Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary
and social critic: but above all a ground-breaking poet, who in 1948 was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in 1888 in St. Louis Missouri, he
moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, later assuming British citizenship
and remaining in England until his death in 1965. While Eliot is best known for his literary
achievements, he was also a Christian convert who held strong views about the
relationship between faith and culture.
The following extract is from Chapter IV of Eliot’s The
Idea of a Christian Society, which
originated as a series of lectures given in 1939 at Cambridge University.
Written on the eve of the Second World War, this work is interesting from the
perspective of the current issue of Humanum because of two crucial insights. First, that only Christianity could
stem the tide of ideological thinking that was devouring both Europe and
Russia, and now plagues the entire world. And secondly, the fact that
Christianity first grew and developed in a culture whose focus was rural rather
than urban. Eliot’s ideas about the role the Anglican Church (to which he
belonged) should play in regenerating Western civilisation may now seem
somewhat naïve, and his ‘medievalism’ has not always been taken seriously even
by those who love his writing. Nonetheless The Idea of a Christian Society remains an important influence on those who
are attempting, in our own day, to rediscover the bond between a respect for
the natural world, and the fundamental needs of the human soul.
[It
should be obvious that the form of political organisation of a Christian State
does not come within the scope of this discussion.] To identify any particular
form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the
permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent. Forms of
government, and of social organisation, are in constant process of change, and
their operation may be very different from the theory which they are supposed
to exemplify. A theory of the State may be, explicitly or implicitly,
anti-Christian: it may arrogate rights which only the Church is entitled to
claim, or pretend to decide moral questions on which only the Church is
qualified to pronounce. On the other hand, a regime may in practice claim
either more or less than it professes, and we have to examine its working as
well as its constitution. We have no assurance that a democratic regime might
not be as inimical to Christianity in practice, as another might be in theory:
and the best government must be relative to the character and the stage of
intelligence and education of a particular people in a particular place at a
particular time. Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a
Christian society should conclude by supporting a particular form of political
organisation, should ask themselves whether they really believe our form of
government to be more important than our Christianity; and those who are
convinced that the present form of government of Britain is the one most
suitable for any Christian people, should ask themselves whether they are
confusing a Christian society with a society in which individual Christianity
is tolerated.
This essay is not
intended to be either an anti-communist or an anti-fascist manifesto; the
reader may by this time have forgotten what I said at the beginning, to the
effect that I was less concerned with the more superficial, though important
differences between the regimens of different nations, than with the more
profound differences between pagan and Christian society. Our preoccupation
with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a surface
complacency rather than a consistent attempt at self-examination of conscience.
Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a
reform here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if
only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing
what is really a different game. What is more depressing still is the thought
that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of
our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as
depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as
evils at all. And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because
it is true, but because it might be
beneficial. Towards the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which
should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of anyone political party or
anyone religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the
uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervour
has been a fervour for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a
disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress
towards the paganism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because it
provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of
Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous
inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of
totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always
found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of
morality—the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not
enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.
I have tried to restrict
my ambition of a Christian society to a social minimum: to picture, not a
society of saints, but of ordinary men, of men whose Christianity is communal
before being individual. It is very easy for speculation on a possible
Christian order in the future to tend to come to rest in a kind of apocalyptic
vision of a golden age of virtue. But we have to remember that the Kingdom of
Christ on earth will never be realised, and also that it is always being
realised; we must remember that whatever reform or revolution we carry out, the
result will always be a sordid travesty of what human society should be—though
the world is never left wholly without glory. In such a society as I imagine,
as in any that is not petrified, there will be innumerable seeds of decay. Any
human scheme for society is realised only when the great mass of humanity has
become adapted to it; but this adaptation becomes also, insensibly, an
adaptation of the scheme itself to the mass on which it operates: the
overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier,
will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution, and
what is realised is so unlike the end that enthusiasm conceived, that foresight
would weaken the effort. A wholly Christian society might be a society for the
most part on a low level; it would engage the cooperation of many whose
Christianity was spectral or superstitious or feigned, and of many whose
motives were primarily worldly and selfish. It would require constant reform.
I should not like it to
be thought, however, that I considered the presence of the higher forms of
devotional life to be a matter of minor importance for such a society. I have,
it is true, insisted upon the communal, rather than the individual aspect: a
community of men and women, not individually better than they are now, except
for the capital difference of holding the Christian faith. But their holding
the Christian faith would give them something else which they lack: a respect
for the religious life, for the life of prayer and contemplation, and for those
who attempt to practise it. In this I am asking no more of the British
Christian, than is characteristic of the ordinary Moslem or Hindu. But the
ordinary man would need the opportunity to know that the religious life
existed, that it was given its due place, would need to recognise the
profession of those who have abandoned the world, as he recognised the
professions practised in it. I cannot conceive a Christian society without
religious orders, even purely contemplative orders, even enclosed orders. And,
incidentally, I should not like the “Community of Christians” of which I have
spoken, to be thought of as merely the nicest, most intelligent and
public-spirited of the upper middle class—it is not to be conceived on that
analogy.
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 organisation 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 mechanised,
commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the
permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. And
without sentimentalising the life of the savage, we might practise the humility
to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or
backward, the operation of a social religious-artistic 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 learn
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.
I should not like to
leave the reader supposing that I have attempted to contribute one more amateur
sketch of an abstract and impracticable future: the blue-print from which the
doctrinaire criticises the piecemeal day to day efforts of political men. These
latter efforts have to go on; but 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. So long, for instance, as we consider finance, industry, trade,
agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as
best they may, so long as we consider “education” as a good in itself of which
everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for
society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to
another. To the quick and simple organisation 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 organisation which will not, to
its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term
“democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive
content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike—it can easily be
transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you
should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
I believe that there
must be many persons who, like myself, were deeply shaken by the events of
September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that
month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. It was not a
disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising.
Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to
disagreement with the policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was
new, and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act
of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened
was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I
repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a
civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas
with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our
society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so
confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent
than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any
beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance
of dividends? Such thoughts as these formed the starting point, and must remain
the excuse, for saying what I have to say.
T. S. Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and ground-breaking poet. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
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