politics, but between conflicting laws within what is still a
religious-political complex, represents a very advanced stage of
civilization : for the conflict must have meaning in the audience's
experience before it can be made articulate by the dramatist and
receiye from the audience the response which the dramatist's art
reqmres.
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As a society develops towards functional complexity and
differentiation, we may expect the emergence of several cultural
levels : in short, the culture of the class or group will present itself.
It will not, I think, be disputed that in any future society, as in
every civilized society of the past, there must be these different
levels. I do not think that the most ardent champions of social
equality dispute this : the difference of opinion turns on whether
the transmission of group culture must be by inheritance -
whether each cultural level must propagate itself - or whether it
can be hoped that some mechanism of selection will be found, so
that every individual shall in due course take his place at the
highest cultural level for which his natural aptitudes qualify him.
What is pertinent at this point is that the emergence of more
highly cultured groups does not leave the rest of society unaffected : it is itself part of a process in which the whole society changes. And it is certain - and especially obvious when we turn
our attention to the arts - that as new values appear, and as thought,
sensibility and expression become more elaborate, some earlier
values vanish. That is only to say that you cannot expect to have
all stages of development at once ; that a civilization cannot
simultaneously produce great folk poetry at one cultural level and
Paradise Lost at another. Indeed, the one thing that time is ever
sure to bring about is the loss : gain or compensation is almost
always conceivable but never certain.
While it appears that progress in civilization will bring into
being more specialized culture groups, we must not expect this
development to be unattended by perils. Cultural disintegration
may ensue upon cultural specialization : and it is the most radical
disintegration that a society can suffer. It is not the only kind, or
it is not the only aspect under which disintegration can be studied ;
but, whatever be cause or effect, the disintegration of culture is
the most serious and the most difficult to repair. (Here, of course,
we are emphasizing the culture of the whole society.) It must not
be confused with another malady, ossification into caste, as in
Hindu India, of what may have been originally only a hierarchy
of functions : even though it is possible that both maladies have
some hold upon British society today. Cultural disintegration is
present when two or more strata so separate that these become in
effect distinct cultures ; and also when culture at the upper group
level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural
activity alone. If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the
classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed,
has already taken place in western society - as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend to become 293
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.
isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with
each other. The artistic sensibility is impoverished by its divorce
from the religious sensibility, the religious by its separation from
the artistic ; and the vestige of manners may be left to a few
survivors of a vanishing class who, their sensibility untrained by
either religion or art and their minds unfurnished with the
material for witty conversation, will have no context in their lives
to give value to their behaviour. And deterioration on the higher
levels is a matter of concern, not only to the group which is
visibly affected, but to the whole people.
The causes of a total decline of culture are as complex as the
evidence of it is various. Some may be found in the accounts
given, by various specialists, of the causes of more readily
apprehended social ailments for which we must continue to seek
specific remedies. Yet we become more and more aware of the
extent to which the baffling problem of 'culture' underlies the
problems of the relation of every part of the world to every other.
When we concern ourselves with the relation of the great nations
to each other ; the relation of the great to the small nations; 1 the
relation of intermixed 'communities', as in India, to each other ;
the relation of parent nations to those which have originated as
colonies ; the relation of the colonist to the native ; the relation
between peoples of such areas as the West Indies, where cornpulsion or economic inducement has brought together large numbers of different races : behind all these perplexing questions,
involving decisions to be made by many men every day, there is
the question of what culture is, and the question whether it is
anything that we can control or deliberately influence. These
questions confront us whenever we devise a theory, or frame a
policy, of education. If we take culture seriously, we see that a
people does not need merely enough to eat (though even that is
more than we seem able to ensure) but a proper and particular
cuisine : one symptom of the decline of culture in Britain is indifference to the art of preparing food. Culture may even be 1 This point is touched upon, though without any discussion of the
meaning of 'culture', by E. H. Carr : Conditions of Peace, Part I, ch. iii.
He says : 'in a clumsy but convenient terminology which originated in
Central Europe, we must distinguish between "cultural nation" and
"state nation". The existence of a more or less homogeneous racial or
linguistic group bound together by a common tradition and the cultivation of a common culture must cease to provide a prima facie case for the setting up or the maintenance of an independent political unit.'
But Mr. Carr is here concerned with the problem of political unity,
rather than with that of the preservation of cultures, or the question
whether they are worth preserving, in the political unit.
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described simply as that which makes life worth living. And it is
what justifies other peoples and other generations in saying, when
they contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct
civilization, that it was worth while for that civilization to have
existed.
I have already asserted, in my introduction, that no culture can
appear or develop except in relation to a religion. But the use of
the term relation here may easily lead us into error. The facile
assumption of a relationship between culture and religion is
perhaps the most fundamental weakness of Arnold's Culture and
Anarchy. Arnold gives the impression that Culture (as he uses the
term) is something more comprehensive than religi
on ; that the
latter is no more than a necessary element, supplying ethical
formation and some emotional colour, to Culture which is the
ultimate value.
