Life for a Biographer

Quite a story here:

I know the biographer A. N. Wilson primarily because I read parts of his biography of C. S. Lewis for one of my theses; he has also written biographies on John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus. Additionally he wrote the book God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization. Wilson was raised Christian, but abandoned it as an adult and became a high-profile atheist.

In his Lewis biography, Wilson interpreted everything through the lens of Freudianism by finding psychological causes (rather than rational reasons) for Lewis’s Christian beliefs and his attempts to defend them rationally….

Be sure to read the rest of it.

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3 Responses

  1. smudge77 says:

    I read his biography of C.S. Lewis some years ago, and, although I wasn’t familiar with A.N. Wilson at that time, instinctively felt his interpretation and innuendoes were not accurate and not in harmony with a number of established facts about Lewis.

    I read, only yesterday, that he had ‘returned to the faith,’ although the commentators felt he had only been messing about with it last time, and other beliefs, since, and this ‘return’ may prove to be the same…
    I obviously need to read the rest of the link now
    thanks.

  2. smudge77 says:

    just read Wilson’s own account of his slow ‘return’
    http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism

    where he says:

    “I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity made me a non-believer – not just in Lewis’s version of Christianity, but in Christianity itself.”

    I actually believe this was actually when he recognised [subconsciously] he was a non-believer…not that it made him a non-believer…

    maybe his ‘return’ is his first actual conversion, as, having read what he says, it seems honest and with some depth of gradual understanding about meaning and non-meaning.

  3. Tom Gilson says:

    Thanks for that, smudge77.