So Max Wright, sometime lecturer in philosophy at Queen’s University (and known to some here), begins ‘Told in Gath’, the autobiographical account of his upbringing among the Plymouth Brethren in Bangor and Belfast. The book is, variously, a witty, evocative, elegiac, supercilious and trenchantly critical account of his youth. Wright’s book was published by the Blackstaff Press in 1990 but it evokes quite explicitly the earlier masterpiece by Edmund Gosse, published in 1907.
Like Wright, Gosse was brought up in a single-parent family consumed by the rigid orthodoxies, and the religious manias, of the Plymouth Brethren.
Edmund Gosse’s book – ‘Father and Son’ – published some 20 years after his father’s death, describes, relentlessly, the gradual disengagement of the author from the strict and dogmatic religious beliefs of his father. As such, it has come to epitomize not only the conflict between the generations – the rebellion of sons against fathers – but has come to be seen as one of the seminal texts defining the character of Victorian Christianity and, more importantly, illustrating religion’s demise at the hands of the rising generation of sophisticated unbelievers. The book’s popularity – it has remained in print since its publication – stems from its both reflecting and expressing this particular climate of opinion. ‘One of the immortal pages in English literature’, George Bernard Shaw was to describe it: it isn’t, but it has rightly come to be seen as one of the classic texts in the tale of Victorian unbelief.
In it, the author, the son, Edmund, tells the story of how he comes to abhor his father’s gloomy faith, rebels against his oppressive upbringing, and consequently rejects all vestige of religious belief. So Edmund’s account of his grim childhood among the Brethren and his subsequent escape from their life-denying clutches, is not purely autobiographical, but comes to be seen as symptomatic, as emblematic, of the quest of modern man to shake off the irrational and despotic chains of religious belief. The itself, then book becomes a metaphor: it is a vehicle for a much bigger story, the meta-narrative of the decline of religion in the modern world. It is a diagnosis of how religious belief distorts human relationships, warps the human spirit and destroys the promise of so many lives. But it isn’t only a cri de coeur, a tale of unremitting woe: it is essentially a heroic tale of the overcoming, the transcending, of one’s upbringing, of how light and reason and culture can bring release and fulfilment and liberty.
The way of escape is through a more scientific education, the reading of many books, the beauty of poetry and art, an openness to the intoxicating riches of high culture. These, it was believed would act as both the antidote to, and the substitute for, all forms of religious dogmatism.
The son is liberated from his benighted background to lead a life among the literary giants of London: a friend of Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Thomas Hardy – anyone who was anyone in literary London of the first three decades of the 20th century. A well-known essayist and critic, he was to go on to publish several biographies and was instrumental in introducing the work of Henrik Ibsen to the English stage.
However, it is for ‘Father and Son’ that Gosse is remembered; of all his prolific output, only that book is in print today. The book caught the spirit of the age, an age which wanted above all things to escape the incubus of religious belief. It was viewed as, in the words of one reviewer, ‘a bitter cry from a world without tenderness and without gaiety; a lamentable world of darkness’. Virginia Woolf, somewhat ironically declaiming on insanity, wrote of the ‘insane religious mania of the father’. Of course, the tendency of her associates in the now famous Bloomsbury Group, was to define a religious maniac as ‘someone who believes in God’. For the likes of them, there was little significant difference between the most obsessive religious fanatic and anyone who was so intellectually handicapped that they still deigned to believe in God! The point was, religion had become passé; an unfashionable thing the proper place of which was entirely in the past; no-one who wished to pass as intelligent, educated, sophisticated – or socially acceptable - could ever be seen to even entertain its possibility. The future belonged to science and art, the first of which had shown the superstitions of faith to be absurd, the second of which would, quite adequately, replace - emotionally and aesthetically - the noxious moralism of religion. In this, as in much else, we are their inheritors.
