04.18.09
Eagleton on the postmodern
Culture & Barbarism
Terry Eagleton plays the postmodern, pro/con, but is there such a catergory? The decline of modernism is a better description, despite the wish of many to refound a new age beyond the modern.
As students of the eonic effect we know that won’t work. The rise of the modern is too complex, with a hidden dynamic impossible to imitate. Why should we need to? A religious postmodernist wishes to undo modernity in the name of religion? Study the effects of modernity on Christianity, starting with a consideration of its state before the Reformation. We will hear no more of that.
The solution, actually, is to fulfill a new ‘modern’ style of religion. Christianity is stuck in the era of the Axial age and its later history. Religion must move on. Perhaps overcome itself, or start from fundamentals. The New Atheists aren’t much threat there. They are staking their own place in the modern.
The false polarization of modernity as anti-religion fails to see that the Reformation began the modern era. What it should be after that, hmm, Christians have shown very little insight into position. But secular they are, as any. By definition, however.