Eliot's Harvard Years and F. H. Bradley

During Eliot's time as a graduate student at Harvard prior to completing his dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley in 1916, he appears to have been preoccupied with a number of epistemological problems that, broadly speaking, pertained to the growing scientism in the academy, that is, the application of the methods of the natural sciences to areas of human experience for which its explanatory power was deemed inappropriate or ill-suited. In particular, Eliot indicated contempt for such efforts with respect to traditional branches of philosophy such as ethics and metaphysics, which he saw as ultimately reductive and doomed to failure.Footnote ³ The attempt to turn ethics into a logical science, he thought, destroyed its meaningfulness, since central questions regarding the existence of God or the experience of freedom, although capable of philosophic reflection and elucidation, were not demonstrable in any scientific sense, and thus were no longer within the proper scope of such inquiry.Footnote ⁴ Eliot's further reflection on the epistemology of the human sciences during these early years is demonstrated in the papers he wrote for his seminar in logic and epistemology with Josiah Royce, which was central to the graduate program in philosophy at the time. The course had become “a veritable clearinghouse of science,” in which the foundations of knowledge would come to be studied by natural scientists of virtually every stripe.Footnote ⁵ It is in Eliot's seminar papers, along with records of the seminar furnished by one of its participants, Harry T. Costello, that one sees Eliot's early engagement with the problem of interpretation, and, in particular, with the scientific approach to the study of religion.

Central to Eliot's concerns in these essays, which were largely critiques of sociological and anthropological studies of religion, was the possibility of purely descriptive or objective accounts of such phenomena that would be demanded of the social scientific observer. Similar to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Eliot here began developing his theory of interpretation by calling into question the ideal of the social scientist who, like the natural scientist, must be able to stand outside the world that is being observed.Footnote ⁶ What must be understood, according to Eliot, is the impossibility of differentiating between “interpretation” and “description,” a difficulty that, Eliot claimed, seemed to elude sociologists and anthropologists, who consider their own beliefs to be wholly unproblematic in rendering such purely descriptive accounts of religion or other social phenomena.Footnote ⁷ Anticipating this central concern at the heart of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics regarding the existence of social “facts,” Eliot suggests the ubiquity of interpretation in making sense of human experience and the impossibility of such objectivity, and he thus calls into question the prospect of there being any true “science of religion.”Footnote ⁸ For Eliot, as for Gadamer, the problem is not that facts lay hidden beneath the distorted or skewed perceptions of the observer, but that any such “fact” is always made present to the human consciousness with the assistance of a particular horizon of understanding. Objectivity, by this view, is not merely impossible to achieve, but has nothing to do with human understanding, which always involves a particular horizon's interpretation. Conceived in this way, a distinction between description and interpretation can never be established, since there are ultimately no “facts” waiting to be observed; interpretation is, essentially, all that we do when we understand.Footnote ⁹

The papers Eliot wrote during Royce's seminar at Harvard involve engagements with anthropologists such as Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, J. G. Frazer, and Andrew Lang, along with sociologists such as Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.Footnote ¹⁰ Eliot concerned himself with showing the problematic imputations of these social scientists to the religious beliefs and practices they studied—often pertaining to primitive religious systems—such as tacit conjectures about the evolutionary nature of religion and implicit assumptions about the uniformity of mind for religious adherents across different cultures.Footnote ¹¹ But what principally concerned Eliot, more than identifying such faulty assumptions or deficiencies of method, was the effect of these theorists relativizing the metaphysical or religious truth claims belonging to the subjects of their studies. In other words, Eliot's concerns were not just related to the possibility or impossibility of sound social science, but also pertained to the effect of the scientific approach on other forms of knowledge. As Manju Jain succinctly observes, “Eliot's serious concern [was] with the whole question of the foundation of religious belief and its place in a scientific, secular society.”Footnote ¹² To be sure, these questions are ultimately related to one another, since this alleged objectivity is, in fact, the basis for science's authoritative claims to knowledge at the expense or exclusion of all others. The implication, therefore, was that if a scientific grounding could be provided as an explanation for the existence of religious belief, no longer would there be any reason or basis for seeing such beliefs as “true” in a sense that would transcend the pragmatic or functional role of assisting believers in making sense of their world.Footnote ¹³ The objectivity of the social sciences, it might be said, was consequently in competition with religious truth as an ultimate or authoritative claim to the nature of reality.

Therefore, even as later sociologists such as Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim came to criticize the older, evolutionary explanations of religious belief belonging to Spencer, Tylor, and Frazer, Eliot did not see their critiques of these earlier assumptions about religious “development” as marking an improvement in the theory of interpretation.Footnote ¹⁴ For the aspiration to a neutral observer's perspective was not only impossible for Eliot, but problematically neglected what goes on in the mind of the religious believer and thus altogether dismisses its truth claim. Indeed, as they became increasingly sensitive to the differences between the primitive and the modern mind, later sociologists actually seemed to exacerbate this tendency to make historically distant beliefs appear less accessible to the interpreter. Lévy-Bruhl's account of the sociology of religion is thus critical of evolutionists for creating an a priori concept of religious belief, of which the primitive mind then represents merely the earliest, undeveloped variety. He continues to reason that this does not do justice to the changes that have occurred between the primitive and the contemporary mind, which represent not merely a difference of degree—as is implied in being unevolved—but one of kind.Footnote ¹⁵ Such differences, Lévy-Bruhl argues, must be accounted for by further qualification of the former as “‘pre-logical’ and mystical” beliefs, in contrast to the civilized consciousness of the latter, which has difficulty even apprehending such earlier views.Footnote ¹⁶ In his seminar paper on the subject, Eliot objects to Lévy-Bruhl's theory “on the grounds that it leaves nothing to explain, because it postulates the impossibility of understanding the primitive mind.”Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, while such analytical frameworks of the interpreter come to be acknowledged by later sociologists as problematic for understanding primitive religious belief, this recognition only seems to widen the gulf between the social scientific interpreter and the mind of the believer in need of being interpreted.

But beyond all of these earlier and later sociologists, it is Durkheim—whose thinking was itself influential on that of Lévy-Bruhl—who represents the core of Eliot's critique of the sociology of religion in this paper. For Durkheim appears to sense the difficulty that the unexplained interior world of the believer represents for the objectivity of the social scientist, who would need to provide an account of such ideas and thus have an understanding of their truth claims. However, despite this awareness, Durkheim nonetheless maintains the possibility of regarding religion and other such phenomena strictly as data or facts within the social world.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly critical of the evolutionary view of religion as an imputation or construct of the social scientist, he insists on pure objectivity and asserts that social facts exist independently of interior belief.Footnote ¹⁹ To be sure, Durkheim does indicate that some engagement with the interiority of the religious subject is necessary when he says that “states of consciousness ‘can and ought to be considered from without,’” yet he quickly adds that this must “‘not [be] from the point of view of the consciousness experiencing them.’”Footnote ²⁰ Thus, even this acknowledgment of the importance of the interior realm to understanding religion would only seem to reinforce Eliot's concern that, when a belief is ultimately taken into account by the social scientist, it is not the “internal” perspective of the adherent with its claim to truth that is to be considered, but that of the external observer who comprehends a conviction only in terms of that which is, in fact, maintained in the mind of the believer.

Here, indeed, is where Eliot's challenge to positivism is made clearest. For the social scientist, by this view, must in the first place assume that understanding is even possible when stripped of all concern or consideration of the truth of the ideas under examination. One relativizes, as it were, in order to understand, since truth is identified a priori with an allegedly superior viewpoint from without. However, as Eliot quickly determines, such detachment would imply what appears to be an epistemological fallacy, which is that the social scientist is not part of the social world, and instead has a distanced and thus privileged perspective on it. In Gadamer's terms, this assumption of the uninvolved vantage point is precisely the “self-forgetfulness” that marks the epistemological position of historical consciousness in the human sciences.Footnote ²¹ It is the hypostatization of the pragmatic fiction of standing outside and apart from social reality, a fiction that Gadamer believes becomes dangerous insofar as it dogmatically asserts the authority of its own claims about reality vis-à-vis those which are under observation.

It is in order to expose this fiction that Eliot drew most prominently upon the thinking of F. H. Bradley, a philosopher whose ideas were clearly on the mind of Eliot during this period of his graduate study, as he began to look ahead toward his dissertation.Footnote ²² And it is principally with the help of Bradley that Eliot began to see the individual interpreter as himself a part of, and not apart from, the social order, which cannot be cast off as the social scientist engages in the task of interpretation. This sense of the constitution and “realization of the self in a cultural order” Eliot thus acquires from Bradley,Footnote ²³ which because of a shared indebtedness to Hegelian epistemology, bears strong affinities with the view of Gadamer and precludes the sort of atomistic assumptions about the autonomous mind of the observer upon which Durkheim had tacitly been relying.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, Eliot takes aim at Durkheim for his claim that all preconceptions of the social scientist must be eliminated in order to provide an accurate account of the fact or datum of social life under examination. Drawing in particular upon Bradley's famous essay, “The Presuppositions of Critical History,” Eliot argues against Durkheim that presuppositions are not only incapable of removal but actually essential to comprehending the social world: “When we have ‘écarté toutes les prénotions’, just what is left?”Footnote ²⁵ In his adoption of this view, Eliot may thus be seen as anticipating the concept of the hermeneutic circle,Footnote ²⁶ which Gadamer later appropriates from Martin Heidegger, by suggesting that presuppositions do not merely occlude understanding but in fact facilitate it—at once disclosing and obscuring reality by virtue of providing a particular vantage point, or horizon of understanding, from which reality may be encountered.Footnote ²⁷

