By R.R. Reno [First Things] – In one of the sharply worded passages of the New Testament, Jesus teaches that he came to bring division, not peace: “father against son and son against father.” As Edmund Gosse draws him memoir of his life with his ardently believing father to a close, he rues this sad fact. “What a charming companion,” Gosse observes, “what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.”

Love ruined. This, for Edmund Gosse, condemns his father’s faith, and in the final pages of Father and Son the anger is palpable as he lets loose a blast:

It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and intolerant spirit of condemnation; it invents sin which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with the pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.

These words are familiar. They can be boiled down to the usual modern critiques of religious faith as a futile life-denying fantasy. Yet, coming at the end of his autobiography, Gosse’s outburst does not read like an atheist’s sermon preached from the high pulpit of Freedom and Reason. He loved his father, and he was loyal to his memory.

Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.