Change & Decay In All Around I See

Tuesday 21 April 2009, 9:57PM

A N Wilson and Christianity

'Doubting Thomas' by Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308

The other day Kate pointed me in the direction of one of the best little essays I’ve read on Christianity for a long time. In Why I believe again, available on the New Statesman website, the writer A N Wilson explains why he has embraced the Christian faith again, after a decade or so of militant atheism.

He’s one of those quintessentially English figures who over the years has become something of a national treasure: unashameably middle class, highly erudite, a profilic writer, good on the radio and TV, and possessed of a sense of humour informed by a strong sense of the absurd. A bit like Alan Bennett, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, and the late Iris Murdoch and Peter Cook.

What I love about A N Wilson is his intellectual curiosity, honesty and humility. As a young man he was a Christian of the sceptical variety, enrolling at a theological training college only to drop out after a few weeks, realising that his faith was insufficiently strong to justify a call to ministry. He wrote a little book called How can we know?, a tentative, appealing defence of the reasonableness of Christianity.

As he recounts in his New Statesman piece Wilson experienced something of a ‘Damascene conversion’ to atheism in the early 1990s. He’s characteristically foggy about the precise reasons why, but puts it down, in part, to irritation with the robust tone of apologists like C S Lewis. (I’m glad to read that there’s someone else who finds Lewis’ apologetics somewhat annoying. I’ve never quite understood the popularity of Lewis’ bluff and blokeish Mere Christianity, with its - I think - simplistic ‘mad, bad or God’ knock-down style of argument. Give me the brilliant Lewis of A Grief Observed over that anyday.)

During his years outside the fold Wilson wrote a couple of books that drew on scholars like Geza Vermes and E P Sanders to question the historicity of the Gospel accounts. I remember at the time that Jesus and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle were rubbished by Christian academics like Tom Wright and Luke Johnson. But whatever the value of their arguments, the books were beautifully written, bringing a novelist’s eye to their evocation of the ancient world.

After that he wrote a series of books on the Victorians, which in retrospect showed him feeling his way back towards belief. I’ve only read one (the others are definitely on my list): God’s Funeral, a fascinating, sympathetic study of the struggles of eminent Victorians and Edwardians like Tennyson, Ruskin, Hardy, Arnold and Carlyle to hold on to God in the newly hostile intellectual climate shaped by 19th century Biblical scholarship, Darwin, and the development of geological science. The melancholy roar of the withdrawing ‘sea of faith’ and all that.

As Wilson puts it, he’s come back to Christianity because of a persistent sense that a materialist view of life just cannot account for our pull towards the transcendent, the deep sense that life points beyond itself to God. He says: “When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.” The Christian story makes sense of life like nothing else: “As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

Anyway, that’s enough from me: I refer you to Why I believe again. And if you’ve got time it’s also worth having a look at Wilson’s interview with Rowan Williams about the Archbishop’s recent book on Dostoevsky.