T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, four years after the end of World War One, is probably the most influential and controversial poem of the past century. Its appearance was at once a revelation and a revolution, polarizing opinion. It bemused and beguiled its admirers and irritated and infuriated its detractors. The avant-garde gazed in awe at its many layers; the old guard claimed that the layers were an elaborate illusion and that the emperor had no clothes. The apparent pessimism of its theme and the libertine nature of its form added further fuel to the burning controversy.

Almost half a century later, the obituary to Eliot in The Times perceived the heated reaction to the poem with a detached perspective enlightened by the wisdom of hindsight:

The irony is that The Waste Land was almost universally misread and misunderstood. It was neither a masterpiece in praise of modernity, as its modernist admirers presumed, nor was it an iconoclastic affront to tradition and civilization, as its traditionalist critics supposed. On the contrary, its pessimism was directed against the wasteland of modern life from a profoundly tradition-oriented perspective. Few realized at the time, though it became apparent in the following decades, that the foundations of Eliot’s thought were rooted in classical tradition and found expression in a deep disdain for modern secular liberalism and the heedless hedonism that was its inevitable consequence.

The real key to understanding The Waste Land is to be found in Eliot’s devotion to Dante. Scarcely two years before The Waste Land was published, Eliot had written:

For Eliot, as for Dante, the pursuit of beauty was simultaneously the pursuit of goodness and truth, the three transcendentals being essentially triune and therefore inseparable. The infernal aspects of Eliot’s poem, its expression of pessimism and despair, were informed by the purgatorial desire to be free of the filth and futility of modernity, a desire that appears to be fulfilled by the poem’s positive conclusion which points suggestively to the poet’s “resurrection” from the wasteland’s culture of death.

As for the culture of death itself, which Eliot was critiquing in the poem, it was a world without faith, wallowing self-indulgently in the wasteland it had created for itself. Such a culture, basking in the pride of its own self-proclaimed nihilism, could sympathize with the souls in the inferno, weeping with them in the midst of the mists of despair, deviant in desire and devoid of hope. It could see the Cross, on which it saw itself being crucified in an agony of meaningless suffering, but not the God on the Cross. It could see the Crucifixion but not the Resurrection. For the denizens of the wasteland, whom Eliot was satirizing, life was as it seemed to the despairing Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

Eliot responded to the vicious vacuity of such nihilism in his next major poem, “The Hollow Men”, published in 1925, in which the doyens of modernity are depicted as the hollow, empty-headed inhabitants of an anticultural no-man’s-land:

In Eliot’s vision, the wasteland is the no-man’s land in which the hollow men are no-men who refuse the call to the virtues and responsibilities of manhood. His vision prefigures C. S. Lewis’s portrayal of the “men without chests” in his book, The Abolition of Man, published in 1943: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

In their respective works, Eliot and Lewis were prophesying the rise of the nihilistic generation which emerged in the 1960s, a generation which questioned all values because nothing was ultimately of any value. The epitome and embodiment of the hollow man of the 1960s was John Lennon, who saw himself and others as “nowhere men”:

According to Lennon, the “nowhere man” is “as blind as he can be” and “just sees what he wants to see”. Blinded by pride and its accompanying prejudice, he sees nothing but nothing. He cannot imagine heaven or hell. Above him is nothing but the sky. He has no faith in what he cannot see, and he sees nothing. To be fair, songs such as Nowhere Man and Imagine are a crie de coeur in which Lennon is seeking something other than the nothing in which he finds himself. Even his talk of love is full of nothing. Listen, for instance, to All You Need is Love: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done…. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung….” The song is a dialogue between the love we need and the nothing we can do. And even the love we need is nothing in the sense that it is passive. Love is not something that we do, in the Christian understanding of the word as the sacrificing of oneself for the beloved, it is something that we need, perhaps as a right, to be demanded of others. Doing your own thing and demanding the right of others to do their own thing is not love, but its absence. It is not laying down our lives for others but the demand that others should lay down their lives for us.

Lennon’s reduction of everything to nothing and love to a passive need stands in radical contrast to Eliot’s insistence that religion is the one thing that makes sense of everything else. “Religion is the most important element in life,” he said in an interview in John O’ London’s Weekly in 1949, “and it is in the light of religion that one understands anything.” He said much the same thing in his seminal Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: “It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance.”

T. S. Eliot died in 1965, forty years after he prophesied the rise of the hollow men. In the following year, John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, prophesying that rock music would outlast Christianity. The former held to the belief that culture was built upon Christ as the rock of ages; the latter believed that it was built upon nothing but a rock that merely rolls with the times. As for which prophet is true and which is false, it really depends on whether we believe in the Something which is God or whether we believe in the Nothing which is the absence of God.

As for anything outlasting Christianity, we will let another prophet, G. K. Chesterton, have the final word. “Christianity has died many times and risen again,” Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, “for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top.”

Perhaps with the faith and reason of Eliot and Chesterton, we might dare to believe that Christianity and Christian civilization will never die because Christ has risen from the dead.