Reason, Faith, and Revolution

Any Good Books

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton (2009, Yale University Press)

I’m late to the party--Terry Eagleton delivered the lectures on which Reason, Faith, and Revolution is based in 2008, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were making headlines with the so-called God Debate. Most prominently among a handful of high-powered scientists and social critics, they had published books (The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively) proclaiming the imminent triumph of Reason and Science over Religion, which they characterized as necessarily superstitious and evil, something of which no good could possibly come.
Eagleton is not a believer himself, but he knows enough about what the Gospels say to vigorously contest that assessment. Mixed as the history of religious belief may be, it surely includes some good, and it’s only fair to acknowledge it. “Insofar as the faith I have described is neither stupid nor vicious, then I believe it is worth putting in a word for it against the enormous condescension of those like Ditchkins, who in a fine equipoise of arrogance and ignorance assert that all religious belief is repulsive. That a great deal of it is indeed repulsive, not to speak of nonsensical, is not a bone of contention between us.” (Conflating Dawkins and Hitchins as ‘Ditchkins’ is a rhetorical convenience. Eagleton does make distinctions, such as considering Hitchins the better writer, but heinously wrong in his support of the Iraq war.)
Eagleton easily makes his case that the militant atheists are arguing the wrong questions: “Science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of things, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are. This is one reason for the grotesque misunderstandings that arise between them.” Orthodox faith would actually agree with Ditchkins that God is not an entity to be looked for in the world, and hence the question ‘Does God exist?’ is the wrong question; but Ditchkins has not looked into the matter seriously enough to see what’s wrong with it.
In the real world, some people of faith are mindlessly dogmatic and others are not, and this is true whether what they are faithful to is God, science, or reason itself. The zealots, of whatever stripe, tend to resemble each other: “Hitchens dislikes people who ‘know they are right’ but most of the time he sounds very much like one of them himself.”
Eagleton himself is commendably willing to entertain exceptions to his arguments, and he gives due credit to dogma, in its place. “The liberal principles of freedom and tolerance are dogmas, and are none the worse for that. It is simply a liberal paradox that there must be something close-minded about open-mindedness and something inflexible about tolerance.” Whatever positions we hold, whatever dogmas we embrace, it behooves us to remember that we can’t prove them all: there’s no logical reason to suppose that logical reasoning can make sense of everything in the world. Nor is there any reason to suppose, with Ditchkins, that human beings are growing in moral stature faster than we’re developing the means to commit mayhem.
Eagleton’s own quarrel with Christianity is, all in spite of himself, a more passionate matter. In his reading, the gospel story is about a world turned upside down, where justice prevails and the hungry are fed. God’s presence on earth is presented as “homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, ...and a scourge of the rich and powerful.” A religious culture that pays obsessive attention to sexual purity and personal salvation has, in his view, gone sadly off the rails.
The notion of Christianity as the putative standard of the capitalist Free World is, if anything, even more of a travesty. “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive.” In fact, says Eagleton, “Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic.” But we don’t like to admit it. We don’t want to live as though the bottom line were the last word; dogmatic religiosity is one natural reaction.
But we are living in a time when our hope lies in facing our situation authentically. It’s more than possible that we will not be able to solve our problems by more aggressiveness on the one hand, or more cogitation on the other. “In the end, only love (of which faith is a particular form) can achieve the well-nigh impossible goal of seeing a situation as it really is, shorn of both the brittle enchantments of romance and the disheveled fantasies of desire.”
This book is a feast; there is far more richness its 170 pages than I have room to tell you about. The author of some forty books, Eagleton is as erudite and witty as he is prolific. If I’m ever tempted to try to read about literary theory, or Marxism, I’ll be sure to start with him; he brings valuable insights to the subjects I already like.




Email January 2012

Breaking up with God

Any Good Books, December 2011

Breaking up with God: A Love Story
Sarah Sentilles (HarperCollins, 2011)

In her memoir Breaking up with God, Sarah Sentilles uses the extended metaphor of a love affair. She has some reservations, though: “Figuring it as a romance seems simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it makes me cringe. Ever worse, calling it a breakup means I have to come out: I have to admit to myself and to the rest of the world the kind of God I loved–namely, a man.” Yes, a man: loving, tender, and wise, but also jealous and moody, and sometimes a little scary.

