Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Terry Lectures) [Paperback]

 

 

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Terry Eagleton has grown in stature over the years. From the late 1960s as the editor of Slant, a left-wing Catholic magazine brought out in the heady days after Vatican II, he became a renowned literary theorist, Oxford Professor of English and expert on Marxism. He has written over forty books and always writes wisely and well. On his life's work, he comments wryly that `one of the best reasons for being a Christian, as well as a Socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States. True civilisations do not hold predawn power breakfasts.'

His latest book is an edited version of the Terry Lectures, given at Yale University on the subject of the links and disjunctions between science and religion. He professes to know only a little about each, but takes as his adversaries the so-called `New Atheists', principally Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (whom he irreverently joins together as `Ditchkins') and their disdainful dismissal of religion as the roots of all human evil, or most of it.

Writing for the defence, Terry returns surprisingly to his Catholic roots. His argument is that salvation is a political affair and all about the anawim (the poor and needy in Hebrew). He concedes that left-wing, radical Christians are a rarity, but that Christian faith is principally a matter of helping people, visiting the sick and the lonely and speaking up for them. It is a view that would be dismissed by most metaphysical, realist churchmen. After all, social workers can do all that.

Yet here is the point. Faith is not an intellectual assent to propositions; it is always faith-as-trust. As Kierkegaard would say, the facts do not really matter, nor even does universal truth. The truth for me is truth enough for me, a truth to live by. Most atheists miss this point. Not only do they have a naive understanding of God and theology, they inveigh against religion without understanding that they are the least qualified to do so. (After all, why go into it deeply when there are better things to do?)

Yet Terry's Socialism and critical background will not let Christianity off the hook. Clerical abuse of children - especially in Ireland where it was far, far worse than here - the demeaning of women, the move of the Church towards the bourgeoisie are all deeply disturbing. Christianity has betrayed itself badly. On the other hand, it is often more down to earth than the fantasies of the Enlightenment. It has the power to transform parts of human society without the hubris of Progress. Ditchkins and their allies cannot see that the Enlightenment was a mixed blessing. Neither are they willing to concede what Christian faith has indeed achieved, for that would mean putting tiresome qualifications on their dislike of it.

As the book and lectures progress, the reader is led into profound areas of religious belief. That it is not the opposite of reason, only of credulity or fanaticism. The relationship between belief and knowledge is complex: belief can be rational but untrue, but then quantum physics can be `true' but irrational (or at least deeply counter-intuitive). And then, most people believe in luck, but no-one knows what it is. Faith, as Terry constantly reiterates, articulates a commitment that precedes an description of the way things are. Suddenly a polemic against the New Atheists becomes a profound and stimulating reflection on the nature of religious faith. And this is the heart of the book, the pearl in the oyster.

And speaking of corny metaphors, sometimes there are things which jar the easy flow of the debate. Terry appears to join his enemies in exaggeration when it comes to organised religions faults. In his view, nuns (he means religious sisters) who ill-treated children were all `psycho-pathologically sadistic' He is also the master of the confusing simile. I puzzled for a while over his point that `it is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.' And yet some of his gnomic utterances bear thinking about. That 'there has been no human culture to date in which virtue has been predominant' is a notion that qualifies many beliefs - religious or secular.

This is a well-written and valuable work. Terry Eagleton is reaching a rich maturity and he has much to offer during the course of his debate. That it reaches no conclusion is no matter. We could profitably take a line from economics and concede that if we put all the world's theologians in a line, they still would not reach a conclusion.

Eagleton is an amazing combination of Catholic believer and Marxist. He derides much of what Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens write, disrespectfully calling them `Ditchkins'. He is contemptuous of their Oxford/Washington/neocon etc scene, adding in Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan for good measure. His main critique is that whilst Dawkins and Hitchens critique religion, they do not apply the same critique to science or the enlightened modernity they promote, summed up in their castigation of the Inquisition but not of Hiroshima. Eagleton however commits the same errors he accuses Dawkins and Hitchens of. They attack a straw man of extremist religion rather than more credible expressions and interpretations - `this straw targeting of Christianity is now drearily commonplace he complains' - whilst Eagleton himself attacks Dawkins and Hitchens rather than the more credible atheist arguments of Simon Blackburn, Andre Comte-Sponville, Julian Baggini etc. He challenges that Dawkins and Hitchens should know more about religion before critiquing it but then himself freely lambasts multinational corporations about which he is equally uninformed. Eagleton deploys streams of similes to support his points - `it is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov' - which start as amusing but soon become irritating. He is clearly annoyed with Hitchens for leaving the Marxist camp where they were former fellow travellers. He doesn't like modernity's belief in its inevitable progress to a finer world, but he fails to say that belief in the kingdom of God offers the same hope. We are told of `the social devastation wreaked by economic liberalism' p145!