Our presuppositions or preconceptions thus appear to play a crucial role in Eliot's hermeneutical theory, remarkably similar to that of Gadamer's prejudices, which are the ready-made set of meanings that allow us to approach each interpretive task with a set of expectations—fore-conceptions or fore-projections—that are continually being revised and then re-projected with each new experience.Footnote ²⁸ Removing such prejudices is not only impossible but would be altogether undesirable, since they actually enable understanding for any interpreter by providing a contextual lens that makes meaning possible. Certainly, this recognition by each thinker implies significant limitations on the kind of knowing of which we are capable—it precludes the possibility, above all, of an Archimedean standpoint from which we could ever obtain perfect knowledge of reality. And it is for this reason that Bradley had indicated, with respect to the study of history, that there is no absolute or presupposition-less standpoint from which to view the past, and that every “history” is inevitably based on the standpoint of the particular historian.Footnote ²⁹

However, this need not imply the arbitrariness of historical knowledge or any relativistic conclusions regarding our ability to comprehend the past and its truth claims. It is not necessary, in other words, to choose between such extreme epistemological alternatives as being completely liberated from our situatedness, on the one hand, and being completely sealed off within the temporality of one's particular horizon of understanding, on the other.Footnote ³⁰ In between these positions is the recognition that when we interpret, our perspective is at once partial or limited and yet capable of achieving understanding with respect to historically distant meanings. In short, this insight into the role of presuppositions in understanding appears to lead Eliot to a nuanced hermeneutical position, one that acknowledges both the enabling and limiting role of our prejudices. It is the influence of Bradley, therefore, in these Harvard years, that ultimately “led Eliot toward understanding that the world is real, but that the self perceives the world only in a glass, darkly.”Footnote ³¹ It was during this formative period, in other words, that Eliot gained prescient insight into the productive role of prejudice in communicating truth, one which Gadamer elaborated in a more thoroughgoing fashion several decades later.

Truth within Tradition

This Bradleyan influence on Eliot during his early years studying philosophy thus marked the beginning of Eliot's effort to come to terms with the epistemological problems of positivism in the human sciences, through which one begins to see a development of his ideas regarding the role of history in facilitating truth claims. If our prejudices or the “presuppositions” of our historically situated vantage point remain always with us and actually contribute to human understanding, there would appear to be a different relationship between knower and known, or subject and object, in coming to an understanding than had previously been conceived within the human sciences. Observation, as it were, is not the appropriate manner of describing this encounter or relationship, and the natural science model of understanding seems to have been misleading in that regard. For Eliot, bringing one's horizon of understanding to bear upon the ideas of another mind instead involves a process that resembles Gadamer's account of understanding as a merging or “fusion” of horizons,Footnote ³² in which the interpreter is always engaged in an attempt to translate the meanings of the past into the framework of understanding that constitutes the present.Footnote ³³ As a result, Eliot ultimately develops an understanding of the encounter between past and present that is itself dialectical, and he sees the interpreter not as having a privileged position vis-à-vis the past but as within a present that is itself a product of the past.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, as Eliot comes to terms with the notion that there is no past that is “there” waiting to be interpreted by a mind outside of history, he develops an appreciation for the fact that the horizon of the present, as well, is continually under way or coming-into-being. This is so, both in the sense that the past never ends but rather continues on into the horizon of the present, and in the sense that every interpretive encounter with the past continues to shape the horizon with which we interpret.Footnote ³⁵

Eliot's most explicit remarks about this dialectical relationship between past and present and his attendant historicizing of interpretation are articulated in his well-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which was published in 1919, just three years after the completion of his dissertation on Bradley. In this essay, Eliot speaks explicitly and at length about the importance of “the historical sense”Footnote ³⁶ and, although in the context of poetical composition as opposed to social science, it is clear that the question of trans-historical meaning continues to be a principal theme in his thinking. It is here, as well, that tradition, as the locus within which the interpreter finds such meaning, begins to emerge for Eliot, since he sees as central to the mediation between past and present an ongoing conversation or dialectical encounter between these historical horizons. Thus, Eliot refers to the historical sense as involving “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” and of the living existence of historical literature within the mind of the poet.Footnote ³⁷ Such remarks indicate two voices—both past and present—in continuing dialogue with one another, as opposed to the view of the past as dead and residing like an artifact in its own historical world. By contrast, Eliot articulates a dynamic past constituted in part by the present, which not only adds continually to a past of which it is an extension but actually changes what has already been said. Eliot emphasizes the two-way nature of this dialectical relationship as follows:

