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Betwixt and Between Christ and Marx: A Review of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press, 2009)
Terry Eagleton is widely regarded as one of Britain’s leading literary critics. Currently Bailrigg Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he has been Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and John Edward Taylor Professor of English at Manchester University. Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and After Theory (2003) are three of the more than forty books he has published. His latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, is based on the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2008. Eagleton has been invited to give the Gifford Lectures in March 2010, their title, “The God Debate,”
Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is a bold and provocative book, elegantly written, witty and at times outré. For the general reader it provides a useful introduction to the God Debate, the ongoing acrimonious battle between the “New Atheists” and their opponents. It is polemical and guaranteed to offend just about everyone who reads it. The book provides a thoroughgoing critique of secular humanism, liberal rationalism, post-modernism, neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Eagleton opposes his own “tragic humanism” to the “liberal humanism” of two high profile atheists: Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007) he conflates as “Ditchkins.”
Eagleton is not concerned so much with the existence or non-existence of God as with the human condition and the possibility of radically transforming it. He easily demolishes the straw figure that the “New Atheists” set up. “This straw-targeting of Christianity (he writes) is now drearily commonplace among academics and intellectuals—that is to say, among those who would not allow a first-year student to get away with the vulgar caricatures in which they themselves indulge with such insouciance.” This is the god of popular religion, an idol, not the God of Augustine or Aquinas, theologians with whom Eagleton is very much at home. Yet the Enlightenment’s critique of popular notions of God has a very long history, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers who criticized anthropomorphism and also with the Hebrew prophets who condemned idolatry outright.
It is Eagleton’s contention that institutional Christianity has betrayed its revolutionary origins. Consequently it is principally responsible for the current impasse that Christianity has reached in the West. It is this failure that gives credence to the arguments of the “New Atheists.”
Christianity began as a messianic movement among the rural poor and dispossessed of Palestine. It spread throughout the Roman Empire, especially among the proletariat, the class of lowest status in ancient Roman society. Jesus identified completely with the poor, the oppressed, the dispossessed and the marginalized. The Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and instantiated directly challenged the political and religious status quo. Christianity, as Eagleton notes, was the first truly global mass movement in human history.
Terry Eagleton has a reputation in England for being highly controversial. An Irish Roman Catholic by birth and education, he became a Marxist and still considers himself a die-hard socialist. He relishes his Marxist standpoint for the discomfort it causes liberals and former Marxists. Eagleton’s understanding of the Gospel is at once theological and political. In this respect his approach is similar to that of the American biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan in God and Empire: Jesus Agains Rome, Then and Now (2007).
Eagleton manages to combine radical Christianity with the ideas of Karl Marx. Roman Catholicism + Marxist theory is a volatile combination, as Latin American liberation theology evidenced before it was suppressed by Pope John Paul II. While Eagleton does not call his theology liberation theology, he does say that all theology worthy of the name is liberation theology. His version of Christian theology is traditional and orthodox, but not one he assents to:
The account of Christian faith I have just outlined is one which I take to be thoroughly orthodox, scriptural, and traditional. There is nothing fashionable or newfangled about it; indeed, much of it goes back to Aquinas and beyond. In my view, it is a lot more realistic about humanity than the likes of Dawkins. It takes the full measure of human depravity and perversity, in contrast to what we shall see later to be the extraordinary Pollyannaish view of human progress of The God Delusion. At the same time, it is a good deal bolder than the liberal humanists and rationalists about the chances of this dire condition being repaired. It is more gloomy in its view of the human species than the bien-pensanmt liberal intelligentsia . . ., and certainly a good deal more skeptical than the naïve upbeatness of American ideology. . . . (pages 47-48)
Eagleton writes as a pragmatic philosopher/theologian, somewhat in the tradition of William James. For James the truth of religion lay in its transformative power. However, unlike the 19th century American philosopher, Eagleton is often inconsistent and occasionally contradictory. Standing betwixt and between Christ and Marx requires a very delicate balancing act. Ruth Gledhill, writing in The Times, remarked, “One of Eagleton’s most endearing strengths, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, is that he can see the contradictions of his own position.” However, unlike Williams, Eagleton is a literary critic and a political agitator; he is not a professional philosopher or theologian.
