REALLY BAD IDEAS.

God's Funeral
A. N. Wilson
W. W. Norton, $25, 385 pp.

As our rapidly elapsing century draws to its close, many commentators are trying to guess how future historians will eventually characterize it. But we can all guess at least this much: whatever else they may say, no doubt later generations will judge the twentieth century to have been uniquely bloody. Just as past centuries came to be called the Age of the Enlightenment, the Age of Faith, etc., so too the twentieth century will one day, I suspect, be known as the Century of Blood.

But perhaps later generations will also notice how thoroughly derivative have been the ideas for which all this blood has been shed. Wars in this century have characteristically been wars of ideology, rarely wars of pure national interest, as they once were in the days of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin (although a Catholic cardinal in the French Court, Richelieu allied France with Protestant Germany and Sweden -even with the Muslim Ottomans!-against Catholic Austria in the Thirty Years War). But our wars were different: As the word "ideology" implies, they were born out of a passion for ideas (Fire in the Minds of Men is the title of a history of Marxism by the former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, but it could easily summarize the political frenzy of the entire century).

But what also remains striking, at least with the advantage of hindsight, about these ideologies is how much they were all carry overs from the nineteenth century. Nearly every idea that has animated the politics and passions of our century was conceived or brought to birth in the nineteenth century: fascism, communism, psychoanalysis, anticolonialism, socialism, protest atheism, feminism, evolution, utilitarian ethics, behaviorism; nearly every idea fueling the passions of the century was hatched during the reign of Queen Victoria. Among all the ideas that have constituted the drama of this century, only laissez-faire capitalism and the idea of universal rights have come to us from the eighteenth century, and none from the twentieth!

Seen in that light (and again with the advantage of hindsight), one also cannot but notice how stale and jejune the legacy of the nineteenth century has become: With the exception of feminism and evolution, which will doubtless remain permanent features of the next century, none of the rest of the threadbare vestments in the Victorian trousseau shows much promise of lasting very long into the new millennium. What Solzhenitsyn has done for Marx, Frederick Crews has done for Freud, Noam Chomsky for behaviorism, and Alasdair MacIntyre for utilitarianism. Indeed, one might even regard the twentieth century as the laboratory, so to speak, in which the human race tried out, tested, and found wanting the ideas conceived in the rather distractable brain of the Victorian intellect-and, as the blood of our century proves, the experiment has blown up in humanity's face.

In God's Funeral, A. N. Wilson has undertaken to describe the ebbing away, to use Matthew Arnold's phrase, of the "sea of faith" throughout the nineteenth century; but, except for a few momentary concessions, he weaves his tale with little sense for how problematic the Victorian legacy has become. Certainly the author is well read, and he knows how to cull out of his authors a telling quote to summarize both the writer's personality and his central thesis. (I particularly liked William James's description of Hegel's universe: "Its necessity, with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had to live in a large seaside boarding house with no private bedroom in which I might take refuge from the society of the place.")

But hovering over the whole effort, like Poe's raven or the vultures of some apocalyptic dystopia, death speaks its rebuke. What reader of a work praising the "Masterpiece Theater" atmospherics of Victorian intellectual culture can forget the killing fields and abattoirs of the twentieth century, the battlefields of Passchendaele and the Marne, the ovens of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Gulags of Siberia, the Golgothas of Cambodia and Rwanda?

True, in the chapter on Marx, Wilson notes how Marx's errors directly and easily led to the very horrors we are now trying so desperately to escape (the NATO-led war in Yugoslavia aptly encapsulates that desperation). But no sooner has he finished showing how nearly every "scientific" prediction of Marx has been refuted by history than Wilson knights Sir Karl with this royal sword of approval: "No doubt these things have to be said in the interests of truth, but in a sense they miss the point of why [Marx and Engels] were destined to be incomparably the most important political prophets [!] of the last century." When the French political philosopher Raymond Aron called Marxism the "opiate of the intellectuals," he spoke more truly than he knew, for even after the collapse of communism, one can detect traces of the opium den in Wilson.

If this were not problem enough, the author also pays little attention to how much, when seen on their own terms, the positions of the writers he has chosen for treatment contradict each other. One reads potted summaries, all following hard upon one another, of Kant, Carlyle, Mill, the luminaries of the Oxford Movement, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Arnold, Huxley, Swinburne, William James, and, finally near the finish line, the Catholic Modernists. Of course in a book of this size and scope, the reader must be content with a thumbnail sketch of each writer; sometimes the portrait is successful, more often it fails to get beyond the level of the anecdotal. But when all these chapters jostle each other in a book of this size, the reader quickly notices how, in this cacophony of conflicting world views, some sort of adjudication on the part of the author is required-but never provided.

I do not mean to say that Wilson never speaks in propria persona; indeed, like a liberal Paul Johnson writing for the Manchester Guardian, he freely dispenses his opinions (anyone associated with the Oxford Movement is a "bigot," Stalin could have learned his interrogation techniques at the Vatican, and so forth; the tedium of these opinions no doubt being partly a function of their sheer predictability). But prescinding from the fact that only the truly devout come in for this kind of treatment, his editorial problems really begin only when the time comes for him to dispense approval: You cannot indiscriminately salute Spencer, Arnold, William James, and the Catholic Modernists without prompting the reader to wonder how all these ideas could ever begin to cohere in one system.

While reading this book I happened by chance to be reading Dostoevski's novelistic screed against liberalism, The Devils. "Let the nihilists and the Westerners howl and call me a reactionary!" he wrote a friend after he had started work on the novel: "To hell with them!" Needless to say, in his slapdash treatment of the man who can perhaps claim to be the greatest novelist of the human race, Wilson rises to the bait and abuses Dostoevski in just those terms. But even more oddly, the author (trained as a literary critic!) scarcely engages the novelist at all. Indeed, one sign of the unsatisfying approach of this book can be gleaned from the telling fact that Spencer and Swinburne get a chapter each, but none is devoted to either Dostoevski or Nietzsche, both of whom defy the potted-summary mode adopted by this superficial assemblage of disconnected essays, essentially a work of journeyman scholarship by a literary journalist.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches in the religious studies department at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.