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.

1. Introduction

Thomas Stearns Eliot’s (1888–1965) play Murder in the Cathedral was written for and performed at the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1935.1 The play is probably the most famous in a long history of dramatic appropriations of the historical conflict between Archbishop Thomas Becket and King Henry II (see Appendix B). This conflict led to the martyrdom of Becket on 29 December 1170 and the most important saints’ cult in Britain, indeed one of the most popular cults of saints in the Middle Ages altogether. (For a brief historical discussion of the Becket conflict, see Appendix A).

In this article, I aim to discuss the relationship between the divine and the human, as it appears in the play. As a main point of comparison, I shall use Karl Barth’s (1886–1968) radical theology of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the gulf between the Word of God and the human world was strongly emphasized. The importance of Barth’s theology in recent scholarship on Eliot’s poetry and what intuitively appears as a parallel to the Barthian gulf in Thomas Becket’s lines in the play provide a background for investigating this particular aspect of Murder in the Cathedral. The point, however, is not biographical. I am not trying to establish to what extent Eliot may have been under the influence of Barth’s theology when he wrote Murder in the Cathedral in the early months of 1935, but to seek an understanding of how Eliot’s text relates to the radical separation between God and the human world, found in Barth’s theology. First, however, I shall briefly review what historically connects Eliot and Barth around this time, not least because the sources show an ambiguity toward Barth on Eliot’s part, which increases the interest (and may be helpful) in investigating how Murder in the Cathedral treats the relationship between the divine and the human.

Especially Domestico but also other scholars have discussed connections between the theology of Karl Barth and Eliot’s poetry (Domestico 2012a, 2012b; Soud 2014; Domestico 2017, in particular chapters 2 and 3), sometimes also including Eliot’s essays (Soud 2014, pp. 1365–67). Domestico has pointed out that in 1934, Karl Barth’s theology was taken up for discussion in the Criterion, the literary magazine that Eliot edited from its first issue in 1922 to its last in 1939 (Domestico 2012a, 2017, chap. 2). He observes that “Karl Barth, whose radical Protestantism would appear to be at odds with Eliot’s orthodox Anglo-Catholicism, was, in fact, one of the Criterion’s major theological interlocutors from 1934 onward” (Domestico 2012a, p. 21; cf. Domestico 2017, chap. 2: pp. 35–36).2

Domestico and Soud have (in each their way) interpreted Eliot’s Four Quartets (1936–1942) in light of Barth’s theology (Domestico 2012b, 2017, chap. 3; Soud 2014), both pointing to similarities between Barth and Eliot even before Eliot knew of Barth (Domestico 2012b, pp. 3–6; Soud 2014, pp. 1365–67). Domestico’s and Soud’s Barthian interpretations of the Four Quartets have recently been criticized by Sicari, although he admits that “there is much to be learned by reading how Barth’s theology affected Eliot” (Sicari 2022, pp. 43–45, quotation: 44). He, however, points to Rudolf Otto and his The Idea of the Holy from 1917 as a more fruitful background for interpreting the Four Quartets (Sicari 2022, pp. 40–45).

Already in 1936, the British Kierkegaardian scholar Melville Chaning-Pearce (see Morgan 2010, p. 123) had identified affinities between Barth and several British contemporary poets, including Eliot, since they all “betray a catastrophic or cacophonic strain” (quoted from Domestico 2012b, p. 6; identically Domestico 2017, chap. 3, p. 58).3 For Chaning-Pearce, Murder in the Cathedral turned Barth’s denunciation of “the worship of the ‘Man-God’” into poetry, while for Domestico, “the affinities between Eliot and Barth are even deeper than Chaning-Pearce could have known” (Domestico 2012b, p. 22 (n. 9); similarly Domestico 2017, chap. 3, pp. 154–55 (n. 29)).

In a letter of 5 September 1934 to the Reverend Geoffrey Curtis, Eliot discusses his relation to Barth’s theology in passing, in the context of the reverend’s reaction to his pageant The Rock (1934). Curtis had claimed, somewhat critically, that Eliot theologically belonged “to the pre-Barthian era” (Eliot and Haffenden 2017, p. 311 (n. 3)). Eliot answered:

It is possible that my very superficial acquaintance with Barthian theology is from the wrong end. That is, I got the impression that it was a movement back to Luther; that as a counter-reformation of Liberal Protestantism it was all to the good; but that it had little to offer to the less Protestant minded, and indeed held dangers in stressing the chasm between the spiritual and the temporal order. In fact, the Bishop of Stepney asked me if I had been influenced by Barth, because he thought that I was emphasising the division of ‘Church’ and ‘World’ to such an extent!

