Book description
Christianity and Culture- The Idea of a Christian Society AND Notes
towards the Definition of Culture By T. S. Eliot. Originally published
in 1940. Contents include: The Idea of a Christian Society I Preface 3
Notes 52 Postscript 69 Appendix 71 Notes towards the Definition of
Culture 79 Preface 83 Introduction 85 i. The Three Senses of Culture 93
n. The Class and the Elite 107 in. Unity and Diversity: The Region 123
iv. Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult 141 v, A Note on Culture and
Politics 158 vi. Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion 171
APPENDIX: The Unity of European Culture. Christianity and Culture has
appeared too recently for me to have made use of it. And I am deeply
indebted to the works of Jacques Maritain, es pecially his Humanisme
integral. 1 trust that the reader will understand from the beginning
that this book does not make any plea for a religious revival in a sense
with which we are already familiar. That is a task for which I am
incompetent, and the term seems to me to imply a possible separation of
religious feeling from religious thinking which I do not accept or which
I do not find ac ceptable for our present difficulties. An anonymous
writer has recently observed in The New English Weekly ( July 13, 1939)
that men have lived by spiritual institutions ( of some kind) in every
society, and also by political institutions and, indubitably, by eco
nomic activities. Admittedly, they have, at different periods, tended to
put their trust mainly in one of the three as the real cement of
society, but at no time have they wholly excluded the others, because it
is impossible to do so. This is an important, and in its context
valuable, distinc tion; but it should be clear that what I am concerned
with here is not spiritual institutions in their separated aspect, but
the organisation of values, and a direction of religious thought which
must inevitably proceed to a criticism of political and economic
systems. CHAPTER I: THE fact that a problem will certainly take a long
time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for
several generations, is no justification for postponing the study. And,
in times of emergency, it may prove in the long run that the problems we
have postponed or ignored, rather than those we have failed to attack
success fully, will return to plague us. Our difficulties of the moment
must always be dealt with somehow: but our permanent dif ficulties are
difficulties of every moment. The subject with which I am concerned in
the following pages is one to which I am convinced we ought to turn our
attention now, if we hope ever to be relieved of the immediate
perplexities that fill our minds. It is urgent because it is
fundamental; and its urgency is the reason for a person like myself
attempting to address, on a subject beyond his usual scope, that public
which is likely to read what he writes on other subjects. This is a
subject which I could, no doubt, handle much better were I a profound
scholar in any of several fields. But I am not writ ing for scholars,
but for people like myself; some defects may be compensated by some
advantages; and what one must be judged by, scholar or no, is not
particularised knowledge but one's total harvest of thinking, feeling,
living and observ ing human beings. While the practice of poetry need
not in itself confer wis dom or accumulate knowledge, it ought at least
to train the mind in one habit of universal value: that of analysing the
meanings of words: of those that one employs oneself, as well as the
words of others.
