SOURCE: "Virgil and the Christian World," in On Poetry and Poets, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, pp. 135–48.

[Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. He introduced a number of terms and concepts that strongly affected critical thought in his lifetime, among them the idea that poets must be conscious of the living tradition of literature in order for their work to have artistic and spiritual validity. The following essay was originally broadcast on the B.B.C. and published in The Listener in 1951. Here, Eliot identifies prominent themes characteristic of Virgil's poetry—labor, piety, and destiny—which have rendered him sympathetic to the Christian mind.]

The esteem in which Virgil has been held throughout Christian history may easily be made to appear, in a historical account of it, largely due to accidents, irrelevances, misunderstandings and superstitions. Such an account can tell you why Virgil's poems were prized so highly; but it may not give you any reason to infer that he deserved so high a place; still less might it persuade you that his work has any value for the world to-day or to-morrow or forever. What interests me here are those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind. To assert this is not to accord him any exaggerated value as a poet, or even as a moralist, above that of all other poets Greek or Roman.

There is however one 'accident', or 'misunderstanding', which has played such a part in history that to ignore it would appear an evasion. This is of course ["Eclogue 4"], in which Virgil, on the occasion of the birth or the expectation of a son to his friend Pollio, recently named consul, speaks in highflown language in what purports to be a mere letter of congratulation to the happy father.

Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns….

He shall have the gift of divine life, shall see heroes mingled with gods, and shall himself be seen of them, and shall sway a world to which his father's virtues shall have brought peace….

The serpent shall perish, and the false poison plant shall perish; Assyrian spice shall spring up on every soil….

Such phrases have always seemed excessive, and the child who was the subject of them never cut any great figure in the world. It has even been suggested that Virgil was pulling his friend's leg by this oriental hyperbole. Some scholars have thought that he was imitating, or taking off, the style of the Sibylline oracles. Some have conjectured that the poem is covertly addressed to Octavius, or even that it concerns the offspring of Antony and Cleopatra. A French scholar, Carcopino, gives good reason to believe that the poem contains allusions to Pythagorean doctrine. The mystery of the poem does not seem to have attracted any particular attention until the Christian Fathers got hold of it. The Virgin, the Golden Age, the Great Year, the parallel with the prophecies of Isaiah; the child cara deum suboles—'dear offspring of the gods, great scion of Jupiter'—could only be the Christ himself, whose coming was foreseen by Virgil in the year 40 B.C. Lactantius and St. Augustine believed this; so did the entire mediaeval Church and Dante; and even perhaps, in his own fashion, Victor Hugo.

It is possible that still other explanations may be found, and we already know more about the probabilities than the Christian Fathers did. We also know that Virgil, who was a man of great learning in his time, and, as Mr. Jackson Knight has shown us, well informed in matters of folklore and antiquities, had at least indirect acquaintance with the religions and with the figurative language of the East. That would be sufficient in itself to account for any suggestion of Hebrew prophecy. Whether we consider the prediction of the Incarnation merely a coincidence will depend on what we mean by coincidence; whether we consider Virgil a Christian prophet will depend upon our interpretation of the word 'prophecy'. That Virgil himself was consciously concerned only with domestic affairs or with Roman politics I feel sure: I think that he would have been very much astonished by the career which his ["Eclogue 4"] was to have. If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be for me the end of the matter. But if the word 'inspiration' is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him. This is certainly true of poetic inspiration: and there is more obvious reason for admiring Isaiah as a poet than for claiming Virgil as a prophet. A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of thier own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. He need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others; and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance.

We have a mental habit which makes it much easier for us to explain the miraculous in natural terms than to explain the natural in miraculous terms: yet the latter is as necessary as the former. A miracle which everybody accepted and believed in with no difficulty would be a strange miracle indeed; because what was miraculous for everybody would also seem natural to everybody. It seems to me that one can accept whatever explanation of ["Eclogue 4"], by a scholar and historian, is the most plausible; because the scholars and historians can only be concerned with what Virgil thought he was doing. But, at the same time, if there is such a thing as inspiration—and we do go on using the word—then it is something which escapes historical research.

