T.S. Eliot and the Sense of History

Abstract

Eliot’s deep interest in ideas about history began early and continued throughout his life. In his student days, he encountered the concepts of human pre-history put forward by early anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He studied under Josiah Royce and George Santayana, was aware of the historical writing of his distant relative Henry Adams. The paper also dwells at some length on Eliot’s attitude to the “Whig historians” and the Criterion-group historians. As Eliot entered the Christian fold, his idea of history became that of the Bible and the Church. He followed St. Augustine, was deeply influenced by the British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. As a Christian, Eliot rejected both progressive and regressive views of history as well as determinism in favor of a belief in free will, the doctrine of Original Sin and faith in Providence. Eliot’s views involve a challenge to the secular view of history, and his key terms are based on his Christian vision: the “historical sense”, in the meaning of awareness of “tradition”, which carries the truths of Revelation and the wisdom of the ages forward in time, adapting them somewhat to various times and cultures but remaining faithful to the essential truths, the “permanent things.”