The Bowels of Wisdom: Part 2/4

T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday

The “bowells” with which I concluded part 1 of this essay are, I think, behind of one of T.S. Eliot’s more startling images in his poem, “Ash-Wednesday.” It begins like this: 

Ash-Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn

—Which, I think, with its repetition of “turn,” is enough to establish the connection with Andrewes’ sermon; also, though people have suggested sundry reasons for the strange hyphenation of Eliot’s title, which does not appear in the Prayer Book, the simplest solution that I can see is that it is the exact punctuation Andrewes uses in the title of his sermon. Anyway, here, Eliot is expressing the desire to stop turning, to turn once and for all, to complete his repentance and hence his return to God, and this is brought home with strength in that startling image I mentioned:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. 

The conjunction of Lady, tree and leopards may catch your attention if you have read Dante. The Lady seems to be a Beatrice figure: Lady Day is usually in Lent, resonant of Springtide fecundity as the Incarnation begins in the Blessed Virgin’s womb. The tree conjures the forest in which Dante first finds himself at the entrance to the Inferno. The juniper, more precisely, is the tree under which Elijah sat to rest after defeating the forces of the wicked queen Jezebel, completely spent, and prayed to God that now his work was done, he might be allowed to die (1 Kings 19:4). And here, too, the poet dies, devoured by three beasts: not, as in Dante, the wolf, the lion and the leopard, but three leopards.

We could go into why leopards, and why white, though Eliot himself refused to give an answer; but more pressing now is to see what they ate, and what they left behind. The legs, the heart, the liver and the brain: that is what they have consumed. The heart, we have already heard plenty about in Andrewes’ sermon; he also mentions the legs, as the limbs which can turn us from the straight and narrow way to “the by-paths of sinne”; I cannot find reference to the liver, alas; but the Bishop does explicitly mention the brain:

“Conversion is a change, no, of certaine notions only in the head, but of the affections of the heart too … neither doth this stand only against the braine; but is commonly in opposition to the whole outward man.”

This opposition, he implies, will not do: “Nay, heart and all must turne.” Noteworthy, I think, then, that Eliot has all of these organs of turning devoured. But what about leopards’ left-overs? His bones, but also:

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject.

His guts: his stomach, or as Andrewes had it, his bowells. Not the eyes themselves, but the bits behind, the strings. So, the organs of Fasting and Weeping. Might we conjecture that it is on these that rests the resurrection of the bones, of which the poet says, “there is no life in them”? Few philosophers dwell on tears or bowels, yet in Andrewes’ vision, shared it seems by Eliot, there is nothing in the human unnecessary to repentance or return to God, and even the most unlikely organs may be surprisingly important to the human whole. Let us focus for now on the wisdom of the bowel.

First, only a little imagination is needed to realise that knowledge is not limited to the brain. Nor even, necessarily, the most important knowledge. If anything, it is gut-knowledge that is fundamental (if you will pardon the pun) to our survival, a knowledge all animals share. What is the knowledge that saves you from a predator, perhaps even before you know what it is that rustles in the bushes? Fear. And we know fear not first in our head, but in our gut. Mental reasoning only follows after this direct, intuitive and unarguable knowledge. And lest this all seem tangential to our concerns here, we might consider where King Solomon insists that Wisdom begins: with the fear of God.

Second, a little scholastic reasoning will swiftly persuade you of the physical importance of the stomach. For if the highest good for beings is to be, and the highest instantiation of being in living beings is to live, then the stomach as processor of food is arguably the most important organ for the living being to pursue its natural telos.

It should be unsurprising, then, that not only Christian tradition, but, to my knowledge, all of the world’s ancient religions prioritise not only what comes out of the mouth, but what goes into it, and make the disciplining of the stomach part of the spiritual life. If anything, it should be more surprising that more modern schools of Christian thought, and the secularism which ensues from them, are so dismissive of the bond between the body, of which the stomach is the basic organ of both survival and growth, and the life of the soul or mind.

Wisdom is the knowledge that embraces reason but sits deeper than it, grounded in profundis. Even so, to call the bowel the “seat of Wisdom” is a dissonant image verging even on the shameful. Yet Holy Scripture is full of such base and dissonant images, applying them even to God. For Dionysius, the more dissonant the image, the better, for reasons we will come to. But for others, inheritors of the Platonic priority of the soul, such bodily allusions have proven a stumbling block. We need not visit the gnostics to find such dualistic traces. Plotinus never quite shakes off the sense that the body and world are to escaped from, rather than through. And this suspicion lingers in even such an orthodox Christian father as St Augustine, to whom we will turn in the next instalment.

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