I confess to being a fan of Terry Eagleton and to having read almost everything he has ever written. Yes, he is a committed Marxist, even though that particular family of philosophies has lost all credibility; but he always writes with wit and intelligence and is perhaps the only man who can make his readers laugh out loud while discussing Althusser or Habermas. More importantly, he has no time for the lazy relativism of much of the postmodern crowd. His evisceration of the latter in books such as After Theory is awesome to behold. If he has no time for postmodern laziness, he certainly has no patience with the smug confidence of Enlightenment rationalists and liberals. And that is the context for this most stimulating volume.
The one thing that even the most unlettered know about Marx is that he described religion as the opium of the people’in effect, a palliative to keep the lumpen underclasses subdued despite the harshness of life the class system imposed upon them. Thus it might come as a surprise to find Eagleton offering a defense of religion in the face of those two enforcers of the New Atheism, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (or “Ditchkins,” the name Eagleton uses to highlight their basic ideological agreement).
A little background is helpful: as a student, Eagleton was part of the intellectual circles around the left-wing Dominican friar Herbert McCabe. While he later abandoned his Roman Catholic faith, it is clear that he retained affection both for McCabe (who is lavishly praised in the foreword to After Theory) and for the connection between a certain strand of Thomist metaphysics and the possibility of radical political transformation. Further, since the work of Christopher Hill in the 1950s and ’60s, Marxists came to see religion as actually a potent revolutionary force. After all, who is more likely to blow up a commercial airplane to make a statement’the radical Islamist or the atheist college student who reads Ditchkins? Both Eagleton’s autobiography and the general trend of Marxist analysis of religion make a book such as this quite a comprehensible phenomenon.
The book consists of four chapters. In “The Scum of the Earth,” Eagleton does a fine job of demonstrating that the God against whom Ditchkins rails is little more than a caricature. Interestingly enough, as he debunks this God, he demonstrates a more accurate understanding of the divine than many professing Christians. He attacks sentimentalized views of God’s love and the consistent human ability to remake God in our own image, conforming to our pieties and expectations. Always careful to make it clear that he does not himself believe in this God, he still manages to describe pretty accurately the God of the Bible. He also warns against allowing religion to become a shelter for paranoid fantasies, as human values are squeezed out or degraded by the dynamics of the market. Yes, the Marxism shows through, but what Christian is there who cannot see that the reduction of all relations to those of money is part and parcel of the destruction of religion in the public square?
In “The Revolution Betrayed,” Eagleton allows that many of Ditchkin’s aesthetic and moral criticisms of religion are uncontestable, but then he goes on to point out that the kind of secular humanism his targets advocate is itself subject to much the same. I suspect American readers will find this chapter the hardest with which to sympathize as Eagleton lambastes American foreign policy. He makes all of the usual left-wing charges and verges at times on the simplistic. Indeed, the chapter also seems rather repetitive and overblown. Nevertheless, the general point is well made, even if the specifics are debatable: modern Western liberalism uses the rhetoric of progress and freedom but has often failed to deliver on either and, indeed, has as much blood on its hands as any religious movement.
Further, Eagleton also makes the important point that one cannot emphasize the positives of modernity without also acknowledging the negatives. If postmoderns also often refuse to acknowledge the benefits of modernity (even as they take antibiotics, enjoy clean water, and so forth), so moderns such as Ditchkins need to understand that the science that gave us pediatric care also gave us the Holocaust. Science is not in itself a moral narrative that provides the kind of values Ditchkins wishes to promote. It is more ambiguous and less ambitious than that.
This leads to the third chapter: “Faith and Reason.” Here, Eagleton does an excellent job of demonstrating how the notion of reason is itself not a given but has a variety of meanings and has been understood differently throughout history. This chapter is a fine example of what happens when someone with a good grasp of philosophy takes on two men who have strayed into territory in which they are less than competent and yet whose self-confidence leaves them oblivious to their vulnerability.
Finally, Eagleton closes the book with a chapter titled “Culture and Barbarism.” Amid the argument here, there is an almost elegiac quality: as he surveys the political impotence that postmodern relativism fosters, he clearly longs for the grand narratives (and thus values) that religion provides. He sees this as dangerous, for he knows that much religion does not embody the kind of social ethic for which he longs; but he sees an affinity of spirit between himself and those who are feeling the pressure of a society where cash is the only ultimate determiner of value.
In closing, he contrasts himself with Ditchkins by saying that his opponents are liberal humanists while he is a tragic humanist. We might recast this as saying that they are optimistic about human nature while he is pessimistic. Indeed, I was left with the impression that Eagleton knows that polite atheism, à la Hitchens and Dawkins et al., is not an option. Yet, while his demolition of Ditchkins is compelling, his attempt to salvage an alternative is ultimately unconvincing. True atheism must be that of Nietzsche’s Madman, facing the cold, impersonal brutality of a godless universe where all that is left is the will to power. Eagleton does not like that scenario at all. But if he wants tragedy, then he needs meaning; and it is only the Bible, not the dialectical movement of capital, that can provide this.
