Introduction: Education and ‘Modern Culture’

The real experts on ‘modern culture’ are likely to be our students. For us, as teachers, the culture we inhabit is likely already to be educated, Christianised, Anglicanised. As for our students, in this critical stage of their formation as adults who will or will not be active Anglican Christians, they are faced with the challenge of learning to discriminate what they can and what they cannot accept from the culture they inhabit: what attitudes, practices, beliefs and values they cultivate in their own lives. What their education may and should give them is an opportunity to relativise the values and the practices of the culture they inhabit, through a new awareness of other values and practices within their educational institution, their society, or other societies of the present or past. A culture that sees itself as only one amongst others by which it is influenced is already in the process of being transformed, as are students who learn that their cultural assumptions are open to challenge from those who hold or have held other values and see life in ways that differ from their own. Within the process of education it is to be hoped that students come to see strengths and weaknesses in their culture and become more appreciative of other cultures, both present and past, which do things differently.

In this paper I shall be much preoccupied with the notion of ‘culture. Two uses of the term will re-echo through what I have to say. The first is a broadly literary or artistic use, as when a newspaper has a section on ‘culture’ which contains reviews of books and plays. Since my own training is literary, I feel most at home in discussing ‘culture’ in such literary or artistic terms. This is the area in which the literary or cultural critic – a Matthew Arnold, a Raymond Williams, an Edward Said, or a T.S.Eliot – operates. This is the field of the ‘liberal arts college’, the field of many Anglican colleges and universities.

However, ‘culture’ is now widely taken, particularly in the field of anthropology, to mean something like ‘ a whole way of life’, so that it may include aspects of religion, economy, social structure and political organisation. Here, the presiding sociological genius is Weber and the key academics are working in the field of sociology and anthropology. When ‘culture’ is used in faculties of anthropology or social science, it would be very unwise to assume the stance of the culture critic who makes normative judgments about what is to be commended or rejected in various cultures. Cultures – in this ‘social scientific’culture - must be understood, not judged: that is interpreted on their own terms. Even though the economy, transport, technology and communication of ‘modern culture’ may give one the tools with which to study and interpret cultures that do not make use of these aids to contemporary living, the methodical stance to be adopted is usually taken to be one of the greatest possible disinterested relativism. I say ‘greatest possible’ because sophisticated hermeneutical thinkers like Clifford Geerz know only too well that detachment from one’s own situatedness within the culture of Western or international tertiary research and education is impossible, but the enemy remains ‘ethnocentrism’.

This methodological relativism clearly creates problems for Christian institutions with a commitment to Christian mission, but it is integral to the ‘modern culture’ of which universities and colleges are major communicators. Within the ‘modern culture’ of research-oriented universities and colleges, besides methodological relativism, there is also a functional secularism, which it is difficult for Christian IHEs to confront. The sheer expense of teaching and conducting research in the natural sciences, medicine or technology, including information technology, places such research beyond the resources of many Christian colleges and universities. Research that raises serious ethical problems such as research funded by governments for defence purposes, or research driven by market forces for major companies, such as research for pharmaceutical or cosmetic companies, often attracts bright young people to work in a research culture which ‘brackets’ the ethical problems raised: the research culture is one of functional secularity. This is one key way in which functional secularity gets a hold in modern culture, whether through the culture of the global company, the research laboratory or the shopping mall. There are large areas of modern culture which are assumed to be effectively and even necessarily secular. Within them, religious belief is recognised only as a private concern. This functional secularity, which is not the same as cultural or religious pluralism, is the assumptive backdrop to much in our everyday lives (for example, approaches to issues in the media) and to much in the lives of our students, even though we and they encounter it differently. One of the key reasons for the rise of religious fundamentalisms is that human beings need more in their lives than this functional secularism, which privatises religious belief and has no place for transcendent ethical values. Those unskilled in critical reflection on cultural, religious and ethical values are likely to show themselves hermeneutically naïve when they do adopt religious beliefs. One of the key roles for Christian educators, faced with the challenges of modern culture, is to equip young people to maintain their critical distance from all forms of religious and cultural imperialism, both that of modern, secular culture and that of unquestioning religious fundamentalism.

