What do you think?
Rate this book
Culture and the Death of God
New observations on the persistence of God in modern times and why “authentic” atheism is so very hard to come by
How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western capitalism’s part in spawning not only secularism but also fundamentalism, and the unsatisfactory surrogates for the Almighty invented in the post-Enlightenment era.
The author reflects on the unique capacities of religion, the possibilities of culture and art as modern paths to salvation, the so-called war on terror’s impact on atheism, and a host of other topics of concern to those who envision a future in which just and compassionate communities thrive. Lucid, stylish, and entertaining in his usual manner, Eagleton presents a brilliant survey of modern thought that also serves as a timely, urgently needed intervention into our perilous political present.
How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western capitalism’s part in spawning not only secularism but also fundamentalism, and the unsatisfactory surrogates for the Almighty invented in the post-Enlightenment era.
The author reflects on the unique capacities of religion, the possibilities of culture and art as modern paths to salvation, the so-called war on terror’s impact on atheism, and a host of other topics of concern to those who envision a future in which just and compassionate communities thrive. Lucid, stylish, and entertaining in his usual manner, Eagleton presents a brilliant survey of modern thought that also serves as a timely, urgently needed intervention into our perilous political present.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
64 people are currently reading
1483 people want to read
About the author
Terry Eagleton
163 books1,286 followersWidely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
August 14, 2020
The Persistence of Faith: A Job Half Done
Being informed about the world is not a result of reading the daily newspapers or the feed from Apple News. If anything, the news media, merely by their choice of what to report not to mention their motivation for reporting anything at all, inhibit understanding by distorting the significance of events and how they are connected historically. Trump is more right than he intends - all news is fake news. The age of the feuilleton, that collection of random factoids that we never wanted but that get served up as if we do, has reached its apogee with modern communication technology.
But there is a simple way to avoid fake news: don’t read the news. To quote the so quotable Sam Goldwyn, ‘don’t even ignore them.’ Instead spend your time reading people like Terry Eagleton. These are the people who have enormous factual knowledge and have sifted through the prejudices and interests of their sources with meticulous detail. The epistemological criteria they use to distinguish rationalization from reason are generated by wisdom not topicality. Because they think independently they are political without being partisan.
The clue that Eagleton is not a purveyor of fake news is that he doesn’t claim to know the way the world is. What he reports is his reactions to the way other people think the world is and why they think (or thought) that way. He is intellectually empathetic even when he is opposed to the issue at hand - in this case the prevailing wisdom about the nature of the so-called Enlightenment which began in the 18th century and continues to trouble many as an attack on religion by reason.
Eagleton reports himself rather than the world. In fact he doesn’t report so much as reveal what’s going on in his head provoked by what’s he’s read, which is an enormous number of authors and books, ancient and modern. The self he presents is distilled, concentrated, witty, frequently self-deprecating but above all critical. Nothing is taken for granted, particularly if it’s fashionable, politically correct, or established as academic doctrine. Therefore he is nothing but interesting - even if one disagrees with him.
Eagleton’s central point is that “The Enlightenment's assault on religion... was at root a political rather than theological affair.” Its protagonists never questioned faith as such, only the ecclesiastical network of clerics and government - the medieval equivalent of the military-industrial complex. The organized church (mainly Catholic) was a target not because of the irrationality of God but because of the very rationally pursued self-interest of those in power. “The task [of Enlightenment],” he says, “was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.”
What the philosophes never addressed was the problem of faith itself - theirs as well as that of religious believers. Religion may have begun a decline but faith remained embedded in European culture: “From Enlightenment Reason to modernist art, a whole range of phenomena therefore took on the task of providing surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been. Part of my argument is that the most resourceful of these proxies was culture, in the broad rather than narrow sense of the term.” That is, faith as a fundamental epistemological principle which excludes any proposition, claim, or idea from investigation and critical scrutiny (a uniquely Christian invention), remained and remains the most distinguishing feature of the European way of thinking, including its thinking about politics.
Consequently “The Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.” By not just leaving the principle of faith intact but also by employing it to justify their views of alternative social organization, Enlightenment thinkers literally revolutionized America and France, but weren’t nearly as radical as they might have been. “Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States.” Reason, which was meant to be some sort of sensus communis enabling political unity, turns out to be just the opposite - the driving force of polarization in democratic societies around the world.
Eagleton quotes Gibbon’s view that “Reason is very often rationalisation, in the Freudian sense of lending a specious air of plausibility to some discreditable motive.” One need only note American evangelicals’ justification of Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, race, sexual equality, and international relations, not to mention his personal life to get the point. Faith reigns. Whether it is called Christianity or not is hardly the point. The principle of faith, which is indistinguishable from any other intellectual prejudice, is what is being demonstrated and defended.
This principle of faith, therefore, has become a sort of fundamental right which is quite different from the right of religious association. Faith is the right not just to believe anything one chooses from the apparently infinite sources of fake news but also to seek to enforce that belief politically. Faith is beyond evidence and immune to discussion. Faith is applied to a growing number of political issues from flouridization of water and autism to immigration and environmental policy. Faith presents an impediment to understanding and a block to political compromise in everything it touches. Consequently it is the one thing with which democracy cannot cope. It is faith which makes fake news so powerful. Faith creates its own form of nihilism. As Eagleton says, “atheism is by no means as easy as it looks.”
I have no doubt that Eagleton would disagree violently with my interpretation of his thought. Somehow he clings to something he calls ‘faith’ as a sort of intellectual life raft: “One reason why postmodern thought is atheistic is its suspicion of faith. Not just religious faith, but faith as such. It makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. Begin with a robust belief in goblins and you end up with the Gulag.” He appears to think that any conviction is equivalent to religious faith. The difference is that conviction is tolerant of politics as well as experience; faith is not.
So, yes, what you do end up with through faith, unfortunately, is a Gulag, or a politicized official Church or, even worse, a Trumpian democracy dominated by evangelical fascists. The only way Eagleton can avoid the consequences of his own logic is to make out faith to be some vague confidence that there is something beyond reason which might be important to our lives. He stops short of giving this any fixed content, however, except tenuous references to historic Christian doctrines like free will, individual responsibility, and the need for salvation.
Eagleton thinks these are important in a poetic sense and that artistic tragedy seeks to capture the essence of his poetic metaphysics. But it is the Greeks who invented tragedy, not the Christian Church. So while I can’t disagree with his conception of tragedy, it is difficult to see how such an idea has any connection whatsoever with the unwavering and anti-experiential pistis of St. Paul and its dogmatic descendants. It seems that Eagleton harbours his own brand of residual faith in his revealed self, a barely hidden authoritarian who would have us all subscribe to such a faith. A salutary self-referential lesson in post-Enlightenment thinking then. It does take effort to get out from under the burden of faith.
Being informed about the world is not a result of reading the daily newspapers or the feed from Apple News. If anything, the news media, merely by their choice of what to report not to mention their motivation for reporting anything at all, inhibit understanding by distorting the significance of events and how they are connected historically. Trump is more right than he intends - all news is fake news. The age of the feuilleton, that collection of random factoids that we never wanted but that get served up as if we do, has reached its apogee with modern communication technology.
But there is a simple way to avoid fake news: don’t read the news. To quote the so quotable Sam Goldwyn, ‘don’t even ignore them.’ Instead spend your time reading people like Terry Eagleton. These are the people who have enormous factual knowledge and have sifted through the prejudices and interests of their sources with meticulous detail. The epistemological criteria they use to distinguish rationalization from reason are generated by wisdom not topicality. Because they think independently they are political without being partisan.
The clue that Eagleton is not a purveyor of fake news is that he doesn’t claim to know the way the world is. What he reports is his reactions to the way other people think the world is and why they think (or thought) that way. He is intellectually empathetic even when he is opposed to the issue at hand - in this case the prevailing wisdom about the nature of the so-called Enlightenment which began in the 18th century and continues to trouble many as an attack on religion by reason.
Eagleton reports himself rather than the world. In fact he doesn’t report so much as reveal what’s going on in his head provoked by what’s he’s read, which is an enormous number of authors and books, ancient and modern. The self he presents is distilled, concentrated, witty, frequently self-deprecating but above all critical. Nothing is taken for granted, particularly if it’s fashionable, politically correct, or established as academic doctrine. Therefore he is nothing but interesting - even if one disagrees with him.
Eagleton’s central point is that “The Enlightenment's assault on religion... was at root a political rather than theological affair.” Its protagonists never questioned faith as such, only the ecclesiastical network of clerics and government - the medieval equivalent of the military-industrial complex. The organized church (mainly Catholic) was a target not because of the irrationality of God but because of the very rationally pursued self-interest of those in power. “The task [of Enlightenment],” he says, “was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.”
What the philosophes never addressed was the problem of faith itself - theirs as well as that of religious believers. Religion may have begun a decline but faith remained embedded in European culture: “From Enlightenment Reason to modernist art, a whole range of phenomena therefore took on the task of providing surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been. Part of my argument is that the most resourceful of these proxies was culture, in the broad rather than narrow sense of the term.” That is, faith as a fundamental epistemological principle which excludes any proposition, claim, or idea from investigation and critical scrutiny (a uniquely Christian invention), remained and remains the most distinguishing feature of the European way of thinking, including its thinking about politics.
Consequently “The Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.” By not just leaving the principle of faith intact but also by employing it to justify their views of alternative social organization, Enlightenment thinkers literally revolutionized America and France, but weren’t nearly as radical as they might have been. “Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States.” Reason, which was meant to be some sort of sensus communis enabling political unity, turns out to be just the opposite - the driving force of polarization in democratic societies around the world.
Eagleton quotes Gibbon’s view that “Reason is very often rationalisation, in the Freudian sense of lending a specious air of plausibility to some discreditable motive.” One need only note American evangelicals’ justification of Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, race, sexual equality, and international relations, not to mention his personal life to get the point. Faith reigns. Whether it is called Christianity or not is hardly the point. The principle of faith, which is indistinguishable from any other intellectual prejudice, is what is being demonstrated and defended.
This principle of faith, therefore, has become a sort of fundamental right which is quite different from the right of religious association. Faith is the right not just to believe anything one chooses from the apparently infinite sources of fake news but also to seek to enforce that belief politically. Faith is beyond evidence and immune to discussion. Faith is applied to a growing number of political issues from flouridization of water and autism to immigration and environmental policy. Faith presents an impediment to understanding and a block to political compromise in everything it touches. Consequently it is the one thing with which democracy cannot cope. It is faith which makes fake news so powerful. Faith creates its own form of nihilism. As Eagleton says, “atheism is by no means as easy as it looks.”
I have no doubt that Eagleton would disagree violently with my interpretation of his thought. Somehow he clings to something he calls ‘faith’ as a sort of intellectual life raft: “One reason why postmodern thought is atheistic is its suspicion of faith. Not just religious faith, but faith as such. It makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. Begin with a robust belief in goblins and you end up with the Gulag.” He appears to think that any conviction is equivalent to religious faith. The difference is that conviction is tolerant of politics as well as experience; faith is not.
So, yes, what you do end up with through faith, unfortunately, is a Gulag, or a politicized official Church or, even worse, a Trumpian democracy dominated by evangelical fascists. The only way Eagleton can avoid the consequences of his own logic is to make out faith to be some vague confidence that there is something beyond reason which might be important to our lives. He stops short of giving this any fixed content, however, except tenuous references to historic Christian doctrines like free will, individual responsibility, and the need for salvation.
Eagleton thinks these are important in a poetic sense and that artistic tragedy seeks to capture the essence of his poetic metaphysics. But it is the Greeks who invented tragedy, not the Christian Church. So while I can’t disagree with his conception of tragedy, it is difficult to see how such an idea has any connection whatsoever with the unwavering and anti-experiential pistis of St. Paul and its dogmatic descendants. It seems that Eagleton harbours his own brand of residual faith in his revealed self, a barely hidden authoritarian who would have us all subscribe to such a faith. A salutary self-referential lesson in post-Enlightenment thinking then. It does take effort to get out from under the burden of faith.
July 26, 2015
Overwrought, overanalysed, somewhat cryptic and a bit repetitive - yet despite the flaws its central argument is worth exploring. I enjoyed the opening chapters in which Eagleton sets out his premise and then goes on to expand on it with an overabundance of references and allusions to already held knowledge. This right there might be the problem: Maybe I need to bone up on the intellectual history of European Enlightenment before reading an advanced level dissection of the same.
I will, nonetheless, sum up the central argument, or let's say the opening hypothesis, in these words: In ousting religion from the mainstream of society and in removing God from the heart of the individual Western intellectual discourse has not been able to replace it with an equally powerful, singular, all-encompassing value system that answers in totality to the endeavour of humankind. Reason, Nature, philosophy, arts, culture, science, the nation, Human Rights, the ersatz religion of psychoanalysis etc have attempted to replace God as unsatisfactory surrogates which, in Eagleton's words, have "acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity."
