Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Friday, August 19

TWL, Lines 307-311: Augustine, Buddha and Jesus

307  To Carthage then I came
308  Burning   burning   burning   burning

309  O Lord Thou pluckest me out
310  O Lord Thou pluckest
 
311  burning

  307. CARTHAGE, literally “new city,” second home of Queen Dido and the site of her tragic affair with Aeneus (see Virgil, Aeneid (note 92), was for St. Augustine a new world.  See Augustine, Confessions (398 AD) 3.1.1, as cited by Eliot (translation not identified).

  Eliot: “V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.’”
 
  See also Confessions 10.16.25 (tr. E. B. Pusey, 1838):
 
  “For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body.”
 
  Augustine, born in Thagaste, North Africa, in what is now Algeria, first moved to Carthage, now in neighboring Tunisia, for schooling at the age of 16.  From the start he struggled between  his faith and the hedonistic lifestyle of the “subverters” he saw all around him.  See Confessions 3.3.6.  See also Confessions 8.7.17:

  “But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.’  For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather than extinguished.”

  At the age of 19, Augustine returned to Thagaste to teach, and while there he became greatly disturbed at the death of a close friend (compare Eliot’s loss of his friend Jean Verdenal, note 42), causing him to return to Carthage two years later.
 
  Augustine converted to Christianity relatively late in life, at the age of 34, after being especially moved by a random passage from Romans 13:13-14 (see Confessions 8.12.29):
 
  “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
 
  See also Confessions 10.6.8-9, and compare this to Eliot’s tour of the classical elements (notes 0.5, 26):
 
  “This is it which I love when I love my God.  And what is this?  I asked the earth, and it answered me, ‘I am not He’; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, ‘We are not thy God, seek above us.’ I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, ‘Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.’ I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, ‘Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.’ And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: ‘Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’”  Finally, see Confessions 10.27.38:
 
  “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever
  new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.”

  308. BURNING: Following the image of Augustine’s cauldron (note 307), see Shakespeare, Macbeth 4.1.10-11 for the witches’ chorus:

  “Double, Double toil and trouble:
  Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.”

  See also the witches call of “‘Tis time, tis time,” at note 141.

  For another reference to burning, see Joyce, Ulysses (note 111).

  THE FIRE SERMON: Eliot: “The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon, (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.”

  The Fire Sermon is a central Buddhist text. See Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Adittapariyaya Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 35.28 (483 BCE, tr. Warren, 1896)):

  “The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent,  originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passions, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation, with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.

  ...Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, an aversion for eye-consciousness, an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye.
 
  ...And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.”

  THE EYE, throughout this poem, is veiled or averted: it fails (line 39), is forbidden (line 54), fixes on the feet (line 65), hides behind wings (line 81), presses lidless (line 138), weeps (line 182), turns upward from the desk (line 216) and is covered, then opened (lines 360-363).  See also note 219 for the spectrum of perceptiveness in this poem.

  311. PLUCKED OUT: Eliot: “From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.”

  See Confessions (note 307) 10.34.53:

  “And I, though I speak and see this, entangle my steps with these outward beauties; but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out; because Thy loving-kindness is before my eyes. For I am taken miserably, and Thou pluckest me out mercifully;  sometimes not perceiving it, when I had but lightly lighted upon them; otherwhiles with pain, because I had stuck fast in them.”

  Augustine’s reference to being plucked out mercifully comes from Psalm 25:15:

  “Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.”
 
  But for a different kind of plucking, see Matthew 5:29:

  “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
 
  THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT, the source for this merciless plucking, turns everything around.  At Eliot’s own prompting, compare the ascetic representations (note 309) of Buddha’s Fire Sermon and St. Augustine’s Confessions with the  “corresponding importance “ (note 308) of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, his most extensively preserved public speech delivered at the beginning of his ministry, not long after he had been tested in the wilderness.  The Sermon includes many well known lessons, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the salt and light metaphors; see Matthew 5: 13, 14:
 
  “Ye are the salt of the earth... Ye are the light of the world”

  but also some harsh morality checks.  Following the above eye plucking passage, which spoke the one whose eye wanders lustfully towards adultery, consider this extension to the “eye” passage on how to react to the evil of others, at Matthew 5: 38-39:
 
  “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”  There is also a stern turn of both the eye and the light metaphors at Matthew 6: 22-23:

  “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.  If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”
 
  Compare Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (note 28):
 
  “Preach to birds and beasts
  What woman is, and help to save them from you;
  How heaven is in your eyes, but in your hearts
  More hell than hell has
  ...How all the good you have is but a shadow,
  I' the morning with you, and at night behind you
  Past and forgotten.”
 
  This refers back to lines 27-29: “...Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.”
 
  See also line 41: “looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
 
  The Sermon on the Mount concludes at Matthew 7: 26-27:
 
  “And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”

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