Not Good Enough

	Book review on REASON, FAITH AND REVOLUTION: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton Reviewed by Lance St John Butler, 2009 published in Network Review No 101
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The Network has always been a place to be brave in and we should welcome this extraordinarily brave book. I read it twice straight through and I haven't felt impelled to do that since John Gray's similarly iconoclastic Straw Dogs.

Eagleton was the paid-up Marxist scourge of university English of the 1980s. His Literary Theory: An Introduction of 1983 sold a million copies mostly to undergraduates bemused by Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Cultural Materialism and the rest. It wasn't the best book in the field but it was well-written (read funny) and took a comprehensible line; even if this was dubious (after all, the ongoing socialist experiment that Eagleton appeared to be endorsing was about to collapse under the weight of its own mountains of lugubrious yet murderous piffle) it has the huge merit that even undergraduates could actually understand it.

Talking of brave, Eagleton left Oxford (how many dons ever quite manage that?) and went a bit quiet after the fall of European communism, but now he has redeemed himself triumphantly by managing to bring off the amazing trick of re-thinking the Enlightenment, Christianity and the Way We Live Now while still remaining consistent with his earlier positions. This is thinking of no mean order.

This book shows us that we need to think harder and better - perhaps some of the softer edges of the Network approach need to be sharpened up for instance. Eagleton will not let us away with a religion involving just niceness; he points out our persistently superstitious view of God (and that's just the agnostics and atheists among us); he asks what the Enlightenment actually did to the notion of Reason; and he never lets us forget the forgotten or forbidden arenas outside the pale of rationalist thinking: the body, politics, experience, suffering, the marginal, our laziness, our self-loathing.

Here is a heady, unfamiliar world of self-contradiction (ours, not Eagleton's) in which the Christian Right clamours for war, the Dawkins atheists set up a Satanic mirror-image of a God not to believe in, we support one illiberal and 'vilely autocratic' regime after another in the name of protecting 'freedom', values are just the decoration that we add to the market, and globalisation has taken over from any other form of universal or catholic faith while pretending somehow to be in congruence with those faiths themselves.

It is above all the figure of Jesus that bestrides this intoxicating book like a colossus. Or rather, not at all like a colossus, more like a piece of tortured meat. Pages 19 to 29 of the volume (it consists of four essays, originally lectures, very much a la Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy), in the section entitled 'The Scum of the Earth', are a real tour de force of theological writing. I don't think anything has ever given me a better insight into what Jesus could and should mean for us. He is not a ruler, not a lawgiver, not powerful (far from it), not bourgeois, not even pleasant, not easy, not soft. He is a bleeding carcase through whom we can see, as very few of us do see, that it is in our squalor, our scumminess, that we reveal our frailty and our need for a god quite other than that of the Judaism of the time or of Dawkins today, and that we are caught up in 'The Law' (rather than the Lacanian 'Real' that is Desire.) God's true law is justice and compassion but 'The Law' will not tolerate that and inclines to reduce adherents of the true law to 'the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary'. The 'primary masochism known as religion' yearns for 'The Law' and for punishment both in the sense of being punished and, of course, of punishing. But the secret god that is Jesus is quite the opposite of this.

So Eagleton is a Blakean, turning us away from Nobodaddy to that other god, the helpless, vulnerable animal that is Jesus and ourselves. Eternal life here would be the escape from 'The Law', self-liberation from the self's desire to hug its chains, and participation, perhaps literal participation, in Jesus' death as well as his life. His death was 'an act of solidarity with the destitute and dispossessed'. As Eagleton points out, 'Crucifixion was reserved by the Romans for political offences alone' and the political gesture of Jesus is on behalf not of 'humanity' and its 'sins' ('Jesus has very little to say about sin at all') but on behalf of 'the shit of the earth - the scum and refuse of society who constitute the cornerstone of the new form of humanity known as the kingdom of God.'

This is astonishingly well-put and it feels, quite inexorably, a more Jesus-like take on the Jesus story than is usually proposed. Beside it Dawkins and his ilk (Christopher Hitchens is Eagleton's other main target) seem pale, defensive optimists.

It took an astute and passionate thinker to see through the truths of evolutionism and the truths of reason, which are truths after all, and, with immense energy, to break almost all moulds of thought at once and lead us to a place that in our hearts we have always known was there, the place caught in Kurtz's famous cry 'The horror! - the horror!', and force us to look at it steadily and look at it whole, but without despair.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. If you think that reason or benevolent agnosticism or human comfort or the market or Sunday religion are, well, anyway, good enough, you will think again.

Prof. Lance Butler is Professor of British Literature at the University of Pau.

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