(Eliot and Haffenden 2017, pp. 311–12)

It seems here that Eliot distances himself, at least to some extent, from precisely the feature that both the Bishop of Stepney (but not the Rev. Curtis) and, more recently, Domestico and Soud have otherwise emphasized as an element common to Barth’s radical theology and Eliot’s poetry.

A few years later, in his The Idea of a Christian State (1939), three lectures given in March 1939, published as a book late in 1939 by Faber & Faber (Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, pp. 2199–411),4 Eliot explicitly brings up the relationship between religious and secular life, both for individuals and communities, referencing Barthian theology in passing:

And I think that the tendency of the time is opposed to the view that the religious and the secular life of the individual and the community can form two separate and autonomous domains. I know that a theology of the absolute separation of the life of the Spirit and the life of the World has spread from Germany. Such a doctrine appears more plausible, when the Church’s position is wholly defensive, when it is subject to daily persecution, when its spiritual claims are questioned and when its immediate necessity is to keep itself alive and to keep its doctrine pure. But this theo-logy is incompatible with the assumptions underlying everything that I have been saying. The increasing complexity of modern life renders it unacceptable, for, as I have already said, we are faced with vital problems arising not merely out of the necessity of cooperating with non-Christians, but out of our unescapeable (sic!) implication in non-Christian institutions and systems. And finally, the totalitarian tendency is against it, for the tendency of totalitarianism is to re-affirm, on a lower level, the religious-social nature of society. And I am convinced that you cannot have a national Christian society, a religious-social community, a society with a political philosophy founded upon the Christian faith, if it is constituted as a mere congeries of private and independent sects. The national faith must have an official recognition by the State, as well as an accepted status in the community and a basis of conviction in the heart of the individual.

(Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, p. 2285)

The modern editors of the text point out that the German theology to which Eliot refers, is the theology of Karl Barth (pointing also to the letter of 5 September quoted above; Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, p. 2387 (n. 47)). Eliot expresses a certain understanding of the “absolute separation” in Barthian theology, because of the political situation in Germany and the position of the Church under the Nazi regime. However, his rejection of a division of life into two separate and autonomous domains is undiminished by this. This accords well with an earlier statement in his “Religious Drama, Mediaeval and Modern”, a lecture held in March 1937 and again in July the same year (published later the same year; Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, pp. 1708–45, see also 1742 (n. 1*)). In this address, Eliot writes:

What I am opposing is not merely a division of religious and secular drama into watertight compartments; what I am proposing is not merely that we need to go to a religious play or to a secular play in much the same spirit. It is an opposition to the compartmentalisation of life in general, to the sharp division between our religious and our ordinary life. I know that in the world in which we live this compartmenta-lisation is constantly being forced upon us. I am not only thinking of certain countries, and of certain tendencies which exist in every country; of the explicit doctrine that religion is for a man’s private life, and that his public life belongs to the secular state. The terminus of such a doctrine is of course to put an end to man’s private life altogether, for the division cannot be maintained.

(Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, p. 1724)

Eliot gave this lecture both before and after the time he signed the foreword of the third edition of Murder in the Cathedral in June 1937 (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 7). The second and third editions of Murder in the Cathedral were unchanged, except that the second edition (1936) had substituted a chorus for the introits, which opened Part II in the first edition. In the third edition, these introits were added as an appendix, and Eliot pointed out that they “may be used instead of the chorus in productions of the play” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 7).

Taking all the referenced sources into account, Eliot’s relationship to Barth’s theology appears to be complex. On the one hand, affinities between Barth’s main theological stance and Eliot’s writings have been found since the 1930s. On the other hand, Eliot himself seems to have had serious reservations, at least about what he had understood of Barth’s theology. Domestico has even suggested a split between Eliot the essayist, on the one hand, and Eliot the poet, on the other (Domestico 2012b, p. 3; identically Domestico 2017, chap. 3, p. 55).

