Two views on faith
Symon Hill is enthralled by two religious heavyweights
The case for God: what religion really means by Karen Armstrong. The Bodley Head. ISBN: 978 1 847 92034 8. £20. Reason, Faith and Revolution: reflections on the God debate by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press. ISBN: 978 030 015179 4. £18.99. As sparks continue to fly between allies and opponents of Richard Dawkins, both sides have taken a hammering in two powerful and exciting new books. Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton suggest that both the ‘New Atheists’ and modern mainstream Christianity are neglecting deeper, more challenging and more socially relevant understandings of religion.
Despite her title, Karen Armstrong has little interest in persuading anyone of God’s existence, but insists that the concept of God is misunderstood in today’s society. She argues that pre-modern cultures and faiths understood that God was too complex to be spoken about easily or literally. In a fascinating analysis, she suggests that when Christians tried to make their religion fit with narrow scientific explanations in early modern times, they reduced its complexity and opened the way for it to look ridiculous once their understanding of science were found to be mistaken.
Terry Eagleton explores similar themes, although his writing style could hardly be more different. Whereas Armstrong is chronological and systematic, Eagleton runs back and forth between poverty, postmodernity, Karl Marx, Bin Laden and the Second Vatican Council. It is evidence of his rare skill that he can carry this off without seeming superficial. Witty analogies fly off the page as he lays into both New Atheists and right-wing Christians. Socialist passion and good theology are rarely united so well.
These books explore deep issues that can at times make them hard to read. However, they do a great job of making difficult ideas explicable, even if this sometimes requires hard concentration. Karen Armstrong illuminates apophatic theology – which emphasises what we can’t say about God rather than what we can – better than anyone else I’ve come across. Terry Eagleton’s mastery of language allows for pithy expressions that cut to the heart of the issues he addresses.
Terry Eagleton makes clear his disdain for those ‘who sneer at religion’ as ‘evidence of the thick-headedness of the masses’. Karen Armstrong is firm in her conviction that authentic religion leads to compassion. Unfortunately, in several of the time periods she covers, she says little about how far the fashionable views of prominent thinkers were shared by people generally. More from this angle would have further strengthened a brilliant book.
Karen Armstrong’s ‘model of authentic religious discourse’ is the Brahmodya, an ancient Indian practice whose participants reduced themselves to silence by their inability to define the transcendent. Terry Eagleton’s most exciting chapter involves his discussion of Jesus, who shows that the ‘stark signifier of the human condition’ is ‘the tortured body of a political criminal’. For both these writers, religion allows us to deal authentically with suffering – not by shallow reassurance but by staring it in the face as we go into the depths to discover the deeper dimensions to existence.
This gripping and gritty understanding is an assault on the shallow and apolitical attitudes that characterise New Atheism and much of today’s Christianity. This is especially relevant when much debate about the existence of ‘God’ – not least in Quaker circles – is more about the acceptance or rejection of a shallow idol than a disturbing, lifegiving and indescribable transcendence.
Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton make clear that faith is not about intellectual assent to factual propositions. For Karen Armstrong, faith makes sense only with commitment and discipline. For Terry Eagleton, faith involves love, trust and hope for a different world while facing head-on the terrors of this one. Religion is not meant to be easy.
These books can be ordered post-free from the Friend. See the print or PDF versions of this edition for details.
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