The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)

Summary

*"A Christian Society. Mr.

Eliot on Ideals and

Methods. Democracy’s

Spiritual Problem."

Times Literary

Supplement 1970

(4 November 1939), 640,

642.

Only those who have done some hard thinking for themselves concerning the nature and destiny of contemporary society will appreciate how much objective analysis and self-scrutiny has gone to the making of this slim book by Mr. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society. It was written before the outbreak of war; its origination, Mr. Eliot tells us, was in the moral shock produced upon him by the crisis of September 1938, which caused in him “a feeling of humiliation … not a criticism of the governments but a doubt of the validity of a civilization.” But it was written with the possibility of war in mind, and it is acutely pertinent to the situation today.

What is the idea—in Coleridge's sense of the word—of the society in which we live? Mr. Eliot begins by asking. We conceive of it under several different phrases the meaning of which we forbear to examine; they are regarded as sacrosanct, as sufficient in themselves to establish the superiority of our form of society over its new and now insistent rivals. We speak of it sometimes as a “liberal” society, less often as a “Christian” society; but the blessed word which is chiefly used to validate it is “democracy.”