My article, H. G. Wells: Mysticism and Machinery, a study of the man’s religious thought, appears at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website.
The Orthosphere
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists – Joseph de Maistre
My article, H. G. Wells: Mysticism and Machinery, a study of the man’s religious thought, appears at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website.
Thank you — I wouldn’t want to miss it.
Paul Gottfried asks me this question: “Why would Wells’ s revulsion for the concept of the Trinity proceed from his dislike for the Catholic Church. This concept seems to be common to all traditional Christian ‘faith communities,’ including Mennonites and (I think) old-fashioned Quakers. The Church of England, into which I assume Wells was born, would have been as Trinitarian in its theology as the Catholic Church.”
I respond: Wells was raised a Low-Church Methodist by his evangelizing mother and he was almost as indisposed to Anglicanism as he was to Catholicism. Wells traced the doctrine of the Trinity to what he saw as the vain wranglings of the priests and Bishops at the Council of Nicaea and he identified that doctrine with squabbling vanity. I don’t argue that Wells’ hostility to the Trinity was rational; on the contrary, I think it was largely emotional and irrational. It was, precisely, a bee in his bonnet. There is something in Wells’ synthetic Christianity that puts it in proximity to Arianism; there is also something in it of the TV-Evangelist “Walk with Jesus” type of Christianity, in which the Father and the Holy Spirit, while they do not vanish, nevertheless take their seats remotely in a back pew somewhere, leaving the spotlight on th Son.