Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith.

Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Doubleday, 312 pp., $24.95)

Mr. DiIulio is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

IN THE 1930s, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, a radio personality (The Catholic Hour), was America's best-known prelate. One day Sheen telephoned the apartment of Heywood Broun, the renowned journalist, combative wit, member of the Algonquin circle, and Socialist congressional candidate. ''This is Fulton Sheen,'' Broun heard the caller say. Broun, who had never met Sheen, asked, ''What are you calling about?'' Sheen's answer: ''Your immortal soul.'' The fairy-tale ending: Sheen eventually receives Broun into the faith. The epilogue of Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith opens with the Sheen - Broun tale, but the book isn't any kind of a cold call for Christianity. Instead, William F. Buckley Jr. approaches his personal exploration of the faith as one who has ''never sought to console in explicitly Christian terms anyone who wasn't, so to speak, already a communicant.'' Despite an intellectual life that became politically consequential in 1951 with the publication of God and Man at Yale, and despite a rich spiritual life that has spanned most of the American Century, Buckley's private life has involved little in the way of outright religious evangelism: ''I am one of many millions who attend church on Sundays, receive the sacraments, say every day a prayer, particularly when a friend is ailing or gone; and yet I shrink from any religious communication that could possibly be thought intrusive. I cannot imagine the circumstances that would bring me to pick up the telephone and call to anyone's attention the Christian vision.'' Fortunately, however, Buckley's desire not to be ''thought intrusive'' did not prevent him from reading, reminiscing, reflecting, consulting, and, finally, writing about his religious faith in Nearer, My God, a small miracle of a book in that it delivers what its publisher's blurb boldly promises. It is indeed one of ''the most reflective, poignant, and searching of Bill Buckley's many books.'' And it's one of Buckley's bravest books. For no matter how eloquent, moving, or intellectually sophisticated the presentation, and regardless of the status, credentials, or political ideology of the presenter, nothing raises secular elite hackles, suspicions, and whispers quite like a well-educated, well-positioned person expressing deep religious faith without temporizing or apologizing for it. True to temperamental form, Buckley doesn't preach or try to make converts. But neither does he blink or wink in expressing his faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ. It has been a lifelong faith, lovingly nourished by his Catholic mother, the late Aloise Steiner Buckley, to whom we are briefly introduced in the early chapters, and whom we are charmed to know a bit better through the epilogue, in which she is touchingly portrayed. The faithful son justly dedicates Nearer, My God to her memory. The 18 chapters of Nearer, My God are incredibly wide-ranging. For starters, the book is a treasure trove of intimate and funny moments from Buckley's private life. One of my favorites, described in the first chapter, occurs when Catholic boarding-school boy Buckley sins against Fr. Sharkey of St. John's, Beaumont, in England. You see, Buckley's principal extracurricular enthusiasm in childhood was horses. Fr. Sharkey had given him special permission to leave school in order to attend the Grand National steeplechase at Aintree. As the boy was about to enter his chauffeur-driven getaway car, the priest reached into his pocket for a two-shilling piece. ''Billy,'' he whispered, ''put this on a horse called Workman, to win.'' Workman won, paying 18 to 1, but Billy had neglected to place the bet. The priest, ''exultant over the news he had got on the radio about the horse that won the Grand National,'' was waiting up for Billy's return. But upon hearing the boy's midnight confession, the priest suddenly smiled and said, ''Those things happen. Now get to bed.'' Billy the failed bookie obeyed, but not before praying ''that God would forgive me, that God should find a devious means of transmitting 36 shillings to Fr. Sharkey, that God should suspend the vow of poverty for long enough to permit Fr. Sharkey full and indulgent use of those 36 shillings . . . We had a secret, Fr. Sharkey and I, and I wondered whether, by his confessional vows, he was bound to silence about my sin.'' The opening chapters of Nearer, My God are the book's most plainly and entertainingly autobiographical. We visit the Vatican with the young Buckley carrying 36 soon-to-be-blessed rosaries on his left arm, including 6 for the Irish maids at St. John's; we march along with 19-year-old soldier Buckley on his two-week tour of duty in 1945 as a Spanish-language sexual-hygiene lecturer in San Antonio, Texas. The book's middle and later chapters, on topics ranging from how Hollywood treats religion (badly) to how the Catholic Church should handle pressures to ordain women as priests (don't cave), are punctuated by Buckley's personal religious recollections and meditations, as in the penultimate chapter, on the ordination of one of his nephews, Michael Bozell, already a monk in ''the reclusive Benedictine order.'' So reclusive, in fact, is the Benedictine order that Brother Michael was required ''to forgo even the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of a party in his honor'' attended by close family members and lifelong friends. ''That,'' confides Buckley, ''was hard to take.'' But in a written response to one of the many probing questions about Christian religious calling and understanding submitted to him by his proud Uncle Bill, Fr. Bozell beautifully characterized the Benedictine monk's life as one of ''continuous striving, a daily battle, and the prize, the summit