The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse the many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends. Prayer is insufficient tribute to a genuine deity, who usually requires religious observance, in the form of ritual and sacrifice. There are many kinds of observance; but in our tradition – the tradition which includes Hellenic, Judaic and Christian cults, and which grew first in the fertile shores of the Mediterranean – we can discern an interesting pattern.
First, there is the community – the collective ‘we’ of dwelling and belonging, the social organism which thrives and suffers as one. The community (or a unified part of it) congregates at the shrine, and undertakes there a collective act, whereby the experience of membership is rehearsed and renewed.
Second, imposed upon and discovered in the feeling of community is the experience of pollution, separation or ‘fall’: the individual’s sense, in the midst of the collective, that he is nevertheless in some way cast out and excluded, through some fault for which he must atone. Sometimes this is a moral fault -in other words, a crime that would be recognised as such even without the benefit of a religious perspective. Often, however, the religion that cures the fault also creates it – as with the Greek miasma, or with the pollution that comes from eating some forbidden animal, or with the idea of ‘original sin’ (i.e. a fault which is mine by nature and inescapable). Many who come to the shrine have no other fault than the original one – the ‘crime of existence itself, as Schopenhauer puts it. But all have lived through the temptations for which the ritual atones.
Third, there follows an act of sacrifice, which is the primary ingredient in the process of atonement. Something is ‘offered’ at the altar, though not necessarily to anyone in particular; and this offering is a custom, regularly repeated, and framed by ceremonial gestures.
Fourth, the ritual transforms the offering from a natural object into something holy and therefore supernatural. Ritual is shrouded in the sanctity that it creates. Its words and gestures are archaic, mysterious, and all the more imperative because they have come down to us unexplained. The voice of ancestors speaks through the ritual, and the one who seeks to change or distort what is done at the altar commits the primary act of sacrilege: he re-creates, and therefore desecrates, the god.
Finally, by a wonderful inversion, which is perhaps the archetype of all miracles, the sacrifice becomes a sacrament, something offered from the altar to the very person whose gift it is, and which raises him from pollution to purity, from separation to communion, from fall to redemption.
Such a pattern is not observed everywhere, of course.1 But it lies deep in our own tradition. It can be found throughout the ancient world – in the cults of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, for example, and of Diana at Ephesus – and forms the core experience of the Christian Eucharist. And with this pattern of behaviour comes also a pattern of belief. The ceremony is construed as an act of worship, and the thing worshipped is believed to be both distinct from the worshippers and yet united to them by an intense personal concern. The god is a supernatural person, who ‘resides’ in the shrine where he is worshipped, and who also travels ubiquitously but invisibly in the natural world.
We should distinguish two kinds of religious understanding: the mythical and the theological. Stories of divinities and ghosts, who journey through the world brimful of interest in our doings there, are inseparable from the religious impulse. Unlike the theological doctrines of religion, they give no answer to our mortal questions – no account of the cause or the goal of our existence. They may suggest answers; but they are valued and remembered for other reasons. The myth animates the world, by projecting intention and desire into natural processes, by describing nature as a thinking, feeling thing, and thereby lifting the natural to the supernatural. In myth we seem to confront a story which asks to be believed, without being believed as true; a metaphor that we re-enact in the literal language of our own emotions. We find a parallel to the mythic consciousness in art, and many of those (like Jung) who have noticed the parallel have used it to explain the experience of beauty. Myth involves a special kind of thought: a projection of consciousness which also clarifies consciousness, by mingling it with the natural order.
Sacred rites and observances are in a certain sense meticulous. Their purpose and power lie in their exact performance. Like magic spells (to which they are closely related) they must be conducted to the letter, without error, as custom dictates. Mistakes may be made: but it is important that they be mistakes rather than innovations, since any spontaneous innovation carries a risk of sacrilege. The difference between correct observance and sacrilege may be so minute as to be imperceptible to the outsider: the question whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or with three once split the Orthodox Church of Russia, with momentous consequences that still affect us.
