As the reader might have already observed, Eliot appears to be proposing a model of culture that involves ever-widening but concentric circles, from the village to the region to the nation to the world.
The difficulty there, of course, is that once one transcends the idea of a national culture, one has to abandon most of the political associations that culture also implies.
In his fourth chapter, as previously noted, Eliot takes up the topic of cultural unity and diversity as it is affected by cults and sects. As he puts it, the more conscious belief becomes, the more conscious unbelief becomes, leading to habits of indifference, doubt, and skepticism.
In The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier, Eliot had already addressed many of these same difficulties attendant on maintaining a meaningful national religious life in a postindustrial, highly materialistic, and contentious modern society.
Now, however, he emphasizes that he wishes to explore those same issues not from the point of view of the Christian apologist but from that of the sociologist. These general premises established, Eliot announces that he will devote the remainder of this discussion to the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, as well as to the diversity of sects that Protestantism has itself produced. It serves his purpose, for he finds himself compelled to admit that Europe since the 16th century, a convenient period reference for the Protestant Reformation, has certainly not suffered in terms of overall cultural development.
When he uses England itself as the focus for a similar discussion, however, he is less sanguine, for while the two dominant religious cultures in England are both Protestant—the Established Anglican Church and the various Protestant sects that have splintered from it during the centuries—the English atheist still shares in the religious life of culture when it comes to signficant social events such as births, marriages, and deaths. Nevertheless, Eliot sees the major Protestant cultures of Northern Europe, where the Protestant Reformation suffered its widest and most enduring successes, as having cut those regions off from the mainstream of European cultural development, which is largely Latin in origin.
While he avoids evaluating the pros and cons of that separation for the cultures of the north, he returns again to its consequence for the English. Since Anglicanism as an offshoot of Catholicism was the result of a decision made at the top, in this case by Henry VIII in his own dispute with Rome, whereas the Protestant dissenters were opposing themselves on native ground specifically against what they saw as little more than a national expression of Catholicism, England may be culturally more stratified religiously in ways that are themselves modified by cultural distinctions among classes.
This Eliot is willing to attribute to the regional divisions based on ethnicities that he desribed in the preceding chapter. The next logical step is to consider the ecumenical movements that are becoming more common.
When it comes to determining whether there should be an international church—Roman Catholicism—or a national church—here Anglicanism would provide a good example—or separated sects, Eliot takes the moderating position as he so often has done in this present treatise, proposing that the maintenance of a persistent tension among all three possibilities is desirable.
Eliot devotes his last two chapters to culture and politics and culture and education. That he treats both topics in a far more cursory fashion than he had culture and class, culture and region, and culture and religion suggests that he does not view those last two categories as being as critical to the maintenance and transmission of cultural values.
However, culture and religion, politics, and education together form a broader category, which is culture and the nation. Still, Eliot is enough a child of his time to recognize the importance that the culture itself, particularly in the postwar environment in which he is writing, attaches to the political sphere, so he treats it gingerly but with a profound respect for its genuine even if superficial importance.
The political, for one thing, bandy the word culture about quite freely. Yet, while all may engage in the political process, by voting, for example, or paying taxes, few actually engage in politics, so that, in view of the considerable power that they wield, these few form a virtual elite unto themselves.
It is that idea, if not practical reality, that Eliot hopes to short circuit somewhat as he now defines what he sees to be the place of the political in a culture. This governing elite should, then, be required to study history and political theory, so that they are inculcated in the life of the mind. Eliot cites present-day communist Russia as an example of a culture attempting to export their revolution to all kinds of disparate cultures throughout the world by presenting theirs as a culture condoning the equality of cultures at all cost—a successful strategy despite its patently obvious contradictions.
The democratic West, meanwhile, does little better. When Eliot, in chapter 6, takes up the topic of culture and education, the reader may recall that Eliot had, in chapter 2, argued that culture is better maintained and transmitted by the family than by those he calls educationists for the simple reason that the family unconsciously embodies the culture, while education, to be successful, must be a conscious process.