What do we Mean by ‘Culture’? – a Preliminary Foray

It is difficult to know where to start a discussion that takes deeper our reflection on ‘culture’. One classic in the field is Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society1780-1950. This is a useful starting point for us as the book charts the way in which a number of prominent words and ideas – ‘industry’, ‘democracy’, ‘class’, ‘art’ and especially ‘culture’ - were used in the period Williams was studying, and the way in which those changes of use reflected the changing experience of British society. Before 1780, ‘culture’ had meant the ‘tending of natural growth’ (as in agri-culture) and then, by analogy, ‘a process of human training’ (the ‘culture’ of certain virtues or attitudes). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the ‘culture of something’ was changed to ‘culture as such, a thing in itself’. It came to mean, Williams argues, ‘a general state or habit of the mind’, then ‘a general state of intellectual development in society as a whole’ (this is roughly how Arnold uses it), then ‘the general body of the arts’ (before C.P. Snow spoke of ‘two cultures’, that of the arts and that of the sciences) and, finally, ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’ (which is, I presume, how it is used in the title of this lecture).

Williams was a Marxist and a literary critic. His concern was to take issue with notions of ‘high culture’ and, even more, ‘bourgeois culture’ and to emphasise the importance of an inclusive or ‘common culture’. He welcomed the extension of education to the extent that education was not merely a ticket to a culture of privilege, even if that privilege was pervaded by an ideal (or ideology) of service; he saw good education as the herald of a truly inclusive or ‘classless’ society. For Williams, the ‘working class culture’ in which he had been brought up was a culture of solidarity in a way that individualist, bourgeois culture is not. Williams charts the rise of a notion of ‘culture’ in which ‘culture’ is ‘not only a body of intellectual and imaginative work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life’, and the way of life that he commends is one characterised by solidarity. In this he is an optimist who believes that such a culture is the product of ‘natural growth and … of its tending’. For Williams, the role of the educator, a role in which he saw his whole life’s work, is to foster such an extension of the ‘common culture’ by every means available.

Before commenting on Williams approach, we should note how important his influence has been for the work of Edward Said. Said pays tribute to Williams in his introduction to Orientalism for aiding his understanding of ‘the way cultural domination has operated’. Said appeals to Williams’ example as he sets out his project of the ‘unlearning of the inherent dominative mode’, moving the discussion into a new area – one that is of particular relevance for the critique of Western Christian mission – as he studies ‘Western conceptions of the Orient’. In his later book Culture and Imperialism he presses this critique further, showing how the culture of England purveyed a disregard and disrespect for other cultures which played into the agenda of imperialism. In this respect he takes his mentor Williams to task. Said alleges that in Culture and Society Williams does not deal with the imperial experience at all and that, when challenged about the absence of something that was ‘absolutely constitutive of the English political and social order’, Williams acknowledged his own Welsh experience should have enabled him to think about the imperial experience, but when he wrote Culture and Society it was ‘very much in abeyance’. It is, however, part of Williams’ argument in The Country and the City, as reported by Said, that through the nineteenth century novel in particular, ‘the idea of England’ was developed through the literary portrayal of an implicit contrast between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’: ‘England was surveyed, evaluated, made known, whereas "abroad" was only referred to or shown briefly without the kind of presence or immediacy lavished on London, the countryside, or northern industrial centres such as Manchester or Birmingham’. Said points to the way the emergent ‘common culture’ of which Williams approved was compromised by the tight national and ethnic boundaries drawn round the community in question; that is England. In doing so, Said makes a link for us with what Clifford Geerz has called ‘thick’ description of cultures. Said’s critique shows how Williams’ acceptance of the ‘thick’ description of English culture and the ‘thin’ description of non-English culture in a whole literary tradition was the unwitting manifestation of a kind of cultural imperialism that needed to be challenged. So successfully has that challenge been taken up, especially in the universities and colleges of the wider English-speaking world, that Williams’ cultural inclusivism now looks almost quaint. In English universities, it would now, rightly, be axiomatic that students of English literature should have the opportunity of studying the literature of Commonwealth and other English-speaking countries and of learning that much of the finest contemporary literature written in English does not reflect the culture of England, Great Britain or America. Said’s point in Orientalism may, however, still be well made by pointing to the continuing ignorance of Islamic culture in England and the shortage of competent teachers of Islam; even more is this true of China and Chinese culture.

