BOOKS
CULTURE, RELIGION, AND MR. ELIOT
NOTES TOWARDS THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE. By T. S. Eliot.
Harcourt,
Br~ce
and
Comp~ny.
$2.50.
In none of his other books has T. S. Eliot taken as little ad–
vantage of his special gifts as in this one. He writes of sociological prob–
lems in the language of the sociologist, treating in very brief space those
questions of class, caste and elites and of the relation of culture and
religion, to which Mannheim, Pareto, Tawney and Malinowski devote
many volumes. Eliot is quite explicit in requiring us to remain within
sociological modes of thought: "Nor can we rely upon any evidence
from the United States," he says, talking of the perpetuation of gov–
ernment by elites. "For the sociologist, the evidence from America is
not yet ripe." And later, in asserting the dependence of Western culture
on dogmatic Christianity, "I am convinced of that, not merely because
I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology."
The brevity of these notes means, however, that they can comprise
none of the supporting material, the detailed studies of comparative and
contrasted cultures, on which anthropological generalizations are com–
monly based. It is true that, insofar as this age is unique in the extent of
its democracy, industrialism and anthropocentric rationalism and-as
Eliot asserts-in the consequent debasement of its culture, such com–
parisons may increase our pessimism without helping us to predict the
future or see anywhere we could go except-as Eliot recommends-back
into the irrecoverable past. Nevertheless, if such comparisons are to
be
made as Eliot makes them, and
if
it is the whole culture which is in
question, then we need to consider, as Eliot does not, the divisions, aliena–
tions and spiritual sicknesses of other periods than our own, of the
Renaissance, of the fourteenth century, of Virgilian Rome. For such
social trials and tensions are a cause--though not a sufficient cause---of
the creativity of a culture as they are, in a more private way, of the
creativity of the individual artist. The most thorough historical study,
however, could hardly prove that the only positive way in which a culture
