Spiritual Travelers in the
Literature of the West*
THE JOURNEY OF life is an enduring master trope by which the postclassical West has made sense of human existence by endowing it with purpose, structure, and values. The trope—the Latin term for it is peregrinatio vitae—images the life, both of each individual and of the entire human race, as an extended journey through alien lands. Its primary source is the early books of the Hebrew Bible, with their narratives of literal journeys that came to be the archetypes for a variety of figurative applications. The most prominent biblical journeys were the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to sojourn in a fallen world; the punishment meted out to Cain, to wander as a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth; and the exile of Ishmael, son of Hagar, to live as “a wild man” whose hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. The most sustained, detailed, and richly suggestive of the biblical journeys is the exodus of the Hebrews “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” their long wanderings in the wilderness in quest of the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the journey of Moses up Mount Sinai to encounter Divinity; and his later ascent of Mount Pisgah for a glimpse of the Promised Land, to which access was denied him but was later granted his people.
The tendency to allegorize these and other stories of expulsions, punishments, escapes, quests, and migrations began in the later books of the Hebrew Bible itself and was given great impetus in the Christian Scriptures. Three scriptural passages—all of them probably written in the middle or later part of the first century—proved to be of great consequence for later forms and applications of the trope of the journey. In his Epistle addressed to the Hebrews (11:8–16), Paul represented the spiritual history of the Hebrew people hitherto in the vehicle of biblical narratives of exile, wandering, and pilgrimage in quest of a promised land—a promise that can now be fulfilled by the higher goal of a heavenly city. “By faith” Abraham and his descendants “sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country,” but died (as had Moses) “not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off . . . and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. . . . But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God . . . prepared for them a city.”1
The second and closely contemporary passage is Luke 15:11–32, which is explicitly identified as a parable, or short allegory, and is invested with the authority of Jesus himself. The passage represents the spiritual events of sin and repentance in human life in the narrative vehicle of the prodigal son who left home and father “and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.” Starving and penitent, he returned to his father, to be greeted with joy and feasting, “for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” In the process of time, this parable assimilated other biblical journey-narratives, was endlessly reiterated, and was often used to represent the totality of human history, from the fall and expulsion out of Eden to a coming redemption at the end of time. Of special historical consequence was the fact that the story of the prodigal son figured the spiritual history of humanity as, specifically, a circular journey that ends at the point of departure. Later commentators often interpreted the assertion of Jesus in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” as signifying a roundabout journey—from home and father, into a far country, and back home.
The figure of the totality of human history as a circular return was abetted, and importantly supplemented, by a third passage, the vision of the end of earthly history that concludes both the Book of Revelation and the scriptural canon. There the last things—to be accomplished by the God who is himself “the beginning and the end, the first and the last”—are described as a replication of the first things. The creation of heaven and earth “in the beginning” is to be matched by the advent of “a new heaven and new earth” at the end; the original felicity in Eden is to be restored, in that “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying,” for “there shall be no more curse,” while the locale of that felicity will include the “river of water of life” and “the tree of life” that had been essential features in the Garden of Eden. What had been a garden, however, is now replaced (as in the Epistle to the Romans) by a city; and this, in a portentous new development, is represented as not only a city but also a woman, “the holy city, new Jerusalem . . . prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The consummation of history is accordingly imaged as a sacred marriage between the Lamb of God and this woman, his bride, while the compulsion to the human quest for consummation is described—in a way that was to resonate through later Western literature, whether sacred or profane—in the language of ardent desire: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come.”
Crucial to the development and widespread adoption of the Christian motif of the circular journey were the Enneads of the pagan philosopher Plotinus. Writing in the third century, Plotinus formulated a cosmic scheme in which everything emanates from the One (who is ipso facto the Good) through stages of increasing remoteness and division, to the ultimate stage of the material universe and the supervenience of evil. Counter to this eternal procession, however, is a ceaseless “epistrophe,” or return to the origin; for “to Real Being we go back . . . to that we return as from that we came.” (The Neoplatonist Proclus later formulated this radical metaphysical metaphor as, “In any divine procession the end is assimilated to the beginning, maintaining by its reversion thither a circle without beginning and without end.”)2 Repeatedly, Plotinus represents the longing of the soul to return to its origin in images that are consonant with those in the Christian Scriptures. The soul, for example, is pictured as a lover and the One as the beloved. Alternatively, the soul is described as an errant daughter who abandons her father for a mortal lover but later repents and once more seeks the father, and finds her peace. And in a reading of the Homeric epic that was to be echoed by many later writers, Plotinus interprets the circular voyage of Odysseus as an allegory for each person’s internal journey in quest of the spiritual home and father he had earlier abandoned. Plotinus quotes the Iliad 2.140, “Let me flee to the beloved Fatherland”: “This is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? . . . For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso. . . . The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.”3
Wherever it came to be known, this world-scheme, with its root metaphor of emanation and return, exerted a profound attraction upon Christian theology, with the result that the personal God of the Bible, creator and redeemer of humankind, was to various degrees assimilated to the utterly abstract and impersonal first principle of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Conversely, however, the cosmic circulation of the Neoplatonic metaphysical system—timeless, unembodied, and as Proclus said, “without beginning and without end”—was by Christian exegetes temporalized, embodied in the process of human history, and figured as a single circle that at its end will return to its beginning, then stop.
