The third volume of T.S. Eliot's letters are set to be published, covering the years 1926-27 – years in which Eliot falteringly became attached to the Christian faith. Adam Kirsch describes what the letters reveal:
The more interesting story, which has to be read around the margins of the letters and often in the footnotes, is that of Eliot’s spiritual evolution, of which his professional and literary evolution was an index. Eliot rarely if ever confides in a correspondent about his spiritual life and even warns the priest who baptised him, William Force Stead, to keep quiet about it: “I do not want any publicity or notoriety – for the moment, it concerns me alone, and not the public – not even those nearest me. I hate spectacular ‘conversions’.”
But there is a remarkable admission, so quick you could easily miss it, in another letter to Aldington. “I agree with you about Christ and I do not disagree with anything else,” Eliot writes. The editors supply what Aldington had written: “Moreover, I don’t really like the gospels, and I don’t much like Christ. I really think Paul was more interesting. He appears to have been a man; I have suspected that . . . Christ is an invention.” Just at the time Eliot is about to enter the Church, we find him apparently saying that he does not believe Christ existed and in any case that he doesn’t “like” Him.
The Dish 