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GIBERSON: Your 1985 book, How Can We Know?, takes a perspective on faith somewhat different from that in God's Funeral. Can you talk a little bit about this transformation?
That is a reasonable question be cause, obviously, in How Can We Know? I am being—though hesitantly—very specifically Christian. I think that is a position that in subsequent years I have revised or moved from. I couldn't exactly explain to you how or why. But when I was commissioned by a publisher to write the life of C. S. Lewis, I thought, "Oh, good, I am going to enjoy this very, very much." And I did enjoy it, but I found, in the course of writing that book, something had happened to me. I wouldn't put it as strongly as to say that I had lost my religious faith because I don't think I have, exactly speaking, but I realized what Lewis called "mere Christianity"—in the way that he de fines it—was not a position which I had entertained in some years. I think I realized that I needed to place myself a little bit outside the Christian fold for a while to think things through after finishing the C. S. Lewis book. Now, here in 1999, I feel much closer to the Christian fold. I feel more like a Christian fellow traveler and indeed do go to church and worship in church on an occasional basis. But I found the C. S. Lewis thing to be troubling, to tell you the truth, because I thought that his attitudes and his arguments for Christianity were so inadequate on many levels. And I also felt that his arguments were dishonest, not in the sense that he was lying, but in that they only came from part of himself. I didn't feel that they were part of the rounded C. S. Lewis who had written the literary criticism.
YERXA: Could you describe in broad terms the Victorian anguish over the loss of faith?
That was certainly something that I wanted to convey. Perhaps this is very novelistic, but I think I can get at it best by anecdote. A few years ago in England there was a book published called The Myth of God Incarnate, written by a group of Anglican theologians, philosophers, and so on. The message of the book is self-evident from the title: that Christianity as popularly understood by a vast majority of the Christian world is not true. So they gave a press conference, and they all had these grins on their faces. They sat there smiling, quite so confidently, wearing their priestly collars. When I watched this on the television (and they are admirable and excellent people; I'm not criticizing them in any way), I couldn't help but think of George Eliot as a young woman in the 1840s, before the novels were written, when she was still Marian Evans, translating David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus. Although by then she had al ready lost her religious beliefs in many respects, when she reached the passage describing the crucifixion, the analytical German coldness with which Strauss described the scene was too much for her. She sobbed as she translated it and stared for comfort at a sculptured relief of the crucifixion by the Scandinavian sculptor Thorvaldsen.
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