If we take culture seriously, we see that a people does not need merely
enough to eat (although even that is more than we seem able to ensure)
but a proper and particular cuisine: one symptom of the decline of culture
in Britain is indifference to the art of preparing food.

I apologize for a second lengthy quote from Eliot. Excerpting Eliot is nasty business; it's a cruel thing to do to people who've already read him, and it's a disservice to those who have not: the force of his writing is not the flash of insight (although you do get a return on investment there) but the structure of an idea. I know a lot of fundamentalists who will snag a quotable bit and run with it. Evangelicals will read him and put down the book feeling like hippies who've dropped acid: they will have the sensation that they were exposed to a profound thought, but it will never amount to anything.

Emergents will never read him because people on couches are much more impressed with citations from Derrida. They'll treat Eliot worse than they treat Plato and Aristotle. Eliot was, after all, the quintessential modern.

Even if you don't agree with Eliot, you have no business talking about culture until you've understood what he's told the rest of us. The passage below will have the most meaning to those who've followed our discussion here for the past three and a half years.

He is discussing the three senses of "culture". He observes that we can speak of the culture of the individual, the culture of the group or class, and the culture of the whole society. These three senses are related to one another in a hierarchical way and it's necessary to understand this relationship.

But one of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or cultural point of view, is the appearance of skepticism—by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision. Skepticism is a highly civilized trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilization can die. Where skepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one.

The conception of culture and religion as being, when each is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing, is one which requires a good deal of explanation. But I should like to suggest first, that it provides us with the means of combating two complementary errors. The one more widely held is that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion. This error may be held by the Christian in common with the infidel, and its proper refutation would require an historical analysis of considerable refinement, because the truth is not immediately apparent, and may seem to be contradicted by appearances: a culture may linger on and indeed produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other error is the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture: a belief which may even lead to the rejection of the products of culture as frivolous obstructions to the spiritual life. To be in a position to reject this error, as with the other, requires us to take a distant view; to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture that we see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to which we can afford to remain indifferent. And I must add that to see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither implies that all the products of art can be accepted uncritically, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can immediately distinguish between them. Esthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into esthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no individual can arrive.

First notice the place of honor accorded to skepticism. Civilized men do not move like male Emperor penguins in winter.

Make a note.

If you find men acting like penguins, or if you find them acting reflexively, despotically, or precipitously, don't bother asking for directions to their art museum. Save your bus token.

Second, notice that the connection between culture and religion is essential. Eliot even describes them as "different aspects of the same thing". I will not develop his point here—much better that you let him develop it for you from the first paragraph to the last. It's bad enough I've truncated his thought this much. But I will just interject a question relevant to our discussion here: Could we have any real confidence in a sub-culture that is totally oblivious to, contemptuous of, and hostile toward aesthetic sensibilities and disciplined taste?

I say this to our fundamentalist readers who have determined that Garlock and Hamilton have embarrassed everyone long enough and who suppose they can do better by just trying harder. I say this to our evangelical readers who suspect that John Mark McMillan is no Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and probably doesn't represent a move in the right direction.

Culture is not done by a few men working out of their trunks, attractive as that notion obviously is. It is slightly more complicated than that.

It may frighten you to consider that your contemporaries' aesthetic sensibilities and spiritual perceptions cut far closer to the theological bone than you ever suspected. But I hope that if you get a glimpse of Eliot's point you will appreciate what culture did for us before it was so stupidly tossed out.

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* Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, January, 1948; Chapter I