Anti-Climacus

LINK: I'd like to point you to this really excellent essay on Lionel Trilling by Gertrude Himmelfarb. To wit:

"What Trilling was now proposing, however, went well beyond the reassertion of that disjunction between literature and politics. Where others found Eliot interesting in spite of his politics, Trilling found him interesting because of his politics: a politics not only conservative but religious, and not only religious but identifiably Christian. And this, to readers who were, as Trilling said in his usual understated manner, "probably hostile to religion" (and many of whom, he might have added, like himself, were Jewish). Where John Stuart Mill had cited Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State as a corrective to Benthamism, Lionel Trilling recommended Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society as a corrective to Marxism. The Left had simplistically assumed that Eliot "escaped" from "The Waste Land" into the embrace of Anglo-Catholicism.


But even if this were true, it would not be "the worst that could be told of a man in our time." Surely, Trilling observed, Marxist intellectuals, who had witnessed the flourishing and the decay of Marxism, should appreciate the intellectual honorableness of Eliot's conversion. They need not follow Eliot's path to theology, but they could emulate him in questioning their own faith.


Marxism was not the only thing that Trilling (by way of Eliot) called into question. He challenged liberalism as well. Totalitarianism, Eliot had said, was inherently "pagan," for it recognized no authority or principle but that of the state. And liberalism, far from providing an alternative to paganism, actually contained within itself the seeds of paganism, in its materialism and relativism. Only Christianity, Eliot argued--the "Idea" of Christianity, not its pietistic or revivalist expressions--could resist totalitarianism, because only Christianity offered a view of man and society that promoted the ideal of "moral perfection" and "the good life." "I am inclined," Trilling quoted Eliot, "to approach public affairs from the point of view of the moralist."


Trilling hastened to qualify his endorsement of Eliot in "Elements That Are Wanted"; he did not believe morality was absolute or a "religious politics" desirable. But Eliot's vision of morality and politics was superior to the vision of liberals and radicals, who had contempt for the past and worshiped the future. Liberals, in the name of progress, put off the realization of the good life to some indefinite future; radicals put off the good life in the expectation of a revolution that would usher in not only a new society but also a new man, a man who would be "wholly changed by socialism.""