If we set those facts aside, and consider religious belief simply as a piece of philosophical theology – a speculative answer to the riddle of existence – then it would strike us as extraordinary that there should be reserved, for those who make some small error in their reasoning, the name of heretic, and the terrible punishments which that name invites. In religious belief and observance, however, it is not the large differences that count but the small ones. The nearer someone is to me in his religious convictions, the greater my revulsion at the ‘errors’ which divide us. The haughty reserve of the Lebanese Shi’ite towards his Christian neighbour in no way compares with his hatred for the Sunni rival, and the distaste with which the Calvinist views the atheist of the modern city seldom matches the vehemence with which he condemns the Catholic Church. Even in the secular religions of our day the fear of heretics has engaged a large part of the church’s energies – witness the constant ‘struggle’ of the communist church against ‘deviationism’, ‘opportunism’, ‘Trotskyism’, ‘revisionism’ and the rest. Only from a safe distance can any of this be viewed with amusement. For those in the vicinity of real religion, the world presents a stark and disturbing choice between the absolute safety of the orthodox creed, and the mortal danger of denying it from a position within its territory. Heresy and sacrilege are dangerous because they threaten the community: the meticulousness of the religious rite is a sign that religion is not merely a system of belief, but a criterion of membership.
The supernatural realm becomes a reality for us whenever we confront the mystery of death and hover above the abyss. We know then that the riddle of existence cannot be understood in words; that the doctrines of religion, to the extent that they are merely doctrines, must fall far short of an answer. In confronting death we find ourselves facing the vertiginous, the bottomless, the unknowable – the supernatural in its most uncanny form. A primeval horror inhabits all of us – a horror of night and closure and nothingness. The religious rite dispels this horror, uniting us to the community not here and now only, but in the land of the dead.
Anthropologists have noticed the tendency among the people they study to assimilate birth and death to the ‘transitions’ which signify a change in social status. Funeral rites and birth ceremonies (baptisms) are like the ‘rites of passage’ that accompany initiation, marriage and the awakening of the tribe from peace to war.2 All these things are experienced collectively, as revelations of the tie of membership. That is how the agony of a death is overcome by those who survive it: death is regarded as a transition to another state within the community. The dead person joins the congress of ancestors, and thereby remains in communication with the living. In marking this transition as ‘sacred’, the tribe is lifting death to the supernatural level, and endowing it – as it endows marriage, birth and war – with divine authority. In the vicinity of death the living are commanded. Moreover, by honouring the dead, recognising obligations towards them, and treating them as part of the community (though a part that has been ‘transfigured’) a tribe acquires a sense of its identity and duration across generations. The cult of ancestors is the surest motive for sacrifice, and for the ‘readiness to die’ on which the future of a society depends. It goes hand in hand with caring for offspring, and for offspring’s offspring, who come into being as a sacred pledge to those who have departed. The desecration of a grave is, on this account, a primary form of sacrilege, as is any comparable disrespect shown towards the dead. From the sacrilegious treatment of the dead all other impieties stem – and in impious times (such as ours) the disrespect towards ancestors becomes a recurring motif of public life. It is important to bear this in mind when considering the current ‘culture wars’.
The funeral rite is a salve for the wound of death because it unites the tribe around its core experience of membership. The dead person does not go from the community, but becomes a permanent, though invisible, part of it. This need not involve a denial of death or a belief in personal immortality: the ritual makes sense at a purely symbolic level, without the benefit of such reflective commentaries. And it shows us the natural origins of the experience of the sacred. Those things are sacred in which the spirit of the community has taken residence, and in which our destiny is at stake: as it is at stake, for example, in sexual feelings, in attitudes to children and parents, in the rituals of membership and initiation whereby the first-person plural – the ‘we’ – is formed. The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become ‘my’ affair, in which ‘we’ no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.
It goes without saying that a common culture binds a society together. But it does so in a special way. The unity of a great society can be achieved by terror, by confronting people with a common danger or an ‘enemy within’ – by variously playing with the threat of death, in the manner of modern dictators. A common culture is an altogether more peaceful method, which unites the present members by dedicating them to the past and future of the community. Death is not a terror, but the benign catalyst of the social order, the transition which ensures that all of us, in time, will join the community of ancestors and become sacred and transfigured as they are.
