Religion and the Rebel was published by Victor Gollancz in 1957, one year after The Outsider. Where the first book diagnosed the Outsider’s condition, this sequel examines the Outsider’s attempts to find solutions — specifically, religious and spiritual solutions. Wilson surveys figures who confronted the Outsider’s crisis and attempted to resolve it through faith, mystical experience, or disciplined contemplation: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Cardinal Newman, Jakob Boehme, Ramakrishna, George Fox, and Gurdjieff.
The book was savaged by the same critics who had praised The Outsider. The reversal was partly the inevitable correction of an overhyped debut, partly a genuine response to the book’s weaknesses (it is more diffuse and less focused than its predecessor), and partly cultural politics: the Angry Young Men were supposed to be secular and materialist, and Wilson’s turn toward religious philosophy violated the brand. Wilson later described the reviews as the most traumatic experience of his life.
Yet the book contains some of Wilson’s most important thinking. His distinction between the “passive” mystic (who waits for grace) and the “active” mystic (who pursues expanded consciousness through effort and discipline) anticipates his later work on Faculty X and the occult. His reading of Kierkegaard — as a man who grasped the Outsider’s problem but solved it through a “leap of faith” that Wilson considers intellectually unsatisfying — is acute.
Collecting Religion and the Rebel
First edition (Victor Gollancz, London, 1957): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80