Eye of Marx, Toe of God

Thought for the Day on Radio 4 contravenes the Trade Descriptions Act as its blended platitudes about how we should all be nicer to each other and bad things happen aren’t something you can chew on for very long.  However, about 10 days ago someone, I can’t remember who, did actually grab my attention.  First of all he said the name “Eagleton”, then he said he’d been reading something Professor Prolific has been writing - evidently his new book about Evil - and how he’d gone from interpreting the three witches in Macbeth as revolutionary socialists overthrowing the old order (that would have been in his Marxist days - what a perverse reading of the withered hags) to thinking they are a bunch of evil nihilists wanting destruction for destruction’s sake (that’s in his present Christian guise, and a standard reading borne out by the text).  Well, anyone can change their mind about a literary work - nah they can’t, it’s Eagleton, and he’s up to no good.

I don’t want to read his latest so I can denounce it as vapour but Anthony Grayling has saved me the trouble by tasting the stew Eagleton has cooked up in his cauldron from random ingredients:-

He [Eagelton]  sets off on one of those complexifying journeys, like the route of a pinball bouncing backwards and forwards among a thicket of pingers, from William Golding to St Augustine, Macbeth to Pseudo-Dionysus, original sin to the Holocaust, Shakespeare to Freud, Satan to Thomas Mann, Arendt to Aristotle, and so copiously on – a verbal pinball ride among the entries in the telephone book of Western culture, to tell us what evil is. But do not expect, by the end, a conclusion, still less a definition, nor even a summary. Eagleton has been too long among the theorists to risk a straightforward statement. You have to grasp at fragments as you bounce among the pingers, not always quite sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing with this or that author, even whether he is still paraphrasing an author or speaking with his own voice. That’s a technique, of course.

Yeah, the shifty sod. 

As we are dealing with Eagleton here, note that this is of course not a mish-mash of inconsistencies, as it appears to be; this is subtlety and nuance. It is, you might say, nuance-sense.

I chose the same bits to quote as Butterflies and Wheels, for the very good reason that they are witty and apt.  Grayling goes on (read the lot - it’s an elegant hatchet job):- 

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book as in others of his recent "late period" prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, "To ask after God’s reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is." This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for "natural evil" – childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands – and for moral evil also even though "he" is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and "he" is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

You can see where this leads: with other ways of defining deity conveniently beyond any possible meaning that can be attached to the notion, the religionists and their fellow-travellers are forever protected from challenge to and criticism and refutation of religious ideas and beliefs.

When Shakespeare was writing about witches he was living at a time when people believed they did have actual powers that could hurt and harm.   Eagleton’s statements on God are an incantation that summon what he no doubt thinks is a Cloud of Unknowing but are in fact a medium’s vapour of ectoplasm, a magician‘s puff of smoke.

Round about the caldron go;
    In the poison'd entrails throw. . .
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
    Then the charm is firm and good.

Comments

[Norman Lamont (no relation!)]

Hmmm. I'd never heard of Eagleton until I read this so I looked him up to see why you hated him so.

On WikiPee I found this: 'He concludes by suggesting Dawkins has not been attacking organised faith so much as a sort of rhetorical straw-man' - which pretty much sums up my view of Dawkins. What's the story about this guy and why is he such a baddie?

[Rosie]

Eagleton is a poseur, a charlatan and intellectually dishonest

He erects his own straw men.

Here's a good take down of his methods:-

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-speaking-of-bullshit-try-this.html