God's Funeral (review)

God's Funeral, by A. N. Wilson; pp. xi + 401. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, $27.95.

Not again! How often can we endure the familiar tale of the erosion of Christian faith in the Victorian era--the soul crises brought on by the hammers of the geologists, by Charles Darwin's account of the chancy origins of species, and by the dreadful Germans reducing the Hebrew and Christian scriptures to myth? A. N. Wilson seems to think that we need to go through it again in order to understand "twentieth-century religious conflict," this time with the emphasis on "the qualities of strife which afflicted women and men who found themselves honourably at war with theology" (xi). Wilson abjures the role of scientist, or philosopher, or theologian; nor is he being a professional historian; he is telling the story to the ordinary educated reader. Underlying this announced purpose is a clear conviction that, despite all the efforts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century rationalists, the burial of God as portrayed in Thomas Hardy's "God's Funeral" (c. 1909), which is Wilson's epigraph, was premature, and that God, or at least belief in God, is, indeed, very much alive.

Wilson rounds up the usual suspects (with photos), including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Rénan from the European scene; Carlyle, Mill, Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Huxley, Ruskin, Swinburne, Eliot, Bradlaugh, and Besant in England; William James and Royce (but not Robert Ingersoll) from the United States; Loisy, Tyrrell, and von Hugel, the Catholic modernists in conflict with the Papacy. If the bibliography is a reliable guide, he has read thoroughly Hume, Kant, Hegel, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Arnold, and Swinburne. He has covered as well a number of more recent secondary sources, sometimes apparently relying on them more than on the primary. Thus, he lists Noel Annan on Leslie Stephen, but not Stephen's Freethinking and Plainspeaking (1873) or An Agnostic's Apology (1893); Robindra Kumar Biswas on Arthur Hugh Clough but, despite praising Clough's poetry, does not even mention the Easter Day poems, let alone quote from them; Volume One of Michael Holroyd on George Bernard Shaw, but no plays, which he dismisses as shallow stuff.

There is a similar unevenness in his treatment of his cast, caused, I think, by a biographical interest which sometimes displaces what his people said about their theological predicaments. Wilson tells us about Clough's upbringing and quotes his reaction to his first years at Balliol, asserts that Clough experienced agonies, but quotes nothing to illustrate them; he recites a third-hand story about Stephen's alleged suicidal mood when he gave up his faith, but gives us nothing of Stephen's sense of liberation as expressed in his "Apology for Plainspeaking" (1873) and in numerous letters, or, for that matter, anything of the polemical excitement to be found in John Morley and the godkillers who wrote for the Fortnightly Review. The case of Bishop John Colenso makes a good story, but not the authors of Essays and Reviews (1862); Algernon Charles Swinburne, one of his heroes, he quotes copiously, but pages about Swinburne's algolagnia seem more sensational than germane.

Inconsistency also seems to result from Wilson's strong opinions and judgments. His account of Karl Marx, for example, lingers over Marx's ugliness and delinquencies as a parent but oversimplifies Marx on religion. He gives Matthew Arnold credit for being a good educational reformer, but declares the lectures on poetry to be boring and Arnold a real snob, illustrating the point by what I consider a misreading of the famous "Wragg is in custody" passage in "The Function of Criticism" (1864), and is guilty of egregious error when he says that Arnold saw England "populated by the Philistines (that is to say the governing aristocratic class) and the rising class--the class he was trying to educate--whom he flatteringly called Barbarians" (258). How wrong can one get! The Arnold section ends with a witty send-up of Arnold's...