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PARTISAN REVIEW
the present body of segregated intellectuals who now write only
for each other.
Of the specifically and immediately practical Mr. Eliot says
little beyond submitting his Christian Society to judgment accord·
ing to its success in carrying out the reforms projected by Christian
sociologists. The natural end of such a society is man's "virtue and
well-being in community"; this is "acknowledged for all" hut "for
those who have eyes to see it" there is also the supernatural end of
beatitude. Culturally such a society is to he pluralistic-perhaps
in
a limited sense of that word, though we are told that even the
Community of Christians will include minds indifferent or even
hostile to Christianity. There is a certain faith in the good effect
of smaller units of social organization than we now have; produc·
tion for use is spoken of as natural and moral; the abolition of
classes is mentioned as not an impossibility.
This, it is clear, is not a social vision likely to heighten any·
one's ardor, but perhaps this is not wholly a fault when we re–
member that neither is it likely to engender despair by raising
expectations not to be realised. Of its obvious inadequacies, some
may be said to rise from certain deficiencies of Mr. Eliot's tem–
perament where it joins with certain aspects of strict and theologi·
cal Anglicanism, giving us such things as the cold ignorance of
what people are really like, or a confusion of morality with snob–
bery or conformity, or even with a rather fierce Puritanism. More
important than these, however, are the inadequacies which come
from an insufficient view-insufficient even when we consider the
self-imposed limitations of the work-of the relation of social
forms to power and of power to wealth. Without a specific consid·
eration of this problem even a religious politics-and even the most
theoretical treatment of such a politics-must seem evasive.
Yet when we have understood all the inadequacies of
Mr.
Eliot's conception there still remains a theoretical interest which,
in the long run has, I think, its own practical value, and this lies
in
the assumption upon which Mr. Eliot's society is based. Mr. Eliot
has not written his apologia and has not, so far as I know, made
a
systematic statement of belief; hut I think a sentence in his essay
on Pascal makes clear what the grounds of his belief are. Mr. Eliot
is talking about the "unbeliever's" inability to understand the
way
the "intelligent believer" comes to his faith; the unbeliever, he
