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Novelist, biographer (of Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis, among others), reviewer (one of the sharpest), literary editor, polemicist, A. N. Wilson has been a lively presence on the British literary scene since the 1970s, when he was still in his early twenties. In addition to producing a steady stream of fiction, he has written most recently Jesus (1992) and Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997). His new book, just published by Norton, is God's Funeral, a narrative of the loss of Christian faith particularly among intellectuals in nineteenth-century Britain. Wilson's own faith pilgrimage has taken him from the church (he was one of the few Christians among the British literati) to a highly publicized deconversion (the Saul-Paul story in reverse) to his current status as a "Christian fellow traveler." Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa met with Wilson in Boston near the end of the June heat wave.

DONALD YERXA: In God's Funeral you write with great empathy about the loss of faith. Did you yourself receive a religious upbringing?

My father was an agnostic; my mother is a practicing Anglican, not of a very enthusiastic kind, but she is a believing Anglican, and so she goes to church each week. For reasons which are quite strange, but trivial, I went to a Roman Catholic primary school. I was taught by the Dominican nuns until I was 7. Then from the age of 7 to 18, I went to boarding schools, which were, broadly speaking, Church of England. I would say I was a more than usually religious child and certainly had aspirations to become a priest, which did not entirely leave me until my mid- to late twenties. So that was my background: Episcopalian, but with a strong element of agnosticism on my father's side. In deed, he was positively antireligious.

YERXA: So you had both influences.

Yes, and I daresay that they both exist in my own psyche. I am naturally pious and naturally skeptical—and probably I've learned both at my father and my mother's knee. It was the only area between them where I would say that there was serious conflict. They were married for 44 years, but it was an area of real disagreement between them.

KARL GIBERSON: In God's Funeral, you describe your youth as "morbid" and your middle age as "sunny." What were you getting at with those descriptions?

I am using the terminology of our old friend Professor James. William James had this idea of the sick soul and the healthy soul. The sick soul would be somebody like Saint Augustine or Tolstoy, who was full of a sense of sin, whose religious life begins with the idea of themselves and the world being drawn awry. Whereas a healthy soul is somebody who becomes religious out of a sense of joyful gratitude in the nature of things—whether they be come Christian or not. Emerson is a classic example of the healthy mind as far as James is concerned. The morbid ones are often much more interesting, of course. I think most teenagers are sick souls rather than healthy souls, and I certainly was a sick soul. I had a sense of guilt, probably due to sex; I can't remember—about everything, really. The sense that life was bleak and gloomy and that religion was all part of that. Very self-indulgent. Whereas, of course, I am now a much more superficial character [laughing]. And I don't suffer from depressions, I am happy to say. I am much more cheerful, as middle-aged men tend to be.

GIBERSON: Where does the novelist in you reside when you're working on something like God's Funeral? Perhaps in the often quirky details you include that make the people you discuss so palpably real?

It is probably novelistic, isn't it? As well as telling you what they thought, I tell you what they were like to meet—their funny little habits. In this book I didn't set out to write straight intellectual history, because there are many people who are better qualified than I am to do that. And after all, there have been plenty of good books about the Enlightenment, and plenty of good books about the loss of faith in the nineteenth century, and certainly many better books than I should ever write about the history of science. But I wanted to chronicle what it was like for people on the inside—how it affected people's inner life deciding either that they had to change their religious views or lose them altogether. And to that extent, perhaps being a novelist helps. In that sense the book may be regarded as a very novelistic enterprise, but I was not trying to fictionalize a story. I was trying to tell the truth.

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