The mirror and the lamp
I read something interesting in M H Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp this morning.
Ever since Aristotle, it had been common to illuminate the nature of poetry…by opposing it to History…But to Wordsworth, the appropriate business of poetry is ‘to treat of things not as they are…but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions,’ and as worked upon ‘in the spirit of genuine imagination.’ The most characteristic subject matter of poetry no longer consists of actions that never happened, but of things modified by the passions and imagination of the perceiver; and in place of history, the most eligible contrary to poetry, so conceived, is the unemotional and objective description characteristic of physical science. Wordsworth therefore replaced the inadequate ‘contradistinction of Poetry and Prose’ by ‘the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science,’ and similar formulations became a standard port of departure in romantic discussions of poetry…Such statements are intended only as logical devices for isolating and defining the nature of poetic discourse. The prevalence of philosophical positivism, however, which claimed the method of the natural sciences to be the sole access to truth, tended to convert this logical into a combative opposition. To some writers, it seemed that poetry and science are not only antithetic, but incompatible, and that if science is true, poetry must be false, or at any rate trivial.
This perhaps does a lot to explain what Eagleton is getting at – but he apparently considers it beneath him to put it in Romantic terms – which would be too naive, too sentimental, too vieux jeu for someone as hip as he is, for whom only toasters and Chekhov will do. But he seems to be speaking Wordsworth all the same.
That’s probably what he means about religion – it’s not facts but feeling, just as it is with Wordsworth. That is at least intelligible, though not really a good defense of religion, given the temporal, political, institutional, rhetorical power it has, and given the fact that it does make literal factual truth-claims about the world and what is in it.
But it is at least intelligible. I don’t strictly think it’s ‘true’ that the mountains are full of meaning – but I do think it’s true that humans feel that way – and in fact that they ought to. I think less of people who don’t. I’m chilled by people who are dead to natural beauty, and to beauty of other kinds. I think beauty is an illusion in a sense, or in several senses, but I think it’s a necessary one. I would loathe to be without it. Imagine a brain lesion that made one indifferent to the blossoming fruit trees, the lilacs, the saturated blue of Puget Sound on a bright day, the swallows, the hummingbirds, the long grass, the stars, the sunset. Imagine what life would be if all that and everything like it became just so much Stuff, like a heap of sawdust or a dirty cement wall or a bucket of decomposing slime.
So perhaps Eagleton’s claim is that religion is like the brain without the lesion – it’s the ability to feel a particular way about things. Well – if that’s what he thinks, I can to some extent understand his vehemence. Perhaps he thinks atheism is a kind of machine for draining all of that kind of feeling from the world.
But it isn’t. It just isn’t. If it were…I might be tempted to see if I could force myself to believe too. But it isn’t. Feeling that way is part of the human equipment. Religion is probably one door into it, for a lot of people, but there are others. Music, art, sport, work (drugs) – there are lots of doors. Mind you – it may be that religion does it better for a lot of people than anything else does. Merlijn de Smit once told us that was true for him – growing up in a drab town he could find lavish beauty in the Catholic church that just wasn’t available elsewhere.
Hummingbirds. The world needs more hummingbirds.
I do think that’s at the core of Eagleton’s objections, yes. But he’s not very articulate about voicing it. In part because he’d lose his ironic manly cred if he were.
I think this is at the core of a LOT of people’s objections to atheism, the notion that it’s anti-beauty and anti-imagination and anti-. And if people want to find this type of meaning through religion, more power to them. All I want them to acknowledge is that not everyone needs religion for this (and of course to stop it with their political agenda).
To be fair, I have encountered some atheists do take pleasure in bashing anything that seems ‘sentimental,’ like love of beauty. But Dawkins doesn’t. He’s an art lover. So to the extent that this is at the core of Eagleton’s objections, not only is he imprecise in his expression, but he is also imprecise in his target.
I don’t think beauty is an ‘illusion,’ by the way, because while I don’t think it’s ‘true’ I also don’t think you can say it’s ‘false.’ It’s a matter of value rather than fact, and therefore can’t be either true or false.
Hmm. I disagree, in that I think the claim that this or that has value IS a claim that can be true or false – and I still don’t think beauty is an illusion. So much for the beauty-rejection of atheism.
