Book review: Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagleton
Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagleton
reviewed by Jonathan Rée
In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers.
Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it went from strength to strength, as churches lost their congregations and theology was put to flight by natural science. But then there was 9/11 and everything changed. Traditional churchgoing may have continued its long decline, while the strident scepticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens still struck a chord with the book-buying classes, but, in the rest of the world, religion was rousing itself from a long slumber. Wild forms of worship – Christian, Islamic or other – have now taken hold of the poor and the oppressed. Religious faith has gone viral.
reviewed by Jonathan Rée
In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers.
Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it went from strength to strength, as churches lost their congregations and theology was put to flight by natural science. But then there was 9/11 and everything changed. Traditional churchgoing may have continued its long decline, while the strident scepticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens still struck a chord with the book-buying classes, but, in the rest of the world, religion was rousing itself from a long slumber. Wild forms of worship – Christian, Islamic or other – have now taken hold of the poor and the oppressed. Religious faith has gone viral.
Or so it seems to Eagleton, and he thinks we should have seen it coming. He is a celebrated practitioner of wide-ranging intellectual commentary, with bestselling books to his credit and acres of polemical journalism. He always seems to have read all the philosophers and theorists that the rest of us find too fearsome, and he has a knack for fitting them neatly into place by means of a well-turned epigram or an alliterative turn of phrase. His prose is alive with dichotomies, insults and laugh-aloud jokes, and at the end we are invariably invited to savour the "irony" as the masterminds are shown losing their mojo as the truth slips out of their grasp. In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers.
Eagleton came to fame in the 70s as the Oxford English don who was also a self-confessed revolutionary socialist, or, if you prefer, as the revolutionary socialist who was also a self-confessed Oxford don. He managed to become an icon of theoretical rectitude and earthy leftism at the same time as climbing to the top of his greasy profession. After a while there was an epidemic of Eagleton-envy wherever literature was an object of academic study. In recent years, however, the comrades have begun to sniff an odour of apostasy: Eagleton may still be loyal to his leftism, but – to judge by recent broadsides against the New Atheists, whom he accuses of misinterpreting true Christianity – his doughty materialism has been deserting him.
Culture and the Death of God will not give much reassurance to the old Eagletonians. The book takes us on a rapid tour of the intellectual battlefields of Europe over the past 300 years, sites where, according to the received version of history, the brave soldiers of progress and rationality have triumphed time and again over a rabble of reactionary God-botherers. But these victories, according to Eagleton, were at best equivocal, and in due course they would be reversed by the cunning of history. First there were the fabled philosophers of the Enlightenment, leading the charge against priestly infamy and angels-on-a-pin theology; but none of them could envisage a world without God, even if they preferred to worship him in the guise of reason or science. Any damage they may have done to religion was repaired by the German idealists with their woolly notion of spirit, and by their followers the romantics, who reinvented God as either nature or culture.
You might think that Marx made a better job of deicide, but on close examination the communist hypothesis turns out to have been a surrogate for the heavenly city. And poor old Nietzsche, for all his bluster and derring-do, ended up resurrecting Christ in the form of the Übermensch. The 20th-century modernists fell into the same trap, vainly appealing to art to plug "the gap where God has once been", and if a few freaky postmodernists have managed to break away from religion in recent years, it was at the price of a complete denial of hope and meaning, which no one else is willing to pay. "The Almighty," Eagleton concludes, "has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of." Rumours of his death have been greatly exaggerated: he has now put himself "back on the agenda", and "the irony is hard to overrate".
Eagleton's well-known verve and cogency are all on display in Culture and the Death of God, but various vices are apparent as well. He seems to have turned himself into the Jeremy Clarkson of philosophy, giving high-performance ideas a quick spin, but making a point of not taking anything very seriously. He has never been a hero of the campaign against cliche, and he repeats himself shamelessly and recycles whole paragraphs. Instead of considering thinkers as individuals struggling to get some clarity about the conceptual problems that trouble them, he fits them up as characters in an off-the-peg story about the Enlightenment begetting idealism which begat romanticism which begat modernism which begat postmodernism.
When he jeers at the idealists with their "high-minded contempt for everyday habits", or at the "high-minded vacuities" and "high-minded fatalism" of Matthew Arnold, or the "high-minded liberal platitudes" of Salman Rushdie, he sounds more like a rowdy kid than a serious subversive. And when he chooses to praise Kant, Burke, Condorcet, Schiller, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud for their "great" books, or rates Alain Badiou as "perhaps the most eminent philosopher of our time" (LOL), he seems to speak with a voice of transcendent self-assurance rather than the gratitude that might be a more appropriate response to greatness.
Eagleton has sometimes been accused of bumptious egotism, but nothing could be further from the truth. If he has a unique selling point, it is his uncanny self-effacement... read more:
