October 2023 Conference

The Gabriel Marcel Institute of Philosophy, in Sydney, Australia, exists to extend the spirit of Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy into the new century. Marcel’s thought ranges across philosophy, religion, drama and the arts. He wrote 35 plays, was theologically literate, and his philosophical Friday soirees were attended by Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolas Berdyaev and Jean-Paul Sartre and others. He was unsystematic (rhizomic we might say today) in his thought and adept at renewing ideas with fidelity to the past and creativity in terms of the future.

Creative fidelity, one of his book titles, is the Institute’s motto.

Conference on T. S. Eliot and Religion

We invite papers on any aspect of T. S. Eliot and Religion, from any perspective whatsoever. Submissions will be selected for presentation on the day of the conference. These and other submissions that were not able to be presented on the day will be published in the inaugural edition of our subscription journal, The Marcellian, the annual journal of the Gabriel Marcel Institute of Philosophy Sydney.

Proposers should send a 300-500-word proposal, a 100-word abstract, a 100-word biographical statement, and contact information, to: mdelnevo.marcelinstitute@outlook.com.

The deadline for proposals is 6 April 2023.

Venue: The Gabriel Marcel Institute of Philosophy Sydney. 17 Augusta Street, Strathfield, Sydney NSW 2135.

Papers may be delivered or written in French or English.

Date of conference: Saturday, 28 Oct 2023.

There will be a get-together with a paper read for delegates and discussed the night before.

Catering: Provided during the day.

Cost: A$200. Concession A$150. No cost for Members of the Gabriel Marcel Society or to those giving papers.

Subscription to The Marcellian (paper copy) A$25

This is the inaugural conference of the Institute. Why T. S. Eliot? (as he is not a poet Marcel was greatly aware of). We see Eliot as a figure that is Marcellian. The academic establishment has Eliot down as a staunch Anglo-Catholic. Eliot said he was "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" and 30 years later noted that he had "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". Yet Eliot’s upbringing was American Unitarian; at Harvard, Eliot studied philosophy; he wrote a doctoral thesis on the Hegelian philosophy of F. H. Bradley, which while commonly dubbed “idealist” by reductionists, is mystical in reach, exhibiting the new abstract language of Hegel. Hegel, in the Lectures on Religion, given across the span of his career and largely ignored by the academic Hegel industry, had historicised Christianity and set the Christian story is a wider global multi-religious context. Hegel was already post-ontotheological as we would say today, as was Bradley,and Eliot knew all this. Moreover, at Harvard, Eliot studied the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and learned the sacred language of Sanskrit. His incursion into Hinduism shows clearly in The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, his major poetic works, as does mysticism – Eastern or Western - and a positive and provocative view of myth, akin to Joyce and his "usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" as Joyce referred to Ulysses in Finnegan’s Wake. Eliot, like the Paris-based Joyce, was interested in recovering the mythic dimension in art that was lost in the culture that had lost its religion. While the literary establishment of the day banned Joyce, Eliot stood by Joyce’s work. He went out of his way to meet the master in Paris, and he was one of the literary forces responsible for making Joyce acceptable to the Anglophone world.

Marcel and Eliiot are roughly contemporaries. Poetically, Eliot was influenced by modern French poetry, Laforgue, Baudelaire, St-John Perse, and, it could be said, their “religion”, such as it was, rubbed off on him. Also, there are the plays of Eliot and Marcel and their cross-currents to consider. The French influence on Eliot was great, his idea of culture and art were – like the ideas of Fry and the Omega circle within the Bloomsbury group – French influenced. Eliot studied at the Sorbonne and took the lectures of Henri Bergson, a significant influence later on Gilles Deleuze (interesting to rethink Eliot through Deleuze). And then, Eliot as a person was very private – even Virginia Woolf could not penetrate his personal armour; but witness the difference between the Eliot of Bloomsbury drawing rooms and the way he writes to Ezra Pound! Was Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism a deflection, a front, an incognito, a way of warding off awkward people and questions he was in no mood for? What new can be said of Eliot’s religion that has not already been said, beyond those well-known statements noted earlier? These and related questions are the questions we want to explore at this conference.