The generation who live without Creator comforts

GOD'S FUNERAL by A.N. Wilson (John Murray, GBP 20) JOHN CASEY

IT was Nietzsche who first, memorably, announced "God is dead". The reason this was a memorable remark rather than simply one designed to shock - was that Nietzsche concluded that the passing of the Judaeo-Christian God meant that it could no longer be rational to hold on to Christian ethics. The English of the 19th century could not accept this unpleasant conclusion.

George Eliot, for instance, famously announced during a walk in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, that although God and immortality were impossible to believe in, yet the Christian- Protestant idea of duty remained "peremptory and absolute". Nietzsche despised "little moralistic females la George Eliot". He said that "in England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe- inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is". A.N. Wilson's book is, in effect, an account of the melancholy that descended on the English (and the Scot, Carlyle) of the 19th century as religious faith retreated before the advances of science and biblical scholarship - a melancholy most poignantly expressed in Matthew Arnold's famous poem, Dover Beach, which talks of the sea of faith ebbing with a "long-withdrawing roar" down the "vast and naked shingles of the world". The odd thing is that the sceptics and disbelievers of the previous century were not melancholy at all. Hume died serenely (to the scandal of the pious Dr Johnson, who lived all his life in terror of hellfire) insisting that he had absolutely no fear of an afterlife. Gibbon's contempt for all the claims of Christianity to be a noble way of living was expressed in sparkling irony and frequent dirty jokes. For Voltaire, unbelief was a source of perpetual high spirits. So why did our own thinkers, when they began to have doubts, become so miserable? Wilson's book takes its title from a quaint, if oddly powerful, poem by Thomas Hardy. In that poem, Hardy dreams he met a procession of mourners who are actually burying God. Hardy's poem amounts to an unanswered question, "And who or what shall fill his place?/ Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes ?" ESSENTIALLY, there were two answers to Hardy's question - that of the Catholics and that of the Protestants. Since nearly all the English Victorian thinkers were Protestants by upbringing, it is their gloomy thoughts which dominate the book. And really they all thought the same thing, with minor variations - that although a God who created and sustains the universe, became man, died and rose again, and will return at the last day to judge both the quick and the dead is impossible to believe in, the Protestant sense of right and wrong and the meaning it gives to life must be preserved at all costs. Gloomy Carlyle (described by Nietzsche as "the philosopher of dyspeptic states") thought that without religion man's life would become "cheap as beasts". Many credit Carlyle with a prophetic horror of the nihilism of 20th century Fascism and Leninism when God's death really did destroy any sense of the sacredness of life. Biblical scholarship, which seemed to show that the first five books of the Bible could not possibly be by Moses, that biblical history could not be relied on, and that the Jesus of the New Testament might tell us next to nothing about the historical Jesus, undermined the central faith of Protestants. Darwinism and geology did the rest. But another Protestant belief survived - that religious truth is whatever enters most deeply into our soul. So virtually the whole movement of Victorian and modern religious thought has been to make God and religion subjective - what we feel in what Matthew Arnold called "our best self". And the great English refusal has been to contemplate Nietzsche's suggestion - that what we feel in our best self is simply the product of centuries of Christian conditioning. If God is dead, the strong can invent their own code of values - which is why Mussolini and Hitler so admired Nietzsche. The Catholic Church reacted in a different way to the crisis of faith. It brutally suppressed those "modernists" who wanted to turn the faith into inner sentiments. Catholics have always believed that religion depends not only on the Bible, but on tradition - the Church's authority to interpret and develop the faith. It is interesting that the Church of Vatican II has laid ever more stress on the Church as the community of the faithful the living proof and guarantee of Christ's presence and God's continuing providence in the world. The lonely, anguished doubters of Victorian England, who felt obliged to make up their own religion substitutes, are psychologically excluded by the Catholic vision. A.N. Wilson is one of those lonely, Protestant doubters. Once a pillar of Anglicanism, he lost his faith, and wrote a book to prove that Christianity was really an invention of St Paul, not of Jesus. THIS new book has an impressive sweep, from Hume and Gibbon, taking in Kant's attempt to put belief in God on the basis purely of our moral experience, to Victorian sages such as Arnold and Ruskin, and finally the sad, suppressed Catholic "modernists". Wilson asks us virtually to relive the ebbing of faith as it afflicted our ancestors. He sees things from a profoundly English perspective (which is why there is hardly any serious discussion of Nietzsche in the book). Like Arnold, he hears only the "melancholy, long withdrawing roar" of religious faith. Yet consider: in the 13th century, St Thomas Aquinas took the thoughts of the Greek pagan, Aristotle, the Jew, Maimonides, and the Muslim, Averro's, and adapted them to the Christian faith in a synthesis that has contented many right up to our own time. As TS Eliot once wrote, Christianity is always in the process of transforming itself into "something which a rational man can believe in". It may all be a mass delusion, but melancholy in the Christian world at large as it approaches its Third Millennium is curiously absent.

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