Following Augustine and Aquinas, Eagleton maintains that religion is a complex mixture of faith and reason, Anselm’s famous dictum about faith seeking understanding. Dawkins and Hitchens seem to have no inkling of this. The truth involved in acts of faith is not independent of propositional truth but neither is it reducible to it. Here Eagleton introduces the prominent Left-wing French Marxist philosopher and atheist Alain Badiou, whose Being and Event (L’Être et l’Événement, 1988) he cites:
The left-wing atheist Alain Badiou, who as perhaps the greatest living French philosopher is predictably almost unknown to British academia, understands this far better than his Anglo-Saxon liberal-rationalist counterparts. Badiouu grasps the point that the kind of truth involved in acts of faith is neither independent of propositional truth nor reducible to it. Faith for him consists in a tenacious loyalty to what he calls an ”event”—an utterly original happening which is out of joint with the smooth flow of history, and which is unnameable and ungraspable within the context in which it occurs. Truth is what cuts against the grain of the world, breaking with an older dispensation and founding a radically new reality. Such momentous “truth events” come in various shapes and sizes, all the way from the resurrection of Jesus (in which Badiou does not believe for a moment) to the French Revolution, the moment of Cubism, Cantor’s set theory, Schoenberg’s atonal composition, the Chinese cultural revolution, and the militant politics of 1968. (pages 117-118)
For Badiou, truth-events are certainly real, although they are not objective facts:”The resurrection for Christians is not just a metaphor. It is real enough, but not in the sense that you could have taken a photograph of it had you been lurking around Jesus’ tomb armed with a Kodak.“Eagleton compares truth-events to singularities in space or mathematical sets: “Badiou-type events are a kind of impossibility when measured by our usual yardsticks of normality.” For Badiou, faith articulates a loving commitment. Eagleton writes:
“A believer, after all, is someone in love,” observes Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death, a claim that by no means applies only to religious believers. For Saint Anselm, reason is itself rooted in God, so that one can attain it fully only through faith. This is part of what he means by his celebrated assertion ”I believe in order to understand.”—a proposition which in a different sense could also apply to believers like socialists and feminists. Because you already take a passionate interest in women’s liberation, you can come to understand the workings of patriarchy better. Otherwise you might not bother. All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment. As Pascal writes, the saints maintain that we must love things before we can know them, presumably because only through our attraction to them can we come to know them fully. For Augustine and Aquinas, love is the precondition of truth: we seek truth because our material bodies manifest a built-in, ineradicable desire for it, a desire which is an expression of our longing for God. For Augustine and Aquinas, love is the precondition of truth: we seek truth because our material bodies manifest a built-in, ineradicable desire which is an expression of our longing for God(page 120)
Eagleton emphasizes the importance of the materiality of our bodies as well as the autonomy of the world. In the act of knowing subject and object are at one because the body overcomes the duality between subject and object: “Doing, Aquinas remarks in Contra Gentiles, is the ultimate perfection of each thing. Being for Aquinas is an act rather than an entity. Even God is more of a verb for him than a noun. (page 79)
Thinkers with Eagleton’s intellectual acuity have a very low tolerance for the vulgar rationalism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Eagleton engages the “New Atheists” directly, exposing their shallowness, their specious arguments, and their sheer hypocrisy. He contrasts the dogmatic and doctrinaire atheism of Ditchkins with the worldwide resurgence of religion, whether Islam or Christianity, and the rebirth of Orthodoxy in Russia after seventy-five years of state-sponsored “scientific” atheism.
