Sept/Oct 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Novelist, biographer (of Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis, among others), reviewer (one of the sharpest), literary editor, polemicist, A. N. Wilson has been a lively presence on the British literary scene since the 1970s, when he was still in his early twenties. In addition to producing a steady stream of fiction, he has written most recently Jesus (1992) and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997). His new book, just published by Norton, is God's Funeral, a narrative of the loss of Christian faith particularly among intellectuals in nineteenth-century Britain. Wilson's own faith pilgrimage has taken him from the church (he was one of the few Christians among the British literati) to a highly publicized deconversion (the Saul-Paul story in reverse) to his current status as a "Christian fellow traveler." Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa met with Wilson in Boston near the end of the June heat wave.

DONALD YERXA: In God's Funeral you write with great empathy about the loss of faith. Did you yourself receive a religious upbringing?

...

YERXA: So you had both influences.

Yes, and I daresay that they both exist in my own psyche. I am naturally pious and naturally skeptical—and probably I've learned both at my father and my mother's knee. It was the only area between them where I would say that there was serious conflict. They were married for 44 years, but it was an area of real disagreement between them.

KARL GIBERSON: In God's Funeral, you describe your youth as "morbid" and your middle age as "sunny." What were you getting at with those descriptions?

I am using the terminology of our old friend Professor James. William James had this idea of the sick soul and the healthy soul. The sick soul would be somebody like Saint Augustine or Tolstoy, ...