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God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization
A magisterial, colorful narrative illuminates the central tragedy of the nineteenth century--that God, or rather man's faith in God, died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him. Tour.
402 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
A.N. Wilson
116 books230 followersAndrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
August 20, 2016
In some ways this was a difficult book to read. It’s not that Wilson didn’t handle his subject matter well. Nor did the author fail to keep my attention. I’ve long been interested in the Victorian period, particularly in those writers and thinkers whose ideas influenced the intellectual and theological landscape.
God’s Funeral surveyed the decline in belief in the historic Christian faith. This is what I’d expected and why I read it. But as an evangelical Christian myself, it made for some dismal reading at times. To his credit, the author, a non-Christian, did deal fairly with both sides of the ongoing debate: faith versus doubt.
In brief, David Hume’s empiricism paved the way for widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas espoused in On the Origin of Species. George Herbert then attempted to apply the theory of evolution to every philosophical question. George Eliot wrote popular novels expressing her brand of agnosticism. William James offered “religious experience” as a mere inevitable human necessity. And Thomas Hardy, according to the author, presided poetically over God’s funeral.
What I noticed in the vast majority of the biographical sketches presented were the underlying tones of hopelessness and even despair:
“If the literalism and the idolatrous (to a mind of a later generation) attitude to ‘science’ are characteristic of the Victorians who lost their faith, so too is their terrible, pitiable unhappiness, their sense of of metaphysical isolation.”
“Few of us are in a position to guess...whether Spencer [after death] considers that the hours, weeks, months, years of dyspepsia, solitude, depression, and loneliness--the price he paid for writing millions of words which no one now reads--were, in the end, worth the effort.”
“[Thomas] Carlyle remained to the end of his unhappy days a disgruntled and disillusioned radical of the 1830s, a man with a perpetual sense of loss, which included a sense of the loss of God.”
To his credit, the author does acknowledge that science still has not “triumphed” over faith, though this was certainly what many scholars of the 19th century believed would eventually occur. He does, however, espouse the opinion that science and faith are incompatible, that one or the other must be discarded in a soundly logical mind. Numerous avowed Christian scientists--deceased and living--would disagree.
The higher biblical criticism of 19th century Germany was a significant factor in the growth of unbelief. This modernist approach to Scripture interpretation basically stripped everything miraculous from the biblical accounts and allegorized the rest. The eventual result was a passive societal acceptance of agnosticism and atheism, even though the vast majority of Europeans still sat in a pew on Sunday morning. When the Bible is rejected as God’s infallible and divine revelation to man, unbelief swiftly follows. But it takes several generations before we see the full impact upon the culture.
As the author admits, “the human race can easily deprive itself of Christianity, but finds it rather more difficult to lose its capacity for worship.” The fact is everyone will worship something. No amount of intellectual posturing or supposed “proofs” of science will change this fact of human nature. And it does matter what or who a person chooses to worship. Truth by its very definition is narrow and exclusive (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...).
On a final note, it’s noteworthy to recognize what the following century would bring: two world wars and unprecedented global genocide under tyrannical regimes:
"Dethroning God, that generation [contemporary with George Bernard Shaw] found it impossible to leave the sanctuary empty. They put man in His place, which had the paradoxical effect, not of elevating human nature but of demeaning it to its depths of cruelty, depravity and stupidity unparalleled in human history."
God’s Funeral surveyed the decline in belief in the historic Christian faith. This is what I’d expected and why I read it. But as an evangelical Christian myself, it made for some dismal reading at times. To his credit, the author, a non-Christian, did deal fairly with both sides of the ongoing debate: faith versus doubt.
In brief, David Hume’s empiricism paved the way for widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas espoused in On the Origin of Species. George Herbert then attempted to apply the theory of evolution to every philosophical question. George Eliot wrote popular novels expressing her brand of agnosticism. William James offered “religious experience” as a mere inevitable human necessity. And Thomas Hardy, according to the author, presided poetically over God’s funeral.
What I noticed in the vast majority of the biographical sketches presented were the underlying tones of hopelessness and even despair:
“If the literalism and the idolatrous (to a mind of a later generation) attitude to ‘science’ are characteristic of the Victorians who lost their faith, so too is their terrible, pitiable unhappiness, their sense of of metaphysical isolation.”
“Few of us are in a position to guess...whether Spencer [after death] considers that the hours, weeks, months, years of dyspepsia, solitude, depression, and loneliness--the price he paid for writing millions of words which no one now reads--were, in the end, worth the effort.”
“[Thomas] Carlyle remained to the end of his unhappy days a disgruntled and disillusioned radical of the 1830s, a man with a perpetual sense of loss, which included a sense of the loss of God.”
To his credit, the author does acknowledge that science still has not “triumphed” over faith, though this was certainly what many scholars of the 19th century believed would eventually occur. He does, however, espouse the opinion that science and faith are incompatible, that one or the other must be discarded in a soundly logical mind. Numerous avowed Christian scientists--deceased and living--would disagree.
The higher biblical criticism of 19th century Germany was a significant factor in the growth of unbelief. This modernist approach to Scripture interpretation basically stripped everything miraculous from the biblical accounts and allegorized the rest. The eventual result was a passive societal acceptance of agnosticism and atheism, even though the vast majority of Europeans still sat in a pew on Sunday morning. When the Bible is rejected as God’s infallible and divine revelation to man, unbelief swiftly follows. But it takes several generations before we see the full impact upon the culture.
