New books reviewed in short

Two new books reviewed in short.

Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press,192pp, £18.99

In his latest polemic, Terry Eagleton attempts to repel his atheist nemeses Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, or “Ditchkins” as he calls them, by reclaiming Jesus as a radical egalitarian. But the literary critic’s attempt to decouple Christian ethics from metaphysics is a doomed enterprise. The belief that Jesus was a great moral teacher, if not the son of God, is a canard that has afflicted modern minds from Thomas Jefferson onwards – moral injunctions such as “Love thine enemy” and “Take no thought for the morrow” are essentially predicated on a belief in imminent apocalypse and the prospect of eternal life.

Eagleton accuses the new atheists of buying their rejection of religion “on the cheap”, but his own critique cuts corners. Nowhere does he seriously consider the secular humanism of Albert Camus, or Joseph Conrad, or Albert Einstein. Yet, as ever, Eagleton contains multitudes. His gloriously rude dismissal of postmodernism and his sardonic jabs against the evangelical preachers of American TV are worth the entry price alone.
George Eaton

Angels and Ages: a Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life
Adam Gopnik
Quercus, 224pp, £16.99

These essays emerged from the slightest of beginnings: Gopnik, a New Yorker contributor, noticed that Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator of slaves, and Charles Darwin, the liberator of secular man, were both born on 12 February 1809. Starting from this spare fact, Gopnik uses his mirroring of the lives of the politician and the botanist to explain how these two great communicators “helped to make our moral modernity”, and to divulge the emotional reality at the heart of their endeavours.

Both men were haunted by death. Darwin’s belief in a divinity wavered in the face of his scientific findings, while Lincoln saw the old order come to a cataclysmic end in the bloodshed of the American Civil War. Both had buried a child. Gopnik sure-footedly explores how, the old certainties gone, each came to believe that “We can’t look up to know how to act. But we can’t look back, either.” Thus they were compelled forward towards a world bounded by science and democracy, dragging the rest of us in their wake.
Joseph Murphy