Every one ought to read this book, especially teachers and the clergy.” MARY WARNOCK, author of Imagination and Time and An Intelligent Person’ Guide to Ethics “A book of morals for our brave new world by a very wise man indeed. Inspiring. Fas- RICHARD HOLLOWAY cinating. Full of hope.” FAY WELDON GODLESS MORALITY is priced £9.99 Phone your credit card orders to Canongate Books (0131 557 5111] or send cheques [payable to Canongate Books) to 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE or visit our website www.canongate.net THE POCKET CANONS LOOK OUT FOR THE SECOND COMING’ 1.11.99 REVIEWS: BOOKS God is Dad God's Funeral, by AN Wilson (Murray) £20, reviewed by David Boulton 0 start at the end: the verdict. This | is an absorbing book. You really should read it. I doubt that it is the “masterpiece” which will still be read in a hundred years’ time, as Bryan Appleyard describes it in the Literary Review, but ’'m with Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday: “Wilson’s rare combination of extraordinary scholarship with an almost pathological sense of mischief’ makes him hugely entertaining. And there’s a lot of entertainment to be got out of God’s funeral.
Wilson’s subject is the decline of church religion, and of belief in God, in the nineteenth century. Most of the usual suspects are here: Hume, Comte, Feuerbach and Strauss, George Eliot, Carlyle, Marx, Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Arnold, Swinburne, James. The starting point is Thomas Hardy’s haunting poem God’s Funeral, where a graveyard procession mourns the “man-projected Figure” whom “we were tempted to create”, and “whom we can no longer keep alive”. The list becomes a procession of mourners, with Wilson himself presiding over the cortege.
His “pathological sense of mischief” leads him to include Popes Pius IX and X as two of God’s killers, not least in the former’s proclamation of his own infallibility. This, says Wilson, “was too much even for many of the [Vatican] Council Fathers... The trains out of Rome were jammed with cardinals and bishops escaping from the Council”. One of the earliest infallible pronouncements condemned the new-fangled electric lighting. Pius X hunted down those who sought to integrate faith and intellect, using methods of which Stalin would have approved. “Kindness is for fools”, he retorted when someone was wimp enough to suggest he show Christian compassion for those who couldn’t in conscience follow his infallible pronouncements, adding “They should be beaten with fists”. Wilson reminds us, by the by, that Pius (sic) X is the only twentieth century Pope to have been canonized.
Another killer was biblical criticism, the idea generated by German theologians and popularised in England by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, that the books of the Bible should be read and analysed (as Jowett put it) “like any other book... in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or of Plato”. So the scriptures were not dictated by God? In which case, how could they be infallible? And if they were fallible, what did that do to the God of whom they spoke?
Then science joined the deicides’ circle: “Religion is not concerned simply to ‘utter the platitudes of certain ethical idealism.
Instead, it invites us to enter a drama, in which we discover that we are as vulnerable as the values we wish to affirm and it is precisely in that vulnerability that those values are tested and achieved.” Graham Shaw, “God and Reality: Essays on Christian Nonrealism Lyell’s geology showing that the earth was rather older than the bishops’ estimate of 6000 years between the creation of Adam and the birth of Queen Victoria, and Darwin’s demonstration that there was no need for a creator in the first place - which left poor old Philip Gosse proposing that God must have planted fossils in a cunning imitation of vast antiquity in order to test the faith of the nineteenth century faithful. (Gosse was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and his “theory” was still being taught to PB Sunday school children like me in the mid-twentieth century).