It may have struck the reader that what I have said about the
development of culture, and about the dangers of disintegration
when a culture has reached a highly developed stage, may apply
also in the history of religion. The development of culture and
the development of religion, in a society uninfluenced from
without, cannot be clearly isolated from each other : and it will
depend upon the bias of the particular observer, whether a
refinement of culture is held to be the cause of progress in religion, or whether a progress in religion is held to be the cause of a refinement of the culture. What perhaps influences us towards
treating religion and culture as two different things is the history
of the penetration of Graeco-Roman culture by the Christian
Faith - a penetration which had profound effects both upon that
culture and upon the course of development taken by Christian
thought and practice. But the culture with which primitive
Christianity came into contact (as well as that of the environment
in which Christianity took its origins) was itsel f a religious culture
in decline. So, while we believe that the same religion may inform
a variety of cultures, we may ask whether any culture could come
into being, or maintain itself, without a religious basis. We may
go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we
call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same
thing : the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak)
of the religion of a people. To put the matter in this way may
throw light on my reservations concerning the word relation.
As a society develops, a greater number of degrees and kinds of
religious capacity and function - as well as of other capacities and
functions - will make their appearance: It is to be noticed that in
some religions the differentiation has been so wide that there have
resulted in effect two religions - one for the populace and one for
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the adepts. The evils of 'two nations' in religion are obvious.
Christianity has resisted this malady better than Hinduism. The
schisms of the sixteenth century, and the subsequent multiplication of sects, can be studied either as the history of division of religious thought, or as a struggle between opposing social
groups - as the variation of doctrine, or as the disintegration of
European culture. Yet, while these wide divergences of belief on
the same level are lamentable, the Faith can, and must, find room
for many degrees of intellectual, imaginative and emotional
receptivity to the same doctrines, just as it can embrace many
variations of order and ritual. The Christian Faith also, psychologically considered - as systems of beliefs and attitudes in particular embodied minds - will have a history : though it would
be a gross error to suppose that the sense in which it can be
spoken of as developing and changing, implies the possibility of
greater sanctity or divine illumination becoming available to
human beings through collective progress. (We do not assume
that there is, over a long period, progress even in art, or that
'primitive' art is, as art, necessarily inferior to the more sophisticated.) But one of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance
of scepticism by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or
-
destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental
sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for
delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilized trait, though,
when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilization
can die. Where scepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness :
for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the
strength to make one.
The conception of culture and religion as being, when each
term is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same
thing, is one which requires a good deal of explanation. But I
should like to suggest first, that it provides us with the means of
combating two complementary errors. The one more widely held.
is that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the
absence of religion. This error may be held by the Christian in
common with the infidel, and its proper refutation would require
an historical analysis of considerable refinement, because the
truth is not immediately apparent, and may seem even to be
contradicted by appearances : a culture may linger on, and indeed
produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes
after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other error is
the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need
not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture : a
belief which may even lead to the rejection of the products of
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culture as frivolous obstructions to the spiritual life. To be in a
position to reject this error, as with the other, requires us to take
a distant view ; to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture
that we see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to
which we can afford to remain indifferent. And I must add that to
see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither implies
that all the products of art can be accepted uncritically, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can immediately distinguish between them. Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into
spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended
into aesthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to
judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in
the end to the same thing : though it is an end at which no
individual can arrive.
The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been
trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it
myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications.
It is also one which involves the risk of error at every moment, by
some unperceived alteration of the meaning which either term has
when the two are coupled in this way, into some meaning which
either may have when taken alone. It holds good only in the sense
in which people are unconscious of both their culture and their
religion. Anyone with even the slightest religious consciousness
must be afflicted from time to time by the contrast between his
religious faith and his behaviour ; anyone with the taste that
individual or group culture confers must be aware of values which
he cannot call religious. And both 'religion' and 'culture', besides
meaning different things from each other, should mean for the
individual and for the group something towards which they strive,
not merely
something which they possess. Yet there is an aspect
in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people,
from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep,
and that way of life is also its culture. And at the same time we
must recognize that when this identification is complete, it means
in actual societies both an inferior culture and an inferior religion.
A universal religion is at least potentially higher than one which
any race or nation claims exclusively for itself; and a culture
realizing a religion also realized in other cultures is at least
potentially a higher culture than one which has a religion exclusively to itself. From one point of view we may identify : from another, we must separate.
Taking now the point of view of identification, the reader must
remind himself as the author has constantly to do, of how much is
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.
here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic
activities and interests of a people : Derby Day, Henley Regatta,
Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin
table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into
sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches
and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list. And
then we h.ave to face the strange idea that what is part of our
culture is also a part of our lived religion.
We must not think of our culture as completely unified - my
list above was designed to avoid that suggestion. And the actual
religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or
purely anything else. There are always bits and traces of more
primitive faiths, more or less absorbed ; there is always the tendency towards parasitic beliefs ; there are always perversions, as when patriotism, which pertains to natural religion and is therefore licit and even encouraged by the Church, becomes exaggerated into a caricature of itself. And it is only too easy for a people to maintain contradictory beliefs and to propitiate mutually
antagonistic powers.
The reflection that what we believe is not merely what we
formulate and subscribe to, but that behaviour is also belief, and
that even the most conscious and developed of us live also at the
level on which belief and behaviour cannot be distinguished, is
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 43