What Barth’s theological position implied in terms of practical–political consequences may not have been easy for everyone to understand, although also in Britain, Barth was known from the end of 1933 for his uncompromising opposition to Nazism, especially as regarded the position of the churches (Morgan 2010, pp. 128–34; Domestico 2012a, pp. 2–3; 2017, chap. 2, p. 36). Indeed, Barth did not advocate a total separation of religious and ordinary life as is evident from his clear reaction against the political development in Germany, even before Hitler officially came to power in 1933. Eberhard Busch, in his biography of Karl Barth, refers, among other writings and actions, to an article Barth wrote in December 1931:

How clear and how serious Barth saw the whole situation at the time came to the fore in an article in December 1931 in the Zofinger Zentralblatt. Here he characterized fascism as a ‘religion in its dogmatically fixed acquaintance with only one reality, the national, in its appeal to reasons, which are no reasons at all, in its behavior as unqualified power’. Indeed, as a religion, from which Christianity could only expect hostility, and towards which, at the same time, Christianity might stand under the greatest temptation to adapt.5

(Busch [1975] 2005, p. 231)

In December 1933, in a controversial sermon, Barth also commented on the question of the Jews, pointing out that Jesus Christ was a Jew. Some listeners left the church in protest. In January 1934, Barth confirmed what he had said in the sermon in a letter to someone who had been present in the church:

in believing Christ, who was a Jew himself and died for heathens and Jews, one simply must not go along with the disrespect and cruelty towards the Jews which is the order of the day.6

(Busch [1975] 2005, p. 247)

Thus, Barth’s separation of the divine domain from the human did not mean that Christian belief for him had only private and spiritual consequences. This came especially to the fore in Barth’s public engagement with the establishment of the German Confessing Church and its famous so-called Barmen Declaration in May 1934, mainly based on a draft written by Barth (Busch [1975] 2005, pp. 257–61; Morgan 2010, pp. 131–34).

What was of the utmost importance for Barth, famously expressed in the second edition of his commentary to Paul’s Letter to the Romans (published in 1922) and in many publications over the following years, was the insurmountable distance between God’s self-revelation in his Word and human attempts at approaching God. Just after he lost his professorship in Bonn, due to his refusal to swear the required loyalty oath to Hitler without reservations, he gave a series of talks in the early months of 1935 at the University of Utrecht (Holland), later published in the volume Credo (Busch [1975] 2005, pp. 272–73). Here, again, he opposes God’s revelation, the Word of God, to the idea that humans can somehow approach the notion of God (the idea traditionally termed “natural theology”):

We must rather begin with the admission that we do not know in ourselves what we say when we say “God”, indeed that all that we believe to know when we say “God” does not capture and comprehend the one who is called “God” in the creed. We will always only capture an idol of ours, thought out and made by ourselves, whether, in truth, we aim for the “Spirit” or “Nature”, “Fate” or the “Idea”.7

(Barth 1948, p. 10)

Eliot was not comfortable with a theology of separation between the life of the spirit and the life of the world. Thus, it is not surprising that his strong commitment to Christianity provides a “useful interpretive frame for understanding his near-despairing critiques of liberal democracy and his sustained, if lopsided, attacks on fascism and communism” (Javadi et al. [2017] 2021, p. 45). Politically, however, it is not possible to make meaningful comparisons between Eliot and Barth, considering the differences between the political situations in Germany and Britain. While some scholars have claimed that Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral can be read as a contemporary statement against dictatorship and the idea that the Church should subordinate itself to anything but the Word of God (Sharoni 1972, p. 148; Lapworth 1988, p. 40), this is weakened by the absence of the king, or his voice, in the play. Based on his interpretation of the knights’ self-justifications after the murder, spoken in modern prose language (in contrast to the play’s otherwise consistent poetry), Andrew Chandler has commented on the contemporary political aspect of Eliot’s play in the following way:

An exploration of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket by agents of King Henry II in the twelfth century, Murder in the Cathedral may at first appear to offer only a further pageant of imaginative medievalism. But Eliot himself acknowledged the dimension of an all too recognizable pragmatism by converting his murderers into self-interested public servants justifying themselves in work-a-day prose. Privately, at least, it is said that Eliot himself saw this work as a response to Hitler. We shall never know how many in those early audiences saw the connection.

