Terry Eagleton
Posted: Saturday Sep 19th | Author: JohnO | Filed under: Dialogue, In the News | View CommentsAll these good theological posts are making me doubt if NT is where I want to be. Ok, not really. But they are where the rubber meets the road, and are all points where the NT will inform our faith. That is why I want to study the NT. And this new atheism “movement”, if it should be called anything more than a stumbling forward powered by vitriol, continues to make press.
This is the second atheist philosopher I’ve now seen go public with a rather extensive critique of the Four Horsemen. On to the juicy tidbits, all the emphasis is mine.
NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion. Is religion literature? Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?
TE: No, not at all. I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture—literary and other kinds of culture—tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.
NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.
TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.
NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?
TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.
I think these three strands speak towards a single truth about what has happened. Religious literacy is at an all-time low. Very few are in a position to understand just what they are reading. It is not their fault. Things have changed. Largely the Church was ill-equipped to deal with fostering a religious literacy. And universities have long since been places where that occurred as well. To study the literary qualities of the religious texts can certainly cause one to gloss over their potential impact. You end up looking for something else. Platitudes get substituted in. You can’t eat a whole meal of platitudes however. They are the sugary bon-bons, the mint on your pillow, after you’ve eaten a full meal at the table. It is therefore easy to call on propositions as the markers. Especially in an increasingly scientific age where modernism has run its course.
Both the civil religion, I would suggest the “dollar-worshipping culture” above, and a great deal of evangelicals and fundamentalists have all grabbed onto the proposition arguments offered by modernism. And, at least in my view, the modernist agenda has fallen flat. It is all but canned on the philosophical front. That would certainly create a vicious circle in which religious literacy becomes worse and worse. Only a “performative” view, to use Eagleton’s term, such as Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, among others, seem to be able to “get” what they are reading. Perhaps their sacramental liturgy has kept this literacy, this performance, alive. Though to be sure, not all of them are on the same page, which makes their examples hard to follow. I know for myself I am looking for a high liturgy tradition that values this emphasis on performance. Hopefully those who are religiously literate are able to move in these directions to open people’s eyes.
And just to close with one stinger.
NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.
TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place!
[HT: Inhabitio Dei]
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