There hasn’t been much time this week for posting. The return from Wittenberg landed me with a pile of work and appointments – all good and all encouraging in one way or another.
Apart from the total and unmitigated misery of Liverpool’s abysmal performance against Northampton Town – which silenced me for a couple of days simply because I couldn’t bear the mockery from my ‘friends’ – I have met great clergy, helped judge an interfaith award, read an excellent book and got up to date with correspondence of all forms.
However, I missed the 76th birthday of the great Leonard Cohen. How sad is that? If you follow the link, you get to a site from which you can download the Radio 2 documentary (in which I took part) on the 25th anniversary of Cohen’s song Hallelujah.
And my quote of the week? Terry Eagleton writing in the Preface to his wonderful and funny Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (which I will post on more fully when I get time):
Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology. I therefore have a good deal of sympathy with its rationalist and humanist critics. But it is also the case… that most such critics buy their rejection of religion on the cheap. When it comes to the New Testament, at least, what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion’s own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood’s opinion of it.
Eagleton goes on to challenge Dawkins, Hitchens et al, but is also profoundly challenging to the Christian churches. The language he uses is very funny as he penetrates through the superficialities of much of the contemporary debate. More anon.
September 24, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Most impressed by Terry Eagleton’s clear and rational take on all this. I found the section on the new atheists easy, but when he turns on the Church, it is upbraided for its failure to live by what it actually professes — a challenging thought. He’s right, often the Church behaves as though it doesn’t actually believe in the stuff it professes…
September 24, 2010 at 8:38 pm
There’s an offer in the Independent today for a Leonard Cohen Collection 5CD Box at £24.99 inc P&P.
September 25, 2010 at 5:57 am
“often the Church behaves as though it doesn’t actually believe in the stuff it professes…”
I think the challenge goes deeper than that.
People genuinely believe different things about our faith depending on whether they read scripture with a more legalistic or a more humanistic eye.
I’m always fascinated by the story of the woman taken in adultery which is interpreted by one group of believers as a story of compassion, freedom from the judgment of others, full responsibility before God and of forgiveness, while the other group just as genuinely sees it as an absolute command to repent and turn away from sin before you can be right before God. When they agree on the principle, they still differ in their interpretation of what constitutes “sin”.
Both groups (and all those nuanced people between those 2 extremes) genuinely believe that they have captured Christianity’s truth and the do, indeed, believe and live the stuff they profess. And both groups are absolutely delighted that they are not like the other.
Our real challenge is not merely to be more like Christ, but to discover what that might mean.
September 25, 2010 at 5:09 pm
I’m going to hear Terry Eagleton speak on ‘The Nature of Evil’ next Saturday at the Ilkley Literature Festival -”Drawing on literary, theological and psychoanalytic sources, he suggests evil is a real phenomenon with palapable force”. Any perspicacious questions you’d like me to put to him (that will make me look very intelligent)?.
September 25, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Alison, I am about to read his book On Evil which I posted about here. You could ask him if it is ‘wicked’ to be evil…
September 26, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I don’t understand how Eagleton has claimed to be both a Marxist and a Catholic or if he still does, but he’s from an (English-born) Irish Republican background where the boundaries between religion and politics are often shifting, and once easily morphs into the other. Are there any real Marxists left today, after 1989 and the demise of both the Soviet Union and liberation theology? Eagleton is himself a cultural theorist and doesn’t claim to be a theologian – but then, neither did C. S. Lewis (with less justification).
The deepest reply I’ve seen to Dawkins and co, and modern atheism as it evolved from 1789 onwards is from the American Othodox theologian historian David B. Hart, who writes for ‘First Things’. His book of earlier this year ‘Atheist Delusions’ (Yale UP) has some profound reflections on Christianity, science and violence.
September 26, 2010 at 2:59 pm
In all these discussions about evil there is usually one thing missing: The Devil. According to the Bible this is the source of evil in the world, however else people may choose to view human nature.
September 26, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Alison, over my years working as a lawyer,I have acted for child abusers and murders including one especially dangerous serial killer who probably killed 11 people. My abiding impression is of the banality of evil.
Just as the holocaust was carried out by little anonymous civil servants, so I have found that most realy evil doers are almost impossible to differentiate from the rest of us. That is not to excuse them in any way, but if you could ask about this it might enlighten just a little.
