““The Four Quartets both is and is not a religious poem. It is religious in the sense of religare (Latin, the restoring of bonds): it attempts to restore the bond joining “God, man and world” to a unity. It is not religious in the sense of espousing a collection of doctrines about God’s relation to humanity. Thus Eliot feels no compunction in alluding to Bhagavad Gita in one section of the poem (DS III) and Dante’s Paradiso in the next (DS IV). He neither asserts the rightness nor wrongness of one set of doctrines in relation to the other; nor does he try to reconcile them. Instead, he claims that prior to the differentiation of various religious paths, there is a universal substratum called Word (logos) of which religions are concretions.””
