T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: Divine vs. Human?

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the divine and the human, as it appears in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, written for and performed at the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1935. On the one hand, and most obviously, this play about the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the Cathedral on 29 December 1170 owes much to a medieval Catholic as well as Anglo-Catholic tradition. On the other hand, the unbridgeable distance between the divine and the human, pronounced by Thomas Becket in all his utterances in the play, resembles the contemporary theology of the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whose theology Eliot had been aware of since 1934. Recent scholarship has discussed the influence of Barth’s theology on Eliot’s poetry, especially the Four Quartets (1936–1940). Contemporary sources, on the other hand, show Eliot’s ambivalence towards what he understood to be Barth’s theology. However, the article does not aim at a biographical understanding; it concerns Eliot’s text and how it relates to the radical separation between God and the human world, as found in Barth’s theology. The analysis of Murder in the Cathedral emphasizes the polyphony of voices in the play, which counterbalances the radical contrast between divine and human in the play’s presentation of Thomas Becket’s voice.

Keywords

• T.S. Eliot
• Thomas Becket
• Karl Barth
• saint’s cult and modernity