The horizons of past and present, therefore, are continually changing one another, on Eliot's view, and he is therefore not articulating an understanding of tradition as the domination or determination of the present by the past, such that the individual within the tradition becomes entirely subsumed or lost. Although many interpreters of Eliot's essay have noted that therein lies a view of the individual poet as so immersed within tradition as to be nearly extinguished,Footnote ³⁹ the remarks above alternatively emphasize the duality of this relationship between past and present.

Consequently, Eliot sees the individual as an active agent whose original contributions actually further tradition's development. The individual, according to his view, is a willful creator of tradition, who is not only a mediator of this conversation between past and present, but is also responsible for tradition's coming-into-being, by continually interpreting it anew, giving fresh life to the ideas of the past. Furthermore, with regard to those who see the preservation of traditional truths as implying the need for strict adherence to the ways of the past, Eliot cautions: “If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. . . . Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Eliot's dynamic conception of tradition as the locus of historical knowledge and understanding, with its stress on individual agency here, is thus strongly reminiscent of Gadamer's. In particular, Gadamer similarly insists that tradition as a source of authority does not simply exist by virtue of inertia or the historical force of the past upon the present. Rather, he indicates, there is in any vital tradition a continual, active process of affirming and embracing in some novel way the meanings of the past, so that they are appropriated and applied in new ways to the present.Footnote ⁴¹

Christopher Dawson and Eliot's Intellectualist Philosophy of History

In light of the areas of convergence outlined above, the existing literature can be viewed as substantially correct in its observation that Eliot anticipates important insights about the nature of interpretation in Gadamer's thinking. However, the scholarship nonetheless overlooks a key difference regarding the hermeneutical theories of these two thinkers and their respective efforts to overcome the relativizing assumptions of positivism in the human sciences. Although both thinkers emphasize the historical nature of understanding and see truth claims as dependent on tradition for their articulation and reception, Eliot ultimately conceives of metaphysical and religious truth in intellectualist terms by maintaining a division between the world of ideas and the world of experience, a premise which Gadamer fundamentally rejects in his philosophical hermeneutics. Key to understanding this feature in Eliot's theory of interpretation is an appreciation of and a return to the context that gave rise to his hermeneutical inquiry. For Eliot, it will be recalled, the problem with the epistemological outlook of the modern human sciences and the assumption of the subject-object relation in observing social phenomena was not merely the pervasiveness of interpretation in understanding and the inability to bracket all of our prejudices, but the related distortion or neglect of what goes on in the minds of those being observed. Thus, more than the problematic implications for those interested in the possibility of the human sciences, Eliot's principal concern was the danger this posed to all metaphysical and religious claims to truth, insofar as it undermined their status as contending accounts of the nature of reality.

Consequently, one of the greatest threats that Eliot came to perceive in the modern age was the pervasive secular outlook promoted by explanations of reality that shared in the basic premises of positivism. In particular, he increasingly viewed the privileged status of empirical observation as problematic, insofar as it tended to devolve into reductionist theories of social life that explained all human experience with reference to observable causes in the natural or material order. And as the twentieth century drew on, Eliot began to observe the threat of secularism from an additional source—the predominant social philosophies that had emerged on both sides of the cultural division between East and West. Thus, Marxism had sought to explain all social phenomena, including the operations of the human intellect and its beliefs about reality, strictly in terms of the economic processes within which they arose. Meanwhile, Western society, typified by the American social ideal, had shown itself devoted to a utilitarian outlook that similarly reduced social life to an aggregate, economic calculus. It was in this intellectual climate that Eliot found himself called, once again, to assert the dignity of truth claims vis-à-vis the relativizing tendencies of these approaches to human affairs that shared positivism's privileging of empirical phenomena in their accounts of social reality.