Now, there is little doubt but that the Plymouth Brethren that Edmund Gosse and, later Max Wright, described were, and are, a particularly introverted, narrow and rigorous sect. Perhaps some of them were joyless and cruel too. Certainly, at some points in his narrative, Edmund Gosse characterises them as such. So he tells of a grotesque incident on Christmas Day 1857, when he was about eight, that ‘made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface’. His father, he claims, in common with the brethren, viewed the celebration of Christmas as idolatrous: it was both a heathen relic and a Popish blasphemy. It was not to be endured – and certainly never to be enjoyed! The story goes that, although strict orders had been given that even the meals should be no different from any other day, two of the maids secretly made a small plum-pudding for themselves. Taking pity on the young Edmund, they brought him into the kitchen and gave him a piece. When his father discovered this, he burst into the kitchen, seized what remained of the ‘idolatrous confectionary’, and threw it violently into the bin.
From these and other similar anecdotes, we glean an unmistakable picture of Edmund Gosse’s father. He has been variously characterised as ‘something of a monster’, ‘a joyless Puritan’, ‘one of the most terrible people the world has produced’. Peter Carey, the Australian novelist, in his 1998 Booker prize-winning novel ‘Oscar and Lucinda’, acknowledges his debt to Gosse, borrowing from him the ‘Plymouth Brethren, a Christmas Pudding and a father who was proud of never having read Shakespeare’.
Edmund Gosse, the son, the author of the book, died almost 80 years ago, in 1928; his father had died 40 years before. Yet, despite the passing of the years, the image is fixed for ever: the religious father leads a gloomy and sombre life; he obsessively attempts to inculcate his fanatical beliefs on his son; he is a man of one book, the Bible, and disparages all other literature as tools of Satan; the only healthy response is for the son to escape the clutches not only of his father but of the religion that has made a monster of him. In the end, the young man takes his life into his own hands, casts off the yoke of religious obedience and ‘took the human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself’. Those are the last words in the book.
So, the son leaves his father’s home to seek his fortune in a far country and, in a neat reversal of the Biblical parable, discovers it to be the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey: he has no need of his father, or his father’s religion. That is not only Edmund Gosse’s story; or Max Wright’s; it is ours: not our personal story, but the story of our age, a cultural stereotype. Like children who grow up, in the modern Western world we have transcended our time of dependency; we have come of age; we can learn to think for ourselves (which is to say that whatever we think is true becomes so precisely because we think it so); we have left our fathers and their religion behind.
My contention is that this story we have constructed to make sense of our world is, far from being a mark of sophistication or an indicator of intellectual ability or even of the liberty of reason, is actually a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, save the fervid imagination of a recalcitrant son rebelling against his father’s world.
This is a peculiarly modern myth; or, if you wish, an attitude of mind, a climate of opinion. It is a myth, an attitude, an opinion that we imbibe from the opinion-makers around us. In our modern world, these stem more often than not from the media, especially from radio and television. Among these, in Britain at least, it was for a long time essential to be seen as a ‘cultured despiser of religion’. But much of this is not the fruit of reasoned argument; or rational assessment of the pros and cons; it is not a consequence of any kind of ‘proof’ at all.
In the 1930s, AJ Ayer, the young rebel of English philosophy, dismissed religion as ‘meaningless’ and most of Western philosophy as ‘metaphysical nonsense’. Now, we might think he and those like him (who for a time came to dominate English-speaking philosophy) had taken the time and the trouble to read what those who went before them had written; we might suppose that a leading philosopher might at least attempt to argue with Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. If so, we would be wrong: they were simply and arrogantly and thoughtlessly dismissed as of no relevance to our more enlightened age. Those who came after simply knew more than those who went before, the son knew better than the father – on no other grounds than that this is now and that was then!
Edmund Gosse’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was a devoted and convinced member of the brethren. He had pronounced – and to our mind, fundamentalist – religious beliefs; he could be, at times, earnest, strict and even censorious. But he was not mad, or bad, or cruel; he was not gloomy or joyless or unaffectionate. Born in 1810, 27 years before the accession of Queen Victoria, he was a world-renowned naturalist: a zoologist, an entomologist, a botanist and ornithologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society. On his death in 1888, the Royal Society’s obituary notice declared of him that ‘no man has ever done so much to popularise the study of natural history in England’.