of the mountain, is Christ. Christ experienced from the inside, Christ fully known and possessed and imitated and loved.'' On the night of the ordination, Buckley, snug in his hotel, ''thought of Michael in his cell, rising at midnight to sing his orisons,'' and ''reflected that almost certainly he was the happiest of us all.'' Nearer, My God is as much a deft theological exploration of major aspects of orthodox Christian belief and Catholic dogma as it is an ''autobiography of faith.'' Moreover, the book beats a fine path back to the concerns about religion in American life that animated God and Man at Yale. To be clear, Buckley himself courts no assessment of the book in terms of its theological rigor or relevance. Much to the contrary, in the introduction he insists that he is ''not remotely qualified as a theologian or historian of Christianity,'' and that for him to write a book about his faith is ''to put [his] faith at a fearful disadvantage.'' Also, he warns that, as his mode as a writer ''tends to be argumentative'' and bred by reactive ''polemical inclinations'' (you don't say), ''readers of this book are entitled to put it down in disgust if exposition alone is what they are looking for.'' No, they are not, for at least three reasons. First, most theological writing that inspires intellects and stirs souls is argumentative, much of it is polemical, and almost all of it is assertive. Second, the greatest religious hearts and minds have always acknowledged precisely what Buckley acknowledges, namely, that their faith is greater than their powers to describe it. Third, WFB wisely got more than a little help from certain of his theologically ready-for-prime-time friends. For example, he provides highlights from the no-holds-barred 1930s debate about the Catholic faith between Monsignor Ronald Knox and Sir Arnold Lunn. Buckley met Lunn in 1960, and it was then that ''the world of Christian apologetics'' caught his eye. Thereafter, the Buckleys visited with the Lunns in Switzerland every year until Sir Arnold's death in 1974. Lunn entered the debate with Fr. Knox on the side of those for whom the worldly history of Mother Church's tortures, trials, inquisitions, indulgences, and insistence on papal infallibility invalidates her claims to holiness and renders her a profane pox on post-Christ Christianity and most of humanity. Take eternal punishment, please. Lunn followed legions of others in thinking it ridiculous that God would have created a world in which innocent unbaptized babies have no shot at salvation (off to Limbo), and even otherwise perfect Christians have no hope of Heaven should they, say, die in their sleep on the morning after a single night of sizzling sex outside of marriage (straight to Hell). Lunn experienced opposition to ''the doctrine of Hell'' not as a moral prejudice but as ''a rationally immovable conclusion,'' and Buckley finds Lunn on this point ''unanswerable by reason alone.'' But faith trumps reason. Fr. Knox's ''knock-him-dead answer'' to Lunn was that if this particular person, in that particular state of sin, doesn't deserve Hell, well, then, by Almighty God ''he won't get it; that is certain.'' Buckley is satisfied, seconding Knox's motion with the assertion that ''our reason is not refined enough to take in divine perspectives.'' Lunn was eventually satisfied, too, for in 1936, two years after his debate with the good priest was published, he was received into Mother Church by -- Ronald Knox. BUCKLEY is pardonably partial to such resolutions of religious difficulties. He recalls this response of a Fr. Sharkey (brother to his headmaster at St. John's) to a devout elderly woman who asked him whether dogs can go to Heaven. Sorry, he told her, there was no Scriptural authority for animals entering the pearly gates. In that case, she said, she would never be happy in Heaven: ''I can only be happy if Brownie is also there.'' With ''mesmerizing authority,'' Fr. Sharkey replied that if that were the case, then Brownie would indeed go to Heaven. ''Because what is absolutely certain is that, in Heaven, you will be happy.'' Dismiss such answers as jesuitical if you wish, comments Buckley, but he has ''never found the fault in the syllogism.'' Buckley's Catholic faith makes him radically resistant to ''the Butler Escape,'' his term for the idea, articulated in a 1736 treatise by Anglican Bishop Joseph B. Butler, that if one were God, one would have created a world different from and better than the one the Creator made (for starters, say, no Hitlers and killer earthquakes, more Mother Teresas and killer landscapes). The Butler Escape is a ''singular invitation to imagine the world as reordered by you,'' an invitation to ''Go ahead, play God! You make up the rules.'' Our author flatly rejects the invitation in favor of what I'll refer to as ''the Buckley Embrace,'' the serviceably inter-faith (Christian, Muslim, or Jewish) idea that we should seek to know and to love God on His terms, not ours, and continue to seek to know and to love Him -- to struggle to embrace, not to escape, Him -- even as the spirit is constantly saddled by the flesh, even as worldly concerns about things (money, sex, power, recognition) constantly divert us from communion with Him who made all things, even as we experience His rules as inconvenient or impossible, and even as we encounter unspeakable (except in the language of prayer) trials, tribulations, and tragedies on this earth. Without explicitly evangelizing, Nearer, My God invites its readers to make the Buckley Embrace. ''The illiterate who believes and is sustained by his faith,'' writes Buckley in preface to his recitation of the learned Lunn - Knox battle, ''is as airborne as Thomas Aquinas after completing his Questions.'' Buckley's mother's ''worship of Him was as intense as that of the saint transfixed''; and, losing a husband and several of her children, she made the Embrace, and struggled with her grief, ''through the solvent of