Editing T. S. Eliot’s Conception of Culture (section)

==== Background ====
Eliot was raised in picturesque New England, with his roots in an extreme form of Protestant rationalism known as Unitarianism, which likely did not appeal to him as a child. However, as his ideology gradually leaned more and more traditionalist, he converted to high Anglican Christianity later in life and began to write on increasingly religious themes. In the preface to The Sacred Wood, Eliot insists that his mind had not changed per se, but rather, went through “an expansion or development of interests.” Writing in the decades after the World War, the themes in his later works such as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1935-1942), illumined the social ills that plagued society, and criticized the modern attitude towards God and religion. He spoke of Christian society, and lamented the loss of culture and the perils of its decay. During his Harvard days, he came in contact with a whole cohort of writers and engrossed himself in the study of orientalism and philosophy alongside them, such as Irving Babbitt who impressed upon him an interest in Buddhism; George Santayana, who shared ideas of naturalism and disillusion and introduced him to Dante, and Josiah Royce, a post-Kantian monist through whom he came in contact with the works of F. H. Bradley.

It was around this time that Eliot began an exploration of “the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life”, since he had already embarked upon and succeeded in defining poetry in his earlier essays. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture begins with Eliot spending considerable time in critically reevaluating Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, and redefining the lexicon Arnold had laid out. In his first chapter, Eliot explains that culture develops through the interaction of and tensions between the individual and the society, and therefore the culture of the individual must be viewed against the backdrop of that of the whole of society, as it cannot be isolated or abstracted from that of the entire society. He disagrees with Arnold’s assertion that religion is secondary and only that which supplies the ethical framework for the larger, more valuable, culture, and instead states that the development, refinement and preservation of culture does not happen in silo, outside of a religious framework, but rather, the two are interlinked — culture in itself is lived religion, an incarnation of religion. In the words of Eliot, religion-<blockquote>“gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the frame-work for a culture and protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair”. Thus, “..Faith can, and must find room for many degrees of intellectual, imaginative and emotional receptivity..”</blockquote>He then traces the misconception that the two are distinct to historical origins, specifically the penetration of the Greco-Roman “culture” by the rise of Christianity. The trajectory of the Western world thenceforth meant that the religious origins of the earlier, declining civilization were forgotten in the throes of time. This is the reason that he believes that in the absence of religious foundation, culture is amenable to decline, that a culture cannot sustain itself without a religious basis.