I am continuing to read Terry Eagleton on Marx. I just came across a very interesting critique of elitism, and of materialism itself; a critique made, indeed, by the materialist par
excellence, Marx. Let me share it with you, and then I’ll close with some commentary (as usual).

The materialist’s response to the sceptic is not a knock-down argument. You might always claim that our experience of social cooperation, or of the world’s resistance to our projects, is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of others. It may be that they see a bap between mind and world. This is ironic, since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat remote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages, artists, counselors, Oxford dons and the like.

Plato thought that philosophy required a leisure aristocratic elite. You cannot have literary salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. (They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice that thought is independent of reality is itself shaped by social reality.[1]

What an insightful critique of a materialism idealized. The same is true of Christian theology; or it can be. This is one other reason why thinking from God’s embodied existence in the flesh of the man from Nazareth; this is why thinking that starts with the resurrection of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ is so important for all theological endeavor. It keeps theology, the wisdom of God, tethered concretely in the material world that God created and recreated. There is no ideology in a genuinely Christian frame; in other words there is no abstract knowledge of God parasiting off of the backs of broken and suffering people. God has so entered into material/physical reality that it can only be said to be suffused with his grandeur and glory as that is revealed in the punched up face of Jesus Christ. Here is where the hidden God becomes the revealed God, and the wisdom of God comes to be known in the weakness and foolishness of God. It isn’t built upon someone else’s discursive machinations about some Big Other we correlate with the living and revealed God; no, God’s knowledge is a Self-knowledge that can only be known as we come to participate in his life through his Self-mediation in Christ by the Spirit—only God can reveal God.

The way I theologized this may sound strange given Marx’s context and thought-frame. But I think his frame has interesting lines of trajectory; secularly parabolic in nature, even. We could commentate on some of the theopolitical implications of Eagleton’s insights on Marx, but I’m not going to do that right now (Eagleton’s own commentary should suffice for the moment).

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 1506, 1514 kindle version.