However, by the mid-twentieth century, as Eliot was composing his two major works of cultural commentary, his opposition toward such reductionist approaches to social life had hardened into a more extreme epistemological orientation, particularly as he came under the influence of the historian Christopher Dawson (later, the first incumbent of the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard Divinity School).Footnote ⁴² For Dawson not only shared Eliot's concerns regarding the excesses of empirical explanation, his historical sensibility also resonated with Eliot's existing philosophical orientation. As a result, it was during this period that Dawson exercised a profound influence on Eliot.Footnote ⁴³ And, in connection with this influence, one begins to observe an evolution in Eliot's understanding of historical truth—and, indeed, in his broader philosophy of history—which can be seen as developing into a substantially intellectualist position echoing that which one finds in Dawson's philosophy. Increasingly, this migration of Eliot's thinking was driven by his concern to demonstrate, together with Dawson, that the interior realm of human thought and belief were not only incapable of being reduced to material interests, but that the empirical or natural realm was, in an ontological sense, independent from and subordinate to the realm of the spirit, which alone was constitutive of the human history that transcended the laws of mechanism.Footnote ⁴⁴

Eliot's cultural commentary during this period thus draws heavily on the work of Dawson as a result of their shared concern for the survival of Western civilization, which both saw as threatened by an erosion within the modern consciousness of any supernatural underpinnings supporting the individual's conception of reality.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Dawson, the inhumanity of the political systems of the twentieth century could be explained with reference to their underlying materialist ontologies, which he had broadly associated with both Marxist ideology and the capitalist systems of the West.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dawson himself acknowledges this shared outlook with Eliot in his review of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), where he recognizes the value of Eliot having redirected the focus away from hard policy decisions toward “the tremendous dangers which threaten man's spiritual freedom” that is entailed by all such mechanized systems.Footnote ⁴⁷ Still, it was Marxism, more narrowly, that Dawson had singled out in the preceding decades as representing the most explicit assault on the interior realm of human freedom and the spirit, insofar as the means of production and the relations of production—the substructure of society, in Marxist terminology—were now conceived as the “ultimate realities” of social life.Footnote ⁴⁸ The well-known implication, which so troubled both Dawson and Eliot, was the reductive determination for all that belonged to the realm of human consciousness: “Everything else—religion, art, philosophy, spiritual life—stands on a lower plane of reality, they are a dream world of shadows cast on the sleeping mind by the physical processes of the real world of matter and mechanism.”Footnote ⁴⁹

For Eliot, one of the main attractions to Dawson's thinking was therefore his confrontation with this problem of empirical determination, which was at the center of his entire life's work as a historian. Repeatedly, Dawson had asserted his opposition to the historiographical tendency of his age to reduce particular historical developments to their material circumstances and the contending pressures of rational self-interest. Dawson's synoptic account of the origins of this tendency in modern thought is succinctly articulated in Progress and Religion (1929).Footnote ⁵⁰ There, he traces the history of the idea of progress to its origins in the Enlightenment's unbounded faith in reason and its desire to provide a scientific grounding for all knowledge, which would then no longer be impeded by the dogmatism of religion.Footnote ⁵¹ Dawson shows that the latter's ultimate legacy was, along with discrediting the idea of progress itself, the thoroughgoing application of the mechanistic view of nature to humanity.Footnote ⁵² Consequently, the spirit of the age even later in the nineteenth century was that biologists such as Darwin and economists from Ricardo to Marx were all adopting the “mechanistic hypothesis.”Footnote ⁵³

Dawson's confrontation with these reductionist tendencies, which then became so influential on Eliot's view of historical truth, entailed a recovery of two philosophical resources, one ancient and the other modern. In the first place, he came to draw heavily on the thinking of St. Augustine for his Christian understanding of the movement of human history, as well as his theological conception of human culture.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dawson (and the mature Eliot) thus inherited two key features at the center of St. Augustine's thinking—intellectualism and metaphysical dualism—which substantially informed the metahistory that Dawson was developing. According to this Augustinian view, history came to be seen as the process of divine sanctification of human affairs, that is, the incorporation of the lower, material world into the universal moral order, which itself was seen in exclusively spiritual terms.Footnote ⁵⁵ As such, the realm of culture—the unchosen way of life that depends on “external circumstances” such as “place and work and language and social institutions”Footnote ⁵⁶—is conceived as that part of the natural world that is subjected to a spiritual ordering, a meeting point between the immaterial and the material realms, as it were.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is therefore “religion” alone, understood as spiritual belief or faith in the divine, that transcends our temporality and offers meaning or significance to culture, our life as it is concretely lived. To be sure, both Dawson and Eliot acknowledge that religion must always be “incarnated” or expressed in some concrete cultural context.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, Dawson is clear that such sanctification of the material world does not imply the transcendence of what is sanctified: “However completely a culture may seem to be dominated by religion, there remains a fundamental dualism between the order of culture which is part of the order of nature and the principle of faith which transcends the natural order and finds its centre outside the world of man.”Footnote ⁵⁹

