Terry Eagleton photographed in Dublin by Cliona O'Flaherty

Eagleton on Ditchkins

By Laurie Taylor
New Humanist, July/August 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
By Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 200 pages

Terry Eagleton has a reputation as a rebel. He appears equally happy whether outraging conventional students of literature at Oxford with his vigorous espousal of critical theory, confounding his long-time Marxist allies with his periodic dabblings with spirituality, or lambasting Martin Amis for his suggestion that British Muslims "must suffer" for the actions of suicide bombers.

In his new book, he widens his target to include a new antagonist he calls Ditchkins, a composite of Richard Dawkins and Eagleton's old International Socialist drinking mate Christopher Hitchens.

When we sat down to talk in Dublin, I decided to play the Catholic card. As an ex-Catholic myself, I said, I wonder why you were quite so generous about your Catholic schooling in your autobiography. Eagleton: "I valued the way it taught me to think analytically, to not be afraid of analytic thought, however nonsensical some of the content surely was. There was an opportunity to argue."

But at Cambridge he'd embraced Marxism: "I was challenged head-on by a number of Dominican clergy who would say, 'Okay, so you're joining the International Socialists. Okay, so we quite agree with that revolutionary project. But it's just that Christianity from within its own revolutionary perspective can see that that project has certain limits to it.' For the first time I was not only hearing an intellectually persuasive interpretation of Christianity but also one that made sense politically to me."

Ditchkins swept away the entire philosophical content of religion with a derisory wave of the hand. Eagleton can never overlook their failure to ever engage in intellectual debate with the likes of the Dominicans who changed the course of his own life at Cambridge.

But as Anthony Grayling pointed out, charging Dawkins with failing to read theology "misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views it is a waste of time to address what is built on those premises." Or, as Richard Dawkins himself put it, "Somebody who thinks the way I do doesn't think theology is a subject at all. So to me it is like someone saying they don't believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven't studied fairy-ology."

Eagleton seeks to show, with the use of the theologian Thomas Aquinas, that the God so readily dismissed by Ditchkins is not a god that many theologians, or indeed believers, would recognise. God, Eagleton tells us, is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. "God didn't create the world. He loved it into being. Now what that means, God knows, but that's exactly what Aquinas was saying. The concept of God is what will not let you go."

I was intrigued by Eagleton's admission of uncertainty, his parenthetical "God knows", in this piece of elaborate theology. Science couldn't even begin to answer the question of why there was a world in the first place. But did this mean that we needed to call upon religion to provide to such fundamental questions? Wasn't this more properly the domain of philosophy? Eagleton was conciliatory. "Yes, I think that's fair enough."

I told Eagleton I had been very impressed, in my own conversation with Dawkins, by his stories of those who had approached him and expressed fervent thanks for the manner in which he changed their lives for the better.

"Listen. If Dawkins has emancipated people, freed them from the religious closet as it were, then all credit to him. Loth as I might be to compare Dawkins to Jesus Christ, in this he resembles the heroic figure in the New Testament who comes to sweep away all the fetishism and sickness and cynicism of the neurotic religionists."

You want to save Christianity from the Christians? "Yes, I quote my father who insisted that Jesus Christ was a socialist and that any Christianity that is not on the side of the dispossessed against the arrogance of the powerful and rich is utterly untraditional."

Eagleton believes in Jesus, or rather in the symbolic power of Jesus the revolutionary who urged his followers to feed the hungry, love their enemies, give away their possessions and visit the sick, and was finally tortured and killed for such advocacy.

For Eagleton, this is a powerful iconic reproof to all those who have perverted liberalism into a belief in unilinear progress. "Dawkins," he contends, "has a Panglossian vision of progress. A view from North Oxford. Indeed for all his self-conscious modernity he turns out to be something of an old-fashioned Hegelian believing in a Zeitgeist."

"Dawkins deeply believes in the flourishing of the free human spirit which makes him a liberal humanist rather than a tragic humanist. He believes that if only those terrible guys out there would stop stifling and shackling us, then our creative capacities would flourish. I don't believe that. As a Marxist I reject that simple liberationism. I'm not again humanism. I'm for a humanism which recognises the price of liberation. And that's what I call tragic humanism."

Marx, of course, sees all religious ideas as social and historical products. This doesn't empty them of all significance, turn them into mere epiphenomena. Marx readily allows that such ideas are vehicles for expressing suffering and the suffering they record is very real indeed. Religion is "the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless circumstances" as well as being "the opium of the people".

As the Marxist critic John Molyneux has argued: "In demonstrating his understanding of the liberal theologians' concept of an immaterial, impersonal god of love and tolerance in contrast to the Old Testament god of vengeance, Eagleton leaves decidedly open the possibility that this liberal god may actually exist, or be worthy of worship. For a Marxist the loving, caring, impersonal god of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and radical Jesus of Terry Eagleton are both just as much human creations, illusory projections, as the unpleasant bigoted gods of Ian Paisley or Osama Bin Laden."
 

AR  I can't help feeling Ditchkins and Marx get the better of this, although the mystic position of Aquinas and Eagleton exerts a definite tug at the vitals. I dimly revelate a philosophical way clear here, but I may need to write a book to explain properly what I think I mean.