Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
Terry Eagleton: The Unexpected Christian
By Alan Franks, The Times
What a temptation it is to say that the incendiary Marxist critic Terry Eagleton is undergoing some late-life epiphany by publishing an introduction to the Gospels. In fact, he is re-engaging with an influence that was with him as a boy in a seriously poor Irish family in Salford.
At the age of 64, he is spending the final years of his academic career back in Manchester after three decades teaching in Oxford, so the temptation shifts to describing his progress as circular. This is to be resisted as strongly as the first, for both are too pat to be hung on such a long-standing public enemy of cliché.
God appears to find him biddable but, as some have complained of Eagleton, is having trouble making Himself fully understood.
“I guess I am still searching,” Eagleton says. The possibility of this astringent leftwinger having something other than a secular faith should not entirely surprise his readers. In the 1960s he was a member of the radical Roman Catholic group Slant and wrote a book called Towards A New Left Theology. Two months ago, in the London Review of Books, he castigated Britain's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, for his alleged ignorance of that discipline.
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology,” he wrote, “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 Dawkins on theology.”
Of course Marxism, Eagleton's most sustaining belief system, is often portrayed as a religion, with its texts, prophets, vision and martyrs. “Yes,” he says, “and I certainly don't think it's odd that Christianity and Marxism should go together in my career, or indeed in anybody's career. They are both concerned with emancipation, and in the narrative of each the poor play a central role. Something I am very drawn to [in both] is that their assessment of the present state of humanity is very glum, whether that is because of original sin or the class society.
“At the same time there is a feasible capacity for transformation. They see things as being much more stark and realistic than most forms of progressive liberalism. They are both tragic but, in contrast to a merely fashionable postmodern pessimism, both believe in the possibility of change.” It is largely because of this shared ground that he has maintained that you can proceed from Catholicism to Marxism without the bridge of liberalism.
Does he still hold this position? “I do. I believe that is true. It certainly is for me. I wasn't brought up with any understanding of liberal, individualist, middle-class culture. Coming from an Irish Catholic, working-class home such ideas were fairly alien. I had to learn them, whereas others got them spontaneously.”
The John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory can be found, with difficulty, in a building full of contradictory corridors away from the main university site. Even inside, hardly anyone seems to have heard of this grand old man of literary theory. They repeat “Eagleton” with the bemusement of locals who don't know the village you are after.
The seclusion suits him. He left Oxford partly because he resented being, as he sees it, forced into administrative roles. The weight of teaching is much lighter than it was at Wadham College. His office is unadorned and doggedly low-tech, almost indistinguishable from the sort of premises that were evoked by David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury when they were the coming young novelists.
What a temptation it is to say that the incendiary Marxist critic Terry Eagleton is undergoing some late-life epiphany by publishing an introduction to the Gospels. In fact, he is re-engaging with an influence that was with him as a boy in a seriously poor Irish family in Salford.
At the age of 64, he is spending the final years of his academic career back in Manchester after three decades teaching in Oxford, so the temptation shifts to describing his progress as circular. This is to be resisted as strongly as the first, for both are too pat to be hung on such a long-standing public enemy of cliché.
God appears to find him biddable but, as some have complained of Eagleton, is having trouble making Himself fully understood.
“I guess I am still searching,” Eagleton says. The possibility of this astringent leftwinger having something other than a secular faith should not entirely surprise his readers. In the 1960s he was a member of the radical Roman Catholic group Slant and wrote a book called Towards A New Left Theology. Two months ago, in the London Review of Books, he castigated Britain's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, for his alleged ignorance of that discipline.
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology,” he wrote, “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 Dawkins on theology.”
Of course Marxism, Eagleton's most sustaining belief system, is often portrayed as a religion, with its texts, prophets, vision and martyrs. “Yes,” he says, “and I certainly don't think it's odd that Christianity and Marxism should go together in my career, or indeed in anybody's career. They are both concerned with emancipation, and in the narrative of each the poor play a central role. Something I am very drawn to [in both] is that their assessment of the present state of humanity is very glum, whether that is because of original sin or the class society.