Someone remarked recently that the standard of atheistic discourse deteriorated considerably after the death of Friedrich Nietzsche in 1900. The reason is perhaps that the current God Debate belongs to modernity rather than post-modernity. In the era of liberal rationalism it was possible for Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston, S.J.,to debate the rational grounds for belief in God on the BBC. Since religion and science were then assumed to be antithetical, the debate was obviously contrived. That time has past. Eagleton writes:
What was long ago named by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno the dialectic of Enlightenment is a form of constructive double-think that Dawkins in particular, with his sanctimonious, high-Victorian faith in scientific progress, has apparently failed to grasp. He is unquestionably right to insist on the reality of progress. Only the kind of postmodernist who ought to get out more denies that. As we have seen, however, Ditchkins, like Herbert Spencer, G.H. Lewes, and any number of Victorian ideologues, appears to believe not only in progress but in Progress—as rare and implausible a doctrine these days as a belief in the imminent return of King Arthur. Liberal rationalism, that is to say, has its own articles of faith, and to that extent has something in common with the religious belief it excoriates. (pages 94-95)
Professor Charles Taylor has summed this up most succinctly:”The pure face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a chimera, or, rather, an ideological construct.” Eagleton cites Taylor’s A Secular Age at several points in his discussion of liberal rationalism, the naïve belief in the inevitability of Progress and the ultimate triumph of Reason:
In his magisterial study A Secular Age, Charles Taylor definitively refutes the well-thumbed myth, wondrous in its simple-minded linearity, that in the course of human affairs a religious view of the world was put to flight by a steady accumulation of scientific evidence. In this flattened, off-the-peg teleology, an Age of Faith is heroically ousted by an Age of Reason. It is one of the plentiful myths or superstitions of Enlightenment. (page 76)
Eagleton further charges Ditchkins” with making a serious category mistake in reducing faith to knowledge, and then claiming that religion presents an alternative explanation for the world. Religion and science constitute two distinct types of discourse, what Stephen Jay Gould called “two non-overlapping magisteria.” Writers like Karen Armstrong are extremely careful to distinguish between logos (dialectical or scientific discourse) and mythos (traditional narratives that are timeless). Dawkins and Hitchens simply ignore this distinction.
Ironically, Christian fundamentalists do the same thing when they willfully confuse faith and scientific fact. Their insistence on the literal and factual interpretation of the Bible renders faith unnecessary. Here Eagleton cites the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek In Defence of Lost Causes: ”Fundamentalists are faithless. They are, in fact, the mirror image of skeptics.”
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek are both representative of an unexpected development on the European intellectual scene in the late 20th century, namely, “the theological turn” or “religious turn,” associated with the names of the French existentialist, theologian, and philosopher, Paul Ricoeur and the French phenomenologist, moral thinker and Talmudic scholar, Emmanuel Levinas.
The collapse of Communism forced radical thinkers to seek other forms of discourse. Marxism had been discredited politically, and was considered dépassé. Philosophy had also failed to change the world as Marx had exhorted it to do. Former Marxists and professed atheists began to employ religious and theological language. Eagleton explains this seeming paradox:
This is not entirely surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world—one whose subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life. These are not questions one can easily raise in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic issues is an advantage in this respect. We find ourselves, then, in a most curious situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the problem, as Ditchkins rightly considers, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which might contribute to some of the answers. There are lessons which the secular left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities and absurdities, and the left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford to look such a gift horse in the mouth. (pages 167-168)
Marxism shares with Christianity a messianic vision of history. Both strive for fundamental human rights and freedoms. Marx was the inheritor of the Enlightenment rationalism and German idealism. He was also descended from a long line of rabbis. Furthermore, his understanding of religion was considerably more nuanced than is generally allowed. Religion as “the opium of the people” was not just a metaphor; rather it was a symptom of very real pain and deep-seated discontent. Eagleton contends that the phrases “the sigh of the oppressed creature,” “the heart of a heartless world,” and “the soul of soulless conditions,” are not to be understood pejoratively nor dismissed as rhetoric. Marx must be understood in his proper historical context.
At a time when global capitalism has brought the world almost to the brink of financial disaster and when multinational corporations continue to obstruct the efforts of governments and NGOs to prevent global warming, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is attracting renewed attention. Marx’s critique of 19th century capitalism is being applied to global capitalism today. Eagleton considers capitalism inherently atheistic because it is antithetical to the fundamental values of Christian civilization:
The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver. As such, it is atheistic in all the wrong ways, whereas Marx and Nietzsche are atheistic in what are by and large the right kinds of ways. A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where theological questions can even be properly raised, just as it rules out political and moral questions of a certain profundity. What on earth would be the point of God in such a setup, other than as ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world?
Eagleton doubts whether Western civilization can withstand a full-blooded critique of its narrative of Reason and Progress. In his view, liberalism and rationalism are inadequate to respond to the challenge that militant Islam represents. Politics has failed to transform the condition of most wretched of the earth; culture is inadequate as a surrogate for religion. What is required is nothing less than a vigorous religious response. Christianity, however, has been seriously weakened by relativism and secularism, both concomitants of advanced capitalism. The West, therefore, has reached an impasse.
I highly recommend Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. This is an important and timely book to be read together with Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008).
© 2010 William Converse
