Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’

At table, James the King is, for a moment, lost in thought. Standing behind him are Richard Neile, Bishop of Durham, and Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester. The King suddenly turns and asks, “My lords, cannot I take my subjects’ money when I want it, without all this formality in Parliament?”

An unctuous Neile replies, “God forbid, but you should; you are the breath of our nostrils.”

The King thinks again: then, “And what of you, Andrewes? You have said nothing.”

Andrewes offers that he has no expertise on parliamentary matters.

But James wants an opinion from a man for whom he not only holds a great fondness, but respects enough to uncharacteristically harness a tendency for foul language. It is said that James sleeps with a collection of the bishop’s sermons under his pillow.

He warns his friend genially, “No put-offs, my lord; answer me presently.”

Andrewes has had time to think on the matter and replies, “Then sir, I think it lawful for you to take Neile’s money for it seems he offers it.”

The King is much amused. As are we.

Providence played a part in the relationship that developed between Andrewes and James I. The earlier consecration of Andrewes as Bishop of Chichester in 1603 had delayed the opening of Parliament by a day, and the subsequent twenty-four-hour lapse had proved crucial in the discovery of the infamous Gunpowder Plot. That aside, the bishop had a reputation as a powerful mind and a model of devotion. In An Exact Narration of the Life and Death of the Late Reverend and Learned Prelate, and Painfull Divine Lancelot Andrewes, Late Bishop of Winchester (1650), Henry Isaacson lauds a subject that:

never loved or used any games or ordinary recreations, either within doors, as cards, dice, chess or the like; or abroad, as hilts, quoits, bowls … his ordinary exercise and recreation was walking either alone by himself, or with some other selected companion, with whom he might confer and argue, and recount their studies; and he would often profess that to observe the grass, herbs, trees, cattle, earth, waters, heavens, any of the creatures, and to contemplate their natures, uses, etc., was ever to him the greatest mirth, content, and recreation that could be; and this he held to his dying day.

He was fluent in a staggering twenty languages (ancient and modern) and spent five hours daily in private prayer. He seemed the logical choice to oversee the translation that we regard as the King James Bible. Nearly 400 years later, and citing the beginning of Psalm 23—“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures”—the novelist Kurt Vonnegut laid claim to Andrewes being “the greatest writer in English”.

However, it was the essay that T.S. Eliot devoted to Andrewes in 1926, initially published in the Times Literary Supplement, that first shone a new light on the power and beauty of expression evident in the bishop’s writing. Eliot suggested that Andrewes exhibited the very opposite of what he called “the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing”. He identified the sermons as both deeply spiritual and at ease with the humanism of Renaissance learning. He admired their being “peppered with allusion and quotation” and ranked them with the finest English prose of any era. Andrewes was “wholly in his subject, unaware of anything else … his emotion grows as he penetrates more deeply into his subject … [until] he is finally more alone with the Alone”. Eliot identified three distinctive stylistic attributes: “ordonnance, or arrangement and structure, precision in the use of words, and relevant intensity”.

Here is Andrewes on angels:

What are angels? Surely they are spirits, glorious spirits, heavenly spirits, immortal spirits. For their nature of substance, spirits; for their quality or property, glorious; for their place or abode, heavenly; for their durance or continuance, immortal.

As for humankind, we reside “among the fleas and flies, moths, and spiders, and crawling worms. There is our place of dwelling … man is but a thing of nought.”

The impression Andrewes made on Eliot was profound. It realised what F.O. Matthiessen describes in The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (1935) as “the union of intellect and emotion”.

The “relevant intensity” that Eliot spoke of found form in his own work as early as Gerontion in 1920, where we have:

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”

The word within a word, unable to speak a word …

while a later poem, Ash-Wednesday, 1930, begins:

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn …

and later again, Burnt Norton (1935):

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Eliot was particularly interested in the seventeen sermons on the Nativity that Andrewes preached before James I on Christmas Day between the years 1605 and 1624. Here, speaking of the three Magi, Balthazar (King of Chaldea), Gaspar (the Ethiopian King of Tarshish) and Melchior (King of Nubia), the bishop explains:

Their journey was exceeding dangerous, as lying through the “black tents of Kedar”, a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day …

It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of year to take a journey, and especially 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.

