Unfinished sketches for real human beings

"[V]icious people are those who have never got the hang of human existence, as someone might never get the hang of playing poker. They are lacking, deficient, incapable of being truly alive. The evil are not really there. They are unfinished sketches for real human beings. [...]

"Pure evil detests the very fact of human existence and wants to wipe it from the face of the earth. It can see nothing in humanity but a pathetic sham. It is out to demonstrate that the whole of human life is as empty as itself. Hell is full of the sniggers and guffaws of those who believe they have seen through the pretentious façade of human existence."

Terry Eagleton has written a new book On Evil. You can get more of a taste of it here. Eagleton offers some great quotes and an engaging one page introduction to a broadly Augustinian take on evil as privation (with some Freud, Arendt and Milton thrown in, along with obligatory references to Simon Cowell and Gordon Brown).
H/T Stephen Cook.

Fish on Eagleton on Ditchkins

In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

- Stanley Fish, "God Talk".

Michael Jensen has also been reading Eagleton's new book, in which he defends the intellectual complexity and importance of Christian theology, belief and practice (or aspects of them at least) against the new atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens (to whom he refers collectively as "Ditchkins"). Sounds like an interesting book. But I mainly put up this post for the title.