Book Review
Post Mortem
Culture and the Death of God
by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2014
(234 pages, $26.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
There is a fashionable way to write cultural history and it has two non-negotiable rules. The first is to treat the "death of God" as a historical event of the late nineteenth century. Under no circumstances must you point out, or even seem to suspect, that God is not the kind of being who could die. For example, the cultural historian Peter Watson has written a 600-page history of recent thought with the subtitle: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. And in all those hundreds of surprisingly interesting pages it never occurs to Watson to wonder what kind of death God died. Was it prolonged or painful? Did he die in good spirits or was he afraid?
But back to the rules of writing cultural history.
The second one is like unto the first. You must believe as fervently in the existence of sorcerers as you do in the death of God. You do not have to use the term "sorcerer." That is simply what I call people who bring things about simply by saying that they are so. Cultural historians find it easy to believe in sorcerers, because they (the historians) confer on them their magical power. But there are a couple of additional rules about who can be made a sorcerer. The candidate sorcerer must, like God, be dead. And you can only make him a sorcerer sacramentally, that is, while you are acting as a cultural historian.
It is normally required that the candidate have been nasty, disliked, and foolish in life, while being regarded today as cool and avant-garde. However, these sorcerers need not resemble the ones we remember from storybooks. They are not necessarily deformed; they do not cackle or fly on brooms; they cast no spells. But the sorcerers of cultural history do possess powers that would make their storybook counterparts envious. They have, or rather receive through anointing, the astonishing ability to make things true simply by saying they are so.
Eagleton Anoints Nietzsche
If you would like to see an application of these rules, let us suppose you were writing a work of cultural history involving the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. You must never say that Nietzsche spoke of decline in religious belief in the colorful metaphor of "the death of God." Instead, you say something like this:
What Nietzsche recognizes is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. The Almighty can survive tragedy, but not absurdity. . . Abolishing given meanings involves destroying the idea of depth, which in turn means rooting out beings like God who take shelter there.
What people are saying about Touchstone:
These very words actually can be found in Terry Eagleton's new book, Culture and the Death of God, and they follow scrupulously the rules for writing cultural history. We see Eagleton here posthumously anointing Nietzsche with a sorcerer's power. We are encouraged to picture Nietzsche striking a gallant pose on some windswept, rain-lashed autumn heath, probably dancing at the very edge of a yawning abyss, and reflecting as follows: "I could of course unleash tragedy on the world, but God would likely survive that. What he couldn't do without is depth. Bingo! I'll abolish depth."
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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