Since the Enlightenment, it has been normal for Europeans to think of society as a contract. The novelty of the idea is two-fold: first, it implies that social membership is a free choice. Second, it suggests that all members of society are currently living. Neither of those thoughts is true. But, without religion, people tend to believe that they are true. Even if we recognise the social contract for what it is – a fiction that hides the empty heart of modern politics – we nevertheless find it hard to formulate our social and political obligations in other terms. Burke reacted violently to the social contract as interpreted by the French Revolutionaries. By making the ‘people’ sovereign, he argued, the Revolution had disenfranchised the dead and the unborn. Care for the dead and care for the unborn go hand-in-hand. Sacrilegious abuse of the dead is also a squandering of social capital. Conversely, by respecting the dead and their wishes we keep intact the accumulated resources of society, and place an obstacle before the living, in their desire to seize all savings for themselves. When a school or foundation is dedicated to the dead, then knowledge and property are rescued from current emergencies, and laid by for future generations. The concept of sacrilege is therefore a safeguarding and conserving force. Without it all resources are open to pillage – a fact of which we, heirs to the Enlightenment, are acutely aware.
Anthropologists study people from an external perspective. They justify practices in terms that would never be used by the people themselves, whose perspective is the internal one of membership. To a visiting anthropologist who observes the rites and customs of a tribe, piety towards the dead has a function: it is justified by the benefit that it confers upon the living. But this benefit is far from the mind of the tribesman. He honours the dead because honour is due to them: his own and others’ future has no part in the calculation. Indeed, if he adopted the perspective of the anthropologist, the tribesman would be a threat to the very order that he wishes to protect. For he would be opening the door to doubt, both in himself and in his neighbours. Piety is a means to social unity only when not treated as a means. The function of piety is fulfilled when people do what piety requires, but for no other reason than that piety requires it.
The clash between the internal and external perspectives is a familiar feature of modern experience: Burke’s defence of prejudice is one of the first and most vivid instances. For how can you defend prejudice except from the assumption of an open mind? Modern people long for membership; but membership exists only among people who do not long for it, who have no real conception of it, who are so utterly immersed in it that they find it inscribed on the face of nature itself. Such people have immediate access, through common culture, to the ethical vision of man.
The ethical vision is what all religions deliver, and what all societies need – the vision of human beings as objects of judgement. Whether the judge be man or god; whether accounts are settled in this world or the next; whether natural or supernatural powers redeem us, judgement is the core of religion. Looked at from the external point of view this judgement is the imagined voice of the tribe, holding its members to account for the long-term common interest.3 But from the internal point of view judgement is a destiny, from which there is no escape, since no deed can be hidden from supernatural eyes.
The ethical vision endows human matter with a personal form, and therefore lifts us above nature, to set us side by side with our judge. If we are judged then we must be free, and answerable for our actions. The free being is not just an organism: he has a life of his own, which is uniquely his and which he creates through his choices. Hence he stands above nature in the very activities which reveal him to be a part of it. He is not a creature of the moment, but on the contrary a creature extended through time, and compromised forever by his actions. You are answerable now for the deeds of yesterday and accountable tomorrow for the deeds of today. When you stand before the judge it is not your act which is condemned or praised but you yourself, who are the same at the moment of judgement as you were at the moment of action and as you will be for ever more.
This long-term answerability means that the free being is set apart from the natural order. His acts and omissions flow from the inner well-spring of intention. His motives are ranged on the scale of virtue and vice, and he is seen as supernatural beings are seen: subject, not object; cause, not effect; the invisible centre of his world, but in some way not truly a part of it. Kant referred in this connection to the ‘transcendental self which is the locus of our freedom. But older idioms strive for the same idea. Soul, spirit, self; the ‘I am’ of God’s word to Moses, the nafs (soul, self, individual) of the Koran, and St Paul’s metaphor of the face (prosopon):
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (I Corinthians 13.)
