“Notes” is far more than it implies, as Eliot has two overarching
themes. The first is that religion and
culture are inseparable, and the second is the relationship between regional,
national, and world cultures. Eliot believes that a world culture is the only
basis of peace, but probably impossible because of the lack of a world
religion. His definition of a healthy culture
seems to be a shared system of beliefs that allow both mutual understanding and
vibrant disagreement at the same time. This is not unlike the great theological
debates of the High Middle Ages, Christianity’s most confident time, when Roger
Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Albert the Great, and other philosophers
flowered.
He wrote these “Notes” in the 1940s, with Nazis fresh in
memory and in the shadow of Stalinist Russia. Sometimes he seems elitist and
dated, other times full of timeless wisdom, and always writing very well. His
chapter on education is presented almost as an afterthought but has actually
held up the best over the years. His
appendix on the poetic nature of the English language and the mutual influences
European cultures have had upon each other is also inspiring (and written for a
German audience).
“To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as
we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency towards reversion
may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice
can exert upon humanity. Totalitarianism
appeals to the desire to return to the womb.”
In lesser words, group think is for babies who don’t have
the courage to think for themselves.
“Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual
perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into aesthetic
sensibility and discipline 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 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.”
Eliot’s Christianity is as unapologetic as his poetry, and
it is heartening to know that even an Eliot struggles with the relationship between
his art and his belief.
“We know that good manners, without education, intellect, or
sensibility to the arts, tends towards mere automatism; that learning without
good manners or sensibility is pedantry; that intellectual ability without the
more human attributes is admirably only in the same way as the brilliance of a
child chess prodigy; and that the arts without intellectual context are
vanity…we must not expect any one person to be accomplished in all of them… we
are driving in the end to find it in the pattern of the society as a whole.”
I think this paragraph says a lot about the sort of people
Eliot had to spend too much of his time with: pedants, prodigies, and the
vain. Not that these are his friends,
but he’s obviously tired of single-minded or thoughtless individuals he met in
his circles. But he’s also right… it brings to my mind the famous Paulian
scriptures about the relationship between faith, hope, and love. Virtues need
each other’s support.
“I have suggested elsewhere that a growing weakness of our
culture has been the increasing isolation of elites from each other, so that
the political, the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, are separated
to the great loss of each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general
circulation of ideas, but through the lack of these contacts and mutual
influences at a less conscious level, which are perhaps even more important than
ideas.”
I think the real divide today is between the political
elites and the elites he mentioned above. Our political class has learned how
to win political battles, but are woefully ill-informed about the truths of
what they are fighting over.
