The Roots of Radicalism

Abstract

Terry Eagleton’s article, The Limits of Liberalism, in the April number of New Blackfriars is as important as it is absorbing. In it he acknowledges that Mrs Rosemary’s Haughton’s book, On Trying to be Human, represents ‘the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition—the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships’ (p. 353), and he seeks to bring it into contact with another ‘important contemporary Christian tradition’, the radical one, which has been articulating itself in a series of articles in New Blackfriars but which was risking becoming closed in on itself. More significantly still it promises to bring the debate between these two traditions, the liberal and the radical, to issue beyond the rhetoric of mere labelling, so enabling and compelling us to choose between them. The importance of the article to all those engaged in the debate and concerned with the exigencies of contemporary Christian commitment is therefore clear.Terry Eagleton’s contention is that Mrs Haughton’s affirmation and exploration of ‘the meaning of being human for a Christian’ is gravely deficient in that it systematically excludes ‘wider (and arguably deeper) connections of this immediate focus’ (p. 353). He devotes the bulk of his article to criticizing Mrs Haughton for attributing a distorted primacy to the spirit, the inward, the personal, with a consequential devaluation of the flesh, the external, the social and the political, and this on account of a misconception of the relationship between the two.