Every country has its own way of believing, and every country has its own way of not believing. The varieties of atheism are as impressive as the varieties of faith. AN Wilson has written a book about the English way of not believing. God's Funeral tells the story of doubt, that grave and melancholy process by which the thinking class of Victorian England lost its faith. It is a process that he himself went through several years ago. This book is therefore not only the history of an epoch, but also the construction of a personal intellectual genealogy.
The image of the funeral captures perfectly the quality of Victorian unbelief. Nietzsche claimed that we had murdered God, but then he was German. In England, God died of natural causes and was buried with due ceremony. We can picture the scene in the drab, non-consecrated chapel (Highgate cemetery, perhaps). The mourners stand around the coffin, looking uncomfortable in their stiff Victorian coats and hats. A distinguished crowd-George Eliot, Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin and Hardy-is in attendance. They wear sombre expressions, appropriate to the high esteem in which the deceased was held. One lady sheds a few decorous tears into a handkerchief. AN Wilson arrives late. He too bows his head in reverence, although he cannot resist a few catty remarks about the other mourners. Speeches follow: the spirit of the departed lives on in our hearts... we must live our lives as he would have wanted... we must keep alight the sacred flame. The mourners depart-sad yet vaguely uplifted. All in all, a very English affair.
Victorian England remained faithful to its dead God in the same way that a widow might remain faithful to the memory of her dead husband. The 19th century was the great age of mourning; Victoria in mourning for Albert is an appropriate symbol for the entire epoch. In all such cases of prolonged mourning the original impulse of grief is soon supplanted by a host of other, less admirable motives: the shame of forgetting; fear of freedom; fear of public disapproval; enjoyment of the "widow's status"; and also vanity. It is not, after all, unpleasant to contemplate oneself as the lead player in a tragic drama.
Fidelity to God's memory took the form of a continuing attachment to Christian morality. A misty reverence before "the moral law" or "duty" or "sacrifice" arose to fill the place of a discredited faith. The attitude of worship was not abolished along with God, but merely redirected towards more serviceable objects: Shakespeare, the constitution, the King James Bible. The case of Leslie Stephen, who did not believe in God but hoped nevertheless "to live and die a Christian gentleman," is typical.
Faith in God is the cornerstone of Christian morality. Remove it, argued Nietzsche, and the entire edifice collapses: the only lucid response to the loss of faith is a thorough-going amoralism. It says something about the underlying religious tenor of Nietzsche's thought that he stands in perfect agreement with the saying attributed to St Augustine: "The virtues of the pagans were merely magnificent vices." Nietzsche was not himself sufficiently pagan to see pagan virtue as virtue simplicita; his admiration for it was at root a Christian fascination with "magnificent vice." Hence the only future he could imagine for Europe after "the death of God" was one which far exceeded the ancient world in its unbridled self-assertion. And can one deny that the history of the 20th century has proved him right?
But if Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the supermen, he also foresaw the coming of what he called "the last men." These "last men" represent the final product of a materialist civilisation; "final" because, with their advent, history comes to an end. Their appearance on the historical scene, like that of the supermen, follows the withdrawal of God. Nietzsche's vision is one of humanity reduced to a race of tame animals. The last men have only one concern: "How is man to maintain himself best, longest, most pleasantly?" The last men do not lay burdens upon themselves, or strive after an impossible excellence. Saints and heroes they regard with suspicion. A self-satisfied mediocrity is their norm. If Hitler and Stalin are parodies of Nietzsche's supermen, then what are Tony Blair and Bill Clinton but Nietzsche's "last men"? After the death of God, it appears we are left with a choice between heroic evil and unheroic good.
It was to protect themselves, and their society, against the frightening possibilities outlined by Nietzsche that the Victorians clung to Christian morality even as they discarded God. They may have been hypocrites, but their hypocrisy served a vital end. It was what Nietzsche called a "useful lie." The aura of sanctity both kept at bay the forces of anarchy-the "ignorant armies clashing by night"-and ministered to a continuing need for higher purpose, a reluctance to descend into mere animality. This latter motive is evident in Carlyle and Ruskin. A remark of John Maynard Keynes to Virginia Woolf, recorded in her diary, sheds a fascinating light upon it: "I begin to see that our generation... owed a great deal to our fathers' religion. And the young, like Julian, who are brought up without it, will never get so much out of life. They're trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Xty & yet had its benefits." We can detect the native genius for compromise at work here. The transition from Christianity to atheism in England no more required a revolution than did the transition from aristocracy to democracy.
