Editor's Note: Criticism is its own fine art, the greatest critics, from Dr. Johnson to Pauline Kael, are willing to engage popular and high culture from an intellectual perspective of brutal honesty. Criticism is separate from the high aesthetic and political concerns of Theory, it is, at its most pragmatic core, mostly interested in answering the question "Why should I spend part of my life concerned with this (whatever the cultural artifact is)"? In this section I am interested in learned reviews of literature, film, music, and other cultural phenomena. The questions here aren't ones of "high meaning," but rather, why should an individual with limited time on the Earth spend or not spend that time with whatever it is that is being reviewed?
It seems as if partisans of subtlety have had to wait for awhile the arrival of the proper critical rejoinder to the increasingly popular diatribes of the so-called “New Atheists.”[i] Predictably there have been several responses from the obviously religious camp, such as the Anglican theologian Alistair MacGrath’s response to Richard Dawkins' “The God Delusion,” which was painfully titled by simply taking the earlier title and replacing the problematic three letter word in the middle with Dawkins' surname, and then putting a question mark at the end. MacGrath’s lame attempts at wit aside[ii], the book was characterized by the standard sort of agreeable, safe, domestic, white-bread defense of religion that one would expect to come from a theologian in a tradition whose history is book ended from start to seeming finish with questions about marriage.
The esteemed Anglo-Irish literary critic Terry Eagleton has added his own book of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens' bashing fun, with “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate,” a set of speeches prepared for the Terry lectures (a fact that Eagleton has great fun with at the beginning of his book). This is not quite the book that we sectarians of nuance and fairness have been waiting for, but it comes the closest. Eagleton launches the clearest, critical demolition of what is easy, cheap, and uniformed about “Ditchkens'” (the portmanteau for the Platonic New-Atheist) arguments, but at several points his own humor and desire to get another shot in can lower his effectiveness. On the whole, “Reason, Faith, and Revolution” is a failure, but it is a great failure, in the way that only a polymath like Eagleton could accomplish.
To anyone who has ever done any graduate work in English or comparative literature, Eagleton may seem a surprising choice to be the grand defender of religious, especially Christian, faith. Most famously known for his classic “Literary Theory,” Eagleton is perhaps the closest that Anglophone high Theory (with a capital “T”) has ever come to a sacrosanct figure. His general introduction is still the best in the discipline, and Eagleton writes in that clear, succinct way that harkens back more to a grand stylist like George Orwell then to a master obscurantist like Judith Butler. Yet Eagleton is nothing if not a curmudgeonly, uniquely Irish iconoclast, so who better to defend religious faith then the Marxist critic, who is seemingly ontologically identical to an atheist? After all, it was the author of “Literary Theory” who wrote “After Theory,” content to throw a brick through the stain glass window of the cathedral he helped to build.
Besides, Eagleton has never shied away from religious questions, something that many of the fashionably secular denizens of high Theory [iii] either forget or never knew. He started his career as a writer for a left-wing Catholic journal advocating liberation theology (and he reminds us that the only true theologies are the ones that know salvation is liberation), and as a Marxist he has never been scared to admit the profoundly Judeo-Christian eschatology of that otherwise materialist faith,[iv] something indicative of the surprising “revival” that seems to be happening among classic Marxists like Slavoj Zizek.[v] While he repeatedly makes metaphysical claims that most normative Christians from Rome to Lynchburg would find problematic, it is clear that Eagleton comes from a very unusual religious position, yet also a very exact one. He might be an atheist, but he is a Catholic atheist. And therein-lay all of the difference.
Eagleton’s own personal theology is in part enough of a refutation to “Ditchkins.” That he is, for all intents and purposes, a non-theist, yet could in some sense be described as “religious,” is enough of a counterexample to their all consuming, simplistic, and reductionist caricature of religion. And one wonders, if Eagleton, who makes clear allusions to this, isn’t angered in part at the stuffy, very English, very proper and very middle class prejudice against religion as exhibited by Dawkins and Hitchens. One can’t help but feel that as an Irish Catholic, Eagleton has seen this kind of prejudice before, and though the two New Atheists are no more Protestant then they are Catholic, one can still imagine them setting up a “hierarchy of superstitions” that still benefits the faiths they left behind.