By the close of the fifth century all these varieties of the spiritual journey, Christian and pagan, were deployed in the extraordinarily erudite and innovative writings of St. Augustine. He adapted Plotinus’ allegoric reading of Homer to the Christian pilgrimage: “Is the sentiment of Plotinus forgotten?—We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither?”4 With this pagan figure of the circular voyage Augustine fused the narratives of exile, wandering, and quest for a promised land in the early books of the Bible, the figurative pilgrimage to “a better country” in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the circular journey of the prodigal son back to the home and father he has left, and the culminating vision in the Book of Revelation of the sacred marriage, supplemented by the candid expressions of erotic desire in the Song of Songs. As a result, Augustine established the full and enduring Christian topos of the peregrinatio vitae—the figure of fallen man, generic and individual, who wanders as an exile in an alien land, on a toilsome journey in quest of a city in another country that, when reached, turns out to be the home and father he left behind, and that often turns out also to be the dwelling of the bride he abandoned in the beginning. And, on the tacit assumption of early biblical hermeneutics that images signifying the same spiritual thing can be substituted for each other, Augustine often represented the conjoint origin and goal of the spiritual journey as a conflation of places, persons, genders, functions, and relationships that bewilders a reader untutored in the interchangeability of the signifiers in Christian typology:
Let me enter into my chamber and sing my songs of love to Thee, groaning with inexpressible groaning in my pilgrimage, and remember Jerusalem with my heart stretching upwards in longing for it: Jerusalem my Fatherland, Jerusalem which is my mother: and remembering Thee its Ruler, its Light, its Father and Tutor and Spouse. . . . So that I shall not turn away but shall come to the peace of that Jerusalem, my dear mother. . . .
For that City the friend of the bridegroom sighs . . . for he is a member of the Spouse of Christ; and he is jealous for it, for he is the friend of the bridegroom.5
Through the Middle Ages and beyond, spiritual renderings of biblical accounts of exiles and journeys, pilgrims and prodigals, served as commonplaces in numberless commentaries, sermons, homilies, and works of literature. In extended form, the peregrinatio constituted the total plot of that familiar allegoric narrative in which the protagonist is named Everyman, or Mankind, or Christian; in which the allegory signifies the normative course of a Christian life; and in which the goal of the traveler’s laborious and dangerous quest is a land or city where one truly belongs, which frequently is also the dwelling place of a woman of irresistible sexual attractiveness.
Early in the fourteenth century, Dante wrote the greatest of all literary instances of this central Christian plot form. The Divine Comedy, Dante’s spiritual history, introduces in its opening line its root metaphor, when the protagonist, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita [midway in the journey of our life],” is granted the vision of another journey, with a relay of guides, through hell and up through purgatory to the verge of the heaven of heavens—thence to return, though only temporarily, to his journeying in this realm of “the sun and the other stars.”