I have had to consider ["Eclogue 4"], because it is so important in speaking of the history of Virgil's place in the Christian tradition that to avoid mention of it might lead to misunderstanding. And it is hardly possible to speak of it without indicating in what way one accepts, or rejects, the view that it prophesies the coming of Christ. I wanted only to make clear that the literal acceptance of this Eclogue as prophecy had much to do with the early admission of Virgil as suitable reading for Christians, and therefore opened the way for his influence in the Christian world. I do not regard this as simply an accident, or a mere curiosity of literature. But what really concerns me is the element in Virgil which gives him a significant, a unique place, at the end of the pre-Christian and at the beginning of the Christian world. He looks both ways; he makes a liaison between the old world and the new, and of his peculiar position we may take ["Eclogue 4"] as a symbol. In what respects, therefore, does the greatest of Roman poets anticipate the Christian world in a way in which the Greek poets do not? This question has been best answered by the late Theodor Haecker, in a book, published some years ago in an English translation under the title Virgil the Father of the West. I shall make use of Haecker's method.

Here I shall make a slight and perhaps trivial diversion. When I was a schoolboy, it was my lot to be introduced to the Iliad and to the Aeneid in the same year. I had, up to that point, found the Greek language a much more exciting study than Latin. I still think it a much greater language: a language which has never been surpassed as a vehicle for the fullest range and the finest shades of thought and feeling. Yet I found myself at ease with Virgil as I was not at ease with Homer. It might have been rather different if we had started with the Odyssey instead of the Iliad; for when we came to read certain selected books of the Odyssey—and I have never read more of the in Greek than those selected books—I was much happier. My preference certainly did not, I am glad to say, mean that I thought Virgil the greater poet. That is the kind of error from which we are preserved in youth, simply because we are too natural to ask such an artificial question—artificial because, in whatever ways Virgil followed the procedure of Homer, he was not trying to do the same thing. One might just as reasonably try to rate the comparative 'greatness' of the Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, simply because Joyce for quite different purposes used the framework of the Odyssey. The obstacle to my enjoyment of the Iliad, at that age, was the behaviour of the people Homer wrote about. The gods were as irresponsible, as much a prey to their passions, as devoid of public spirit and the sense of fair play, as the heroes. This was shocking. Furthermore, their sense of humour extended only to the crudest form of horseplay. Achilles was a ruffian; the only hero who could be commended for either conduct or judgment was Hector; and it seemed to me that this was Shakespeare's view also:

If Helen then be wife to Sparta's king,
As it is known she is, these moral laws
Of nature and of nations speak aloud
To have her back returned …

All this may seem to have been simply the caprice of a priggish little boy. I have modified my early opinions—the explanation I should now give is simply that I instinctively preferred the world of Virgil to the Homer—because it was a more civilized world of dignity, reason and order. When I say 'the world of Virgil', I mean what Virgil himself made of the world in which he lived. The Rome of the imperial era was coarse and beastly enough; in important respects far less civilized than Athens at its greatest. The Romans were less gifted than the Athenians for the arts, philosophy and pure science; and their language was more obdurate to the expression of either poetry or abstract thought. Virgil made of Roman civilization in his poetry something better than it really was. His sensibility is more nearly Christian than that of any other Roman or Greek poet: not like that of an early Christian perhaps, but like that of Christianity from the time at which we can say that a Christian civilization had come into being. We cannot compare Homer and Virgil; but we can compare the civilization which Homer accepted with the civilization of Rome as refined by the sensibility of Virgil.

