God's Funeral - A.N.Wilson

This blog is rapidly becoming a blog of book reviews but I have found food for thought in a number of the books I have been reading recently, perhaps because they have been a bit different from what I usually read.

'God's Funeral' is not an atheist rant by Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, but a study by A.N.Wilson of the decline of faith and the growth of doubt, scepticism and atheism in the Victorian era. The book's title comes from Thomas Hardy's eponymous poem and Hardy is the subject of the first, inevitably sad, chapter.

Wilson follows up with readable summaries of Hume and Kant, rapidly succeeded by Hegel, J.S. Mill and Auguste Comte. Then come Carlyle, Marx and Engels, who make way for J.A.Froude, Dean Colenso, Thomas Arnold and Benjamin Jowett.

After them come author George Eliot and philosopher Herbert Spencer. Darwin, Huxley and the impact of evolution are examined, as is the life and influence of the outright atheist poet Algernon Swinburne. Freud follows, with the Gosses ('Father and Son'), Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin in their van. Numerous lesser lights are discussed in passing.

William James is given a long and sympathetic chapter. The book ends with perhaps the most sympathetic chapter of all, a study of the Roman Catholic 'Modernists' and one of their heroes, George Tyrrell. This probably tells us more about the sympathies of A.N. Wilson than it does about the importance of Tyrrell.

I found the book fascinating. Wilson's knowledge is broad and he manages to package it attractively for a non-expert. His sub-text is a gentle undermining of the atheism, agnosticism and scepticism he discusses, and the muddled and in some cases tragic lives of his subjects are little commendation of their 'creed'.

The overall impact is of sadness and also, for me at least, surprise at how prevalent varieties of doubt were in the Victorian era, which one somehow thinks of as a very religious period. 1851, for example, saw the highest figure for church attendance ever recorded in Britain.

But that is just the irony. The 19th century was profoundly religious. Some of these figures were also very religious. Their religion had however lost vitality. Many of them were struggling, often very painfully and sincerely, with doubt. German biblical criticism made it impossible , they thought, to believe the Bible as their parents had done. Darwin made it unnecessary if not impossible to believe in a Creator. Schleiermacher (who interestingly is not given much of a mention) made Christianity synonymous with religious sentiment. The Arnolds wanted to equate it with morality and a kind of culture.

Of course, all this was in a very intellectual stratum of society, but their ideas spread. They were articulating what a lot of less able people would have thought, expressing doubts that others either could not, or wanted simply to suppress. Widespread scepticism was to follow in the 20th century.

There is no mention, either, of the evangelical leaders (apart from a passing reference to Lord Shaftesbury, none too complimentary) or the revivals of the first half of the century, or of 1859, or of Spurgeon and many like him. These are below the radar of Wilson's authorial interest, and probably of his personal affection - he is evidently a 'believer' of the most rarified liberal high Anglican/Catholic type.

But it made me realise that we should not complain about atheism and unbelief growing as we see it in our day. We, at least, have a century of evangelical and other scholarship which makes it easier for us to fight back agains the trends in theology and science the Victorians were feeling threatened by. We have the apologetic advantage of a century of unspeakable ferocity and cruelty which has given the lie to the blessing of atheism as a creed. We have much to help us which the Victorians did not.

The book also reminds us that a 'Christian culture' can be a dangerous thing. How much dead belief lay behind the church-going, the mere orthodoxy, the respectable religion of the period. Does one not even have a sneaking sympathy for some of these men and women who were not content with the empty professions of their peers and contemporaries?

They had nothing to put in its place. Why not? They had rejected the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. Simplistic as it may sound, that is the watershed. That is fundamentally what was lost in the 19th century.