prayer, her belief in submission to a divine order, and her irrepressible delight in her family and friends.'' Malcolm Muggeridge, the great British journalist, convert to Catholicism, and former atheist who became ''perhaps the most eloquent English-speaking Christian'' of his day, lived the Embrace late in life through the example of Mother Teresa and through his meditation on the Crucifixion. (Too bad that, as Buckley humorously recounts, Pope John Paul II missed the chance to trade Embraces, as it were, with Muggeridge when he, Buckley, and David Niven were granted a private interview with the Pontiff but through some bureaucratic bungle got only a papal handshake and the Vatican version of a photo-op.) As Buckley admits in the course of meditations ''On the Uniqueness of Christ,'' everything would ''be so simple'' if God saw fit to remove the doubt of every Doubting Thomas by, say, ''worldwide thunder at three in the afternoon (local time) on Good Friday,'' or such. But He does not see fit, and so ''the struggle to believe has got to have been intended as exactly that, an achievement of the will and the spirit, seeking concordance with divine purpose.'' IN several chapters Buckley tightens the bolts on his Catholic belief by drawing upon the words and experiences of a hand-picked forum of converts to the faith. Muggeridge and Clare Boothe Luce died before the project was under way, but he was fortunate to enlist the formidable likes of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, Ernest van den Haag, Fr. George Rutler, and the young Wick Allison, a former publisher of this magazine. I found it impossible not to be fascinated by what the members of Buckley's forum (especially Fr. Neuhaus) said, and how well most of them said it, in response to his well-formulated questions about everything from Christ's resurrection to what, if any, one feature of the Church distinguishes it from other Christian faiths and drew them thither. And, on those matters where a consensus was evident, I generally agreed with what they argued. (A prediction: If the Church yields any further ground on divorce, priestly marriage, and such, before the end of the next century Rome will hear, even if it does not heed, voices calling for the ordination of remarried pro-choice lesbians.) Still, I rather wish that Buckley had done more to relate in his own words what he himself had learned (or not) from the members of his august council of converts. As he tells us in the introduction, what evolved into Nearer, My God began as a plan for a book whose second working title was ''Why I Am a Catholic.'' He was wise to break out of that straitjacket, but, having done so, he would have been equally well advised to step beyond even his sterling ''Why I Became a Catholic'' set. Undoubtedly, Buckley and his faithful readers would have gained something had he as eagerly sought out the ideas and religious inspirations of cradle Catholics, converts to other Christian faiths, and other lifelong Christians. I especially wish he had somehow found his way to America's growing ranks of young, well-educated, inner-city African-American Protestant clergy, orthodox Christian Pentecostals, and other churchmen whose Embrace is being made not only in highly literate words but in walk-among-the-poor deeds. WHILE Buckley makes no more pretense to social-science expertise than he does to theological erudition, I wish that he had found a place to discuss some of the good news (and Good News) from empirical and survey research on spirituality and religion in American life (over 90 per cent of Americans believe), and the extent and efficacy of God-centered, faith-anchored approaches to social problems (over half of Americans think that faith-based approaches can work, and many thousands of clergy and churched volunteers are working hard to prove them right). I also wish that Buckley had lingered a bit on the question of whether rich Christians (or, if he preferred, rich Catholics) have any Biblically required responsibility to serve the poor, and, if so, how, if at all, they ought to transact that part of their Embrace in the public square. But such wishes for more are admittedly greedy, and Nearer, My God has, if you will, its special bonus sections, including the author's guided tour of the still smoldering terrain of God and Man at Yale. A chapter title asks, ''Where Does One Learn about the Christian God?'' Not, Buckley informs us, at the nation's institutions of higher learning, where ''there is today another God, and it is multiculturalism.'' By 1951, Christianity had been excluded at Yale ''by the very instrument --academic freedom -- that Protestantism had counted on to further its mission, and this evolution came as a near total surprise.'' When Buckley's first book was published it was news to some that Yale and other once Christ-centered colleges and universities had lost or were in the process of shaking their Christian foundations. Their leaders felt the need to deny Buckley's thesis. Today their successors would hardly miss a beat in celebrating the rout of Christianity and religion in general. I dare say that, as a class, today's elite college and university leaders are about as likely to act publicly in ways that fortify faculty and student commitments to Christianity or other religious faiths as the boss-pimps of whorehouses are to lead their staff and customers in a chorus of ''Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?'' Not only that, but, as Buckley was sad to discover, traditionally Christian elementary and secondary schools like his own Millbrook have fallen on hard times, unless, that is, you happen to be in the market for a traditional pagan education. (In the book's two appendices, he briefly but conscientiously reports on God and Man at Millbrook and several other schools.) So, where can one reliably go these days to learn how and why we should make the Embrace? Nearer our God, according to the man from Yale.