These new viceroys of God, to an extent, have filled the gaping hole left behind the proverbial death of God, but the better we understand any of these self-help keys to living the more we see their practical limits with the result that the future which a couple of generations ago was thought to have become, or in the inevitable process of becoming, godless for good, is now reverting to the discarded divine and finding in this rediscovery new answers to old dilemmas. It appears to me that Eagleton considers various manifestations of religion-inspired fundamentalism to be, at least partially, a reaction to modernity putting the divine in disrepute and treating it with curious condescension.
Whether one agrees or disagrees, this coming from an atheist and proud communist is remarkable. If nothing else it shows Eagleton can think beyond dogmas and -isms from an intellectual standpoint and has the courage to hold opinions which, as Proust had said, our modern-day compartmentalised convention thinks an act of calculated cowardice, of which he has been accused of by the oversimplified new-age atheism of Hitchens-Harris variety.
I will, nonetheless, sum up the central argument, or let's say the opening hypothesis, in these words: In ousting religion from the mainstream of society and in removing God from the heart of the individual Western intellectual discourse has not been able to replace it with an equally powerful, singular, all-encompassing value system that answers in totality to the endeavour of humankind. Reason, Nature, philosophy, arts, culture, science, the nation, Human Rights, the ersatz religion of psychoanalysis etc have attempted to replace God as unsatisfactory surrogates which, in Eagleton's words, have "acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity."
These new viceroys of God, to an extent, have filled the gaping hole left behind the proverbial death of God, but the better we understand any of these self-help keys to living the more we see their practical limits with the result that the future which a couple of generations ago was thought to have become, or in the inevitable process of becoming, godless for good, is now reverting to the discarded divine and finding in this rediscovery new answers to old dilemmas. It appears to me that Eagleton considers various manifestations of religion-inspired fundamentalism to be, at least partially, a reaction to modernity putting the divine in disrepute and treating it with curious condescension.
Whether one agrees or disagrees, this coming from an atheist and proud communist is remarkable. If nothing else it shows Eagleton can think beyond dogmas and -isms from an intellectual standpoint and has the courage to hold opinions which, as Proust had said, our modern-day compartmentalised convention thinks an act of calculated cowardice, of which he has been accused of by the oversimplified new-age atheism of Hitchens-Harris variety.
May 5, 2023
Marksist düşünür Terry Eagleton kısa cümlelerle, oldukça akıcı bir dille “Tanrı” kavramını geniş bir perspektifle aktarıyor, yani bir derleme kitabı. Bununla beraber inanç, din, kültür ve ateizm hakkında değerlendirmelerde bulunuyor. Çok sayıda düşünür ve kaynaktan alıntılar yaparak tezini anlatmaya çalışıyor. Çalışıyor çünkü konu çok yoğun, tezler birbiriyle çarpışırken yeni sorular ortaya çıkıyor.
Neredeyse bir elin parmakları kadar düşünür dışında (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche) herkesi hırpalıyor. Kültürü ölen veya öldürülen tanrının yerine koyarak “kültür, tanrının seküler adıdır” diyor, sonra da bunu da tatminkar bulmayarak tanrı vekilleri arasında (insanlık, akıl, sanat, millet, devlet, ahlak, toplum, imgelem, geist) en akla yatkın olanı kültürdür diye düzeltmek gereği duyuyor. Hatta L. Feuerbach’ın modern çağda tanrıyı tahtından indirip yerine insanı oturtarak teolojiyi antropolojiye çevirdiğini yazıyor.
Kültürün din, dinin ise siyaset emrinde olduğunu belirtiyor. W. Benjamin’in kültüre ilişkin olumlu olumsuz değerlendirmeler arasında kararsızlıkla salınmasını Marksizm’in de kararsızlığına bağlıyor. Postmodern düşüncenin ateist olduğunu her türlü inanca dönük şüphesi olduğunu, Nietzsche felsefesinin ateizme yönelik boyutlarının çoğunu (Ubermensch dışında) miras aldığını iddia ediyor. En çok A. Badiou’ya yüklenerek Agamben, Debray, Derrida, Habermas ve Zizek’in teolojik meselelere yönelmelerini eleştiriyor. Ancak hedefindeki iki esas isim Matthew Arnold ve Auguste Comte. Althusser, Derrida, R. Dawkins gibi isimler, aslında tüm Aydınlanmacı ve rasyonalist düşünürler de T. Eagleton’dan paylarını alıyorlar.
Çok yavaş giden zorlayıcı bir okuma oldu, derleme olduğu için yararlandım, ancak kafasında benim gibi belirli bir kalıp oturmuş insanlarda düşüncelerde değişiklik yaratması beklenmeden okunmalı.
Neredeyse bir elin parmakları kadar düşünür dışında (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche) herkesi hırpalıyor. Kültürü ölen veya öldürülen tanrının yerine koyarak “kültür, tanrının seküler adıdır” diyor, sonra da bunu da tatminkar bulmayarak tanrı vekilleri arasında (insanlık, akıl, sanat, millet, devlet, ahlak, toplum, imgelem, geist) en akla yatkın olanı kültürdür diye düzeltmek gereği duyuyor. Hatta L. Feuerbach’ın modern çağda tanrıyı tahtından indirip yerine insanı oturtarak teolojiyi antropolojiye çevirdiğini yazıyor.
Kültürün din, dinin ise siyaset emrinde olduğunu belirtiyor. W. Benjamin’in kültüre ilişkin olumlu olumsuz değerlendirmeler arasında kararsızlıkla salınmasını Marksizm’in de kararsızlığına bağlıyor. Postmodern düşüncenin ateist olduğunu her türlü inanca dönük şüphesi olduğunu, Nietzsche felsefesinin ateizme yönelik boyutlarının çoğunu (Ubermensch dışında) miras aldığını iddia ediyor. En çok A. Badiou’ya yüklenerek Agamben, Debray, Derrida, Habermas ve Zizek’in teolojik meselelere yönelmelerini eleştiriyor. Ancak hedefindeki iki esas isim Matthew Arnold ve Auguste Comte. Althusser, Derrida, R. Dawkins gibi isimler, aslında tüm Aydınlanmacı ve rasyonalist düşünürler de T. Eagleton’dan paylarını alıyorlar.
Çok yavaş giden zorlayıcı bir okuma oldu, derleme olduğu için yararlandım, ancak kafasında benim gibi belirli bir kalıp oturmuş insanlarda düşüncelerde değişiklik yaratması beklenmeden okunmalı.
August 9, 2020
Faced with the seemingly impossible task of reconciling the old and the new during a period of rapid technological and political change in the 17th century the old Western metaphysics based on Christianity began a slow-rolling collapse which is still playing out to this day. God, the central unifier of all spheres of life, had been assassinated by man, though it would take Friedrich Nietzsche two centuries later to finally confront the staggering implications of this unprecedented historical event. The disorienting changes that dissolved Western belief (collapse of tradition, technological change, diaspora, commercialism) are now the shared experience of everyone on earth, even as they continue to wreak ever-new changes on the inner lives of former Christians. This book is an overwrought yet still useful analysis of how people have sought to live in the absence of God.
The short answer is: it’s been very difficult. The Enlightenment thinkers who began the process were not all, or even mostly, atheists. The old beliefs of Christianity were still considered natural and even necessary, but faced with the shock of the new the apparently irrational underpinnings of the old system began appearing as a scandal to the philosophes. Very few of them meant to dethrone their own deity but in critically undermining the bases of Christianity this is what they inadvertently did. All their work since has been to try and grapple around this incredible event. In place of God people have sought with some varying levels of desperation to substitute secularized concepts like the will, geist, the volk, the people, the imagination, progress, and even the pure aesthetics of poetry and art as repositories of the sublime. Unlike religious faith (and with the possible exception of progress) these efforts have had remarkably little purchase with ordinary people.
The heart is touched by symbols and rituals that contain what people crave: meaning. To date, I don’t think anyone has managed to develop any symbolic rituals purveying the inner meaning of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit the way that the high theology of religion can be filtered down to the masses. In any case they haven't done in it in a way that has won any popular communities of Hegelians. Progress has made a bit more...progress, but it is doing so usually in the context of an all-consuming capitalist modernity that birthed it and makes it increasingly hard to discern system from transgression. That system would prefer its subjects not to believe anything too much. But if they must believe, to do so through approved channels that suit its ultimate purpose of generating as many docile consumers as possible.
God in some sense survived his assassination attempt because people still seem to feel the need for many of the functions that their deity once performed. There is a God-sized hole in the fabric of the public consciousness. As Nietzsche argued, this gaping void can only be abolished with the abolition of mankind itself and the creation of a new species entirely different in psychology. The closest modern ideology that comes to this is postmodernism, which negates the subjective individual to the point where it almost seems to dissolve. As the concept of God recedes further and further away, we will probably see mankind become an even more indistinct image of itself in the years to come. One can only warm themselves against a fire for so long after it has gone out.
It’s a bit hard to top what Nietzsche had already said about this subject to be honest. The best part of this book was, unsurprisingly, the one chapter that heavily quoted Nietzsche. The other chapters deal with the range of both admirable and pathetic attempts people have made to generate meaning after killing meaning itself. As a whole the book is quite dense with analysis and frequently does the head-spinning thing of talking about a new philosopher every page rather than distilling the crux of their arguments. But it still contains a few gems of insight for people with a taste for the single most important issue in the world that is also possible to completely ignore.
The short answer is: it’s been very difficult. The Enlightenment thinkers who began the process were not all, or even mostly, atheists. The old beliefs of Christianity were still considered natural and even necessary, but faced with the shock of the new the apparently irrational underpinnings of the old system began appearing as a scandal to the philosophes. Very few of them meant to dethrone their own deity but in critically undermining the bases of Christianity this is what they inadvertently did. All their work since has been to try and grapple around this incredible event. In place of God people have sought with some varying levels of desperation to substitute secularized concepts like the will, geist, the volk, the people, the imagination, progress, and even the pure aesthetics of poetry and art as repositories of the sublime. Unlike religious faith (and with the possible exception of progress) these efforts have had remarkably little purchase with ordinary people.
The heart is touched by symbols and rituals that contain what people crave: meaning. To date, I don’t think anyone has managed to develop any symbolic rituals purveying the inner meaning of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit the way that the high theology of religion can be filtered down to the masses. In any case they haven't done in it in a way that has won any popular communities of Hegelians. Progress has made a bit more...progress, but it is doing so usually in the context of an all-consuming capitalist modernity that birthed it and makes it increasingly hard to discern system from transgression. That system would prefer its subjects not to believe anything too much. But if they must believe, to do so through approved channels that suit its ultimate purpose of generating as many docile consumers as possible.
God in some sense survived his assassination attempt because people still seem to feel the need for many of the functions that their deity once performed. There is a God-sized hole in the fabric of the public consciousness. As Nietzsche argued, this gaping void can only be abolished with the abolition of mankind itself and the creation of a new species entirely different in psychology. The closest modern ideology that comes to this is postmodernism, which negates the subjective individual to the point where it almost seems to dissolve. As the concept of God recedes further and further away, we will probably see mankind become an even more indistinct image of itself in the years to come. One can only warm themselves against a fire for so long after it has gone out.
It’s a bit hard to top what Nietzsche had already said about this subject to be honest. The best part of this book was, unsurprisingly, the one chapter that heavily quoted Nietzsche. The other chapters deal with the range of both admirable and pathetic attempts people have made to generate meaning after killing meaning itself. As a whole the book is quite dense with analysis and frequently does the head-spinning thing of talking about a new philosopher every page rather than distilling the crux of their arguments. But it still contains a few gems of insight for people with a taste for the single most important issue in the world that is also possible to completely ignore.
September 13, 2016
It's strange and fascinating to see Terry Eagleton, a Marxist who once wrote a book called "Why Marx Was Right", defend religion at a time when many people in the West have jettisoned it, either under the influence of media fashion or legitimate disgust with fundamentalism after 9/11. Watching a Marxist defend religion is like watching two old enemies become friends late in life: Antonio Salieri helping Mozart wrap up the Requiem, Adams gasping "Jefferson still lives". Eagleton seems grateful that "religion still lives" -- as an expression, somewhere deep down, of Marxism's own best principles.
Like Czeslaw Milosz and Leszek Kolakowski, whose works are still hugely relevant long after the end of the Cold War, Eagleton isn't ashamed to tackle theological issues and think theologically. While I doubt that he is a believer himself, he seems to be one of the shrinking number of scholars who can draw creatively on the poetry of religious thought (i.e. theology) to make valid points about secular culture. His work is strengthened by this willingness to treat theology with respect.