In the second place, Dawson draws heavily on nineteenth century Romanticism, which had reacted strongly against the atomistic tendencies of the eighteenth century, preferring to see societies as organic wholes that are defined by a shared spiritual and intuitive union among a people.Footnote ⁶⁰ He thus joined in the Romantic reassertion of the freedom of the spirit against the forces of mechanism, a movement whose roots he located in the Renaissance, which had in fact drawn from its Christian predecessors an “ascetic discipline and intensive cultivation of the inner life.”Footnote ⁶¹ What Dawson recognized as the value of Hegel's philosophy of history, despite his strong reservations about the latter's statism, was the correction it offered to physical science, which could only witness the eternal cycle of natural phenomena, whereas Hegel's universal History, he believed, had restored transcendental significance to the natural world.Footnote ⁶² An appropriate philosophy of history, therefore, must see individual cultures in terms of both the “First Cosmos” of nature and the “Second Cosmos” of human thought,Footnote ⁶³ for an overemphasis in either direction would lead, respectively, to the naturalistic relativism of Spengler or the extreme idealism of Collingwood.Footnote ⁶⁴

Still, it ought not to be inferred that the attempt to avoid the extremes of naturalism and idealism within this account of culture implies no privileging among the two realms in Dawson's, and ultimately Eliot's, philosophy of history. On the contrary, Eliot follows Dawson's view closely, namely that religion is the ultimate creative force that shapes culture, an influence which—although capable of working in the opposite direction—overwhelmingly sees the spiritual realm as more significant.Footnote ⁶⁵ This particular indebtedness becomes clearest in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, where Eliot adopts what he periodically refers to as a “sociological” or “sociologist's” perspective,Footnote ⁶⁶ in which he echoes Dawson by calling attention to the formative role of religion in shaping culture. Eliot thus insists, “While we believe that the same religion may inform a variety of cultures, we may ask whether any culture could come into being, or maintain itself, without a religious basis.”Footnote ⁶⁷ To be sure, Eliot is clear—consistent with his earlier views—that he does not think it possible from this “sociological” perspective to stand outside of Western culture to make such observations as a “detached and disinterested” observer.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nonetheless, he uses this term to situate a fundamentally Dawsonian claim regarding the determinative influence of religion on culture, which he sees as an unavoidable “fact” of social life.Footnote ⁶⁹

In perhaps his most prominent illustration of this influence on his philosophy of history, Eliot claims that his purpose in this text is not to attempt to persuade anyone of the truth of Christianity, but to assert the role of religious belief in the making of European history:

Eliot's observations in this passage should therefore be seen as illustrating the Dawsonian thesis regarding the relationship between religion and culture that Eliot has appropriated. He aims to assert the point that the raw material of social life would mean nothing without the ideational ordering of the spirit or intellect, which is the impetus for the cultural developments that define human history. Consequently, while the material and the immaterial realms must ultimately converge in the metaxy of individual and culture, it is clear that for Eliot, as for Dawson, religion has a superior ordering power that “gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the framework for a culture,” which is to say: it is the lens of spiritual valuation that organizes or structures events in the material world.Footnote ⁷¹

The idea that culture flows from religion, which is conceived as the seminal ideational source of every form of communal life, thus becomes central to both of Eliot's major cultural commentaries during this period.Footnote ⁷² However, it ought to be noted that there is more to this privileging of religion over culture than an idealist inversion of a materialist account of historical development. Also discernible in the relationship between religion and culture to which Eliot subscribes is the sense in which the transcendent is identified exclusively with “religion,” understood as faith, belief, or doctrine regarding the nature of the divine that is maintained in the collective consciousness of a people. In this sense, the regulative function of religion in the realm of culture is, for Eliot, not merely “sociological” (understood in his sense) but also normative.Footnote ⁷³ In other words, it is not only the lens through which the material world is organized and historical culture develops, but the source of standards with which the activity of human life is to be measured. However, because Eliot maintains a metaphysical dualism in his understanding of transcendence, which sees the latter in exclusively spiritual terms, he conceives the truth of these standards in terms of intellectual principles, which become the reference point for judging and ordering the concrete life of society.

