Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  This reliance of Puritanism on Holy Scripture, or certain portions of it, seems to have set him on the endeavour to ascertain how far the Puritans had really mastered the meaning of the writers on whom they relied; and more particularly of St. Paul. And this particular direction seems to have been given to his thoughts by a sentence, then recently published, of Renan: “After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.”

  Arnold, as his manner was, fastened on these last words, and made them the text of his treatise on St. Paul and Protestantism, which began to appear in October, 1869. “St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end;... but the real reign of St. Paul is only beginning.”

  In Culture and Anarchy he had shown how “the over-Hebraizing of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, so narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.” And he showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer’s. Now, he said, let us go further on the same path, and, “instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men.” Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan’s phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and Puritanism; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism. “The Church of England,” he says, “existed before Protestantism and contains much besides Protestantism.” Remove the Protestant schemes of doctrine, which here and there show themselves in her documents, “and all which is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain”; whereas those schemes are the very life and substance of Puritanism and the Puritan bodies. “It is the positive Protestantism of Puritanism with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England.” Leaving, then, the Church of England on one side, we fix our gaze on Puritanism, and we see that “the conception of the ways of God to man which Puritanism has formed for itself” has for its cardinal points the terms Election and Justification. “Puritanism’s very reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital conception”; and, when we are told that St. Paul is a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, “we in England can best try the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth with St. Paul’s.”

  Entering upon this endeavour, he divides Puritanism into Calvinism, and Arminianism or Methodism. The foremost place in Calvinistic theology belongs to Predestination; in Methodist theology to Justification by Faith. Calvinism relies most on man’s fears; Methodism most on his hopes. Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal to the Bible, and above all to St. Paul, for the proof of what they teach. Very well then, says Arnold, we will enquire what Paul’s account of God’s proceedings with man really is, and whether it tallies with the various representations of the same subject which Puritanism, in its two main divisions, has given. We will also, he says, follow Puritanism’s example and take the Epistle to the Romans as the chief place for finding what Paul really thought on the points in question.

  He illustrates his argument freely by citations from the other undoubtedly Pauline epistles, but he characteristically attributes the Epistle to the Hebrews to Apollos, as being “just such a performance as might naturally have come from ‘an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures,’ and in whom the intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding somewhat dominated the religious perceptions.” While he thus appeals unreservedly to St. Paul, he is careful to point out that we must retranslate him for ourselves if we wish to get rid of the preconceived doctrines of Election and Justification which the translators have read into him. A strong example of their method was to be found in the word atonement in Romans v. II, which has disappeared from our Revised Version, being replaced by reconciliation. The other point to be borne in mind is that Paul wrote about Religion “in a vivid and figured way” — not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, “he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew’s arbitrary and uncritical fashion”; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically.

  With these cautions duly noted, Arnold goes to the order in which Paul’s ideas naturally stand, and the connexion between one and another. Here the unlikeness between Paul and Puritanism at once appears. “What sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the desire to flee from the wrath to come; and what sets the Methodist in motion, the desire for eternal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion? It is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master-impulse of Hebraism — the desire for righteousness.” How searching and keen and practical was Paul’s idea of righteousness is shown by his long and frequent lists of moral faults to be avoided and of virtues to be cultivated. This zeal for righteousness marks the character of Paul both before and after his conversion. Nay, it explains his conversion. “Into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic doctrines of Christ, which brought a new aliment to feed this hunger and thirst — of Christ, whom he had never seen, but who was in every one’s words and thoughts, the Teacher who was meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one another, that the last should often be first, that the exercise of dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable, and that we must become as little children — sank down and worked there even before Paul ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the crisis of his conversion.” As soon as that conversion was accomplished, as soon as Paul found himself a teacher and a leader in the new community, he resumed, with all his old vigour, though in an altered fashion, his labours for righteousness. In all his teaching he harps upon the same string. If he leaves the enforcement of the law even for a moment, it is only to establish it more victoriously. “This man, out of whom an astounding criticism has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he is gone there.”