What, then, are the chief characteristics of Virgil which make him sympathetic to the Christian mind? I think that the most promising way of giving some indication briefly, is to follow the procedure of Haecker and try to develop the significance of certain key words. Such words are labor, pietas, and fatum. The Georgics are, I think, essential to an understanding of Virgil's philosophy—using the word with the distinction that we do not mean quite the same thing when we speak of the philosophy of a poet, as when we speak of the philosophy of an abstract thinker. The Georgics, as a technical treatise on farming, are both difficult and dull. Most of us have neither the command of Latin necessary to read them with pleasure, nor any desire to remind ourselves of schooltime agonies. I shall only recommend them in the translation of Mr. Day Lewis who has put them into modern verse. But they are a work to which their author devoted time, toil and genius. Why did he write them? It is not to be supposed that he was endeavouring to teach their business to the farmers of his native soil; or that he aimed simply to provide a useful handbook for townsmen eager to buy land and launch out as farmers. Nor is it likely that he was merely anxious to compile records, for the curiosity of later generations, of the methods of agriculture in his time. It is more likely that he hoped to remind absentee landowners, careless of their responsibilities and drawn by love of pleasure or love of politics to the metropolis, of the fundamental duty to cherish the land. Whatever his conscious motive, it seems clear to me that Virgil desired to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour, and the importance of good cultivation of the soil for the well-being of the state both materially and spiritually.

The fact that every major poetic form employed by Virgil has some precedent in Greek verse, must not be allowed to obscure the originality with which he recreated every form he used. There is I think no precedent for the spirit of the Georgics; and the attitude towards the soil, and the labour of the soil, which is there expressed, is something that we ought to find particularly intelligible now, when urban agglomeration, the flight from the land, the pillage of the earth and the squandering of natural resources are beginning to attract attention. It was the Greeks who taught us the dignity of leisure; it is from them that we inherit the perception that the highest life is the life of contemplation. But this respect for leisure, with the Greeks, was accompanied by a contempt for the banausic occupations. Virgil perceived that agriculture is fundamental to civilization, and he affirmed the dignity of manual labour. When the Christian monastic orders came into being, the contemplative life and the life of manual labour were first conjoined. These were no longer occupations for different classes of people, the one noble, the other inferior and suitable only for slaves or almost slaves. There was a great deal in the mediaeval world which was not Christian; and practice in the lay world was very different from that of the religious orders at their best: but at least Christianity did establish the principle that action and contemplation, labour and prayer, are both essential to the life of the complete man. It is possible that the insight of Virgil was recognized by monks who read his works in their religious houses.

Furthermore, we need to keep this affirmation of the Georgics in mind when we read the Aeneid. There, Virgil is concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule. He set an ideal for Rome, and for empire in general, which was never realized in history; but the ideal of empire as Virgil sees it is a noble one. His devotion to Rome was founded on devotion to the land; to the particular region, to the particular village, and to the family in the village. To the reader of history this foundation of the general on the particular may seem chimerical; just as the union of the contemplative and the active life may seem to most people chimerical. For mostly these aims are envisaged as alternatives: we exalt the contemplative life, and disparage the active, or we exalt the active, and regard the contemplative with amused contempt if not with moral disapproval. And yet it may be the man who affirms the apparently incompatible who is right.

We come to the second word. It is a commonplace that the word piety is only a reduced, altered and specialized translation of pietas. We use it in two senses: in general, it suggests devout church-going, or at least church-going with the appearance of devoutness. In another sense, it is always preceded by the adjective 'filial', meaning correct behaviour toward a parent. When Virgil speaks, as he does, of pius Aeneas, we are apt to think of his care of his father, of his devotion to his father's memory, and of his touching encounter with his father on his descent into the nether regions. But the word pietas with Virgil has much wider associations of meaning: it implies an attitude towards the individual, towards the family, towards the region, and towards the imperial destiny of Rome. And finally Aeneas is 'pious' also in his respect towards the gods, and in his punctilious observance of rites and offerings. It is an attitude towards all these things, and therefore implies a unity and an order among them: it is in fact an attitude towards life.