Anglicans on ‘Culture’: Matthew Arnold and TS Eliot

One of the key features of contemporary discussions of culture, though not of contemporary culture as such, is that it recognises the key role played by religion in the formation of a culture, and of an individual’s cultural identity. If ‘religion’ is taken in its oldest, Latinate sense, as that transcendent loyalty or practice which binds together a society, this is hardly surprising. This is a use of religio which antedates the coming of Christianity, and which has now returned again via anthropology. Before taking up that idea, however, we need to visit the thought of two social critics for whom the critique of religion, and particularly the Christian religion, was central to their critique of British culture.

For Matthew Arnold, whose Culture and Anarchy (1869) must be one of the major texts in this discussion, it was axiomatic that religious critique was central to his account of the ‘culture’ of his own day, but critique of Christianity was by no means the only strand in his argument. Arnold set out his aim in the following words:

By ‘culture’ Arnold does not mean Christianity. Part of his aim was to provide a critique of the Christianity he saw practised around him, much of which he regarded as lacking in the ‘culture’ he commended. Arnold’s ‘culture’, which he describes as ‘having its origin in the love of perfection,’ and as moved ‘by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good’, is deployed throughout his essay as a kind of social ideal, from which Britain in his own day falls far short and to which it should aspire:

The links here with a Coleridge’s conception of an educated elite in society, a ‘clerisy’, and Newman’s aim in the ‘idea of a university’ are evident. Like Newman, whom he greatly admired, Arnold held to a kind of Oxonian ideal of the educated man, but for Arnold it was axiomatic that such a man would be attuned to playing his full part in the social and public life of his time. For Arnold ‘culture’ (and this is where he distances himself from Newman) enlists religion as an ally but is quick to criticise religion when it threatens to take over a life or an institution. Thus he writes:

In presenting the function of religion within society as he does, he is, of course, highly selective, developing his critique in number of important studies, but he remains at a deep level influenced by the Anglican ideal of England, in which the state has a religious identity, and the Church has its place through its establishment within a Christian, monarchical polity. Arnold’s ideal of the state is worth quoting at length because it is an ideal purveyed both in England and through the British Empire by the practice of Anglicanism:

To us this sounds like a kind of naïve Hegelianism, but we need to see its origins in the Anglican polity which Hooker expounded, in Burke’s vision of the state as ‘a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection’, - and its outworking in the twentieth century welfare state. ‘Modern culture’, which has responded to the experiences of Nazism, fascism, state socialism and other forms of state-sponsored tyranny with a resolute aversion to the unitary state, a commitment to human rights, and to pluralism within a liberal polity, would regard Arnold’s commitment to ‘culture’ and his confidence in the power of an inclusive but unitary state to hold at bay the threat of anarchy as simply a commitment to heteronomy, to another form of imperialism. It can, however, be seen in a more open way. Arnold sought in his criticism, to seize ‘directly’ the ‘idea’ of a text or a culture, and then to show why his intuition was sound. He talked of ‘enabling ourselves, whether by reading, observing, or thinking, to come as near as we can to the firm intelligible law of things and thus to get a basis for a less confused action and a more complete perfection than we have at present’. Arnold was always concerned for inclusiveness, for the deployment of intelligent criticism within a stable social framework. Integral to the framework he sought to defend was the place of an inclusive national church. One of the key questions facing Anglicanism today is how it can play its part in a secular, pluralist state, which has no place for no such a national church.

