Mr. Eliot and Notions of Culture:
a Discussion
R. P. BLACKMUR
MY
POINT OF DEPARTURE
is not from the beliefs which Eliot ex–
presses-for to most of them I assent- but from the implications
which seem to me to lie in the relations between religion and culture,
which he did not express. The implications in his use of the word
religion affect profoundly the validity of his total position.
If
Eliot
is speaking as an Anglo-catholic-if he adheres to a supernatural
revelation institutionalized in a particular church-then his argument
becomes to those outside the fold progressively inapplicable-the fur–
ther it is pushed-to the actual world. The challenge of the super–
natural revelation is one to which I have nothing to respond with;
and I must needs be doomed-or damned-another way.
If,
on the
other hand, Eliot means only what he here says-if he is holding
nothing back, and is not aching to add any authority beyond that
of his words-then his argument opens itself for development and
criticism.
If
religion is, as he says in different places, a "common faith
and order," or is "the body of beliefs which gives ... culture signifi–
cance" without further specification, then his argument is much
strengthened. But it would be strengthened, for me, much more if
both statements were made the other way round, so that the ideal is
the envisaged term rather than the beginning or motor term. The
"common faith and order"
is
religion; "the body of beliefs which
gives culture significance"
is
religion. The feeling of history in my
bones- my sense of how thought has moved, and is moving--suggests
that such has been the actual process of the creation of religion dur–
ing what Eliot calls periods of original culture; and I think that the
failure to recognize that this is the direction of the process is what
has vitiated our sense of the significance of religion and is also what
has aborted our efforts to conceive the materials of our culture.
The point is crucial. For most people, the supernatural aspects
of the Christian tradition are no longer a matter of secular experience,
or of any kind of experience, even inherited experience, or what is
called instinct. No doubt much of the actual is thereby shut out into
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