Blogtrotter

God-shaped Hole?

Observers as diverse as Louise Fuller in her "The Decline of Irish Catholicism," Mary Kenny's "Goodbye to Catholic Ireland," John Moriarty in his autobiographical mythopoeic "Nostos," Ken Bruen in his "Galway noir" Jack Taylor series--the latest of which at least in the US where we lag one book behind the Brits is "The Priest," Desmond Fennell's series of small-press reflections on "Ameropean" hegemony and consumer capitalism, Roy Johnston's "Century of Endeavour," or Tim Robinson in his new collection of essays on his adopted West Connemara, part one "Listening to the Wind" all wonder about the effects on their Ireland of the cause of the collapse of traditional (at least for the past 150 post-Famine years) Catholicism. Not even all of the authors were raised Catholic. I don't know about Bruen-- although as native of the City of Tribes, odds are in the mackerel snapper's favor. Dr. Johnston has returned in his later career to embrace Quaker principles along with his Red-Green republican- nonsectarian- marxian ideals; Robinson bitterly inveighs against the comforts of faith in a realm he determines totally oblivious to our primitive pleas to the supernatural.

But these educated historians, scholars, literary figures, and/or seekers all agree. The future of an Ireland 10% foreign-born and rising (where in one of my ancestral dioceses, Elphin, finds its dwindling cadre of priests at the average age of 70) is not one where the Church will flourish at least in any sense that we who were raised in the last spasms of post-conciliar counter-reaction in the 60s and 70s even can recognize, let alone our elders. This situation appears to worry few Irish at least on the outside, but within their EU-enamored open-bordered souls, I wonder.

David Williams in a book that's made a splash in Ireland (not published here, but I must get a copy), calls this new generation of Irish raised amidst comparative luxury both morally and materially "The Pope's Children." That is, those whom as captivated post-punks and New Romantics may have cheered John Paul II in his visit twenty-five years ago, but who blithely disregarded the pontiff's appeal that Ireland remain-- as with Poland perhaps-- the bastion of piety that the rest of Europe had abandoned. He applies a pop sociology with catchy names for the new demographic categories and marketing niches in a suburbanizing, yuppified, and affluent Irish society that rejected the scandal-ridden hierarchy, the hypocritical clergy, and the wealthy infrastructure that has now being dismantled and sold off as once Church of England/ Ireland/ Scotland/ Wales vicarages were, turned into designer lofts or artists studios or ashrams over the past century.

These are just a few of the diverse Irish-themed studies regarding what we Pope's children and their parents, or siblings, might be contemplating between trips to the mall. These admittedly are only a few among what I have read over the past couple seasons. Some of them I reviewed, not only for Amazon but for The Blanket. Here's my in-depth Fuller & Kenny review:

http://www.phoblacht.net/SOM0207065g.htm

A very detailed Johnston review:

http://www.phoblacht.net/SOM020107.html

A bit shorter Moriarty review can be found under Amazon US for his book "Nostos"

A mercifully brief Bruen review: http://lark.phoblacht.net/SOM060507.html

Many Irish as their counterparts throughout the West of course celebrate the end of clerisy. Priestcraft dismantled, the age of Enlightenment looms. Yet, is the trade fair? Fennell-- an early participant in the progressive reforms of 1950s pre-Vatican II for instance, finds little to cheer about in the ordum novarum saeculam. I often wonder, in my own pensive self-scrutiny and edgy spiritual life as well as the mentality writ large upon many of my fellow if former communicants, what will replace for Irish Catholicism its own insular shaped "god-shaped hole" that Sartre memorably, bastard as he was, envisioned as our modern predicament.

I'd be curious how an Irish thinker, say around my age so able to remember the past hold of the Church as well as its loss of traction, would weigh in on these changes. Kenny's study I found surprisingly balanced, but she gives the perspective of one of the generation roughly a half-step ahead of mine, by a quarter-century at least in age. Malachi O'Doherty, a Belfast social commentator, has recently penned "I Was a Teenage Catholic" and I reckon he's closer to my own timing-- again, his memoir's out from Mercier Press in Ireland but I have not yet been able to track down here. The Irish American memoirist Rosemary Mahoney, born the same year as me, in her "The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground" about five years ago anticipated in the real world my own mental perigrinations. It had a chapter on Lough Derg, and that drew me into the whole travelogue as she seeks the holy across the world. Not that she falls for it all. She records honestly her mixed emotions. It's one of the few books that I did not review for Amazon as I couldn't think of anything worthwhile to add. Mahoney's a challenging and rather catty witness to her self's lassitude and her strivings, and I like her. But, a lot of readers tend to be put off by her rather Irish acerbity and sharp tongue...not me.