(Chandler 2007, p. 304)

However, Chandler’s suggestion that the knights are unequivocally exposed as negative pragmatic figures, when justifying the murder of Thomas and their own roles in it (cf. also Robinson 1986, p. 41), is not the only way to read this scene (see further below). A contemporary political perspective does not stand out in the play.

Altogether, it does not seem possible to reach a firm conclusion about the affinities between Eliot and Barth. As already stated, this article does not seek such a conclusion, nor does it aim at a biographical understanding of Murder in the Cathedral. This introduction has attempted to establish the complex background for the interest in raising a particular question about the text of the play: to what extent is this text in alignment with the fundamental Barthian understanding of the qualitative and absolute distance between the divine and the human. A discussion of this will be the task for the remainder of the article.

2. Murder in the Cathedral: The Divine and the Human

Since the first performance of Murder in the Cathedral, critics have focused to a large extent on how the text draws on medieval liturgy and, more generally, is based in Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Christianity (Ayers 1978; Davidson [1985] 1988; Ferguson 1988; Gardner [1950] 1988; Robinson 1986; Heady 2019, pp. 123–49). This is obviously so as demonstrated by the play’s numerous quotations (and paraphrases) from medieval (and Anglo-Catholic) liturgy, mainly delivered by the chorus of women of Canterbury, a chorus looming large in the play (see further below). It is also unsurprising, as Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927 (Davidson [1985] 1988, p. 123; Heady 2019, p. 24). It has also been pointed out that the play owes a good deal to the medieval saint’s play (Kornbluth 1959; Davidson [1985] 1988). The prayer to St Thomas by the chorus with which the play ends (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 86) and the discourse about martyrs in Thomas’s sermon on Christmas Day clearly reference the long Roman-Catholic tradition and understanding of sainthood. In his sermon, Thomas points out what a saint is, and is not:

A martyr is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom.

(Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 49–50)

Eliot’s play is divided into two parts, with Thomas’s sermon on Christmas Day as an interlude between the parts. Throughout both parts, the chorus of Canterbury women put the action into perspective, responding, sometimes directly to what is happening, but mostly through basic responses of human incomprehension and fear of what they sense, sometimes praying for divine as well as human help.

In Part II, after the actual murder, the knights justify themselves directly to the audience, interpreting Thomas’s struggle and his death in a way completely opposite to the religious interpretation otherwise dominating the play. In sharp contrast, the priests then take up the religious interpretation, now in poetic language, partly expressing the Church’s feeling of bereavement and fear since they have lost their shepherd (First Priest), while the Third Priest expresses the Church’s feeling of triumph, having now gained a new martyr. He calls on everyone to give thanks “to God, who has given us another Saint in Canterbury” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 83). The chorus takes up his request in a poetic paraphrase of the Te Deum, while this is “sung in Latin by a choir in the distance” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 83). The very last words of the chorus (and the play) consist of an English Kyrie eleison (“Lord, have mercy upon us. Christ, have mercy upon us. Lord, have mercy upon us”) followed by “Blessed Thomas, pray for us”, expressing their devotion to the new martyr of Canterbury (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 86).

Whereas Part II focuses on the confrontation with the knights, the murder, and its interpretation, Part I anticipates the dramatic events by presenting the forebodings of the women of Canterbury. Then follows Thomas’s arrival (at the beginning of December 1170 after his exile) and his confrontation with four tempters as its main dramatic contents. The first three tempters correspond more or less to the temptations of Jesus in Matt 4:1–11, but they also have a basis in Thomas’s earlier life as the king’s chancellor, tempting him with pleasure and power. At this point, all such worldliness constitutes no real temptation for him, but a fourth (unexpected) tempter tempts him with the glory of sainthood. This temptation stems from Becket’s own innermost wishes, as he admits:

Thomas:	Who are you, tempting with my own desires?
	Others have come, temporal tempters,
	With pleasure and power at palpable price.
	What do you offer? what do you ask?
Tempter:	I offer what you desire. I ask
	What you have to give. Is it too much
	For such a vision of eternal grandeur?
Thomas:	Others offered real goods, worthless
	But real. You only offer
	Dreams to damnation.
Tempter:	You have often dreamt them. (Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 39–40)

Falling for this temptation would mean becoming a false martyr, and Thomas is well aware of this. The tempter now directs words to him that are (almost) verbatim the same that Thomas himself spoke about the women of Canterbury when he arrived:

