God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization

In this elegantly written book, prolific biographer A. N. Wilson (Tolstoy, Milton, Paul, Jesus) presents a group portrait of the leading British intellectuals of the century between Napoleon and World War I. It is a time when inquiring minds found it ever harder to accept the existence of God. Wilson is at pains to refute the common notion that this was due to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Instead, the roots of British agnosticism and atheism lay in Hume’s trenchant criticisms of the Deism fashionable in the previous century, Gibbon’s witty depiction of the less-than-Christian behavior of the church hierarchy from the last days of the Roman Empire onward, Lyell’s demonstration that the geology of the earth required a much longer show more span of time than the six to ten thousand assumed by many Bible-readers, and the effect of German higher criticism on literal readings of the Bible.

All of this was before Darwin, Marx, or Freud published.

For every Swinburne or Gosse eager to be done with God as part of a break with a tyrannical father, there were others who mourned the loss of the comfort faith afforded. Others, meanwhile, clung ever more tightly to a rigid belief system that shielded them.

Wilson name-checks many intellectuals; most of them I’d heard of, but others were new to me. I never knew, for instance, that John Henry Newman had a brother, Francis. They started out together as evangelical Anglicans. While one converted to Roman Catholicism, the other resigned his Oxford fellowship because he could not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles that summarize the Anglican faith, after which John Henry refused to speak to Francis again.

Such stubborn fundamentalism wasn’t limited to believers, Wilson observes. Science became the new fundamentalism for many.

I felt that Wilson had read the works of all the writers he touches on, including the “windbag” (Wilson’s term) Carlyle or the once popular and now nearly-forgotten Herbert Spencer. He deflates the reputations of some (Shaw, for instance) while pointing out other books unjustly neglected, such as Ruskin’s Praeterita or the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In addition, Wilson is sure-footed and informed about the leading philosophical schools of the time. I was disappointed that, for all his evident erudition, he never gives any indication that he is aware of the misunderstanding of natural selection that led to Social Darwinism, with its dolorous belief that aggression and rapacity ensure the survival of the human species.

After seeming to have officiated at the funeral of God that Hardy, in the poem from which the book takes its title, imagined viewing, Wilson takes the book in another direction. The penultimate chapter is devoted to William James. Not a believer, James nonetheless took religious experience seriously, terming it “mankind’s most important function.” In his concluding chapter, Wilson turns to the Modernists, Catholics such as Tyrrell and Loisy, who sought to “maintain religion without sacrificing intellectual integrity.” Theirs is a sad tale—forbidden to say mass or hear confession, even denied burial on consecrated ground—yet the reader senses Wilson’s sympathy. For him, they testify to a living faith that is not fundamentalist. The chapter fittingly has, as one of two epigraphs, words of Christ quoted in the Book of Revelation: “I am the first, and the last; I live, and I was dead.” show less

Wilson's book is a tour de force of the unraveling of bourgeois Christianity in the English speaking world during the Victorian Era. He guides us through the minds of the great believers-at-all-costs and unbelievers, including both the at-all-costs and the because-I-must types, with skill, wit, and precision. In his own sympathy for the various figures of this period, he leads us to sympathize with the plight of those who wouldn't and those who couldn't believe. This sympathy, in turn, leads us to a great understanding of our own modern situation as we fall in at the tail end of the dismantling of bourgeois Christianity.

In spite of the excellence of this book, however, I have two complaints to lodge against it and its author. The first: show more as I mentioned twice in the preceding paragraph, this is a book about bourgeois Christianity and about those members of the bourgeoisie (and, yes, that includes Karl Marx) who came to disbelieve in it, and came to disbelieve in it largely because both it and they were (and are) bourgeois. What might have been a great credit to this book, or perhaps to another study as it might not have fit in this book, is the effect that, for example, Darwin's and Lyell's theories or perhaps the biblical criticism a la the Tubingen School had upon believers of other classes in society and castes of mind.

