By the time in which T. S. Eliot wrote, religion, literature and society in western culture had already, he knew, shared a long and ambivalent history. Often, literature had been a medium of critical support for such Judeo-Christian religious doctrines as creation, covenant, exile, incarnation and redemption, and a source of relative stability for various moral and social orders based on their premises. This “easy and natural” association between religion, literature and society, Eliot argued, had happened when society was moderately healthy and its various discourses in some relation with one another, though necessarily not always perfectly harmonious. Just as often, however, or so it seemed, literature had been either a monolithic reflection or a mode of subversion of society and religion, as each discourse set up its own creative and prophetic energies over and against the others, vying for a totalizing hegemony on its own terms (SE [1950], p. 390; NTDC [New York], pp. 67-69).

Eliot felt keenly the value of the rare moments of “easy and natural” association between literature, religion, and society (though he noted that “many of the most remarkable achievements of culture” had been made “in conditions of disunity” [NTDC [New York], p. 71]); and he spoke with eloquence of their combination of underlying order and deliberate if controlled cultivation of differences in point of view. As Eliot recognized, the maintenance of these differences made for cultural strength; just as their collapse into one totalizing discourse made for one-dimensionality, and their proliferation into a congeries of special interests for disintegration. He also felt, however, the difficulty of realizing the ideal of a harmonious but multivalent culture, especially in the midst of the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” which was, for him, contemporary history.