Another week, another book chastising, or cheering, the new atheists. God can't have had such publishing appeal since a bunch of renegade Jews, who followed a loser called Jesus, decided to publish their collected memories and letters.
But this month, two books are a cut above the rest. For one thing, they pack hilarious rhetorical punch. You'd expect that in Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry Eagleton. His review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books became a minor publishing event in its own right: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology," it began.
Eagleton does not let up now. Of Daniel Dennett's scientific treatment of belief, he writes: "[Dennett] is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology." To Christopher Hitchens, whom he respects, Eagleton says: "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."
However, there is something deeper going on in Eagleton's book than highbrow trench warfare. As there is in the second work, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart. They're worth considering even if you naturally side with Dawkins et al.
Eagleton has three arresting arguments. The first is that the greatest human traditions are those that contain their own best critique too. Take Plato. We keep reading him, not just because he raised fascinating questions, and proposed answers, but because he also showed why his philosophy could fail. "Tell the truth but tell it slant, Success in circuit lies," wrote Emily Dickinson, charting the route by which flawed humans may nonetheless find wisdom.
Or consider Christianity. Christians in history have undoubtedly perpetrated many crimes. But their most fearsome judge is the very individual they claim to follow, the man who blessed peacemakers, tended lepers and loved enemies. Religion can be monstrous, like love – though like love, it also longs for the best. As the philosopher Bernard Williams realised:
That religion can be a nasty business (with its evil admitting God) is a fact built into any religion worth worrying about, and that is one reason why it has seemed to so many people the only adequate response to the nasty business that everything is.
Eagleton's second point follows from this thought. He believes that the problem with the liberal humanism that the new atheists follow is its woeful underestimation of the horrors of which humans are capable. The defect in liberalism, he says, is that whilst it champions noble ideals, it has little to draw on when it comes to their "unsavoury incarnation" beyond the assertion of bland platitudes like the harm principle (do what you like, just don't damage others.)
Instead, he advocates a tragic humanism, one that confronts the reality of the death camps of the 20th century and the exploitation of the 21st. Christianity is one form of tragic humanism, which is why Eagleton admires it: to address the extravagant defects of human nature, it has an equally extravagant remedy. Roughly, be prepared to love until you die. The Dominican scholar, Herbert McCabe, informs much of Eagleton's reading of Christianity, and McCabe summed up the gospel in this way: if you don't love, you die; if you do love, they kill you.
With Eagleton's third point we come to the terrain covered by Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions too. It is this: in what are we to have faith now? Eagleton's difficulty is that he remains agnostic about Christianity. Bentley Hart's problem is that he believes Christianity's best times have passed. His book is a kind of lament for its failures.
He shows how Christianity started to go wrong when it got mixed up with the exercise of political power following the conversion of Constantine in the 4th century. Its revolutionary features – focused on an insistent belief in the absolute dignity of each and every human individual – became compromised. That's why, say, it took Christians the best part of 2000 years to get round to campaigning for the abolition of slavery. Today, in a plural world, Bentley Hart argues that Christianity has compromised itself again because it has failed to forge a distinctive response to modernity. It has fallen in with the modern conception of freedom that sees human liberty as little more than choice, acquisition, celebrity, distraction and therapy.
The only hope, Bentley Hart concludes, is in a revival of Christianity's prophetic tradition. This was the impulse that took the fourth century monks into the desert, renouncing power, even as the church took power. In this, he follows the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose book, After Virtue, lamented the loss of communities in which any profound or revolutionary moral life could be sustained. "We are waiting not for a Godot," he concluded, "but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict."
"There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will even be born," is how Eagleton ends.
But, you know, there is an optimism that lurks in the dark heart of pessimism. For pessimism is not nihilism, that wants nothing from life, nor cynicism, that doubts everything about life. Rather, if it expects nothing, it gives everything, because it knows it is onto something. Isn't that what the loser Jesus speaks of too?