As the author admits, “the human race can easily deprive itself of Christianity, but finds it rather more difficult to lose its capacity for worship.” The fact is everyone will worship something. No amount of intellectual posturing or supposed “proofs” of science will change this fact of human nature. And it does matter what or who a person chooses to worship. Truth by its very definition is narrow and exclusive (https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...).
On a final note, it’s noteworthy to recognize what the following century would bring: two world wars and unprecedented global genocide under tyrannical regimes:
"Dethroning God, that generation [contemporary with George Bernard Shaw] found it impossible to leave the sanctuary empty. They put man in His place, which had the paradoxical effect, not of elevating human nature but of demeaning it to its depths of cruelty, depravity and stupidity unparalleled in human history."
August 21, 2009
Religious skepticism was becoming more popular at the end of the nineteenth century among many intellectuals and writers in Europe. Why had they abandoned traditional Christianity? Was it a result of industrial and scientific progress? Was it Charles Darwin and his insightful writing on evolution? As A.N. Wilson writes, the sources of this skepticism and disbelief were many and varied. Synthesizing biography and intellectual history, Wilson traces the lives and ideas of people like Hume, Mill, Hegel, Gibbon, Hardy and others to demonstrate that the seeds of the destruction of traditional religious belief had been sown long before Darwin. I appreciated his insights into some of my favorite authors like Hardy and Hume. However, the main purpose of the author is to explain this growth in atheism and agnosticism and as such it is a useful guide. In it Wilson covers the breadth of Victorian intellectual thought regarding theism and atheism.
May 23, 2009
God still has " value" e.g., when a politician or other prominent individual gets himself into trouble (usually through a failing of his zipper or wallet), and he (rarely she) seeks redemption in the eyes of the public by public confession of his sins and expression of the need for divine forgiveness and grace. Witness Charles Colson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bill Clinton (the bizarre prayer breakfast).
" Value" may have a rather foreign meaning in this context, but the philosopher who coined the phrase meant that whether God exists or not may be irrelevant; those in disgrace can always fall back on Divine Mercy to seek redemption. It's effective. This despite centuries of scientific destruction of religious dogma. It was no wonder the Renaissance popes reacted so fiercely to Galilean ideas. The anthropomorphic view of the universe, and " made in God's image" was being effectively destroyed.
The discovery by geologists of the long evolution of the earth and the creation and extinction of numerous forms of life on the planet made belief in a loving, benevolent, and omnipotent creator seem fatuous. The scientific research of the nineteenth century revealed a Nature with no discernible purpose, "not a loving purpose, or an anthropocentric purpose. In other words, if you pressed the argument from Design too far you might infer a God who was curious about a multiplicity of life-forms, entirely unconcerned about the bloodiness and painfulness with which many of these forms sustained life while on this planet, a God who was no more demonstrably interested in the human race than He was in, say, beetles, of which He created an inordinately large variety."
What Wilson has done is to examine the origins of the twentieth-century conflict that has evolved between scientific fact and religious belief (fantasy) through brief sketches of a variety of nineteenth-century philosophers, writers, and naturalists who participated in this great debate. He examines the Victorian experience of the conflict between doubt and faith and its effect on the twentieth century. The nineteenth century provided the context for the debate and polemics for the discussion of God's demise.
It was a time for celebration of political thinkers, scientists and artists to proclaim the end of religion, yet Wilson notes that church attendance remained constant. Even the debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce helped create an atmosphere of optimism about the perfectibility of humankind. Thinking ranged from the stubborn unbelief of people like Marx and Swinbourne to Freud, who thought religion would just wither away, to William James, who argued it provided a useful psychological crutch.
Thinkers of the nineteenth century had to "choose between giving up intellectual honesty or abandoning that spiritual and religious dimension to life which, as far as we can discover from the historians and anthropologists, is so fundamental a part of all previous human existence."
The title of the book is from a poem by Thomas Hardy, subject of the first chapter. In this poem, Hardy imagines himself at God's funeral. He speaks of the death of the myth of God that we have created, but simultaneously he regrets the loss of faith and notes sympathetically those who continue to believe despite evidence that the God we have created no longer exists. Hardy, himself atheist, remained very fond of religious trappings, the music and liturgical ceremony. When he was invested in Magdalene College, the dons were very worried he might eschew the formal religious ceremony, but he surprised them by accepting it completely. His remark, " course, it' all just sentiment to me now" did spoil the effect, however.
" Value" may have a rather foreign meaning in this context, but the philosopher who coined the phrase meant that whether God exists or not may be irrelevant; those in disgrace can always fall back on Divine Mercy to seek redemption. It's effective. This despite centuries of scientific destruction of religious dogma. It was no wonder the Renaissance popes reacted so fiercely to Galilean ideas. The anthropomorphic view of the universe, and " made in God's image" was being effectively destroyed.
The discovery by geologists of the long evolution of the earth and the creation and extinction of numerous forms of life on the planet made belief in a loving, benevolent, and omnipotent creator seem fatuous. The scientific research of the nineteenth century revealed a Nature with no discernible purpose, "not a loving purpose, or an anthropocentric purpose. In other words, if you pressed the argument from Design too far you might infer a God who was curious about a multiplicity of life-forms, entirely unconcerned about the bloodiness and painfulness with which many of these forms sustained life while on this planet, a God who was no more demonstrably interested in the human race than He was in, say, beetles, of which He created an inordinately large variety."
