From Death Our Birth?
In an editorial for The Telegraph, novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco muses about Christmas, money, and the need for religion. Eco believes we need religion to face death and justify our place here on earth.
“Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.”
In his view, due to the “death of God” in the sixties, a God-shaped hole in our culture has spurred the creation of modern Pagan religions and heretical Christian beliefs.
“The “death of God”, or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church — from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code…The existing religions just aren’t big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret “container” with his or her own fears and hopes.”
He goes on to warn of the fascist leanings that he feels walk hand-in-hand with occult beliefs (invoking Hitler), and ends with a grudging respect for Christianity as least-worst religious system for humanity.
I’m somewhat disappointed that a writer of his caliber would release an editorial so devoid of nuance and thought to the subject at hand. What does he think of when he talks of “strange pagan cults”? How has Christianity answered the great questions in life any better than the smaller movements springing up in our secular post-Christian world? Perhaps we return to strange cults and alternative/heretical Christian beliefs because mainstream religion has a serious lack it is unwilling to face. Not because we are grasping at unanswerable questions but because monotheism is lopsided and incomplete.
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