we each face.
Just beneath the surface of “The Hollow Men,” though, careful readers might detect a faint hope for redemption. In his interpretation of the poem, Russell Kirk pointed out the image of a rose near the center of the text. In his reading, it represents a kind of timeless love, a grace that can redeem us from this hollow condition. “A man who has emptied himself of vanity and fleshly desire may struggle through suffering to that rose,” Kirk wrote, “but a Hollow Man, a stuffed man, stirred only by the wind of the dead land, circles endlessly round the prickly pear.”
The end of the poem suggests what emptying oneself of vanity might look like. Snatches of the Lord’s Prayer burst forth as the narrator contemplates the Hollow Man’s strange condition of in-betweenness. The familiar line “For Thine is the Kingdom” stands out as both a reminder of the transcendent and an indication of the pilgrimage for spiritual renewal upon which the Hollow Man must embark. As one of the assigned texts for the Ash Wednesday service instructs, “rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil.”
“The Hollow Men” marks a kind of turning point in Eliot’s poetry and life. From the nadir of spiritual despair it represents, he embarked on a religious journey is search of true peace. Ultimately, that quest culminated in his own baptism and the stunning mysticism of “Ash Wednesday” and The Four Quartets. He lived out a kind of earthly purgatory, a “long Lent” until he discovered that we find “Our peace in His will” and that “all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.”
Western civilization is desperately in need of this Lenten humility because the dominant forces in contemporary politics and culture are fueled by a kind of bitter hubris. On one hand, secular liberalism leaves people uprooted in the gale of perpetual revolution. On the other, reactionary postliberalism reduces religion to a tool of political utility rather than the soul-saving relationship it ought to be. In both cases, ideology leads to spiritual poverty and social disaster. Eliot, by contrast, provides a model for serious cultural engagement that avoids these ideological excesses. His faith is not “The hope only / Of empty men,” but rather a principle that can give order to the soul and to the commonwealth alike.