The medieval chivalric romances—with their literal plots of journeying knights, quests, and perilous trials by which the protagonist proves that he merits his lady love—obviously invited adaptation into allegories of the wayfaring Christian life. A late and elaborately designed instance is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The plot of the first book consists of the journey, quest, and trials of the faith and morality of the Red Cross Knight and ends with his betrothal to Una in the land of Eden, which he has just delivered from the dragon. This event prefigures the projected ending of the poem as a whole—the successful conclusion of Arthur’s protracted search for the Faerie Queene, by whose beauty, seen in a vision, he had been ravished before the beginning of the narrative proper. Almost a century later, John Bunyan wrote the great working-class equivalent of the adventurous quest of the aristocratic knight on horseback, in his story of the pilgrim who shoulders his pack and trudges sturdily through commonplace obstacles, temptations, and perils, toward the celestial city for which he longs. Even in Bunyan’s demotic and puritan version, the motivation for the quest continues to be expressed in the language of overwhelming sexual desire. When Christian and Hopeful finally arrive “within sight of the city they were going to,” in the land where “the contract between the bride and the bridegroom was renewed,” Christian “with desire fell sick,” wherefore the travelers “lay by it a while, crying out because of their pangs, If you see my Beloved, tell him I am sick of love.”6
THE LITERATURE OF the early nineteenth century, especially in Germany and England, was to a remarkable degree a literature of literal, allegorical, and symbolic travelers. One familiar type is the exiled and guilt-ridden wanderer—recognizably on the model of Cain and his later avatar the Wandering Jew—represented by Coleridge’s penitent Ancient Mariner and Byron’s impenitent Manfred. Another type, like the protagonist in Shelley’s Alastor, wastes away on a journey in an insatiable quest for an inaccessible object, which is represented as a woman of irresistible allure. Most widespread is the reemployment of the ancient trope of the peregrinatio vitae. The representation of the normative life as a toilsome but indefatigable journey toward an ultimate land or place constitutes the plot form not only in the major literary kinds in verse and prose, but also in the many instances of Universalgeschichte (a summary of the cognitive and moral history of all humankind, from its origin to its future culmination) and in the genre of the partly fictionalized autobiography. And surprisingly, the same trope is deployed as both theme and organizing principle in the most prominent systems of German philosophy. In its distinctive Romantic version, however, whether in literature, history, or autobiography, the fifteen-hundred-year-old plot of the spiritual peregrinatio has undergone a drastic alteration: the goal of the journey has been transferred from heaven to earth and has been internalized and secularized. That is, the journey of life, which had hitherto been a sustained trial for admission to an otherworldly city, is now conceived as a process of self-education, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment in this world. In the economy of statement made possible by German compounds, the Christian Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) has modulated into the Romantic Bildungsgeschichte (history of education); the goal that justifies the ordeal of human experience is located within experience itself; and that goal consists of the mature identity and assurance of vocation that the ordeal of life’s journey has served to form.
A landmark in the transformation of sacred history into a secular process of self-development is Gotthold Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780. Undertaking expressly to translate the “revealed truths” of the Bible into conceptual terms, the “truths of reason,” Lessing converted the scriptural narrative of humankind’s fall and coming redemption into the natural history of humankind’s gradual education in reason and morality; interpreted the stages of civilization as advancing degrees of the maturation of the human race; and represented the educational process—both of the race and of the individual—in the persistent vehicle of a journey, compelled by an immanent teleology, along a Weg (path) or Bahn (road) toward a distant goal.
As a thinker of the Enlightenment, Lessing conceived the journey of humankind to be linear, in the mode of a progressive education toward the achievement of rational and moral perfection. The Romantic version of the peregrinatio, however, adopts the circular rather than the linear form of the ancient plot, but with a distinctive difference that fuses the concept of progress with that of a return to the origin. That is, the distinctively Romantic educational journey is imaged not simply as a two-dimensional circle but as ascending along a third, or vertical, dimension so as to form a spiral. The educational process, accordingly, is conceived as moving from an initial unity through multiple divisions back to a complex integrity which replicates the simple unity of the origin, but on a higher level. In many versions of the Romantic spiral journey, the place of origin and return is also figured as the home the traveler left behind and toward which he is compelled back by a homesickness for the father, mother, and a lost sheltered place; but this place, once it has been recovered, proves to be of higher status than the original home, because now it has been earned, and as a result is for the first time properly recognized and adequately valued. In many instances the educational traveler is driven also by desire for a female figure, who turns out to be the beloved he heedlessly abandoned at the outset. In this latter mode of the Romantic peregrinatio, as in innumerable earlier examples, the father and home to which the prodigal returns has been fused with the bride of the Apocalypse, so that the motivation for the journey is erotic as well as nostalgic. The bride, however, now tends to be conceptualized into an abstract feminine principle, but one that is endowed with infinite allure. In the rendering with which Goethe concludes the second part of Faust:
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
[The Eternal-Womanly
Draws us upward.]