The other complaint is that A.N. Wilson seems himself to advocate a form of Christianity that is no-Christianity at all; while complaining – rightly – about the watered-down pseudo-religiosity of the Deists, Wilson seems very close to their ideas, especially in the conclusion of his book. Whether that is the effect he intended, I do not know, but it is the impression I received. A Christianity without the Resurrection, with a God who intervenes directly and is/can be experienced by mystics and saints, etc. – that is, a Christianity without passion, asceticism, mysticism, and zeal -- is not Christianity at all. show less

God still has " value" e.g., when a politician or other prominent individual gets himself into trouble (usually through a failing of his zipper or wallet), and he (rarely she) seeks redemption in the eyes of the public by public confession of his sins and expression of the need for divine forgiveness and grace. Witness Charles Colson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bill Clinton (the bizarre prayer breakfast).

" Value" may have a rather foreign meaning in this context, but the philosopher who coined the phrase meant that whether God exists or not may be irrelevant; those in disgrace can always fall back on Divine Mercy to seek redemption. It's effective. This despite centuries of scientific destruction of religious dogma. It was no wonder the show more Renaissance popes reacted so fiercely to Galilean ideas. The anthropomorphic view of the universe, and " made in God's image" was being effectively destroyed.

The discovery by geologists of the long evolution of the earth and the creation and extinction of numerous forms of life on the planet made belief in a loving, benevolent, and omnipotent creator seem fatuous. The scientific research of the nineteenth century revealed a Nature with no discernible purpose, "not a loving purpose, or an anthropocentric purpose. In other words, if you pressed the argument from Design too far you might infer a God who was curious about a multiplicity of life-forms, entirely unconcerned about the bloodiness and painfulness with which many of these forms sustained life while on this planet, a God who was no more demonstrably interested in the human race than He was in, say, beetles, of which He created an inordinately large variety."

What Wilson has done is to examine the origins of the twentieth-century conflict that has evolved between scientific fact and religious belief (fantasy) through brief sketches of a variety of nineteenth-century philosophers, writers, and naturalists who participated in this great debate. He examines the Victorian experience of the conflict between doubt and faith and its effect on the twentieth century. The nineteenth century provided the context for the debate and polemics for the discussion of God's demise.

It was a time for celebration of political thinkers, scientists and artists to proclaim the end of religion, yet Wilson notes that church attendance remained constant. Even the debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce helped create an atmosphere of optimism about the perfectibility of humankind. Thinking ranged from the stubborn unbelief of people like Marx and Swinbourne to Freud, who thought religion would just wither away, to William James, who argued it provided a useful psychological crutch.

Thinkers of the nineteenth century had to "choose between giving up intellectual honesty or abandoning that spiritual and religious dimension to life which, as far as we can discover from the historians and anthropologists, is so fundamental a part of all previous human existence."

The title of the book is from a poem by Thomas Hardy, subject of the first chapter. In this poem, Hardy imagines himself at God's funeral. He speaks of the death of the myth of God that we have created, but simultaneously he regrets the loss of faith and notes sympathetically those who continue to believe despite evidence that the God we have created no longer exists. Hardy, himself atheist, remained very fond of religious trappings, the music and liturgical ceremony. When he was invested in Magdalene College, the dons were very worried he might eschew the formal religious ceremony, but he surprised them by accepting it completely. His remark, " course, it' all just sentiment to me now" did spoil the effect, however. show less

After a slow and shaky start, my philosophy-challenged brain cells adapted to the intellectual tone of this meticulously researched and documented book about the decline of religious faith in the 19th century. The author discusses the various scientific discoveries and philosophical arguments that led to many prominent individuals to abandon Christianity, and even God, altogether; and the effects this abandonment of belief had on these individuals and on society itself.

The thing I found most notable is how much this 19th-century struggle between intellectualism and faith is still going on for many people today. It certainly was mirrored in my own life. After about age 17 or 18, I could no longer accept the dogmatic, literalist show more fundamentalism with which I had been raised, but I couldn't reject the concept of God out of hand. After several years of searching, I returned to Christianity, but a different faith tradition: one which allows and encourages me to think, to question, to come to my own understanding of God and a faith that works for me.

I found it interesting, and encouraging, that the book itself ends on a similar note. show less