Rather than revisit that earlier argument in chapter 6, then, Eliot analyzes the general expectations associated with the idea of education by the culture, in order to extrapolate a more general idea of how education might best serve cultural purposes. To do so, he first sets out to examine and set in order the prevalent assumptions regarding education. Dent, Herbert Read, and C. In each instance, he convincingly demonstrates that to varying degrees education has come to be seen as an instrument for advancing social ideals.
He remarks that it is therefore unfortunate if education as a means for individuals to acquire wisdom, knowledge, and a respect for learning is overlooked in the interest of serving broader social aims. Thus, he is happy to debunk the notion that everyone wants an education. If there is a commonality to these assumptions that he raises only to challenge them, it is that they all emphasize the social benefits of education rather than promoting it for its own sake and as a force to help shape individual lives.
In an appendix, which comprises the English-language transcriptions of three radio broadcast talks that Eliot originally made in German in , he comments on the unity of European culture. Addressing a German-speaking audience in their own language within a year after they had suffered a deserved and total defeat in World War II, Eliot introduces himself as a poet and editor—a man of letters.
He begins by commenting on the rich variety of languages that make up modern English, which he identifies as the best language for writing poetry, for that reason.
It has extensive elements from German, Scandinavian through Danish, French through the Normans, not to mention the Celtic that has infiltrated the language through the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish peoples of the British Isles. Yeats but who had themselves been influenced by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe.
That while this culture is the expression of the whole people, that expression is continuously being modified, revised, and adjusted by the sometimes conflicting interactions and goals of the various groups, classes, and regions that make up any single culture. Furthermore, because a culture so defined is as living and as organic a thing as any other natural product of the thinking, feeling universe, it is best transmitted by the human families that compose its most central collective unit.
It should be apparent that Eliot would then, of necessity, take a long step back from English culture, which, sensibly enough, had been the primary focus of his presentation till now, to take a look at the same phenomena from the point of view of a larger cultural sampling, the European experience. As he continues his survey of European cultural unity, he is indeed able to bring his own experience to bear by recounting in general but nevertheless detailed terms the 17 years, from to , that he edited a literary review, the Criterion.
Now the decline of Christianity has left the world without a guidebook to living and living well. One has only to look about at the rank hedonism pervasive throughout society to know this. Pagan morality, lacking significantly creative direction by some kind of inherent law of nature, ultimately fails. And so the search begins again, as it began in the waning days of the Roman Empire, for some kind of viable alternative or moral imperative.
That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory. For Eliot, the key to reviving a Christian civilization lies in the educational system that conveys a unifying body of knowledge and wisdom throughout the culture.
Lacking such unity, there can be no consensus developed as to the merits of good literature versus literary trash. Each, the good and the bad, can vie for dominance; in a democracy one can guess which will win; the one that can sell the most books, usually to the less educated, or to those whom the political parties have a tie of allegiance.
The oppressive crush of politics, wrongly used, can destroy the attempt to create a good educational system; and all the more so if the political powers that be are bent on using education to feather their own nests by training future adults how they should vote; and are bent on using the classroom as propaganda mills rather than laboratories for free and creative thought and imagination. Eliot was concerned that Christianity had a vital connection with the natural world, a connection that could not be thwarted by pagan complaints that celibacy is unnatural, when in fact the more unnatural thing is to insist that families should be limited to one or two children.
Indeed, the more natural thing might be that more people should be celibate and more families should have larger families. In any case, Eliot regarded the rapid consumption of natural resources as the most unnatural thing of all, for this radical consumption at the present rate would mean future generations would have to pay dearly for our destruction of natural resources. Thus the ethic of thrift preached by Christianity is superior to the wasteful pleasures demanded by the pagans.
It is this recognition that will bring us back to Christ. In his Notes Toward the Definition of Culture Eliot begins by exploring the evolution of simple cultures into complex ones. At first all the functions of an early tribe, appearing in all their simplicity, are interwoven and almost indistinguishable. But as the tribe grows into a civilization the various functions — religion, crafts, science, politics, etc.