This trope of the developing consciousness of the human race and individual as a spiral journey—to reach, at the end, a superior level of its beginning—informs a great variety of literary works in the Romantic era.7 It is identifiable in Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion, as well as in Novalis’ visionary prose romance Heinrich von Ofterdingen—of which the leitmotif is “Wo gehen wir denn hin?” “Immer nach Hause” (Where are we going to then? Ever homeward)—and serves also as a structural element in Novalis’ verse Hymnen an die Nacht. In William Blake’s cosmic myth, the fall of humankind out of a primitive unity and its long recursion to a higher integrity is at times represented as the wanderings of a mental traveler seeking that “sweet golden clime” at the conclusion of his journey; and Blake pictures the consummation of human history as the sexual reconjunction of Albion with Jerusalem, the female contrary from which he was divided at the beginning. In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, after the first act in which Prometheus renounces divisive hate for integrative love, the plot consists of the educational journey of Asia down through the underground realm of Demogorgon up, around, and back to her marital reunion with Prometheus. In his quasi-autobiographical prose fiction Sartor Resartus, Carlyle describes how Teufelsdröckh, the foundling who is his protagonist, “lifts his Pilgerstab (Pilgrim staff) . . . and begins a perambulation and circumambulation of the terraqueous Globe.” The quest of Teufelsdröckh, that is, takes him on a great circle route around the world, during which he ever turns “full of longing . . . to that unknown Father” who might take him to his paternal bosom. This route turns out to be an educational journey through division and anguished isolation to his ultimate recognition that the seemingly alien earth—“now my needy Mother, now my cruel Stepdame”—was in fact the home in which, educated by suffering, he may now return to live as a member of the family of humanity.8
German philosophy of the Romantic era incorporated the same radical metaphor as contemporary works of literature—the metaphor of the development of philosophy as a spiraling self-educational journey that ends where it began, but on a higher turning. The major metaphysical systems of that era are never static systems of established truths, but always on the move, compelled by the tension between internal polarities, antitheses, or “contradictions” toward the closure of the circle in an end state that, since all oppositions will be therein maintained but reconciled, constitutes a superior version of the undivided self-unity from which the process originated. And persistently, this progressive systemic movement is rendered in the plot form of a Bildungsreise (educational journey), the restless journey of an exiled agent—named “ego,” or “subject,” or “consciousness,” or “Spirit”—in quest of an ultimate reconciliation with its divided other, in a conclusion that is pictured as a return to the place from which it set out, but on a higher level.
Fichte, for example, described Wissenschaft (the science of knowledge), as beginning with the unity of the absolute ego, which posits the non-ego and so inaugurates a sustained tension, which drives a process that concludes when it reaches the point at which it “closes with its first principle, returns into itself, and accordingly becomes, by its own agency, completely closed.”9 He also represented universal human history in the pictured form of a circuitous peregrinatio of humankind from a paradise of thoughtless self-unity toward a recovered paradise, which will be a superior one because it will have been earned by all the endeavors en route:
The collective journey [Weg] which, according to this view, mankind pursues here below, is no other than a way back to that point upon which it stood at the very beginning, and has no other goal but to return to its origin. [Driven out of the paradise of effortless and ignorant innocence, mankind] by effort and knowledge builds his paradise for himself according to the model of the one he has lost.10
Friedrich Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism (1800) presents another version of the division of the unitary subject into polarities that compel a circuitous return to the undivided origin. At one place Schelling describes this process by repeating Plotinus’ reading of the Homeric epic as signifying a circular spiritual voyage back to the home that has been left. Alienated nature, Schelling wrote, “is a poem” that, if unriddled, would disclose itself to be “the Odyssey of the spirit which, wonderfully deluded, in seeking itself, flees itself,” and will reach its goal only when it “returns completely to itself,” as a subject that finally recognizes it is itself the object it seeks.11
In his book of letters entitled On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller repeatedly images the history of civilization as a complex educational journey toward maturity through which “both the individual and the species as a whole must pass . . . if they are to complete the full circle of their destiny [Kreis ihrer Bestimmung].” His long essay “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” develops this figure, representing the evolution of human culture as a circuitous educational journey in which we (like the prodigal son) arrogantly storm “into an alien land,” only to discover that “we desire with painful longing to go back home”—a home that Schiller also identified as “a paradise, a state of innocence, a golden age.” But this painful way out turns out to be the way back, although to an infinitely higher form of the innocence and self-unity we have lost. “The road [Weg] upon which the modern poets are traveling is the same which mankind must travel, collectively and as individuals. Nature makes him in unity with himself; art divides and cuts him in two; through the ideal he returns to unity.” In an important variant of the circuitous journey, however, that Schiller shares with Fichte, Hölderlin, and others, he maintains that, since the goal of the journey is infinite while mankind’s powers and possibilities are finite, “the ideal is an infinite which he can never reach,” but can only approximate.12 In this version of the motif we find the common Romantic view that “der Weg ist das Ziel,” that the goal of the journey is the journey itself, as well as the distinctive Romantic ethos that the proper aim of humankind is an indomitable “Streben nach dem Unendlichen [striving after the infinite],” in which the measure of dignity and greatness consists, not in absolute achievement, but in maintaining the discrepancy between an infinite reach and a finite grasp.