Tempter:	You know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.
	You know and do not know, that acting is suffering,
	And suffering action. Neither does the actor suffer
	Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
	In an eternal action […] (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 40, cf. 21)

The tempter thus identifies Thomas with the all too human women of Canterbury who sense, hope and struggle for themselves and their lives with only premonitions of the greater perspectives, although they do know of suffering, having always suffered, as they state in the opening chorus of the play:

Chorus:	[…] what tribulation
	With which we are not already familiar? There is no danger
	For us, and there is no safety in the cathedral. Some presage of an act
	Which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet
	Towards the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness. (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 11)

Thomas points out that the women do not understand the role of their suffering in the overall divine perspective, “they know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer […]” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 21). Action and suffering belong together as part of “an eternal action, an eternal patience, to which all must consent that it may be willed” and in order for “the pattern” to “subsist”, so “that the wheel may turn and still be forever still” (Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 21, 40). Action and suffering are part of the eternal meaning of life, of the turning wheel, which precisely for that reason is “forever still”. For humans this is something one struggles against, attempting to find some way out of suffering, or, if possible, to turn suffering to one’s own advantage, as indeed Thomas does when tempted by the glory of martyrdom. As long as that temptation has its grasp on him, he has come no further than the poor women. In the film version of the play, Murder in the Cathedral (1951; see Appendix B), the voice of the fourth tempter was heard, but not seen (as opposed to the other tempters).8 The words of the fourth tempter quoted above may support a reading of that voice as internal, maybe even in some way a divine, or divinely inspired voice, prompting Thomas to accept what martyrdom actually means. The fourth tempter is thus a highly ambiguous figure, offering a false temptation that actually does tempt Thomas, but thereby indirectly points him in the direction of true martyrdom. The peripeteia of the play is this change in Thomas. It is textually expressed only after a worried exchange between tempters, priests, and the chorus, followed by an almost despairing chorus (“We have not been happy, my Lord”, Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 42–44), ending in what sounds like a cry:

O Thomas Archbishop, save us, save us, save yourself that we may be saved;

Destroy yourself and we are destroyed.

What they, as humans, long for, is an archbishop at their side, who makes them feel safe, but Thomas is now beyond all human hopes and temptations, including his own last temptation, which was “the greatest treason” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 44):

Thomas:	While I ate out of the King’s dish
	To become servant of God was never my wish.
	Servant of God has chance of greater sin
	And sorrow, than the man who serves a king.
	For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them,
	Still doing right: and striving with political men
	May make that cause political, not by what they do
	But by what they are. I know
	What yet remains to show you of my history
	Will seem to most of you at best futility,
	Senseless self-slaughter of a lunatic,
	Arrogant passion of a fanatic.
	[…]
	I shall no longer act or suffer, to the sword’s end.
	Now my good Angel, whom God appoints
	To be my guardian, hover over the swords’ points. (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 45)

Here, Thomas has parted with pretensions, presenting himself, as it seems honestly, with no attempt to justify himself. Critics of the play, however, have pointed to a seeming discrepancy between Thomas’s self-presentations in the play and the theology of martyrdom to which he refers. Indeed, Thomas’s assertive self-presentations, only indirectly perceivable in the lines just quoted, and his unbending attitude throughout Part II of the play can be read as pride or lack of appropriate humility (Gardner [1950] 1988, pp. 18–20; Sharoni 1972, p. 145; Cutts 1974, p. 204), or as abstract theology (Ferguson 1988, p. 8).

During the confrontations with the knights before the murder in Part II, the dialogue appears more historicized, bringing in canon law and the papacy:

Thomas:	It is not I who insult the King,
	And there is higher than I or the King.
	It is not I, Becket from Cheapside,
	It is not against me, Becket, that you strive.
	It is not Becket who pronounces doom,
	But the Law of Christ’s Church, the judgement of Rome.
	Go then to Rome, or let Rome come
	Here, to you, in the person of her most unworthy son. (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 62)

Even so, and throughout Part II, Thomas claims his actions (thus his words) to be in accordance with God’s will, postulating it rather than explaining it. Dramatically, it comes to the fore when he commands the priests to unbar the door to the cathedral, making it possible for the threatening knights to enter the church:

Unbar the door!

You think me reckless, desperate and mad.

You argue by results, as this world does,

To settle if an act be good or bad.