What Wilson has done is to examine the origins of the twentieth-century conflict that has evolved between scientific fact and religious belief (fantasy) through brief sketches of a variety of nineteenth-century philosophers, writers, and naturalists who participated in this great debate. He examines the Victorian experience of the conflict between doubt and faith and its effect on the twentieth century. The nineteenth century provided the context for the debate and polemics for the discussion of God's demise.
It was a time for celebration of political thinkers, scientists and artists to proclaim the end of religion, yet Wilson notes that church attendance remained constant. Even the debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce helped create an atmosphere of optimism about the perfectibility of humankind. Thinking ranged from the stubborn unbelief of people like Marx and Swinbourne to Freud, who thought religion would just wither away, to William James, who argued it provided a useful psychological crutch.
Thinkers of the nineteenth century had to "choose between giving up intellectual honesty or abandoning that spiritual and religious dimension to life which, as far as we can discover from the historians and anthropologists, is so fundamental a part of all previous human existence."
The title of the book is from a poem by Thomas Hardy, subject of the first chapter. In this poem, Hardy imagines himself at God's funeral. He speaks of the death of the myth of God that we have created, but simultaneously he regrets the loss of faith and notes sympathetically those who continue to believe despite evidence that the God we have created no longer exists. Hardy, himself atheist, remained very fond of religious trappings, the music and liturgical ceremony. When he was invested in Magdalene College, the dons were very worried he might eschew the formal religious ceremony, but he surprised them by accepting it completely. His remark, " course, it' all just sentiment to me now" did spoil the effect, however.
September 19, 2020
One Sunday in 1842, when George Eliot was only 23, she refused to accompany her parents to church. She no longer believed in the Evangelical faith. She was a bellwether for her generation in turning away from such faith. This signaled the beginning of secularism in Britain.
Post-Boomer, it's likely the same will happen in the U.S.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...
For more detail on the Eliot story, see my review of Middlemarch.....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Post-Boomer, it's likely the same will happen in the U.S.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...
For more detail on the Eliot story, see my review of Middlemarch.....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 24, 2019
A very interesting topic, but I find this hard to read. The sub-title says "Western Civilization", but this focuses mostly on Victorian-era England. It is fine to focus on that area, but the title should reflect the narrower focus. (I haven't finished it, so maybe it does broaden-out later.) [Update: it does not.] It is probably easier to read for people who've already studied the various writers who are mentioned, for it seems the author presupposes some background in them.
I put it aside for a while and came back later because it was tough for me to get through. Some of the writers discussed here are still well-known. Others, barely remembered at all, get dredged up here. All are upper-class English people, and maybe a few Scots. (A few non-Brits are mentioned but not discussed in depth.)
Interesting subject. Progress in science, most specifically the theory of Evolution and historical research into biblical texts, was raising doubts about things the Christian church had been saying. At the same time, Victorian England was preoccupied with ancient Greek culture, fathers were spending more time at home (causing conflicts with their children which is seen in lots of the fiction of the time), the British Empire was starting to decline. You could still go to jail for blasphemy.
My favorite line: "We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is God is Dad, and we wish him dead."
The title, by the way, is from a poem by Thomas Hardy.
A different author could probably make it come alive for me, while this one could not, though he certainly seems to know his subject.
I put it aside for a while and came back later because it was tough for me to get through. Some of the writers discussed here are still well-known. Others, barely remembered at all, get dredged up here. All are upper-class English people, and maybe a few Scots. (A few non-Brits are mentioned but not discussed in depth.)
Interesting subject. Progress in science, most specifically the theory of Evolution and historical research into biblical texts, was raising doubts about things the Christian church had been saying. At the same time, Victorian England was preoccupied with ancient Greek culture, fathers were spending more time at home (causing conflicts with their children which is seen in lots of the fiction of the time), the British Empire was starting to decline. You could still go to jail for blasphemy.
My favorite line: "We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is God is Dad, and we wish him dead."
The title, by the way, is from a poem by Thomas Hardy.
A different author could probably make it come alive for me, while this one could not, though he certainly seems to know his subject.
July 15, 2024
Author is incredibly condescending and egotistical in his tone and writing style and is no doubt the same in life as well. Spends about half of his time trying to justify authors no one reads anymore (not even many academics) or trying to convert any readers to an absurd wishy-washy Christianity which also is very much like the 18th century deism that the author spends another 1/3 of his book condemning and even more perverse than the literal Christianity that exists in the United States. As a scientist, I was offended by the author's near total misunderstanding of scientific principles and incredible generalizations (and entirely false ones) about the intentions of scientists. Incorrect identification or very poor understanding of specific scientific theories or ideas made the author sound like a ignorant philosopher trying to use science, which he does not understand, to justify motives he conceived before any investigation of the facts. The reason why he appears in this light is that what he did or was doing. I just wanted to read a book about why Christianity began to decline in Victorian Europe. Instead I stumbled upon an opus almost entirely enshrined to convert me to an option that I find untenable. He comes at you, with big words and quotes from obtuse and dusty philosophers dabbling in the most incredible arm-waving and nonsense even engaged by humanity, asking the same stupid meaningless questions that any spiritualistic modern Christian always feels the need to ask, such as: What is the purpose of the universe or life or the Big Bang, et cetera. I honestly wanted to like this book, but the author has such an agenda throughout the whole book to make it unreadable to anyone uninterested in his pseudo-philosophic, misty-eyed, vague, meaningless rubbish. Plus I cannot stand authors with no humor (and Mr. Wilson is a fine specimen of such an author) and who write with prose the oozes with his self-righteous, knowledgeable, stiflingly preachy and pointlessly spiritualistic, ignorant and wayward, self-aggrandizing, conceited, duplicitous, pathetic, egotism! Okay, now I had said my stuff! Don't read this book, unless of course you enjoy being dictated to or sermonized to by a conceited jerk with an ego larger than that of the collected Rolling Stones!
