Not-so-'funny things have happened on the way to the Forum', or, how do Salesians understand ‘culture’ from an English language mindset?
ROME: 5th November '04 -- The company words keep is all important! The gap between culture and faith is the word ‘and’, linguistically speaking. That is, while we are expressing concern that there is a divide between the two in our modern world, our very discourse is able to keep them together by a small, positive conjunctive unit, subtly yoking them together.
But the yokes are many: in
George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four blamed a fictional
Matthew Arnold, a British contemporary of Don Bosco,1822-1888, did more than any English writer to keep culture firmly yoked to religion even while in gentlemanly fashion setting uphigh culture in opposition to Christianity. But the pattern, since
Pluralisation: Just add an ‘s’ and a grand concept becomes so diffused it begins to lose meaning altogether; as many cultures as there are groups of two or more! Mind you, the pluralisation of culture goes back to Herder (in German) in the late 18th Century, but it wasn’t picked up in English to any great degree until the development of anthropology from ethnology in the 20th Century.
Adjectival expansion: cultural only entered English in the 1870’s or thereabouts. But tie it to genocide, for example, and you expand meaning in ways that lessen what genocide is, an unspeakable horror. Cultural genocide has been levelled against the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, even the IRA, but what about the real genocide?
Colloquial expansion: a subtle one this; a culture vulture is a person interested in the refined arts, but in the mouth of the utterer it has a belittling intent: a pretentious, excessive interest in the refined arts! Then there’s pop culture, street culture…
Meanwhile the term cultura keeps a very different type of company in our Salesian literature, rather more optimistic, intrinsically valuable, more geared to the grand salvific plan for the human person, rather more singular, I would say in general. And that has something to do with the Italian mindset, and with Continental roots which are Christian even if denied. It's just that the English reader carries rather more 'baggage' on the way to the Forum, and we do well to be alert to that as we read.
JBF