All those idioms are attempts to capture the same vision, of the agent in the world who is judged from a point of view outside it – a point of view which is also his own.
The ethical vision of man confers value on the human form, on the human face, the human deed and the human word. It permits the higher emotions, through which we ennoble our lives and the lives of those around us. Erotic and parental love pass through the merely ‘empirical’ being whom we hold in our arms, and target the elusive and transcendental centre, the god-like nothing which is everything, the light that shines from human eyes but which shines also from an elusive point beyond them. This revelation of the individual in his freedom forms one of the primary themes of high art, and it is easy to see why. For it both attracts and forbids description. It causes awe and elation, as though in the presence of a divine mystery. And that is exactly what it is, according to Dante’s matchless account in La vita nuova.
From the internal point of view, the ethical vision of man is a constant and self-renewing motive to action. It prompts us to accord respect and loyalty to other people. It confers importance, mystery and sanctity on our meanest transactions, and irradiates our actions with a meaningfulness that is not of this world. Hence, from the external point of view, it is a priceless addition to the bond of society. No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in the faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others. For the anthropologist, the religion is the mainstay of the culture, and therefore the guarantee of social knowledge.
The ethical vision safeguards social capital; it also releases and assuages social emotions. A common culture permits the deeper feelings, and at the same time educates them. I shall take an example, from Homer’s Odyssey.
In the hurry to leave Circe’s palace, Elpenor, one of Odysseus’s band of hetairoi, had fallen while drunk to his death. Odysseus and the remaining members of his crew had fled the enchanted isle, leaving Elpenor unburied. When later Odysseus summons the spirits of the dead, it is Elpenor who, in his urgency, is first to appear. He addresses his lord and master thus:
Now I beseech you, by all those whom you left behind, by your wife and by the father who reared you as a child, and by Telemachus your only son whom you left within your halls, that you will, sailing from the Kingdom of Hades, put in with your good ship at the isle of Aeaea. And there my lord I beseech you to remember me and not to leave me there unwept and unburied, lest I should become a cause of divine wrath against you. But burn me there with all my arms and raise a mound for me by the shore of the grey sea, in memory of an unfortunate man, so that those yet to be will know the place. Do this for me, and on my tomb plant the oar that I used to pull when I was living and rowing beside my companions. (Bk. XI, 11. 66–78.)
It is not simply that Elpenor is asking to be buried; he is asking to be mourned. ‘Do not leave me,’ he implores, ‘unwept and unburied’ (aklauton kai athapton). Odysseus knows what to do: he must burn Elpenor’s body, mourn his passing, and erect a monument. The unborn are crucially involved in this oblation to the dead, and in honouring Elpenor Odysseus acts also for ‘those who are yet to be’. His actions are connected, in a way that is immediate to Odysseus’s perception, with Odysseus’s own love for his family and respect for the father who reared him. The common culture embraces these complex states of mind and reinforces their validity. Elpenor, by demanding grief, confirms all other dutiful feelings. He is confronting Odysseus as one ethical being confronts another – the object of judgement.
No reader of Homer can fail to be impressed by the natural and uncorrupted feeling that flows so abundantly through the characters, making them transparent to each other and also to themselves. In every situation they ‘know what to feel’, and move unhesitatingly to express and vindicate their view of things. The example of Elpenor casts light on this. The rites and customs of a common culture close the gap between emotion and action: they tell people what to do, precisely in those situations where the ethical vision intrudes – where love, grief, anger or revenge are the proper motives, and where we face each other soul to soul. And because they are socially constructed and socially endorsed, these rites and customs legitimise not only the actions but the feelings that advance through them. It is easier to feel serious emotions, when this is what society expects; easier still when provided with a repertoire of accepted gestures, through which to choreograph and bring order to one’s wretchedness. And that is why Elpenor can demand to be mourned: under the benign jurisdiction of a common culture, grief is something you do.
