God's Funeral

by A N Wilson (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $12.98

  By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers and artists, and intellectuals had abanied Christianity, and many abandoned belief in God altogether. This was partly the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species . But as Wilson demonstrates in such diverse lives as those of Gibbon, Kant, Marx, Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, the dough about religion had many sources. By 1900, the Chruch of England, so rich and politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually empty, however full its pews might be on a Sunday. Echoes of The Death of God could be found everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Garibaldi and Lenin; in the poetry of Tennyson and the novels of Hardy; in the work of Freud, connecting this death to our deepest wishes; and in the decline of hierachical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism.