Early Chronicles of a Post-Christian Age
by Russell Shaw - October 22, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
One sunny morning in September 1860, a British widower broke the news to his 11-year-old son that he was planning to marry again. The boy paused to take it in, then demanded, "But, Papa, is she one of the Lord's children?"
The father replied that she was.
"Has she taken up her cross in baptism?" the lad persisted.
The father confessed that his intended hadn't done that yet, since she'd been "brought up, hitherto, in the so-called Church of England." Sheepishly he added, "We must pray that the Lord may make her way clear."
The child was not appeased. Shaking a finger at his father like an angry inquisitor, he exclaimed, "Papa, don't tell me that she's a pedobaptist?"
For the benefit of those whose theological vocabularies may not have reached such esoteric heights, a pedobaptist is someone who believes in infant baptism.
Are we meant to laugh or cry over this snatch of dialogue? Probably a bit of both. The bizarre scene is one of many in Edmund Gosse's extraordinary memoir Father and Son, which first appeared just a century ago, in 1907.
By a coincidence of sympathetic timing, another remarkable autobiographical work, The Education of Henry Adams, appeared in that same year. Although the Education was not published for general circulation until after Adams's death in 1918, its fastidious and patrician author issued it in a limited edition of 100 copies in 1907 to be read and critiqued by friends.
The two books are alike in several ways. Both are marked by a tone of cool, skeptical irony – a literary and psychological distancing device – regarding the events they relate. More important, both supply incisive, complementary accounts of the loss of faith as experienced in 19th-century America and England by two uncommon men. In doing so, they also shed light on the situation of faith today.
Religious belief had been in crisis among Western elites for well over a century before 1907. The assault on Christianity involved attacks on the veracity of the Bible, attacks on the divinity of Christ – attacks on very nearly all of the significant elements of Christian faith. In general, the response of Protestants reluctant to abandon religion entirely took either of two forms: the rationalistic, relativistic religious liberalism that John Henry Newman so abhorred and religious fundamentalism, grounded in unyielding insistence that everything the Bible appeared to state as historical or scientific fact could only be taken literally.
That year, 1907, also saw the publication, among other works, of E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey, J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and works by Andre Gide and Henri Bergson. (It also brought the condemnation of Modernism by Pope St. Pius X.) The volumes by Adams and Gosse bear comparison with any of these. More than just histories of their times, they are penetrating self-analyses by two subtle minds at the dawn of a supposedly post-Christian era.