To be sure, this is not to say—and Eliot is quite explicit on this point—that all members of the Christian society he depicts in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) must bring their behavior into conformity with the principles of Christianity through the use of practical reason combined with a theological understanding of Christian doctrine. For Eliot explicitly recognizes that in “the great mass of humanity,” whose activities are largely focused on “the soil, or the sea, or the machine,” it may simply be through custom that their behavior is brought into conformity with Christian ideals, since “their capacity for thinking about the objects of faith is small.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In the large class of citizens he refers to as the “Christian Community,” Eliot tells us that what is required, as a minimum, is only “a largely unconscious behaviour,” and he acknowledges that the acceptance of Christian principles will not be intellectual but will tend to be “a matter of behaviour and habit.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In light of this acknowledgment, it must be made clear that the argument here is not that Eliot neglects religious behavior or practice in any wholesale fashion. Nor could it even be claimed that Eliot fails to recognize the influence of religious practice on belief, which he does occasionally mention.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that behavior may so closely approximate belief—as when it becomes the “whole way of life of a people”—that the two become nearly indistinguishable.Footnote ⁷⁷

However, what Eliot reveals throughout his discussion of religion and culture is that religion is the ideational component, culture the material, and that, however “integrated” the two may be, it is the former which may contain “truth, partial truth, or falsity.”Footnote ⁷⁸ And it is to promote such integration of true religion and culture that Eliot sketches the organization of his Christian society the way that he does. Thus, Eliot describes another of his social classes, his “Community of Christians,” as comprised of “consciously and thoughtfully practicing Christians . . . of intellectual and spiritual superiority,” who are said to possess “superior intellectual and/or spiritual gifts.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Their knowledge of Christian standards is, consequently, to inform their support for “a Christian philosophy of life” in the education system of this society, and therefore these standards must be rationally knowable if Eliot's emphasis here on this class’ intellectual gifts is to be of any import.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although not a clerisy in the strict sense, Eliot is nonetheless clear that their role in “form[ing] the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation” is also based on these intellectual and spiritual gifts.Footnote ⁸¹ Consequently, whenever a culture is properly and thoroughly ordered by Christianity, Eliot argues that such religious behavior must ultimately be seen as “regulated by reference to Christian principle”Footnote ⁸²—even when the individuals whose behavior is brought into conformity are not entirely knowledgeable of the source of these standards.Footnote ⁸³ The standards, or truth of Christianity is, even in circumstances such as these, conceived of by Eliot in terms of “Christian principles,”Footnote ⁸⁴ which are understood as the reference points for judging our concrete behavior, and in those cases where he recognizes a role for customary religious practices, they are not seen as a source of truth but as the concrete experience over which the truth of Christianity presides.

The Concreteness of Religious Truth

What is overlooked, therefore, among those who see anticipations of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics in Eliot's thinking, is the latter's understanding of religious truth as an intellectual phenomenon, that is, as a set of principles or doctrines which are held by a community of believers across time that sanctify or order life as it is lived in the material world. Such a view is inconsistent with Gadamer's thinking, which sees truth as emerging from particular customs, habits, and practices—the concrete tradition within which we are already-under-way—and through which the transcendent may be experienced in real historical communities with others. To be clear, this is not to say that when viewed through Gadamer's eyes, Eliot inappropriately reverses the relationship between religion and culture, such that he misses the formative role of the concrete element in culture in shaping religion. For, to assert this, given Eliot's understanding of culture, would merely be to insist that the arbitrary and contingent facts of the material world have a role in shaping one's apprehension of the divine. Rather, it is to note the normative import of Gadamer's practical philosophy, which comprehends our encounter with the transcendent concretely,Footnote ⁸⁵ as a distinct feature of his theory of understanding vis-à-vis that of Eliot. Informed by a concrete set of practices that exist over time, religious truth can, according to Gadamer's view,Footnote ⁸⁶ be seen as the expression of sacred ways of living, that is, the transcendent quality of the concrete, or the good as it is more truly “incarnate” than Eliot had conceived.

Perhaps more than any other thinker in the modern era, Gadamer sees himself as part of the “metaphysical tradition beginning with Heraclitus and Parmenides, continuing with Plato (especially the later Plato), Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Augustine, and Hegel”Footnote ⁸⁷ and at once as drawing on the proto-existentialist philosophy of Heidegger, who sought to restore an appreciation for the concrete, embodied conditions that inform our knowledge of the good. It is the latter influence, in particular, that distinguishes Gadamer's philosophy from that of Eliot, insofar as Gadamer gains an understanding, particularly through the early Heidegger's study of Aristotle, of the good as residing in particular enactments, and that such concretizations of the good, instead of conforming to Platonic forms (eidos), are seen as having an analogical relationship to one another.Footnote ⁸⁸ Demonstrating both the latent concreteness that is typically neglected within Plato's metaphysics, as well as the incipient historical awareness in Aristotle's ethics, Gadamer argues that both thinkers, in fact, embrace a moral philosophy that sees the universal as residing in this world and not apart from it. Thus according to Gadamer, Plato's often misleading locutions used to articulate the good—such as choriston (separate)—must be understood metaphorically and indicate not a literal separation from the phenomenal realm, but merely the intellect's attempt to link together the quality of “good” across a variety of concrete instantiations.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, far from hypostatizing such conceptualizations, Gadamer sees the universal good, the One, as coming-into-being in this world through its participation (methexis) in the particularity of the Many.Footnote ⁹⁰

