BOOK REVIEW.

God's Funeral by A. N. Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999); 402 pp.; $27.95 cloth; $16.00 paperback.

A.N. Wilson's study of the Victorian crisis of faith borrows its title from one of Thomas Hardy's later poems, in which a procession of mourners bear "a strange and mystic form" to its final resting place. The mood of the poem is quintessentially funereal: a lamentation of bereavement and a contemplation of a future much diminished by irrevocable loss. This, for Wilson, encapsulates the true consequence of nineteenth-century religious decline in Britain. Through a series of biographical sketches of leading literary figures, God's Funeral describes a Victorian intellectual and spiritual landscape dominated less by the clash of scientific and religious certainties than by a pervasive mood of dilemma and doubt.

Wilson is an English novelist and literary biographer, who has had an interesting religious odyssey of his own. His father was an agnostic, his mother a practicing Anglican. He was educated at a Catholic primary school and then at Anglican boarding schools. Until his mid-twenties he entertained the idea of entering the priesthood. But his religious convictions began to wane, especially after he researched a biography of C. S. Lewis and found the arguments of Lewis' Mere Christianity to be thin and unsatisfactory. In 1985, Wilson wrote How Can We Know? which he followed in 1991 with the more polemical Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. He now describes himself as both pious and skeptical by nature, and as "a Christian fellow-traveler," though it's clear from this book that the place of religion in human life remains one of his core concerns.

Wilson's central argument in God's Funeral derives from philosophical pragmatism's turn-of-the-century rehabilitation of metaphysics--in particular William James' 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. Wilson is convinced that religious belief is fundamental, even instinctual. Those who claim to renounce religion tend to experience intolerably painful doubt, to reach for some form of religious solace later in life, or to commit themselves to more earthly creeds that are nonetheless essentially religious in character.

The psychological hardship of the formerly religious is epitomized by Thomas Hardy, who agonized over his loss of faith and suffered public embarrassments, such as the Bishop of Wakefield's burning a copy of Jude the Obscure in protest of its sacrilegious import. Alfred Tennyson struggled too. Grief over the death of his close friend, A. H. Hallam, coalesced with an interest in science to make Tennyson, in Wilson's terms, "the poet of the Honest Doubters," until he found the path back to belief at the end of his poem In Memoriam.

The path back was well-trodden. George Eliot broke with the church in 1842 and translated for English audiences both David Friedrich Strauss' humanistic Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach's materialist Essence of Christianity. Yet, while continuing to profess her unbelief, she over and over again turned to In Memoriam for comfort following the death of her life-partner, George Henry Lewes, in 1878.

Annie Besant was much more forthright in her return to religion. She left the Anglican church and her cleric husband in 1873, became a socialist and a feminist, and emerged as a leader of the National Secular Society. But, as the 1880s drew to a close, she began to experiment with spiritualism, and she devoted the last forty years of her long life to theosophy and mysticism.

Others successfully remained outside the religious fold but immersed themselves in secular religions. As early as 1829, in Signs of the Times, Thomas Carlyle despaired that traditional religious faith had given way to a worship of mammon. Religion was also challenged by intellectual movements, such Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy and Karl Marx's dialectical materialism, both of which denied the explanatory power of religion and sought to replace it with scientific method.

But, as Wilson shows, the nineteenth-century dilemma was that science and philosophy could subvert, but not replace, religious devotion. As faith receded--like the waves in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach"--society suffered what William James, in The Will to Believe, called "the sick shudder of frustrated religious demand." This demand was responsible, Wilson argues, for religion's recovery in the twentieth century.

If explanations for the persistence of religious belief are inconclusive, the phenomenon itself is real enough. But if belief is perennial, so is doubt. The problem is that belief often hardens into dogma and false certainties, while doubt can dissolve into confusion and anxiety.

In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Cardinal John Henry Newman offered his solution to Victorian doubt: "It would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present." The same sentiment can be found in the pronouncements of religious fundamentalists everywhere today.

The human propensity for wonderment is religion's greatest asset. If science could replace religion it would have done so in the Britain of the Industrial Revolution. Science and religion are going to coexist. As Richard Dawkins has argued in Unweaving the Rainbow, the task is for science to realize its own potential as a source of wonderment.

God's Funeral is a serious historical study. Yet it has a novelist's emphasis on personality, and some of the biographical detail is superfluous. Readers wanting a more thematic approach should look at Frank M. Turner's Contesting Cultural Authority. But Wilson has produced a highly engaging tour of conflicted psyches.

Peter C. Grosvenor is assistant professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in government from the London School of Economics.