blame) and not individual insincerity, which is responsible for the
hollowness of many political and ecclesiastical utterances. You
have only to examine the mass of newspaper leading articles, the
mass of political exhortation, to appreciate the fact that good prose
cannot be written by a people without convictions. The fundamental objection to fascist doctrine, the one which we conceal from ourselves because it might condemn ourselves as well, is that
it is pagan. There are other objections too, in the political and
economic sphere, but they are not objections that we can make
with dignity until we set our own affairs in order. There are still
other objections, to oppression and violence and cruelty, but however strongly we feel, these are objections to means and not to ends. It is true that we sometimes use the word 'pagan', and in
the same context refer to ourselves as 'Christian'. But we always
dodge the real issue. Our newspapers have done all they could
with the red herring of the 'German national religion', an eccentricity which is after all no odder than some cults held in Anglo
Saxon countries : this 'German national religion' is comforting in
that it persuades us that we have a Christian civilization ; it helps
to disguise the fact that our aims, like Germany's, are materialistic.
And the last thing we should like to do would be to examine the
'Christianity' which, in such contexts as this, we say we keep.
If we have got so far as accepting the belief that the only
alternative to a progressive and insidious adaptation to totalitarian
worldliness for which the pace is already set, is to aim at a
Christian society, we need to consider both what kind of a society
we have at this time, and what a Christian society would be like.
We should also be quite sure of what we want : if your real ideals
are those of materialistic efficiency, then the sooner you know
your own mind, and face the consequences, the better. Those
who, either complacently or despairingly, suppose that the aim of
Christianization is chimerical, I am �ot here attempting to
convert. To those who realize what a well organized pagan society
would mean for us, there is nothing to say. But it is as well to
remember that the imposition of a pagan theory of the State does
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not necessarily mean a wholly pagan society. A compromise
between the theory of the State and the tradition of society exists
in Italy, a country which is still mainly agricultural and Catholic.
The more highly industrialized the country, the more easily a
materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly
that philosophy will be. Britain has been highly industrialized
longer than any other country. And the tendency of unlimited
industrialism is to create bodies of men and women - of all classes
- detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible
to mass suggestion : in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no
less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well
disciplined.
The Liberal notion that religion was a matter of private belief
and of conduct in private life, and that there is no reason why
Christians should not be able to accommodate themselves to any
world which treats them good-naturedly, is becoming less and
less tenable. This notion would seem to have become accepted
gradually, as a false inference from the subdivision of English
Christianity into sects, and the happy results of universal toleration. The reason why members of different communions have been able to rub along together, is that in the greater part of the
ordinary business of life they have shared the same assumptions
about behaviour. When they have been wrong, they have been
wrong together. We have less excuse than our ancestors for un
Christian conduct, because the growth of an un-Christian society
about us, its more obvious intrusion upon our lives, has been
breaking down the comfortable distinction between public and
private morality. 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. Anything
like Christian traditions transmitted from generation to generation Vithin the family must disappear, and the small body of Christians will consist entirely of adult recruits. I am saying
nothing at this point that has not been said before by others, but
it is relevant. I am not concerned with the problem of Christians
as a persecuted minority. When the Christian is treated as an
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enemy of the State, his course is very much harder, but it is
simpler. I am concerned with the dangers to the tolerated minority ; and in the modern world, it may turn out that the most intolerable thing for Christians is to be tolerated.
To attempt to make the prospect of a Christian society immediately attractive to those who see no prospect of deriving direct personal benefit from it, would be idle ; even the majority
of professing Christians may shrink from it. No scheme for a
change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable,
except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it
will accept any change. A Christian society only becomes acceptable after you have fairly examined the alternatives. 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. Or we might get
a 'totalitarian democracy', different but having much in common
with other pagan societies, because we shall have changed step by
step in order to keep pace with them : a state of affairs in which we
shall have regimentation and conformity, without respect for the
needs of the individual soul ; the puritanism of a hygienic morality
in the interest of efficiency ; uniformity of opinion through
propaganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official
doctrines of the time. 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.
[ii
. . . It may be that the conditions unfavourable to the arts today
lie too de
ep and are too extensive to depend upon the differences
between one form of government and another ; so that the prospect before us is either of slow continuous decay or of sudden extinction. You cannot, in any scheme for the reformation of
society, aim directly at a condition in which the arts will flourish :
these activities are probably by-products for which we cannot
deliberately arrange the conditions. On the other hand, their
decay may always be taken as a symptom of some social ailment to
be investigated. The future of art and thought in a democratic
society does not appear any brighter than any other, unless
democracy is to mean something very different from anything
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THE I DE A O F A C H R I S T I A N SOCI ETY
actual. It is not that I would defend a moral censorship : I have
always expressed strong objections to the suppression of books
possessing, or even laying claim to literary merit. But what is more
insidious than any censorship, is the steady influence which
operates silently in any mass society organized for profit, for the
depression of standards of art and culture. The increasing
organization of advertisement and propaganda - or the influencing
of masses of men by any means except through their intelligence is all against them. The economic system is against them ; the chaos of ideals and confusion of thought in our large scale mass
education is against them ; and against them also is the disappearance of any class of people who recognize public and private responsibility of patronage of the best that is made and written.
