T. S. Eliot and the Play of Belief: Reading Dante in the Aftermath of World-War I

T. S.艾略特和信仰思辨：第一次世界大戰後對但丁 的閱讀

Referring back to Coleridge's notion of''the willing suspension of disbelief,'' this paper explores the transition that occurs when ludic identification with a religious text becomes real identification. This transformation was particularly poignant in the reception of an especially strong religious poet, Dante, by an extremely influential critic, T. S. Eliot, at a major historical moment, the period of and after the sexcentenary of Dante's death in 1921. The sexcentenary took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when various European intellectuals on both sides of the war turned to Dante for spiritual, intellectual, and political sustenance to heal the trauma of the war. Eliot's short, widely read monograph on Dante, published during a continuing dialogue with I. A. Richards on religion and literature, reveals his difficulty with the concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. Eliot raises and then rejects the possibility that a twentieth-century reader could cross confessional lines and truly enter Dante's world through the suspension of disbelief and the imaginative assumption of belief in Dante's theology| actual identification with Dante's faith is ultimately necessary, Eliot concludes. The fraught political dimension of the willing suspension of disbelief during this tumultuous time is apparent in the monograph's now suppressed dedication to Charles Maurras. Eliot's was developing his thinking about belief and non-belief in relation to politics, society and literature during his friendship with this self-described reactionary, monarchist, anti-democratic figure.

參考柯勒律治的「自願終止懷疑」，本文探討對宗教文本的頑固認同成為實際認同的一個轉變。這個轉變發表在一個重大的歷史時刻，那是在但丁死亡六百週年後的1921年，是由一個非常有影響力的評論家，艾略特，對一個具有強烈宗教信仰詩人但丁的評論所造成的。但丁死亡六百週年對第一次世界大戰帶來的立即影響是，歐洲知識分子為了醫治戰爭的創傷轉向但丁的精神、思維和政治願景求取慰藉。在艾略特廣泛快速閱讀但丁的同時，I.A.理查茲仍持續出版專著，繼續宗教和文學上的對話，揭示他難以苟同自願終止懷疑的論點。艾略特指出，一個二十世紀的讀者不可能透過終止懷疑、透過對但丁神學信仰的豐富想像力而形成的假設，就越過自白線而真正進入但丁的世界。艾略特的結論是，實際確認但丁的信仰仍是最終的必要|在這個動盪的階段，充滿政治考量的自願終止懷疑，顯然會成為壓抑自我而奉獻給民族主義者查爾斯•莫拉斯的理論論述。在這種有關對自述反動、君主、反民主的人物懷抱善意的政治、社會、文學的信仰或無信仰爭辯中，艾略特發展著他的思想。