Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on the “Chance of Greater Sin”)

"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.”—Archbishop Thomas Becket, in T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) 

Somehow this past year, I missed writing about two anniversaries related to T.S. Eliot, including the 45th of his death and the 60th of his verse drama, The Cocktail Party. I would have missed discussing the 75th anniversary of the publication of his most famous verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, except that another date provided me with an opportunity to discuss it. 

On this date in 1170, Archbishop Thomas a Becket--recently returned to England after seven years on the continent, where he had fled after fearing for his life—was murdered. 

He wasn’t the first archbishop to die violently, nor the last (the long, grim line of highly placed Roman Catholic martyrs extends from St. Peter to Archbishop Oscar Romero, and undoubtedly more recent ones I’m not aware of). 

 But the site of the crime—on the altar of the archbishop’s own cathedral, in Canterbury—shocked the English public. When it became common knowledge that the four assassins were acting on the half-wish, half-command of the prelate’s friend-turned-enemy, King Henry II (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), unrest grew to such a state that three years later, Henry felt obliged to proceed to the cathedral for public penance, kneeling before the tomb of Becket while a crowd of priests and monks took turns striking him with a rod. 

It’s not an accident that interest in Becket and another English “Thomas” engaged in a long, ultimately fatal battle of wills about a royal named Henry, Thomas More, peaked twice in the last century, in the exact same two years. More’s canonization occurred in 1935, the year that Eliot’s drama made its stage debut. The two events occurred as Adolf Hitler threatened virtually every major church in Germany as part of his larger attempt to crush all opposition as he marginalized, disenfranchised, then annihilated the Jews of his country. 

Twenty-five years later, with the Soviet Union trying to snuff out religious sentiment behind the Iron Curtain, Paul Scofield electrified Broadway audiences as More in A Man for All Seasons, and Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier were facing off as Henry and the Archbishop of Canterbury in Jean Anouilh‘s Becket. Becket and More, then, became heroes of conscience for a Western Christian civilization desperate to maintain portions of the private realm from the encroachment of an all-powerful state. 

I had a difficult time in choosing between the Eliot and Anouilh dramas (particularly because, in the case of the latter, I still have a powerful fascination with the 1964 cinematic adaptation with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in the roles of Henry and Thomas). Even after picking Eliot, I could have selected a different quote from that play (notably the most famous couplet, “The last temptation is the greatest treason,/To do the right deed for the wrong reason”).

I ended up picking the lines above because they are so jarring in the context of the play, like a streak of lightning across a dark sky. A poet obsessed with heritage and antiquity is sounding an unexpectedly contemporary note. 

At the heart of the conflict between Henry and Becket was the archbishop’s refusal to accede to the king’s command that accused clerics be tried in the civil realm. (In one case that particularly brought a public outcry, one priest had been acquitted in an ecclesiastic court on a murder charge.) 

In a long essay on Becket, G.K. Chesterton scoffed that the modern understanding of the argument between the king and his former friend--that is, the relationship between church and state--had nothing to do with what was really at stake. Much as I admire the great contrarian, his reading in this case is simply a case of denying the obvious. The proper place of church and state had everything to do with this tragedy. 

In fending off the arguments of the four tempters, Eliot’s Becket argues for a church as a center of a rightly ordered world. But in the quote above, he briefly acknowledges the grave potential in one of the temptations he quickly dismissed: power. 

When popes and theologians looked to scripture for sources of church authority, more often than not they cited Christ’s charge to his first among equals among his Apostles: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16: 18-19). 

A more powerful element, however, was fear--the well-founded concern of what would happen in a society without a clerical bulwark against both anarchy and political oppression. Burnt into the collective memory of the Church--and especially the popes--were Roman emperors’ persecution of the early Christians, and Pope Leo the Great’s meeting with Attila the Hun that saved the Eternal City from slaughter. 

By Becket’s time, however, the potential for ecclesiastic abuse of power loomed large. Henry had banked on a reaction against it when he sought to extend his legal jurisdiction over the church in his realm. 

Moreover, two centuries before Martin Luther took aim at Rome for its corruption, Geoffrey Chaucer was already satirizing, in Canterbury Tales, the abuse of clerical privilege by at least two pilgrims to Becket’s shrine, in “The Friar‘s Tale“ and “The Summoner’s Tale.” 

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens, immersed in centuries of anti-Catholic feeling, had little sympathy for the martyred archbishop and his defense of church privilege. His need to explain why Henry would threaten his old friend leads to a pile of suppositions in his Child’s History of England: 

“He [Becket] may have had some secret grudge against the King besides. The King may have offended his proud humour at some time or other, for anything I know. I think it likely, because it is a common thing for Kings, Princes, and other great people, to try the tempers of their favourites rather severely. Even the little affair of the crimson cloak must have been anything but a pleasant one to a haughty man. Thomas a Becket knew better than any one in England what the King expected of him. In all his sumptuous life, he had never yet been in a position to disappoint the King. He could take up that proud stand now, as head of the Church; and he determined that it should be written in history, either that he subdued the King, or that the King subdued him.” 

Today, nearly a millennium after Becket’s murder, the Church is dealing with the fallout from a hierarchy who employed the martyred archbishop’s method of dealing with accused clerics: i.e., let us handle it, not the state. The results, in the case of the priest abuse scandals, have not been pretty. 

The usual suspects--that is, revisionists--are all too aware of the implications of this. In a 2005 poll of historians on the worst Britons of all time that was published in BBC History Magazine, John Hudson of St. Andrews University nominated Becket as the 12th century’s worst villain, barely containing himself: “Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December, 1170, a fittingly grisly end."

Somehow, in Hudson's view, outrageous state sanction of murder by Henry has assumed second place behind Becket's alleged "greed." But that was bound to happen, given the tenor of our time.

But it needs to be said: Though, despite Chesterton, the relationship between church and state was at work in the Becket-Henry conflict, there was no solid concept of separation of church and state at this point in history. That would need to be resolved over the course of centuries, with landmarks including the battle over the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Virginia in the 1780s (pitting Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against Patrick Henry) and France's 1905 law mandating separation of church and state in the wake of the Dreyfus Affairs.

Eliot's Becket, in his agony of conscience, has hit upon the special need of clergy for eternal self-vigilance. Their position holds special potential for the "chance of greater sin/And sorrow" than one who serves the state, because abuse of a sacred trust matters more in the hearts of the people who hold their faith as dear as their lives. The Church is now, to its great shame and sorrow, re-learning the meaning of these lines.