Eagleton on Ditchkins
By Laurie
Taylor New Humanist, July/August 2009
Edited by Andy Ross
Reason, Faith and Revolution By Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton has a reputation as a rebel. In his new book, he attacks an
antagonist he calls Ditchkins, a composite of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Eagleton embraced Marxism at Cambridge: "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.
Eagleton seeks to show that the God so readily dismissed by Ditchkins is
not a god that many theologians would recognise. Eagleton:
"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."
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.
Eagleton:
"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."
AR I can't help feeling Ditchkins and Marx get
the better of this.
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