A.N. Wilson gained a well-deserved reputation as a biographer because of his works on Sir Walter Scott, John Milton and Leo Tolstoy. His work on C. S. Lewis, however, was a step backwards, and then he quite unashamedly blotted his copy­book by publishing two dreadful, albeit well-written, efforts — one on Jesus and the other on Paul.

In writing on Jesus, Wilson claimed that he was producing a dispassionate and objective account, but only managed to come up with the lunatic proposition that the disciples saw James and thought that it was the resurrected Jesus. He went on to portray Paul as the great pagan villain who in effect became the founder of Christianity.

Paul, in Wilson’s view, had no interest in the historical Jesus, and so interpreted Jesus’ death through the filter of the cult of Mithras where devotees stood under a platform as a bull was being sacrificed. As a result, they were drenched in its blood. The book of Leviticus is a rather more likely filter, but it is difficult to convince a man who is determined to come up with what he thinks is a novel idea. For all-round credibility, Wilson’s views on Paul and Jesus only just manage to shade the efforts of Barbara Thiering and John Shelby Spong.

In the light of these developments in Wilson’s thinking — or lack of it — in the 1990s, one might have expected that his new historical work on the 19th cen­tury, God’s Funeral, would be one which exuded an air of liberal triumphalism. That is certainly present, but the result is rather more significant than just another rehash of the Whig addiction to evolu­tionary notions of progress.

The title — God’s Funeral — comes from a poem by Thomas Hardy, written about 1908-10, where Hardy states that “what was mourned for, I, too, long had prized”. The 19^th century was indeed a period of revolution in Europe. A great many politicians, artists, scientists, novelists, poets, philosophers, social commentators, and clergymen came to doubt the basic verities of the Christian faith, and even the existence of God himself. Indeed, some of these intel­lectuals were positively hostile, even paranoid, about the issue.

Matthew Arnold, an archetypal Victorian, saw religion as “morality touched by emotion”, and portrayed the essence of Jesus’ religion as his sweet rea­sonableness. In Dover Beach he wrote of his own religious position:

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;
But now I only hear
Its melancholy long withdrawing roar.

Leslie Stephen was an Anglican cler­gyman, but lost his faith and became a journalist. In 1875 he called Hardy in to witness his renunciation of his clerical orders. Like Arnold, Stephen retained a firm commitment to living and dying like a gentleman — not the first men in history to entertain the hope that a house on sand would survive the storms.

Not unreasonably, Wilson sees a collective aspect to religious experience, and presumably to the decay of it. His thesis is that “Scepticism in the 19^th century was, as often as not, allied not with the sunny good cheer of Gibbon or Hume, but with profound depressions, self-hatred and melancholy”. There is plenty of evi­dence for this. Virginia Woolf said that the friends of her father, Leslie Stephen, feared that he would take his own life ­ a tragically ironic comment in the light of Virginia Woolf’s own suicide. Fedor Dostoyevsky in 1876 also commented on the number of suicides.

Gibbon and Hume might be urbane, detached and humorous, but skeptics from the 19^th century were not so endowed. Immanuel Kant looked up and within from the dull routine of his life, and exclaimed:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

However, that was about as much excite­ment as he could manage, and the wor­ship of the ethical imperative proved unable to rally the masses.

Far from being a triumph for light and sanity, the rejection of God in the 19^th century led to some bizarre, twisted, and tragic consequences. Jeremy Bentham wore his hair down to his waist, paid obsessive attention to detail, and pro­pounded (the philosophy of Gradgrind, according to Charles Dickens).

John Stuart Mill reacted to this kind of approach to life — whereby he spent a childhood without games or fairy-tales — and came to discover feeling and beauty. But the best he could do with Christ was to write from a great height:

When this pre-eminent genius of Christ is combined with the qualities of proba­bly the greatest moral reformer and mar­tyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man ...

It was hardly the sort of stuff to inspire martyrs in the Coliseum, but Mill thought of it as religious progress.

Meanwhile, Auguste Comte tried to marry science and sociology to establish a cult to rival Christianity. His pamphlets advocating this new cult of Positivism suffered from a number of defects, notably the fact that Comte himself was mad, and that he spent too much space in vilifying the prostitute whom he had married. Nietzsche announced the death of God, but also lost his mind, but was not committed to an asylum until after he wrote his works.

Marxism was no more convincing, although it was more successful than Positivism for a time — tragically so.

Marx himself drank too much, fathered an illegitimate child, denounced the Jews, and quarreled with every socialist who had the temerity not to fawn before him. Indeed, Wilson maintains that Marx deliberately tried to look like the god Zeus. After coming to power in Russia in 1917, Lenin, the mass murderer, was hailed as ‘the invisible messenger of peace’.

When Marx died in 1883, Engels compared his work with that of Charles Darwin, and claimed that millions in Siberia, California and elsewhere were mourning. The true mourning came later as Marx’s ideas were implemented in the USSR and China, and millions perished of starvation or in labour camps. Not for nothing did Solzhenitsyn see a peasant woman in tears cross herself repeatedly as she saw a trainload of prisoners, including Solzhenitsyn, pass through Torbeyevo station.

Others are more embarrassing than anything else. Herbert Spencer wrote on virtually everything — First Principles; The Principles of Biology (in two volumes); The Principles of Psychology; The Principles of Sociology; and The Principles of Ethics. He seems to have read not much more than his own works, but he had absolute confidence in the creed of progress.

It was Spencer who coined the term “the survival of the fittest”. He was con­vinced that Papuans proved the theory of evolution as, in Spencer’s view, their legs were short and their brains small. When he died, the Italian parliament observed a minute’s silence, so he did not die totally in vain.

Another participant in “God’s funeral” was Charles Darwin. He was no obsessed Nietzschean, but he especially objected to the doctrine of everlasting punishment. If evolution is correct, then the meek cannot expect to inherit the earth. More emphatic but not more influential was the poet A. C. Swinburne. To give his poetry the appearance of depth, he resorted to the constant use of Christian imagery. Perhaps his most infamous lines are:

Glory to man in the highest!
For Man is the master of things.

Swinburne’s other great obsession was flagellation, and like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas, he wrote better while he was drunk.

George Bernard Shaw abandoned Christianity but extolled the Life Force. He also crusaded for public female lava­tories and against the eating of meat. Two of his heroes were Hitler and Stalin.

A recurring pattern is that those who exalt man end out demeaning him. Either wittingly or unwittingly, Wilson has illustrated C. S. Lewis’ quip that an atheist cannot be too careful about what he reads. It is the unbelievers who come across as flawed and dangerous.

As Wilson realises:

The human race can easily deprive itself of Christianity, but finds it rather more difficult to lose its capacity for worship.

Strangely enough, he concludes by looking at Roman Catholicism Modernism, exem­plified by the likes of George Tyrell and Alfred Loisy. One can only hope that, for Wilson as for others, Simone Weil is right:

Christ likes us to prefer truth to him. If one turns aside from him to go to the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

On the evidence presented, God’s funeral looks more like man’s funeral. There is every reason for the Christian to lament, but not to despair. God’s funeral has been proclaimed many times before — by Pilate and Caiaphas in the first century, by Julian the Apostate in the fourth century, by Voltaire in the 18^th century, by Nietzsche in the 19^th century, and by Khrushchev in the 20^th century.

The last word does not belong to their ilk. Even Wilson finishes not with the vagaries of modernism but with the words of Revelation 1:18,

I was dead, and see, I am alive for evermore.