Eagleton simply assumes God. By page 7 he is writing in detail about the nature of God without any supporting argument - God is just as Eagleton says he is. He says on page 34 that he has given a theological account which he clearly hasn't. He has simply speculated on some ideal fabrication of an imagined God. And Jesus is Eagleton's revolutionary, a Che Guevara figure who stands for the poor, critiques the establishment, and himself suffers ignominy and bears injustice.

He does offer allegory as a useful interpretation of religion and this deserves further development. He says p48 `there has been no human culture to date in which virtue has been predominant' which is a succinct moral challenge to human society which should cause reflection and correction? For Aquinas p122 `all virtues have their source in love' so here is Eagleton's key virtue which compares to Iaian King's twin virtues of empathy and obligation and Comte-Sponville's 18 virtues in his 'A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues'.

If I were going to throw a dinner party where I could be reasonably sure the conversation would turn, sooner or later, to God, I'd want Terry Eagleton to be a guest. On the evidence of this book, he'd be insightful about the true nature of faith-commitments - whether of the Christian or liberal humanist/rationalist variety; even-handed - sparing no-one from waspish, bitingly accurate criticism, whilst generous in praise where due; and, above all, very, very funny.

As a contribution to the God (so-called) debate, 'Reason, Faith and Revolution' is as thoughtful and learned as it is bracing and uncomfortable. While Eagleton's occasional forays into the labyrinthine infighting that leftwing politics seems to specialise in can be self-indulgent, the philosophically- and culturally-referenced breadth and depth of his critique of Dawkins and Hitchens is both impressive and iconoclastic. He writes beautifully, with a feel for the arresting metaphor and the pithy aphorism: as a summary of the radical demands of Christianity, his almost throwaway line `If you don't love, you're dead, and if you do, they'll kill you' (22) can scarcely be bettered. He is insightful about faith as gift rather than as voluntaristic act of will, and there's a refreshing honesty to his thinking about how knowing necessitates pre-rational commitments from even the most supposedly `rational' among us.

He's realistic, too, about human fallibility, and therefore the need for a humanism that acknowledges our race's tragic side, its capacity for dark deeds and ignoble behaviour. He explores well the limitations to `capital-p Progress' as ideology that Dawkins/Hitchens (`Ditchkins') either blithely or blindly ignore. He unpicks, too, the fundamentalism of the marketplace that - anti-intellectually and artificially - sets up faith and reason as mutually opposed and allows no debate with theologies (Christian, Islamic or otherwise) that `might contribute to some of the answers' (168). In its call for something like repentance on the part of actually existing liberal humanism and Christianity equally, and its vision of a more modest hope in `small-p progress' as a precondition to some sort of redemption, it's as honest as it is profound. Superb.

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4.0 out of 5 stars If you want to write about Theology, you ought at least to understand it first.
This is a passionately engaged book, written as a response to the work of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (an entity the author refers to collectively as `Ditchkins')... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Geoff Sawers

1.0 out of 5 stars Eagleton is no scientist
For Eagleton to claim to understand, never mind critique, a real scientist like Dawkins is laughable. Read more

Published 20 months ago by William Podmore

1.0 out of 5 stars another anti atheist disappointment
Eagleton clearly sees Dawkins and Hitchens as irritants which he scratches relentlessly (shades of the sort of Trotskyism that gives it a bad name). Read more

Published 23 months ago by M. I. McGrath

4.0 out of 5 stars Reason, faith and revolution review
Item is a new book, published 2009.

This represented a good value purchase, which arrived fairly promptly and in excellent condition. Read more

Published on 24 Jan 2010 by Yogi fair

5.0 out of 5 stars Eagleton's well targeted blast
This is a good book. It's cheerful, straightforward, well argued and iconoclastic.

It shatters the idols that atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens have made for... Read more

Published on 4 Aug 2009 by Dr. Nicholas P. G. Davies

5.0 out of 5 stars Soaring on Eagleton's wings ...
Terry Eagleton is such a joy to read. His text is actually very dense in the amount of content it conveys in such a modest page run, yet it is so entertainingly written that you... Read more

Published on 24 Jun 2009 by P. Younger

1.0 out of 5 stars Those in glasshouses...
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Terry Eagleton... Read more

Published on 30 May 2009 by S. J. Wright

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