Paradoxically, one of the finest men I ever knew killed his wife when he was mentally unwell. He had killed her one morning after breakfast out of compassion for the suffering his illness caused her. He was a cultivated man, and a fine pianist who was later described by the sentencing Judge in terms of his war time gallentry and humanity. It was very moving. I will always remember that he did not want anything from the justice system, had huge compassion for fellow prisoners but no pity for himself.
He told me that “at the time it had perfect logic- but now I can never recapture that logic”. We had lengthy discussions about philosphy, justice and the nature of evil; he was well read in Arthur Koestler who figured in these conversations. He told me that Koestler said that Man has the front brain of a human the mid brain of a monkey and the back brain of an alligator.
He respected the legal process and co-operated out respect and civic responsibility.
He was sent to a mental health unit. Two years later, sitting in my office I was told he had arrived to see me. Leaving his “minder” downstairs, we had a pleasant chat over a cup of tea as old friends. He had put all his affairs in order. He thanked me for all I had done.A few weeks later I met a mutal friend in the pub who had just returned from his funeral. He had hanged himself. I know he had given his family and friends a chance to get over the tragedy and then “checked out”.
Evil?.. goodness?..all very confusing.
September 26, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I read the “Bhagavad Gita” some time ago and was struck, forcibly, by its account of sin. The commentary to the text explained that sin = “that which causes suffering” … not just to others but to the self. Therefore, the person who is suffering has fallen into sin.
This is a hard message to take on board but, understood properly, it means an end to offloading responsibility for our states of mind onto other people or events in our lives[the demons 'out there']- the Devil is inside us and can only be dispelled by an act of will. The word ‘sin’, in this sense, denotes a state of being, not an action or set of actions. It is the moral antithesis of grace.
Not only does this way of thinking reveal the internality of sin/evil but it demonstrates how the experience of negative emotions impacts upon ourselves just as much as, in some cases more than, it impacts upon others. If I am angry, my anger not only damages the person I direct it to – it damages me. The same is true of any ill feeling. If I nurture ill feeling I end up feeling ill. I am the cause and must be the solution.
So, if I was Terry Eagleton, I would answer ‘yes’, it is wicked to be evil. The person who has fallen into evil-doing has fallen into sin. The suffering and misery they inflict on others is immediately apparent and must [eventually] be the cause of their own unravelling…. and this doesn’t just happen in fairy stories. Life has a nasty way of imitating fiction I find.
September 26, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Martin
Don’t you think that just as with goodness, there are degrees of “evil”? Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil arose from her work on Eichmann.
That is miles removed from a loving husband killing a suffering wife and later no longer being sure that it was the right thing to have done.
September 27, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Hi Erica, Yes I agree. I wasn’t trying to pretend I have a deep insight into the problem of evil, but when we can concretise the problems it may assist rather than to talk in abstract terms.
If I were to venture a thought – certainly not an authoritative one, I might consider evil in terms of emptiness rather than the fulness of the love of God.
The serial killer has an emptiness of empathy, realisation and self respect. The husband I describe pondered the empty logic that had taken him to a bad place and found it unbearable.
I am not claiming this is an answer but offer the thought for what it may or may not be worth.
September 27, 2010 at 1:05 pm
I don’t accept the thesis that evil is banal. This is a judgement made after the event and with all the crushing irony that such realisation entails. Hannah Arendt’s ‘ordinary’ people who carried out the orders of their Nazi superiors were filled with the glory that inspires people when they think they are serving a wonderful cause. They experience a sense of divine purpose coupled with a conviction of their own invincibility. The shame that follows is intensified by the memory of such pride and the callous indifference to suffering that goes with it. Eagleton reveals himself to be in a fallen state when he writes that “ it {evil} has the ludicrous pomposity of a clown seeking to pass himself off as an emperor.” He could only know so by having been that clown … or by having served one.
The ‘pre-lapsarian’ power which evil has, at its height, is terrifying. We’re in real danger if we imagine otherwise. But perhaps that is Eagleton’s conclusion … I haven’t read him yet. My point is that evil only looks banal [or appears so]when the spell is broken. We have to beware the spell and acknowledge that its power is nothing without our complicity.
September 27, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Well, here is why I reject the New Testament http://bit.ly/aVbPxm
Illustrated with Lego and passages from the Bible.
Looking forward to reading Eagleton’s book.