Wordsworth described his work as a “poem on my own poetical education,” and his account of this education is repeatedly represented as a self-formative journey. The poem opens with a deliberate echo of the exodus from Egypt, as the poet departs on foot from the city that to him had been “a house / Of bondage”; in the course of this walk, which is at first desultory, he becomes “as a Pilgrim resolute” and sets out toward a goal, “the chosen Vale.” In Wordsworth’s retrospective narrative of his life, many of the crucial episodes are literal journeys on foot, which modulate into spiritual landscapes traversed by a metaphorical wayfarer. Wordsworth deploys the figure of the journey in a double way: On the one hand, he applies the figure to the educational course of his life in the outer world, “from stage to stage / Advancing” until it achieves the “consummation of the Poet’s mind.” On the other hand, Wordsworth applies the figure internally, to his artistic quest through his memory, in the process of composing the poem that narrates the journey of his life. In symmetry with its first book, the last book of the Prelude opens with a literal walk; this time, however, he travels not on a level plain but up Mount Snowden where—in the tradition of definitive visions on a mountain established by Moses on Sinai—Wordsworth recognizes in the cloud-shrouded and moonlit landscape the outer correlation to his own poetic mind and imagination. The close of the poem rounds back to its narrative beginning as Wordsworth, confirmed in his mature identity and vocation as a poet, takes up his “permanent abode” in the Vale that, in the initial passage, he had chosen as the goal of his journey. And in the title of the opening book of The Recluse, to which his entire autobiography was designed as prelude, this goal of his life’s pilgrimage, in accord with the ancient tradition of the circular journey, is identified as home—Home at Grasmere—and is at the same time conflated with Eden. But consonantly with the Romantic pattern of the spiral return, Wordsworth describes his achieved Eden as immensely superior to the original Eden because he has earned it in the painful course of his self-formative journey: “Here must be his Home, this Valley be his World.”
The boon is absolute; surpassing grace
To me hath been vouchsafed; among the bowers
Of blissful Eden this was neither given,
Nor could be given—possession of the good
Which had been sighed for, ancient thought fulfilled. . . . 13
Hegel’s metaphysical system is in ceaseless motion, and that motion, compelled by an internal, goal-directed tension of successive antitheses, is always circular. “The true,” as he describes this timeless circulation in his preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, “is its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and so has it for its beginning.” But, he also says, the circling is always a spiraling upward, in that “this return to the beginning is also an advance.” The Phenomenology narrates the history of the Spirit’s painful process toward acquiring the knowledge of systematic metaphysical truth (Wissenschaft)—a process that incorporates, within the temporal course of time and history, the timeless spiral pattern manifested in the truth toward which it unknowingly strives. The history of the Spirit, that is, evolves spirally from an original self-unity, through a passing over into its other, then into many successive others, toward the ultimate achievement of a higher reunion with itself. Hegel renders this history in the literary plot form of the self-educative journey of the Spirit, which is represented (in its aspect as the collective human consciousness) as though it were a single protagonist: “The task is to consider the general individual, the self-conscious Spirit, in its education [Bildung],” of which “the aim is the Spirit’s insight into what it is that constitutes knowledge”—the knowledge that is articulated in Hegel’s metaphysical system. Repeatedly this Bildungsgeschichte, both of the race and of each individual, is imaged in the traditional mode of the Bildungsreise: “To become genuine knowledge,” the Spirit “has to work its way through a long journey [Weg]”; while “each individual consciousness must also pass through the contents of the educational stages of the general Spirit, but . . . as stages of a way [Weg] that has been prepared and leveled for him.” This way can be considered as an educational pilgrimage and quest, “the way of the natural consciousness, which presses on to true knowledge.”14
The denouement of Hegel’s protracted quest narrative, which he calls the stage of absolute knowledge, is rendered in the form of a recognition scene, in which the Spirit, now fully “self-conscious,” recognizes that the knowledge that has been its goal is in fact self-knowledge. The Spirit, that is, finally becomes aware of its own identity as constituting not less than everything and everyone, all of which had once been alienated from itself, but are now recollected, and so repossessed, by an act of ultimate awareness. This culmination of the self-educative way is a circuitous recursion to “the beginning from which we went out,” although now “at a higher level.” Hegel images the recursion to the beginning in the time-honored figure of a spiritual return home, although it is a home where the Spirit has all along been without knowing it: at that moment at which the Spirit “has annulled and taken back into itself this alienation and objectification, it is at home with itself [bei sich ist] in its otherness as such.”15 And since the homecoming that concludes the educational quest of the Spirit is achieved in Hegel’s own consciousness, in his role as both a manifestation and an amanuensis of the Spirit, we in turn now recognize that Hegel’s educational history of the Spirit has in fact been—like Wordsworth’s Prelude—the autobiography of its own protagonist.