You defer to the fact. For every life and every act

Consequence of good and evil can be shown.

And as in time results of many deeds are blended

So good and evil in the end become confounded.

It is not in time that my death shall be known;

It is out of time that my decision is taken

If you call that decision

To which my whole being gives entire consent.

I give my life

To the Law of God above the Law of Man.

Those who do not the same

How should they know what I do?

How should you know what I do? Yet how much more

Should you know than these madmen beating on the door.

Unbar the door! unbar the door!

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by stratagem, or by resistance,

Not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast

And have conquered. We have only to conquer

Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Now is the triumph of the Cross, now

Open the door! I command it. OPEN THE DOOR!

(Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 71–72)

And slightly later:

I am here.

No traitor to the King. I am a priest,

A Christian, saved by the blood of Christ,

Ready to suffer with my blood.

This is the sign of the Church always,

The sign of blood. Blood for blood.

His blood given to buy my life,

My blood given to pay for His death,

My death for his Death.

(Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 73)

The dichotomy between human and divine in the first of these statements may not only remind the reader or spectator of the unsurmountable distance between God’s realm and will on the one hand and human understandings of the world on the other, as asserted by Barth. It reflects many of Jesus’s expressions in the Gospel of John, the gospel text in the New Testament that most strongly emphasizes the divinity of Jesus. Compare, for example, the following words from John 8: 23: “Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world”, and John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid”. The idea that his (true) disciples are not of this world, but share the divine world with him, is explicitly stated in the following words of a long prayer to God:

For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me, for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. […] I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

(John 17: 8–11, 14–16)9

The sharp dichotomy in Barth’s theology of the 1920s and 1930s did have a solid basis in classical theology, going back all the way to early Christians. As is well known, the question of how to express (and not upset) the balance between Christ’s divine and human natures occupied Christianity for centuries, before as well as after the famous Christological (paradoxical) solution of the Council of Chalcedon (in 451), claiming that Christ’s two natures should neither be separated nor confounded. The dichotomy in Thomas’s lines in Murder in the Cathedral does not concern the Christological question itself, but one derived from it, how the divine and the human realms relate to one another. For Thomas, as for Barth, and as for the Johannine Jesus, the emphasis on the unapproachable divinity of the divine is so great as to seemingly threaten an intelligible connection between the divine and the human spheres (although Barth certainly did not reject the doctrine of Christ’s two natures). In the overall History of Christianity, the humanity of God’s Son, born as a helpless and poor child, plays just as important a role as his divinity. In the so-called objective doctrine of the Atonement by Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas’s famous archiepiscopal predecessor, the balance (and its necessity) was theoretically explained in his Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), written just before 1100.

In the following, I shall argue that in Murder in the Cathedral, a kind of balance between the divine and the human is achieved poetically, through a polyphony of radically different voices.10 The following section will direct the attention to these other voices. Among these, those of the women of Canterbury, already briefly touched upon, are particularly important.

3. The Women of Canterbury and the Knights

In the original version of the play, Part II began with a dialogue between the priests referencing the feasts between Christmas and 29 December (the Day of St Thomas of Canterbury): St Stephen’s Day (26 December), St John’s Day (27 December), Holy Innocents (28 December), at each instance letting banners and the appropriate introit be sung. As mentioned, Eliot wrote a new chorus for the opening of Part II in 1936, but in the third edition inserted the original opening of the play as an appendix, allowing it to be used in performances. Altogether, liturgical hymns play a significant role in the play, making it possible for the women of Canterbury, for the priests, but not least also for the audience to participate in what they do not understand. The use of liturgical hymns provides a voice with which to participate in the divine world, even without understanding what is going on. In addition to this, the women of Canterbury sense a divine world that concerns them, regardless of their lack of insight, and are able to express this sensory appreciation.

This comes to the fore when the women of Canterbury speak in counterpoint to sung medieval hymns as in the final Te Deum. Another similar situation occurs before the actual murder, between the two scenes in which the knights confront Thomas. After the first of these scenes, the chorus opens at the point where the priests force Thomas into the cathedral with the aim of protecting him by closing the doors of the church during vespers. The stage directions indicate a Dies Irae to be sung simultaneously by a choir in the distance (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 68). The beginning and end of the women’s chorus are written in three-line stanzas of four trochees, just like the originally Franciscan, thirteenth-century Dies Irae, except that the last line mostly abbreviates the last trochee into only one (stressed) syllable. However, after three stanzas in this traditional poetic meter, the chorus continues in its usual, less regular meter, before they conclude the chorus, at a point where the women paraphrase one of the stanzas of the Dies Irae, with two more three-line stanzas of four trochees:

Numb the hand and dry the eyelid,

Still the horror, but more horror

Than when tearing in the belly.