If MacGrath, or that terminally pleasant yet simple vicar N.T. Wright were to read “Reason, Faith, and Revolution” one suspects that they would find it a less then exemplary work of Christian apologetics. Eagleton lets us know where he stands when he makes the point, in the very first sentence of his book, that religion has caused more pain and evil in the world then any other social phenomena – something that for the most part, seems unarguably true. He also makes clear that religion is the most powerful form of human popular culture to ever evolve – more powerful then art, more powerful then literature, more powerful then philosophy, more powerful then science and technology. Religion is the codified form of mass human folk belief, it is the literature collectively written into our understanding. For Eagleton, to deny religion's painfully brutal history, as one could imagine some modern day Lewis or Chesterton as doing, is to be disingenuous. But it couldn’t be any other way – with as powerful and profound a force as religion was and is, it is inevitable that it would also produce terrible atrocities. To deny religion’s fundamental power, and transcendent hold on the human psyche as “Ditchkens” does, is also disingenuous. And to Eagleton, jus as dangerous, because if we play the Enlightenment myth of seeing religion as only on old wife’s tale to be swept aside in the long, determined sweep of technocratic progress; then we are denying a fundamental Dionysian force that must be understood with caution and reverence.[vi]
Eagleton gives us an atheist’s defense of religion, the ultimate devil’s advocate. At times what he seems most incensed by is Ditchken’s bourgeois approach to religion. In Dawkins' he sees not a radical, but rather a most English-stilton-eating-bowler-hat-wearing-St. Swiggen’s-day-celebrating-port-drinking conservative[vii]. And Hitchens fares even worse, for in the latter’s’ embrace of cowboy wars of choice, Eagleton finds the ideology of a Judas. And Eagleton is of course correct in his summation of Hitchens’ opportunism, hypocrisy and irrationality. The most esteemed pundit can shot about how stupid the religious are, but when he whole-heartedly signs onto the program of the neo-con thugs, who mixed evangelical fervor in with borderline totalitarian politics to a degree never seen in the United States, one can’t help and wonder: why the bother? If Hitchens is going to reject religion, but promote some of its worst excesses, why doesn’t he at least keep the mythology as well, since it’s at least uplifting to the human spirit? What Eagleton is disturbed by isn’t that “Ditchkens” reject the mythos of Christianity (and Eagleton argues they miss the point about its function any how), but that they reject its ethics, which he feels is the most important source of truly radical, transformative, revolutionary politics. It’s not that they are against Christianity, it’s that they are not against capitalism.
In terms of theology Eagleton is spot-on, and why shouldn’t he be? Educated by Jesuits, and with one foot firmly planted in the post-modern seminary issues of the ‘60’s, it’s clear that any scholastic disputation between him and “Ditchkens” wouldn’t go a full round. As he makes clear throughout the book, in scholastic philosophy, religion was never the poor-man’s-science as Dawkins' claims; it wasn’t a type of overly analytical form of just-so story. Eagleton argues that to claim that religion was born only to explain the natural world – and that thus we no longer need it – is a type of category mistake. Perhaps since the early modern period there has been a certain tendency to view religion as purely a system of affirmative explanatory knowledge, but any reading of Theresa of Avilla, Meister Eckhart, John Scotus, John of the Cross, and so on for thousands of examples, will prove that they weren’t primarily interested in explaining geological, botanical, meteorological issues with recourse to religion. There’s was never the “how,” but always the “why;” and in that sense religion and science simply have absolutely nothing to do with one another. As intellectual history has gone, the positivists like Hitchens and Dawkins, and the fundamentalists, all of those usual suspects who shall go unnamed here, have come to the same conclusion about religion’s definition, just with some assenting and others dissenting. The fact that what they are defining only bares similarity to one particularly modern interpretation of religion is ignored by both of them.
This point in particular seemed to bother the message boards and Amazon reviews the most. When you get a chance, read some of them, they have convinced me of a fundamental aspect of the New Atheists. That is that the newest thing about the New Atheists is that they now have the right to be stupid. In the past, out of the closet atheists were people of profound intellectual honesty and courage; today, any asshole can be an atheist. This is, on the whole, a good thing; it shows that religious freedom, both politically and culturally, is healthy. At the same time it doesn’t make the trying-to-piss-off-the-priest arguments of “Ditchkens” any more interesting, relevant, or honest. The character of most of these criticisms of Eagleton tend to be confused as to how one can be a religious atheist, and these writers tend to point out inconsistencies in scripture and theology as if they were the first people to ever notice them. Eagleton has the background to know that any stupid thing you ever asked in Sunday school to one up the clueless ministers was already expounded on in the past, [viii] at an incredibly high degree of intellectual rigor. That doesn’t mean that those ancient explicators were “right,” but it also doesn’t mean that they were painfully ignorant morons who have been swept aside by the cyclotron pf moral and technological progress. To paraphrase a line from the book, Eagleton’s Amazon.com critics are atheists in the wrong ways, but the great atheists of the past, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, did it in the right way. One that fundamentally understood the power and importance of what it was up against, instead of collapsing into a high pitch, self contented, British giggle.