The evolution of a culture is by stages, which means that certain functions may dominate one era but be replaced by the dominance of other functions in the next era. Thus we see the primitive language of drums and horns appear at an earlier stage, and symphonic music at a later stage. Simple religion dominates in the early stage, and is significantly challenged by complex theologies in a later era.
Noticing this change through history encourages the idea of progress, that the later stage is an improvement over the earlier one. However, progress can turn to regress given the right conditions. The present is not necessarily better than the past, and the future is not necessarily better than the present. A monarchy can turn into a democracy, but a democracy can turn into a mobocracy, and a mobocracy into a dictatorship, as the history of France showed from the Revolution through to the ascendancy of Napoleon.
Therefore it seems that all so-called progress is subject to perilous adventures. Whereas in the early phase of a civilization the different functions of a society that support each other may for a time do so, in the later phase they may cease to do so for one reason or another. But there is no doubt that, since Darwin at least, a certain generalized tension has come to exist in western society between religion and science. That tension is accompanied by yet another tension, the one between religion and the arts.
In a post-Christian society, one can successfully predict the arts coming into the service of anti-religious forces. The artistic sensibility is impoverished by its divorce from the religious sensibility, the religious by its separation from the artistic.
The spiritual malaise of western cultures cannot help but to produce by-products evident to anyone who is willing to see them. The post-Christian era has produced an emptiness of soul that is over-compensated for by the national rush toward physical obesity. Statistics prove that obesity exists among 35 percent of Americans, and the numbers are predicted to get substantially higher in decades to come.
The question concerns not just how much people are eating, but what kind of foods they crave. Eliot goes on to insist that religion is not just one element of a culture, but that it is an essential element. Notice that the decline of the Roman Empire was contemporary with the decline of the pagan religions.
Notice too that the re-invigoration of the West only came very slowly with the arrival of Constantine and Charlemagne, both champions for Christianity as the official religion of Europe.
One feature of that religion is that, through the Catholic Church, it unified Europe in a way that no other religion had. Whereas two or more moral codes could exist in other cultures such as one for the rich and one for the poor in Hinduism Christianity had taught that rich and poor were equally accountable to the same God.
Christianity also taught that not only infallible dogmas could be preached, but that they could be defended against a robust skepticism. Britain is in fact more a neutral than a Christian society, according to Eliot.
But Eliot, though himself a convert to Anglican Christianity, does not seek to respond by engaging in a project of conversion. He seeks to increase our awareness of the kind of society in which we live, and the kind of life we ourselves are living. Eliot clearly is engaged in an intellectual pursuit, explaining and defining key terms in our public discourse.
But this puts him no less, and perhaps more, at odds with contemporary standards of intellectual life than if he were merely seeking converts.
This is not to say that ours has become a pagan society. In saying that ours is a neutral society, Eliot also is pointing out that it remains Christian, though only in vestigial form.
As Eliot puts it,. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination.
By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
CC, Liberalism is fundamentally negative in its teleology. Its inherent purpose is to liberate individuals from constraints of tradition, social structure, and cultural context. It can have good effects some structures are, indeed, oppressive but if not checked it will corrode the social framework, producing anarchy and brutal responses to that anarchy.
Here, obviously, Eliot is referring to the rise of totalitarianism, perhaps most obviously in response to the anarchy of post—World War I German society. He also points to the discomfiting fact that Western democracies share significant affinities with totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes simply have advanced more fully and ironically, more efficiently on the road to paganism, a destination toward which our society continues to move. Few people of sense and goodwill would choose either the totalitarianism or the cultural death naturally succeeding to a neutral society that is not brought back to its religious roots.
But the liberal secular viewpoint has become increasingly untenable due to the difficulty of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society. The problem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is now very present to us, and it is a very different problem from that of the accommodation between an Established Church and dissenters.
It is not merely the problem of a minority in a society of individuals holding an alien belief. It is the problem constituted by our implication in a network of institutions from which we cannot dissociate ourselves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer neutral, but non-Christian.
