Culture and the Death of God.

• Author: Duran, Hazal
• Position: Book review

Culture and the Death of God

By Terry Eagleton

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014, 248 pages, $19.17, ISBN: 9780300212334

Is it possible to reincarnate God--who has been assumed to be dead for a long time? Terry Eagleton, a prominent thinker and literary critic, focuses on this question in his book entitled Culture and the Death of God. To answer this question, Eagleton describes the changing perceptions of God beginning with the Enlightenment and ending with the rise of radical fundamental terrorism. From the Enlightenment through Idealism to Romanticism, then to Modernism and Postmodernism, Eagleton tells the story of religion. While Enlightenment thinkers tried to replace God with Reason, Idealists sought to do the same with Spirit, and Romantics used Nature and Culture to do it. Culture, which was brought forward as a substitute for God, was perceived as the roughest proxy of it. In addition to culture, "Reason, Nature, Geist, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the other, desire, the life force and personal relations" have also been used for replacing the concept of God from past to present (p. 44). Eagleton evaluates the role of Culture and other concepts in replacing God, and whether and to what extent they were successful. Eagleton's main argument depends on the inability of Culture and other imitative forms of God in bringing together a unity of "theory and practice, elite and populace, spirit and senses" which religion can achieve (p. ix). Thus, from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, efforts to replace God have been unsuccessful.

Eagleton claims that although the Enlightenment and its accompanying forms of thought were perceived as a secular movement, actually they were not. Drivers of the Enlightenment, such as Newton, Priestley, Locke, Shaftesbury, Voltaire, and other prominent figures were people of faith who believed in the existence of God. In this vein, Eagleton claims that the Enlightenment was an issue of faith versus reason, not a fight between Catholic versus Protestant. The Enlightenment intentionally brought religion into the picture while trying to replace God with reason, because its main aim was "to oust a barbarous, benighted faith in favor of a rational, civilized one" (p. 12). In the last instance, the main subject of the Enlightenment was religion, and its aim was to create a more rationalized form of it, not to destroy it. The final destination was removing the...