But at what a cost! Where, among the dreary congregation at God's funeral, are the "lost violent souls": the de Sades, the Bakunins, the Nietzsches? Do even our atheists have to be respectable? The best of the Continental atheists rage against God with a Luciferian fury. Even when they make a show of demonry, English atheists are a cut-price imitation of their Continental equivalents. Compare Swinburne's poems about spanking to de Sade; and Carlyle has all of Nietzsche's faults but none of his genius. The Continent produced blasphemers; the most we could produce were doubters.
Blasphemy presupposes a residue of faith. It makes no sense to curse God unless one believes-on some level of consciousness-that he exists. A hidden bond unites blasphemer and believer; the religiosity of Marx and Nietzsche has often been noted. The feebleness of English atheism testifies to a feebleness of belief. If England has not produced a Bakunin or a de Sade, neither has it produced a Bonhoeffer or a Simone Weil.
Martin Buber tells the story of two rabbis, Rabbi Moshe and Rabbi Asher, both opponents of Hasidism. They receive a Hasidic prayer book. Rabbi Moshe throws it on the floor in fury, but Rabbi Asher picks it up, saying: "After all, it is a prayer-book, and we must not treat it disrespectfully." When the great Rabbi of Lublin is told of the incident, he says: "Rabbi Moshe will become a Hasid; Rabbi Joseph Asher will remain an opponent of the Hasidic way. For he who can burn with enmity can also burn with love for God, but he who is coldly hostile will find the way closed." The story can be taken as a metaphor for the contrast between English and Continental atheism.
The conciliatory instinct of the Anglican church has deep roots; it owes its existence to a political compromise. But it was in the 18th century, during the long period of Whig ascendancy, that its modern character took shape. It was during this period that the union of "squire and parson" came to dominate the shires. Holy orders became a means of livelihood for the younger sons of the gentry. Far from realising the high church ideal of a society apart-a societa perfecta-the 18th-century church was embroiled in every aspect of national life. This is still the basic condition of the Anglican church, as its enthusiastic response to the Nato bombing of Serbia testifies.
The subordination of church to society paralleled the subordination of faith to reason. The 18th century was the era of natural theology, that misguided attempt to establish the existence of God by means of empirical demonstration. Christianity was reinterpreted as a theory about the origins of the universe; the harmony of nature was invoked as evidence in its defence. This approach is caricatured in the joke about the country parson who argues that white tails on rabbits are a sign of God's providence; if they did not have them they would be impossible to shoot.
By reformulating Christianity as a scientific hypothesis, the 18th century rendered it vulnerable to scientific refutation. This is what the 19th century went on to achieve. On the Origin of Species made Genesis false and the "theistic hypothesis" superfluous. A bad theory had been replaced by a better one. But this way of formulating the issue between theism and atheism -as an argument between two rival theories of the origin of the world-was hopelessly superficial and led to the illusion that it was possible to discard Christian doctrine without discarding Christian morality.
But if Darwin finally provided a convincing non-theological explanation for the harmony of nature, Hume, a century earlier, first established the possibility of such an explanation. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he wrote: "For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or spring, of order originally, within itself, as well as the mind does." This is the seed from which the various 19th-century theories of evolution-of which Darwin's is only the most famous-all spring. It is, as AN Wilson says, a "time-bomb." Hume is Wilson's philosophical hero.
After Hume, it is only a matter of time before agnosticism reigns supreme. The perseverance of belief is attributed to mere ignorance or else to a wilful "sacrifice of the intellect." Unbelievers, on the other hand, are congratulated for their disinterested pursuit of truth "wherever it may lead." But Wilson, like his Victorian subjects, is torn. He appears to subscribe both to the Enlightenment view of religion as an outmoded superstition and to the romantic view of religion as, in von Hugel's phrase, "the deepest kind of life." He scoffs with Gibbon and laments with Carlyle. This leaves him, like the Victorians, in the melancholy position of the reluctant doubter.
This position is philosophically confused. It is not that there is no connection between the rise of empirical science and the decline of religious belief, or that the two are simply "language games," each valid in its own sphere-as some Wittgensteinians maintain. Those thousands of 19th-century intellectuals who abandoned their religion as being "contrary to science" cannot merely have been under a philosophical illusion. But the relationship between the two systems is more subtle than is suggested by the claim that "science has refuted religion." The movement from religion to empirical science is more accurately described as a movement from one system of thought and feeling to another system of thought and feeling.
It is misleading to suggest that Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion inexorably led to agnosticism. Whether or not Hume's arguments are irrefutable, they are effective only against the scientistic religion of the Enlightenment. Against the faith of the church they are entirely impotent, because that faith was never founded on the kinds of consideration that Hume is concerned to refute. No one has ever come to believe in God on the basis of argument; it is easier to torture someone into faith than it is to argue them. This is not to say that faith is irrational or absurd, but that its rationality becomes fully visible only to those who participate in it. Religious justification is, as Alasdaire MacIntyre has put it, retrospective. This is why the medieval scholastic proofs are not addressed to unbelievers, but to those who already share in the life of faith. It is not an accident that Anselm's famous ontological argument is written in the form of a prayer, and is prefaced with the motto credo ut intelligentum-I believe in order to understand.
