Terry Eagleton on Reason, Faith, and Revolution

I was in my local Powell's bookstore yesterday and I ran across a pristine used copy of Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate and I had previously read a fairly hilarious review article by Eagleton on, if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins, which was as entertaining and scathing a review as I can remember reading, so I picked the book up and couldnt put it down, finishing it this afternoon. Eagleton is the Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the U. of Lancaster, England, Professor of Cultural Theory at the national University in Ireland, and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame. The book, based upon the Terry Lectures Eagleton presented a few years ago, is a lengthy repudiation of the New Atheist attack on Christianity, which amused me to no end as I, like many, find the writings of Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, Harris, et al to be mystifyingly bad and yet simultaneously ravenously popular (I have several atheist friends who have done all but canonize them as saints and fix their images into the color and iron of stain glass, and this is hardly an isolated phenomenon). Eagleton points out that these are normally quite intelligent men who have for numerous reasons, as they turn their vitriol toward Christianity, rehash arguments that a freshman philosophy student would get hammered for. "The truth is," says Eagleton," that a good many secular intellectuals with a reasonably sophisticated sense of what goes on in academic areas other than their own tout an abysmally crude, infantile version of what theology has traditionally maintained...There are always topic on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in to the grossest prejudices with hardly a struggle...for militant atheists it is religion." (pp.49-51).

The most interesting thing about Eagleton is that he is, in fact, an atheist himself, and a Marxist one at that. Yet he is as generous and broad reader of Christian theology as many Christian theologians themselves (in fact he uses Aquinas, Augustine, Rowan Williams, and Herbert McCabe quite frequently. Even Barth makes an appearance.) But he is also a vicious critic (in a generally good way) in that he sees modern Christianity as often betraying its originally revolutionary intuitions. In this way it kind of reminded me of reading Zizek, though Eagleton is certainly less sympathetic to postmodernism, and was an easier read in some senses because one isnt wrenched to and fro between hyper concrete pop culture references and, for example, the surreal Lacanian psychoanalysis that Zizek effortlessly switches between. I hope in a few days, after I finish the final few posts on contemporary trinitarianism, to write a brief synopsis and review of the book. For now, however, i thought a few quotes were in order. Enjoy!

Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennet in Breaking the Spell he thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who, therefore, cant see the point of it at all. (p.6)

The non-God or anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds--gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies, and the like. You shall know him for who he is when you see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out to be not a matter of cult, law, and ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, of slaughtering animals for sacrifice or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned, and widowed from the violence of the rich. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another. It was Christianity, not the French intelligentsia, which invented the concept of everyday life. (p.19)

For christin teaching, Gods love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective self rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God is not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the Law. Which is to say that those who are faithful to God's law of justice and compassion will be done away with by the state. If you dont love, youre dead, and if you do, they'll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety. Here is the fantasy and escapism that the hard-headed secularist pragmatist finds so distasteful. Freud saw religion as a mitigation of the harshness of the human condition; but it would surely be at least as plausible to claim that what we call reality is a mitigation of the Gospel's ruthless demands, which include such agreeable acts of escapism as being ready to lay down your life for a total stranger. Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable. The death is the consummation of the life, the place where the ultimate meaning of Jesus' self-giving is revealed. (pp.22-23)

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and dont end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress, for which, as we shall see, Ditchkins is a full blooded apologist. There are rationalist myths as well as religious ones. Indeed, many secular myths are degutted versions of sacred ones. (pp.26-27)