Culture and the Death of God review – has Terry Eagleton become the Jeremy Clarkson of philosophy? Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it went from strength to strength, as churches lost their congregations and theology was put to flight by natural science. But then there was 9/11 and everything changed. Traditional churchgoing may have continued its long decline, while the strident scepticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens still struck a chord with the book-buying classes, but, in the rest of the world, religion was rousing itself from a long slumber. Wild forms of worship – Christian, Islamic or other – have now taken hold of the poor and the oppressed. Religious faith has gone viral. The 20th-century modernists fell into the same trap, vainly appealing to art to plug the gap where God has once been, and if a few freaky postmodernists have managed to break away from religion in recent years, it was at the price of a complete denial of hope and meaning, which no one else is willing to pay. The Almighty, Eagleton concludes, has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of. Rumours of his death have been greatly exaggerated: he has now put himself back on the agenda, and the irony is hard to overrate. he argued that Christians could not be true to the recklessness of faith unless they committed themselves to revolutionary socialism, and conversely that Marxist materialism was exhausted, and only Christianity could save it. Christianity, he explained, is an extremist belief, extreme and uncompromising in its tolerance and love. Christians must pledge themselves to live as potential martyrs, battling with philistine capitalism for the sake of real culture – for a whole society in which the Mystical Body may be realised on the shop-floor and Christ can live in fact rather than in word. Eagletons analysis may have been a little cranky, but it was presented with a guileless honesty that would soon be lost in a flurry of evasive flippancy. God’s enemies – Marx, Nietzsche, Hitchens – are many. But the Almighty, says Terry Eagleton, is “remarkably difficult to dispose of”
Posted on: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 07:29:23 +0000