The ethical vision of our nature gives sense to our lives. But it is demanding. It asks us to stand up to judgement. We must be fully human, while breathing the air of angels; natural and supernatural at once. A community that has survived its gods has three options. It can find some secular path to the ethical life. Or it can fake the higher emotions, while living without them. Or it can give up pretending, and so collapse, as Burke put it, into the ‘dust and powder of individuality’. These are the stark choices that confront us, and the rest of this book defends the first of them – the way of high culture, which teaches us to live as if our lives mattered eternally. But first we must go back to Elpenor.
In modern conditions grief is not an easy thing to feel; every person has a reason to avoid it, and may very well try to avoid it, even in the presence of its proper object, which is the death of someone loved. A sort of busying anxiety intervenes to arrest emotion – a haste to clear away the debris, and a numbness which refuses to believe. Emily Dickinson describes the experience in memorable words:
She mentioned, and forgot;
Then lightly as a reed
Bent to the water, struggled scarce,
Consented, and was dead.
And we, we placed the hair
And then an awful leisure was,
Belief to regulate.
In response to death it is important to feel something, and yet there is no precedent, since every death is original, the loss of just this individual, just this judging gaze. The demand to feel is addressed to me, here, now; it is not detachable from the imperatives of my individual life and present situation. And looking around I find no help, no example, no repertoire on which to draw and with which to elicit the unembarrassed sympathy of my real or imaginary tribe. Deep emotion demands the unseen chorus – the others who will dance with it; when there is no chorus, we flee into solitude and mute refusal. We begin to lose confidence in the vision which makes human life the centre of a cosmic drama. Our emotions then come to us as though from outside, bearing no mark of self, of intention, of commitment or answerability. An ‘awful leisure’ overcomes us: the leisure of a life that flees from judgement.
There is an important parallel here between common culture and high culture. Since the Enlightenment philosophers have debated the value of high culture (though not necessarily using that term to describe it): what exactly do we learn through the study of art, literature, history and music? Are we simply memorising dates and facts, lines and techniques, accumulating a body of literary scholarship? Or is there some other kind of knowledge involved? Here is one answer to those questions:
Knowledge includes three distinct kinds: knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge what. I know that uranium is radioactive; I know how to ride a bicycle; and I sometimes know what to do, what to say or what to feel. The first kind of knowledge is information (of which science is the systematic part); the second is skill; the third virtue. In reverse order these correspond to the three inputs into a rational life: the ends, the means and the facts. Knowing what to do, Aristotle suggested, is a matter of right judgement (orthos logos); but it also involves feeling rightly. The virtuous person ‘knows what to feel’, and this means feeling what the situation requires: the right emotion, towards the right object, on the right occasion and in the right degree. Moral education has just such knowledge as its goal: it is an education of the emotions. The virtue of the Greek hero is of a piece with his emotional certainty, and this certainty is the gift of culture, and of the higher vision which culture makes available. By setting the individual within the context of the group, by providing him with ritual expressions and the path to collective release, by uniting him in thought with the unborn and the dead, and by imbuing his thoughts with ideas of sanctity and sacrilege, the culture enables the hero to give safe and sincere expression to the feelings that social life requires. The common culture tells him how and what to feel, and in doing so raises his life to the ethical plane, where the thought of judgement inhabits whatever he does.
Something similar has been said of high culture. In studying what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and said’, we are extending the repertoire of emotion. Lamenting the death of Wordsworth Arnold wrote: ‘who, ah who, will make us feel?’4 As Arnold knew, feeling does not exist in and of itself, in some purely subjective medium, much as we deceive ourselves into thinking the opposite – into believing that we are paragons of sensitivity who are accidentally deprived of the means to reveal it. Feeling exists when it finds objective form, in words, gestures, plans and projects. A feeling involves a picture of the world, and a stance towards it. It is predicated on understanding. The poet, who causes us for a moment to move in time to his emotion and so to re-make it in ourselves, can open the avenues of expression and unfreeze the veins.
