God's Funeral

Description

By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers and 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". But as Wilson demonstrates in such diverse lives as those of Gibbon, Kant, Marx, Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, thought about religion had many sources. By 1900, the Church of England, so rich and 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 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 hierachical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism.

First Sentence

THE ENGLISH POET Thomas Hardy, some time between 1908 and 1910, wrote a poem in which he imagined himself attending God's funeral.

Description

By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity; many had abandoned belief in God altogether. This was in part the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species and the controversy that followed. But the doubt about religion had many sources. A. N. Wilson demonstrates in this synthesis of biography and intellectual history that the real destruction of religions belief had been achieved well before Darwin's momentous publication. Yet despite the fact that the church had essentially become an edifice empty of faith, it survived into our century because so few of the fascinating, tortured people Wilson portrays could face the brutal consequences of their own logic. Whether or not God was dead, they still needed to believe, hence the great spiritual angst of their culture which is now echoed in ours.

Subjects

Other Editions

• God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western CivilizationW. W. Norton & Company1999-06-01
• God's funeralJohn Murray1999-01-01
• God's funeralW.W. Norton1999-01-01
• Biografía de la fe y la duda en la civilización occidentalOcéano2006-01-01