Similarly, no one has ever lost their faith because of an argument. Many people claimed to lose their faith after reading Darwin, but this can only mean that their faith was an empty shell. Faith is a passion; losing it is like falling out of love. Someone falling out of love might offer reasons why the previous object of their affection is no longer lovable, but these reasons are only the barometer of an inexplicable inward change. So it is with faith. At a certain point in the last 200 years the great passion of Europe came to an end; Hume and Darwin merely document the loss.
Miracles are one of the chief points of contention between religion and science. But here again the terms of the debate are often misunderstood. There can never be a scientific proof of the impossibility of miracles, but science proceeds on the assumption that miracles don't happen, that the laws of nature are inviolable. Whenever a scientist is confronted with a strange occurrence, he or she will assume the operation of a hitherto undiscovered natural law rather than supernatural agency. The justification for this is pragmatic: it has, in the past, proved remarkably profitable. But religious believers disdain this kind of pragmatic justification. And so we reach a deadlock.
Take the case of Padre Pio's stigmata, discussed in last month's Prospect by Jim Holt. They were well-documented, and appear not to have been fraudulent. The Vatican has pronounced them miraculous. The scientific community views them as a case of "psychogenic purpura," a little understood neurotic disorder. Who is right? There is nothing in the stigmata themselves that could incline one either way. The decision one reaches will depend on one's metaphysical assumptions: is there a God? Does he intervene in the world in this way? Of course, the more cases of "psychogenic purpura" that medicine can collate, the stronger its case will appear. Scientific justification, like religious justification, is retrospective. But the religious believer still remains at liberty to view Padre Pio's stigmata as miraculous, because religion always focuses on the individual case rather than on statistical generalities. Once again-deadlock.
Science is founded on the assumption that nature is amenable to human intelligence. There is no eternal mystery, no "riddle of existence." If we do not yet know everything, this is only because we have not yet developed the appropriate techniques. Logical positivism-the most refined expression of the scientific mentality-claimed that all meaningful questions must in principle be answerable. Unanswerable questions are meaningless; their existence is the result of a misuse of language. Carnap argued that Heiddeger's famous question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" was ill-phrased, because it treats nothingness as a peculiar kind of object rather than the mere absence of objects. In the logical notation developed by Carnap and others such a question would not even be capable of formulation.
Christianity-and indeed all revealed religion-adopts the opposite position: our existence constitutes an insoluble riddle. Of course, Christians believe that "light has come into the world," but this light is visible only obscurely, through the parables of Jesus and the illogical doctrines of the church. It will be revealed fully only in some future state. "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." Ignorance cannot be abolished through our own efforts. The achievements of science, impressive though they are, ultimately only compound the darkness. Our theoretical mastery only accentuates our practical ineptitude, a paradox illustrated by the well-known figure of the absent-minded professor. This point is well expressed by the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert:
So many books dictionaries
obese encyclopaedias
but no one to give advice
they explored the sun
the moon the stars
they lost me
my soul
refuses the consolation
of knowledge
so it wanders at night
on the roads of the fathers
The promise of faith is that we will receive illumination only if we first "wander at night"-confess our ignorance. But the "ignorance" of the theologian is not the same as the "ignorance" of the scientist. Wittgenstein famously claimed that even if all the questions of science were answered, the questions of life would not have been touched upon. This is true, but he neglected to add that success in answering the questions of science tends to make the questions of life disappear from view. All genuine problems-psychological, economic, political-are treated as possessing a technical solution. The remaining doubts are consigned to the realm of the neurotic-along with Padre Pio's stigmata. Science does not so much assuage metaphysical anxiety as anaesthetise it.
After the school massacre in Denver, Bill Clinton announced that such catastrophes might be prevented if only more money could be spent on classes in conflict resolution. This is surely the reductio ad absurdum of technocratic optimism. Was it not to refute this world-view-to demonstrate that some things are not susceptible to rational explanation-that the two Denver schoolboys murdered their classmates?
So underlying what AN Wilson calls "the old Victorian Big Fight... with God in the Blue Corner and Science in the Red Corner" is a real opposition. It is a pity that so few Victorian writers, on either side of the debate, realised what was at stake. Instead they tangled themselves in what Wilson admits were "essentially silly questions"-such as whether the dimensions of Noah's Ark recorded in Genesis could have accommodated all the species.
