Continuing the Culture War

Conservatives fighting the culture war should take note, and use to their advantage, Eliot’s insight that the development or even improvement of culture occurs spontaneously.

Michael Frigon obtained a bachelor’s degree in history from Westmont College and a master’s degree from the Institute of World Politics. He is currently living his vocation as a husband and father in Alexandria, Virginia.

As the “culture war” continues to be fought over either restoring or transforming Western civilization, it is necessary to have an improved and proper understanding of what makes a good culture. A common tendency when attempting to evaluate the culture of a society is to assess the quality of individual aspects of culture observed throughout — such as its art, politics, or social customs — and from those individual judgments, infer its overall health.

This tendency, while understandable, runs the risk of misdiagnosis and, therefore, mistreatment. If we wish to avoid this mistake, we must go deeper and understand the conditions that are most necessary and the drivers that are most effective for robust cultural development.

In doing so, we find that at the heart of any societal culture is a shared belief in what is good and worthwhile in life. In other words, the heart of a society’s culture is its religion, which is unrivaled in its power to inspire and form the essential conditions and drivers that produce vigorous culture.

Essential Conditions of Culture

Identifying the factors responsible for creating any kind of culture — let alone a good culture — is a profoundly difficult endeavor. Fortunately, poet T.S. Eliot undertook the challenge of defining what makes a culture in his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

Eliot felt the need to clarify the definition of culture after observing its repeated misuse among the intellectuals of his day.¹ He went about rectifying this abuse not by presenting an authoritative, textbook-style definition, but by offering what he assessed to be the essential conditions for the growth and continuation of culture.²

One condition that Eliot set forth is the presence of a class structure in which there is a gradation of levels and where each level has its unique function in producing culture for the overall society.³ Eliot acknowledged that this typically includes an elite, but the elite may not necessarily constitute in itself a class, and he (although, erroneously) did not ascribe any greater importance to the function of the elites than to the other classes.⁴

The higher level of culture does not possess more culture than the others, but it is that level of culture that is most conscious and specialized, hence its description as elite.⁵ In robust cultures the classes overlap and interact, nourishing one another in an almost cyclical movement while still retaining their distinctiveness.⁶

Another condition identified by Eliot as necessary for the flourishing of culture is the presence of both unity and diversity when it comes to geography, with the diversity of regions balancing the unity of the overarching civilization. A recurrent theme of Eliot’s book is that “people should be neither too united nor too divided, if its culture is to flourish.”⁷ We find this theme most clearly in his argument that people in a healthy societal culture should feel attachments to locality as well as to nation. ⁸

Eliot argued that for robust culture to develop within a large nation or civilization, there must be a common culture that unites each successive geographic unit that incorporates it, while also drawing vitality from the uniqueness of each unit.⁹ In other words, the various cultures of localities combine to produce a regional culture, while the unique cultures of the regions combine to produce a national culture, and so on, with the entirety held together in an overarching cultural unity. A balance must be maintained for a thriving culture, for if a culture becomes too uniform within the limits of its geographic scope, then it becomes stale, while if there is excessive regionalism, then the unity breaks apart.¹⁰

The most essential condition for a culture identified by Eliot, however, is the presence of religion. Eliot did not go so far as identifying culture as equal with religion, but he did assert that no culture has developed without the presence of religion.¹¹ He writes that culture cannot be “preserved, extended, and developed in the absence of religion,” and that religion must be concerned with the preservation and maintenance of culture.¹² A true religion is the whole way of life of a people, and that way of life is also its culture.¹³

Religion naturally leads people to find the means that are favorable to culture inherently desirable. The religion’s practical value for the development of a robust culture is demonstrated by the fact that in each of the other conditions identified by Eliot, religion can play an instrumental role in providing the unity necessary across classes and regions, while also providing room for diverse and unique expressions. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the role religion — more specifically, the Christian faith — has played in the development of Western culture. 

Christianity & the Rise of Western Culture

Nobody understood and conveyed the centrality of the Christian religion to the initial development and unprecedented success of Western culture better than the eminent historian of religion and culture, Christopher Dawson, a contemporary of Eliot.

Dawson found that Western culture advanced from the fall of the Roman Empire to the height of European world dominance because it had a spiritual energy that inspired both the rational examination of nature and the pursuit of communion with the Divine.¹⁴ With Christianity, the soul of Western man had a purpose, a meaning that allowed him to flourish even when all around him there was nothing but barbarism and darkness. 

