A.N. Wilson Returns to the Faith
A.N. Wilson — the British novelist and biographer — has returned to the Christian faith of his youth.
He wrote about it recently for The Daily Mail — while simultaneously getting some licks in against Britain’s highly secularized elites.
I don’t know how many of you have followed Wilson’s career, but in the early 1980s, when he was still a believer, he wrote a number of novels and biographies that had a refreshingly offbeat take on life. Many of these books are out of print but I remember loving a novel of his called Wise Virgin. His biography of Hilaire Belloc demonstrated a full awareness of the monstrousness of some of Belloc’s ideas but it was balanced with a graceful appreciation of Belloc’s many gifts.
His biography of C.S. Lewis — and a short apologetic book entitled How Can We Know? – signalled his parting of ways with Christianity.
“It felt so uncool to be religious,” he writes in the Mail. “With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.”
By his own admission, Wilson became a fairly conventional mocker of Christianity. The article in the Mail is somewhat ironic, of course, because Wilson lashes out against the likes of Christopher Hitchens — after spending the better part of two decades sounding rather like…Christopher Hitchens.
It will be interesting to see what he writes next. He’ll have to go deeper than newspaper articles to regain credibility. I for one hope he does.
Gregory,
Thank you very much for this link. Some years back I read “God’s Funeral” by Wilson, and was surprised in the last chapter (if my memory can be trusted) to find him quoting the Book of Revelation where Jesus says: “I was dead, and, behold, I live.” It struck me at the time that Wilson was doing more than merely transcribing a quote.
Now I find this in the Daily Mail article: “My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known – not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.”
Thank you for drawing my attention to this article. It is so refreshing to find someone who will stand up for the faith and say, “I was wrong, and I return.”
Was Wilson “wrong”?
Or, in his years of unbelief, was he learning what faith really is?
He talks very little of how he lost his way, just notes that secularism was in the air, the norm. My guess is that there’s more to it than that.
In my experience, for every Dawkins or Toynbee, there’s an eager-beaver politician who wants to enshrine his belief in the penal code, or a smug Church Lady more than happy to list your failings as a Catholic and a human being.
Perhaps Wilson’s time in the wilderness, so to speak, was where he learned that faith is not supported so much by fallible and human religious structures as it is by the example of those who truly live their faith in the face of ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, those who love us unconditionally as Jesus does.
In my view, the best evidence that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church is that people like Wilson are still able to find their faith in it despite politicization of the belief and the Church Ladies.
More from A.N. Wilson:
http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism
http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/returning-to-religion
I have long shared Wilson’s view, before I just now encountered it in Wilson, that the evolution of language is a lot to swallow.
A. N. Wilson says: No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
I copied that quote to post here before Joseph Gannon posted his message above. I don’t have the same feeling (and it seems to me it is basically just a feeling). The evolution of something like an eye seems a lot more incredible than the evolution of language. Certainly human beings are more (very much more) than “collections of meat.” It is a huge leap from that conclusion to belief in a Creator. And then, of course, it’s another leap to believe anything in particular about that Creator. Of course, considering the immensity of the topic, Wilson’s article is very short. But it doesn’t seem to tell me very much at all.
All human languages are complete systems and what can be said in one language can in principle be said in another. There are no partial or incomplete languages. I doubt that one is conceivable. Either you have language or you don’t. Either you can do language or you can’t. There is no middle ground. For this reason it seem to me very difficult to envisage language gradually developing. A community with linguistic potential will develop a language and be that sort of community. One lacking that potential will not. It is difficult to see how a community could be semi-linguistic.
I was surprised to discover that some think A.N. Wilson’s biography of Hilaire Belloc has some value. Wilson makes very clear that he does not like Belloc, and at the time, had no patience with the Church. Considering the bitterness and sourness of his attitude to Belloc, and Newman, it is an astonishment to read of his conversion. Is it to the Church? or that vague thing called Christianity?
Anent the discussion about language, Wilson’s prose style is a hodge-podge of vague sentimentalities and impossibly illogical.
I am incline to think that we should rejoice that Wilson has seen the light and not fuss about the details.
Wilson, I believe, has returned to the Church of England.
Also, my recollection of the Belloc biography is not at all the same as yours, Gabriel. But it has been a while since I read it.
I look forward to reading the other pieces that Patrick has given links for.
A. N. Wilson writes too belligerently here.
I hope he is not going to be one of those reconverters who equate faith with reactionary and fundamentalist pig-headedness.
People like Richard Dawkins have the unmistakeable virtues of intellectual honesty and courage. It would be more courteous of Wilson to acknowledge this, as Dawkins’s intelligent interlocutors, such as Archbishop Rowan Williams and Bishop Richard Harries, do.
There are lots of problems with the contradictory empty-tomb narratives, and it would be better to locate the basis of one’s resurrection faith elsewhere. He talks of Dostoevsky, but I recently noticed that Dostoevsky’s attitude to the resurrection is very complex; see http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/dostoevsky-and-resurrection.html