And as for the Christian who is not conscious of his dilemma—and he is in the majority—he is becoming more and more de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space. CC, 17—18; emphasis in original. Nor is it one with any specific set of political or economic structures. It is a society that promotes a particular way of life—a Christian way of life.
Rather, he begins with the understanding that we mean something when we call a society Christian, something more than that it is simply tolerant of Christian religious beliefs. What we are seeking is not a programme for a party, but a way of life for a people. Instead we must choose what kind of life we shall live; what habits and preconceptions we will evince in our daily conduct.
Culture, religion, political philosophy, and art all are facets of the way of life. They help define, support, and limit one another in ways that can enrich or impoverish our modes of conduct. But we can not do without any of them. Such convictions are at root religious, according to Eliot, even as they suffuse political philosophy and artistic pursuits.
And, because they inhabit all aspects of our lives, from the most exalted to the most mundane, their loss leaves us in dire straits. Without Christianity we might, of course, merely sink into an apathetic decline: without faith, and therefore without faith in ourselves; without a philosophy of life, either Christian or pagan; and without art.
Our ideal cultural aim is to enjoy the fruits of material success without going to the trouble of working for them. And the descent of leisure into the mere satisfaction of appetites has brought with it no fewer social constraints than the older, more productive form of materialism. One who seeks to uphold or even argue for more elevated standards soon finds that one can indeed be punished for going against the prejudice of the day. To those who can imagine, and are therefore repelled by, such a prospect, one can assert that the only possibility of control and balance is a religious control and balance; that the only hopeful course for a society which would thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilization, is to become Christian.
That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.
CC, 18—9. What, then, is a Christian society? To begin with it is culturally Christian. That is, it is by nature aimed toward a Christian life in all its aspects. This does not mean that it necessarily entails a confessional state.
But it means that the assumptions and framework of beliefs and practices making up public, social, and even private life are suffused with Christian symbols. A Christian society must have a particular kind of state, one providing a Christian framework or rationale for political conduct.
And it must have a Community of Christians, understood as a small number of highly conscious, intellectually engaged Christian persons comprising what today might be called the religious and educational elites.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his deep engagement in the life of the mind, Eliot sees all these elements of a Christian society as engaged less in conscious, self-directed, and self-willed Christian thought and more in the following of traditions and habits suffused with Christianity. For example, the Christian state is neither limited in its membership to professing Christians, nor directed by any one church or group of churches.
But neither is a Christian state the realm of Great Men reshaping society in accordance with their own reading of the will of God or themselves. Such cabining would not be the result of propaganda or of a formal institution of censors, but rather of education. Most politicians, like most people in any walk of life, do not hold to a specific, self-chosen, and well-articulated philosophy; they are the products of their education.
So it is important that that education form them properly to conform to the needs of society. The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system that aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist.
A Christian education would primarily train people to be able to think in Christian categories, though it could not compel belief and would not impose the necessity for insincere profession of belief CC, Not theological indoctrination but intellectual formation would be the goal. Educational institutions would not parrot religious dogma. They would seek to instill an understanding of Christian categories such as teleology, human dignity, and the common good. In a society thus formed,.
And a skeptical or indifferent statesman, working within a Christian frame, might be more effective than a devout Christian statesman obliged to conform to a secular frame. For he would be required to design his policy for the government of a Christian Society.
CC, 22— That to which the statesman must conform is not merely a Christian dogma or ideology but a way of life consistent with Christian principles and goals.
It is, again, more a matter of habits and assumptions than of well-articulated prescriptions. A Christian society must provide such people with the means by which to achieve integrated social and religious lives, some means of attaining a real though imperfect Christian way of life in daily activities without such undue sacrifice as to forestall the very attempt.
The desire and need to make money in a society almost wholly devoted to that pursuit or today, to the pursuit of pleasures formerly, and to a significant degree still, reliant on the possession or claim upon significant amounts of money make personal conduct that is virtuous in the Christian sense difficult.