The account that Dawson gave in his book Religion and the Rise of Western Culture of the impact that witnessing the Christian faith had on the barbarian cultures which had come to dominate the lands of the former Roman Empire offers a glimpse of what can happen when religion is energetically lived and celebrated faithfully for its own sake. According to Dawson, the conversion of Western Europe to Christianity was achieved not by teaching a new doctrine, but by offering the visible manifestation of the spirit of a new religion in the lives and acts of the faithful.¹⁵ He wrote:

The lives of the saints and ascetics impressed the minds of the barbarians because they were the manifestation of a way of life and a scale of values entirely opposed to all they had hitherto known and accepted. But the contrast was not between the higher civilization of the Christian Roman world and the barbarism of the pagans, but a contrast between two spiritual worlds or two planes of reality. For behind the ethical contrast between the life of the saint and the barbarism of society there lies the eschatological dualism of the present world and the world to come which was the background of the medieval Christian view of life. The Western Church did not come to the barbarians with a civilizing mission or any conscious hopes of social progress, but with a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation.¹⁶

The saints believed, and their faith bore fruit. Their seemingly superhuman devotion to their principles and practices were so strong that they caused some of the most violent and proud men in history to first lower their swords and then seek to acquire the force of life that these strange men and women so clearly possessed. 

The spiritual energy observed in the saints also found daily expression in a liturgy that provided a rich tradition of Christian culture as an order of worship, a structure of thought, and a principle of life.¹⁷ The liturgy provided direct access to the spiritual world through the Sacred Mysteries, and the Christian’s devotion to it inspired some of the most seminal works of poetry, music, art, and literature in the history of Western culture.¹⁸

Dawson found that this burgeoning tradition developed spontaneously and produced fruits in different forms according to the unique rites that arose in various places.¹⁹ In fact, according to the late historian Paul Johnson, part of the Latin Church’s original motivation for enhancing the splendor of the liturgy was to replace the grandeur of the pagan rituals in the public mind and compete with the growing magnificence of the liturgy in the Eastern sects.²⁰

This competition fed the liturgy’s development until, as Dawson wrote, it became the center of Christian culture, as “whatever else might be lost, and however dark might be the prospects of Western society, the sacred order of the liturgy remained intact and, in it, the whole Christian world, Roman, Byzantine, and barbarian, found an inner principle of unity.”²¹ Through the liturgy the mind of the barbarian was opened to a new view of life and concept of history, as it was a visible form of the dramatic story of mankind’s creation, fall, redemption, and providence.²²

Dawson ascribed similar significance for the development of Western culture and the conversion of the barbarian kingdoms to the work of the monks. The monks provide clear evidence that the Christian emphasis on eternal life by no means dissuaded medieval Christians from abandoning the world around them and denying the importance of improving life on earth.

Dawson described how the monks worked silently and tirelessly to bring back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted in the age of barbarian invasions, scrupulously copied and recopied ancient manuscripts to preserve the achievements of the classical period, built great centers of learning and education, and evangelized kings and commoners alike.²³ This inspired work turned the tide of barbarism and provided the foundations for the cultural and intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.²⁴

Rediscovering the Source of Western Culture

In Dawson’s account of the development of culture in Western Europe from Ancient Rome to the early modern period, we see the practical expressions of the conditions necessary for a robust culture identified by Eliot. There was a spiritual aim that inspired and guided social, economic, political, and artistic activity.

Towards this common spiritual end, elites produced high culture in literature, art, and science, while the common man infused ideas drawn from the same spiritual wellspring into his work and communal life. New modes of cultural expression and ideas developed spontaneously out of the unique contexts of diverse regions yet were diffused beyond their geographic boundaries.

Those of us fighting the culture war should take note, and use to our advantage, Eliot’s insight that the development or even improvement of culture occurs spontaneously.²⁵ If we do not understand how and why that the greatest source and driver of culture is authentic religious faith, as demonstrated by the vital impact that Christianity had on the extraordinary rise of the Western culture, then there will be no chance of revitalizing Western culture today. If we are to rebuild the foundations of our culture and recapture the spiritual energy that propels it, we must remember what makes life truly worth living.

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1. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 13-14.

2. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 16.

3. Ibid, 47-48.

4. Ibid, 42, 48.

5. Ibid, 48.

6. Ibid, 37, 50.

7. Ibid, 50.

8. Ibid, 52.

9. Ibid, 51-52 54-55, 60, 66.

10. Ibid, 52-5362.

11. Ibid, 13.

12.  Ibid, 30.

13. Ibid, 31.

14. Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: The Classic Study of Medieval Civilization (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 15-18, 22-23.

15. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 35.

16. Ibid, 35.

17. Ibid, 43.

18. Ibid, 38.

19. Ibid, 43.

20. Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), Kindle, 101-103.

21. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 41.

22. Ibid, 35, 42.

23. Ibid, 51-53, 64, 181-182.

24. Ibid, 53.

25. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 16, 19, 108.