Culture and the Death of God Quotes

“The form of life Jesus offers his followers is not one of social integration but a scandal to the priestly and political establishment. It is a question of being homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, celibate, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, averse to material possessions, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, a thorn in the side of the Establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Indeed, Pierre Bayle points to this fact as an argument against the political necessity of religious faith. Christianity, he remarks, is no basis for civil order, since Jesus proclaims that he has come to pitch society into turmoil.47”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“Instead of seeking fulfilment in an object, the subject must acknowledge that it can flourish only through another of its kind. It is when two free, equal individuals engage in an act of mutual recognition that desire can transcend itself into something rather more edifying.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature...”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“Truth is ugliness, not beauty. If the artist is to redeem the whole of reality, whether as naturalistic novelist or demonic post Baudelairean poet, he must undergo what Yeats calls the baptism of the gutter, refusing orthodox moral distinctions so as to become imaginatively at one with the slime and refuse of human existence. Only in this way will he be able to gather the excremental into the eternal. It is an aesthetic version of crucifixion and resurrection, one which invests the poet with a certain aura of sanctity. Yet he is also sacred in the ancient sense of being both blessed and cursed. To live by imaginative empathy is to be bereft of a self; to be without a self is to exist as a kind of nothingness; and nothingness is unnervingly close to evil.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“What rationalism from d’Alembert to Dawkins is loath to acknowledge is that human rationality is a corporeal one. We think as we do roughly because of the kind of bodies we have, as Thomas Aquinas noted. Reason is authentically rational only when it is rooted in what lies beyond itself. It must find its home in what is other than reason, which is not to say in what is inimical to it. Any form of reason which grasps itself purely in terms of ideas, and then fumbles for some less cerebral way in which to connect with the sensory world, is debilitated from the outset.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“It was always true for capitalism that it needed citizens who were believers at home but agnostics in the marketplace


The hard-boiled who believe in nothing turn out to be the kind of fantasists who will believe in anything


Feeding the hungry is too close to filling in one's tax return for those in reach of an escape from the mundane


It was passion ,not belief that governed the greatest minds


There are also reluctant atheists - thinkers who can sometimes be distinguished from the Archibishop of Canterbury only by the fact that they don't believe in God”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“It is on our bodies that the law must go to work, not only on our minds. Reason must govern in collusion with the senses it subdues, rather as an astute sovereign rules in a way that allows each citizen to feel that he is doing no more than obeying the diktats of his own desires.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“High modernism is numinous through and through, as the work of art provides one of the last outposts of enchantment in a spiritually degenerate world. Postmodernism, with its notorious absence of affect, is post-numinous. It is also in a sense post-aesthetic, since the aestheticisation of everyday life extends to the point where it undermines the very idea of a special phenomenon known as art. Stretched far enough, the category of the aesthetic cancels itself out.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“What Nietzsche recognises 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.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

“The privatisation of the symbolic sphere is a strictly relative affair, not least if one thinks of the various Victorian contentions over science and religion, the culture industry, the state regulation of sexuality and the like. Today, one of the most glaring refutations of the case that religion has vanished from public life is known as the United States. Late modernity (or postmodernity, if one prefers) takes some of these symbolic practices back into public ownership.”
― Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God