Aeneas is therefore not simply a man endowed with a number of virtues, each of which is a kind of piety—so that to call him pius in general is merely to use a convenient collective term. Piety is one. These are aspects of piety in different contexts, and they all imply each other. In his devotion to his father he is not being just an admirable son. There is personal affection, without which filial piety would be imperfect; but personal affection is not piety. There is also devotion to his father as his father, as his progenitor: this is piety as the acceptance of a bond which one has not chosen. The quality of affection is altered, and its importance deepened, when it becomes love due to the object. But this filial piety is also the recognition of a further bond, that with the gods, to whom such an attitude is pleasing: to fail in it would be to be guilty of impiety also towards the gods. The gods must therefore be gods worthy of this respect; and without gods, or a god, regarded in this way, filial piety must perish. For then it becomes no longer a duty: your feeling towards your father will be due merely to the fortunate accident of congeniality, or will be reduced to a sentiment of gratitude for care and consideration. Aeneas is pious towards the gods, and in no way does his piety appear more clearly than when the gods afflict him. He had a good deal to put up with from Juno; and even his mother Venus, as the benevolent instrument of his destiny, put him into one very awkward position. There is in Aeneas a virtue—an essential ingredient in his piety—which is an analogue and foreshadow of Christian humility. Aeneas is the antithesis, in important respects, of either Achilles or Odysseus. In so far as he is heroic, he is heroic as the original Displaced Person, the fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society, of which the few other survivors except his own band languish as slaves of the Greeks. He was not to have, like Ulysses, marvellous and exciting adventures with such occasional erotic episodes as left no canker on the conscience of that wayfarer. He was not to return at last to the remembered hearth-fire, to find an exemplary wife awaiting him, to be reunited to his son, his dog and his servants. Aeneas' end is only a new beginning; and the whole point of the pilgrimage is something which will come to pass for future generations. His nearest likeness is Job, but his reward is not what Job's was, but is only in the accomplishment of his destiny. He suffers for himself, he acts only in obedience. He is, in fact, the prototype of a Christian hero. For he is, humbly, a man with a mission; and the mission is everything.

The pietas is in this way explicable only in terms of fatum. This is a word which constantly recurs in the Aeneid; a word charged with meaning, and perhaps with more meaning than Virgil himself knew. Our nearest word is 'destiny', and that is a word which means more than we can find any definitions for. It is a word which can have no meaning in a mechanical universe: if that which is wound up must run down, what destiny is there in that? Destiny is not necessitarianism, and it is not caprice: it is something essentially meaningful. Each man has his destiny, though some men are undoubtedly 'men of destiny' in a sense in which most men are not; and Aeneas is egregiously a man of destiny, since upon him the future of the Western World depends. But this is an election which cannot be explained, a burden and responsibility rather than a reason for self-glorification. It merely happens to one man and not to others, to have the gifts necessary in some profound crisis, but he can take no credit to himself for the gifts and the responsibility assigned to him. Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. Aeneas is a man guided by the deepest conviction of destiny, but he is a humble man who knows that this destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided. Of what power is he the servant? Not of the gods, who are themselves merely instruments, and sometimes rebellious ones. The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Nor does destiny relieve mankind of moral responsibility. Such, at least, is my reading of the episode of Dido. The love affiar of Aeneas and Dido is arranged by Venus: neither of the lovers was free to abstain. Now Venus herself is not acting on a whim, or out of mischief. She is certainly pround of the destiny of her son, but her behaviour is not that of a doting mother: she is herself an instrument for the realization of her son's destiny. Aeneas and Dido had to be united, and had to be separated. Aeneas did not demur; he was obedient to his fate. But he was certainly very unhappy about it, and I think that he felt that he was behaving shamefully. For why else should Virgil have contrived his meeting with the Shade of Dido in Hades, and the snub that he receives? When he sees Dido he tries to excuse himself for his betrayal. Sed me iussa deum—but I was under orders from the gods; it was a very unpleasant decision to have imposed upon me, and I am sorry that you took it so hard. She avoids his gaze and turns away, with a face as immobile as if it had been carved from flint or Marpesian rock. I have no doubt that Virgil, when he wrote these lines, was assuming the role of Aeneas and feeling very decidedly a worm. No, destiny like that of Aeneas does not make the man's life any easier: it is a very heavy cross to bear. And I do not think of any hero of antiquity who found himself in quite this inevitable and deplorable position. I think that the poet who could best have emulated Virgil's treatment of this situation was Racine: certainly the Christian poet who gave the furious Roxane the blasting line 'Rentre dans le Néant d'où je t'ai fait sortir' could, if anyone, have found words for Dido on this occasion.

