Reviewed Book: Buckley, William F. (William Frank). Nearer my God: an autobiography of faith. New York: Doubleday, 1997

Erb, Peter C.

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 24Issue 1 Leadership into the 21st Century Article 215-1-1998Nearer my God: an autobiography of faithPeter C. ErbFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Book Reviews is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationErb, Peter C. (1998) "Nearer my God: an autobiography of faith," Consensus: Vol. 24 : Iss. 1 , Article 21.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol24/iss1/21Book Reviews 161Nearer My God: An Autobiography of FaithWilliam F. Buckley, Jr.New York: Doubleday, 1997313 pp. $34.95There is every reason why I should dislike this spiritual autobiography.My conservativism is so unlike that of its author, we would need a thirdlanguage to make any communication between us possible. I’ve spent agood deal of time reflecting on many Catholic “moments”, but the struc-ture of this one is so marked by Buckleyan staccato (an extension perhapsof the static of his speech patterns) the reader sometimes despairs. And de-spite the virtues of tolerance and respect inculcated into me as a child andrequired by the now sadly necessary mandates of rising multicultural moral-ists, I continue to find it difficult to appreciate Buckley’s peculiar ethnictradition—that of the American monied, self-defined, and thus self-assured,elite.Worst of all, the book is filled with the strangest juxtapositions. Thetitle, for example, is taken from a hymn written by a Unitarian and appro-priated by firmly Trinitarian Protestants. Catholics, Buckley is proud toclaim, can’t sing. It appears they can’t recognize hymn sources either. But,then, inconsistencies are part of Christian practice as a whole. Protestants,who, as the myth has it, can sing, bear their own musical contradictions,having pinched that arch- Catholic, Frederick Faber’s hymn, “Faith of our[Roman Catholic] Fathers” as a weapon for the attack. And Buckley is nofool: He quite consciously shortens the full title of the hymn from “Nearer,My God, to Thee”, thus opening his work to a deliciously double meaning,describing both the movement of God to us and our movement to God.By so doing, he emphasizes the function of grace in his and other Chris-tian lives, a doctrine often claimed by chauvinistic Protestants. He claimsback, as it were, that other Faber hymn, plagiarized as uniquely Protestant,“There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”.Again: Buckley, the cradle Catholic, depends on the oddest assortmentof converts to support his approach. Most are his friends. To one of them—the mountaineer, skier, inventor of the slalom—Arnold Lunn, he devotesa sixth of his text and that to Lunn’s early writing as an opponent ofCatholic faith. Setting aside the comments of Lunn’s debating partner,Ronald Knox, and a not particularly well developed chapter on John HenryNewman’s theory of the development of Christian doctrine, Buckley’s nextmost quoted writer is the convert from Lutheranism, Richard J. Neuhaus.There is little unexpected in what any of them say, although their commentsare worth the reading. The obligatory chapter on Vatican II leaves one withthe impression that the Council was primarily concerned with lifting theobligation of Friday abstinence and removing Latin from the liturgy. Of theCouncil’s “achievements”, hinted at in the chapter’s title, we learn little.There follow a collection of rambling interviews with Buckley’s “advisors:162 Consensusmy forum of converts”, first among whom is Neuhaus and including thepolitical conservative Russell Kirk (deceased) among others. They commentin their varying ways on the crucifixion, women as priests, birth control,divorce and remarriage, church and state, the uniqueness of Christ, andother matters. Into the midst of this are embedded idiosyncratic reflectionson Lourdes, on Hollywood (a sort of review of the film. True Confessions),and on Malcolm Muggeridge.And yet. . .the book is well worth the read, if only for the first four andthe final two chapters. The machine-gun staccato disappears when Buckleygives up the firing line and is willing to rest in reflection on his childhood, hisearly teachers, his university experience, his deep cover in the CIA, his tieswith Howard and Dorothy Hunt (of Watergate fame) and his acquaintancewith Charles Coulson, the ordination of his nephew, and his mother’s faith.In a strange way, where Buckley is at his very best, he is at his worst.The speed of his wit makes him a quick debater but a poor assimilator. Hisattention is given to proving his enemy wrong, not convincing her. He leapsfirmly to the attack; he is slow in considering the nature of the struggle. Aready defender of the faith, he is a poor theologian.I was once told by a Southern Baptist friend that the Mason-Dixonline separates two religious approaches. In northern seminaries, he pointedout, priority is given to rational apologetic techniques, in the South toinstruction in personal evangelism. Buckley’s book begins in the North. Wemeet him first at a childhood home in Connecticut. At the book’s close thereader discovers that this home is replaced by modern condominiums andthat his parents returned to their roots and “a [restored] antebellum housein South Carolina” (283). In the epilogue, when he speaks of the deathof his mother, Buckley comes, I think, to understand the implications ofthis shift. Certainly the book shifts. At the beginning the reader is tossedunwittingly from nostalgic comments on boyhood schoofing into a steriletreatment of Newman on the notes of the church. At the close we rest bythe graveside of Buckley’s mother in hope of the resurrection of “the oldand the beautiful”,of her body and of the best of Catholic faith, recalling—as perhaps Buckley himself does, although he makes no comment on thefact—other aspects of the Venerable John Henry Newman’s life and work.“No man would die for a proposition” the Newman adage runs. Whatcounts is the person, a person, perhaps erratic, often unintegrated, alwaysdisjunctive, and inevitably contradictory, a fallen person, but a full personnevertheless, a “heart” as Newman would have said. Cor ad cor loquitur:Heart does speak to heart.Peter C. ErbWilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario

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