Eagleton's basic question in his latest book is to ask what is actually stepping in to fill God's shoes as engagement with the idea of God becomes less common in the West. As he reiterates, the story of God's death starts to take on the color of a comic Eastern European folktale: "The Overman [Nietzsche's Superman] has more than a smack of divinity about him," Eagleton proclaims, "which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him." (Zbigniew Herbert's fable of a dead Russian czar who was left in place on his throne to rule on taxidermically while bureaucrats governed in his shadow might be relevant here, even in the increasingly atheistic West.) A fabulously humane writer and thinker, Eagleton recognizes that if God has ever "died" at all, humans have turned themselves into a kind of deity in turn -- surely this huge lesson of the 20th century (the core spiritual lesson of probably every century) is bound to be repeated. Interestingly, even for this Marxist writer, whom you would expect to celebrate God's slow eclipse, that possibility poses more problems than opportunities.
While the heart of the book draws on the growing realization that there's a huge difference between "old" and "new" atheisms, Eagleton is hardly the first person to see the disappointing gap between the existential atheism of older writers like Beckett and Sartre and that of the shallower and less interesting Hitchens-Dawkins generation. No news there. Where Eagleton shines is in seeing glimmers of the underlying cultural arrogance, rife with Western imperialist attitudes and elitist assumptions that practically sound like attempts at crowd-control, in the supposedly liberated and humanist New Atheism, as well as the strange commercialization of Atheism as a movement. Here, the old Marxist distrust of aristocracies and the middle-class (a huge base for the New Atheism) is pretty resounding.
Eagleton is also concerned with how the "death of God" culture manifests itself not only in what he considers unconvincing arguments against religion, but in the superficiality of so much contemporary literature. Eagleton sounds surprisingly conservative when he says that the 21st century hasn't produced much of anything to rival the great literature written even in the few years after World War II, when existentialism had so much influence. Eagleton implies that the fragmented writing of today, obsessed (he claims) with brittle egos and unconvincing personalities, doesn't hold up to a time when people treated the idea of God more seriously, even when that idea thrived on the idea of absence or pain (Nikos Kazantzakis might be a great example). Can one really envision an atheistic literature of the American South, or of Ireland? (Surely possible, but how much would that literature belong to a Southern or Irish tradition? I didn't find Eagleton's argument totally convincing, but certainly food for thought.) Even when non-believers write about God (as they've often done very beautifully), this in itself ties them to important traditions, which is what Nietzsche feared but others have found liberating. Eagleton eloquently asserts that contemporary writers seemed to have ditched tragedy in the process of ditching God, and that this has hurt literature. As he writes brilliantly: "Postmodernism is a post-tragic form of culture -- though post-tragic [only] in the sense that Morrissey is post-Mozart. It is not as if it has been hauled through tragedy in order to emerge, suitably transfigured, on the other side."
What is left after God's long 20th-century funeral is a culture that is significantly less haunted (or so Eagleton asserts) by the big metaphysical questions. He fears that in a world where spirit is largely traded in for matter, where humans are scientifically defined as not much more than walking meat (truly on a level with zombies), there won't be enough to prod us on to great art -- at least not without bringing into play the old religious ideas about fate, transcendence, and worship and weaving them in some compelling way onto a secular canvas. (To the credit of many atheists, I think there's an increasing awareness of this, matched unfortunately by a vocal atheist fundamentalism that rivals the worst religious obscurantism.) Ultimately, Eagleton fears empty and unengaged art and literature, and suggests that, on a cultural level, this will be the main contribution of haughty Richard Dawkins types. The argument is not that "godless" people do not lead incredibly creative lives (they clearly do), but that a culture bereft of wrestling with God or Spirit risks becoming hollow. "In [postmodernity's] eyes," Eagleton concludes critically, "a lack of inherent meaning in reality is not a scandal to be confronted but a fact to be accepted. Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism does not experience it at all. There is no God-shaped hole at the center of its universe, as there is at the center of Kafka, Beckett, or even Philip Larkin. Indeed, there is no gap in its universe at all."
This, in the end, he thinks signals a cultural tragedy, and may mark the Death of Man, not long after we finish celebrating the so-called "funeral of God".
Like Czeslaw Milosz and Leszek Kolakowski, whose works are still hugely relevant long after the end of the Cold War, Eagleton isn't ashamed to tackle theological issues and think theologically. While I doubt that he is a believer himself, he seems to be one of the shrinking number of scholars who can draw creatively on the poetry of religious thought (i.e. theology) to make valid points about secular culture. His work is strengthened by this willingness to treat theology with respect.
Eagleton's basic question in his latest book is to ask what is actually stepping in to fill God's shoes as engagement with the idea of God becomes less common in the West. As he reiterates, the story of God's death starts to take on the color of a comic Eastern European folktale: "The Overman [Nietzsche's Superman] has more than a smack of divinity about him," Eagleton proclaims, "which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him." (Zbigniew Herbert's fable of a dead Russian czar who was left in place on his throne to rule on taxidermically while bureaucrats governed in his shadow might be relevant here, even in the increasingly atheistic West.) A fabulously humane writer and thinker, Eagleton recognizes that if God has ever "died" at all, humans have turned themselves into a kind of deity in turn -- surely this huge lesson of the 20th century (the core spiritual lesson of probably every century) is bound to be repeated. Interestingly, even for this Marxist writer, whom you would expect to celebrate God's slow eclipse, that possibility poses more problems than opportunities.
While the heart of the book draws on the growing realization that there's a huge difference between "old" and "new" atheisms, Eagleton is hardly the first person to see the disappointing gap between the existential atheism of older writers like Beckett and Sartre and that of the shallower and less interesting Hitchens-Dawkins generation. No news there. Where Eagleton shines is in seeing glimmers of the underlying cultural arrogance, rife with Western imperialist attitudes and elitist assumptions that practically sound like attempts at crowd-control, in the supposedly liberated and humanist New Atheism, as well as the strange commercialization of Atheism as a movement. Here, the old Marxist distrust of aristocracies and the middle-class (a huge base for the New Atheism) is pretty resounding.
Eagleton is also concerned with how the "death of God" culture manifests itself not only in what he considers unconvincing arguments against religion, but in the superficiality of so much contemporary literature. Eagleton sounds surprisingly conservative when he says that the 21st century hasn't produced much of anything to rival the great literature written even in the few years after World War II, when existentialism had so much influence. Eagleton implies that the fragmented writing of today, obsessed (he claims) with brittle egos and unconvincing personalities, doesn't hold up to a time when people treated the idea of God more seriously, even when that idea thrived on the idea of absence or pain (Nikos Kazantzakis might be a great example). Can one really envision an atheistic literature of the American South, or of Ireland? (Surely possible, but how much would that literature belong to a Southern or Irish tradition? I didn't find Eagleton's argument totally convincing, but certainly food for thought.) Even when non-believers write about God (as they've often done very beautifully), this in itself ties them to important traditions, which is what Nietzsche feared but others have found liberating. Eagleton eloquently asserts that contemporary writers seemed to have ditched tragedy in the process of ditching God, and that this has hurt literature. As he writes brilliantly: "Postmodernism is a post-tragic form of culture -- though post-tragic [only] in the sense that Morrissey is post-Mozart. It is not as if it has been hauled through tragedy in order to emerge, suitably transfigured, on the other side."
What is left after God's long 20th-century funeral is a culture that is significantly less haunted (or so Eagleton asserts) by the big metaphysical questions. He fears that in a world where spirit is largely traded in for matter, where humans are scientifically defined as not much more than walking meat (truly on a level with zombies), there won't be enough to prod us on to great art -- at least not without bringing into play the old religious ideas about fate, transcendence, and worship and weaving them in some compelling way onto a secular canvas. (To the credit of many atheists, I think there's an increasing awareness of this, matched unfortunately by a vocal atheist fundamentalism that rivals the worst religious obscurantism.) Ultimately, Eagleton fears empty and unengaged art and literature, and suggests that, on a cultural level, this will be the main contribution of haughty Richard Dawkins types. The argument is not that "godless" people do not lead incredibly creative lives (they clearly do), but that a culture bereft of wrestling with God or Spirit risks becoming hollow. "In [postmodernity's] eyes," Eagleton concludes critically, "a lack of inherent meaning in reality is not a scandal to be confronted but a fact to be accepted. Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism does not experience it at all. There is no God-shaped hole at the center of its universe, as there is at the center of Kafka, Beckett, or even Philip Larkin. Indeed, there is no gap in its universe at all."
This, in the end, he thinks signals a cultural tragedy, and may mark the Death of Man, not long after we finish celebrating the so-called "funeral of God".
August 1, 2014
Unfathomable decades ago I first read Terry Eagleton – specifically his 1981 assault on the mandarin sensibilities of George Steiner's introduction to the Verso edition of Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama. (Yes, a tangle of connections.) It had taken me an hour at least to understand Steiner's arcane literary and philosophical fantasia. Eagleton's own text exploded all those carefully composed periphrases. Benjamin; Steiner; Eagleton. Outer darkness and the gnashing of teeth. What was a young leftist left to believe?
After that initial encounter I read him with a jaundiced care, sometimes almost won over entirely, as in his memoir. But for this common reader Eagleton was always a bit too dry, a bit too brittle and slashing. Reading his books always meant getting nudged by the chip on his shoulder.
This latest – very clever – bit of a cultural acrimony deserves a careful reading. Page by page, Eagleton is illuminating, a series of swift aperçus that scout the ideological landscape from the Enlightenment to Twitter. Turns out that fashionable atheism is not easily essayed. The Godhead sticks to our most scrofulous abjurgations; there's always some remnant of unpurged numinous gristle that proves we're not the atheist we though we were. We cannot kill the Almighty God without killing the Almighty Human, the apex of God's creation, the raison d'être of 20 centuries worth of philosophy, political visions, great art and literature, liberté, égalité, fraternité – the virus hidden in the host of Ecce Homo. God is in our DNA. Atheists old and new deceive themselves that they've escaped the stain of belief. It's the pattern even for the most secular intuitions and visions of the mysterious cosmos. In the end Eagleton, like the eminent Charles Taylor (A Secular Age), concludes the atheists are a bit quixotic, and deep in denial.
In fact at the very end we encounter the kind of uncompromising fideism I haven't seen celebrated since the passionate polemics of Jacques Ellul in the late 1970s (The New Demons). The notion of non-Christians promoting Christianity for the masses, who truly need binding by those ties that bind, however stupid, disgusts Eagleton. And fair enough. Jesus did indeed end as a crucified criminal, an outcast and a revolutionary, who'd long discarded any notion of sweetness and light in his apocalyptic fervor. People get ready.
This is a deeply intelligent book that got sidetracked by ornery polemicism. God is dead even if the heathen rage so furiously together – shouting "Alahu Akbar" or bombing Gaza. The hard scrabble of whatever human meaning that's left on the ground will work just fine for the faithless rest of us. Whatever patterns we construct from the shattered kaleidoscope will serve us well enough even as we keep enjoying the mysteries of the Christian Past that we much admire but cannot credence.
After that initial encounter I read him with a jaundiced care, sometimes almost won over entirely, as in his memoir. But for this common reader Eagleton was always a bit too dry, a bit too brittle and slashing. Reading his books always meant getting nudged by the chip on his shoulder.
This latest – very clever – bit of a cultural acrimony deserves a careful reading. Page by page, Eagleton is illuminating, a series of swift aperçus that scout the ideological landscape from the Enlightenment to Twitter. Turns out that fashionable atheism is not easily essayed. The Godhead sticks to our most scrofulous abjurgations; there's always some remnant of unpurged numinous gristle that proves we're not the atheist we though we were. We cannot kill the Almighty God without killing the Almighty Human, the apex of God's creation, the raison d'être of 20 centuries worth of philosophy, political visions, great art and literature, liberté, égalité, fraternité – the virus hidden in the host of Ecce Homo. God is in our DNA. Atheists old and new deceive themselves that they've escaped the stain of belief. It's the pattern even for the most secular intuitions and visions of the mysterious cosmos. In the end Eagleton, like the eminent Charles Taylor (A Secular Age), concludes the atheists are a bit quixotic, and deep in denial.
In fact at the very end we encounter the kind of uncompromising fideism I haven't seen celebrated since the passionate polemics of Jacques Ellul in the late 1970s (The New Demons). The notion of non-Christians promoting Christianity for the masses, who truly need binding by those ties that bind, however stupid, disgusts Eagleton. And fair enough. Jesus did indeed end as a crucified criminal, an outcast and a revolutionary, who'd long discarded any notion of sweetness and light in his apocalyptic fervor. People get ready.
The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a 'civilized' document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus… What it adds to common-or-garden morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of the dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture and politics might be born.Bitter echoes of Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans. Except not even Barth was so sanguine. Christians are exiles, and Jerusalem and Athens do not converge even in infinity.
