Michael Morton reviews Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press (New Haven, CT, and London 2014). Pbk (2015). 248 pages. £10.99.
God has been through a very rough patch over the last 500 years. The one-time creator and ruler of the universe has appeared to fall into a long and precipitous decline with the advent of modernity. Secular intellectuals have been of two minds about the Death of God. He does live on in private belief, religious communities and seminaries but can also be found (under deep criticism) in Theology and Religious Studies departments.
However, Terry Eagleton proposes in Culture and the Death of God that God has proved far more resilient than his critics. Ever since the Enlightenment, substitute forms of transcendence have tried to replace God. They include reason, science, literature, art, nationalism and culture — but none has been up to the job. Catholicism embodied a grand synthesis of the human condition but, shaken by the Reformation, its synthesis of religion and culture was finally demolished by the Enlightenment. Although it was taught as a militant secular movement, the Enlightenment emerges from Terry’s account as a much more reformist affair, looking not to abolish but to make religion more urbane and rational — something people could take up without excessive zeal.
Another surrogate, that of Culture, was first advanced by German Idealists and Romantics as the heir to God. Providing cold reason with the cloak of mythology and art, it could impersonate a synthesis of religions to become the sacred discourse in a post-religious age, binding people and intellectuals alike.
Interestingly, there are two absences from Terry’s list of surrogates: the market and the commodity. He insists that capitalism is fundamentally irreligious in a critical area (the economy) and totally alien to the category of the sacred. But despite the apparent secularity of its monetary ethic, capitalism is not really post-metaphysical at all. Its metaphysics is money, the criterion of reality, meaning and identity. Marx himself referred to the divine power of money and its status as the god among commodities. As the realm of the commodity widens, money not only buys everything, it brings things into being from nothing by performing all manner of astonishing feats of moral and metaphysical wizardry.
Terry also rejects the idea of Marxism itself as a proxy for religion, because he argues that Marx was the first real atheist. Nevertheless he also acknowledges some clear affinities between religious thought and Marx’s vision of history, especially the struggle for justice, the ultimate victory of the ordinary and the establishment of peace, freedom, and prosperity.
Terry approaches political theology with a wealth of experience. In the 1960s, impressed by the aggiornamento (bringing up to date) of Pope John XXIII and the Vatican Council, Terry and other young Cambridge intellectuals inaugurated the Catholic New Left in Britain. In books such as The New Left Church (1966) he joined the spirit of aggiornamento to revolutionary socialism by arguing that christians, as the body of Christ, embodied ‘a revolutionary vanguard, working to dissipate the layers of false consciousness.’ And the eucharist betokened ‘a symbolic transcendence of alienation.’ A brilliant and agile intellectual emissary among Aquinas, Wittgenstein, and Marx, he ranks among the earliest theorists of liberation theology.
As the New Left faded in the 1970s, Terry left the church and abandoned what seemed to be the fruitless task of revolutionary theology, devoting himself to literary criticism and becoming one of the most prolific and celebrated Marxist scholars and theoreticians. But after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, his theological concerns resurfaced in tandem with his misgivings about postmodernism and its debilitating political consequences. By the time the so-called New Atheism appeared in the early part of this century, Terry had circled back to his earlier vocation as philosopher and theologian, although now with an edgier style.
He accuses most unbelievers of rejecting nothing more than a theologically illiterate caricature of God, unknown to classical theology. Even to say ‘God exists’ is to commit a kind of ontological faux pas. God is no kind of entity but the condition of possibility of anything at all. God and the universe do not add up to two. God is neither the metaphysical industrialist imagined by creationists, nor a claimant to ownership of the universe.
If Terry Eagleton’s theology is right, then today’s schismatics must insist that love widens the range and magnitude of moral and political possibility. In the coming age of political and ecological crisis, we may have no other choice but to embrace the vulnerability that comes with the rejection of possession and domination. We may discover that the meek will indeed inherit the Earth.
Michael Morton is the parish priest of St Winefride’s Catholic Church, Sandbach, Cheshire.