Another hero jester from the far left

On previous occasions you have referred to several of the left-wing thinkers whom you thought deserved more attention. Since you were such a close friend of Herbert McCabe at Oxford, it is hardly possible that you are unacquainted with Terry Eagleton. He was the literary editor of Blackfriars when McCabe was its editor. Eagleton is generally regarded as one of the leading Marxists surviving today. How relevant do you think are the most recent of Eagleton's more than 40 books?

My first glimpses of Eagleton were at the Lamb and Flag pub, near St John's, almost right in front of Blackfriars. At that time, shortly after Vatican Council II, he was perhaps the wittiest theorist of what he called "the New Left Church" (the title of a book he published in 1966) and editor (from Jesus College, Cambridge) of its short-lived journal Slant.

The most typical comment I recall from his talk, fuelled by many pints, is "when man does this - uses others as objects for his private self-advancement - he commits what the Christian calls sin, and the socialist, capitalism".

I next saw him many years later, on one of my occasional visits to Oxford, at the King's Arms pub, near Wadham College, where Eagleton was now a Fellow. Although still as ardent a Marxist as ever, he had become disenchanted with the institutional Church.

He felt that the cardinals and bishops had abandoned "the riff-raff and undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out".

They had adopted instead "the creed of the suburban well-to- do", whose "substantive response to the anawim, a term which can be roughly translated into American-English as 'loser', is for the most part to flush them off the streets".

But he did not actually talk at all about what most took to be his 'apostasy'. For about 30 years, there was no allusion whatever to theology in his prolific output. Had English literature substituted Christianity as the route to salvation? Or was he asking whether art could replace religion?

The sort of memorable remark typical of the King's Arms pub talk is "scientists like Heisenberg or Schroedinger are supreme imaginative artists who, when it comes to the universe, are aware that the elegant and beautiful are more likely to be true than the ugly and misshapen".

Eagleton's most recent book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, contains a full-scale criticism of the ringleaders of the militant atheist campaign lately unleashed in the English-speaking world.

His particular targets are the two books, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

He takes some side-swipes also at the more philosophical Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennet. Eagleton, "for convenience sake", concocted the 'single signifier Ditchkins' to refer to the battalion as a whole, although he appreciates the elegance of the style of Hitchens much more than the turgid prose of Dawkins.

What is Eagleton's postion now with regard to the Church and politics?

Decades after Eagleton had given up hope of persuading the Church that its faith required it to join forces with the Marxist movement in 2002 he wrote a 'memoir', or 'anti-autobiography'.

It contains a self-censored account of the Irish Roman Catholic background of his childhood at Salford. In it, he is The Gatekeeper of a Carmelite convent of enclosed nuns. For him, their choice of a way of life based on dispossession of self and service of the needy was a political protest against capitalist society.

A year later, in perhaps his best book on tragedy, Sweet Violence, there appears the main theme of his latest books. The most vital need of the Left is to realise the decisive importance of Christ.

"The Christian Gospel invites us to contemplate the reality of human history in the broken body of an executed political criminal. The message this body proclaims, as the theologian Herbert McCabe puts it, is uncompromising: if we don't love, you're dead, and if you do love, you'll be killed. Here, then, is the pie in the sky, the opium of the people, the sentimental twaddle of salvation."

In this year's book, he asserts that "the advanced capitalism system is inherently atheistic". It cannot acknowledge that even economic life needs to be grounded on the exchange of gifts, because God intended our life to be that way.

"To say of the world that it is created, is, for classical theology, to say that it is pointless. Like God and like humanity, it exists purely for its own delight. God created the world just for the hell of it, as a quick look around will doubtless confirm. Creation is a scandal to the sharp-faced stockbrokers for whom everything must have a point."

Eagleton's theology has many other challenging points, such as his holding that "Jesus's attitude to the family is one of implacable hostility", or that the role of the priesthood is comparable to that of the party in the Leninist theory of revolution. These views are not as flippant as one might at first think.

What do you regard as most valuable in Eagleton's life work?

Essentially, the style that he has evolved, with punchline following fast in the heels of another punch-line. His jokes are chirpier than Zizek's but they usually have a deeper meaning. For instance, again from this year's book:

"The directors of an oil company were concerned that one of its plants was losing money hand over fist, managed as it was by Evangelicals who based their commercial decisions on instructions from the voice of God.

"The directors accordingly sent in a troubleshooter, a tough-minded ex-military type. But his efforts were to no avail and his superiors eventually had to extract the rational colonel from the mystical shell."

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.