This is a deeply intelligent book that got sidetracked by ornery polemicism. God is dead even if the heathen rage so furiously together – shouting "Alahu Akbar" or bombing Gaza. The hard scrabble of whatever human meaning that's left on the ground will work just fine for the faithless rest of us. Whatever patterns we construct from the shattered kaleidoscope will serve us well enough even as we keep enjoying the mysteries of the Christian Past that we much admire but cannot credence.
October 25, 2017
‘Most Idealist thinkers were Pelagians’. Didn’t everyone already know that? If you didn’t know it already, you might be lost with this book, because he’s not going to explain what that means, but he just asserts it. I found that kind of writing incredibly refreshing, and I like an author who doesn’t talk down to the reader (or in my case listener) and he always assumed the reader was interested in the topic under consideration and already has a familiarity with the topic under consideration. Not once, was I not on the edge of my seat as he was telling his story and connecting the dots for me. (I do most of my listening while riding a bicycle and I was literally on the edge of my seat, but I meant it metaphorically, of course).
The Enlightenment, the German Idealist and the Romantics are covered in detail, as are the masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), and then the nature of culture and post-modernism. Every page was a delight, and I probably disagreed with something he was saying on every other page. He was right when he said Hegel oversaw the completion of history in his own mind, but everything else he said about Hegel and his ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ I took with a jaundice eye. And his statement that ‘Schopenhauer remained a full-blooded metaphysician, a nightmarish version of the Hegel he envied so deeply’ beggars belief for me. Perhaps, that is true, but I’ve never seen a footnote more cutting towards someone then Schopenhauer had towards Hegel in his ‘Will and Representation’, and one can’t help notice the different world views of each. Yes, they both claim kinship with Kant. In particular, Schopenhauer says that directly in ‘Will as Representation’, but Hegel uses Kant only to go elsewhere and uses him as launching pad.
I’m nitpicking. I just love the way this guy wrote. He was not afraid of dropping names or concepts or educating his reader. I don’t think it’s possible to find a more concise review of the period under consideration then this survey and it was all tied together by his narrative: religion always needs to be with us and culture acts as its surrogate. As he’s telling his story he gets at why Kierkegaard and Nietzsche really matter. Both are anti-humanist (he doesn’t use that word) and want feelings to be our guide for being human. The author definitely prefers Kierkegaard’s slant over all, and would think of Nietzsche as a nihilist. Nietzsche argued that the Christian who outsourced their values to a book, and they would believe that their eternal payoffs could be dependent on behavior in this life were the real nihilist because they were the ones with no principles just dogma.
He loves his Edmund Burke. He’ll quote him all throughout the book. That means the author has a predisposition towards culture, community and character in making us good humans. This book loves playing with the importance of culture. Pascal was mentioned in this book but not quoted for saying ‘culture is nature’ as Hubert Dreyfus mentioned in his lecture on Heidegger. What Pascal meant by that is that we can’t easily rise above the world we are thrown into and the ‘they’ (das man) and our authentic selves are hard for us to obtain. This author thinks the truth is out there and is not that hard for us to find especially if we are willing to believe in false world structures even if we know they are false.
The author really had a lot of Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow type thinking within him. ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ has many themes in it and one of them was that believing a lie even when we know it is a lie can be a good thing. Another theme the author has that overlapped with that book was that identity politics spring from post-modern thought. He’s walking a fine line by the way he uses culture such that one should embrace ones culture because it is ones culture. That’s sort of a restating of how people want to use patriotism to justify their bigotry.
I really think the word ‘believe’ is a loaded word. ‘Believe in’ means faith in. For me, ‘faith’ is always best translated as ‘to pretend to know something you don’t know’. ‘Belief’ is a word one uses when one has an opinion about something but not with enough sufficient reason to have ‘justified true belief’ since the something does not quite comport to reality, nor is it internally consistent, nor even pragmatic in the William James usage of the word. The author wants to bring belief back as a standard for truth in his quest for refuting the humanism and modernity which were firmed up during the Enlightenment.
The author called Sam Harris a liberal. Harris wanted to use a nuclear bomb after 9/11 and wanted to torture more often (the book doesn’t mention the torture part but Harris did say that). Therefore all liberals believe in stupid things (there’s probably a name for that fallacy because it’s such a common poor way to argue). We currently have a president who doesn’t understand why we don’t use nuclear weapons and has said that if the North Korean Ambassador doesn’t behave properly we will wipe out their country which is populated with human beings and they would die or suffer in the process, and Trump has said that he would use torture more often if he could. So, not only a liberal can think that way, but the leader of the Republican Party thinks that way too. (But that doesn’t mean all conservatives think that way!).
I had a bet with myself that this book would mention Proust. It did. The quote was ‘The imagination as a means of grace is one of modernism's abiding motifs, from the redemptive power of memory in Proust's great novel to the priestly vocation of the Joycean artist’. This links back to two separate items I’ve talked about above: the ‘Pelagian’ quote above and Schopenhauer. Pelagius believed prays made a difference and that salvation could come from good works. In a word, Augustine did not. He believed in a necessary universe created from the free will of God and salvation was through God’s Grace alone. Schopenhauer in the very end of his book ‘Will as Representation’ explicitly cites Grace as a supplement to his Will alone and disses Pelagius by name. All of those main points are also within this book, but the author spreads it out across the book, because he has a lot he wants to tell the reader and expects them to pick them up for themselves. I give kudos to a writer that has that much trust in his reader.
There’s a whole lot I disagree with the author with, actually, probably almost everything, but I don’t read to reinforce my beliefs, I read to be challenged. This book was a delightful challenge and within it were all of the major themes that have been lurking about philosophy since the time of Spinoza. (BTW, I think the author read a different version of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ then I did because I took away a whole different set of lessons then he did).
The Enlightenment, the German Idealist and the Romantics are covered in detail, as are the masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), and then the nature of culture and post-modernism. Every page was a delight, and I probably disagreed with something he was saying on every other page. He was right when he said Hegel oversaw the completion of history in his own mind, but everything else he said about Hegel and his ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ I took with a jaundice eye. And his statement that ‘Schopenhauer remained a full-blooded metaphysician, a nightmarish version of the Hegel he envied so deeply’ beggars belief for me. Perhaps, that is true, but I’ve never seen a footnote more cutting towards someone then Schopenhauer had towards Hegel in his ‘Will and Representation’, and one can’t help notice the different world views of each. Yes, they both claim kinship with Kant. In particular, Schopenhauer says that directly in ‘Will as Representation’, but Hegel uses Kant only to go elsewhere and uses him as launching pad.
I’m nitpicking. I just love the way this guy wrote. He was not afraid of dropping names or concepts or educating his reader. I don’t think it’s possible to find a more concise review of the period under consideration then this survey and it was all tied together by his narrative: religion always needs to be with us and culture acts as its surrogate. As he’s telling his story he gets at why Kierkegaard and Nietzsche really matter. Both are anti-humanist (he doesn’t use that word) and want feelings to be our guide for being human. The author definitely prefers Kierkegaard’s slant over all, and would think of Nietzsche as a nihilist. Nietzsche argued that the Christian who outsourced their values to a book, and they would believe that their eternal payoffs could be dependent on behavior in this life were the real nihilist because they were the ones with no principles just dogma.
He loves his Edmund Burke. He’ll quote him all throughout the book. That means the author has a predisposition towards culture, community and character in making us good humans. This book loves playing with the importance of culture. Pascal was mentioned in this book but not quoted for saying ‘culture is nature’ as Hubert Dreyfus mentioned in his lecture on Heidegger. What Pascal meant by that is that we can’t easily rise above the world we are thrown into and the ‘they’ (das man) and our authentic selves are hard for us to obtain. This author thinks the truth is out there and is not that hard for us to find especially if we are willing to believe in false world structures even if we know they are false.
The author really had a lot of Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow type thinking within him. ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ has many themes in it and one of them was that believing a lie even when we know it is a lie can be a good thing. Another theme the author has that overlapped with that book was that identity politics spring from post-modern thought. He’s walking a fine line by the way he uses culture such that one should embrace ones culture because it is ones culture. That’s sort of a restating of how people want to use patriotism to justify their bigotry.
I really think the word ‘believe’ is a loaded word. ‘Believe in’ means faith in. For me, ‘faith’ is always best translated as ‘to pretend to know something you don’t know’. ‘Belief’ is a word one uses when one has an opinion about something but not with enough sufficient reason to have ‘justified true belief’ since the something does not quite comport to reality, nor is it internally consistent, nor even pragmatic in the William James usage of the word. The author wants to bring belief back as a standard for truth in his quest for refuting the humanism and modernity which were firmed up during the Enlightenment.
The author called Sam Harris a liberal. Harris wanted to use a nuclear bomb after 9/11 and wanted to torture more often (the book doesn’t mention the torture part but Harris did say that). Therefore all liberals believe in stupid things (there’s probably a name for that fallacy because it’s such a common poor way to argue). We currently have a president who doesn’t understand why we don’t use nuclear weapons and has said that if the North Korean Ambassador doesn’t behave properly we will wipe out their country which is populated with human beings and they would die or suffer in the process, and Trump has said that he would use torture more often if he could. So, not only a liberal can think that way, but the leader of the Republican Party thinks that way too. (But that doesn’t mean all conservatives think that way!).
I had a bet with myself that this book would mention Proust. It did. The quote was ‘The imagination as a means of grace is one of modernism's abiding motifs, from the redemptive power of memory in Proust's great novel to the priestly vocation of the Joycean artist’. This links back to two separate items I’ve talked about above: the ‘Pelagian’ quote above and Schopenhauer. Pelagius believed prays made a difference and that salvation could come from good works. In a word, Augustine did not. He believed in a necessary universe created from the free will of God and salvation was through God’s Grace alone. Schopenhauer in the very end of his book ‘Will as Representation’ explicitly cites Grace as a supplement to his Will alone and disses Pelagius by name. All of those main points are also within this book, but the author spreads it out across the book, because he has a lot he wants to tell the reader and expects them to pick them up for themselves. I give kudos to a writer that has that much trust in his reader.
There’s a whole lot I disagree with the author with, actually, probably almost everything, but I don’t read to reinforce my beliefs, I read to be challenged. This book was a delightful challenge and within it were all of the major themes that have been lurking about philosophy since the time of Spinoza. (BTW, I think the author read a different version of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ then I did because I took away a whole different set of lessons then he did).
February 16, 2020
مهما تسلحت بأدواتك؛ القراءة لإيغلتُن غالبًا تكون مفاجِئة.
March 3, 2025
A punchy and well-written jaunt through Western intellectual culture since the Enlightenment in which Terry Eagleton reveals just how nigh impossible it has been for skeptics to truly be atheists. In Eagleton's telling, disavowing traditional Christianity inevitably leads to the elevation of something else (art, nationalism, etc...) to take religion's place.
November 5, 2018
The final chapter of this book bears many similarities to Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism, but that last chapter comes only after a good deal of historical ground is covered, tackling the “God problem” from the era of the Enlightenment on to the Postmodern present, dealing with the thoughts of the Romantics, the Idealists and many in between. Nietzsche famously pronounced God dead, but not without adding that “there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.”
To Eagleton, the Enlightenment era tried to kill God in the greatest act of patricide (deicide really) since Oedipus, but this shape-shifting God just took on other forms: aesthetics, culture, Reason, Spirit. The God that was taken for dead was never really killed after all.
While Eagleton covers a lot of ground and can be quite funny, he has a way at times of making his philosophical progenitors into rather cartoonish versions of themselves. Perhaps this over-simplification is necessary with the great deal of ground that he covers; otherwise this book could have been three times as thick and less likely to be read by any but a very select few (fewer than the few who read it already).
Even if Eagleton is sometimes guilty of making certain figures into fairly sturdy strawmen, he at least acknowledges them and presents their views with some degree of accuracy, which is more than can be said for those who merely treat history like an elephant in the room. The high point of the work for me is the final chapter, where Eagleton takes aim at (post)modern society and capitalism as the institution that has attempted to drive the final stake through the heart of God. In earlier epochs mankind was a producer and creator, and thus easily able to see his/herself as being made in the image of The Creator. But in late capitalism we have changed from being producers to being consumers, and as consumers, hollow, empty and robbed of our last shreds of divinity.
And yet, while God would have been thought effectively disposed of in the era of postmodernism and late-stage capitalism, it became clear in the 21st century that God – recognized in earlier periods by some unbelieving elitists in the vein of Machiavelli as a utilitarian tool for social control – was alive and well and thriving in certain regions. Much as elitist politics has given rise to radical populism on both the right and left (recognized by some scholars, like Slavoj Žižek and Eagleton, as at least partly responsible for the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro and movements like Brexit), the godless creeds of Western capitalism are at least partly responsible for the rise of religious fundamentalism. While fewer seats are filled in churches and synagogues across the US (save certain regions like the “Bible Belt”), there is a global surge in religious fundamentalism.
