Atheism vs. Religion: Eagleton re-enters the fray

A long time ago, Terry Eagleton was a radical Marxist Catholic. Over the course of a volatile career in the English literary academy, he's played various parts – pugnacious champion of critical theory, art-film scriptwriter (for Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein ), and one of the most readable practitioners of the higher journalism – but had always made it very clear that, yes, he was still a Marxist. It was broadly assumed, however, that he was not still a Catholic: in general, the learned British left do not have *faith*. 

In recent years, however, the public debate on atheism drew something out of him. He's always been a scrapper, probably the best among English literary critics; and, after sizing up the aggressive anti-monotheistic rationalism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens – whose most famous works have been celebrated by some as bona fide literary events –  he saw a good match: his weight class, decent purse in it, worth a bout or two.

A 2006 brawl entertained Britain's bien pensants for a little while, most especially the right hook that opened Eagleton's review of The God Delusion by Dawkins: 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.'

Eagleton followed that with his own book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and since then has been an odd sort of defender of the faith. Not quite kneeling at the communion rail, but making a steady case for the radical possibilities of Christianity. 

This time out, it's a little more complicated. It's not hard yay-science atheism that he's against this time, because there's been a change in the weather. Lately, atheists have been noticing religion is useful – rituals, social force, symbolic power, the inculcation of virtue and so on. The new question for sceptics isn't 'How do we destroy this blight on man's reason?', but rather 'How do we get a bit of this?' – how do we chuck God but keep the feel-good way to spend a Sunday morning? It's in the air at the moment with books such as Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists and events like the Sunday Assembly. 

Culture and the Death of God is a heavy entry in that discussion, though the polemic is left till the last chapter. It began as a series of visiting lectures at Nottingham University and is really a fairly serious intellectual history of post-Enlightenment attempts to replace God or repurpose religion – to find a way to add a bit of blood and joy to reasonable liberalism.  

That's the bulk of the book – a series of arguments that take us through the Enlightenment, German Idealism, Romanticism and Modernism then up to the present day. As religion is put aside, or increasingly subject to reason, various candidates arise to try and replace its social-symbolic force: art, nation, culture, imagination, the human spirit, nature and whatever else comes to hand. Each is tangled in internal contradictions, generally arising from the fact we're stuck in a big capitalist, class-riven mess. Then we hit postmodernity and are finally giving up on replacing religion – but irony of irony, some people drive planes into the Twin Towers and religion stages a comeback. 

It's a good read if you've got a taste for a serious history of ideas – if you can take 30 pages on Herder and Schelling, you're all set. It swings convincingly into the present, showing that the polite atheists with their little temples to whatever are ultra-bourgeois heirs of various strands of anxious God-replacers – the kind who vaguely approve of faith for the hoi polloi because it gives them better manners, and think there's something pleasant in religion to be preserved. Eagleton gives them short shrift: 'Christian faith, however, is not about moral uplift, political unity or aesthetic charm. Nor does it start from the portentous vagueness of some "infinite responsibility". It starts from a crucified body.' 

Eagleton's book closes with a defence of the wild and revolutionary side of Christianity – the apocalyptic Gospel message that 'our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities' – that serves as a reminder that El Tel is still a good Marxist. 

Eagleton doesn't always hit the mark – there are philosophical marshes to cross and been-there passages if you know his academic work, and it's easier to see what he's against than what he's for. In the main, however, this learned, provocative and timely book will make most dinner-party agnosticism look markedly underpowered. 

Want to see more? Members enjoy full access to all Culture Whisper's arts previews, exclusives and features. Click  here  to take our cultural quiz and get a month's free trial.