Of course, he’s an old family friend, someone she’s known all her life. Sentilles was raised in Catholic schools and churches, though her mother brought an Episcopalian sensibility to her parenting. “Her ongoing critical commentary gave me an early theological education: People tell a lot of stories about God, but only some of them are true.” The prevailing story in the church where she was confirmed included a God who took attendance in church, but when Sentilles got to Yale, she was ready to leave that behind. She majored in literature, with a side helping of philosophy.

After college, she moved to southern California, working in Compton with Teach for America. She discovered a much warmer and more welcoming God at All Saints, Pasadena, where she became so enraptured that she decided to become a priest. “By the time I arrived at All Saints, I had lived most of my life trying to be the person I thought other people wanted me to be because I believed that was the only way I would ever be loved. ... All Saints offered me a way out of this. God loves you God loves you God loves you, I heard every single Sunday. The priests promised God loved me exactly as I was, with all my flaws and failings and shortcomings.” But, at twenty-three, Sentilles was far from free of the urge to be what others wanted her to be, and becoming a priest was a very good way to feel special.

The master of divinity program at Harvard can lead to the Episcopal priesthood, but the way is hardly straight. It leads through “Martin Luther’s belief that to fulfill the law you had to love the law, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s ‘ditch,’ Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Paul Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern,’ and Gordon Kaufman’s ‘serendipitous creativity.’” In the course of all this theologizing, Sentilles found that “a canyon began to open between the God I was in love with and the God I was studying.”
If God is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, Gordon Kaufman suggests, then everything we say about him is a construction of the human imagination. This is both a profoundly liberating idea and a dangerously disorienting one, which deepened the chasm between Sentilles’s head and her heart. If God is a fundamentally unknowable mystery, then what was the God who loves her so much but her own wish fulfilled?

The conceivable attributes and constructions of God multiplied on every hand. Feminist theology, liberation theology, and the Nag Hammadi texts all opened up worlds of conjecture and contention, and Sentilles was intoxicated by the possibilities. “I wanted to share what I had learned with a community–to show the kind of expansive thinking about God that was possible, to illustrate how God language could change the world, to work together to do good.”

Meanwhile, ominously (from the standpoint of the priesthood project) she had never found a church to worship with on Sundays. No church she visited held a candle to her beloved All Saints, and because she was not yet in the ordination process, she had nobody in a counseling role to force the issue. So it was something of a shock when Sentilles, after earning her degree, went to work in a suburban Boston church. “Theology, it seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right, counting the number of people in the pews, ... –that was church work.”

The congregation also disappointed her: “They came to figure out how to live a life with meaning, how to do go work in the world, how to give back, how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole enterprise–background noise.”

She sounds so young, doesn’t she? Those don’t sound like such terrible reasons for going to church, particularly since her own craving for connection had drawn her in at All Saints. Though she had a discernment committee at last, through the church she was working in, the fracture between what she had learned about God and what the church was prepared to entertain had widened beyond healing.
Her sense of fracture and confusion led her to be madly honest with the discernment committee, in the secret hope that they would turn down her application and let her off the hook, which is how it turned out. “I broke up with God that night. I broke up with the priesthood. I broke up with the river and the sky opening and the dove calling me beloved. I broke up with chosenness and salvation and belonging. And I imagined God held me while I cried.”

Her anguish notwithstanding, I see it as good news that Sentilles was not permitted to become a priest. And it’s not terribly surprising that her faith was also a casualty, though I can’t call that good news; it’s just the way of things, a natural consequence of misguided expectations and hopes. Her metaphor is apt: she was like a bride who was so taken with the role of bride that she never spared any thought for what being a wife would be like. Standing up at the bridal shower and calling the whole thing off was the hardest thing to do, except for going through with it. It was a healthy crisis.
Sentilles landed on her feet, partly by becoming attached to a flesh-and-blood man, and learning how not to give away all her power to him. She finished a doctorate in theology at Harvard, and then became a teacher and a (very good) writer. She moved on to engage with the world in a new way; I wonder if God is still waiting for her.


