My first Spectator article, 21 years ago, was a rebuke to the religious attitude of certain public intellectuals whom I dubbed ‘devout sceptics’. They gave the impression, I said, of being drawn to the depth of religion, unlike shallow atheists, but also of being too intellectually honest to believe in it. To my delight, one of my targets, Clive James, wrote a self-defending letter. I had been noticed by a big beast!
A.N. Wilson was another of my targets. Of him, I said that a foppish antiquarian interest in religion was just a water-muddying distraction; we could do with some intellectuals who get off the fence and set out the case for religion. I met him soon after that article and he was very nice about it. He is a charming and friendly chap. But I won’t let this stop me updating my critique of his approach to religion.
In his enjoyable new memoir, Confessions, he explains that he has always been drawn to Christianity, but distracted by a gadfly agnosticism, a sense that secular open-mindedness is for him unavoidable, a sort of calling. Fair enough: in our less-sparkling ways, most of us who try to be Christian experience something similar. The question is whether one really tries to resolve this tension in a Christian way, or whether one becomes comfortable in one’s ambivalence.
One cannot really know another person’s spiritual life – in Wilson’s case, the smooth dilettante is perhaps not the whole story
His relationship to Roman Catholicism is central to his story. As a boy he was taught by nuns – the saintly headmistress showed him ‘that there is a higher way of living, that human nature is capable of transformation if one is humble enough, simple enough, to submit to the Gospel of Christ. (I’ve never quite done it, much as I have hope or aspired, in pious moments to try.)’ During his gap year in Florence he converted, but soon, still a student, he married an older woman who refused to let their children be raised Catholic. He tried High Church Anglicanism but drifted away from taking it fully seriously. Maybe he remained bugged by a sense that Catholicism was the more authentic faith, but that he was an outsider to it. In fact, he had a glimpse of this as a boy: he recalls kneeling as the priest carries the sacrament into the school: ‘we are not simply being well behaved, as I am [in the Anglican church]. We are awestruck because God Himself is passing by…’ But he is honest enough to qualify this and say that a good Anglican service makes him feel uniquely ‘at home’. And then he qualifies it again: agnosticism is an even stronger force than either of these traditions.
His admiration for Catholicism – as the fully authentic version of religion, expressed in rare lives of saintly devotion – can be seen as a convenient way of keeping religion at arm’s length. For he is too full of worldliness and doubt (unlike that ‘simple’ nun) and has the normal liberal aversion to the authoritarian and dogmatic side of Catholicism. In a sense he wants to see authentic religion as at odds with liberal values, so it remains impossible, other. The Anglican attempt to reconcile faith and liberal values is assumed to be a sell-out – as a young journalist he was a waspish critic of trendy Anglican bishops. But really, surely, a liberal version of religion is the only serious option for someone like him. To dismiss it as wishy-washy is a way of defending oneself from having to take religion fully seriously.
In the same way he is periodically attracted to Tolstoy’s Christian radicalism – rejecting wealth and power, and political realism, and trying to launch the kingdom of God on earth. It is convenient to see this as another version of ‘real Christianity’, because its pacifist utopianism can’t be seriously pursued. By admiring it, one can sound hard-core while slipping away from wrestling with the question of how the claims of the gospel can be renewed in our day, in real humdrum life.
Also, it’s significant that he is not very drawn to Protestant tradition. For central to Protestantism is the notion that Christianity is for ordinary flawed people, and that heroic virtue is a potential distraction. And there is a strong Protestant tradition, beginning with Luther, of seeing doubt as integral to grown-up faith. To be incurably agnostic is just to be incurably human, not an off-faith note.
Ultimately, Wilson does not really want to find a version of Christianity that a modern-minded person might find compelling. He prefers to remain in an ‘aesthetic’ relationship to religion (to borrow from Kierkegaard), which sees it as a fascinating string to one’s soul. With suave Oxford wit and buckets of bookish charm, he slips away from the task of trying to reconcile Christianity with an honest commitment to liberal values, and an honest admission of doubt, preferring to see it as a beautifully impossible thing.
My analysis might sound judgemental – but he is inviting it by writing a book in which religion features heavily. I should add that one cannot really know another person’s spiritual life – in Wilson’s case, the smooth dilettante is perhaps not the whole story. I am only going on the religious persona he presents us with.
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