This study continues English critic/biographer/novelist Wilson’s recent spate of articulate religion books (including Jesus:...
A mellifluous, perceptive intellectual history of the Victorians’ struggles with faith.
This study continues English critic/biographer/novelist Wilson’s recent spate of articulate religion books (including Jesus: A Life, 1992, and Paul: The Mind of an Apostle, 1997). It defies easy classification. In the sweeping style of the grand narrative, Wilson converses wittily on the philosophy, literature, art, science, music, and theology of Europe during more than six decades. Amazingly enough, he does it brilliantly. Wilson has a keen eye for historical detail and can chronicle even a familiar story (such as why Darwin hesitated before publishing On the Origin of Species) in a fresh way. He notes that religious faith was shaken in the last half of the 19th century because of biblical criticism, the onslaught of Darwinism, and a new awareness of economic injustice. We meet the era’s most famous thinkers, such as Kant, Marx, and the James brothers, as well as some less celebrated, such as the libertine poet Algernon Swinburune. The latter was among those most openly hostile to religion, while others (George Eliot, whom Wilson calls that “poor horse-faced lady”) persisted in stubborn, though relatively private, unbelief. At the other end of the spectrum, Sigmund Freud and William James were clearly fascinated by religion, though Freud thought it would fade into obsolescence as civilization marched forward, and James considered it a useful psychological crutch. By century’s end, there appeared to be “no good arguments left for religion.” The Church of England in particular was devastated by the challenge from its intellectuals and its own wealth and power. Yet the rumors of God’s imminent death proved to be greatly exaggerated, since the 20th century has seen a new crop of philosophers and theologians (as well as ordinary believers) bent on demonstrating God’s vitality.Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04745-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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