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Culture and the Death of God

Book by Terry Eagleton · 2 quotes · Artificial, Empathy, False

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Culture and the Death of God Quotes

“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.”

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“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.”

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