Contours of Culture
Twilight Sage
by Ken Myers
There are some books that are remarkably insightful in describing and evaluating the forces that made contemporary culture what it is today. There are other books that force us as readers to ask whether we—as well as the books in that first group—are even asking all of the right questions. T. S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture falls into the second category.
Christianity and Culture is actually two short books in one volume. The Idea of a Christian Society is a collection of lectures given by Eliot at Cambridge in March 1939 and assembled in book form before Britain’s entry into the war with Germany. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is an essay begun by Eliot in the mid-1940s and completed in 1948.
The dates are significant. On either side of the Second World War, Eliot inhabited a country in which the phrase “Christian society” was not the embarrassment it would become in just a generation. In 1939 or 1949, one could make assumptions that could not be made in 1959 or after. As Callum Brown writes in The Death of Christian Britain, “From 1956 all indices of religiosity in Britain start to decline, and from 1963 most enter free fall.”
Eliot’s reflections were formulated on the far side of that decline, and some readers will no doubt regard them as irrelevant relics of an irretrievable past. But if Christians are to think well about questions of church and culture, they will have to ask whether the reigning paradigms of our cultural moment can possibly do justice to either the proper concerns of church or of culture.
The Preface to The Idea of a Christian Society begins with a statement of the inadequacy of reigning paradigms. Eliot voices a “suspicion that the current terms in which we discuss international affairs and political theory may only tend to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilisation.” He soon makes it clear that one of those real issues is whether one can sustain a society that is neutral with regard to all questions of religion. Eliot clearly doubts it: “The choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.” A Christian society is not one “consisting exclusively of devout Christians,” but “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.”
Negative Culture
Eliot believed that modern Liberalism—the intellectual foundation of Western democracies, giving rise to the ultimately untenable “neutral society”—was defined more by what it was against than by what it was for. It was a “negative” culture. “It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite.” This teleological vacuum meant that “Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation,” a threat that Europe is only now facing due to the challenge presented by radical Islam to the dictates of absolute tolerance.
Eliot believed that the negative tendency of Liberalism was bad for politics, for the arts, for religious life, and for education. “In a negative liberal society you have no agreement as to there being any body of knowledge which any educated person should have acquired at any particular stage: the idea of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation.” By contrast, a positive culture is characterized by “a positive set of values, and the dissentients must remain marginal.”
Eliot was clearly a “crunchy conservative.” He insisted that “the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to one another which neither has with the mechanistic life.” He also maintained that “a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God.”
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Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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