Eagleton amuses Fish
Stanley Fish, who often seems to take delight in being perverse, has an amused, amusing, and sympathetic reflection on Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution.
“When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Fish ends thus: “He [Eagleton] is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.”
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/?ref=opinion
Presumably Fish knows how Eagleton feels, but does Fish refute “Ditchkins,” for other reasons? He doesn’t say.
Apologies to Matt Boudway; I posted without checking. Please add your comments to his post.
Indeed, he doesn’t say. To put Margaret’s question another way: is that last line sympathetic to Eagleton’s anger; or is he making a winking allusion to the energy he spends on refuting the arguments of the “schoolyard Eagletons”?
Eagleton was close to the late Herbert McCabe O.P. McCabe was brilliant in controversy, but slow to publish. I think that Eagleton lacks McCabe’s disciplined way and remarkable finesse with an argument.
Ms. Steinfels –
Thanks for the article. I liked it so much I read another NYT article by him, “Atheism and Evidence”.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/atheism-and-evidence/.
The latter goes a bit more deeply into the question of how faith is warranted, and the article is a good exercise in what I call “theological epistemology”. Faith, he says, is composed of “structures of reasons”. HIs position is a much needed antidote to the Tertulian=Kierkegaardian nonsense (“I believe because it is absurd”) that gives religion a bad name. I wish he’d do a whole book on the subject
Eagleton may now amuse Fish but Fish does not always amuse Eagleton. Here’s Eagleton’s review of Fish’s “The Trouble with Principle” from the year 2000:
“Fish … sees all conviction as necessarily authoritarian, since he imagines that the political institution of tolerance is just a fancy way of not having the courage of one’s convictions. And this is the rather sinister side of his sometimes bracing critique of liberalism.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n05/eagl01_.html