Holy Terror (review)

Existential dilemmas and how, from an existential (or modernized religious) perspective, one can learn to understand them better than terrorists do, are the subjects of this book. The ultimate dilemmas are that sacred and profane are two sides of the same coin and that the sacred is both dangerous and necessary. Thus religious fundamentalists and anarchists have basic agreements ("Both suspect that chaos is our natural condition. It is just that absolutists fear it, whereas anarchists revel in it"), and the Judeo-Christian God is as terrible as Dionysus. To manage these dilemmas, Eagleton introduces a concept from aesthetics—the sublime, which combines fear and pleasure (and is an agnostic's synonym for religious feeling). The term quickly loses its religious, and acquires political, undertones, because Eagleton is mainly interested here in the sacred as a human experience rather than an experience of the divine. He understands as sublime the way in which societies acquire legitimacy by forgetting their origins in revolution, disorder, or outright crime. He associates sublimity also with freedom, which, combining joy and dread, produces a feeling like religious awe. Nihilism is his version of sin, and staring into its abyss accompanies freedom. Eagleton likes to reflect on how human values, rooted in inferred divine qualities, are now thought to be rooted in human psychology, but he trusts the nostrums of psychologists no more than he does the old tales of divine influence on everyday life. It is a humanistic rendering, rather than an alternative, to religion that Eagleton offers; in other words, more a sermon than a political treatise, though his politics are apparent: "It is the lack of organized political resistance to the present system, of the kind to which socialists have traditionally been dedicated, which encourages it to trample upon the weak, thus stimulating the growth of terror." The genre of this book is blurred and curious, but not unprecedented. It resembles early modern tomes, like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, that throw in everything but the kitchen sink to explain why we live in depressing times. Books of this kind are hard to describe (and review). But they work.