He left behind him a corpus of over 40 books some of titles of which might indicate the wealth of his knowledge and the breadth of his interests: ‘Monuments of Ancient Egypt’, ‘Illustrations of the Birds of Jamaica’, ‘A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast’, ‘Seaside Pleasures’, ‘A Manual of Marine Biology’, ‘Letters from Alabama’, ‘The Romance of Natural History’, ‘Glimpses of the Wonderful’.
Although he maintained a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation, and disapproved of the theory of evolution, he remained a life-long friend of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. His grandson, Edmund’s son, who died in 1959, remembers the old man in 1884 as the ‘embodiment of happy energy as he strides along, humming the chorus of a Devon song’. Far from being the cheerless, anti-intellectual, ‘proud of having never read Shakespeare’, he never tired of reading Shakespeare and loved to quote passages from his plays throughout his life. And as for that most famous incident with the Christmas plum-pudding well, late in life, when he sat down to write his own memoirs he remembers with fondness being carried in his mother’s arms, a slice of plum-pudding in each hand.
Resistant though I remain to admitting anything of worth in the theories of Sigmund Freud, one begins to suspect that the son’s portrait of his father has a deeper origin than mere fact.
The moral of our story is plain: it is not that Edmund was wrong or his father right, or vice-versa. It is that the zeitgeist, the world-view, the cultural assumptions we inherit and thoughtlessly accept must also be held open to critical scrutiny. Of course, we are rightly sceptical of the dogmatic insistence by born-again Christians that the Bible, and the Bible alone, contains truth; we are rightly dismissive of the claim that all else is damnable error. But religious dogmatism isn’t the only kind of credulity in our world. We should be equally sceptical of the complacent assurances of secular reason: every bit as dogmatic (although seeming not to be), every bit as thoughtless (although claiming exclusive possession of the truth), every bit as irrational (although judging itself to be the epitome of reason).
Like Max Wright and Edmund Gosse, I too was brought up in a milieu of fervent fundamentalist Christianity. I too rebelled against my father’s claustrophobic religion and way of life, and went into a far country in search of sophistication. It was only later in life that I began to realise, perhaps imperfectly, what it was he was trying to do, the role religious belief played in his life and in the life of his family. There weren’t many choices in the back streets of Belfast in the 1910s and 20s when he was growing up; there were a few more in my time. Yet I’m not sure they didn’t make a better job of the little that they were given than we are making of the riches that we have been given.
At the age of 14 and being a Grammar School boy, I already knew everything that was worth knowing. Certainly, I knew more than my father who had left school at 12 and had worked as a plasterer on building sites ever since. I couldn’t help feeling superior to him. Educationally and socially, I wasn’t destined to share his world.
So it was that one evening a discussion arose at home. It was over some trivial matter but as sometimes happens, when teenagers are involved, the discussion became heated and turned inevitably into a ‘shouting-match’. As a climax to my argument, I suddenly realised that it was beneath my dignity to live in such a benighted household and, dramatically declaring my intention to leave home forever, I slammed the door behind me as I went out into the dark November night.
It was about five minutes later that I began to have second thoughts. The problem was – how to return home without losing too much face and before I died of exposure! Then there occurred what James Joyce would call an epiphany: there in the distance, about 30 yards away, I saw a figure walking in my direction. A familiar figure. A small, stocky man, with hard workman’s hands; an unsophisticated man; one who had slaved all his life for no great material reward; who had invested the little of what he had earned to ensure that his son would never have to come home every night covered in the dust of plaster and asbestos, the asbestos that would claim his life two years later.
And he came to his son, to his arrogant son, to one who had been given all the advantages that he himself had been denied, to one who habitually treated him abysmally, to the one who had done nothing to deserve his compassion or his love, and he said: ‘Son, come home’.
That is the image of fathers and sons, of mothers and daughters, that is the image of God that remains when all the others fade into incoherence or insignificance. God is the One who says to each of his children:
‘Son, daughter, come home!’

Rev.Nigel Playfair
May 2007
Rosemary Street, Belfast.