Civilization has made great strides, but it has also led to repression, anxiety and alienation (as pointed out by Freud and Marx, to whom Eagleton is deeply indebted). We may have made progress in certain areas of civil rights, but society has at the same time neglected the problems of many of the world’s poor and the struggling. Eagleton, raised Catholic, and not what one would call a traditional “Christian” as the term is often used, notes that some scholars on the left, himself included, have (like those on the right) given another look at theology in recent years. For Eagleton, the answer is not to turn away from religion, but to turn toward it in an attempt to solve our problems, to bridge the gaps that culture has created. While he never uses the term itself in this work, his call for us to work in solidarity with the “poor and powerless” sounds a lot like the Marxist-influenced liberation theology preached by the likes of Gustavo Gutierrez and Oscar Romero. This is the seed with which he feels a new culture and politics can take root.
To Eagleton, the Enlightenment era tried to kill God in the greatest act of patricide (deicide really) since Oedipus, but this shape-shifting God just took on other forms: aesthetics, culture, Reason, Spirit. The God that was taken for dead was never really killed after all.
While Eagleton covers a lot of ground and can be quite funny, he has a way at times of making his philosophical progenitors into rather cartoonish versions of themselves. Perhaps this over-simplification is necessary with the great deal of ground that he covers; otherwise this book could have been three times as thick and less likely to be read by any but a very select few (fewer than the few who read it already).
Even if Eagleton is sometimes guilty of making certain figures into fairly sturdy strawmen, he at least acknowledges them and presents their views with some degree of accuracy, which is more than can be said for those who merely treat history like an elephant in the room. The high point of the work for me is the final chapter, where Eagleton takes aim at (post)modern society and capitalism as the institution that has attempted to drive the final stake through the heart of God. In earlier epochs mankind was a producer and creator, and thus easily able to see his/herself as being made in the image of The Creator. But in late capitalism we have changed from being producers to being consumers, and as consumers, hollow, empty and robbed of our last shreds of divinity.
And yet, while God would have been thought effectively disposed of in the era of postmodernism and late-stage capitalism, it became clear in the 21st century that God – recognized in earlier periods by some unbelieving elitists in the vein of Machiavelli as a utilitarian tool for social control – was alive and well and thriving in certain regions. Much as elitist politics has given rise to radical populism on both the right and left (recognized by some scholars, like Slavoj Žižek and Eagleton, as at least partly responsible for the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro and movements like Brexit), the godless creeds of Western capitalism are at least partly responsible for the rise of religious fundamentalism. While fewer seats are filled in churches and synagogues across the US (save certain regions like the “Bible Belt”), there is a global surge in religious fundamentalism.
Civilization has made great strides, but it has also led to repression, anxiety and alienation (as pointed out by Freud and Marx, to whom Eagleton is deeply indebted). We may have made progress in certain areas of civil rights, but society has at the same time neglected the problems of many of the world’s poor and the struggling. Eagleton, raised Catholic, and not what one would call a traditional “Christian” as the term is often used, notes that some scholars on the left, himself included, have (like those on the right) given another look at theology in recent years. For Eagleton, the answer is not to turn away from religion, but to turn toward it in an attempt to solve our problems, to bridge the gaps that culture has created. While he never uses the term itself in this work, his call for us to work in solidarity with the “poor and powerless” sounds a lot like the Marxist-influenced liberation theology preached by the likes of Gustavo Gutierrez and Oscar Romero. This is the seed with which he feels a new culture and politics can take root.
October 10, 2023
In the preface to Culture and the Death of God, literary critic Terry Eagleton provocatively asserts that “atheism is by no means as easy as it looks” (1:02). In the chapters that follow, he goes on to demonstrate the ways in which Western societies, from the enlightenment onwards, have sought to make God redundant. But just when they assume they’ve done away with the Deity for good, God’s “viceroys” inevitably crop up in His absence. With his very helpful phrase “viceroys for God” Eagleton is referring to the driving beliefs and values—often rooted in Judeo-Christian presuppositions—from which secular societies (irrationally) derive transcendent meaning, direction and morality:
“The history of the modern age is, among other things, the search for a viceroy for God: reason, nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, being, society, the Other, desire, the life-force, and personal relations. All of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity” (ch 3; 0:01).
Before I go any further, I must confess that this book made me feel a bit like one of those ridiculous game show contestants ensconced in a glass rectangle, giddily and greedily swatting at a manic swirl of flying dollar bills. There’s so much intellectual gold in this book, and my feeble brain allowed me to grasp only a nugget here or there. It would be pretentious of me to indicate otherwise. A criticism I have of this book is that Eagleton does little to make many of his ideas accessible to the reasonably thoughtful and curious reader. (Would it really kill him to define Socinianism?) I did, however, manage to find the main thrust of the book supremely interesting, and though I relied on Wikipedia far more than I’d like to admit, I persisted until I reached the end. What impressed me most was not the argument (which theists have been positing for a while) but the source of the argument: Terry Eagleton, a Marxist, and seemingly no friend of theistic belief as far as I can tell. How compelling: an atheistic critique of the New Atheists and those others who have exchanged Christian doctrine for “a deluded brand of faith…more to the taste of a skeptical age” (ch. 2; 0:54).
.
Chapter 5 I found by far the most enthralling. In it, Eagleton focuses his analysis on Nietzsche, a thinker who “above all confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of the death of God” (ch. 5; 0:44).
“Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundation and expect the building still to stand” (ch.5; 11:01).
“…In Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain in tact. Morality, for example, must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in the chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience, and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience, or obligation in the first place” (ch. 5; 12:27).
According to Eagleton, though, even Nietzsche couldn’t rid himself entirely of God’s viceroys. (The concepts of Übermensch and der Wille zur Macht are cited as examples of transcendent beliefs in Nietzschean philosophy.)
It’s hard to disagree with Eagleton’s critique of those who, having flippantly dispatched God, still presume upon those benefits that belief in Him bestows:
“…our true crime is less deicide than hypocrisy. Having murdered one creator in the most spectacular of all Oedipal revolts, we have hidden the body, repressed all memory of the traumatic event, tidied up the scene of the crime, and, like Norman Bates in Pscyho behave as though we are innocent of the act. We have also dissembled our deicide with various shamefaced forms of pseudo religion, as though an expiation of our unconscious guilt. Modern secular societies, in other words, have effectively disposed of God but find it morally and politically convenient, even imperative, to behave as though they have not” (ch. 5; 14:15).
Also included are some really interesting distinctions made between modernism and postmodernism that helped me understand why I often find the latter unsatisfying:
“Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism does not experience it at all. There is no god-shaped hole at the center of its universe, as there is at the center of Kafka, Beckett, or even Phillip Larkin. Indeed, there is no gap of any kind in its universe. This is one of several reasons why postmodernism is post-tragic. Tragedy involves the possibility of irretrievable loss, whereas for postmodernism there is nothing momentous missing” (ch. 6; 27:58).
“If [postmodernism] abjures religion, it does so, as we have seen, at the cost of renouncing depth, of which it is notably nervous” (ch. 6; 37:57).
A demanding read but very worthwhile. As far as I could discern, Eagleton doesn’t exactly offer answers and alternatives, but his diagnosis seems to me spot on.
Note: I don’t own a print copy of this book. All quotes are transcribed from my audiobook version. I apologize for any punctuation and capitalization discrepancies between what I’ve cited here and Eagleton’s original text.
“The history of the modern age is, among other things, the search for a viceroy for God: reason, nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, being, society, the Other, desire, the life-force, and personal relations. All of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity” (ch 3; 0:01).
Before I go any further, I must confess that this book made me feel a bit like one of those ridiculous game show contestants ensconced in a glass rectangle, giddily and greedily swatting at a manic swirl of flying dollar bills. There’s so much intellectual gold in this book, and my feeble brain allowed me to grasp only a nugget here or there. It would be pretentious of me to indicate otherwise. A criticism I have of this book is that Eagleton does little to make many of his ideas accessible to the reasonably thoughtful and curious reader. (Would it really kill him to define Socinianism?) I did, however, manage to find the main thrust of the book supremely interesting, and though I relied on Wikipedia far more than I’d like to admit, I persisted until I reached the end. What impressed me most was not the argument (which theists have been positing for a while) but the source of the argument: Terry Eagleton, a Marxist, and seemingly no friend of theistic belief as far as I can tell. How compelling: an atheistic critique of the New Atheists and those others who have exchanged Christian doctrine for “a deluded brand of faith…more to the taste of a skeptical age” (ch. 2; 0:54).
.
Chapter 5 I found by far the most enthralling. In it, Eagleton focuses his analysis on Nietzsche, a thinker who “above all confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of the death of God” (ch. 5; 0:44).
“Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundation and expect the building still to stand” (ch.5; 11:01).
“…In Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain in tact. Morality, for example, must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in the chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience, and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience, or obligation in the first place” (ch. 5; 12:27).
According to Eagleton, though, even Nietzsche couldn’t rid himself entirely of God’s viceroys. (The concepts of Übermensch and der Wille zur Macht are cited as examples of transcendent beliefs in Nietzschean philosophy.)
It’s hard to disagree with Eagleton’s critique of those who, having flippantly dispatched God, still presume upon those benefits that belief in Him bestows:
“…our true crime is less deicide than hypocrisy. Having murdered one creator in the most spectacular of all Oedipal revolts, we have hidden the body, repressed all memory of the traumatic event, tidied up the scene of the crime, and, like Norman Bates in Pscyho behave as though we are innocent of the act. We have also dissembled our deicide with various shamefaced forms of pseudo religion, as though an expiation of our unconscious guilt. Modern secular societies, in other words, have effectively disposed of God but find it morally and politically convenient, even imperative, to behave as though they have not” (ch. 5; 14:15).
Also included are some really interesting distinctions made between modernism and postmodernism that helped me understand why I often find the latter unsatisfying:
“Whereas modernism experiences the death of God as a trauma, an affront, a source of anguish as well as a cause for celebration, postmodernism does not experience it at all. There is no god-shaped hole at the center of its universe, as there is at the center of Kafka, Beckett, or even Phillip Larkin. Indeed, there is no gap of any kind in its universe. This is one of several reasons why postmodernism is post-tragic. Tragedy involves the possibility of irretrievable loss, whereas for postmodernism there is nothing momentous missing” (ch. 6; 27:58).
“If [postmodernism] abjures religion, it does so, as we have seen, at the cost of renouncing depth, of which it is notably nervous” (ch. 6; 37:57).
A demanding read but very worthwhile. As far as I could discern, Eagleton doesn’t exactly offer answers and alternatives, but his diagnosis seems to me spot on.
Note: I don’t own a print copy of this book. All quotes are transcribed from my audiobook version. I apologize for any punctuation and capitalization discrepancies between what I’ve cited here and Eagleton’s original text.
July 16, 2014
This book comes from 2008 Terry Lecture. Terry lecture series is an endowed Yale University lectureship on religion in the light of modern science and philosophy. In other words, it is explicitly foster a religious thought-process sustainable in the modern age. It is not a forum to give voice to atheism but to its most articulate opponents. Professor Eagleton blazed in with a combination of unabashed contempt for atheism, deeply felt resonance with Marxism, and a voice with pithy, witty declarations.
In general, I found this book thought-provoking and entertaining. There are many quotable turn-of-phrases. Yet, there are too many declarative sentences seemed to be around the same idea. Of course, it was a lecture series. The format of lecturing may require such style and tones. Yet I have learned some useful insights:
(1) What is the new Christian theology? Not "God as a very large and powerful creature”, nor providing a rival view of the universe to science. In such light, the new atheists were attacking obsolete or extreme views of Christianity by assuming that all Christians are creationists or fideists (believing knowledge comes from faith or revelations). These points were settled a long time ago by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (I did not know previously). To say that religion is pseudos-science is missing the point. Religion is about ontological issues (metaphysical issues such as meaning of life), while science is about ontic features of things. My own analogy is building a piano (science and technology), and emotional response to music from piano (religion). A useful quote from Professional Eagleton:
“God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.”
(2) Can humanism replace God? The author argues strongly against such “self-authorship” as delusional, arrogant and dangerous. Without being checked by a higher power, human desire and drive, exercised under “free will”, often leads to unmitigated disasters. The author also argued for the unique “strangeness” of Christianity embodied in the Jesus — a misfit, a loser, a counter-social — yet it is about kindness, justice and love. He said:
“Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out to be not a matter of cult, law, and ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, of slaughtering animals for sacrifice or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. “
The basic animal and social instincts would be to weed off the weak, spur off the strangers, concentrate resources on the rich and powerful, if one is to read Darwinism broadly. From its wellspring, however flowing and creative, can hardly justice a dominating conscious as the “meek shall inherit the earth”. In this sense, God is transcendent from human nature.