“At the same time there is a feasible capacity for transformation. They see things as being much more stark and realistic than most forms of progressive liberalism. They are both tragic but, in contrast to a merely fashionable postmodern pessimism, both believe in the possibility of change.” It is largely because of this shared ground that he has maintained that you can proceed from Catholicism to Marxism without the bridge of liberalism.
Does he still hold this position? “I do. I believe that is true. It certainly is for me. I wasn't brought up with any understanding of liberal, individualist, middle-class culture. Coming from an Irish Catholic, working-class home such ideas were fairly alien. I had to learn them, whereas others got them spontaneously.”
The John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory can be found, with difficulty, in a building full of contradictory corridors away from the main university site. Even inside, hardly anyone seems to have heard of this grand old man of literary theory. They repeat “Eagleton” with the bemusement of locals who don't know the village you are after.
The seclusion suits him. He left Oxford partly because he resented being, as he sees it, forced into administrative roles. The weight of teaching is much lighter than it was at Wadham College. His office is unadorned and doggedly low-tech, almost indistinguishable from the sort of premises that were evoked by David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury when they were the coming young novelists.
Because of his assaults on Dawkins — and Martin Amis and Christopher
Hitchens, of which more soon — it is a surprise to find him quite so
genial and ruddy. For years he had a reputation for being beery and
flirtatious, but you would now have to call him avuncular were he not
such an unstoppable father in his own right — two children from a
previous marriage, now in their thirties, and three more — aged 10, 2
and six months — with his wife Willa Murphy, an American academic.
Why did he choose to write an introduction to the Gospels? “Basically because I was asked to do it. They [the publisher, Verso] were running a series on revolutionaries, and would I do Jesus, knowing I had some background. So I said OK. They were bringing out one on Trotsky, and I said I think my man has the edge over him, as Trotsky didn't rise from the dead.”
Meaning that Jesus did? Or at least that Eagleton believes he did? He does not give so much an answer as a fairly broad, all-purpose kind of laugh that may be as much agnostic as evasive. The Christ of his 30-page essay is nothing if not revolutionary, and more profoundly so, Eagleton suggests, than any other historical figure.
“In his Crucifixion and descent into Hell,” he writes, “Jesus in St. Paul's view is ‘made sin,' identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his Resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure.”
Reading him in this vein, it is hard to know whether you are in the company of an unreconstructed, literalist Catholic or a literary scholar responding to the power of metaphor. What was Christ up to? “Well,” Eagleton replies, “in a way which is far more radical than the secular Left, he's saying it's all over; even as you look at it, it's out of date, passing away. Something new, something unimaginable is striking into this place.”
And what did he (Christ — or Eagleton for that matter) have in mind here? “Well. He called it the Kingdom of God. But a lot of ink has been spilt over what that means.”
Not some posthumous glory for this flesh and blood of ours? “No. I don't know. He's talking a traditonal kind of Judaic talk. It's the realm of justice, the realm where tragedy will be wiped away, the realm of fellowship. Though what that means...”
He tails off in a way that makes his fabled powers of exegesis look either frustratingly fallible or reassuringly human.
Apart from Dawkins, whom he accuses of conjuring a satanic and easy-to-pillory God, another writer to have felt the lash of his disdain is Martin Amis. In a new edition this year to his classic, Ideology: An Introduction, he accused the novelist, who teaches creative writing at the same university, of sounding like a British National Party thug by advocating the strip-searching of travellers who look as if they come from the Middle East.
Since the War on Terror, he argues, there has been a revival of old-fashioned liberal rationalism. “Not just Amis, but Hitchens as well. There is an element of panic and even hysteria in the way that people are waving their rational credentials.
“What Amis is really talking about is a war between barbarism and civilisation. This is an old theme. It takes different forms, and now it's taking this one. If by civilisation you mean a West that's at present killing hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Iraq, then the smugness of that is extraordinary.”
While Eagleton may well prove the truth of the saying, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,” in his case you might equally substitute the word Marxist. He considers himself as committed as ever.
“In some ways perhaps even more so. Some of what Marx was predicting in The Communist Manifesto has come about. What he said about increasing globalisation, rising inequalities and battles over scarce resources; those bits are true, and in a world where capitalism is more powerful than ever, it seems right that it should be subjected to a proper critique.”
Look closely at Eagleton's career and the surprise of him addressing the Gospels is no surprise at all, just the next part of a story that is consistent for its seeming incongruities.