A distinguished observer over on these shores, about the same age as Mary Kenny, today gives his thoughts on the thoughts of one of his contemporaries, more or less. Jack Miles, himself a former Jesuit, wrote "God: A History" a decade ago. Today, he reviews Christopher Hitchens' new book on his atheism. Miles' take fits in well with my own recent reactions to Daniel Dennett, Francis Collins, Sam Harris, and similar appeals to faith-based or reason-dependent arguments upon which we should organize our interpretations of the Big Questions.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-miles29apr29,1,2740001.story?coll=la-books-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW

'god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' by Christopher Hitchens

An atheistic rant that is, well, just preaching to the choir.

By Jack Miles
Jack Miles is distinguished professor of English and religious studies at UC Irvine. He is the general editor of the forthcoming "The Norton Anthology of World Religions."

April 29, 2007

FIGHTING the good fight for atheism isn't as easy as it looks. The fighter must, on the one hand, proclaim that religion is fading fast and for good reason yet, on the other, rouse fellow or prospective atheists to be on guard against it. If his audience takes the warning seriously, it may wonder whether there is not something to religion after all; if it takes the death notice seriously, it may wonder why the author is bothering to write.

The atheist alternative has been around from the beginning, after all. How dispiriting it must be for the neo-atheist pamphleteer to pick up "The Cambridge Companion to Atheism" and read even Chapter 1, "Atheism in Antiquity." To be sure, several recent works of anti-religious polemic have had heartening success in the marketplace, but even reliable allies are beginning to show signs of market fatigue. Thus, James Wood, a professed atheist reviewing for the New Yorker, writes: "I have an almost infinite capacity for the consumption of atheist texts, but there is a limit to … the number of times one can be told that the Bible is a shaky text, and that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things."

Such is the challenge facing Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, self-described as "a tentative and amateur foreign correspondent," leading "a rather tranquil and orderly life: writing books and essays, teaching my students to love English literature," but a man nonetheless who "[has] been writing this book all my life." What his lifelong effort has consisted of, to judge from the now-published result, is the assembly of an anthology of outrageous instances of misconduct under religious auspices. What Hitchens offers, beyond the reporting of these outrages, is the emotional power of his denunciation of them. Here is an example that I find both typical and thrilling:

"By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit suicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means — for all I care — let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin."

As the orator mounts through that withering, seven-fold repetition of "By all means," imagine excitement building in the audience and erupting in a roar of applause at his righteous climax: "But the conscription of the unprotected child…. " The strength of this book is the undeniable eloquence of its indignation — in Alexander Pope's famous phrase, "What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd." Its weakness is that the thinking in it has indeed oft been thought. Rhetorically, Hitchens, a repentant and affectingly rueful Marxist, could rally a band of timid schoolboys to storm the Winter Palace. But did the paragraph just quoted tell you anything you did not already know or change your mind about a single thing you did know?

Despite the fact that "religion poisons everything," to quote Hitchens' subtitle and the refrain in his early chapters, he regards it as "ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other." Given that this despair is his premise, it should come as no surprise that his closing call to action — a single paragraph on his final page — is rather half-hearted and slapdash. He calls for a "new Enlightenment" with a platform of just three planks: 1) literary study, attending to both aesthetics and ethics, that "can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected" (this reads rather oddly: Does he mean to depose the enthroned texts or, in the legal sense, depose previously muzzled critics?); 2) unfettered scientific inquiry; and 3) "most importantly," the divorce of our sexual lives from fear, disease and tyranny. He cautions: "We have first to transcend our prehistory and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection." But if the effects of that prehistory are as "ineradicable" as he says they are, what hope have we?

Hitchens' book lacks any definition of religion more intellectually ambitious than the just-cited "fear of death, and of the dark," etc. Fellow atheists Daniel Dennett, David Sloan Wilson, Marc Hauser and others — touched on glancingly or not at all in this book — have found the very religious durability that so frustrates Hitchens a fascinating and legitimate challenge for evolutionary psychology. And contemporary religious thought has followed this research with more interest and sympathy than one would guess from his assertion that "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago." And yet, "god is not Great" must be judged a success on its own terms, for its terms are not those of exploration and persuasion but of exposé and taunt. Hitchens does not speak to the theistic majority of the world but about that majority to the atheistic minority, and in terms that it will relish.

For him, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a "nebulous humanist." Mahatma Gandhi was "an obscurantist" who would "impose his ego on the process [of Indian independence] and both retard and distort it." The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a plagiarist, an orgiast down to his last hours on this Earth, and "in no real as opposed to nominal sense … a Christian." The Dalai Lama is "a medieval princeling" who, whatever his charm and presence, is the continuation of "a parasitic monastic elite" and who "tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her."

Most contemporary controversialists aim to turn their worthier foes into friends, taking to heart another of Pope's astute criticism couplets: "Cursed be the verse how well soe'er it flow / That tends to make one worthy man my foe." Hitchens is different, at least here. He finds the worthy man of religion so nearly a contradiction in terms that persuasion is pointless. One cannot win such people over, he implies, one can only smash them, rhetorically, and then only to delight those for whom they are already smashed. In that sense, but only in that sense, "god is not Great" must be judged a smashing success.