But that’s another long discussion. In this context, what makes the Eagleton and Fish (et al) even less respectable than they already are – and that’s sayin’ somethin’ – is that NONE of the published atheists they target their pseudo-criticism at espouses anything even remotely like this blinkered, narrow, anti-human view that their “critique” (and I use that term as loosely as they do) does seem to imply. To go to such lengths to tear down a straw man view that no one anywhere in all of space and time has ever actually promoted or defended – and seriously, I can’t think of anyone – indicates a mind-boggling level of intellectual corruption and profound dishonesty.
Well, mind-boggling if I didn’t expect it. Cynicism has a certain anesthetic effect against some varieties of idiocy.
Also, if atheists were so beauty-blind as this (not in my experience) they would not be able to create art or art that was any good – but they did and do. George Eliot did. Phillip Larkin did. George Orwell did. They are among the most profound English writers since free-thinking began, and all of them made due acknowledgement to what was valuable and fine in Christianity.
One of Eagleton’s claims seems to be that that certain kind of beauty, or the capacity to feel it or appreciate it, is not accessible without religion. If this is the claim he is making, that atheists are blind to certain invaluable qualities of life, then he is also showing himself to be blind to the beauty, itself verging on the transcendental, that science can offer (not even to mention that non-believers can be every bit as sensitively attuned to the nuances of the arts as any believer).
It may well be true that for some people such feelings are best experienced through religion, and of course it is their private right to continue to enjoy the benefits that religious feelings may bring them. What atheists are claiming otherwise? If all were content with such a state of affairs, most of these discussions wouldn’t be taking place.
All these people claiming atheists are attacking an idea of religion and god that is not the “real” or “right” one (or the most-widely held, or genuine one) are missing an absolutely vital point. There are enough people with enough power out there who hold the view that religion has rights over and above the private rights of any individual, that no self-respecting atheist can afford not to speak up about it. When the Feagletoshes of this world can truthfully say that that kind of religion isn’t manifesting itself and making people’s lives miserable, then there will be a point to claiming that atheists are unnecessarily loud.
If you are part of a group that you think has good principles and some unrepresentative fringe elements (in your perception, anyway) of that group are physically assaulting non-members of the group, how ought you to be reacting? Should you be dismissing the non-members’ complaints, because their attackers are fringe elements who do not represent what you believe (therefore any physical or other injury suffered by the non-members is not relevant, especially not to you)? Or do you respect the complaints as genuine and make looking at the behaviour of your own fringe elements a priority?
What good does it do an Inquisition victim to be told that the faith of the torturers is simply being expressed in a way that doesn’t represent religion properly (replace Inquisition with the contemporary phenomenon of your choice)?
When in the 1990’s, British Prime Minister John Major famously
said `Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a
little less’, most of my readers will probably agree that he got
it dead wrong. It is very good to see OB striking out to understand
Terry Eagleton a little more; I think all of us atheists need to
work harder at this. When PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins criticize
the arguments of creationists, I feel nothing but gratitude;
however the tenor of some of their more general remarks makes me
wonder if they are taking John Major a little too literally. It
is all too easy, under the cover of the need for honesty, to say
things that are counterproductive, not to mention downright
hurtful. Just what are the limits of honesty anyway? If you are
at funeral of a young Mother whose young child is being comforted
with the idea that Mummy is in heaven, do you rush in and say
this is rubbish? Where is the line drawn? For homework, discuss.
(BTW, I don’t know the answer.)
Here’s an angle on the Eagleton affair: this week, the journal
Nature reminded us that just fifty years ago the `Two cultures’
affair was the source of debate around the world (literally; I
vividly remember at that time debates in New Zealand with literary friends who vigorously defended the attack by F R Leavis on C P Snow).
Indeed, reading Eagleton, I can easily imagine him also defending
Leavis’s attack on Snow. The atheist-science two cultures divide
seems to me to be a close relative of the original two-cultures
divide. (And don’t say that doesn’t exist; I have a feeling that
it exists _within_ those of us who would like to believe that we
exemplify its non-existence.) For example, tell it not in Gath,
publish it not in Ashkelon, but PZM’s recent comments on the
bible as literature struck me as downright philistine. I often
wonder if the creationism problem in the USA may in part be the
lack of real teaching in school of poetry (as distinct from
verse) and other forms of non-literal communication. (Did I
really wish something I said not to be told in Gath?) I put to
public debate the following proposition: that it would be of
profound benefit if all children studied as great poetic
literature those parts of the bible that have great literary
merit. This would be done as part of their study of poetry in
general, in which the distinction between literal and
metaphorical communication would be taken for granted.
