Tom, please, what was the original footnote?
Tom Colket wrote:
> Nancy wrote:
> N> It would be hard to imagine a more unjust world than
> N> the one Eliot idealizes in After Strange Gods,
> N> in the name of tradition.
>
> The List had a long discussion in 2009 on ASG, particularly on this passage:
>
> "You are hardly likely to develop tradition except where the bulk of the
> population is relatively so well off where it is that it has no
> incentive or pressure to move about. The population should be
> homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are
> likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become
> adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious
> background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large
> number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." (1934)
>
> I was recently reading Eliot's "Notes on the Definition of Culture"
> (1948). In the Preface to the paperback edition in 1962, he wrote:
>
> "These 'Notes' began to take shape towards the end of the Second World
> War. When it was suggested that they should be reprinted in 'paperback'
> form, I re-read them for the first time for some years, expecting that I
> should have to qualify some of the opinions expressed herein. I found to
> my surprise that I had nothing to retract, and nothing upon which I was
> disposed to enlarge. One footnote, on p. 70, I have re-written: it may
> still be that I have tried to say too much too briefly, and that the
> notion needs further elaboration."
>
> And what is that footnote on page 70, the one thing TSE decided needed
> further re-writing/clarification for the 1962 edition? It is this:
>
> Footnote on page 70:
>
> "It seems to me highly desirable that there should be close
> culture-contact between devout and practising Christians and devout and
> practising Jews. Much culture-contact in the past has been within those
> neutral zones of culture in which religion can he ignored, and between
> Jews and Gentiles both more or less emancipated from their religious
> traditions. The effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that
> there can be culture without religion. In this context I recommend to my
> readers two books by Professor Will Herberg published in New York:
> 'Judaism and Modern Man' (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy) and
> 'Protestant-Catholic-Jew' (Doubleday). "
>
> -- Tom --
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