George Moore
From Philosopedia
Moore, George Augustus (24 February 1852 - 21 January 1933)
Moore was born into a Roman Catholic family in Ballyglass, County Mayo, Ireland. He was educated at a Catholic college, but jettisoned his faith in Paris, where he went at 18 to study art, as described in Flowers of Passion (1877).
His 1883 novel, A Modern Lover, set in artistic Bohemian society, was banned by the circulating libraries, a fact that confirmed Moore in his outspoken battle against prudery and censorship. In The Apostle, the author depicted Paul murdering Jesus after finding him alive many years following his alleged "resurrection." The preface is "a charmingly free study of the bible," according to freethought historian Joseph McCabe.
In his Confessions of a Young Man (1888), he observed, “Women have never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and they are not moralists.” Ester Waters (1891) is about a nun who gives birth to a son. In Brook Kerith (1916), what McCabe called "his beautiful rationalized version of the life of Christ," Moore described Jesus as an Essenian monk, for which the Catholic Church attempted to prosecute him.
His "whole work," including his autobiography, Hail and Farewell (3 vol., 1911-14), "is pagan," according to McCabe. Moore's nonfiction includes Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906). His Collected Works (1924) is 21 volumes. Moore was instrumental in the Irish Renaissance
Moore told McCabe he called himself a Protestant for political reasons but that he actually was an agnostic. In his literary drama, The Apostle (1911), Moore made Paul strike Jesus dead on finding him alive years after his supposed resurrection, and Catholics tried to get him prosecuted for Brook Kerith (1916), which presented Jesus as an Essenian monk. Moore was instrumental in the planning of the Irish National Theatre, which Yeats acknowledged “could not have been done at all without Moore’s knowledge of the stage.”