The strengths of this book are legion; Eagleton offers a subtle hermeneutic that punctures the profound inadequacies of “The God Delusion,” “God is not Great,” and the rest of the New Atheist offering on your local best seller table. But of course there are some problems. As any one who has ever used one of Eagleton’s texts with undergraduates knows, there is sometimes an overabundance of Briticisms. What seems charming and faintly evocative of warm ale at the beginning can quickly become overbearing, as the references to soccer teams and provincial examples of English culture reaches a saturation point. One starts to wonder if all of the mentions of Tottenham are to make the book more inaccessible to Americans, as Eagleton unfortunately employs a preponderance of anti-American rhetorical turns. As vociferous a critic as Eagleton is of late-stage capitalism and the empty consumerism that it promotes, it seems naturally that he would spurn the home of Madison Avenue and Hollywood. But quickly it can degenerate into one cheap shot after another. [ix] And one wonders, in the profoundly utopian “city on a hill” that Americans have both dangerously and majestically, both religiously and secularly, imagined their country to be, does Eagleton really not see the occasion for a radical moment? One thinks that at this point he is reacting more to some stock image of “Texas U.S.A!” rather then the country that produced Roger Williams, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass and Emma Goldman.[x]
There is also a misuse of the word “Science.” If it’s true that Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet have created a mocking image of religion that is based not on history but rather their own misperceptions and prejudices, then sadly Eagleton can often use the term science in the same way. At times he seems to be talking about scientism and its handmaiden postivism, the philosophical view that empirical science is the only method of knowledge, and thus the only source or meaning in reality. Yet these views, as Karl Popper would remind us, aren’t science, merely opinions about science, which the former can’t prove or disprove. To be an anti-positivist it is not necessary to be anti-science; and to collapse all the terms into one word is to muddle the debate. Eagleton would do well to stand by his original point: that science and religion have nothing to do with one another, and to conflate them is a linguistic error.
And one wonders where Eagleton’s faith really lay, for though he seems to be the radical inheritor of liberation theology, content to pray to a fictional God and to see religion as the most concentrated, powerful and sublime form of literature ever created by humans, it can sometimes seems as if his religion isn’t secretly a bit more traditional. Perhaps it’s those contradictions and complexities that make his book so rewarding. One always knows where Hitchens and Dawkins stand, no matter how many Gandhi’s, Sistine Chapels or copies of “Paradise Lost” one shows them, religion is always evil, simply a bit of old fashioned witch-doctory. It isn’t always easy to figure out where Eagleton stands, trained by New Critics as he was, he knows the power of ambiguity, all seven types and otherwise. But Eagleton is strangely consistent as well, he writes clearly, so he has to be. Whether puncturing the hypocrisies of stale literary theory, or self-contented, unthinking anti-religiosity, he has always been willing to plant his feet where they may be. And while “Reason, Faith and Revolution” isn’t, nor should it be, the last word on the “God Debate,” yet in this current debate it is so far the most coherent and nuanced celebration of the complexity of human belief in defense against smug unthinking reductionism that I have yet read.
[i] Where the “New Atheists” include writers and intellectuals like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Trotskyite turned Neo-Con ideologue Christopher Hitchens, the profoundly inane philosopher Daniel Dennet, and the whatever-the-hell-he-is Sam Harris. All are characterized by a particularly snarky, rigid, and dare-one-say-it (and it has certainly been said before) fundamentalist quality in their opposition to virtually all religious belief.
[iii] The same ones who had no idea that Walter Benjamin was an enthusiast of Jewish mysticism.
[iv] Something the conservative British philosopher John Gray had admitted in anti-utopian works like “Straw Dogs,” which Eagleton quotes as a secondary source.
[v] Whose work “In Defense of Lost Caueses,” among others, is one of the most salient defenses of religious faith written by a secular philosopher in the last decade – and by a self-described Marxist nonetheless?
[vi] It isn’t for nothing that the longest sustained work of critical interpretation in this literary theorist’s book is on Euripides’ “The Bacchae.”
[vii] But he isn’t unfair, he makes clear that he lauds Dawkins' opinions against the Iraq War, and his otherwise progressive political record.
[viii] Probably by St. Augustine
[ix] Does Eagleton really think that many Americans claim to be abducted by aliens? And if we get the brunt of that kind of joke, why not Iceland, where highways are diverted to not anger “the little people”?
[x] Or at least formed her, if it didn’t literally produce her.