Drawing on this concrete metaphysics, more traditionally associated exclusively with the thinking of Aristotle, Gadamer thus sees the discovery of the good taking place within the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as a process of learning from and acquiring historical experience, as well as the phronetic application of concrete precedents and examples within a tradition.Footnote ⁹¹ However, it ought to be noted that Gadamer is also adamant that an ethical tradition cannot be conceived as a tool that is to be reached for in the moment of action. Although the individual actor is able to draw on such models or precedents for the enactment of virtue (arête), the tradition is conceived as constituting the person one already is, such that every ethical actor must be seen as “always already” under way and as having previously acquired a customary sense of what is right and appropriate.Footnote ⁹² Such traditionary knowledge thus informs the sense of “fit” that allows for the application of precedent to the present situation. Consequently, proper interpretive application of the past always depends upon the prior formation of the person, who has developed the necessary hexeis and phronesis from the lived experience (Erfahrung) of the ethical life.

These insights into Gadamer's practical philosophy have substantial consequences for his theory of understanding and the parallels that may (and may not) be drawn with the thinking of Eliot. The principal implication is that while Gadamer clearly shares with Eliot the view that a horizon of understanding is made possible by prejudices we inherit from tradition, the existential dimensions of Gadamer's hermeneutics entail that such prejudices are always formed by concrete experience. And it is in this way that Gadamer may be said to collapse the dualism on which many, such as Eliot, rely between the metaphysical and the physical. The relationship between the world of experience and consciousness in Gadamer's thinking is ultimately dialectical, such that our communication is at once seen as always deeply implicated in a concrete way of life and its experience of reality, while that concrete manner of living, in turn, is informed by individual and collective articulations of experience. The implication for the present essay is that, insofar as we express and successfully communicate the experience of the divine or the transcendent to one another, that must always depend upon prior lived experience in actual religious communities. Our articulations of religious truth, in other words, are deeply imbued with this background, such that any successful communication will tacitly rely on a concrete preparation for the reception of what is said.Footnote ⁹³ And, in the case of religious truth, this preparatory experience will range from the most overtly religious practices within the historical community to those aspects of ordinary life that have a more latent, sacramental quality.Footnote ⁹⁴ Whenever religious truth is communicated among human beings, it must, in Gadamer's terms, be the expression of that which is apprehended at this prior, experiential level of reality.

The implication of Gadamer's existential sensibility and his emphasis on the “this-worldliness of being,” according to Joel Weinsheimer, is that Gadamer “views this world as itself beyond, and correlatively the divine comes to be conceived as much nearer than we are wont to think it.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Moreover, Weinsheimer notes that this concrete presence of the eternal is not limited to ancient Greek religion, which is often used in Gadamer's illustrations, but is found in Christianity as well, as demonstrated in Paul's statement that God, who made the world and everything in it, is “not far from every one of us; for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Common to these religious traditions is thus “a sense of God's immediacy to us and the corollary notion of our being within God,” which, Weinsheimer explains, is also prominent in Gadamer's philosophical ethics.Footnote ⁹⁷ Ethical knowledge, for Gadamer, is “knowing from within, because in this, as in every instance, knowing is indissolubly tied to being.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Therefore, it may be said that just as Gadamer famously calls into question the specious antithesis of the Enlightenment between ethos (habituated practice, custom) and logos (reasoning) with his critique of abstract reason, he similarly calls into question such a division between ethos and mythos (story of the divine) with respect to our articulation of religious truth. By moving readily between the concepts of “mythos” and “logos,” which he sees as constituting an “indissoluble unity,”Footnote ⁹⁹ Gadamer demonstrates that the ultimate grounding of both is the historical ethos in which we are raised and habituated.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The “concrete moral consciousness,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ which Gadamer sees as preformed in Sittlichkeit, thus informs both our ethical and religious experiences and makes possible our knowledge and articulation of the transcendent, however incompletely. Our knowledge of religious truth must, therefore, be seen as deeply rooted and embodied in our concrete religious practices—such as our rituals and patterns of worship, the institution of the church, the loving relationships among members, and the willful works in which they are engaged—which we come to know, not as belief or doctrine, but ultimately through their performance.Footnote ¹⁰² Tied as it is to the ethos which becomes part of who we are, our knowledge of religious truth is thus bound up with these experiences, which we engage in as historical customs, habits, and practices.