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If you are interested in
the history of unbelief, this book is for you. An intellectual
history of the growth of atheism and agnosticism in the Victorian
age, that is throughout the nineteenth century. The author considers
the insights and influences of German and French theologians,
philosophers, and other thinkers, but the relentless focus is on
Britain, at that time the leading nation of the world. Wilson starts
with forerunners, the ideas which undermined religion which took
shape in the previous century and are generally ascribed to the
enlightenment. He discusses in particular two books. Edward Gibbons History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published between
the American and the French Revolutions, examined for the first time
the Christian Religion with all its warts, absurd and contemptible.
The other was David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion (1779) which has not been surpassed to this day as a
philosophical examination of matters of faith.
By 1883 unbelief had become sufficiently
commonplace for an atheist MP to be elected, and for the Prime
Minister, himself a full believer, to defend his right to sit in
Parliament without swearing an oath by god. Wilson ends with the
American philosopher William James. His psychological lectures, The
Varieties of Religious Experience affirm the importance of
faith. Religion, he recognized, is like every other impulse, like
hope, love, anger, and jealousy, an important emotion which adds to
life’s enchantment. It is of course "not logically or
rationally deducible from anything else," (p. 329).
Much of Wilson’s narrative turns on who
said what, who influenced or taught whom, and how far did they go
towards denying god in their writing. His examination is not so much
of philosophers, as of historians and literary figures, of Carlyle
and George Eliot, of the poet Swinburne, of Arnold and Ruskin. Even
Marx and Engels come in for consideration. The book’s title in
fact is from the Thomas Hardy poem by the same heading.
Wilson does not omit the role of science in
the growth of unbelief. This was the age of Charles Lyell, Darwin,
Herbert Spencer, and Huxley. It was also the period of thorough
critical and historical examination of the Bible. According to
Wilson, these scientific and scholarly insights were as much made
possible by the growing lack of faith, as they gave religion the
death blow. The Victorian age built on the age of Enlightenment, on
the philosophy of Hume, Kant, and Hegel. These philosophers examined
religion rationally and found it unsupportable. After that reason
could no longer be satisfied with the mysticism and magic of
religion. The thinking classes rejected the Enlightenment religion
of deism.
By the turn of the century no rational way
to accept the Christian religion remained. Thomas Aquinas’
contention that faith and reason can never be in conflict stood
refuted. The Pope, Leo XIII, condemned the French and English
"modernizers" who tried to reconcile the Church to the
developing science and the insights of the historical Bible
research. His successor, Pius X, excommunicated them. He died at the
outbreak of World War I "convinced that atheism, mayhem, and
nihilism would engulf the world, and he was, of course, absolutely
right." (P. 352)
It seemed there were no good arguments left
for religion. But people went right on praying, for faith is
indifferent to reason. Many chose the side of religion for emotional
needs, because they felt it was necessary as a cement for society,
or because much of music and art is incomprehensible without
Christianity. Many wished to preserve the forms of religion, the
ritual, the pomp, and the ceremony, and willing to do so at the
expense of the intellect. What did it matter if Jesus really was a
first century rabbi, or whether the Eucharist or the Church was
established by the Nazarene or arose as a cult after his death or
without his existence at all. The Victorians killed the god of
reason, but the god of faith and emotion marches on.
— Wolf Roder |
