Kabbalistic Reflections on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Epigraph One

Four children from a single father. No paternity test required. T.S. Eliot may have penned these poems that are collectively referred to as Four Quartets over the course of years but they manage to maintain an exceptional thematic unity. In kabbalistic parlance, we might liken them to four immanent lights, torches of consciousness or experiential and meditative modes that are nonetheless wrapped in two surrounding, transcendent lights.

Termed orot makifim, these surrounding lights do not merely stake out a perimeter. They simultaneously frame and flow throughout all of the text just as the nervous system organizes and permeates the entire body. Eliot has placed them at the beginning, outside the main text as epigraphs, as words written upon the whole of what is to follow.

Just as poetry pushes past the limits of traditional linear exposition in prose, so too does the practice of minting aphoristic fragments of philosophy. Heraclitan thought survives more than the erosion of history in this manner of address. While terse and pithy statements may make fewer incisions into the concepts with which they operate, it is also true that they enable wounded thoughts to recover more quickly so that they are sooner back on their feet moving about.

Both epigraphs are from Heraclitus. As the surrounding lights for the cycle of poems, they both feed into and play off one another. Eliot opts to retain them in the original Greek perhaps out of respect for their abundant possible of translations. This has not prevented scholars from giving it a go. Let us consider but one of these for the sake of brevity, while willfully ignoring others. I have found Terry L. Fairchild’s version to be a good point of departure:

Although logos (universal consciousness) is common to all, most live as though they had an individual wisdom (consciousness) of their own.

With an extensive history of interpretation, the loaded word with the longest shadow in this passage is ‘logos’. Capturing a sense of law, reason, wisdom, language and more, ‘logos’ risks being untranslatable without a considerable sacrifice of meaning. For the purposes of our commentary, let us simply accept this risk and forge ahead with a plausible reading that has no pretense to being a totalizing one.

What our fragment establishes is the juxtaposition of universal and individual wisdom/consciousness. Since we have made it our task to tease out a kabbalistic reading of this text, let us look for a fitting parallel distinction in Jewish tradition. Keeping in mind that our attempt to bridge Eliot’s chosen words with Hebrew expressions (that he may or may not have ever considered) can enrich our reading only if we tread softly, we can look to the following remark in Proverbs 1:20: “Wisdoms are expressed to the outside…” [חכמות בחוץ תרנה].

The sages, using the principle that the minimum number of plurality is two (when otherwise unspecified) interpret “wisdoms” as two levels or types of wisdom. The fact that these wisdoms are expressed to the outside begs the question as to the outside of what? Perhaps the ‘outside’ designates a condition of exile, a displacement from an initial unity, from rectified conditions?

Amongst the most sustained and profound reflections on this verse, the writings of R’ Dov Baer Schneersohn (otherwise known as the Mittler Rebbe 1773-1827) in his work Torat Chaim on Genesis, unveil a wealth of insight into the nature of these two levels of wisdom. If we can make the assumption that ‘logos’ is somewhat equivalent to the Hebrew word chochmah (which can also be translated as ‘wisdom’), then the division of wisdom into universal and individual aspects begins to make sense.

For the Mittler Rebbe, water is a favorite metaphor. Following in the traditions of the kabbalists before him, he asserts the distinction between higher or supreme wisdom (chochmah ila’ah) and lower or mundane wisdom (chochmah tatah). These, in turn, relate to the image of higher and lower waters that were separated by the firmament in the Genesis narrative [1:6]. Higher wisdom as the higher waters relates (in the Zohar and elsewhere) to the universal spiritual wisdom that is the root of everything. It precedes creation.

In turn, the lower waters, as emblematic of lower wisdom, are an outgrowth of creation itself. They correspond to the natural wisdom that resides within the concrete world. As such, the lower waters/wisdom may be understood as science and worldly knowledge. In the Zohar, the wisdom within nature and within creation is sometimes referred to as the wisdom of Solomon (chochmat Shlomo) due to his astonishing command of all the sciences which was gleaned from his ability to observe the ingenious design within the natural world.

In the primordial universe, these two wisdoms were like two intermingled kinds of water. With time an artificial schism arose (much like the cartesian compromise that relegated  matters of the spirit to the abstract nether regions of metaphysical speculation, whilst reserving an incommensurable domain for concrete scientific inquiry) and the waters were separated. The kabbalistic insistence that lower wisdom as the lower waters were originally incorporated within the higher waters suggests that Torah once ‘consciously’ contained all of natural science. With exilic time however, the two became progressively more disassociated until popular conceptions began to pit one against the next.

In response to this fragmented state of affairs, the Mittler Rebbe cites a midrashic description wherein the lower waters are depicted as crying out due to their desire to be reunited with the higher waters. The division is to be overcome. Consequently, Jewish esotericism insists that a core feature of the redemption of reality is to hear the cry of the lower waters and to work to affect their unification with the higher waters. In other words, what we explicitly associate as Torah must be conjoined with our knowledge of the natural world.

Taking the relationship a bit further (along the lines of our accepted translation of Heraclitus), we can also retrieve from the kabbalistic discussion of higher wisdom a sense of the universal. In that the Torah itself is said to be derived from higher wisdom, we might reformulate it as the wisdom of wisdom, the root of intelligibility, the indivisible essence from which all other branches of wisdom stem. Torah, as meta-wisdom, is common to all.

In contradistinction, lower wisdom is individuated and not just in terms of the person possessing it. The various areas of study that emerge over time, the path-dependent exploration of our world, breaks a single seamless form of insight into a patchwork of knowledge fields. Domain specificity enforces the feeling of territorialized knowledge. By contrast the sages relate to us the necessity of the Torah having been given in the desert for the desert is an ownerless place. The higher wisdom of the Torah signals the ultimate deterritorialization.

Another facet of our distinction plays upon the relationship of the respective wisdom to temporality. Higher wisdom, according to Kabbalah, remains above the world, above evolution, in a timeless dimension. Just the opposite is true of lower wisdom. Fully time-bound and in constant flux, the natural sciences are context dependent. Thus, the reunification of these two level entails that trick of combining that which is beyond time with the temporal itself.

In the words of Heraclitus, most live only in this particular mode of temporal wisdom, individualized knowledge, and the musing of our private person. For the time being, the triumph of the wisdom of the individual eclipses higher eternal universal wisdom despite its abundance and availability.

The foreshadowing of this essential conflict–the interplay of the universal and the particular, the temporal and the eternal–resonates throughout the Four Quartets. In light of this overarching theme, all of our subsequent reading will be oriented and guided.

Next we take up the second Heraclitan observation in the second epigraph.

We wish to dedicate this series of articles to the memory and elevation of the soul of Yaakov Ben Tzvi Hersh (Ballan) whose soul should experience the reality where ‘time present and time past’ are both definitely ‘present in time future…May his soul be bound in the bundle of life. –The 5th of Tamuz 5772.

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