by Ian Crowe
For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1]
It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.” Eliot’s purpose was not a defense of conservatism—which he referred to in the same passage as, too often, “conservation of the wrong things”—but of the vital role of the institution of the Church in Western society. Eliot considered the province of the “permanent things” to be the “pre-politicalarea,” and their intellectual guardian to be theology.[2] The social sciences, Eliot mentions sociology and economics specifically, may guide us to what is expedient, or ameliorative, or even utopian—that is, they may inform our ethics and politics—but without a claim on permanence, they cannot really reinforce, and certainly cannot replace, theological understanding.
Reading Eliot’s words as an historian, seventy years on, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Eliot’s defense of the “permanent things” was both prophetic and elegiac. In today’s even more secularized world, largely intolerant of theology, the pre-political area itself, the moral and cultural substructure of politics, has become the non-political area, or has been dismissed altogether, and perhaps the results are evident in the reckless innovation, blind reaction, and cynical opportunism that appear to underlie politics today. But before I throw in the towel to all that, I want to suggest we revisit the doom Eliot has laid out before us and ask one more time:
Can history offer us “Permanence we can believe in”?
...........
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario