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

A. N. Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

A magisterial, colorful narrative illuminating the central tragedy of the nineteenth century: that God (or man's faith in him) died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many abandoned belief in God altogether. This was partly the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. (No reader here will soon forget the venomous Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley, brilliant defender of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860.) But as Wilson demonstrates in such fascinatingly diverse lives as those of Gibbon, Kant, Marx, Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, the doubt about religion had many sources. By 1900, the Church of England, so vastly rich, so politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually empty, however full its pews might be on a Sunday. Echoes of the "Death of God" could be found practically everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Garibaldi and Lenin; in the poetry of Tennyson and the novels of Hardy; in the work of Freud, connecting this "death" to our deepest wishes; and in the decline of hierarchical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism. Wilson's exquisitely detailed argument reveals the growth of a new imaginative order of unbelief that supplanted organized religion, and left in its wake a devastating sense of loss extending to our own times.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

God's Funeral is A.N. Wilson's account of the decline of orthodox Christianity in Victorian Britain. The most popular explanation for this widely-recognized phenomenon is the acceptance by intellectuals of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. To disprove the notion that Darwin singlehandedly committed deicide, Wilson describes a host of secularizing predecessors and accomplices such as Hume, Gibbon, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, and Carlyle. All play major roles in Wilson's brilliantly staged reconstruction of the so-called death of God. God's Funeral also takes account of the pain and confusion these intellectuals brought upon themselves when their great achievements helped erode the social and intellectual foundations of their lives. Furthermore, Wilson shows how their crises of faith relate to our own. Like our Victorian forebears, contemporary readers still must ask, "Is our personal religion that which links us to the ultimate reality, or is it the final human fantasy...?" and, "Is there a world of value outside ourselves, or do we, collectively and individually, invent what we call The Good?" God's Funeral helps readers learn to ask these questions in smarter and sharper ways by giving them a clearer sense of how Western society reached its current state of confusion.

From Publishers Weekly

At the end of the 19th century, Christian theologian Ernst Troeltsch proclaimed that the sun was setting on Christianity, and poet Matthew Arnold declared that in the future poetry would replace religion. As Wilson (The Vicar of Sorrows) points out in this splendid book, the 19th century provided the context not only for theories of God's demise but also for the numerous challenges that political thinkers, scientists and artists posed to Christian belief. Yet, as he notes, while the battles between faith and doubt were raging, church attendance did not decline but remained constant. The famous debates between Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog," and Bishop Wilberforce contributed to an atmosphere of optimism about the perfectibility of humankind and the world. Wilson traces the development of this rise of unbelief from the 18th century to the early 20th century. He contends that Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its contempt of Christianity's "highest ideals," and David Hume's skeptical Dialogues Concerning National Religion, which challenges the very possibility of the existence of the supernatural, provide the groundwork for the demise of belief in the 19th century. Wilson explores some of the most explicit instances of the century's intellectual challenges to faith: George Eliot's translations of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Darwin's evolutionary formulations calling into question the idea of a special creation; Marx and Engels's charge that bourgeois institutions used religion to enslave people and make them weak; William James's reading of various religious states in The Varieties of Religious Experience as psychological states of mind. Eliot's translations alone introduced into England both Strauss's contentions that the life of Jesus was clothed in myth pictures like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection and Feuerbach's claim that God was nothing more than a projection of humanity's wishes. Wilson examines also how the Catholic Church responded to the Modernist thought of Alfred Loisy, who imported much of the skepticism of the 19th century into his religious writings and challenged conventional Catholic teachings on the Church and the Bible. With passionate prose and a lively style, Wilson narrates a first-rate intellectual and religious history.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047458
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047455
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,252 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't get the wrong idea, December 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (Hardcover)

Several of the reviewers of this book suggest that its main focus is whether God exists or not, and that it argues that God does not exist. This is incorrect. It would be much more accurate to say that the subject of the book is the movement of atheism and agnosticism into the intellectual mainstream of Western Europe. While Wilson does suggest that the discoveries of Darwin et al. require a re-evaluation of religious faith (and especially of Christian fundamentalism), he does not argue that faith is obsolete or God non-existent.

I enjoyed the book very much- the breeziness and partiality that seem to have annoyed some of its reviewers made it, for me, a lively and amusing read. Though Wilson often comes across as snotty or condescending, both to his readers and his subjects, just as often he seems to have genuine regard for his readers, and genuine sympathy for his subjects. The result is a book refreshing in its clarity and vitality, one that made me want to go out and read the authors and philosophers it discusses (except for Herbert Spencer).

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A bit tough, but worth it, January 13, 2000

By 

Dan Allison - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (Hardcover)

As usual, Wilson is a little tough to read. He's an English intellectual, and his own struggles with faith and reason hide just between the lines here. Nevertheless, "God's Funeral" is an important contribution to the history of ideas. In a nutshell, the book details the struggles of 19th-century British intellectuals and theologians as they attempted to cope with advances in science and philosophy, particularly with the work of Darwin, Lyell, Marx and Freud. Brief profiles of Carlyle, Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold and many others are well-researched and enjoyable. You probably need a background in philosophy, literature or theology to fully appreciate "God's Funeral," but this book is worth it. Don't judge the book by its cover: while Wilson writes with what Americans will consider an elitist tone, no judgments or diatribes are offered here. Wilson works hard to be objective, and he achieves that goal.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Overview of Victorian Lit and Religious Thought, November 29, 1999

By 

Robert Horan (Thousand Oaks, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization (Hardcover)

Wilson tackles the Crisis of Faith that beset mid 19th century England in the wake of Enlightenment reasoning, devastating scientific advances, and German theology. This book will be hard going for readers without a grounding in, or a profound curiosity about, the notable thinkers (Newman, Carlyle, Spencer, Ruskin, et al) of the era, but Wilson's portraits are appropriately economical, lively, and wonderfully referenced to the great literature of the period. One comes away with an appreciation of the moral and intellectual struggles that engaged many Victorians as they re-examined the idea of a relationship to a personal God. Not much here for fundamentalists, but if you consider yourself a deist, an agnostic, an atheist, or a "sweetness and light' Christian a la Matthew Arnold (not a Wilson hero), this is a particularly rewarding book. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, we still have much to learn from the Victorians and Wilson demonstrates vivedly yet another reason why this is so.