(3) Linking to contemporary issue such as terrorism and commercial culture, the author points out the consequences of a Godless world without true understanding of one and other. Multiculturalism is just a shallow facade to mask the profound indifferences toward other’s thinking. He said bitterly of today’s developed world: “an unholy melange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.”
In the end, the author asked his audience to think differently of the labeling of each ideological allegiance to confront the tragic nature of human history.
In general, I found this book thought-provoking and entertaining. There are many quotable turn-of-phrases. Yet, there are too many declarative sentences seemed to be around the same idea. Of course, it was a lecture series. The format of lecturing may require such style and tones. Yet I have learned some useful insights:
(1) What is the new Christian theology? Not "God as a very large and powerful creature”, nor providing a rival view of the universe to science. In such light, the new atheists were attacking obsolete or extreme views of Christianity by assuming that all Christians are creationists or fideists (believing knowledge comes from faith or revelations). These points were settled a long time ago by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (I did not know previously). To say that religion is pseudos-science is missing the point. Religion is about ontological issues (metaphysical issues such as meaning of life), while science is about ontic features of things. My own analogy is building a piano (science and technology), and emotional response to music from piano (religion). A useful quote from Professional Eagleton:
“God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.”
(2) Can humanism replace God? The author argues strongly against such “self-authorship” as delusional, arrogant and dangerous. Without being checked by a higher power, human desire and drive, exercised under “free will”, often leads to unmitigated disasters. The author also argued for the unique “strangeness” of Christianity embodied in the Jesus — a misfit, a loser, a counter-social — yet it is about kindness, justice and love. He said:
“Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out to be not a matter of cult, law, and ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, of slaughtering animals for sacrifice or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. “
The basic animal and social instincts would be to weed off the weak, spur off the strangers, concentrate resources on the rich and powerful, if one is to read Darwinism broadly. From its wellspring, however flowing and creative, can hardly justice a dominating conscious as the “meek shall inherit the earth”. In this sense, God is transcendent from human nature.
(3) Linking to contemporary issue such as terrorism and commercial culture, the author points out the consequences of a Godless world without true understanding of one and other. Multiculturalism is just a shallow facade to mask the profound indifferences toward other’s thinking. He said bitterly of today’s developed world: “an unholy melange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.”
In the end, the author asked his audience to think differently of the labeling of each ideological allegiance to confront the tragic nature of human history.
November 10, 2025
We chose this book for our faculty study group here at Saint Martin's University, a group made up of math, philosophy, engineering, and other science faculty. We're a small group; usually only about 3-4 show up since most are busy with their workloads.
From my perspective as a student of Asian/Western comparative philosophy and philosophy of science, the whole topic of this book already bespeaks of Western-only concerns. Eagleton's writing is hard to follow and bounces all over the place, and believe me, I read A LOT of writers. He drops names left and right but rarely goes into much detail of what the person he referred to thinks. He critiques the Enlightenment, discusses idealism and romanticism, discusses what he calls "the crisis of culture and the death of God," and then proposes his solution.
By far the most annoying (for me) part of this book is its unabashed theism. By his language and vocabulary, Eagleton clearly has Christian theistic commitments - the book is full of words such as "Almighty," "providence," “a viceroy for god,” “fall out of his (God’s) hands,” “no contradiction between the Father who is Spirit and the Son who is flesh and blood,” “lordship of the mind over nature,” constantly referring to God with male pronouns. His presentation fails to address the patriarchal, colonialist, ethnocentric assumptions implied in such a theistic presentation. If I didn't have to read this for our group, I never would have chose to read it in the first place.
So, if you're looking for a Western-only discussion of a Western-only problem from a theistic perspective, I sure Eagleton will speak something to you. If you're looking to dig deep into the metaphysics of ultimate truth/reality, go somewhere else.
From my perspective as a student of Asian/Western comparative philosophy and philosophy of science, the whole topic of this book already bespeaks of Western-only concerns. Eagleton's writing is hard to follow and bounces all over the place, and believe me, I read A LOT of writers. He drops names left and right but rarely goes into much detail of what the person he referred to thinks. He critiques the Enlightenment, discusses idealism and romanticism, discusses what he calls "the crisis of culture and the death of God," and then proposes his solution.
By far the most annoying (for me) part of this book is its unabashed theism. By his language and vocabulary, Eagleton clearly has Christian theistic commitments - the book is full of words such as "Almighty," "providence," “a viceroy for god,” “fall out of his (God’s) hands,” “no contradiction between the Father who is Spirit and the Son who is flesh and blood,” “lordship of the mind over nature,” constantly referring to God with male pronouns. His presentation fails to address the patriarchal, colonialist, ethnocentric assumptions implied in such a theistic presentation. If I didn't have to read this for our group, I never would have chose to read it in the first place.
So, if you're looking for a Western-only discussion of a Western-only problem from a theistic perspective, I sure Eagleton will speak something to you. If you're looking to dig deep into the metaphysics of ultimate truth/reality, go somewhere else.
March 22, 2020
Full disclosure: I listened to this as an audiobook.
As in many of his books, Terry Eagleton seeks to explain complex ideas (here, theology, philosophy and culture) in a coherent way - without any dumbing down.
You’ll need to work pretty hard in order to understand him (at least, I did!). That was true when I first read "Literary Theory" in the early 1980s, and it's still true today. In this case, I ended up hitting “rewind” a lot. It’s worth the effort, even if it’s a daunting task.
Apropos of the title, it turns out that the reports of the death of God are greatly exaggerated - even if his latest resurrection has some disquieting aspects (you'll have to listen to the book - there's no way I'm going to try to paraphrase him).
If you're interested in this subject (Nietzsche is discussed at length, and Richard Dawkins is in for some serious criticism), and you're up for an intellectual challenge, this is highly recommended.
As in many of his books, Terry Eagleton seeks to explain complex ideas (here, theology, philosophy and culture) in a coherent way - without any dumbing down.
You’ll need to work pretty hard in order to understand him (at least, I did!). That was true when I first read "Literary Theory" in the early 1980s, and it's still true today. In this case, I ended up hitting “rewind” a lot. It’s worth the effort, even if it’s a daunting task.
Apropos of the title, it turns out that the reports of the death of God are greatly exaggerated - even if his latest resurrection has some disquieting aspects (you'll have to listen to the book - there's no way I'm going to try to paraphrase him).
If you're interested in this subject (Nietzsche is discussed at length, and Richard Dawkins is in for some serious criticism), and you're up for an intellectual challenge, this is highly recommended.
abandoned
February 15, 2020Got to page 50 but I don’t think I really absorbed much of anything. Virtually every page has mentions of lots of people I’ve barely heard of, or have certainly heard of but haven’t studied.
Here’s a fairly random example, on page 29:
(John) Toland
Electress Sophia
(John) Milton
(?) Harrington
Giordano Bruno
William of Orange
Moses
Hegel
I’m not educated in a way where I can deal with page after page of this. I might be happy to read a clear explication of ideas, but not so interested in laundry lists of the arguments that various historical and literary figures had with other historical and literary figures.
In short, not my kind of book.
Here’s a fairly random example, on page 29:
(John) Toland
Electress Sophia
(John) Milton
(?) Harrington
Giordano Bruno
William of Orange
Moses
Hegel
I’m not educated in a way where I can deal with page after page of this. I might be happy to read a clear explication of ideas, but not so interested in laundry lists of the arguments that various historical and literary figures had with other historical and literary figures.
In short, not my kind of book.
February 14, 2020
This is not an easy read, and I say that with respect. Every masterfully crafted sentence alludes to the immensity of Terry Eagleton's knowledge, and every line simultaneously astounds and manages to teach you a thing or two. "Death of God" was a particularly eloquent embodiment of my inner turmoil. Almost exactly, I think.
Also present(but well-hidden)-English humour.
Also present(but well-hidden)-English humour.
July 23, 2020
Since the enlightenment philosophers and thinkers have been trying to find a replacement for The Man Upstairs, something to bring meaning to life. Eagleton describes this mostly failed battle. Some of the ideas used as a replacement have been reason, the economy, culture, the nation, the state, humanity, art and desire. From the rationalists to the romantics to the post-modernists and even Nazis (the nation and state are some of the worst mentioned, from a results oriented perspective) all fail in their efforts in one way or another. And they all seem to think their skepticism is justified for the "smart people" but religion is necessary for the rabble to keep them in line. (This was not in the book, but both Tom Jefferson and Ben Franklin said as much to Tom Paine in letters). Anyways, the book started a little clunky and I felt like I needed to read 5 or 6 more books for every page of this one just to keep up. It settled down later on and focused on some ideas I am more familiar with, and I ended up mostly enjoying it...
September 2, 2016
What is this book like? It's like walking into a 201 class when you haven't taken the 101 class. In other words, it's like walking into a discussion that's already started. You've missed the introductory comments and now you're just hearing names of people, with the assumption that you know them all, and you know when and where they lived, and some basic terms, and now the discussion is moving forward. At least, that's how I experienced this book.
Culture and the Death of God is about how we (in the West) have tried to make sense of life from the time of the Enlightenment to today. One might say that in the modern (and postmodern era), the idea of God has been dying. At least, God's role in the public square has been diminished. With God playing a less prominent role in public life, a vacuum is left. What fills that void? Cold Reason? Some vague "Ideal"? Abstract ideas don't capture the imagination of most people. In other words, atheistic philosophies are not existentially viable for the masses. They don't give meaning and shape to life. Various God substitutes (art, for example) fail to fill for the role God once played.
The book is frustrating because it rambles a bit. It could use clearer structuring. And, also, it's hard to know the intended audience. For people like me, well educated but not familiar with every name and movement, the book is difficult because Eagleton fails to give dates, or explain terms, or even give basic introductions to the various thinkers he references. For those who know such things already, this book would probably seem too simple. One of the things I value the most is clarity. Eagleton is not always a clear writer. The problem isn't his prose, the way he structures his sentences. It's in the way he makes (or fails to make) arguments, and his lack of care for the reader. A good author will bring the reader along. Eagleton doesn't always do this well.
The best chapter, in my view (not surprisingly), is Chapter 5: "The Death of God."
One frustration which I experienced, in this book and in Eagleton's The Meaning of Life, is that he doesn't clarify what he believes. In such a book as this (and The Meaning of Life), I think it is necessary for the author to land somewhere, to make clear what his stance is. Eagleton hints around here and there, but both books fail to arrive at a point.
Culture and the Death of God is about how we (in the West) have tried to make sense of life from the time of the Enlightenment to today. One might say that in the modern (and postmodern era), the idea of God has been dying. At least, God's role in the public square has been diminished. With God playing a less prominent role in public life, a vacuum is left. What fills that void? Cold Reason? Some vague "Ideal"? Abstract ideas don't capture the imagination of most people. In other words, atheistic philosophies are not existentially viable for the masses. They don't give meaning and shape to life. Various God substitutes (art, for example) fail to fill for the role God once played.
The book is frustrating because it rambles a bit. It could use clearer structuring. And, also, it's hard to know the intended audience. For people like me, well educated but not familiar with every name and movement, the book is difficult because Eagleton fails to give dates, or explain terms, or even give basic introductions to the various thinkers he references. For those who know such things already, this book would probably seem too simple. One of the things I value the most is clarity. Eagleton is not always a clear writer. The problem isn't his prose, the way he structures his sentences. It's in the way he makes (or fails to make) arguments, and his lack of care for the reader. A good author will bring the reader along. Eagleton doesn't always do this well.
The best chapter, in my view (not surprisingly), is Chapter 5: "The Death of God."
One frustration which I experienced, in this book and in Eagleton's The Meaning of Life, is that he doesn't clarify what he believes. In such a book as this (and The Meaning of Life), I think it is necessary for the author to land somewhere, to make clear what his stance is. Eagleton hints around here and there, but both books fail to arrive at a point.
July 2, 2017
With 293 notes at 208 small, double-spaced pages, this book is at best a solid guide to the high school senior considering philosophy and/or history. It doesn't surprise me that this is some of the best that the present-day Ivy League has to offer, though I am not beneath testing my seemingly pessimistic conclusions from time to time. There is not much doing amongst living writers. I see Dr. Suglia can be added to my subterranean legion of supporters; I shall keep an eye out for what he produces going forth.
If one despises most of the world and all of its suicidal optimism divided by pedestrian humor, it is not a bad thing to double check every so often that one is missing out on nothing. Then, of course, one can once more resume work on a hellish, monstrous work, designed to destroy false hopes and wicked institutions from within, melt down the cosmic steel of epistemological shackles, and go insane for the sake of salvation while we have the chance.