The tragedy is, that those who know no better than to take
Genesis literally, not only end up with truly absurd beliefs, but
are also denied an appreciation of one historic episode in the
human struggle to understand existence.
“I often
wonder if the creationism problem in the USA may in part be the
lack of real teaching in school of poetry”
That’s a very interesting suggestion.
“I don’t think beauty is an ‘illusion,’ by the way”
“I still don’t think beauty is an illusion.”
Don’t forget, I said only that “I think beauty is an illusion in a sense, or in several senses” – not that it’s an illusion, period. I don’t think it is an illusion, period – but I do think it is for instance a human feeling, not some sort of Absolute.
I think Ray is right too. ‘More hummingbirds’ was a kind of synecdoche for that – more hummingbirds, more poetry, more sunsets, more beauty.
Maybe we should start a movement – Atheist Aesthetics, or something. Meetings to be held alternately in King’s College Chapel and the Sainte Chapelle.
Your synecdoche, Ophelia, was not lost on me. However, since the memory of Leavis’s Richmond lecture is still fresh in my mind (I was not there, but it was heard round the world), and since, at the time, I thought he was right, and that CP Snow was a towering bore and wrong into the bargain, and, to add insult to injury, that Eagleton had been so incautious as to characterise himself as a Leavisite, a man (that is, Leavis, of course) whose charisma was incandescent and grasp of literature profound, I thought the point needed to be given some historical perspective. And we don’t really need atheistic aesthetics. Anyone in the know knows that God and the gods are literary tropes.
Yeah but we need atheist aesthetics for the sake of people like poor befuddled Eagleton in case he does think that atheism is an aesthetics-drain. We need him to understand that we don’t actually think pushpin is as good as poetry.
Do you think he can understand that?
No.
But at least if we try we will have given him the opportunity.
Thanks for the educational comments, I love the idea of studying parts of the Bible as pure poetry with metaphor and, er, synec…doche as well. The Message is a good translation to use for the Psalms, I think, but to see what people were reading when they wrote the poetry of previous centuries you need to develop a comfort with the old translations too.
Its worth noting that the idea of reduced beauty in the absence of religion is to a degree contradicted by the breeds of religion that DENY the value of beauty and art. Lots of ‘repent and take-up-thy-cross’ religious leaders denigrate/ed art, artists and emotional responses to art and literature. Some explicitly, some by living around an astonishingly large blind spot.
Oh, and despite some cultural equequivalence hype over Islamic art, much of Islam is of this breed. Artists are decorative artists, tradesmen, and such careers are less respectable than, for example, theology.
Or how about blowing up giant Buddha statues? Is that the perfect example of how true appreciation of art is not possible without some kind of religious feeling?
Iconoclasm is what always comes to mind when religion starts claiming aesthetics as its domain. Church walls scoured white, saints decapitated with cannonballs, et al. I’ll always remember the art-history prog I saw, pointing out that England has [almost] no native renaissance art left, because the late C16 reformers destroyed the religious works that were at its heart. An entire vernacular tradition, erased. Separately, Simon Schama’s producers also did a lovely job of electronically ‘repainting’ an English parish church as it would have appeared at the start of the C16 – glorious.
The feeling that something is lacking in aesthetics without God is similar to the feeling that something is lacking in sex without costumes. It’s compelling if that’s your scene.
To ignore a beautiful garden in favour of looking for the fairies at the bottom of it is silly. To tear it up because they cannot be found is evil.
Some of you will no doubt already have seen this, but PZ was moved to get all literary again over what he this time calls “Eagletosh.” Mark my words, he’s going to end up with a whole anthology of these, starting with “The Courtier’s Reply” and this one: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/elephants_wings.php
Yeah, very true about aesthetics v the Puritan tradition, image-hatred, etc. The idea is also at war with the whole hatred of the world schtick. Eagleton seems to be quite blind (or obtuse) about how modern and liberal his version of religion really is.