Slippery Slyboots

This is an addition to Jim Denham's excellent post over at Shiraz Socialist.

Why doesn't Terry Eagleton come out as a Catholic?  It's not like coming out as a Jehovah's Witness or a Scientologist or even a Mormon. Roman Catholicism is an ancient religion which has spread throughout the world, and so is not seen as weird or cultish.   Also, a literary critic like Eagleton could consider the twentieth century writers in English who were Catholics – Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark just for starters.  It's a creditable list of talents.  And although Catholics have historically been in the majority in Western Europe – and an oppressive majority at that – in Britain post Reformation they were a minority and often persecuted.  So he would have all the pleasures of being anti-establishment, and none of the dangers of earlier ages, which should satisfy a revolutionary spirit like his.

When I came across his piece ridiculing Alain de Botton's ideas of a genteel atheism I was firmly on Eagleton's side. It is a repulsive idea, that the elite should promote religion because it's good for the masses. Honest Christians don't think like that. C S Lewis frequently expressed his disgust at the idea that an educated caste of priests would keep one set of beliefs for themselves and another for their flock.  Lewis himself went the whole supernatural hog.

I hate being on Eagleton's side, as he's a slippery slyboots, so like Jim I pounced on this paragraph:-

Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

As Jim, and de Botton himself pointed out, this really is a hint at the sympathies of the writer and where his beliefs are heading.  Imagine a sentence like this:-

The late Osama Bin Laden, who some people think is now enjoying 72 virgins. . .

The "some people" aren't the credulous or superstitious that are being ridiculed. Though Eagleton isn't straight enough to say, "I believe in an afterlife where souls are judged" - he has to do the jokey wiggle that shimmers through his writing and makes it both dishonest and irritating- you can guess he'd like there to be such a place for his adversaries to admit how very wrong their wrongness was.

(As an aside, Eagleton obliquely and George Galloway openly do show relish at the thought Hitchens may be burning in hell for eternity.  I don't like either of them, but if I wouldn't them to suffer that fate for– not more than a week, anyway. )

The other Eagleton-trope in that quoted paragraph is:- Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

Shame we're still not united by an enforced Christendom complete with burnings of heretics or a cult of the Great Leader Stalin.   Also, is this being divided and contentious a distinction of "liberal-capitalist societies"?   Ancient Rome, say, could be very divided and contentious, including a plethora of religions and peoples, but it kept itself together for quite a long time with an idea of Roman citizenship, which I suppose can be called "communitarian".   But "liberal-capitalist" would not describe it in the slightest.

However this is typical Eagleton rhetoric.  Do a diatribe against atheism or what have you and then garnish it with something vaguely Marxist sounding, so it appears as weighty analysis and not a run of the mill critique. You can see it here in after a incoherent and dodgy piece about multi-culturalism (we're all the same really and isn't that great! no we're not, and isn't that great!!) 

Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies.

That is a dubious statement, but it sounds like political analysis so gives more gravity to what could be instead mere cultural observation.

I don't know why Eagleton won't come clean vis-a-vis  his own Catholicism.  Is it because among the British academics and intellectuals who are his peers atheism and liberalism are the norm and religion a little backward (he would be better off in the USA)? Is it because, for all the talk of revolutionary priests "and the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice", it's associated with social conservatism?  Does he fear seeming less like the impartial analyst and more the partisan on religious matters?   Perhaps he doesn't really know himself - but if religion is attacked he reacts to the "twitch upon the thread"  and arises, thrashing and gasping. 

Comments

[Andrew Coates]

Eagleton is slippery.

His book on Evil and many, many, others,are hard to pin down in Thomist terms.

But in his modestly entitled Introduction to the Gospels Verso 2008) he does come our with what passes for his political theology theology.

I note this favaourable review by the Editor of the Tablet.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/jesus-christ-the-gospels-presented-by-terry-eagleton-770981.html