September 27, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Dubious, I would be interested to see your response to Joachim Fest’s classic analysis of the chief protagonists of Nazism, The Face of the Third Reich. ‘Banality’ does not come out of this as a synonym for something trivial or anodyne. The chapter on Rudolf Hoess is particularly worrying.
September 27, 2010 at 8:43 pm
EnglishAtheist, thanks for linking to your post. I look forward to hearing your response to Eagleton’s book (which I intend to summarise and comment on when I get time). However, I read your post and am surprised that you can read the New Testament text in the way you do – and with such some rather surprising literary logic. Again, if I get time, I’ll comment in further depth.
September 27, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Actually, Dubious, my worry is not that evil is done in the euphoric state which you describe but in terms of ” it’s a living”- or some other day to day purpose.
You may remember the “set up” experiment where an actor was attached to non functioning electrodes and intelligent students invited to press the button giving an increasing “shock”. As the actor simulated agony, the volunteers began to waver in their commitment to the experiment, yet the experiment controller urged them on, saying the whole experiment would fail if they did not complete the task.
All of these ordinary decent folk did so.
They were not monsters or idealogues, they were ordinary people whose respect for scientific process and research overode their sense of empathy or core of morality.
Evil came out of an imperfectly balanced set of potential “goods”. The ease with which we all slip from the good, is what should worry us most. Very great evil can be done by people who look, think, and feel much like us.
September 27, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Martin & Dubious, a good illustration of the ease or banality of evil can be seen in the German film Die Welle (The Wave) in which an experiment in a school class goes wrong. The teacher wants to get his students to understand totalitarianism and it soon gets beyond and illustration.
September 27, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Nick, thank you very much for taking the time to read my post, I look forward to your (and any of your dear readers too!)feedback.
September 28, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Nick: I hadn’t heard of Joachim Fest so I did a quick internet search and found this [amongst a lot of other things] http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/thefeastofthegoat.htm It is a review of two books: THE FEAST OF THE GOAT by Mario Vargas Losa and SPEER: THE FINAL VERDICT by Joachim Fest. Both, according to the Canadian reviewer, consider “the problem of complicity” a phrase taken from the American writer Robert Pen Warren. I was struck particularly by the reviewer’s observation [courtesy of Hugh Trevor-Roper] that “Moral annihilation is the end of complicity in a dictatorship.” S/he ends “Fest concludes by pointing out how the likes of Hitler and Trujillo {one time ruler of the Dominican Republic} will always crop up again. They are simply forces of nature. It is their courtiers – the managers, lackeys, propagandists, technocrats, and office-seekers – that are ‘the product of a long process of civilization.’ And so we are always unconsciously preparing the ground.” I don’t know if it was this aspect of his work that you were calling my attention to but, anyway, thank you for pointing me in his direction. I’m actually reading about Stalin at the moment. Happy days!!
Martin: I am familiar with the experiment you refer to [Milgram’s Study of Obedience 1963]. It presented some very worrying findings but has also been criticized on several grounds – not least that it wasn’t properly representative. My own concern I suppose would be to what extent it is possible [advisable] to extrapolate from what happened in the clinical environment of a laboratory at Yale University to what happened in Germany during the years of the Third Reich [and what might happen anywhere else]. It is the passion that is missing and which most accounts of tyranny testify to. Otherwise I suspect we would probably be in agreement, certainly over your final paragraph.
October 4, 2010 at 1:23 am
[...] Communion and the CoE, Colin Coward on his blog Changing Attitude makes a very powerful post. Bishop Nick Baines does Leonard Cohen and Terry Eagleton together in one blog post. That should be worthy of mention, although he doesn't give any narrative bridge between the two. [...]
October 4, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Cheers, I see the trackback is here to my Sunday/Monday blogs round-up. Would love to see a bit more Leonard Cohen. Maybe we could do a blogfest on Leonard Cohen and belief/disbelief, with even a little Eagleton thrown in? Cheers.
November 12, 2010 at 6:55 pm
[...] go with the agnostic Marxist Terry Eagleton when he complains that the so-called New Atheists have bought their atheism on the cheap and that [...]
January 18, 2011 at 12:42 am
[...] raised in his book Reason, Faith and Revolution: reflections on the God Debate (commented on here). Aside from discussion of the tendency of people on all sides to demonise those with whom they [...]