Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Persistence of Faith: A Job Half Done

Being informed about the world is not a result of reading the daily newspapers or the feed from Apple News. If anything, the news media, merely by their choice of what to report not to mention their motivation for reporting anything at all, inhibit understanding by distorting the significance of events and how they are connected historically. Trump is more right than he intends - all news is fake news. The age of the feuilleton, that collection of random factoids that we never wanted but that get served up as if we do, has reached its apogee with modern communication technology.

But there is a simple way to avoid fake news: don’t read the news. To quote the so quotable Sam Goldwyn, ‘don’t even ignore them.’ Instead spend your time reading people like Terry Eagleton. These are the people who have enormous factual knowledge and have sifted through the prejudices and interests of their sources with meticulous detail. The epistemological criteria they use to distinguish rationalization from reason are generated by wisdom not topicality. Because they think independently they are political without being partisan.

The clue that Eagleton is not a purveyor of fake news is that he doesn’t claim to know the way the world is. What he reports is his reactions to the way other people think the world is and why they think (or thought) that way. He is intellectually empathetic even when he is opposed to the issue at hand - in this case the prevailing wisdom about the nature of the so-called Enlightenment which began in the 18th century and continues to trouble many as an attack on religion by reason.

Eagleton reports himself rather than the world. In fact he doesn’t report so much as reveal what’s going on in his head provoked by what’s he’s read, which is an enormous number of authors and books, ancient and modern. The self he presents is distilled, concentrated, witty, frequently self-deprecating but above all critical. Nothing is taken for granted, particularly if it’s fashionable, politically correct, or established as academic doctrine. Therefore he is nothing but interesting - even if one disagrees with him.

Eagleton’s central point is that “The Enlightenment's assault on religion... was at root a political rather than theological affair.” Its protagonists never questioned faith as such, only the ecclesiastical network of clerics and government - the medieval equivalent of the military-industrial complex. The organized church (mainly Catholic) was a target not because of the irrationality of God but because of the very rationally pursued self-interest of those in power. “The task [of Enlightenment],” he says, “was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.”

What the philosophes never addressed was the problem of faith itself - theirs as well as that of religious believers. Religion may have begun a decline but faith remained embedded in European culture: “From Enlightenment Reason to modernist art, a whole range of phenomena therefore took on the task of providing surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been. Part of my argument is that the most resourceful of these proxies was culture, in the broad rather than narrow sense of the term.” That is, faith as a fundamental epistemological principle which excludes any proposition, claim, or idea from investigation and critical scrutiny (a uniquely Christian invention), remained and remains the most distinguishing feature of the European way of thinking, including its thinking about politics.

Consequently “The Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.” By not just leaving the principle of faith intact but also by employing it to justify their views of alternative social organization, Enlightenment thinkers literally revolutionized America and France, but weren’t nearly as radical as they might have been. “Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States.” Reason, which was meant to be some sort of sensus communis enabling political unity, turns out to be just the opposite - the driving force of polarization in democratic societies around the world.

Eagleton quotes Gibbon’s view that “Reason is very often rationalisation, in the Freudian sense of lending a specious air of plausibility to some discreditable motive.” One need only note American evangelicals’ justification of Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, race, sexual equality, and international relations, not to mention his personal life to get the point. Faith reigns. Whether it is called Christianity or not is hardly the point. The principle of faith, which is indistinguishable from any other intellectual prejudice, is what is being demonstrated and defended.

This principle of faith, therefore, has become a sort of fundamental right which is quite different from the right of religious association. Faith is the right not just to believe anything one chooses from the apparently infinite sources of fake news but also to seek to enforce that belief politically. Faith is beyond evidence and immune to discussion. Faith is applied to a growing number of political issues from flouridization of water and autism to immigration and environmental policy. Faith presents an impediment to understanding and a block to political compromise in everything it touches. Consequently it is the one thing with which democracy cannot cope. It is faith which makes fake news so powerful. Faith creates its own form of nihilism. As Eagleton says, “atheism is by no means as easy as it looks.”

I have no doubt that Eagleton would disagree violently with my interpretation of his thought. Somehow he clings to something he calls ‘faith’ as a sort of intellectual life raft: “One reason why postmodern thought is atheistic is its suspicion of faith. Not just religious faith, but faith as such. It makes the mistake of supposing that all passionate conviction is incipiently dogmatic. Begin with a robust belief in goblins and you end up with the Gulag.” He appears to think that any conviction is equivalent to religious faith. The difference is that conviction is tolerant of politics as well as experience; faith is not.

So, yes, what you do end up with through faith, unfortunately, is a Gulag, or a politicized official Church or, even worse, a Trumpian democracy dominated by evangelical fascists. The only way Eagleton can avoid the consequences of his own logic is to make out faith to be some vague confidence that there is something beyond reason which might be important to our lives. He stops short of giving this any fixed content, however, except tenuous references to historic Christian doctrines like free will, individual responsibility, and the need for salvation.

Eagleton thinks these are important in a poetic sense and that artistic tragedy seeks to capture the essence of his poetic metaphysics. But it is the Greeks who invented tragedy, not the Christian Church. So while I can’t disagree with his conception of tragedy, it is difficult to see how such an idea has any connection whatsoever with the unwavering and anti-experiential pistis of St. Paul and its dogmatic descendants. It seems that Eagleton harbours his own brand of residual faith in his revealed self, a barely hidden authoritarian who would have us all subscribe to such a faith. A salutary self-referential lesson in post-Enlightenment thinking then. It does take effort to get out from under the burden of faith.

View all my reviews