Again, the notes are worth photocopying for profane brethren. If I hadn't received this book as a gift some time ago I would have returned it and spent the money on anti-diarrhea pills to distribute among the afternoon barbarians who have taken a fancy to one of the several libraries I'll be studying at throughout the rest of the year.
If one despises most of the world and all of its suicidal optimism divided by pedestrian humor, it is not a bad thing to double check every so often that one is missing out on nothing. Then, of course, one can once more resume work on a hellish, monstrous work, designed to destroy false hopes and wicked institutions from within, melt down the cosmic steel of epistemological shackles, and go insane for the sake of salvation while we have the chance.
Again, the notes are worth photocopying for profane brethren. If I hadn't received this book as a gift some time ago I would have returned it and spent the money on anti-diarrhea pills to distribute among the afternoon barbarians who have taken a fancy to one of the several libraries I'll be studying at throughout the rest of the year.
February 16, 2022
In this book, Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton traces the philosophical and practical problems that have arisen out of God’s apparent exile from intellectual thought and society from the beginning of the enlightenment to the present day. As it turns out, Eagleton argues, a Supreme Being is extremely difficult to get rid of, often taking a pleasing shape: “Reason, art, culture, Geist, imagination, the nation, humanity, the state, the people, society, morality or some other such specious surrogate.” Even Friedrich Nietzsche, who was probably more aware of God’s ghostly presence in secular moralities than anyone else before him, succumbed to basing his own work on the supreme foundational force of Will to Power.
This is not just an observation in philosophy and high culture, but in the everyday of secular society. Today, the vast majority of people in England may be atheist, by which Eagleton understands as “no longer agitated by religion”, but the upshot of atheistic culture is that it will be subjected to ‘horror vacui’ – nature’s abhorrence of empty space (think of a neglected back garden). This is a hypothesis that I happened to present on last year in a philosophy class, and so it was gratifying for me to see that this book was in harmony with much of what I was arguing. The gist of it can be understood as follows.
Religion encompasses a unified answer for various human needs: community, worship, wisdom, purpose, mysticism, identity, prayer, confession, ceremony, transcendence, identity, ethics. Take but religion away, and the vacuum attracts the miscellaneous fancies of the imagination in an age defined by individualism, postmodernism and consumerism:
• For community, instead of going to church on Sundays, men might go to football matches and sing songs of praise to their idols.
• For wisdom, the ambitious listen to what the managerial priesthood say about the quest towards ‘success’ (about as elusive as the Buddhist notion of enlightenment).
• For purpose, there is environmentalism for the noblest of causes – saving the planet from the wrath of the Climate god – the end is nigh!
• For mysticism, there is what my old philosophy professor called ‘picknmix spirituality’ – a hodgepodge of paganism, astrology and Eastern spiritual ideas – but without the inconvenience of real moral constraints.
• For art, we are passively inundated with an oversupply of pop media and consumer mythology.
• For prayer, there are meditational practices and gratitude journals.
• For confession, there is therapy.
• For ceremony, the caste of Christianity remains in the form of Christmas, funeral and marriage, but increasingly, they are hollowed out, annulling the few cultural links between the dead, the living and the unborn.
• For transcendence, you can experience exhilarating psychedelic visions induced by psychoactive drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, and ayahuasca.
• For identity, there is identity politics.
• For ethics – beyond being basically harmless, individuals are permitted arrogate unto themselves the problem of good and evil – the original sin.
This practice of finding such parallels can be interesting and amusing, but I insist that I am not trying to be cynical, even if it may appear that way. Through these observations, hypothetical as they may be, it appears that one may find certain patterns in the apparent chaos of postmodern existence – perhaps an opportunity to affirm glimmers of truth about the human condition in the mystifying quest to understand what it means to be. Such a pursuit is of course a core feature of religious literature.
All of us can perceive a certain void within us or when we question the transcendentals (truth, goodness and beauty), in so far as they escape final definition. But we should be wary of those who seek to use our limited capacity for understanding as proof that these things are nothing but illusion. Eagleton makes a very interesting Marxist observation of all this. In postmodern age when the transcendentals are assumed to be subjective and therefore relative and illusory, then humans are not more adaptive, but more malleable to the powers that be. For a Marxist like Eagleton, that would be the owners of capital - our beliefs and habits can be moulded in a way that feeds the cycle of consumer capitalism.
I think there is some truth in this. In fact, while I would not describe myself as a Marxist, I think Marxist critique can be a very insightful method of understanding power relations. But I would go further than he does. Power, while inhibited by the economic constraints of global capitalism, is not only motivated by capital accumulation. Sometimes power over people’s minds and habits is exercised in the name of an ideology. Sometimes the motivation to expand or protect power is empty. Sometimes it is good.
In a liberal state in which repression of dissenters is illegal (supposing those dissenting are within the law), it is remarkably convenient for the state to rule over a society that is exposed to cultural division. When there is no moral force large and unified enough to constrain its questionable motives, such as a dominant religion, the state can achieve much more without resorting to force.
The main weakness of this book however, is the fact that it is addressing the subject of the Death of God in an overwhelmingly political way. Indeed, the personal and political may be connected, but I still think that there is much more to questions of religion and culture than its relationship with the whole. Taking the macro view is typical for Marxist, nonetheless, it’s refreshing that Eagleton does not conclude by extolling some fanciful Marxist solution to all the world’s problems. Instead, he argues that not only is there a danger in believing too much (like a religious fundamentalist), but also, in believing too little.
There are deep, mysterious, horrifying voids in our knowledge and understanding of being, but they also just happen to be the very openings for the foundations of thought. Atheist thinkers have often accused theologians of using these gaps as opportunities for religious mysticism. They may be right, but take away that mysticism, take away God, and the void still remains.
Unless you ignore it, you can either fill it back up again with fanciful notions, old and new, or it swallows all the meaning you attach to anything, whole. Don’t believe me? Then read some postmodern philosophy.
This is not just an observation in philosophy and high culture, but in the everyday of secular society. Today, the vast majority of people in England may be atheist, by which Eagleton understands as “no longer agitated by religion”, but the upshot of atheistic culture is that it will be subjected to ‘horror vacui’ – nature’s abhorrence of empty space (think of a neglected back garden). This is a hypothesis that I happened to present on last year in a philosophy class, and so it was gratifying for me to see that this book was in harmony with much of what I was arguing. The gist of it can be understood as follows.
Religion encompasses a unified answer for various human needs: community, worship, wisdom, purpose, mysticism, identity, prayer, confession, ceremony, transcendence, identity, ethics. Take but religion away, and the vacuum attracts the miscellaneous fancies of the imagination in an age defined by individualism, postmodernism and consumerism:
• For community, instead of going to church on Sundays, men might go to football matches and sing songs of praise to their idols.
• For wisdom, the ambitious listen to what the managerial priesthood say about the quest towards ‘success’ (about as elusive as the Buddhist notion of enlightenment).
• For purpose, there is environmentalism for the noblest of causes – saving the planet from the wrath of the Climate god – the end is nigh!
• For mysticism, there is what my old philosophy professor called ‘picknmix spirituality’ – a hodgepodge of paganism, astrology and Eastern spiritual ideas – but without the inconvenience of real moral constraints.
• For art, we are passively inundated with an oversupply of pop media and consumer mythology.
• For prayer, there are meditational practices and gratitude journals.
• For confession, there is therapy.
• For ceremony, the caste of Christianity remains in the form of Christmas, funeral and marriage, but increasingly, they are hollowed out, annulling the few cultural links between the dead, the living and the unborn.
• For transcendence, you can experience exhilarating psychedelic visions induced by psychoactive drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, and ayahuasca.
• For identity, there is identity politics.
• For ethics – beyond being basically harmless, individuals are permitted arrogate unto themselves the problem of good and evil – the original sin.
This practice of finding such parallels can be interesting and amusing, but I insist that I am not trying to be cynical, even if it may appear that way. Through these observations, hypothetical as they may be, it appears that one may find certain patterns in the apparent chaos of postmodern existence – perhaps an opportunity to affirm glimmers of truth about the human condition in the mystifying quest to understand what it means to be. Such a pursuit is of course a core feature of religious literature.
All of us can perceive a certain void within us or when we question the transcendentals (truth, goodness and beauty), in so far as they escape final definition. But we should be wary of those who seek to use our limited capacity for understanding as proof that these things are nothing but illusion. Eagleton makes a very interesting Marxist observation of all this. In postmodern age when the transcendentals are assumed to be subjective and therefore relative and illusory, then humans are not more adaptive, but more malleable to the powers that be. For a Marxist like Eagleton, that would be the owners of capital - our beliefs and habits can be moulded in a way that feeds the cycle of consumer capitalism.
I think there is some truth in this. In fact, while I would not describe myself as a Marxist, I think Marxist critique can be a very insightful method of understanding power relations. But I would go further than he does. Power, while inhibited by the economic constraints of global capitalism, is not only motivated by capital accumulation. Sometimes power over people’s minds and habits is exercised in the name of an ideology. Sometimes the motivation to expand or protect power is empty. Sometimes it is good.
In a liberal state in which repression of dissenters is illegal (supposing those dissenting are within the law), it is remarkably convenient for the state to rule over a society that is exposed to cultural division. When there is no moral force large and unified enough to constrain its questionable motives, such as a dominant religion, the state can achieve much more without resorting to force.
The main weakness of this book however, is the fact that it is addressing the subject of the Death of God in an overwhelmingly political way. Indeed, the personal and political may be connected, but I still think that there is much more to questions of religion and culture than its relationship with the whole. Taking the macro view is typical for Marxist, nonetheless, it’s refreshing that Eagleton does not conclude by extolling some fanciful Marxist solution to all the world’s problems. Instead, he argues that not only is there a danger in believing too much (like a religious fundamentalist), but also, in believing too little.
There are deep, mysterious, horrifying voids in our knowledge and understanding of being, but they also just happen to be the very openings for the foundations of thought. Atheist thinkers have often accused theologians of using these gaps as opportunities for religious mysticism. They may be right, but take away that mysticism, take away God, and the void still remains.
Unless you ignore it, you can either fill it back up again with fanciful notions, old and new, or it swallows all the meaning you attach to anything, whole. Don’t believe me? Then read some postmodern philosophy.
January 29, 2018
Whilst Eagleton's discussion of the difficulty mankind has had with replacing God with another socially cohesive belief system is fascinating, he assumes a lot of prior knowledge from the reader.
Entire chapters are devoted to certain movements, such as idealism and romanticism, with no clear explanation or definition of what these movements actually embodied or how they really differ from one another. If you haven't got a rough idea about these movements or the thinkers who gave them life then you're essentially left trying to work out what's happened after the event...or at least that was my experience as a fully certified dunce.
Things pick up a little when Eagleton's starts letting his punches swing a little more unreservedly in the final chapter, however, although his equating of radical Islamism to Christian fundamentalists in the Bible belt is worth flagging up as completely disingenuous.
Entire chapters are devoted to certain movements, such as idealism and romanticism, with no clear explanation or definition of what these movements actually embodied or how they really differ from one another. If you haven't got a rough idea about these movements or the thinkers who gave them life then you're essentially left trying to work out what's happened after the event...or at least that was my experience as a fully certified dunce.
Things pick up a little when Eagleton's starts letting his punches swing a little more unreservedly in the final chapter, however, although his equating of radical Islamism to Christian fundamentalists in the Bible belt is worth flagging up as completely disingenuous.
March 10, 2024
A fantastic read, not just for anyone interested in secularisation, but also anyone wanting to unpack the structure of our ideologies. Terry Eagleton is a master of topological thinking; his picking apart of social thought forms using the same tools he applies to literary theory is the unsung hero of this book.
We have two ideological challenges, he suggests: 1. our inclination towards a two-tier structure of relativism and absolutism, and 2. the need for any concept stepping into this structure to successfully marry "fact and value" respectively in our lives. In other words, we hanker after some universal principle to give our lives meaning, but this principle needs to filter into practical application in our everyday to make that meaning useful.
Eagleton's gripe is that although we've held onto this same thought-form structure, no single attempt to embody it post-God has successfully managed to provide the symbolism of one half, and the pragmatism of the other. His respect for the abstract capabilities of religion is clear: there's a satisfaction in his regard of religion's self-sufficiency, as well as a sadness towards the increasing need to outsource its jobs to additional staff.
As he hauls mammoth ideas under synthesis and separation in the natural order, Eagleton ultimately defends synthesis, and leans on time to do so: after all, "one does not jettison history's most formidably successful symbolic system overnight". But while his clinging to that system rather than attempting to break it might offend some, this is a razor-sharp, dry-witted and unapologetic masterclass in dialectics, and a testament to Eagleton's staggering breadth of knowledge and luminous mind.