June 22, 2011
Ah, what a soothing experience Wilson's prose is, a quiet and erudite voice that one must strain ever so slightly to hear and whose locution and placidity can but heighten the reasonableness and rightfulness of the learned elucidations and expositions which—lovingly carved from a stone of Victorian society—are set to stand comfortably amidst an atmosphere of genial and persuasive conversation. He has well heard the lengthy and melancholy sigh that escaped from this era when the essence of a steadying and ubiquitous God was evaporating, and endeavored impressively to set down the notes that comprised its sorrowing timbre.
April 1, 2009
From David`Hume, Karl Marx, George Eliot 'til Thomas Hardy, this book paints a big picture of deism and atheism in western civilization; and not only presenting details of some prominent atheist leaders, this book also gave some insight to the causes of their unbelief. The author's erudation is to be congratulated. It is highly readable, and hence an ideal place to start having an intelligent conversation between Christianity and Atheism.
February 8, 2020
When Wilson wrote this he was an atheist, he has since come to some sort of Christian faith. It would be interesting to read how he would write the same book today. I don't know that it would be much different, for he does show an admiration for a certain type of mystical believer who was open to the truth as the science of the Victorian age defined it.
The book is a depressing tale of person after person who loses his or her faith in light of the crushing new knowledge bursting upon the world. The main challenges to Christianity that Wilson sees in Victorian times are Hume, Darwin, and Lyell in the realms of philosophy, biology, and geology respectively. These men and many more like them (Marx for one) scythed through the established theology of the day. Historical critical interpretation of the Bible rose in Germany and was for a time ignored in England, but gradually swept over the clergy and people like a flood. To a large degree these same forces are all still in play today, which makes this an important read.
Largely, the book describes a discussion among the educated classes of that day about the most important aspects of being human. Wilson spends a chapter on a person or two and delves into how he or she dealt with God, or the death of God. There is a lot of assumed knowledge, such as knowing the broad facts of a life, or the lay of the land, or that you are conversant with literature and philosophy.
The book is a depressing tale of person after person who loses his or her faith in light of the crushing new knowledge bursting upon the world. The main challenges to Christianity that Wilson sees in Victorian times are Hume, Darwin, and Lyell in the realms of philosophy, biology, and geology respectively. These men and many more like them (Marx for one) scythed through the established theology of the day. Historical critical interpretation of the Bible rose in Germany and was for a time ignored in England, but gradually swept over the clergy and people like a flood. To a large degree these same forces are all still in play today, which makes this an important read.
Largely, the book describes a discussion among the educated classes of that day about the most important aspects of being human. Wilson spends a chapter on a person or two and delves into how he or she dealt with God, or the death of God. There is a lot of assumed knowledge, such as knowing the broad facts of a life, or the lay of the land, or that you are conversant with literature and philosophy.
August 7, 2012
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 WeeklyAt 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.
July 2, 2016
After a slow and shaky start, my philosophy-challenged brain cells adapted to the intellectual tone of this meticulously researched and documented book about the decline of religious faith in the 19th century. The author discusses the various scientific discoveries and philosophical arguments that led to many prominent individuals to abandon Christianity, and even God, altogether; and the effects this abandonment of belief had on these individuals and on society itself.
The thing I found most notable is how much this 19th-century struggle between intellectualism and faith is still going on for many people today. It certainly was mirrored in my own life. After about age 17 or 18, I could no longer accept the dogmatic, literalist fundamentalism with which I had been raised, but I couldn't reject the concept of God out of hand. After several years of searching, I returned to Christianity, but a different faith tradition: one which allows and encourages me to think, to question, to come to my own understanding of God and a faith that works for me.
I found it interesting, and encouraging, that the book itself ends on a similar note.
The thing I found most notable is how much this 19th-century struggle between intellectualism and faith is still going on for many people today. It certainly was mirrored in my own life. After about age 17 or 18, I could no longer accept the dogmatic, literalist fundamentalism with which I had been raised, but I couldn't reject the concept of God out of hand. After several years of searching, I returned to Christianity, but a different faith tradition: one which allows and encourages me to think, to question, to come to my own understanding of God and a faith that works for me.
I found it interesting, and encouraging, that the book itself ends on a similar note.
February 4, 2022
Sometimes you read a book, and you realize that the intellectual world is much bigger than you will ever be able to absorb, and that there are really smart people out there who have mastered hard stuff and have it seemingly at their fingertips. This is one of those books.
"God's Funeral" is a rapid trip through the intellectual history of (primarily) the UK and (somewhat) Germany in the 19th century as scientists, philosophers, and general thinkers demolished the centuries of tradition that God exists and that the events in the Bible, such as Creation, actually happened as they are portrayed. Its pace is a strength, as the author covers everyone from Carlyle to Kant to George Eliot to Marx to Freud to Henry James. But the pace also makes for a challenge for the average reader, such as me, as it's hard to grasp these tough concepts. However, the alternative of me stopping at each new idea and going back to the original text or even watching a couple of YouTube lectures is impossible, given the sheer breadth of coverage.
