audiobook Concise Encyclopedia of Islam: Edited on Behalf of the Royal Netherlands Academy by Gibb in History

Description

A magisterial; colorful narrative illuminating the central tragedy of the nineteenth century: that God (or man's faith in him) died; but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him. By the end of the nineteenth century; almost all the great writers; artists; and intellectuals had abandoned 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. (No reader here will soon forget the venomous Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley; brilliant defender of Darwin; and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860.) But as Wilson demonstrates in such fascinatingly diverse lives as those of Gibbon; Kant; Marx; Carlyle; George Eliot; and Sigmund Freud; the doubt about religion had many sources. By 1900; the Church of England; so vastly rich; so 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 practically 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 hierarchical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism. Wilson's exquisitely detailed argument reveals the growth of a new imaginative order of unbelief that supplanted organized religion; and left in its wake a devastating sense of loss extending to our own times.