First Things RSS Feed - Alan Jacobs

The Benedict Option and the Way of Exchange

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:25:00 -0400

Surely there has never been a richer and more deeply faithful model of Christian faith and practice than that offered by the leaders of the Church in Roman Cappadocia in the fourth and fifth centuries. Think of Basil the Great, exhorting the rich of Caesarea to “empty their barns” to feed the poor, building hospitals for the sick, upholding Trinitarian orthodoxy against the Arians, teaching young Christians the right uses of pagan literature. And Basil was only one among many great ones, even in his own neighborhood: His sister Macrina, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, were all titans of faith and charity, and built a thoroughgoing Christian culture the likes of which the Church has rarely if ever seen.

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Russian Brahmin

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

Laurus
by eugene vodolazkin
translated by lisa hayden
oneworld, 384 pages, $24.99

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From the May Issue: “Lena Dunham’s Inviolable Self”

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In an episode from the first season of HBO’s series Girls , Hannah Horvath”played by the show’s creator and chief writer, Lena Dunham”is having sex with her occasional lover Adam when Adam does something odd. The description I am about to give will strike some as exceedingly graphic, but in fact I will exclude the more disturbing details. In a kind of reverie, Adam stops mid-intercourse and begins masturbating while fantasizing about an eleven-year-old heroin addict. In the grip of this fantasy, Adam seems to forget that Hannah is present, though she attempts half-heartedly to join the verbal part of the fun, as though it were some kind of role-playing game. Afterward he seems not to remember any of it.

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Lena Dunham's Inviolable Self

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In an episode from the first season of HBO’s series Girls , Hannah Horvath—played by the show’s creator and chief writer, Lena Dunham—is having sex with her occasional lover Adam when Adam does something odd. The description I am about to give will strike some as exceedingly graphic, but in fact I will exclude the more disturbing details. In a kind of reverie, Adam stops mid-intercourse and begins masturbating while fantasizing about an eleven-year-old heroin addict. In the grip of this fantasy, Adam seems to forget that Hannah is present, though she attempts half-heartedly to join the verbal part of the fun, as though it were some kind of role-playing game. Afterward he seems not to remember any of it.

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Against Stupidity

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I have been thinking a lot about stupidity lately, largely, I suppose, because I spend a good deal of time online. I define stupidity as “remediable but unremedied ignorance,” and few human traits are more evident to a reader of your average website. It is relatively easy to discover that Barack Obama is not a Muslim; that the government of Israel was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks; that the Christian God does not hate fags; that your average everyday evangelical Christian is not simply itching for his chance to take over the government and impose theocratic law upon a nation of vile unbelieving reprobates. Yet people who could remedy their ignorance on these and many other matters consistently fail to do so. This is curious and significant.

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A Prophet Wrongly Honored

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Terry Eagleton made his name in the 1980s by demonstrating that it is possible to write wittily and even elegantly about literary theory. At the time this was something of a revelation. Theory was almost synonymous with what its advocates might have called a “problematizing” style”things are more complicated than they seem, and language must embody that complication”and with what its opponents might have called sheer obfuscation. Eagleton himself, in his earlier writing, had not scaled the heights of opacity but had not been the most stylish of stylists.

In his 1976 book Marxism and Literary Criticism , Eagleton wrote many sentences like this one about Dickens’ Dombey and Son : “The ideological basis of this ambiguity is that the novel is divided between a conventional bourgeois admiration of industrial progress and a petty-bourgeois anxiety about its inevitably disruptive effects.” Clear enough, in the earnest and wooden way characteristic of much Marxist criticism, and with an undertone, if you listen carefully, of tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague.

But then the University of Minnesota Press commissioned Eagleton to write an accessible overview of literary theory”a decision that proved more rewarding than the press could have imagined. Literary Theory: An Introduction became an academic bestseller: It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its first publication in 1983, largely because Terry Eagleton, it turns out, has remarkable gifts of clear exposition, narrative urgency (about ideas!), and mordant wit.

About the belief, proclaimed with zeal by the English scholar F. R. Leavis in his journal Scrutiny , that reading great literature makes you a better person, Eagleton notes: “When the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps some years after the founding of Scrutiny , to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.” And on a later development: “Such deconstruction is a power game, a mirror image of orthodox academic competition. It is just that now, in a religious twist to the old ideology, victory is achieved by kenosis or self-emptying: The winner is the one who has managed to get rid of all his cards and sit with empty hands.”

Clarity and wit, yes; but there’s something else at work here: not just a narrative urgency but also a moral one. Eagleton’s wit has a barb to it, and that barb is for people”whether traditional humanists or radical post-humanists”whose thought takes no real cognizance of injustice. His implicit critique of both the humanists and the devotees of deconstruction is that they are morally frivolous.