The author's style is very engaging. His summaries of thinkers' ideas is excellent, and he a really smart thing besides of reminding you of their ideas by using a short phrase when he reintroduces them in later chapters as precursors to new ideas. It's tremendously helpful to have these smooth reminders presented throughout.
I also greatly enjoyed the author's obvious comfort with the subject matter, as he tosses off his commentaries (with humor) about the better and weaker elements of various thinkers' writings and lectures. He even throws in mini-biographies, especially when they mattered to what the thinker had to say. Somebody, I think it was Newman (?) hated his father and was barely on speaking terms with him, and this led him to think about God-the-Father as an angry, vengeful God; and this leads the author later into a discussion of Freud and the son-killing-the-father idea and how that translates to anti-religion; and that leads to a discussion of the James family and their break on religion that did not lead to personal anger; and that leads to the conclusion in which the author is very sympathetic to the ideas of James that God in some form of human commonality is a positive force in the universe, and that we are an angrier, sadder people without it. That's just one example of the masterful weaving in this book.
At times, however, I was in over my head. This came earliest in the book, with the work of Kant, Hegel, and others who were doing deep philosophical thinking. I don't fault the author's explanations, which were important digressions. But I think you really have to spend time studying these topics to reach an understanding -- remember, these smart guys wrestled with them their whole lives and debated them with other smart people, and they never figured it out. So I had some trouble following how some of those early ideas about what we can know (through our perceptions vs. what is really out there in reality -- i.e., is an apple red independent of our perception of the color, which comes not through our consciousness but through features in our eyes and brains, etc.) specifically found their way into the God argument. I understand in general what happened: new ways of understanding what we know and the growth of the use of science to study what we know, rather than the abstract thinking based on the Bible led to a diminishment of belief in the Bible as truth and therefore in God. I get that. But I'd like to "get" it more deeply. That's up to me to investigate further.
The only criticism I have of the book is that it's so UK-centric. Maybe the British guys (mostly guys) were the leaders of this form of Enlightenment. But clearly the German thinkers were at least their equal and, likely, ahead of the game. And given that France had already experimented during its revolution with dropping the whole state religion thing, I image there were many French intellectual diving into the same questions about God, heaven, transubstantiation, and so on. But we're left with an almost wholly British intellectual history, as if not much else was going on culturally elsewhere on this topic. And we know in the US that the religious revival of pre-Civil War led to all sorts of things, such as creation of the Mormon religion, so obviously people were reacting to anti-God debate in the US as well. But those other movements are more or less ignored in this book. In the interest of length, this is probably a good idea.
One more thing. I think it's interesting that the author's stance on the issue is, more or less, that the 19th century in England, at least, marked the end of belief by both the elite and the masses in God as an omnipotent being that watched over and maybe manipulated lives. And the author believes this is, ultimately, a bad thing because the man-centered, no-higher-motive ideologies that replaced it in the 20th century led to two world wars and the horrors of the Soviet Union. As bad as the established Church has been -- sexism, racism, greed, starting innumerable religious war -- it's not as bad as what came next. And that's a pretty compelling argument even for me, as a total non-believer in any type of higher power.
"God's Funeral" is a rapid trip through the intellectual history of (primarily) the UK and (somewhat) Germany in the 19th century as scientists, philosophers, and general thinkers demolished the centuries of tradition that God exists and that the events in the Bible, such as Creation, actually happened as they are portrayed. Its pace is a strength, as the author covers everyone from Carlyle to Kant to George Eliot to Marx to Freud to Henry James. But the pace also makes for a challenge for the average reader, such as me, as it's hard to grasp these tough concepts. However, the alternative of me stopping at each new idea and going back to the original text or even watching a couple of YouTube lectures is impossible, given the sheer breadth of coverage.
The author's style is very engaging. His summaries of thinkers' ideas is excellent, and he a really smart thing besides of reminding you of their ideas by using a short phrase when he reintroduces them in later chapters as precursors to new ideas. It's tremendously helpful to have these smooth reminders presented throughout.
I also greatly enjoyed the author's obvious comfort with the subject matter, as he tosses off his commentaries (with humor) about the better and weaker elements of various thinkers' writings and lectures. He even throws in mini-biographies, especially when they mattered to what the thinker had to say. Somebody, I think it was Newman (?) hated his father and was barely on speaking terms with him, and this led him to think about God-the-Father as an angry, vengeful God; and this leads the author later into a discussion of Freud and the son-killing-the-father idea and how that translates to anti-religion; and that leads to a discussion of the James family and their break on religion that did not lead to personal anger; and that leads to the conclusion in which the author is very sympathetic to the ideas of James that God in some form of human commonality is a positive force in the universe, and that we are an angrier, sadder people without it. That's just one example of the masterful weaving in this book.
At times, however, I was in over my head. This came earliest in the book, with the work of Kant, Hegel, and others who were doing deep philosophical thinking. I don't fault the author's explanations, which were important digressions. But I think you really have to spend time studying these topics to reach an understanding -- remember, these smart guys wrestled with them their whole lives and debated them with other smart people, and they never figured it out. So I had some trouble following how some of those early ideas about what we can know (through our perceptions vs. what is really out there in reality -- i.e., is an apple red independent of our perception of the color, which comes not through our consciousness but through features in our eyes and brains, etc.) specifically found their way into the God argument. I understand in general what happened: new ways of understanding what we know and the growth of the use of science to study what we know, rather than the abstract thinking based on the Bible led to a diminishment of belief in the Bible as truth and therefore in God. I get that. But I'd like to "get" it more deeply. That's up to me to investigate further.