Arnold’s spiritual and intellectual successor is T.S. Eliot, whose Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is another classic Anglican text on the issue. Eliot distinguishes three sense of ‘culture’, which he relates to the individual, the group or class, and the society. In a move which brings him closer to modern anthropological and sociological writers, he affirms that ‘it is the culture of the society that is fundamental, and it is the meaning of the term "culture" in relation to the whole society that should be examined first.’ Eliot criticises Arnold for his attitude to religion, arguing that culture should not be seen as something more comprehensive than religion, but that we should ask ‘whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people’. For Eliot ‘no culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion’: it is equally wrong to regard religion and culture as ‘two separate things between which there is a relation’ and to identify religion and culture. This he exemplifies with respect to Europe and ‘the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is. … Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or Nietzsche’, he argues. At this point he sounds distinctly like Samuel Huntingdon who, in The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order describes civilisations as ‘culture(s) write large’, and religion as ‘a central defining characteristic of civilisations’.

Eliot comes close to defending plural expressions of Christian faith held together by modern culture. He argues that Christendom should be one but ‘within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas’. He calls for ‘endless effort on the part of each region to shape its Christianity to suit itself. … The local temperament’, he says, ‘must express its particularity in its form of Christianity, and so must the social stratum, so that the culture proper to each area and each class may flourish; but there must also be a force holding these areas and these classes together.’ The culture of a nation prospers, he says, ‘with the prosperity of the culture of its several constituencies’ … but ‘it also needs to be itself part of a larger culture, which requires the ultimate ideal, however unrealisable, of a "world-culture"’. What the religious base for the ‘world-culture’ would be he leaves us to imagine.

Eliot’s organic vision of a culture of cultures is immensely attractive, and has deep roots in Anglican tradition, but we can now see that it fails to reckon with two key tendencies in what we are identifying as ‘modern culture’. The first is the radical secularism of the Market and of marketing which now have such a powerful effect on the cultures we all inhabit. The second is the market-driven imperialism of various forms of modern culture. If there is an emergent world-culture, it is that of Hollywood, McDonalds, Disney and Adidas. To say that it has a religious sub-structure would be nonsense. We are faced, perhaps for the first time ever, with forms of culture that are entirely vapid and which have no discernible religious sub-structure at all. If there is to be a viable ‘world-culture’, it is clearly going to have to be one of radical pluralism, in which the cultures formed by different religions co-exist successfully. Elements of this can be seen in the multicultural cities of the world, like London, Melbourne or Tokyo. The possibility of a culture of radical pluralism within an integrated society is something Eliot never dreamed of, but if we are to avoid the endless ‘clash of civilisations’ it is the only possible sub-structure for the world which we are handing on to our students and their children.

The Da Vinci Code, Modern Culture and Christian Faith

In concluding this address, I would like to take one specific expression of ‘modern culture’ and to discuss the challenge it poses to Christianity by means of its presentation of ‘the Christian Faith’. As an ‘airport novel’ – in itself a symbol of modern culture – the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown can have had few equals. This is puzzling for those of us who have been trained in Arnoldian notions of literary ‘culture’. Its characterisation is poor, its descriptive writing bland, and its plot weak. Yet it seems to have captured the imaginations of people all round the world. Somehow, it reflects and develops attitudes and ideas that have become prevalent within the common culture of the enormous numbers of people from all round the world who read such novels.