The critic Eva Brann said this of Jane Austen’s novels:
They reform the dispersed soul and inculcate respect for the concealed heart. They afford the example of a correct and uncorrupted tongue, and they encourage us to know ourselves and to judge others rightly …
True or not, this description says something important about what is imparted to us by novels – not facts or theories but states of mind and moral virtues. Somehow, through reading Austen, Brann suggests, we are restored, much as we are restored through the rites and sacraments of a common religious culture. There is a making whole, a rejoining of the self to its rightful congregation that come through art and literature. And maybe this is the importance of high culture, that it continues to provide, in a heightened and imaginative form, the ethical vision that religion made so easily available.
If high culture and common culture are connected in such a way, then we can immediately settle that vexatious debate between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, in which the former ridiculed Snow’s suggestion that there are now two (high) cultures – the artistic and the scientific – and that, to be truly cultivated, one must be adept in both.5 On the view that I am proposing, high culture is not a source of scientific or technical knowledge (knowledge that or knowledge how), but a source of practical wisdom (knowledge what). Its meaning lies in the ethical vision that it perpetuates, and in the order that results in our emotions. On such a view, there can no more be a scientific culture than there can be a scientific religion; culture, like religion, addresses the question which science leaves unanswered: the question what to feel. The knowledge that it bestows on us is a knowledge not of facts nor of means but of ends: the most precious knowledge we have.
Many people will find the view that I am advancing preposterous. It seems too far from our post-modern experience, too much a legacy of ways of thinking that are no longer available -or available, if at all, only by studious isolation from the realities of post-modern life. In a certain measure I share this scepticism. Yet I can find no alternative account that explains either the history of high culture or its power. So here are some considerations which might lead us to take the view seriously.
The high culture of Athens centred on the theatre, and in particular on tragedy. But tragedy was a dramatisation and deepening of the religious experience. Tragedies were religious festivals and in many of them we see enacted, in a varied and agonised form, the central drama of the cult – the drama of the individual, who falls from grace by some sacred fault, and is thereby sundered from his congregation. The catharsis (as Aristotle described it) that is brought about by the hero’s death is itself a religious feeling – a sense of the restored community, into which, through death and transfiguration, the erring hero is reabsorbed. The movement of many Greek tragedies can best be understood in terms of the religious archetype of the cult – for this makes sense of the strange experience of peace that emerges from these obligatory murders.
In no genuinely religious epoch is the high culture separate from the religious rite. Religious art, religious music and religious literature form the central strand of high culture in all societies where a common religious culture holds sway. Moreover, when art and religion begin to diverge – as they have done in Europe since the Renaissance – it is usually because religion is in turmoil or declining. When art and religion are healthy, they are also inseparable.
Finally, if you consider the high culture of modern times, you will be struck by the theme of alienation which runs through so many of its products. Modern literature, art and music speak of the isolated individual, his quest for home and community or his lapse into solitude and estrangement. It is as though the high culture of our society, having ceased to be a meditation on the common religion, has become instead a meditation on the lack of it. And some of the greatest works of art of our epoch are attempts – like the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot, the Duino Elegies of Rilke, or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – to discover an inward and imagined restoration of the self, that would have the redeeming force of cult, community and sacrament.
True, those observations are anecdotal. But they suggest that the connections between common culture and high culture are deep, and that the two cultures perhaps stem from the same psychic need – the need for an ethical community into which the self can be absorbed, its transgressions overcome and forgiven, and its emotions re-made in uncorrupted form. The community offered by art is only imagined, born from the currents of sympathy that animate the realm of fictions. But consolation from imaginary things is not an imaginary consolation.
The connection is further confirmed by reflecting on the sacred text and its meaning. Writing transforms religion as it transforms everything. The universal religions are precisely those whose deities reside not in idols or temples but in texts, and the God of Israel makes explicit in the second commandment that, being defined by a text (the tables of the law), he can tolerate no ‘graven images’. The text has the universality of thought: it emancipates itself from place and time and addresses itself to all who can read or hear. Although the local shrine may retain its holiness, it is holy, nevertheless, only as an instance of the god’s visitations. Other places, equally holy, are admitted as ‘consecrated’ ground. The prime source of sanctity now becomes the universal ritual, which may be conducted in any consecrated place. It is times rather than places which attract the greatest aura of sanctity – the hours of worship, as in the Muslim faith, the holy days and days of obligation of the Christians and the Jews. The rite becomes imbued with thought; its words become sacred, not to be altered unless by some great authority empowered to speak for the god himself. Hence, virtually all serious liturgies are phrased in some antique language or historic idiom. They must remain unchanged in the midst of change, like the voice of God. That is how a cult becomes a church, and membership emancipates itself from kinship, tribe and locality to become a ‘communion of the faithful’.
Although the purpose of an act of worship lies beyond the moment, in the form of a promised redemption from the original sin of solitude, it cannot really be separated from the liturgical means. Means and end are inextricable. Thought and experience are inseparable in the liturgy, as they are in art. Changes in the liturgy are of great significance to the believer, since they are changes in the experience of God. The question whether or not to use the Book of Common Prayer or the Tridentine Mass are not questions of ‘mere form’. To suppose that the rite is a matter of form is to imagine just the kind of separation of form and content which is the death (the death by protestation) of a true common culture.
Enlightened people often mock the controversies surrounding the liturgy, and profess not to understand the desire for the old words, save for ‘aesthetic reasons’. They are right to see a resemblance between aesthetic interest and the act of worship. But they are wrong in thinking this resemblance to be merely accidental. The quasi-aesthetic absorption in the holy words and gestures is a component in the redemptive process. In participating, the believer is effecting a change in his spiritual standing. The ceremony is not so much a means to this end as a prefiguration of it. In the ritual the believer confronts God, and is purified by standing in God’s gaze.
The jealousy over the liturgy is of a piece with God’s jealousy over idols. Sacred words do not issue from the merely human voice, but from the deity: like the Koran or the Bible, they are dictated from the transcendental realm. When a text is eternal, unalterable, and an expression of God’s changeless will, there arises a need for commentary. As time goes on, the application of these holy words becomes ever more obscure, ever more bound in contradiction, ever more polluted by circumstance. Their very venerable character, which places them beyond question, surrounds them with questions. Hence the art of interpretation – hermeneutics – is an essential part of any culture founded on sacred texts. The people stand increasingly in need of the mediator who will elucidate God’s word, without detracting from its absolute authority.
Where texts are sacred, the written word becomes the primary vehicle of communication, the paradigm way of giving permanent and meaningful expression to experience. Other texts too obtain an aura of sanctity, and are studied for their deeper meanings. This attitude to the written word again illustrates the continuity between high culture and a religious tradition, and suggests that the first is built upon the second.
We find a telling illustration of this in the predicament of literary studies. If students are to read and analyse literary texts, then surely there ought to be some agreement as to which texts are to be studied? If any text will do, then so will no text. Only if the texts are in some way self-selecting can an education be constructed from the art of reading them. Hence the need for a ‘canon’ or tradition of literature, in which the store of literary knowledge is sequestered and from which it can be gleaned. But when young people are brought up without a sacred text, they find it difficult to understand that the secret of life could be obtained in anything so inanimate as a book – especially not a book written thousands of years ago in a language which is no longer spoken. Professors find themselves in a quandary, when it comes to explaining why their students should be reading George Eliot rather than Irvine Welsh, or why they should be reading at all, rather than watching MTV. It is pointless to run through the weighty arguments of Leavis, to show that George Eliot is central to the Great Tradition. For in the nature of things, the arguments of a critic are addressed only to those who already have sufficient reverence for literature; for only they will see the point of detailed study and moral interrogation.
This quandary underlies many of the battles over the curriculum in our time. We will understand those battles, it seems to me, only if we recognise the connection between high culture and religion, and the pathos of high culture, when finally severed from the experience of sacred things.
But here we must pause. The idea of the sacred, and the common culture that nurtures it, are no longer easily available. Nor have they enjoyed, since the Enlightenment, their previous dominance in human affairs. At the same time, it is precisely since the Enlightenment that theories of culture have arisen. It is as though culture were noticed for the first time, at the very moment when the older forms of it were vanishing. We should do well, therefore, to gain an overview of the Enlightenment, one legacy of which is the subject-matter of this book.