The only criticism I have of the book is that it's so UK-centric. Maybe the British guys (mostly guys) were the leaders of this form of Enlightenment. But clearly the German thinkers were at least their equal and, likely, ahead of the game. And given that France had already experimented during its revolution with dropping the whole state religion thing, I image there were many French intellectual diving into the same questions about God, heaven, transubstantiation, and so on. But we're left with an almost wholly British intellectual history, as if not much else was going on culturally elsewhere on this topic. And we know in the US that the religious revival of pre-Civil War led to all sorts of things, such as creation of the Mormon religion, so obviously people were reacting to anti-God debate in the US as well. But those other movements are more or less ignored in this book. In the interest of length, this is probably a good idea.
One more thing. I think it's interesting that the author's stance on the issue is, more or less, that the 19th century in England, at least, marked the end of belief by both the elite and the masses in God as an omnipotent being that watched over and maybe manipulated lives. And the author believes this is, ultimately, a bad thing because the man-centered, no-higher-motive ideologies that replaced it in the 20th century led to two world wars and the horrors of the Soviet Union. As bad as the established Church has been -- sexism, racism, greed, starting innumerable religious war -- it's not as bad as what came next. And that's a pretty compelling argument even for me, as a total non-believer in any type of higher power.
August 22, 2014
Brilliantly written. Contrary to several reviews I read, this book is not advocating atheism or even saying that God is "dead." Rather, it describes the ascent of atheism as accepted thought in the Western world.
February 18, 2009
waste of paper and environmental resources. destroy in profligate carbonaceous fashion.
February 21, 2023
"For any society deocide is the worst possible crime imaginable".---Susan Sontag
A..N. Wilson is the best kind of British conservative (not necessarily Tory) you could want on your bookshelf. Billy Boy once suggested ditching the Windsors, whose combined I.Q. does not exceed room temperature, with a cadet branch of the family. Like Edward Gibbons and David Hume before him, he is an agent provocateur who loathes organized religion. GOD'S FUNERAL covers the English intellectual, political and cultural landscape after Darwin threw a sucker punch at God with the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) and the Supreme Being went down for the count. Freud suggested, in TOTEM AND TABOO, that killing God (deocide) is like killing your father and that is precisely what happened in Victorian England. Some denied the act had ever taken place. One Oxford don wrote of THE ORIGINS, "I don't believe a word of it". Others followed the dictum of "if you can't beat them, distort the facts". Thus one theologian marveled at natural selection,"how marvelous of God to choose such a subtle way of revealing his creation". (Bear in mind that this is now, 2023, the Catholic position on evolution, including the Pope.) But, for the vast majority, from aristocrat to working class, heaven was now empty: "Imagine being told that not only did God not exist but that such a being had never existed". Of course, Darwin was not the sole slayer of the Deity. Wilson finds the wide gap between Victorian morals, above all in sexual matters, set by Victoria and Albert, and the practice of sex, starting with their two sons and emulated by the rest of the ruling class, to have profoundly shaken a morality based on God-worship; it turned out to be unsound and unusable. Great Britain's great progress in economics---the U.S.A. did not surpass the U.K. in industry until after 1900, also undermined organized belief. So did modern modes of transportation, which gave people something to do on Sundays other than attend church. Great Britain is a laboratory experiment for Wilson. The rest of the Western world would soon follow in witnessing the death of God. (Those who argue for American exceptionalism had better prove their case.) Once religion declines in any society it never comes back. And, after God? George Orwell wrote in the Thirties that the decline of faith in Great Britain had "left a hole that nothing seems to be able to fill". Children, you must learn to live without your defunct father.
A..N. Wilson is the best kind of British conservative (not necessarily Tory) you could want on your bookshelf. Billy Boy once suggested ditching the Windsors, whose combined I.Q. does not exceed room temperature, with a cadet branch of the family. Like Edward Gibbons and David Hume before him, he is an agent provocateur who loathes organized religion. GOD'S FUNERAL covers the English intellectual, political and cultural landscape after Darwin threw a sucker punch at God with the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859) and the Supreme Being went down for the count. Freud suggested, in TOTEM AND TABOO, that killing God (deocide) is like killing your father and that is precisely what happened in Victorian England. Some denied the act had ever taken place. One Oxford don wrote of THE ORIGINS, "I don't believe a word of it". Others followed the dictum of "if you can't beat them, distort the facts". Thus one theologian marveled at natural selection,"how marvelous of God to choose such a subtle way of revealing his creation". (Bear in mind that this is now, 2023, the Catholic position on evolution, including the Pope.) But, for the vast majority, from aristocrat to working class, heaven was now empty: "Imagine being told that not only did God not exist but that such a being had never existed". Of course, Darwin was not the sole slayer of the Deity. Wilson finds the wide gap between Victorian morals, above all in sexual matters, set by Victoria and Albert, and the practice of sex, starting with their two sons and emulated by the rest of the ruling class, to have profoundly shaken a morality based on God-worship; it turned out to be unsound and unusable. Great Britain's great progress in economics---the U.S.A. did not surpass the U.K. in industry until after 1900, also undermined organized belief. So did modern modes of transportation, which gave people something to do on Sundays other than attend church. Great Britain is a laboratory experiment for Wilson. The rest of the Western world would soon follow in witnessing the death of God. (Those who argue for American exceptionalism had better prove their case.) Once religion declines in any society it never comes back. And, after God? George Orwell wrote in the Thirties that the decline of faith in Great Britain had "left a hole that nothing seems to be able to fill". Children, you must learn to live without your defunct father.
