Think Big? - Review

National Review, May 31, 1999 by David Klinghoffer

God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, by A. N. Wilson (Norton, 512 pp., $29.95)

If you want to feel like an ant in the footsteps of your not-so-distant ancestors, read this book. The alleged "big issues" of our own time range from the profound yet mainly theoretical (partial-birth abortion, homosexuality) to the piddling yet . . . piddling (school vouchers, war with Yugoslavia). In Victorian England, and to some extent in America, the main issue before the public was profound both in its philosophical and practical aspects. A variety of passionate and eloquent parties- orthodox, modernist, agnostic, atheist-were at war over the ultimate question: the existence of God.

The modernists won, as A. N. Wilson makes clear in this first-rate work of popular intellectual history. By "modernist" he means folks who don't deny God, who respect the spiritual yearning of human beings, yet who don't for a minute accept the historical underpinnings of Biblical religion: Sinai for Jews, Calvary for Christians.

Though as a young man he was an enthusiastic Christian, Wilson himself falls into the modernist camp. Every book I've read by him-this one along with his lively, fascinating biographies of Jesus and St. Paul and a less memorable novel about a disillusioned clergyman, The Vicar of Sorrows-seeks in part to justify or explain the loss of faith that befell him. As Cardinal Newman, one of Wilson's protagonists here, described his own religious evolution from Anglican to Roman Catholic, "It was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather . . . [T]he whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it."

Between the lifetimes of David Hume and Sigmund Freud, the religious sensibility of the educated classes moved violently from belief to unbelief. Seeking to understand how this happened, Wilson offers a record of paper logic.

The blows to orthodoxy commenced around 1776 and kept coming thereafter. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon debunked the official church history of the early Christian saints and martyrs. Hume unleashed his philosophy of skepticism with its nihilistic implications. Kant undermined the traditional proofs for God's existence. Building on Kant, Hegel's notion of history's progress hurled itself against traditional belief in the degeneration of generations: that each historical era takes the human community farther from the moment of Revelation, so that in wisdom father always trumps son. Hegel's generous evaluation of his own era's wisdom led to German Biblical criticism, demoting the Bible from sacred history to sacred myth. Unlike most writers who have traced the etiology of modern spiritual sickness, Wilson doesn't underestimate this last development: "If any one phenomenon may be said to have been responsible for the destruction of ordinary Christian faith in the 19th-century Protestant world (and in the Catholic world, when they allowed themselves to become aware of it), it was this critical approach to the Scriptures."

By the time Darwin appeared with his own soon-to-be-sacred myth, the just-so story of Natural Selection and its teaching that no Creator need have played a role in the evolution of life, it was as if resistance to agnosticism had been weakened, blow after blow, by some noxious, history-guiding spirit. It only remained for Freud to invent the faith-substitute that cosmopolitan Westerners are stuck with today: salvation through psychotherapy.

Wilson tells the story so enjoyably, with such witty, clear-eyed unsentimentality, that you forget to ask how devastating all this must have been in the lives of regular people influenced by but outside the often smug circles of intellectuals who did all the heavy thinking. Wilson doesn't say. About the thinkers, however, there's no question you get the straight stuff from him, free of flatulent history- classroom reverence. His frank appraisals are delightful, as in his comments on the Utilitarians ("men who were . . . deeply odd"), Hegelianism ("mass-egomania on the grand scale"), Thomas Carlyle ("to the 20th-century reader . . . [he] seems little more than a windbag"), and Herbert Spencer ("this pompous ass").

One notes that then as now, secularism and left-wingery go together-a fact that should worry conservatives who want to buttress their political notions with Darwinian sociobiology. The autobiographical novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902), for example, could pitch a movie script in Hollywood any day this week with his "two great themes- dismissal of Christianity and hatred of family life."

But the most interesting lesson of this book has nothing to do with politics; it has to do with with the advisability of trying to think big thoughts about God. We may feel Lilliputian in relation to our ancestors, but there's a virtue in thinking small.

Wilson's intellectuals debated the biggest question they could think of: What, if anything, is God? In their company, one encounters no discussion whatsoever of more modest questions: of ethics, ritual. Their mistake is alluded to in the Bible.