Email column, December 2012

The Belief Instinct

The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
Jesse Bering (2011, W.W. Norton)

There was no way I could resist a book called The Belief Instinct, even on discovering that it was intended to debunk the fallacies about God that make us religious. Jesse Bering’s stance is psychological and evolutionary, rather than philosophical, on the one hand, or neurobiological, on the other, and this is all to the good. I have other sources for MRI images of the parts of the brain that seem related to transcendent experience; for Bering’s purposes, I’m content with the brain as a wet Black Box.
I am a big fan of evolutionary stories, and the ingenious ways modern psychologists try to test them, whether by comparing humans with apes and monkeys, or by practicing elaborate deceptions on small children. As it turns out, evolution has provided us with very robust tools for dealing with the social world. We find it easier than not to imagine that other people reason the same way we do, or that events have causes. If we feel that we are being watched, or that a deceased loved one might be alive but out of town for a long stretch, it’s only natural. It’s but a small step to extending such imaginings to the supernatural realm, with or without a specifically religious apparatus in place.
After demonstrating all this, Bering continues, as a rationalist atheist, to rue it. He says, “We can squint our mind’s eye so that the glare of our subjective biases is reduced, but in general we’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions preventing us from sustained moments of clarity.” Many people won’t even go that far, because such moments of clarity are so much less satisfying than the comfort of the illusion.
In short, viewing these things as illusions dispels them only in very tough-minded people, (or people with Asperger’s syndrome, which may tell us something in itself.) Bering’s conclusion is that we are the first generation with the psychological insight to see the Man behind the Curtain of our evolutionary heritage, but he doubts we’ll do it, and he admits that it’s an open philosophical question whether we’d be better off for it. (His passing suggestion that today’s social-tracking technology, all those traffic-cams and closed-circuit video systems, could replace our natural sense of an all-seeing, all-judging Almighty, strikes me as distinctly dystopian.)
In the end, I was hoping for more philosophy than this book has room for. Yes, our sense of the presence of God may be an illusion, but what then? Bering’s work stops short of grappling with the experiential reasons people might have for finding his purely logical reflections somewhat beside the point.
The short answer, and one which Bering slightly too humorless to come up with, is the joke at the end of Woody Allen’s "Annie Hall", about the guy who goes to a psychiatrist.and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.’


E-mail edition, November 2011

The Merry Recluse

The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays
Caroline Knapp (Counterpoint, 2004)

Gail Caldwell’s book about her friend Caroline Knapp, which I reviewed last month, has led me The Merry Recluse, a collection of Knapp’s columns and articles put together by her friends after her untimely death in 2002. I was curious to meet Knapp in her own words. Not surprisingly, I found her much as Caldwell describes her: bright, and a great writer; fragile, and a loner; self-absorbed, and deeply wise about the world.

Still, this doesn’t sound promising, does it? Like trying to read Anna Quindlen’s or Ellen Goodman’s old books; hasn’t the world moved on? Perhaps. But on the public side, her concerns are as real as ever. There’s a sexual harassment piece from the second anniversary of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing, and an early reaction to 9/11: “The people I talk to feel an odd, almost adolescent yearning for leadership, craving and mistrusting it in the same breath. Some of us feel compelled to reach out–give blood, light candles, sign petitions, anything!–and simultaneously compelled to retreat, edges of paranoia leaking in, talk of terrorists in the backyard.”

And on the private side, there are fascinating paradoxes, like the public nature of her privacy itself. Of her own sexual harassment experiences as a recent college graduate: “I went out to lunch with him and got drunk with him and let him kiss and paw me. It’s disgusting to me in retrospect, and shameful, but I honestly didn’t know what else to do.” It takes considerable charm to complain about feeling unsophisticated without sounding phony; it takes plenty of courage to confess to fear.

Knapp’s resolute honesty is what saves all this from preciousness, for me. She quit drinking in February of 1994, in her early thirties, so she had, she says, a lot of growing up to do. There’s a lifetime of emotional work in the seven years covered by this collection: her parents’ death, her history of anorexia, her affair with alcohol, and her acceptance of her solitary state as a way of life, which grew to include friends, a boyfriend, and a dog.

