Murder in the Cathedral

“We Rejoice and Mourn at Once”:

The Complexities of the Authentic Christian Life in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
January 29, 2023

A Symposium on Murder in the Cathedral

Join us for a symposium on T.S. Eliot’s  harrowing tale of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket.

Sponsored by Frassati Catholic High School’s
Ethics & Culture, History, and English Departments

• Who: Parents & their friends interested in (re)encountering literature and the  contemplative life
• Where: Frassati Catholic High School, Assembly Hall, 22151 Frassati Way Spring, TX 77389
• When: 2-5:30pm, January 29, 2023
• Why: To reencounter the classroom, the joy of communal learning, and pleasures of thinking
• What: Vespers, discussions, film, food, drink, and mirth!

In Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas Becket explains that the Christian ought to mourn and rejoice, and be capable of doing both at once. In other words, we do not declare victory over the world, but we will not concede defeat. It is a life of tension and balance and feeling that Thomas Becket proposes. Perhaps it is a balance we are no longer knowledgeable of how to maintain. A lifelong concern of T.S. Eliot’s was what he called the dissociation of sensibility- a cultural or progressive impediment that severed a unity between thought and feeling. As Eliot surmised, for  the human person pre-18th century, a thought was a feeling. However abstract his suggestion sounds, it is the same conclusion Pascal arrives at with his critique of modernity, that man now suffers a fissure between his reason and his passions. This means that the modern man can know something to be true without simultaneously loving it. Thoughts are no longer experiences, just mere abstractions with no consequences. Murder in the Cathedral presents the confrontation between the last great Medieval figure of Thomas Becket, whose thoughts and feelings were unified, against the parvenu moderns, whose thoughts are all abstracted from reality.