Still the horror, but more horror

Than when twisting in the fingers,

Than when splitting in the skull.

More than footfall in the passage,

More than shadow in the doorway,

More than fury in the hall.

The agents of hell disappear, the human, they shrink and dissolve

Into dust on the wind, forgotten, unmemorable; only is here

The white flat face of Death, God’s silent servant,

And behind the face of Death the Judgement

And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell; Emptiness, absence, separation from God;

The horror of the effortless journey, to the empty land

Which is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void,

Where those who were men can no longer turn the mind

To distraction, delusion, escape into dream, pretence

[…]

Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,

We fear, we fear. Who shall then plead for me,

Who intercede for me, in my most need?

Dead upon the tree, my Saviour,

Let not be in vain Thy labour;

Help me, Lord, in my last fear.

Dust I am, to dust am bending,

From the final doom impending

Help me, Lord, for death is near. (Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 68–69)11

In this way, the words of the women of Canterbury reflect or resonate with the voice and prayers of a medieval congregation; however, they also reflect a modern consciousness, a modern feeling of emptiness, the futility of human efforts, and, not least, God’s absence. As much as the play gives voice to a divine authority through Thomas’s lines, an authority, which seeks no human affirmation but is self-contained, the play also gives voice to a human search for meaning and the human experiences of the lack of meaning, of the absence of God.

The knights return with anger and heated lines, brutally killing Thomas, who commends his cause to Almighty God, the blessed Mary and a host of saints (Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 72–74). The women of Canterbury, in a highly dramatic, emotional chorus, express their experience of the presence of evil, the overwhelming presence (in theological terms) of sin in the world.

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.

The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood.

[…]

We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural vermin,

It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,

But the world that is wholly foul.

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from the stone […] Wash

the stone, wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash them wash them!

(Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 74–75)

Right at this moment, radically different new voices appear. The knights “advance to the front of the stage and address the audience” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 75) in modern prose language, and, as James E. Robinson has argued,

Eliot’s own consciousness of the play as play is emphasized when he boldly brings forth the Knights, the murderers of Thomas, out of the intense interior space of the play’s spiritual and poetic experience, to have them address the audience in “platform prose”, as he called their speeches […]. This is Metatheatre. This is the play drawing attention to itself as play, as illusion.

(Robinson 1986, p. 40)

Indeed, the voices of the knights form a sharp break with the style as well as the contents of the play, stylistically even with the previous lines of the knights, which have so far conformed to the play’s metric poetry. The stylistic break corresponds to the contents. Whereas everything up to this point (and again after the knights’ scene) takes place in a high, sublime style far from everyday speech, we are now in a modern recognizable world with rational argumentation and an appeal to common sense. However, I do not agree that “their obtrusive apologia creates counterpointing ironies” (Robinson 1986, p. 31) or “disturbs our trust in the sanity of the imagination” (Robinson 1986, p. 41). Rather, it seems here that dissenting voices that have been raised time and again since Becket’s own time as well as by modern historians (see note 12 below and Appendix A) are given a place in the play along with the other—main—voices of Thomas and the women of Canterbury. These are one-sided (to the point of being manipulative) voices, which point out the unaccountability of the gap between the divine and human realms in Thomas’s actions and words. They are allowed a place among all the other, and as it seems from the focus of the play, more important voices, but they are allowed a place, and I think they may also function as a point of identification for many in a modern audience, for instance when the Second Knight points out how Thomas as archbishop

abandoned every policy that he had heretofore supported; he affirmed immediately that there was a higher order than that which our King, and he as the King’s servant, had for so many years striven to establish; and that—God knows why—the two orders were incompatible.

(Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 79)

The murder itself might—not least at the time in which it was written—give associations to the violence and brutality of the Nazi and fascist regimes, and the Second Knight shrewdly takes this into consideration when he points to the political changes of the centuries since the time of Thomas and Henry II, pointing out that,

At another time, you would condemn an Archbishop by vote of parliament and execute him formally as a traitor, and no one would have to bear the burden of being called a murderer. And at a later time still, even such temperate measures as these would become unnecessary.