Fortunately, Knapp is also funny, mining the rich lode of her own insecurities: “Last week, I had an I-suddenly-sense-my-lips-are-too-thin day. I also had a since-when-have-my-pores-been-so-cavernous? day, but not at exactly the same time as the bad-lip day. Whew! Can you imagine what that would have been like? It would have turned into an I-have-to-stay-home-and-hide-under-the-bed day, no question.”

I’m struck by how lucky it is that Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp became friends when they did. Here’s Knapp, shortly after they began taking their dogs for walks together: “I’ve tended to be the sort of person who believes that walking doesn’t really ‘count’ as a form of exercise, that you’re not really working out unless you hurt. But it occurs to me now, perhaps for the first time, that the heart is a muscle in many respects, and needs attending to beyond the gym.” This is hard-won wisdom, and I’m grateful for it.

Email, October 2011

Let’s Take the Long Way Home

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: a memoir of friendship.
Gail Caldwell (2010, Random House)

The grief memoir can be a tricky matter, as Gail Caldwell acknowledges. On the one hand, she says, “Like most memories tinged with the final chapter, mine carry a physical weight of sadness.” At the same time, “...writing about a friendship that flourished within the realm of connection and routine has all the components of trying to capture air.” I think that’s all true, and that she has made a masterful job of it.
Caldwell met Caroline Knapp when she was in her early forties, and Knapp in her early thirties. Both were single, and both had active writing careers: Caldwell was a book reviewer for the Boston Globe, and Knapp was a columnist for the Boston Phoenix who had recently published a memoir about her struggles with alcoholism and anorexia. Caldwell, who had forsaken the glow of the bourbon bottle a dozen years earlier, felt she’d met a kindred spirit. “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.”
They were commended to each other by a woman who was helping them each with training a new dog. This meant hours of walking and talking around the Fresh Pond reservoir in Cambridge, and in wooded sanctuaries and on beaches all over eastern Massachusetts. As their friendship deepened, they vacationed together, and took up one another’s recreations: Knapp introduced Caldwell to rowing, and Caldwell taught Knapp to swim.
Let’s Take the Long Way Home encompasses several familiar kinds of memoir. Caldwell recapitulates her own history of drinking, which had been her shield against loneliness and boredom, certain though these were to be the long-term result of her continuing to drink. “I used to think this was an awful story–shameful and dramatic and sad. I don’t think that anymore. Now I just think it’s human, which is why I decided to tell it.”
It’s a wonderful dog story, too. Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, and Knapp’s shepherd mix, Lucille, make demands for life’s real necessities that are a salutary check on their people’s tendency to hide out alone. Caldwell has no choice but to get outdoors in all weather, with Knapp and with other neighbors she might otherwise never get to talk to. She gets hooked on dog training, “reveling in the clarity of communication that training an independent sled dog entailed. Bullying revealed itself immediately for what it was; equally useless were mixed signals, irony, or indecision. Dogs craved and responded to straightforward instruction, recognition, and praise, all of it in the direct-arrow language of the heart.”
Rich as they are, these matters are just the context for the grief memoir at the heart of the book. In 2002 Caroline Knapp was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. She was forty-two. Caldwell captures the bad news:“ ...the obscene euphemism that telegraphs the end: ‘We can make her more comfortable.’“ She shows us the hospital room with a view of the river, which after a certain time Knapp doesn’t want to see; and the village that forms: “We were all circling her like heartbroken hens, while Caroline was simply trying to swallow a bagel or get through a phone call.” And she gets the way that life goes on–the dogs still have to be walked and fed. Knapp had reunited with a faithful old boyfriend, and they were married during an intermission in the cancer treatment.
Stage four, of course, is as bad as it gets, and within two months Knapp was gone. Caldwell writes, “The ravages of early grief are such a shock: wild, erratic, disconsolate. If only I could get to sorrow, I thought, I could do sorrow.” Some days she could hold it together in a way that was itself surprising; other days she was blindsided by some fresh loss, finding a habitation in the empty place that was left. “I lived in that house of absence, took solace in it, until sorrow became a stand-in for what was gone.”
In the years since then, Clementine has passed on, too, and so Caldwell has endured another season of pain, of talking to the departed to feel the bond alive. “I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.” I’d say that Caldwell has been made wiser, as well, to write so movingly without being sentimental. The pain of loss is the price of love, she reminds us, and it’s a price well worth paying.


Email edition, 9/1/11