156
PARTISAN REVIEW
can be no culture. Neither the arts, nor political life, nor economic
life, nor anything that can be included under the term civility, can
flourish without a total culture, and there is no total culture without
a religion-not a multiplication of private figments, but a common
faith. and order. I would assert further that a religion cannot be fully
apprehended until it becomes the faith of peoples of different.original
cultures, and while uniting these peoples in a common brotherhood,
can be contemplated in its transcendence of culture, as well as lived
in the conditions of each particular culture. Any mere political, legal–
istic or economic union of humanity is a frail and temporary substi–
tute for the union in diversity of cultures, which only a common
religious faith can create.
Culture eludes definition: a conception of it valid for the whole
world would omit all the factors which make it possible in any parti–
cular time and place; and a conception of it for any one people or
social group would attempt to arrest and
fix
what is, if vital, moving
and fluid. Because of this difference, also, it is not something for
which we can directly plan: it is not an area such that we can make
'
specific recommendations for "culture in a Christian order." Not that
there is nothing whatever to be done about it. What I have tried to
convey is something which I think should be at the back of our
minds,
or rather, which should affect all our value-feelings, in each of the
departments of intellectual design. For instance, culture is certainly
not
Education, and to think that we can deliberately produce culture
by educating a class, or a selected group, or the whole people for
culture, is to expect the cart before the horse. But theories of education
which ignored culture would be as mistaken as those which aimed
to produce it. Theories of politics which ignore it ignore the particular
peoples for whose benefit the theories should be designed.
As
culture
refuses to be captured by the museums, or the universities, or the
Workers' Educational Association, or the British
Co~ncil,
so on the
other hand a recognition of it can make
all
the difference to our
action in every other direction.
I think, also, that there is something more than a fanciful analogy
to be drawn between my view of culture and the view, held by some
contributors and vigorously put forward from time to time in the
pages of
The New English Weekly
on the subject of agriculture. I am
concerned here with our relation to the spiritual soil, just as that view
is concerned with our r.elation to the material soil; and I
v~nture
to
think that these two views are, in the end, concerned with the same
reality. The greatest achievements of the imagination, religious and
artistic, have the firmest roots. And if we can keep our minds clear,