(Eliot [1935] 1937, pp. 79–80)

The Second Knight thus calls attention to the unexplained opposition between the order of the king and the order of the Church, i.e., the lack of actual explanation in human terms of what exactly Thomas dies for. Thus, The Second Knight puts his finger on the apparent dissociation between human experience and the postulated knowledge of God’s will. For a modern audience, both the chorus of Canterbury women and the voices of the knights in their speeches of self-justification form potential points of identification, depending on the individual member of the audience.

In the historical context of the Becket conflict, ‘Gregorian’ ideals of universal papal and ecclesiastical supremacy were expressed in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (The Statesman, 1159), dedicated to Thomas Becket, at the time still the king’s chancellor (Guy 2012, pp. 39, 124, 171; Dickinson 1926, p. 336; see also Barlow 1986, pp. 91–92). John of Salisbury remained a close advisor and friend of Thomas Becket to the very end, and was the first to write about the murder of Thomas in a letter, Ex insperato (Unexpectedly, 1171), later expanded into the very first of the Lives of Thomas Becket (Staunton 2006, pp. 19–27; cf. Appendix A). As the conflict with Henry II developed, Thomas Becket began “to draw heavily” on ideas formulated in Policraticus, not least about resistance to tyrants, his own “presentation copy” of Policraticus containing what seems to be “Thomas’s own marginal notes” (Guy 2012, p. 174). Learned men such as John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham were his advisors and among his supporters, and both expressed the theological rationale behind the struggle before as well as after Becket’s death. Whereas the presentation in Murder in the Cathedral condenses Thomas’s rational theological (albeit not undisputed)12 position to an abstract spiritual, otherworldly position, his voice stands as only one among several in the play.

Together, the polyphony of the voices contributes to a complex web of human experience. In the play, Thomas’s self-assertive divine authority, the ordinary human voices represented by the women of Canterbury, open to the divine as well as the worldly, capable of sensing but not of comprehending, the voices of the prosaic as well as manipulatively one-sided knights, and, finally, the various voices of priests and tempters, all stand side by side. Clearly, the play prioritizes Thomas’s divine authority, without, however, diminishing the effect of the other voices, which makes it possible for anyone in the audience to find a point of identification from which to experience the play. Through the final acceptance of Thomas’s sainthood by the all too human women, the message is no longer that of the unapproachability of this divinity. It may not be possible to understand it from a human perspective, but it is at least possible to acknowledge it and thereby come to peace with life in its impenetrable complexity.

4. Conclusions

Overall, the polyphonic web of different voices in Murder in the Cathedral does not represent a Barthian theological stance. The self-presentation of Thomas, especially after he has overcome the temptations in Part I of the play, involves a Barthian gulf between the divine and human, between transcendence and immanence. However, it equally resembles voices heard much earlier in the history of Christianity, all the way back to the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of John. Moreover, in the play, human attempts at grasping what is going on counterbalance Thomas’s voice. This is primarily seen in the intuitive approaches of the women of Canterbury and their sensory appreciation of what happens, which does not bring them to understand, but, in the end, to accept and even praise a divine message they cannot understand. Thomas’s self-assertive statements, on the other hand, are directly contradicted by the knights’ one-sided, worldly and prosaic justifications, which present a completely reversed understanding of Thomas’s postulated sainthood and divinity as human pride and, in Thomas’s own words, “senseless self-slaughter of a lunatic, arrogant passion of a fanatic” (Eliot [1935] 1937, p. 45).

Barth’s separation of the divine from the worldly did not prevent him from drawing political consequences of his Christian belief. Similarly, Thomas’s martyrdom can be seen as a political act against tyranny. Altogether, no human logic prevents it from being viewed in the very different lights shed on it during the play, even though the play clearly prioritizes an acceptance of martyrdom as real and divine. Reading the play through the lens of a Barthian gulf between the divine and the human does not tell us if the play was inspired by Barth. It discloses that the play promotes several voices. One of these propagates the idea of the divine as totally different from the human. Other voices, however, express differing experiences of the human condition, different ways of coming to terms with meaning, suffering and politics.