Culture and the Death of God

Reviewed by John mcDade
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 264pp, £18.99
Tablet bookshop price £17.10            
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I don’t believe in God but I miss him,” Julian Barnes has said: a nostalgic sentiment quite different from Samuel Beckett’s anger at God’s not being there at all: “He doesn’t exist, the bastard!” 

The disappearance of God from our cultural landscape – the “death of God” – should be the occasion of regret or anger, secularist triumph or religious desolation. At least, that is what ought to happen. But the strange thing is, this death is felt to be not a crisis but a step into maturity of a humanity now come of age. And, like Jimmy Savile, its true character can be hidden in the full glare of publicity: at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, John Lennon was mysteriously resurrected to sing “Imagine”, leading the nation in the fond wish that we would be done for ever with God, religion and heaven. At the closing ceremony of the same games, Eric Idle sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, the song that accompanies the parody of the Crucifixion in the Monty Python film Life of Brian. And nobody noticed the strange death of Christian Britain that was taking place as part of a national celebration of “Britishness”. Not even the godless French would have arranged something as offensive as this and got away with impunity. To my knowledge, no British church leader said anything about it. 

But thank God for Terry Eagleton – or, as Prince Charles calls him, “that dreadful Terry Eagleton”. The epithet is undeserved, but Eagleton, I suppose, takes it as a compliment. His latest book confirms him as one of the most interesting thinkers on culture and religion that we have, and the good news is that what he says about our contemporary situation is true, important and accessible. Religion, according to Eagleton, is “both vision and institution, felt experience and universal project”; but in the first stage of the “death of God”, that of post-Enlightenment modernity and the sloughing off of the codes of Christian identity and way of life, society invents a range of surrogates that might fill the gap and replicate these goals. Eagleton identifies “Reason, Nature, Geist (Hegel’s “Spirit”), culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations” as “forms of displaced divinity”. Atheism, he says, is not as easy as it looks; it is generally religion in another guise; a mutation of religious faith.

In an age sceptical about religious truth claims, a “diluted brand of faith” without specific content but with warm sentiments suits us more than doctrine-heavy or law-focused religions that chasten and discipline the self. If an instinct for a transcendent God remains, unsatisfied by the socially constructed surrogates on offer, it is privatised and people “believe” (just about) without “belonging” socially anywhere. Christians become invisible to others and perhaps in the end they become invisible to themselves. Is this where we are now? We should be disturbed by the depth of inner “lapsing” around us and within us. 

But just when you thought it could not get any worse, the second stage of the “death of God” hits us. For Eagleton, this is full-blown postmodernism, “when the deity is finally put to death”, as even a nostalgic feeling for the holy and the transcendent is banished. The earlier post-religious surrogates for God are discarded as all forms of transcendent meaning are judged delusory. Whereas Nietzsche, the best atheist God has given us, was furious because he saw the continuing presence of “grammar”, the condition of meaning and truth in human speech, as a sign of the hated God’s presence, the postmodernist raises Nietzsche’s rage to a pitch and denies all truth and meaning, making language and life endlessly self-referential, abolishing even this final trace of God. In order to be finally shot of God, subjectivity itself is refashioned, shorn of all pretensions to objective truth and value. At last, “authentic atheism” arrives, in which God, the source of value and purpose, the one who tells us who we are and what we are for, is edged out by the self-fashioning, foundationless self, engaged in nothing more than playful trivia. (Think Madonna and Lady Gaga, body modification and narcissism, brands and celebrities, Boris Johnson’s calculated jolliness, and the hedonism of The Only Way is Essex.)

Finally, into this radically post-religious world, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, something unexpected happens: two planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, “metaphysical ardour” breaks out afresh and God is suddenly back on the social and intellectual agenda. Hence, for Eagleton, our present position: in which fundamentalist religion of various hues, on the one hand, and an aggressive secularism on the other, face off against each other, with little prospect of mutual understanding. 

I am not sure: my hesitation about accepting the view that 9/11 changed everything, and inscribed religious terror on to the body politic, comes from the experience of surviving London’s 7/7, and two days later taking part in a Catholic-Shia conference that was conducted with more urgency precisely because of the violence. Dialogue is not quashed by violence. Indeed, the deeper and better impulses of religion are often unleashed by the experience of violence. In part, this is what the crucified body of Christ effects, still. 

Eagleton’s analysis of the channels of surrogate divinity takes the reader through intellectual landscapes rarely visited in these islands, but which merit the journey: his expositions of German philosophical Idealism and Romanticism are simply superb, and indeed the way in which German intellectual culture is presented and made intelligible is masterly. It will be impossible for anyone, having read this book, to take Matthew Arnold seriously ever again. But that Eagleton himself ought to be taken seriously by serious people is beyond doubt.