Eagleton comes by this moral impulse in two ways: through his Marxism and through his allegiance to a form of Catholic Christianity grounded in the pursuit of social justice. Few of Eagleton’s readers know that his early career focused more on theology than on literary criticism, although the merger of the two was his self-professed goal. In 1964 the twenty-one-year-old Eagleton was a founding editor of Slant , a journal “devoted to a Catholic exploration of . . . radical politics.” In the preface to his first book, The New Left Church ”published in 1966, when he was just twenty-three”he wrote, “The essays in this book are concerned with the church, literature, and politics.”

At that time, Eagleton would later write, “I was a socialist, to be sure, but I was anxious to know how far to the left a Catholic could go without falling off the edge.” After consulting with clerical and theological friends, he got his answer: “It seemed there was no edge after all.” Eagleton means this politically”that is, he learned that you can’t be too far left to be a Christian”but it appears that the Catholicism he came to know in Cambridge didn’t have many other edges, either. This perhaps helps to explain why, a few years later, he crossed the Church off his professional list, leaving himself with literature and politics.

In one of his early essays, “Priesthood and Leninism,” he argues that Catholic priests should identify themselves explicitly with what Lenin called the revolutionary “vanguard.” This was not a self-description many Catholic priests were likely to adopt, but they did not offer an alternative account of their vocation that Eagleton found compelling. Thus, when he ultimately felt he had to choose between Catholicism and life as an “authentic radical,” it was clear which of the two would be pitched over the side.

For the next thirty years or so, Eagleton’s ecclesial and theological past disappeared from view. He rarely mentioned it, even in his 2003 memoir The Gatekeeper, which dealt with his working-class Catholic upbringing in Salford, near Manchester, and his eventual arrival at Cambridge. (Not incidentally, Salford was once the site of a mill owned by Friedrich Engels’ father.) In 2008 Eagleton mentioned his professional origins in a thoroughly self-mocking way: “I must confess that I did begin my intellectual career as an amateur species of theologian, in those heady post“Second Vatican Council days in the 1960s when anyone able to spell the name Schillebeeckx was instantly drafted onto the editorial board of some opaque theological journal based in Nijmegen.” (Or, perhaps, Cambridge.)

Christianity became largely a source of metaphor in his writings, as seen in the deconstruction-as- kenosis line cited earlier, or in this passage from his 2004 book After Theory : “There is a joke about the bogusly ecumenical Catholic who conceded to his Protestant colleague that there were many ways of worshipping God, ‘you in your way, and I in His.’ This is pretty much how many conservative critics regard theorists.” But then something more substantial started creeping back in.

One of the early signs came in 2006, when he reviewed Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion for the London Review of Books and led off with this now-famous sentence: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology 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 Richard Dawkins on theology.” The rise of the New Atheism seems to have brought the old combative Catholic leftist out in Eagleton; he has written often, and largely scornfully, about this movement.

So thorough has been Eagleton’s rehabilitation as a theologian that he has recently delivered the Gifford Lectures, established long ago to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term”in other words, the knowledge of God.” This might mean more, of course, if Gifford lecturers were all theists, which they are not; but Eagleton’s willingness to deliver the lectures suggests his willingness to be known once more as someone participating in an essentially theological conversation.

As far as I have been able to discover, none of this has brought Eagleton to the point of professing religious belief. In Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate , an expansion and revision of the Terry Lectures that he gave at Yale in 2008, Eagleton denies the importance of the belief question: “Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.” This kind of statement is problematically evasive, however: If there is a “promise of transformative love” to which I may remain faithful, who is the promiser? Surely that matters.

Similarly, in a 2007 interview with The Times of London, Eagleton said, “I certainly don’t think it’s odd that Christianity and Marxism should go together in my career, or indeed in anybody’s career.” Both are

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On the Works of Kahlil Gibran

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Alan Jacobs reviewed the great twentieth-century poet’s complete oeuvre, and found it verse than expected. From the November 2007 issue.

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Beyond the Wild Wood

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The Annotated Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Annie Gauger.
W.W. Norton, 480 pages, $39.95

The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition
by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer
Belknap/Harvard, 288 pages, $35

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Pedantic Park

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West
by Anthony Grafton
Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95

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Blessed Are the Green of Heart

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Some years ago I was leading a summer study tour in Oxford, England, during which as a matter of course—we were from Wheaton College, after all—we paid a visit to Magdalen College, the longtime academic home of C.S. Lewis. The dean of divinity, as Magdalen terms its chaplain, was gracious and welcoming and gave us an informative tour that concluded in the chapel with Morning Prayer. It was lovely in every way, but then at the end something unusual happened. The dean, instead of pronouncing the traditional benediction, began to recite the concluding paragraph of the final adventure in Narnia, The Last Battle : “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion. . . .”

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First Things RSS Feed - Alan Jacobs

The Benedict Option and the Way of Exchange

​Russian Brahmin

From the May Issue: “Lena Dunham’s Inviolable Self”

Lena Dunham's Inviolable Self

Against Stupidity

A Prophet Wrongly Honored

On the Works of Kahlil Gibran

Beyond the Wild Wood

Pedantic Park

Blessed Are the Green of Heart

Russian Brahmin