What is Culture?
“Culture” is a word, made up of letters, which represent sound. This particular mixture of sounds is as aloof as language itself. To uncover the original meaning and use of the word “culture” we must travel back to Ancient Greece. “Culture” is derived from the latin root word “cultus.” “Cultus” meant, in its primary sense, “divine worship” (Pieper, 15). This explains the derivative association we make of the word “cult”. This practice of cultus, which embodied the spirit of divine worship and self-sacrifice, was the “quintessence of all natural goods which lie beyond the immediate sphere of [people’s] needs and wants,” [paraphrased] (16). So how do we attain that which is good, yet not useful, but essentially honourable and divine? Plato’s school of philosophy, the birth of liberal arts, was indeed a society made for the celebration of cultus.
Philosophy is not the only thing that embodies the original spirit of the word “culture”, but liberal arts as a whole (21, 40). Yet that which may not seem inherently “useful”—can’t eat The Odyssey, music can’t keep you warm—the arts and culture is, according to Aquinas, “necessary for the perfection of human society,” (41).
One may ask, what does God and worship have to do with art and contemplation? I would simply respond: Those who understood and continue to understand the spirit of art and contemplation is centred in the idea that there is something bigger than you and I. Cultus means that it is through God that we are drawn to the love of things unseen (paraphrased, 74). In essence, it is the devotion of that which is sacred. This original understanding of culture actually dates back to before Plato and Aristotle, for in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he says, “to us who come afterward, it has been handed down by our fore fathers and the ancients, that the whole of nature is surrounded by the divine,” (128).
So is this how we think of culture today? What with how we define and analyze cultures by their music, religions, fashion, laws, literature, etc. Ken Myers sums it up in a few words: “Culture is what we make of the world,” (Crouch, 23). It is how we value, protect, and express what we consider to be divine. “Meaning and making go together,” (24). Therefore when we look at the expressions in these expressions of culture, we can begin to decipher what these cultures value and protect—what these cultures consider divine. So then, we are not far off from the original meaning of the term at all.
We can admire how Chinese culture values the virtue of balance and harmony in its decor, fashion, Buddhism, and exercises. We can contemplate the beauty in Black culture which protects the sacred virtues of resilience and unshakable joy and spirit in it’s music, literature, religion, and art.
However, the divine that a culture values and protects is not always divine in nature. For example, rape culture considers that which is divine (what should be preserved, protected and valued) to be the freedom and respect of man; the freedom of men to do whatever they want to women.
I once had an encounter with a rapist, where he sexually harassed me. I decided to gently address the matter with him and was disappointed to find that he did not believe he did anything wrong. It was my fault that I was offended and therefore there was no need to apologize. I genuinely wanted him to understand, not for my sake but for his—so that he could be a better person from it. However, his pride and invincibility, reinforced by rape culture, would not be challenged or swayed. My words fell on deaf ears, along with those of many women who dared to speak out against him in the years to come.
(And he had a small penis.)
#smallpenisrulenyt
So what is virtuous? What is truly divine? I believe we cannot fully know, for any good virtue can become imbalanced, freedom of speech for instance. However, there is something that guides us and calls us deeper into an understanding of life. The ancients called this 'something', Logos: that which unifies the world. The Christians understood that the Logos became flesh in Jesus Christ. We must trust our hearts and be guided by tradition.
And yet still we are left with the question: What do we do in a culture that is corrupt? Julia Kristeva, a pioneering French feminist, said,
“[Forgiveness] is a limitation that knows the crime and does not forget it but, without being blinded to its horror, banks on a new departure, on a renewal.”
This statement is one response to evil that propels culture forward into the divine. What is sacred must be protected, and what threatens that which is sacred, must eventually be forgiven.
Culture is what we make of it.
Biography:
Andy Crouch, Culture Making (2013)
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989)
John Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (2009)