The Radical Gap

Extract

In the April issue of New Blackfriars, Terry Eagleton wrote a fair and interesting review-article on my book On Trying to be Human. This article is a comment on certain questions that arise out of the review. They are quesdons about politics and philosophy and theology, but what it is really about is the irreducible gap in human awareness of life, the edges of which my book was clumsily exploring, and the reality of which gap the reviewer denies. I hope to throw some light on what it is that makes for growth in a society or in an individual.

On Trying to be Human is a mixed book with some extremely turgid passages. Reading it over now, I find much of it unnecessarily complex and lengthy. On the other hand several people, whose scholarship and intelligence is unquestioned, have found it illuminating, and said so. The book was written in an attempt to use Christian ideas as a tool for interpreting the common experience of human life, without calling on support from faith or the idea of revelation. (This was what made some reviewers — Christian and non-Christian — wonder if I were really a Christian at all. As a matter of fact I scarcely was, when I wrote it.) Its starting point was that of many of those who are vaguely called ‘humanist’, and whose prevailing mood is a pessimism which is the only realism they feel is justified by the facts. It was a response to a view of life which can accept nothing but verifiable fact and refuses even to see connections between facts, except for purely practical purposes.