Richard Holloway
HELL ON EARTH
On Evil
By Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press 176pp £18.99)

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William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, famously asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, and proceeded to plunder them for his own missionary purposes. In his stimulating new book, Terry Eagleton seems to have asked himself why theologians should have all the best metaphors, and has proceeded to plunder them in his campaign to bring greater realism to an understanding of contemporary politics. Without repudiating the possibility of a supernatural dimension to Christian doctrine, his purpose in this book is to demonstrate how it can be used to express and interpret the human condition. Using technical theological language, his book could be described as an exercise in realised eschatology: 'while there could no more be anyone "in" hell than there could be anyone in a material location called debt or love or despair', hell is real enough, he says - and it's not just other people.

Central to Eagleton's use of theology in this book is the doctrine of original sin, the only doctrine for which there is an abundance of empirical evidence. Christian anthropology, properly understood, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic - it is realistic; and in that triangulation, which is very important to Eagleton, there are the makings of a whole political philosophy. The human is a tragic animal, aware of the complexity of its own condition, yet never in complete control of it. Claiming to be free, we also know that our choices in life are largely determined by circumstances we had no part in creating. Eagleton quotes Adorno: 'If we knew at every moment what has happened and to what concatenations we owe our own existence, and how our own existence is interwoven with calamity, even if we have done nothing wrong ... if one were fully aware of all things at every moment, one would really be unable to live.' That is why Spinoza said freedom was ignorance of necessity. To exist is to be guilty of actions we never had much hope of controlling. So it is not surprising that, for Adorno, human history is a catastrophe.

According to the doctrine of the Fall, humanity has fallen upward into the knowledge of good and evil, and our original sin is what defines us as the moral animal, the hybrid creature who knows good and evil. But this does not mean we are wholly determined and therefore unable to alter our state for the better. 'We are not powerless to transform our current condition ... but we shall not do so without soberly acknowledging our dispiriting history', claims Eagleton. This brings us to an important point in understanding Eagleton's political philosophy, which he calls realism as opposed to both conservatism and liberalism.

Conservative anthropology is essentially pessimistic. Humans are not true moral hybrids, prone to evil yet capable of good; 'they are for the most part corrupt, indolent creatures who require constant discipline and authority if anything of value is to be dragged out of them'. It is for this reason that conservatives lay great store on the role of institutions in governing the unruly wills and affections of sinful men. The flaw in their loyalty to tradition, however, is that they fail to apply the hermeneutics of corruption to the bodies they erect as barriers against chaos, and refuse to acknowledge that the very institutions they build to protect themselves against disorder frequently end up as instruments of the destruction they are seeking to avoid. Eagleton believes that capitalism, in particular, has to be distinguished from other institutional forms of life, because it plugs directly into the unstable, contradictory nature of the human species. 'Capitalism is a system which needs to be in perpetual motion simply to stay on the spot. Constant transgression is of its essence.' The same might be said of religious institutions, with the added difficulty that their transcendental pretensions make them peculiarly resistant to redemptive change.

If conservatives believe in original sin but not in redemption, then liberals believe in redemption but not in original sin. They are deficient in the tragic sense of life, which is why they tend to identify the source of the ills that beset us as not in ourselves, but in external impediments to human well-being: remove these external obstacles, goes the mantra, and the kingdom will come on earth as it is in the heaven of the liberal's imagination.

Radicals, on the other hand, try to maintain a precarious balancing act between these extremes. 'On the one hand they must be brutally realistic about the depth and tenacity of human corruption to date ... On the other hand, this corruption cannot be such that transformation is out of the question.' Eagleton believes that what prevents the radical from sliding into despair is an understanding of what he calls materialism. 'I mean by this belief that most violence and injustice are the result of material forces, not of the vicious disposition of individuals ... The opposite of materialism here is moralism - the belief that good and bad deeds are quite independent of their material contexts.'

What he is proposing, in fact, is a materialist understanding of original sin. He believes that most immoral behaviour is bound up with structures and institutions, so that it is not entirely the fault of the individuals who are implicated in it. A good example would be the way men and women who would no more torture an animal than shoot their grandmother collude in the existence of a vast, industrialised system of cruelty to animals because of their addiction to cheap food. Eagleton does not use the term, but what he is calling for is repentance in the sense used by Jesus in the Greek New Testament: metanoia, a change or turnaround in our minds that enables us to see what is really going on. Like a prophet crying in the wilderness, Eagleton is calling us to a radical analysis of the human condition. We are binary creatures, capable of good and evil, yet prone to disguising from ourselves the impact on others of our actions, particularly in the structural or systemic realm. Another great realist theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, captured this paradox in the title of one of his books, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr demonstrated again and again in his writings that we are at our worst in the collective or structural sphere - Eagleton's materialism. Acts we would never dream of performing ourselves we allow to be done in our name at a distance. Eichmann did not himself kill a single Jew, but he made sure the trains to the death camps ran on time.

I have concentrated on the core of Terry Eagleton's challenging and timely book, his application of the theology of original sin to the situation of our time. I hope it heralds a rebirth of the Christian realist tradition in interrogating the systems that have loosed so much injustice upon the earth. But there are many other provocations and pleasures in this text, including one I'll leave you to think about: 'Evil is supremely pointless. Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity. In this, it resembles God, who if he does turn out to exist has absolutely no reason for doing so.'

Richard Holloway is a writer and broadcaster. A former bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, his latest book is 'Between the Monster and the Saint', published by Canongate.