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The Gospel According to Terry

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C C Offline
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/t...g-to-terry

EXCERPT: [...] As Eagleton contends in Culture and the Death of God, the Almighty has proven more resilient than His celebrated detractors and would-be assassins. God “has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of”; indeed, atheism itself has proven to be “not as easy as it looks.” Ever since the Enlightenment, “surrogate forms of transcendence” have scrambled for the crown of the King of Kings—reason, science, literature, art, nationalism, but especially “culture”—yet none have been up to the job.

Eagleton demonstrates that all the replacements for God have proved abortive, and that secular intellectuals must concede the futility of all attempts to find proxies for divinity. It’s a simple and courageous contention, conveyed with Eagleton’s signature wit and learning and without a trace of sanctimony or schadenfreude. With brisk but never facile aplomb, he recounts an intellectual history of modernity as the search for a substitute for God and adumbrates, in his own running and spritely commentary, a political theology for the left.

Once upon a time—before modernity, to be precise—God was alive and robust, and religion united “theory and practice, elite and populace, spirit and senses.” With its capacious embrace of the soul and the body, religion—clearly epitomized, for Eagleton, by Roman Catholicism—has repeatedly exhibited the capacity to “link the most exalted truths to the daily existence of countless men and women.” More attuned to our most fundamental needs and longings than the modern cultural apparatus, it has been “the most tenacious and universal form of popular culture.”

[...] Shaken by the Reformation, the Catholic synthesis of religion and culture was finally demolished by the Enlightenment. Retailed to generations of undergraduates as a monolithically and militantly secular movement, the Enlightenment emerges from Eagleton’s account as a much more reformist affair, seeking not to écrasez l’infâme but to make religion more urbane and rational, something gentlemen could espouse without an unbecoming zeal. Purged of superstition and fanaticism, religion would defer to Reason, defined in terms of logical consistency and effectiveness in practical affairs. Most philosophes rejected the churches, not the Intelligent Designer of the universe; the Enlightenment aimed “at priestcraft rather than the Almighty.”

If they mocked the clergy, the philosophes respected the magistrates, for they feared the common people as credulous rubes who needed an enlightened ruling class. [...] If God and religion must pass—and likely fail—the tests of Enlightenment rationality, is reason compelling enough to assume the vacant throne of the Almighty? Relentlessly critical and iconoclastic, Enlightenment reason tends to pulverize symbols and deprive them of hegemonic power. It became evident toward the end of the eighteenth century that reason defined in the philosophes’ terms was too irreverent, cerebral, and rarefied to generate symbols capable of commanding popular deference. How would a secular society—defined in terms of religion’s relegation to private life, not its abolition—achieve the unity once afforded by a common faith?

The answer was—or appeared to be—“culture,” first advanced by German Idealists and Romantics as the heir to the mantle of God. [...] Under the talisman of Culture, philosophers and poets aspired to establish a new, post-Christian clerisy whose art and literature would leaven the people with new myths, icons, and epiphanies. As Walt Whitman would put it in Democratic Vistas, “the priest departs, the divine literatus comes.”

The divine literatus came, and saw, but did not conquer the realm once enchanted by God and his priestly minions. Culture fumbled the Almighty’s rod, failing both to close the chasm between elite and populace and to elaborate an authoritative metaphysics and morality. [...] Matthew Arnold’s model of culture, for example—a “gentrified form of Christianity,” as Eagleton scathingly describes it—proved all too transparently phony.

[...] Eagleton prefers Nietzsche’s sacrilege to Arnold’s bland and disingenuous unbelief. Nietzsche was the first infidel to realize the full implications of atheism: once God has been assassinated, there must be no successor, lest anyone or anything once again assume His inherently illegitimate authority. [...] Yet because Nietzsche himself abhorred nihilism, he ultimately failed as an atheist. Fashioning his own values out of nothing but his own ingenuity and will to power, the Übermensch, Eagleton observes, “has more than a smack of divinity about him”; his aristocratic hauteur and his indomitable volition recall the Almighty in all His lordly potency. Like culture, Nietzsche’s atheism turns out to be yet another ruse of “counterfeit theology.”

If even Nietzsche wasn’t the genuine article, has there ever been an authentic atheism? Eagleton identifies two candidates: postmodernism (both as a historical moment and as a mélange of critical theory) and Marxism. In the era of postmodernism, both the restless heart and the infinite abyss are dismissed as relics of humanism. The venerable questions of meaning and destiny are sloughed off as unreal and coercive “metanarrative”; revolutionary hope yields to the conquest of cool, the imperium of a hip and benevolent plutocracy. Meanwhile, thanks to mass communications, postmodernism joins the elite and the people, the aesthetic and the commonplace: culture is increasingly popular and even populist, while everyday life is thoroughly aestheticized by advertising and product design. “The only aura to linger on is that of the commodity or celebrity.”

This points to two glaring and puzzling absences from Eagleton’s roster of surrogates: the market and the commodity. Eagleton insists that capitalism is “fundamentally irreligious in a critical area (i.e., the economy), and totally alien to the category of the sacred.” Yet despite the apparent secularity of its pecuniary ethos, capitalism is hardly post-metaphysical: its metaphysics is money, the criterion of reality, meaning, and identity in a competitive commodity culture. The young Marx 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 purchases everything; it brings things into being from nothing, performing all manner of astonishing feats of moral and metaphysical alchemy. Contra Lennon and McCartney, money can buy you love: I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. However “secular” their origins in property relations, commodity fetishism and the idolatry of the market are capitalist forms of enchantment.

Eagleton rejects the idea of Marxism itself as a proxy for religion and implies that Marx, not Nietzsche, was really the first real atheist. For Marx, the humanity that finally replaces God is not utterly independent or self-fashioning; men and women will remain limited, material beings even in the realm of freedom. Thus, Eagleton asserts, Marx refrains from turning humanity into yet another surreptitious stand-in for God. Yet he also acknowledges some “clear affinities between religious thought and Marx’s vision of history,” especially the eschatological imagination: the arduous struggle for justice, the final conflict of oppressor and oppressed, the ultimate victory of the subaltern and the establishment of peace, freedom, and abundance. Marxists, Eagleton admonishes his comrades, should be grateful for this prophetic legacy.

[...] By the terms of Eagleton’s theology [...] avarice is more than a grubby moral failing, and capitalism is much worse than a system of exploitation and injustice. They stem from a lack of trust in the basic goodness of creation; as Eagleton writes, they deny God as “friend, lover, and fellow accused,” who created the world out of lavish affection and will suffer anything to reconcile us. Christianity, Eagleton reminds us, is a radical humanism, rooted in the faith that a superabundant love is the leaven and marrow of the universe.

[...] That faith will seem folly to secularists, however touching or even appealing they may find it; but if Eagleton’s story of unavailing surrogates is right, they might want, at the very least, to reconsider their indifference or animosity to theology. Secular liberals and radicals continue to speak in a moral and political idiom, originating in the Enlightenment, a lexicon of justice and compassion derived mainly from the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet those traditions insist that justice and compassion are anchored in the very metaphysics that a secular left dismisses as superstitious at best and ideological at worst.

If Eagleton’s theology is right, then today’s apostates must insist that love widens the range and magnitude of moral and political possibility; but they can do so only if they affirm a very different account of the nature of the cosmos. In the coming age of political and ecological crisis, we may have no other choice but to embrace the vulnerability that comes with the eschewal of possession and domination. We may discover, contrary to the fraudulent realists, that the meek will inherit the earth....


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