December 26, 2019
A.N. Wilson has written a chatty, readable book about the death of God in Victorian Britain. He ventures outside to the United Kingdom occasionally to include German, French and American philosophers, but focuses principally on his countrymen and a few countrywomen.
He has written elsewhere on this topic and this book ties much together and that is perhaps why it doesn't seem all that well edited. Personages are referred to on occasion only by their last names, or their names are dropped without a hint as to why they are important at this juncture in the narrative. Apparently everyone knows who Joseph Chamberlain is, for example.
The structure of the book is loose in the sense that Wilson doesn't really build to a climax, but instead moves from one group of people to the next and lets you know how they contributed to the demise of the deity. Generally, God was under threat on a couple of fronts. First, philosophy progressed to a point where it could show that as a revealed religion, Christianity was pretty much of a bust. Lots of Protestant truisms, such as that the Pentateuch was dictated to Moses by God, are shown to be quite insupportable. Second, science began to make entirely different claims about the history of the Earth than one can find in the Bible, when one was expected to think of the Bible as a history book.
In the end 'God's Funeral' felt like a primer on this topic rather than an indepth survey. Wilson is an entertaining writer, which helps the reader plow through weighty material, but his readability also encourages you to think about reading his other books, including the three on the Victorian era and his 'biography' of Jesus.
But he is not reliable on all topics. Most glaringly, he doesn't not understand the theory of natural selection. Like a lot of non-scientists, however well educated, he for example believes that evolution is progressive, which it emphatically is not. Any time he ventures into the historical sciences, his perspective is therefore not to be trusted. He is more at home with philosophy and certainly with history. Although in some cases, he seems to simply want to relate an interesting story about a Victorian and what they have to do with killing God seems like a bit of a reach.
He has written elsewhere on this topic and this book ties much together and that is perhaps why it doesn't seem all that well edited. Personages are referred to on occasion only by their last names, or their names are dropped without a hint as to why they are important at this juncture in the narrative. Apparently everyone knows who Joseph Chamberlain is, for example.
The structure of the book is loose in the sense that Wilson doesn't really build to a climax, but instead moves from one group of people to the next and lets you know how they contributed to the demise of the deity. Generally, God was under threat on a couple of fronts. First, philosophy progressed to a point where it could show that as a revealed religion, Christianity was pretty much of a bust. Lots of Protestant truisms, such as that the Pentateuch was dictated to Moses by God, are shown to be quite insupportable. Second, science began to make entirely different claims about the history of the Earth than one can find in the Bible, when one was expected to think of the Bible as a history book.
In the end 'God's Funeral' felt like a primer on this topic rather than an indepth survey. Wilson is an entertaining writer, which helps the reader plow through weighty material, but his readability also encourages you to think about reading his other books, including the three on the Victorian era and his 'biography' of Jesus.
But he is not reliable on all topics. Most glaringly, he doesn't not understand the theory of natural selection. Like a lot of non-scientists, however well educated, he for example believes that evolution is progressive, which it emphatically is not. Any time he ventures into the historical sciences, his perspective is therefore not to be trusted. He is more at home with philosophy and certainly with history. Although in some cases, he seems to simply want to relate an interesting story about a Victorian and what they have to do with killing God seems like a bit of a reach.
August 11, 2021
A.N. Wilson is brilliant. I had to skip a number of chapters because some of it was over my head. I found the concluding chapter to be quite wonderful. I esp. recall his point about the inability to explain the boundary between lust and love (as an analogy to the boundary between materialistic atheism and the feeling of religious experience documented by Wm. James [and others]). I also found the collection of photos very engaging ... and, using the book's index, went back and looked at the relevant passages for various people of interest (George Eliot, Cardinal Newman, William James, others). I also found the opening chapters very enlightening ... e.g. Gibbons' takedowns of the early Christians (and of Christianity) in his monumental work - takedowns which apparently went over the heads of many of Gibbons' readers, but which set the stage - or which were representative of sentiments already extant among some people - for the 19th Century explosion of Doubt. As a materialist atheist myself (although I believe in complexity that springs spontaneously from organic matter [I forget the terminology used for this; but an example would be 'mind' arising from wet neurons with the help of trillions of quantum mechanical chemical reactions happening in those neurons] ..anyway, I'm astounded that after the age of enlightenment how fundamentalist adherents to religion, Christianity in particular, are still a powerful force in society. I think this book is mostly useful to people with historic interest in the topic, and esp. in the 19th Century.
February 18, 2023
Really enjoyed this book. Wilson deftly guides the reader through the intricacies of Nineteenth Century thought as it slowly dispenses with the idea or need of God. Although I disagree with the idea of God’s death, I appreciated a helpful introduction to a number of writers and thinkers who I had never become acquainted with. Others I had studied, but could now see them in a fuller context of Nineteenth Century thought. Wilson is a good writer and he keeps the readers interest throughout with helpful biographical information as well as some deft analysis of their beliefs and their relationships with a whole range of other characters. Whilst I will not be mourning God’s death because I find him very much alive, I now find myself better informed and understanding of those who do judge God is dead.
