The Gatekeeper - Terry Eagleton

One of my guilty pleasures is the reading of memoirs, especially those of theologians or philosophers. Occasionally some of them take themselves so seriously that they cannot offer any sense of humanity or tension in their lives. Either they never made a mistake and therefore have nothing "interesting" or human to share, or, they have such a carefully guarded "mystique" or reputation to maintain that they take care to brush out anything that would resemble a character flaw or error in judgment. Others have no such qualms and unabashedly highlight their shortcomings. Terry Eagleton, the enfant terrible of English letters and renowned literary critic, is  a little of both. He gives and he keeps in equal measure. His relatively short memoir, The Gatekeeper, is a witty and caustic view of his early years through to his student days at Cambridge and early tenure at Oxford. Born in the northwest of England to poor Irish parents and the only surviving child of three, he writes bitingly of his childhood years in a chapter called "Losers." Raised a Catholic and for a time an altar server in the local Carmelite convent chapel, he was required to be in attendance when the young novice now finally took the veil and disappeared into the convent for good; thus "the gatekeeper" of the title.

Eagleton's book is a fascinating interplay between his religious upbringing, his political awakening and his intellectual development. What is clear is that each facet of his life informed the other and that Eagleton has lost all reverence for any firmly held belief or position. What comes through, however, is a certain wistfulness which may be interpreted as a wish for more or even a wish for "truth." Wanting to admire his father, he finds it nearly impossible. "What I remember most of my father is silence. He was silent because he was agonizingly inarticulate, and deeply ashamed of it. One failure of speech thus overlaid another. He was cut off from communication, lacking language to excess. Perhaps I have compensated enough for that in my time. I am still not sure whether his silence was a rock or an abyss, strength or indifference. He was painfully shy and unsociable, yet also practical, rational, reliable and infinitely patient. ...He did not think much of artistic types like me. (p. 121) Eagleton's own experience in the role of the public intellectual borders on pure farce. "To be a public lecturer is to occupy a symbolic role rather than a real-life one, and almost nothing you can do can shake this identification. You could ostentatiously don a false red nose and start to pull on a pair of sponge-rubber trousers while being talked at by some mildly obsessive type after a lecture, but it would almost certainly be blocked out. And there are also the genuinely disturbed, who describe to you the messages they are receiving on the radio which the CIA have installed somewhere between their liver and lower intestine." Eagleton's account of his Cambridge tutor is hilarious although sad at the same time as it describes a man incapable of empathy or developing healthy relationships. Unfortunately, the caricature is often far too close to the truth in real life.

But it is Eagleton's love/hate relationship with religion that is fascinating because, no matter how caustic and cynical he becomes in his frequent and varied diatribes, he cannot let his faith go. Both extremist in its demands and mundane in its practice, Christianity both succeeded and failed gloriously in the attempt to convince the young Eagleton. As he says early on in the book, "In the end, I refused co-optation, but only just." Eagleton's body of work has ranked him among the most influential of the literary critics of the English-speaking world. His willingness to take on popular positions and personalities equally larger-than-life have led him to speak and write against the so-called exponents of "The New Atheism", Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, because as he would argue, they show an appalling ignorance of religion. St. Terry to the rescue? No, but he is fun and outrageous and just sometimes you feel that he wishes that he could overcome that "little" hurdle called belief.

The Gatekeeper is a fascinating read.  I look forward to the next stage of Eagleton's journey.             





                                  

Orthodoxy, Chesterton, and Hyperbole

I've just finished rereading Gilbert Keith Chesterton's justly famous Orthodoxy in time for our book club. Again, what a wonderful experience! Chesterton's enthusiasms and "extraordinary" writing style make this little exercise in apologetics an experience one can't forget. The image I get from the book is the good knight Sir Gilbert, mounted on his steed, looking for dragons to slay, and when he thinks he's found one, it's a hoop and a holler, a big belly laugh and on to the battle. Chesterton loves the thrust and parry of debate and it shows by the grandiose language and nothing left half-said approach that he uses.

For the most part I am sympathetic to his larger agenda which is to speak for a world which is congruent with the claims of Christian doctrine. This world is created, flawed, in need of salvation and offers clues to the reality of transcendence, clues which in turn give witness to God. The "modern" alternatives such as evolution, scientific rationalism, progress, and pragmatism, are dead ends, unable to deliver what they claim: individual free will, rational thought, salvation, and freedom. For Chesterton, it is only the Christianity which delivers all that humanity desires and needs and more besides. (Note the idea of "joy" which echoed throughout C.S. Lewis' account of his own turn to Christian faith in Surprised by Joy.

And yet there the places where I take great exception to Chesterton's tone. For example, Chesterton's unbridled appreciation of Christendom and his enthusiasm for Empire wear a little thin in the light of subsequent historical analysis. He is patronizing, arrogant, somewhat racist (in that imperial British superior way), and sometimes cruel, especially to proponents of alternative points of view. But he is always cheerful! When I read sublime passages like the one which concludes the book, I am ready to forgive (almost) all.

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on his open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet he concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that he hid from all men when he went up the mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometime fancied that it was His mirth."
                                                                                                     G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy