Faith & Spirit Quote by T. S. Eliot

Eliot’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered without anesthesia: modern people are drowning in information while starving for conviction. “We know too much” isn’t praise for education; it’s an accusation that knowledge has metastasized into trivia, commentary, and secondhand opinion - endless ways to be informed without being changed. The real sting is the second clause: we’re “convinced of too little.” Eliot is pointing at a cultural collapse of assent, the inability to commit to any belief strongly enough to let it organize a life.

Then he sharpens the blade. “Our literature is a substitute for religion” names a very modern bargain: art becomes the place where we go for awe, meaning, moral seriousness, even transcendence - but without obligations. You can binge epiphanies in novels and poems and still keep your metaphysical options open. It’s spiritual experience as aesthetic consumption, intense but nonbinding.

“And so is our religion” flips the expectation. Religion, in this world, has begun to behave like literature: a set of texts to interpret, a mood to cultivate, a cultural membership, something appreciated rather than obeyed. The subtext is less “religion is bad now” than “everything has become symbolic, nothing sacramental.” Coming from Eliot - writing in the aftermath of World War I, amid the fragmentation he dramatizes in The Waste Land, and before his own turn toward Anglicanism - it’s both critique and confession. The modern mind has plenty to say, and no altar it trusts enough to kneel at.