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the complete review - religion / lectures

Reason, Faith and Revolution

by
Terry Eagleton

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : well-turned phrases (and put-downs); muddling argument

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Eagleton points out that the religion New Atheists keep attacking is one held by nobody but the most naive fundamentalists. It is literalistic, ahistorical, and without a shred of humanism. The account of Christianity that Eagleton offers is more palatable, though at the cost of passing over the miraculous magic tricks, like virgin births and multiplying fish, that are the bread and butter of popular religiosity everywhere. The Christianity on offer from Eagleton is so thin it's no wonder he feels no particular urgency to actually believe it. (...) However much Eagleton's theological literacy may outreach Ditchkins', in the end, being able to drop a few lines from Aquinas still doesn't cut it. And he admits at the outset that what little he knows about Christian theology is still much more than he knows about any other tradition. He cites Marx and Freud almost as much as Jesus, and certainly more than Karl Barth." - Nathan Schneider, The American Prospect
  
  
• "Eagleton’s criticisms, however, mostly shoot wide. (...) But this misses the point: the Ditchkins duo are not attempting to write about theology. It is the job of philosophy to examine whether the idea of a theistic God is credible; and it is the role of science to give us hypotheses we have reason to believe on the basis of the evidence. (...) This is a bold and stylish book, guaranteed to provoke -- in the best possible way -- anyone who might read it. Eagleton is a gifted cultural critic, drawing his insights from the worlds he knows best -- those of fiction and ideology. It is, however, in these categories that his views on God belong." - Stephen Cave, Financial Times
  
  
• "Eagleton carves up the "militant" atheists using their own weapons of reason. He accuses them of superstition in their belief in the march of progress; their commitment to individual freedom, he maintains, is an article of faith that has no grounding in science." - Jonathan Bartley, The Guardian
  
  
• "This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible. For all that, the book levels a broadside at faith too. (...) It is easy to see why a lot of people will not be happy with this book. Much of what it says is too true." - Paul Vallely, The Independent
  
  
• "It makes a sharp, limited case against Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens -- concertinaed by Eagleton into the unappealing compound "Ditchkins" (a very drab English town ?) -- better than any previous book of its kind has. But its own incoherence is symptomatic of the frailty of what might be called the new anti-atheism." - James Wood, The New Yorker
  
  
• "Eagleton writes with lucidity, wit and panache. (...) Eagleton knows he is more learned than these "avatars of the liberal establishment" and shows himself to be broader in his thinking in those passages where he drops the Ditchkins-like abuse of religion and conveys his understanding of the "tragic humanism" in the Gospels." - Piers Paul Read, The Observer
  
  
• "(B)risk, funny and challenging (.....) It's only a slight simplification to say that in this compact little tome, which runs less than 200 pages and is largely conversational in tone, Eagleton hopes to save Christianity from the Christians and Marxism from the Marxists. Yet the book's easy-breezy, wisecracking character is deceptive; I had to read it through twice before concluding that it's one of the most fascinating, most original and prickliest works of philosophy to emerge from the post-9/11 era." - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
  
  
• "While ostensibly a defence of Christianity, it is tempting to speculate that this latest entry into the great God debate is nothing more than yet another column, or crusade, marching under the slightly tattered banner of Marxism. (...) 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. At times in this book he seems to come close to suggesting a "new order" for the 21st century, in the mould perhaps of Christ himself in the first. This seems particularly the case when the book is read in the light of the present catastrophes brought on by the capitalist excesses of greed and pride. But Eagleton is far too aware of hubris to fall into such error. Instead, the book is a tantalising invitation for us to make that journey, almost like a journey of faith, one that simultaneously mocks and invites." - Ruth Gledhill, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Reason, Faith and Revolution collects a series of lectures given by Terry Eagleton in April, 2008 at Yale University. These are indeed, as the subtitle has it, 'Reflections on the God Debate' -- with Eagleton rather cleverly avoiding taking much of a position on the actual debate about whether or not there is a god. His main points of reference (and attack) are the two popular and widely discussed books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (god is not Great) -- whom he catchily conflates: "for convenience to the single signifier 'Ditchkins'". Signifier, indeed.
       Making it even easier on himself, Eagleton sticks mostly to Christian theology (the only one he doesn't know much about, "as opposed to those I know nothing at all about"). All this makes for a rather narrow argument. It is not an uninteresting one, but the (many) parts that are reactive -- a critique of Ditchkins -- leave much of it tottering: both Ditchkins books have many weaknesses, but even so Eagleton's readings often seem willfully limited, and he may have done better to make his points more generally. (Tellingly, he thinks the mess of an argument Hitchens presents is a vastly better book than Dawkins', whereas Dawkins' (admittedly bloated and flawed) work is clearly the superior one. But Eagleton's focus is also more on the role of religion in society, rather than any question of its validity -- something Hitchens deals with more extensively (and deals with speaking Eagleton's language, so to speak) than Dawkins.)
       Eagleton doesn't bother much with the issue of the validity of the god-concept because he doesn't consider it a particularly interesting question or point. Religion is a fact of life, so what does it matter ? he seems to be suggesting. But he has some very specific ideas about god (and, frustratingly, he pretty much always means the one-and-only Christian deity (who, of course, is far from the one and only god-version floating around out there)) and religion, which he doesn't really substantiate -- while arguing that, for example: "Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is". Eagleton, instead, thinks that, for example, it is silly to argue (as he suggests Hitchens does) that scientific advancement has obviated the need for religion:

Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view, but simply for the love and delight of it.

Because God is transcendent -- that's to say, because he doesn't need humanity, having fashioned us just for the fun of it -- he is not neurotically possessive of us. He needs us no more than one needs a pet mongoose or tattoo. He is therefore able to let us be; and the word for this is freedom, which is where for Christian theology we belong to him most deeply.

Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.

Even after Auschwitz, there is nothing in their view to be redeemed from. Things are just not that desperate enough. In their opinion, it is just shoddy, self-indulgent leftist hyperbole to imagine that they are. Your average liberal rationalist does not need to believe that despite the tormented condition of humanity there might still, implausibly enough, be hope, since they do not credit such a condition in the first place.

     Ditchkins and his ilk support, by and large, the political status quo, with varying degrees of reformist dissent.

His campaign against fundamentalism has been signally unmatched by an equally forthright critique of global capitalism, a system which breeds so much of the anxiety and sense of humiliation off which fundamentalism feeds.

have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam Indeed, most of them hardly mention the word "capitalism" at all, however they may protest from time to time against this or that excess.

     A surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late-capitalist civilization itself has helped to spawn. This is not only because it has helped to create the conditions for fundamentalism. It is also because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative, and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish.

- M.A.Orthofer, 8 May 2009

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Links:

• Yale University Press publicity page

• The American Prospect
• Boston Globe
• Financial Times
• First Things
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• The Observer
• Open Letters
• Pharyngula
• Salon
• Socialist Review
• Think Again
• The Times

• Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script

• See Index of books dealing with Religion

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About the Author:

       Noted literary critic Terry Eagleton is a Professor of English at Oxford University.

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© 2009 the complete review

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