The Romantic variation on life as a journey by no means marked the end of the literary uses of the image. So late as the mid twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets (1935–42), composed the most sustained and intricate deployment of the theme of the journey in all of literature. The whole of Eliot’s long poem articulates a figurative quest, by land and sea and underground, for a garden, “our first world,” that has been glimpsed and lost but not forgotten. That the journey is circular is indicated by the persistent and paradoxical interplay, in the course of the poem, between the words “beginning” and “end”; and the second quartet, “East Coker,” itself enacts that circular shape by opening, “In my beginning is my end,” and by closing with the repetition of the opening sentence, with its elements reversed: “In my end is my beginning.” We learn that this movement signifies the poet’s own educational journey, which (as in Wordsworth’s Prelude) constitutes a dual education, both in his life and in his poetic craft; and in the traditional way, the place of origin, the unforgotten garden, is identified as home: “Home is where one starts from.” This origin turns out also to have been the goal of the quest, for “the way forward is the way back”;16 although, as the end of the Quartets reveals, it is not until our circumnavigation has reached its haven that we will achieve the knowledge that it has been, all along, our home:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.
This is a remarkably inventive poem that, in the way it orders and relates its elements, justifies its reputation as a distinctively modernist work. In those elements themselves, however, we can recognize the Romantic image of the spiral educational journey impelled by a dialectic of contraries; and beyond that, the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy that Eliot’s poem often echoes and emulates; and ultimately, the Augustinian paradigm of the peregrinatio vitae as a quest whose goal is not in this world. Eliot’s poem epitomizes the long and varied history of the trope of the spiritual journey, even as it attests its continuing viability as an imaginative option.
NOTES
1. Hebrews 11:8–16. All biblical quotations are from The New English Bible, edited by Samuel Sandmel (Oxford, 1976).
2. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, translated and edited by E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1933), propositions 33, 146.
3. Plotinus, The Six Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (London, 1956), 1.6.8; see also 6.5.7, 6.5.10, 6.9.9.
4. Augustine, The City of God, translated by Marcus Dodds (New York, 1948), 1.9.17.
5. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by F. J. Sheed (London, 1944), 12.16, 13.13.
6. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London, 1945), pp. 157–58.
7. For a detailed treatment of the motif of the spiral journey in these and other writers of the early nineteenth century, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), chapters 4 and 5.
8. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, edited by C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), pp. 147, 185, 188–89.
9. J. G. Fichte, Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre, in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Fichte (Berlin, 1845), vol. 1, pp. 332–33.
10. J. G. Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen zeitalters, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, p. 12.
11. F. W. J. von Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1856–61), vol. 2, pp. 341, 628. For other references to the Iliad and Odyssey as a two-part epic of spiritual departure and return, see Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, pp. 42, 57.
12. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), p. 171; Schiller, “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Otto Güntter and George Witkowski (Leipzig, n.d.), vol. 17, pp. 505–6.
13. William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere, edited by Beth Darlington (Ithaca, N. Y., 1977), ms. D, lines 45, 103–7.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, edited by Johannes Hoffmeister, 6th ed. (Hamburg, 1952), pp. 20, 26–27, 67, 563–64, 549; also, The Logic of Hegel, translated by William Wallace, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1892), 379.
15. The Logic of Hegel, 379.
16. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–62 (London, 1963), pp. 187–214.