Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780300203998
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 5

THE DEATH OF GOD

FOR SOME ENLIGHTENMENT savants, religion is an error, if an occasionally fruitful one; for Romanticism, there is some profound truth to be extracted from its mystical shell; for Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, it is a syndrome which demands vigilant interpretation. Perhaps it is with Nietzsche that the decisive break comes. He has a strong claim to being the first real atheist. Of course there had been unbelievers in abundance before him, but it is Nietzsche above all who confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of the death of God. As long as God's shoes have been filled by Reason, art, culture, Geist, imagination, the nation, humanity, the state, the people, society, morality or some other such specious surrogate, the Supreme Being is not quite dead. He may be mortally sick, but he has delegated his affairs to one envoy or another, part of whose task is to convince men and women that there is no cause for alarm, that business will be conducted as usual despite the absence of the proprietor, and that the acting director is perfectly capable of handling all inquiries. When it comes to humanity doing service for divinity, we have the curious situation of Man, panic-stricken at his own act of deicide, plugging the resultant gap with the nearest thing to hand, namely his own species. Man is a fetish filling the frightful abyss which is himself. He is a true image of the God he denies, so that only with his own disappearance from the earth can the Almighty truly be laid to rest. Only then can timorous, idolatrous Man pass beyond himself into that avatar of the future which is the Übermensch. Only somewhere on the other side of Man can authentic humanity be born.

Nietzsche himself awarded the accolade of first atheist to Arthur Schopenhauer. Yet though it is true that the only form of religion which attracted this gloomiest of philosophers was an atheistic one (Buddhism), there is a sense in which his infamous Will is a grisly parody of the Almighty, and thus remains secretly theological. Like God, this baleful power is the essence of all phenomena; like God, too, it is closer to human beings than they are to themselves. In this latter respect, it is a forerunner of the Freudian unconscious, as well as a malevolent version of Augustine and Aquinas's godhead. The malign twist that the Schopenhauer of The World as Will and Representation adds to the traditional vision of God is that this power which constitutes the very pith of my being, which I can feel from the inside of my body with incomparably greater immediacy than I can know anything else, is as blankly unfeeling and anonymous as the force that stirs the waves. There is indeed a kind of transcendence at the heart of humanity, but it is one which is implacably alien to it. Subjectivity is what we can least call our own. Who says consciousness says false consciousness. We bear a

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