The Idea of a Christian Society
By T. S. Eliot
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About this ebook
Originally delivered in 1939 at Corpus Christi College, these three lectures by the renowned poet and playwright T. S. Eliot address the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems. With sincerity and intellectual rigor, the Nobel Prize winner asks whether—and how—it is possible for Christianity to coexist with Western democracy and capitalism.
T. S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet of American descent. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent family from Boston, Eliot was raised in a religious and intellectual household. Childhood ailments left Eliot isolated for much of his youth, encouraging his interest in literature. At the age of ten, he entered a preparatory school where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. During this time, he also began writing poetry. From 1906 to 1909, he studied at Harvard University, earning a Master of Arts in English literature and introducing himself to the poetry of the French Symbolists. Over the next several years, he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Harvard Graduate School before attending Oxford on a scholarship to Merton College. Tiring of academic life, however, he abandoned his studies and moved to London, where he met the poet Ezra Pound. With Pound’s encouragement and editing, Eliot published such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922), works that earned him a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and a major figure in literary Modernism. Living in England with his wife Vivienne—from whom he would separate in 1932—Eliot worked as a prominent publisher for Faber and Faber, working with such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. He converted to Anglicanism in 1927, an event that inspired his poem “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and led to the composition of his masterpiece Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great poet.Great thinker. Great book. It's important think about ways of being christian in terrible post-modern days.
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The Idea of a Christian Society - T. S. Eliot
Appendix
Copyright, 1949, by T. S. Eliot
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
First American edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York, 10003.
www.hmhco.com
eISBN 978-0-544-35857-7
v1.0214
Preface
THE THREE LECTURES which, with some revision and division, are here printed, were delivered in March 1939 at the invitation of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on the Boutwood Foundation. I wish to express my thanks to the Master and Fellows for this honour and privilege. The notes I have added while preparing the lectures for press.
My point of departure has been the suspicion that the current terms in which we discuss international affairs and political theory may only tend to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilisation. As I have chosen to consider such a large problem, it should be obvious that the following pages can have but little importance by themselves, and that they can only be of use if taken as an individual contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come. To aim at originality would be an impertinence: at most, this essay can be only an original arrangement of ideas which did not belong to me before and which must become the property of whoever can use them. I owe a great deal to conversations with certain friends whose minds are engrossed by these and similar problems: to make specific acknowledgement might have the effect of imputing to these friends an inconvenient responsibility for my own faults of reasoning. But I owe a great deal also to a number of recent books: for instance, to Mr. Christopher Dawson’s Beyond Politics, to Mr. Middleton Murry’s The Price of Leadership, and to writings of the Revd. V. A. Demant (whose Religious Prospect has appeared too recently for me to have made use of it). And I am deeply indebted to the works of Jacques Maritain, especially his Humanisme intégral.
I trust that the reader will understand from the beginning that this book does not make any plea for a religious revival
in a sense with which we are already familiar. That is a task for which I am incompetent, and the term seems to me to imply a possible separation of religious feeling from religious thinking which I do not accept—or which I do not find acceptable for our present difficulties. An anonymous writer has recently observed in The New English Weekly (July 13, 1939) that
men have lived by spiritual institutions (of some kind) in every society, and also by political institutions and, indubitably, by economic activities. Admittedly, they have, at different periods, tended to put their trust mainly in one of the three as the real cement of society, but at no time have they wholly excluded the others, because it is impossible to do so.
This is an important, and in its context valuable, distinction; but it should be clear that what I am concerned with here is not spiritual institutions in their separated aspect, but the organisation of values, and a direction of religious thought which must inevitably proceed to a criticism of political and economic systems.
I
THE FACT that a problem will certainly take a long time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for several generations, is no justification for postponing the study. And, in times of emergency, it may prove in the long run that the problems we have postponed or ignored, rather than those we have failed to attack successfully, will return to plague us. Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow: but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. The subject with which I am concerned in the following pages is one to which I am convinced we ought to turn our attention now, if we hope ever to be relieved of the immediate perplexities that fill our minds. It is urgent because it is fundamental; and its urgency is the reason for a person like myself attempting to address, on a subject beyond his usual scope, that public which is likely to read what he writes on other subjects. This is a subject which I could, no doubt, handle much better were I a profound scholar in any of several fields. But I am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself; some defects may be compensated by some advantages; and what one must be judged by, scholar or no, is not particularised knowledge but one’s total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and observing human beings.
While the practice of poetry need not in itself confer wisdom or accumulate knowledge, it ought at least to train the mind in one habit of universal value: that of analysing the meanings of words: of those that one employs oneself, as well as the words of others. In using the term Idea
of a Christian Society I do not mean primarily a concept derived from the study of any societies which we may choose to call Christian; I mean something that can only be found in an understanding of the end to which a Christian Society, to deserve the name, must be directed. I do not limit the application of the term to a perfected Christian Society on earth; and I do not comprehend in it societies merely because some profession of Christian faith, or some vestige of Christian practice, is retained. My concern with contemporary society, accordingly, will not be primarily with specific defects, abuses or injustices but with the question, what—if any—is the idea
of the society in which we live? to what end is it arranged?
The Idea of a Christian Society is one which we can accept or reject; but if we are to accept it, we must treat Christianity with a great deal more intellectual respect than is our wont; we must treat it as being for the individual a matter primarily of thought and not of feeling. The consequences of such an attitude are too serious to be acceptable to everybody: for when the Christian faith is not only felt, but thought, it has practical results which may be inconvenient. For to see the Christian faith in this way—and to see it in this way is not necessarily to accept it, but only to understand the real issues—is to see that the difference between the Idea of a Neutral Society (which is that of the society in which we live at present) and the Idea of a Pagan Society (such as the upholders of democracy abominate) is, in the long run, of minor importance. I am not at this moment concerned with the means for bringing a Christian Society into existence; I am not even primarily concerned with making it appear desirable; but I am very much concerned with making clear its difference from the kind of society in which we are now living. Now, to understand the society in which he lives, must be to the interest of every conscious thinking person. The current terms in which we describe our society, the contrasts with other societies by which we—of the Western Democracies
—eulogise it, only