NOTIONS OF CULTURE
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unknowable unity or intolerable chaos; but it is only the natural that
can touch, or drive, or attract the secular mind; and we must work
with the experience that we have without use of experience to which
we cannot pretend. That is the point of my departure from Eliot;
all that seems to me false in his position comes from his implied
resort to unavailable experience; all that seems true or valid in his
position comes from his addiction to the actual secular experience of
our time. Thus I would not only transpose the terms of his statements
about religion, I would submit them to a secular conversion and put
them together as follows :
A
common faith and order make up the
body of beliefs which give culture significance.
I do not suggest such a conversion in order to damage the foun–
dation of Eliot's position, nor because I cannot swallow dogma as
such, but rather because, for me, such a conversion reveals his foun–
dation and utters a dogma which vitalizes the enterprise of the secu–
lar mind. In a desperate world of nature it seems good to get rid
of the unnecessary despair caused by the effect of asserted superna–
tural authority to which there is no access; anything less than such
an amputation is dishonesty; anything more is pride; the balance
between is precarious, perhaps unmanageable, but necessary to life.
Let us see what such a conversion-such an amputation-does
to Eliot's
Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.
As
his arguments
stand, he can neither define culture nor plan for
it
but can only feel
it as spiritual soil: a diffidence of intellect and uncertainty of feeling
which would have been unlikely in the age of Christian faith, when
the supernatural was accessible to the secular mind because it was a
tensile part of it and the very experiment of thought itself. Making
the conversion, do we not immediately see- not what culture is- but
how to go about discovering the materials in the actual society that
confronts us. Can we not at once begin looking, not entirely with our
own eyes, for we use what aids we can, but wholly and directly
through
our own eyes at the things that do exist and are believed, at
anarchy struggling to order, at order combating anarchy: the very
body of beliefs which if we can see them together give our culture
significance and make the enterprise of envisaging them upon a higher
level once again an approximate possibility. Can we not then feel of
the past, the Christian past and also the human past of which the
Christian was but one effort at universal expression, not the weight of
its dead formularies, but its permanence in change, its change in per–
manence, its pressing, enveloping life: all in the life we actually live.
Are we not then strengthened and convicted by the vital dogma, that
as man has had the power to create imperfectly both his society and