What then does this destiny, which no Homeric hero shares with Aneas, mean? For Virgil's conscious mind, and for his contemporary readers, it means the imperium romanum. This in itself, as Virgil saw it, was a worthy justification of history. I think that he had few illusions and that he saw clearly both sides of every question—the case for the loser as well as the case for the winner. Nevertheless even those who have as little Latin as I must remember and thrill at the lines:

His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi …
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
[hae tibi erunt artes] pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos …

I say that it was all the end of history that Virgil could be asked to find, and that it was a worthy end. And do you really think that Virgil was mistaken? You must remember that the Roman Empire was transformed into the Holy Roman Empire. What Virgil proposed to his contemporaries was the highest ideal even for an unholy Roman Empire, for any merely temporal empire. We are all, so far as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire, and time has not yet proved Virgil wrong when he wrote nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi. But, of course, the Roman Empire which Virgil imagined and for which Aeneas worked out his destiny was not exactly the same as the Roman Empire of the legionaries, the pro-consuls and governors, the business men and speculators, the demagogues and generals. It was something greater, but something which exists because Virgil imagined it. It remains an ideal, but one which Virgil passed on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.

In the end, it seems to me that the place which Dante assigned to Virgil in the future life, and the role of guide and teacher as far as the barrier which Virgil was not allowed to pass, was not capable of passing, is an exact statement of Virgil's relation to the Christian world. We find the world of Virgil, compared to the world of Homer, to approximate to a Christian world, in the choice, order and relationship of its values. I have said that this implies no comparison between Homer the poet and Virgil the poet. Neither do I think that it is exactly a comparison between the worlds in which they lived, considered apart from the interpretation of these worlds which the poets have given us. It may be merely that we know more about the world of Virgil, and understand it better; and therefore see more clearly how much, in the Roman ideal according to Virgil, is due to the shaping hand and the philosophical mind of Virgil himself. For, in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher (as distinct from the sense in which a great poet may embody a great philosophy in great poetry) Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient Rome. It is not, therefore, simply that the civilization in which Virgil lived is nearer to the civilization of Christianity than is that of Homer; we can say that Virgil, among classical Latin poets or prose writers, is uniquely near to Christianity. There is a phrase which I have been trying to avoid, but which I now find myself obliged to use: anima naturaliter Christiana. Whether we apply it to Virgil is a matter of personal choice; but I am inclined to think that he just falls short: and that is why I said just now that I think Dante has put Virgil in the right place. I will try to give the reason.

I think of another key word, besides labor, pietas and fatum, which I wish that I could illustrate from Virgil in the same way. What key word can one find in the Divine Comedy which is absent from the Aeneid? One word of course is lume, and all the words expressive of the spiritual significance of light. But this, I think, as used by Dante, has a meaning which belongs only to explicit Christianity, fused with a meaning which belongs to mystical experience. And Virgil is no mystic. The term which one can justifiably regret the lack of in Virgil is amor. It is, above all others, the key word for Dante. I do not mean that Virgil never uses it. Amor recurs in the Eclogues (amor vincit omnia). But the loves of the shepherds represent hardly more than a poetic convention. The use of the word amor in the Eclogues is not illuminated by meanings of the word in the Aeneid in the way in which, for example, we return to Paolo and Francesca with greater understanding of their passion after we have been taken through the circles of love in the Paradise. Certainly, the love of Aeneas and Dido has great tragic force. There is tenderness and pathos enough in the Aeneid. But Love is never given, to my mind, the same significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe that pietas is given; and it is not Love that causes fatum, or moves the sun and the stars. Even for intensity of physical passion, Virgil is more tepid than some other Latin poets, and far below the rank of Catullus. If we are not chilled we at least feel ourselves, with Virgil, to be moving in a kind of emotional twilight. Virgil was, among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning. But he was denied the vision of the man who could say:

'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe.'

Legato con amor in un volume.