CULTURE RELIGION, AND MR. ELIOT
751
can conceivably respond creatively to its tensions and divisions is by re–
covering literal belief
in
specific mythic events of the past.
Eliot is not, of course., attempting such a detailed historical demon–
stration, though his conclusions require it. The extreme of his ambition,
he says, is to rescue the word
culture
from abuse. He wishes, in an
entirely backward view, to establish the conditions under which culture
is possible at all, by seeing what conditions of religion and class differ–
entiation have supported it in the past. He does not ask the progressive
who is unwilling to restore such conditions to change his political faith.
"I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to culture." But despite
the title of this collection,
culture
is never very satisfactorily defined in it,
nor does Eliot suggest any permanent standards by which one culture
may be compared with another. As several reviewers have pointed out,
Eliot uses the word in different senses, sometimes inclusive, sometimes
selective, sometimes merely descriptive, sometimes eulogistic. The result
of this equivocation, since his argument is highly abstract and syllogistic,
is to lead us into what seems like question-begging and circular proof.
Because of the almost total absence of illustration,
Notes towards the
Definition of Culture
lacks the literary excitements that occurred in
After Strange Gods
when Lawrence and Hardy were treated in terms
of diabolism, and Joyce, of religious orthodoxy.
Though Eliot writes as a sociologist, he also writes as a dogmatic
Christian, and this involves him in very difficult questions of the rela–
tion of the conditioned and the unconditioned, the temporal and the
timeless in human history. When he talks of the attitudes and beliefs
of Liberalism as doomed to disappear because they belong to a past
age of free capitalism, he uses a Marxian mode of analysis, and likewise
when he describes the changes in the Anglican church that have re–
sulted from economic, class and educational changes in English society.
But though the cultural and institutional forms of Christianity may be
treated as in a sense socially conditioned, the doctrines may not. For
Eliot, Christian doctrine does not develop any more than, in the long
run, culture does. It has simply been necessary to define Christian doc–
trine more exactly as heresies appeared. "The life-long battIe of St.
Athanaiius against the Arians and Eutychians need not be regarded in
any other light than the light of theology: the scholar who endeavored
to demonstrate that it represented a culture-clash between Alexandria
and Antioch, or some similar ingenuity, would appear to us at best to
be talking about something else."
But for Eliot a religion need not be true as revealed truth to be cul–
turally superior in some respects to Christianity. "A people whose cul-