We have two ideological challenges, he suggests: 1. our inclination towards a two-tier structure of relativism and absolutism, and 2. the need for any concept stepping into this structure to successfully marry "fact and value" respectively in our lives. In other words, we hanker after some universal principle to give our lives meaning, but this principle needs to filter into practical application in our everyday to make that meaning useful.
Eagleton's gripe is that although we've held onto this same thought-form structure, no single attempt to embody it post-God has successfully managed to provide the symbolism of one half, and the pragmatism of the other. His respect for the abstract capabilities of religion is clear: there's a satisfaction in his regard of religion's self-sufficiency, as well as a sadness towards the increasing need to outsource its jobs to additional staff.
As he hauls mammoth ideas under synthesis and separation in the natural order, Eagleton ultimately defends synthesis, and leans on time to do so: after all, "one does not jettison history's most formidably successful symbolic system overnight". But while his clinging to that system rather than attempting to break it might offend some, this is a razor-sharp, dry-witted and unapologetic masterclass in dialectics, and a testament to Eagleton's staggering breadth of knowledge and luminous mind.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2019
خيبة امل كبيرة . هذه ليست دراسة بل " خراطيش " .
August 26, 2021
I pooped my pants multiple times when reading this, terry is a goddam genius
You can literally open any page and it will say something interesting
I was genuinely afraid reading the first chapter though it made me feel very stupid but terry had taught me to accept this so thanks I guess
You can literally open any page and it will say something interesting
I was genuinely afraid reading the first chapter though it made me feel very stupid but terry had taught me to accept this so thanks I guess
May 19, 2017
Based on a Christian Century review that ended with this description--"This is articulate, winsome, and dashing Christian apologetics dressed up as the history of ideas. It’s a sumptuous feast."--I ordered this book last year.
In an enjoyable survey of Western thought since the Enlightenment and its efforts and failures to find a replacement for God, Eagleton narrates how we have arrived at our current moment of a meaningless postmodernism and violent fundamentalism. He does so with intelligence and wit. Reading while flying the other day, I kept giggling at the humourous lines, such as "The first sentence of Fichte's Science of Knowledge declares that the book is not intended for the general public, a warning that the briefest glance at its pages renders instantly superfluous."
Along the way he makes key points such as this in a critique of Matthew Arnold and Emile Durkheim, “The idea of religion as a source of social cohesion receives scant support from the Christian Gospel. By and large, the teaching of Jesus is presented by that document as disruptive rather than conciliatory. . . . Jesus proclaims that he has come to pitch society into turmoil.”
Much like my own thought, and those Don Wester who influenced me, he reads Nietzsche in a way that opens up the possibility for a truly revolutionary Christianity rather than the socially and politically accommodating kind that has traditionally existed, even if this is not at all what Nietzsche had in mind. Basically, it’s a good thing that God is dead—at least the God Nietzsche proclaimed as dead.
For much of the book I was unsure where he was heading, and enjoyed the turn near the end.
But I throughout I thought the book lacking, though finishing I now realize that the missing elements may have been intentional. There is no discussion of key figures who represent an alternative to the main narrative of the book, folks such as Peirce, James, and Whitehead. In other words, those figures who have most influenced my own thought.
In an enjoyable survey of Western thought since the Enlightenment and its efforts and failures to find a replacement for God, Eagleton narrates how we have arrived at our current moment of a meaningless postmodernism and violent fundamentalism. He does so with intelligence and wit. Reading while flying the other day, I kept giggling at the humourous lines, such as "The first sentence of Fichte's Science of Knowledge declares that the book is not intended for the general public, a warning that the briefest glance at its pages renders instantly superfluous."
Along the way he makes key points such as this in a critique of Matthew Arnold and Emile Durkheim, “The idea of religion as a source of social cohesion receives scant support from the Christian Gospel. By and large, the teaching of Jesus is presented by that document as disruptive rather than conciliatory. . . . Jesus proclaims that he has come to pitch society into turmoil.”
Much like my own thought, and those Don Wester who influenced me, he reads Nietzsche in a way that opens up the possibility for a truly revolutionary Christianity rather than the socially and politically accommodating kind that has traditionally existed, even if this is not at all what Nietzsche had in mind. Basically, it’s a good thing that God is dead—at least the God Nietzsche proclaimed as dead.
For much of the book I was unsure where he was heading, and enjoyed the turn near the end.
But I throughout I thought the book lacking, though finishing I now realize that the missing elements may have been intentional. There is no discussion of key figures who represent an alternative to the main narrative of the book, folks such as Peirce, James, and Whitehead. In other words, those figures who have most influenced my own thought.
July 30, 2014
I waffled a bit between a three-star and a four-star rating... but settled on just three, mostly because of my own relative ignorance of many of the philosophers and thinkers Eagleton engages in this book. He more or less assumes a fair familiarity with a broad swath of thinkers, from the Enlightenment to today, and I'm just not that well read. Eagleton, though, has read that deeply and is more than a little opinionated in his response to those thinkers, which left me feeling a bit as if I was watching only one side of a boxing match. Is he striking well? I think he is when dealing with the Enlightenment and with the 20th century; I suspect he is when dealing with the Romantic movement; but as for the German Idealists, I've not a clue. Again, that reveals the gaps in my own knowledge, but it still makes this a much less scintillating read than "Reason, Faith, and Revolution" or "On Evil"... but in the case of those two books, I'm on more familiar ground!
Here, though, is a word for the church: "If religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politics. In this sense, its superfluity might prove its salvation. The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a 'civilized' document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus. Since it holds that such values are imminently to pass away, it is not greatly taken with the standards of civic excellence or codes of good conduct. What it adds to common-or-garden morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture and politics might be born."
Here, though, is a word for the church: "If religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politics. In this sense, its superfluity might prove its salvation. The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a 'civilized' document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus. Since it holds that such values are imminently to pass away, it is not greatly taken with the standards of civic excellence or codes of good conduct. What it adds to common-or-garden morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture and politics might be born."
March 5, 2018
I've been positively surprised by Terry Eagleton's 'turn to religion'. It's not often that people conversant in Marxism are so in religion. Marx plays second fiddle in this book, unfortunately, and neither is the book (thankfully) the 'how to' kind of book the blurb would lead you to believe. Eagleton's thesis is that since the coming of secularity (encompassing both the sociological aspects--completely ignored here--and secularism, the ideology) European intellectuals have tried to fill the gap left by religion with culture. Eagleton presents an accessible history of ideas, examining philosophers and poets from the philosophes to Freud. Some of the chapters are more engaging than others, but overall it is a good read, as Eagleton is not afraid to point where thinkers went wrong--or were right, for that matter. He shows well how none of the proposed substitutes (science, art, humanity) for religion really have the same encompassing power to move people--with the possible exception of nationalism. Joining a host of other commentators who have recently discovered religion, Eagleton ends up with a view (although he doesn't use the term) that we live in a post-secular world. Interestingly, Eagleton never offers a definition of religion, but implicitly, there's a strong 'will to religion' (Lori Beaman's term): although Eagleton says Durkheim failed to instill society as a substitute for religion, his view of religion is profoundly functionalist. Humans and societies need religion in some form to function. The alternatives have failed. While I agree that few or no alternatives have been able to cover all of the 'functions' of religion, I don't think all of those functions are required by people living in late modernity. It is possible to live a meaningful life without constant fear of lapsing into 'fundamentalism', anomie or shallow consumerism.
May 17, 2016
An erudite overview of what Eagleton calls 'the enlightened afterlife of Christianity'. It takes the Enlightenment as its stamping off point and progresses thence via Idealism and Romanticism to modernism and postmodernism, reviewing the Zeitgeist of each in turn as regards its particular way(s) of stopping the gap left by religion.
Outside of articles, editorials and blog posts this was the first work of Eagleton's that I have read and I was surprised, given his eminence and reputation, that I didn't find the language more to my taste. I was expecting something far more luminous than this perfectly unobjectionable but fairly workaday, academic prose. While there were several instances of wit and humour, they tended in many cases towards the slightly too barefacedly obvious; and would that his penchant for certain words - "apologists" comes to mind - had been curbed by a kinder and more attentive editor.
My biggest criticism of the work is not, however, to do with style but rather with content. Eagleton sounds a condemning note against those moderns who empty religion of its contents in order to bend it to their political or philosophical will and yet in the final two pages that is exactly what he himself sets about doing. I must say I rather like his idea (just as I rather like many of the other pseudo-religious wranglings of which he seems contemptuous, or at least dismissive), but it seems odd to me that a thinker of his stature would succumb to his own conceptual trap.
The criticisms out of the way, I am free to say that I nevertheless thought it most interesting to mark the three hundred years or so of the West's tangoing with the numinous in its various guises, the accounting of which Eagleton proved almost equal. And that's saying a great deal.
Outside of articles, editorials and blog posts this was the first work of Eagleton's that I have read and I was surprised, given his eminence and reputation, that I didn't find the language more to my taste. I was expecting something far more luminous than this perfectly unobjectionable but fairly workaday, academic prose. While there were several instances of wit and humour, they tended in many cases towards the slightly too barefacedly obvious; and would that his penchant for certain words - "apologists" comes to mind - had been curbed by a kinder and more attentive editor.
My biggest criticism of the work is not, however, to do with style but rather with content. Eagleton sounds a condemning note against those moderns who empty religion of its contents in order to bend it to their political or philosophical will and yet in the final two pages that is exactly what he himself sets about doing. I must say I rather like his idea (just as I rather like many of the other pseudo-religious wranglings of which he seems contemptuous, or at least dismissive), but it seems odd to me that a thinker of his stature would succumb to his own conceptual trap.
The criticisms out of the way, I am free to say that I nevertheless thought it most interesting to mark the three hundred years or so of the West's tangoing with the numinous in its various guises, the accounting of which Eagleton proved almost equal. And that's saying a great deal.
May 4, 2015
I only know a little bit of Enlightenment philosophy and had to scrape my way through most of this book, but it was still extremely worthwhile. Eagleton's basic thesis is that if Christianity is like a house, the Enlightenment philosophers wanted to remove the foundation, yet keep the walls and roof. Eagleton's book seeks to show the weaknesses of such a house. Nietzsche, according to the author, was the first thinker to take Enlightenment ideas to their honest conclusions. If there is no God, there is no objective truth, there is nothing transcendent, there is no love, there is no universal morality. Or, as Dostoyevsky said, "If there is no God, everything is permitted." People who are uncomfortable with Nietzsche's conclusions are repenting and recognizing the need to restore the foundation.
Let me give the example of science. Every scientific endeavor presupposes 2 things: 1) that the universe has meaning and 2) that the human mind can know something of it. When the Enlightenment thinkers removed God from their thinking, they could no longer provide satisfactory explanation for these two ideas. Nietzsche said we have no reason to believe the universe has meaning, nor that the human mind can understand it through science. Augustine, a Christian thinker who faced such skepticism, said 1) The universe has meaning because God made it to point us to his beauty and glory (Psalm 19:1), and 2) man can understand something of the universe because he's made in God's image and can think some of God's thoughts after him.
If God has provided humans with reason, we should honor him and thank him, not shut him out.
Let me give the example of science. Every scientific endeavor presupposes 2 things: 1) that the universe has meaning and 2) that the human mind can know something of it. When the Enlightenment thinkers removed God from their thinking, they could no longer provide satisfactory explanation for these two ideas. Nietzsche said we have no reason to believe the universe has meaning, nor that the human mind can understand it through science. Augustine, a Christian thinker who faced such skepticism, said 1) The universe has meaning because God made it to point us to his beauty and glory (Psalm 19:1), and 2) man can understand something of the universe because he's made in God's image and can think some of God's thoughts after him.
If God has provided humans with reason, we should honor him and thank him, not shut him out.
June 8, 2015
Eagleton's self-assured survey of the Western world's repeated (and his view, futile) attempts at deicide begins with the Enlightenment and brings us right up to our current era. The writing is dense, and Eagleton makes no concession to those among us who may not be quite as familiar with our Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx, Weber, Freud or Wittgenstein as the learned professor himself. As a result, you have to, for the most part, take his word for it, as he carves out his argument for the surprising resilience of the Godhead to the various attacks mounted against It. God is primally necessary, and our concerted attempts to replace the concept with rationality, reason, art, culture, nature or aesthetics have all been worthy ideas in their own rights, but eventually not powerful enough to kill the idea. Post-modernism comes closest in Eagleton's analysis, rejecting as it does all notions of history, meaning and value. And, for Eagleton, it more than a little ironic, that once we had completely rejected God and His dominion, He rises up with renewed and angry force in the first years of the 21st century, as a profound fundamentalism as much of the West as it is of the East. My sense is that Eagleton liberally bends the thinkers and the movements he discusses to the shape he wants them to take, but he tells a rollicking tale, so you forgive him these little liberties.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews