Yale University Press (New Haven CT & London 2014). Hbk. 234 pages. £18.99.
To me, receiving a new book is one of the great pleasures in life, one that is to be accompanied by a little ritual. First I caress it in admiration at this most wonderful artefact of civilization, then I savour the scent of its pages – the sheer exoticism of the ink and paper – and then I glance through the index to see if the author has done his homework.
Peculiar though this may be it meant that before I actually came to read this book – and despite the favourable comments and reviews that prompted me to buy it – I was disappointed. Why? I was surprised to find no mention in the index of our own dear Don Cupitt, nor of the Sea of Faith: surprised because this is a theme and terrain which Don has spent a life time exploring. Unlike Eagleton, who thinks culture, in all its various aesthetic manifestations, is the next best substitute we have come up with to fill the vacuum left by the demise of belief in a divinity – but which for him never quite lives up to the expectation – Don's thesis, explored in The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, is that it is simply Life itself which has replaced divinity in the explanation of 'It All'. As Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, 'Life is everything. Life is God'.
Even more surprising, as I glanced through the index, was to see no mention of Strauss, as in David Friederich Strauss of The Life of Jesus. I find this shocking because in the process of secularisation, which Eagleton explores, Strauss is a pivotal figure.
His critical examination of the texts of the New Testament and suggestion that much of it was myth, scandalised what was then still a solidly based Christian culture. What Strauss's work did was to trigger a textual and archaeological quest to prove him wrong, but which in the end only provided more and more compelling evidence that he was right – that the Bible, far from being an authoritative legitimating text, was a very flawed historical artefact.
Eagleton makes much of the 'double truth' thesis in which the scepticism of the educated elite – such as the eighteenth century philosophes – should not be allowed to unsettle the superstitions of the populace: religious belief was, after all, a very useful tool of social compliance. The effects of Strauss, as the influence of his work seeped through popular writings such as those of his English translator, George Eliot, was to enable a sceptical spirit to spread into wider society. It is this that makes 'Death of God' narratives such a pervasive feature of Western, Christian-based, society and not a feature of other societies such as Muslim or Hindu, currently experiencing a resurgence of religious belief.
Needless to say, religious authorities of non-Christian traditions are keen not to let their sacred texts be subjected to critical scrutiny by sceptical rationalists.
However, Eagleton identifies an even more potent threat to belief: that, 'Modern societies are faithless by their very nature.' The argument here is that the rise of the middle class represents for the first time in history not merely a class that has generally lost faith but whose whole way of life is fundamentally irreligious and 'totally alien to the category of the sacred.' Science, technology, education, social mobility, globalisation, market forces, and 'a host of other secularising factors' – all characteristics of the modern society we live in – erode the traditional structure of faith based societies and with it the credibility of their putative divine underpinning.
The response of the modern deracinated zealot is a desperate, but individualistic and romanticised, attempt to resurrect the past. This accounts not only for that other, unexpected, feature of modern secularism, the growth of fundamentalism, but also its narrowly sectarian and radical nature. As such it represents an affliction of, rather than antidote to, modern secularised society. Commenting on the chaos caused by sectarian Islamism in the Middle East, Baroness Warsi expressed sadness that it is stripping the soul out of Islam.
This is not too different from the troubled subjectivity from which nineteenth century German Idealism sought to rescue a precarious civilization – with disastrous consequences. As Eagleton comments: 'Subjectivity, like the divinity whose place it is now stealthily usurping, is an unfathomable abyss, a thought which is as alarming as it is exhilarating.' The dramatic reappearance in our own supposedly faithless age of radical forms of religion is something which engages Eagleton and prompts him to think that the case for atheism is by no means as compelling nor 'as easy as it looks'.
When all is said and done, religion remains the most distinctive expression of the human spirit, in its many cultural transformations and surrogates. It is not going to disappear. It was Ernest Renan – whose scandalous Life of Jesus followed in the wake of Strauss – who said 'Religion is as eternal as poetry, as love.' His book was soon on the Church's Index of forbidden books, though it doesn't feature on Eagleton's!