October 1, 2019
I liked the concept of this book more than the book itself. At times I had to skip over sections of it, and wasn't that drawn to the level of depth it went into on 19th century thinkers. Perhaps fundamentally I disagreed with much of the premise of the book, and found little which opened my eyes or made me see things differently. Worth a brief flick through, unless you're passionately interested in this topic.
December 7, 2013
Excellent book. Brings to life the 19th century thinkers -- the writers, philosophers, teachers, priests, and politicians who found themselves unable to believe in the doctrines and dogma of the Christian church, and makes vivid the issues that captivated them. The crisis in faith (secondary in part to advances in science, esp. in evolutionary biology; and also to historical/critical analyses of of Hebrew/Christian scripture) was widespread among the well-educated, and was met by a truly vicious push-back from the Vatican just after 1900 (Pius X started the purge against what was then called Modernism; his insistence that the Catholic Church turn its back on science and an honest look at scripture kept the church in a medieval frame of mind until Vatican II, and shortly thereafter this way of thinking returned with surprising vigor).
The author's sympathies lie with theism, and he makes some attempt to defend and support religious faith in spite of the very real difficulties and concerns that did then and still do confront any thoughtful person who honestly looks at the claims made by any religion. However, his defense is not persuasive (he appeals to the idea that those who are religious have lives that are "deeper" than those who lack religious faith/beliefs -- and this is patently nonsense), and it does not detract from the fascinating and vivid pictures he gives us of the lives and thinking of some very interesting people and times.
The author's sympathies lie with theism, and he makes some attempt to defend and support religious faith in spite of the very real difficulties and concerns that did then and still do confront any thoughtful person who honestly looks at the claims made by any religion. However, his defense is not persuasive (he appeals to the idea that those who are religious have lives that are "deeper" than those who lack religious faith/beliefs -- and this is patently nonsense), and it does not detract from the fascinating and vivid pictures he gives us of the lives and thinking of some very interesting people and times.
February 20, 2014
A philosophical discourse on the 'death of God' in the late 18th and 19th centuries begins with the idea that Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" started the slow demise of God. Readers of Gibbon's book began questioning the 'Church's" teachings on the history of "Christianity" and then its teachings on the Bible itself. The Enlightenment and science added to the doubt of a literal interpretation of the Bible as people recognized discrepancies as they started reading and studying the basis of 'Christianity'. Wilson covers most of the well known philosophers of the era and several most people have forgotten or never heard of before. This work is a literary and philosophical critique and while categorized as history could just as easily find a place in Religion or Philosophy.
August 3, 2010
The 19th century was the era in which it appeared that God no longer held any meaning, when Biblical literalism ceased to be tenable to thinking people, and when Darwinism seemed to eliminate the need for a Designer. This book examines the struggles and thoughts of many of the great thinkers, writers and artists of the period and how they responded to this new era in Western Culture. Many of the leading lights are present, though the emphasis is on British letters. Emerson, Carlyle, Hardy, Marx, Swinburne, Eliot, and many others. A fascinating review and a much deeper examination of this topic than our current discussions--the Victorians wrestled with the implications of "God's demise" much more deeply than our present crop of atheist evangelists.
December 23, 2010
Pius X was convinced that with liberalism and modernist way of thinking about the divine will lead to atheism, mayhem and nihilism in Society (Page 462). Of course, He was right, but look at the aftermath of freedom, wealth creation for the masses that came from the struggles of the minds of the Victorian age. Mr Wilson has weaved another gem looking at the minds that has shaped the world we are now enjoying. Marx, Spencer, Darwin, Kant and a host of others were luminaries of modernity and a new way of looking into Scripture and our idea of God. A good read and a book that will open another world to a seeking mind.
November 22, 2009
A history of the decline of religious belief among European intellectuals during the 19th century. The title is taken from a poem by Thomas Hardy. Wilson focuses on the personal stories of the writers, philosophers, and artists he writes about. This is not a dry history of an intellectual movement, but rather a series of accounts of very personal crises of faith that accurately reflect the spiritual zeitgeist of the Victorian Age.
December 9, 2011
A history of the growth of doubt in God's existence in 19th Century British literature and science. Here we are almost 200 years later and over 40% of the US population believes the earth is only 6000 years old and evolution is a godless myth. Myths have a powerful hold on the human mind. It's nice to believe that in the end the good folks will be rewarded and the evil ones punished and everything will be OK. I guess it's a way of dealing with an unfair existence.
August 17, 2011
I really loved this book, which was a history of "doubters" of religion from Kant to about 1910. I had never heard of many of the people, but everyone has a vague notion of their ideas, so it was nice to get a little look into the lives that led their philosophy. I read with a notebook in hand because it was full of wonderful quotes and references to interesting books.
November 12, 2014
A beautiful and rich review of Victorian and Edwardian thinking, as God's life support was unplugged and how later generations may come, in time, to feel the need to apply resuscitation. As Kenneth Clark observed, heroic materialism and Marxism aren't enough. We need something more.
December 8, 2007
Potentially interesting concept, pedantic and utterly dull execution.
February 8, 2008
A completely absorbing view of the Victorian despair surrounding the demythologizing of God.
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