Eliot saw this as “extraordinary prose, which appears to repeat, to stand still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most deliberate and orderly manner”. What he refers to as Andrewes’s “flashing phrases” took hold to the extent that his own poem, “Journey of the Magi” (1927)—the first of the Ariel poems, shilling pamphlets published by Faber & Gwyer to celebrate Christmas—begins thus:

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

In the sermons, Andrewes asks the question, what did the Magi find? And he elaborates:

No sight to comfort them, nor a word for which they were any whit the wiser; nothing worth their travel … [yet] they will take Him as they find Him, and all this notwithstanding, worship Him for all that.

Eliot, writing to C.W. Dilke at the BBC in the week before Christmas in 1948, stated explicitly that his poem had asked the reader to wonder, “how fully was the Truth revealed to those who were inspired to recognise Our Lord so soon after the Nativity?”

Speaking for the Magi at once individually and collectively in the poem, Eliot is emphatic:

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods …

In a 1927 letter to his mother, Eliot says he intends to send her a copy of Andrewes’s Private Devotions. He explains: “These are the prayers which he wrote for his own use … I like to turn to them during the night whenever I cannot sleep.”

An example is a Thursday morning prayer in celebration of the Fifth Day of Creation:

Blessed art Thou, O Lord

who didst bring forth of water

moving creatures that have life,

and whales,

and winged fowls:

and didst bless them,

so as to increase and multiply.

When Eliot sends his mother the book, he adds a note:

Herewith the little book of Lancelot Andrewes prayers … The first five lines of my Journey of the Magi are quoted directly from one of his sermons. I had a very amusing letter … telling me that if I meant to be accurate, my geography of the country about Bethlehem was completely wrong! There are no snow mountains anywhere about, it appears.

Reassuringly however, Eliot adds: “The poem has sold very well.”

For the record, the letter that Eliot received from a Horace M. Kallen reads in part:

there is no way that men travelling with horse and camel can pass from snowline to vegetation overnight and reach Bethlehem. That sink lies in the arid Judean hills, which stick up sharp and nude all around. They slope eastwards to the waste lands of the Dead Sea, south to the desert. There is no snow nearer than Hermon, to the north, several camel journeys away.

Eliot’s response was perfectly reasonable:

Theoretically I believe one ought to make verse as watertight as prose on such points. On the other hand, if I had bothered about the topography and archaeology of Asia Minor, I should have had to omit a good deal of detail which really is meant to be symbolical.

For Eliot, Journey of the Magi always remained an important poem. He had felt that his poetry may have come to an end with The Hollow Men (1925), a poem redolent with the idea of spiritual death. The poem interestingly carries allusions to the Gunpowder Plot, and the world it describes will end “not with a bang but a whimper”. Yet Eliot felt that the opportunity to contribute to the Ariel poems had directly facilitated the writing of Ash-Wednesday, 1930, the first major work since his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and one which dealt with the problem of religious belief in an uncertain age—“Wavering between the profit and the loss”—and the difficulty of finding the courage to seek faith. Journey of the Magi “released the stream”, he said. Eliot somewhat self-effacingly put it to fellow poet Conrad Aiken that he had “no illusions about it: I wrote it in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.”

The extent to which the influence of Andrewes played a part in Eliot’s decision to forgo his American family’s commitment to Unitarianism in favour of Anglicanism is uncertain. However, in a piece for the Listener in 1932 titled “The Modern Mind”, he did state that “the Christian scheme” as expressed by Andrewes and more particularly the next generation of theologians such as Jeremy Taylor seemed to him the only way forward. The year 1927 marked the need to be part of something. He explained the relinquishing of his American citizenship in order to become properly British by his not liking “being a squatter” and once this was achieved, he would clearly define himself as: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”.

His commitment to the last descriptor is evidenced by a curt response to Bertrand Russell’s piece of the same year, Why I Am Not a Christian. Here Russell made the standard arguments against divine design in favour of Darwinism, doubts over the historical presence of Jesus and the Hobbesian thesis that religious morality was essentially based on fear. Eliot told Russell:

I have just read your little pamphlet on Christianity. With some sadness. All the reasons you advance were familiar to me, I think, at the age of six or eight; and I confess that your pamphlet seems to me a piece of childish folly … why don’t you stick to mathematics?

Barry Gillard lives in Geelong. He wrote “Rhyme and Reason: The Poet as Tormented Genius” in the November issue.