I've also had a long-term interest in The Waste Land, from when I was a Humanities academic teaching on the history of ideas and their expression in culture - though with more focus on the other great spiritual tradition that shaped Eliot, Christianity. There are some very similar resonances from that tradition to those you call out, albeit from a very different ontology: The belief in the incarnation of Christ, absolute truth being embodied in grounded everyday reality for instance, in a way that totally disrupted Greek Platonist thought about the strict separation between the ideal realm of forms and the imperfect shadow physical reality; the inherent relationality in the concept of the Trinity; the rejection of autonomous being apart from God; and a concept that you didn't call out, a highly relational epistemology based on love as an essential prerequisite for truth. As broken as the images are, their truthfulness is only fully experienced when the perception is grounded in love ...
I've also had a long-term interest in The Waste Land, from when I was a Humanities academic teaching on the history of ideas and their expression in culture - though with more focus on the other great spiritual tradition that shaped Eliot, Christianity. There are some very similar resonances from that tradition to those you call out, albeit from a very different ontology: The belief in the incarnation of Christ, absolute truth being embodied in grounded everyday reality for instance, in a way that totally disrupted Greek Platonist thought about the strict separation between the ideal realm of forms and the imperfect shadow physical reality; the inherent relationality in the concept of the Trinity; the rejection of autonomous being apart from God; and a concept that you didn't call out, a highly relational epistemology based on love as an essential prerequisite for truth. As broken as the images are, their truthfulness is only fully experienced when the perception is grounded in love ...
I've been reading a lot about Modernist literature recently, so this felt uncannily timely!