One obvious response would be to return to a more idyllic, pastoral society in which small, face-to-face communities could be re-established on the basis of Christian norms. This Eliot rejects as impossible, as he rejects the invitation to specify concrete reforms to current social structures that might make them less hostile toward Christian conduct.
Rather, Eliot seeks to reaffirm his teleological point:. However bigoted the announcement may sound, the Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society—which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.
It would be a society in which the natural end of man—virtue and well-being in community— is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end—beatitude— for those who have the eyes to see it. One can see here the manner of thought Eliot brings to bear on the problem of cultural decay.
It is a manner, or method, deeply rooted in the natural law tradition, stretching from Aristotle through Aquinas and continuing among a remnant to this day, but rejected by modern thinkers, with their emphasis on distinguishing fact from value, ends from means, and desires from claims of proper ends. One also can see why Eliot believes that his particular skill as an analyst of the meaning of words is called for under current circumstances.
Most contemporary thinkers are incapable even of understanding the nature of the dilemma our society faces. And they will remain incapable of understanding that dilemma so long as they refuse to consider the possibility that in important ways we live our lives in common with our fellows; that there is such a thing as a real society; that we are joined in a set of social groups that has its own purpose, transcending even as it includes the purposes of each of us, and each of the lesser groups within it.
So long as we continue to think in liberal categories, of rights and wants and relations among atomistic individuals, we will be incapable of recognizing the need for reforms to our inhumane social, political, and economic structures. We will be incapable of seeing any proper end for society, and so remain in cultural chaos until or unless a comprehensive, religious vision of some perhaps pagan and quite brutal kind is imposed upon us.
The rethinking for which Eliot calls would seem the provenance of intellectuals—ironically, of course, those least likely to be willing to engage in such a project. Yet that irony does not escape Eliot, who after all is fully cognizant of the need to reform the habits and frameworks within which intellectuals operate as well as those affecting other members of society.
But this powerful role will not fall to them singly, or even as a group of individuals, acting on those around and presumably beneath them. Rather, the community of Christians will affect society through its role in forming, protecting, and enriching the framework of education. This community will not be rooted solely in either educational or religious institutions. It will be cognizant of the limits of merely rational constructs.
And, if it is to accomplish its inherent purpose, it must form and re-form itself constantly through engagement with other communities and with the wider culture so that a common mind of the nation can be maintained, a common understanding of the purpose of society as well as the groups and individuals within it.
What Eliot seeks more than anything else is coherence. It is a particular contemporary conceit that such coherence is impossible in any free society. Yet it is the modern philosopher who writes the blueprints for the good society explicitly rejected by Eliot. Rather than some supposed vision of perfection to be imposed on the people, Eliot seeks in this essay to urge his readers toward recognition of the need for a fundamental re-thinking of our cultural assumptions; or at any rate an attempt to formulate such assumptions.
Unless we can find a pattern into which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos. Prose will die, and so will our culture and our souls. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality.
The second major essay in Christianity and Culture seeks to define culture or, more modestly, to move us toward a greater understanding of what culture is.
Such convincing will not be easy on a wide scale because, properly understood, culture is deeply and irrevocably intertwined with religion. Eliot points out that culture can be understood in three aspects— individual, group, and society.
People today tend to think that one can be cultured, cultivating higher tastes and artistic or intellectual pursuits, as an individual. One must simply pick and choose so as to create the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and sensual life one wishes to have.
The elimination of any framework of cultural understanding is, on the liberal view, a positive good. It means the elimination of various potentially confining filters that might get in the way of the production or consumption of various individually chosen baskets of cultural goods. Unfortunately, the result of this orientation is a culture in decline, perhaps unto death. Thus to disassociate the individual from the societal culture is to disintegrate or corrode the culture in all its aspects.
Moreover, such false liberation makes people lose sight of the very fact that culture like society has an inherent purpose or teleology, and so prevents them from even considering the proper ends of their own cultural endeavors. Disintegration is an inherent and ever-present danger that grows as cultures become more complex and variegated.
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