A poor Salford Irish boy becomes a star in the Oxford firmament. While part of that establishment he draws odium from all sides for being a token Red.
He calls himself “Doctor” while his academic peers adopt the affected modesty of “Mister”. He is a literary critic but breaks the convention of the calling by writing a bestseller on theory. He tackles the great English canon but elevates marginal characters to a higher significance than their “betters.” He applauds Das Kapital but trades in the opium of the people. Paradoxes come as standard.
He asks: “Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary?” and decides that the answer “is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.” Surely this can't be an instance of an author visiting his own narrative on his subject?
Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ The Gospels
Verso, £7.99; 160pp
Why did he choose to write an introduction to the Gospels? “Basically because I was asked to do it. They [the publisher, Verso] were running a series on revolutionaries, and would I do Jesus, knowing I had some background. So I said OK. They were bringing out one on Trotsky, and I said I think my man has the edge over him, as Trotsky didn't rise from the dead.”
Meaning that Jesus did? Or at least that Eagleton believes he did? He does not give so much an answer as a fairly broad, all-purpose kind of laugh that may be as much agnostic as evasive. The Christ of his 30-page essay is nothing if not revolutionary, and more profoundly so, Eagleton suggests, than any other historical figure.
“In his Crucifixion and descent into Hell,” he writes, “Jesus in St. Paul's view is ‘made sin,' identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it through his Resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds only through failure.”
Reading him in this vein, it is hard to know whether you are in the company of an unreconstructed, literalist Catholic or a literary scholar responding to the power of metaphor. What was Christ up to? “Well,” Eagleton replies, “in a way which is far more radical than the secular Left, he's saying it's all over; even as you look at it, it's out of date, passing away. Something new, something unimaginable is striking into this place.”
And what did he (Christ — or Eagleton for that matter) have in mind here? “Well. He called it the Kingdom of God. But a lot of ink has been spilt over what that means.”
Not some posthumous glory for this flesh and blood of ours? “No. I don't know. He's talking a traditonal kind of Judaic talk. It's the realm of justice, the realm where tragedy will be wiped away, the realm of fellowship. Though what that means...”
He tails off in a way that makes his fabled powers of exegesis look either frustratingly fallible or reassuringly human.
Apart from Dawkins, whom he accuses of conjuring a satanic and easy-to-pillory God, another writer to have felt the lash of his disdain is Martin Amis. In a new edition this year to his classic, Ideology: An Introduction, he accused the novelist, who teaches creative writing at the same university, of sounding like a British National Party thug by advocating the strip-searching of travellers who look as if they come from the Middle East.
Since the War on Terror, he argues, there has been a revival of old-fashioned liberal rationalism. “Not just Amis, but Hitchens as well. There is an element of panic and even hysteria in the way that people are waving their rational credentials.
“What Amis is really talking about is a war between barbarism and civilisation. This is an old theme. It takes different forms, and now it's taking this one. If by civilisation you mean a West that's at present killing hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Iraq, then the smugness of that is extraordinary.”
While Eagleton may well prove the truth of the saying, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,” in his case you might equally substitute the word Marxist. He considers himself as committed as ever.
“In some ways perhaps even more so. Some of what Marx was predicting in The Communist Manifesto has come about. What he said about increasing globalisation, rising inequalities and battles over scarce resources; those bits are true, and in a world where capitalism is more powerful than ever, it seems right that it should be subjected to a proper critique.”
Look closely at Eagleton's career and the surprise of him addressing the Gospels is no surprise at all, just the next part of a story that is consistent for its seeming incongruities.
A poor Salford Irish boy becomes a star in the Oxford firmament. While part of that establishment he draws odium from all sides for being a token Red.
He calls himself “Doctor” while his academic peers adopt the affected modesty of “Mister”. He is a literary critic but breaks the convention of the calling by writing a bestseller on theory. He tackles the great English canon but elevates marginal characters to a higher significance than their “betters.” He applauds Das Kapital but trades in the opium of the people. Paradoxes come as standard.
He asks: “Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary?” and decides that the answer “is not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more and less.” Surely this can't be an instance of an author visiting his own narrative on his subject?
Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ The Gospels
Verso, £7.99; 160pp