I guess that one of the reasons for its success is that it gives the reader a whole range of reasons not to believe in Christianity: by suggesting that Christianity is a political construction of the Emperor Constantine; that Christianity is based on lies about Jesus; that Christianity has systematically excluded the feminine, represented especially by the person of Mary Magdalene; that Christianity in the form of the unscrupulous, authoritarian, violent, masochistic and grotesque members of Opus Dei is positively dangerous. Second, it flatters the reader into thinking that she or he is following a path of discovery along which secrets that the Church has long wanted to conceal are being uncovered. The ‘decoding’ of Christianity, with the help of Gnostic texts, an alternative account of the Holy Grail legend, of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, of the Knights Templar, and of the Priory of Sion, leaves the reader with the sense that they have access to secret or privileged knowledge which the Church has long wanted to conceal. The strategy is clearly Gnostic and appeals explicitly to Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Philip. In the end, two Christianities are presented: the one of Constantine, the Vatican and of Opus Dei; the other the transmuted Christianity of the Priory of Sion, in which it is suggested that Jesus had a child by Mary Magdalene and that the life-giving implications of this ‘sacred union’ of male and female are what should really be celebrated.

At key points, Dan Brown’s characters express certain ideas which are absolutely reflective of ‘modern culture’ and which illuminate the approach to the religious issues discussed in the novel. For example, the character later revealed as ‘The Teacher’ tells Sophie (whose name of course means wisdom), ‘History is always written by the winners’, which is not unreasonable – but then goes on to say of documents ‘discovered’ in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1975, ‘The Sangreal documents simply tell the other side of the Christ story. In the end, which side of the story you believe becomes a matter of faith and personal exploration, but at least the information has survived.’ The ‘information’ Teabing refers to, as it is expounded through the book, is riddled with inconsistencies and improbabilities, but the significant phrase is the earlier one: In the end, which side of the story you believe becomes a matter of faith and personal exploration. Later, Robert Langdon, who is meant to be a top-flight professor of religion, with an expert knowledge of symbols, says: ‘Sophie, every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith – acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.’ Throughout the book, religious faith is presented as irrational trust, a life-choice, belief in what we would like to be true. Brown is thus entirely consistent when he presents his own account of Christianity in the terms that he would like to be true - and the demonstrable evidence that can be stacked up on page after page against his de-coding and re-encoding of Christianity is, from his point of view, an irrelevence.

Brown’s success is a testimony to his brilliance in engaging the interest and the sympathy of his many readers. His book, which at one level is of course, harmless fun, is at another dangerous for orthodox Christianity because it offers his audience ‘reasons’ not to believe, the main reason being that belief is not a matter of reason at all. Neither is it a matter of ethical challenge. Any ethical challenge there might be in Christianity is undercut both by his presentation of believing as irrational choice and by his portrayal of Christians as amoral. Brown presents two versions of ‘Christian faith’ – that of the Vatican and Opus Dei, and that of the Priory of Sion, Mary Magdalene and the sacred feminine. He leaves the reader to choose their own faith and to engage in their own personal exploration.

Brown’s depictions of the Christian Faith are, of course, quite different from the historic, orthodox faith of the Christian Church, of which the Anglican Churches are just a part. This is a faith open to historical falsification and open to rational investigation. Anglicans who believe in the incarnation have traditionally seen openness to rational historical and scientific investigation as an implication of that belief. Anglicans have also seen in the incarnation an affirmation of humanity, which implies an affirmation of all that is good in human culture. Since humans are fallen, this is not to say an uncritical affirmation – and here lies the question with which I wish to close.

As Anglicans, many of us inherit cultures which are the products of imperialist thinking and forms of heteronomy. The very language we use, English, is in this sense problematic within many cultures where English is associated with imperialism. The buildings and forms of worship we use often have similar associations. We are the inheritors of a tradition which affirms the enculturation of Christianity, the use of ‘language understanded of the people’, the use of the imagination and all forms of creative expression in worship and in exploration of what it means to be human. Whether the cultures we inhabit are formed by Christianity, by a religion other than Christianity or no religion at all, we are committed to exploring what it means to be Christian in terms of the cultures of our time. For Anglican Christians, Christ is the transformer, not the enemy, of modern culture.

This is the text of an address given at the Conference of Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion, Christ Church Canterbury, 19 June 2005

Nicholas Sagovsky
Westminster Abbey
nicholas.sagovsky@westminster-abbey.org