At a period in which each nation has less and less 'culture' for its
own consumption, all are making furious efforts to export their
culture, to impress upon each other their achievements in arts
which they are ceasing to cultivate or understand. And just as
those who should be the intellectuals regard theology as a special
study, like numismatics or heraldry, with which they need not
concern themselves, and theologians observe the same indifference to literature and art, as special studies which do not concern them, so our political classes regard both fields as
territories of which they have no reason to be ashamed of remaining in complete ignorance. Accordingly the more serious authors have a limited, and even provincial audience, and the more
popular write for an illiterate and uncritical mob.
You cannot expect continuity and coherence in politics, you
cannot expect reliable behaviour on fixed principles persisting
through changed situations, unless there is an underlying political
philosophy : not of a party, but of the nation. You cannot expect
continuity and coherence in literature and the arts, unless you
have a certain uniformity of culture, expressed in education by a
settled, though not rigid agreement as to what everyone should
know to some degree, and a positive distinction - however undemocratic it may sound - between the educated and the uneducated. I observed in America, that with a very high level of intelligence among undergraduates, progress was impeded by the
fact that one could never assume that any two, unless they had
been at the same school under the influence of the same masters
at the same moment, had studied the same subjects or read the
same books, though the number of subjects in which they had
been instructed was surprising. Even with a smaller amount of
total information, it might have been better if they had read fewer,
but the same books. In a negative liberal society you have no
agreement as to there being any body of knowledge which any
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S O C I AL A N D R EL I G I OUS C R I T I C I SM
.
educated persons should have acquired at any particular stage :
the idea of wisdom disappears, a,nd you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation. A nation's system of education is much more important than its system of government ; only a proper
system of education can unify the active and the contemplative
life, action and speculation, politics and the arts. But 'education',
said Coleridge, 'is to be reformed, and defined as synonymous
with instruction'. This revolution has been effected : to the
populace education means instruction. The next step to be taken
by the clericalism of secularism, is the inculcation of the political
principles approved by the party in power . . . .
[iii
We may say that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to
each other which neither has with the mechanistic life : but so far
has our notion of what is natural become distorted, that people
who consider it 'unnatural' and therefore repugnant, that a person
of either sex should elect a life of celibacy, consider it perfectly
'natural' that families should be limited to one or two children. It
would perhaps be more natural, as well as in better conformity
with the Will of God, if there were more celibates and if those
who were married had larger families. But I am thinking of 'conformity to nature' in a wider sense than this. We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private
profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our
material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations
may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now ·
very much before the public eye, the results of'soil-erosion' - the
exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for
commercial profit : immediate benefits leading to dearth and
desert. I would not have it thought that I condemn a society
because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material
success a sufficient test of its excellence ; I mean only that a wrong
attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude
towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom.
For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values
arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life :
i t would b e a s well for u s t o face the permanent conditions upon
which God allows us to live upon this planet. And without
sentimentalizing the life of the savage, we might practise the
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THE I DEA O F A C H R I S T I A N S O C I ETY
humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look
down as primitive or backward, the operation of a social-religiousartistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane.
We have been accustomed to regard 'progress' as always integral ;
and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a discipline,
greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing upon itself,
that material knowledge and power is gained without loss of
spiritual knowledge and power. The struggle to recover the sense
of relation to nature and to God, the recognition that even the
most primitive feelings should be part of our heritage, seems to
me to be the explanation and justification of the life of D. H.
Lawrence, and the excuse for his aberrations. But we need not
only to le
arn how to look at the world with the eyes of a Mexican
Indian - and I hardly think that Lawrence succeeded - and we
certainly cannot afford to stop there. We need to know how to see
the world as the Christian Fathers saw it; and the purpose of
reascending to origins is that we should be able to return, with
greater spiritual knowledge, to our own situation. We need to
recover the sense of religious fear, so that it may be overcome by
religious hope.
from NOTES TOWARDS THE
D E F I N I T I ON OF CULTURE
[i
. . . It is obvious that among the more primitive communities the
several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven. The
Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping, carving
and painting his barque of the peculiar design required for the
annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising several cultural
activities at once - of art and religion, as well as of amphibious
warfare. As civilization becomes more complex, greater occupational specialization evinces itself: in the 'stone age' New Hebrides, Mr. John Layard says, certain islands specialize in particular arts and crafts, exchanging their wares and displaying their accomplishments to the reciprocal satisfaction of the
members of the archipelago. But while the individuals of a tribe,
or of a group of islands or villages, may have separate functions of which the most peculiar are those of the king and the witchdoctor - it is only at a much further stage that religion, science, politics and art become abstractly conceived apart from each
other. And just as the functions of individuals become hereditary,
and hereditary function hardens into class or caste distinction,
and class distinction leads to conflict, so do religion, politics,
science and art reach a point at which there is conscious struggle
between them for autonomy or dominance. This friction is, at
some stages and in some situations, highly creative : how far it is
the result, and how far the cause, of increased consciousness need
not here be considered. The tension within the society may
become also a tension within the mind of the more conscious
individual : the clash of duties in Antigone, which is not simply a
clash between piety and civil obedience, or between religion and
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 42