Edmund Burke
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-political area,” 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. [Read more...]
