How Must We Build? With a Sword and Trowel

Eliot's vision of building the Temple

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Now that in our series on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Choruses from The Rock” (see parts one, two, three, four, and five) we have established that we need to rebuild the city (representing the modern world), and that the center of the city must be the Temple (representing the Church), the question becomes, how do we build? Practically speaking, how do we rebuild the modern world given the mess it’s in? What should our posture be? A defensive posture that focuses on protecting our religious liberties in an increasingly secular world or a creative posture that builds something new?

In the next stanza we will consider, Eliot addresses these very questions by taking us to the story of Nehemiah:

There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet
There was no exception to the general rule.
In Shushan the palace, in the month Nisan,
He served the wine to the king Artaxerxes,
And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;
And the King gave him leave to depart
That he might rebuild the city.
So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,
And there, by the dragon's well, by the dung gate,
By the fountain gate, by the king's pool,
Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;
No place for a beast to pass.
There were enemies without to destroy him,
And spies and self-seekers within,
When he and his men laid their hands to rebuilding the wall
So they built as men must build
With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

The first thing Eliot reminds us is that bare fact that some people will work to build up the Church in its local manifestation, but there are also “those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.” This is a fact we must live with. There are many who believe the world would be better off if all the churches were converted into storefronts. This may take the form of public schools that are hostile to churches renting their space on Sundays for worship. But it also may take the form of people in a community being hostile and unwelcoming to Christians and the gospel. For building the Temple to Eliot doesn’t just mean the physical building, but the Church itself. And it is certainly the case that in many places in the United States Christianity, particularly traditional Christianity, is opposed as transphobic, homophobic, toxic bigotry. There are “those who would prefer the Temple should not be built.”

Eliot uses Nehemiah as a model of a man whose heart is set on rebuilding a city for God. He feels called to this mission and grieves for Jerusalem. His heart is broken for the city. I wonder if we can say the same for our own. Certainly Jerusalem was a city set apart by God, and yet all cities belong to God; He has dominion over all the Earth. Should we not grieve for our own cities as Nehemiah did? My fear is that we grow callus to modernity by living within it too long, so that its perverse practices and norms come to seem natural and right to us, nothing to grieve over at all. And even the worst issues (abortion, gun violence, pornography) are so common that we don’t bother shedding any tears over them.

But Nehemiah’s love for Jerusalem drives him to request to go back and rebuild the city, which he is granted, and Eliot says he finds the city “lay waste, consumed with fire.” Again we find the image of the modern world as a wasteland in Eliot’s writing. But perhaps more distressing than the fire are the people he discovers there: “There were enemies without to destroy him, / And spies and self-seekers within.” Here is a warning from Eliot about the nature of all rebuilding efforts, whether we are rebuilding the city or specifically the local church. You will find enemies outside and inside seeking to destroy your efforts. The particular danger of those within is that they might be “self-seekers,” those who sign on to grow your church or build up your local community only out of selfish ambition. And while some good may come out of their work, in the end, their selfishness will work like a cancer in the group and eventually lead to conflict.

As I think about the work of shoring up the ruins of modernity on multiple levels, this idea of “self-seekers” rings particularly true on the national level with various conservative ‘influencers” who often begin their careers by promoting righteous causes that aim at restoring morality, order, and justice to our nation—things which are necessary for rebuilding the modern city. But because they are at their hearts “self-seekers,” they very quickly shift to promoting increasingly radical and sensational positions and adopting hostile and combative styles in order to collect “followers” for themselves. They usually succeed in their self-seeking. But they fail at doing the work of building.

My favorite lines in this stanza are the final two, and they are in response to these very real threats from within and from without:

So they built as men must build
With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

For Eliot, the work of cultivating the city (including the church!) requires us to be ambidextrous. In one hand we must carry a sword, ready to defend ourselves and our fellow workers from attacks from within and from without. These could be attacks on our faith, they could be accusations that Christianity is merely a bigoted religion, they could be attacks on the unborn or religious liberty. They could be anything that keeps us from building a city that is honoring to God. Eliot then is not advocating retreatism from the public square. With one hand we must hold our swords.

But with our other hand, we must be building. Institutions, churches, schools, families, books, poems, works of art, laws—culture creation. The trowel is the tool of building, and we cannot be constantly in conflict. We must cast a positive vision of culture and pursue it, create it with our labor. It’s not enough just to defend ourselves in the culture war, we must build something beautiful, true, and good.

This is how we must build. We have no other option. Only focusing on the sword (the culture war or self defense) is anemic. It does not have a telos. It only has more fighting as the end goal. Not a finished city. And only focusing on building denies the reality of enemies within and without who will work to destroy our efforts. We must be prudent enough to see reality as it is, which in this case means recognizing that there are forces in the world deeply opposed to Christianity and the Church and the moral order it teaches. We must have an answer for those opposed to us.

A danger is that we beat the trowel into another sword. We use all our culture building efforts as efforts to defend or attack those who oppose us instead of primarily using our cultivating efforts to glorify God and edify our neighbor. One is a posture of hostility and combat, the other is a posture of grace and humility. And the truth is, if we build our churches and our poems and our schools well, they will, naturally be defenses against those who “prefer that the Temple should not be built.” But that won’t be their primarily mission. Right now, the culture war has subsumed everything so that so much of our culture building endeavors are framed as culture war endeavors: “Send your child to this private school to protect them from wokism,” “Support our magazine! We’re fighting CRT!” And so on. Meanwhile what they are building for takes second place to what they are against, if it is mentioned at all.

Now I don’t think Eliot means that we literally each must be ready to defend and build. I think some of us can specialize in one or the other. I think we can have institutions built for the defense of religious liberty, for example, and institutions built for the promotion of Christian artists or schools. But what I don’t think is that we can neglect either of these tools, the sword or the trowel, or turn the one into the other.