Meanwhile, the philosophers are performing their own dances on the grave. Hegel depersonalises God, Feuerbach etherialises him as a projection of human values, and Marx offers a vivid definition of a nonrealist’s God: “Real dollars”, he writes (in his Notes... on Reason and the Proof of God), “have the same existence imagined gods have. Has a real dollar any mode of existence other than... in man’s general or communal conception? Take paper money into a country where this use of paper is not known, and everyone will laugh at your subjective concept. Come with your gods into a country where other gods prevail, and people will prove to you that you are a victim of fictions and abstractions.” One of Wilson’s best jokes is his observation that, as God was dethroned, “the deicides, with their long white beards, came more and more to resemble Blake’s Ancient of Days. Marx, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, William Morris, could all have been mistaken for Jehovah in a frock coat”. He might have included Shaw in the bearded pantheon, but instead he reminds us that as a St Pancras councillor (Very Old Labour) GBS was responsible for the construction of England’s first ladies’ public lavatory. Let it never be said that atheism is incapable of offering relief and comfort.
Wilson is at his most original in showing us just how many of these eminent Victorians had bad relationships with their earthly fathers as well as their heavenly one. “We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is God is Dad, and we wish him dead”.
He offers many valuable insights, but also some startling eccentricities. Is there anyone else in the universe who thinks Swinburne was a great poet? And what of the observation that only “a foolish person” would not find Rossetti’s vapid, sentimental, primly-erotic Beata Beatrix “one of the greatest works of art of the entire nineteenth century, not merely in England but in Europe - perhaps the greatest”. I suspect that makes a fool of vitually every critic except A N Wilson (and perhaps Dante Gabriel Rossetti).
He is cranky, too, about Matthew Arnold. He may be right to respond with one of his foppish yawns to Arnold’s prose, which he finds boring (I confess I haven’t read any, so I wouldn’t know), but it is plain silly to moan that Dover Beach is a bad poem on the ground that Sophocles could not have heard the outgoing tide of the “sea of faith” because the Aegean, unlike the English Channel, is REVIEWS: BOOKS not tidal! Wilson also thinks the poem fails because Arnold “appears not to have noticed [the] rather simple bidiurnal fact” that tides which go out come in again.
These observations, written perhaps on a bad day when his Evening Standard column was demanding his primary attention, say little about Arnold and much about Wilson: that he hasn’t quite got the hang of what poetry is, how it works, and how it differs from a scientific or metaphysical tract.
There are other irritations. One might suppose from this account of God’s funeral that the great I Am had survived virtually unscathed till bourgeois Victorian intellectuals put their best bone-handled knives in. We learn nothing of the seventeenth century radicals who either abolished him altogether as a “bugbear”, or reinvented him as “in us” rather than “out there”, or identified him/her with Nature or Reason or Community. And Wilson’s whole account is very scientistand philosopher-centred. One would not guess that the great mass of urban working people had buried God and the supernatural as the mumbo-jumbo of exploitative priestcraft long before Hume, Kant and the frock-coats cottoned on.
Finally, Wilson’s fellow-feeling for the mourners means that he doesn’t show much interest in those who experienced the loss of an all-powerful transcendent deity as a positive liberation, a burden rolled away rather than a departed comforter remembered in pious nostalgia.
So Shelley is barely noticed, Blake (who found God in “the pride of the peacock... the lust of the goat... [and] the nakedness of woman”, but not in the bible and never in the church, gets only passing mentions, Bradlaugh little more, and Holyoake nothing. If Wilson’s mourners resemble Jehovah in a frock coat, they also look suspiciously like Victorian versions of Wilson himself: believers who lost their Dad but spent the rest of their lives seeking answers to the question “And when did you last see your father?”.
But these are quibbles. They should not deter you from reading the book. It demonstrates that for many, a century and more after the funeral, God may be dead but he won’t lie down. He persists in running around the farmyard like the proverbial chicken, long after we have decapitated him. Whether we respond to his grisly demise with grief or relief, “we cannot any longer write, or speak, or live,” says Wilson, “as if the revolutions in human sensibility which we have observed... simply never took place”. How then must we now write, speak and live?
The question, surely, is at the very heart of our SoF project.
Review of God's Funeral by A.N. Wilson (John Murray, £20).