  Righteousness then, as St. Paul conceives it, stands in keeping the law and so serving God. But to serve God, “to follow that central clue in our moral being which unites us to the universal order, is no easy task.... In some way or other, says Bishop Wilson, ‘every man is conscious of an opposition in him between the flesh and the spirit.’” No one is more keenly conscious of this opposition than St. Paul himself. How is he to bring the evil and self-seeking tendencies of his composite nature into conformity with the law and will of God? “Mere commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition in the desires it tries to control.... Neither the law of nature nor the law of Moses availed to bind men to righteousness. So we come to the word which is the governing word of the Epistle to the Romans — the word all. As the word righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul’s entire mind and life, so the word all is the governing word of this his chief epistle. The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike fail to achieve righteousness. ‘All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.’ All do what they would not, and do not what they would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. ‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Hitherto we have followed Paul in the sphe
re of morals; we have now come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion.” Paul is profoundly conscious of his own imperfections, of the tendencies in his nature which war against righteousness; of his inability, in common with all the human race, to follow perfectly the law of God. He has now come to know Christ’s mind and life. Christ has, in his own phrase, apprehended him — laid hold on him; and he is persuaded that Christ so laid hold upon him in order to lead him into perfect, not partial, righteousness — into entire conformity with the will of God. In coming to know Christ, he had come to know perfect righteousness, and he desired to attain to it himself, believing that Christ had laid hold on him for that very purpose.

  And when we come to the vision of that perfect Righteousness, and Paul’s desire to attain to it, we are seasonably reminded of the order in which his ideas come. “For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is Christ’s divinity which establishes His being without sin. For Paul, who approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Christ’s being without sin which established His divinity. The large and complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and late, and only by Christ’s help, awakened, in Christ he seemed to see existing absolutely and naturally. The devotion to this conception which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Christ still stronger, by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining the righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity with the moral order and with God’s will, he saw no such impotence existing in Christ’s case as in his own. For Christ, the uncertain conflict between the law in our members and the law of the spirit did not appear to exist. Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove Paul to despair, in Christ were absent; smoothly and inevitably He followed the real and eternal order in preference to the momentary and apparent order. Obstacles outside there were plenty, but obstacles within Him there were none. He was led by the spirit of God; He was dead to sin, He lived to God; and in this life to God He persevered even to His cruel bodily death on the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of God, says Paul, are the sons of God. If this is so with even us, who live to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience, how much more is He who lives to God entirely and who renders an unalterable obedience, the unique and only son of God?” This, says Arnold, is undoubtedly the main line of movement which Paul’s ideas respecting Christ follow; and so far we have no quarrel with our guide. But he hastily goes on to an assertion which seems arbitrary and controvertible. He is forced to admit that Paul, who saw perfect righteousness in Christ and believed in His Divinity because of it, also identified Him with that Eternal Word or Wisdom of God, which, according to Jewish theology, had been with God from the beginning, and through which the world was created. He also has to admit that Paul identified Christ with the Jewish Messiah who will some day appear to terminate the actual kingdoms of the world and establish His own. But in both these cases he treats St. Paul’s idea as a kind of afterthought, due to his training in the scholastic theology of Judaism, and quite subsidiary to his paramount belief. That belief was that, if we would fulfil the law of God and live in righteousness, we must learn from the All-Holy Christ to die as He died to all moral faults, all rebellious instincts, and live with Him in ever-increasing conformity to His high example of moral perfection.

  For the power which drew men to admire this sanctity and follow this example Paul had his own name. “The struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear man to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of sympathy and emotion”; and to this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of faith. So vital is this word to Paul’s religious doctrine that all Pauline theology and controversy has centred in it and battled round it. “To have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified with Christ” — but how? Paul answers, “By dying with Him.” All his teaching amounts to this, and it is enough. We must die with Christ to the law of the flesh, live with Christ to the law of the mind. To live with Christ after death is to rise with Him. It implies Resurrection. Here again Arnold is constrained to admit the validity of Catholic interpretation. He cannot deny that Paul believed absolutely in the physical, literal, and material fact of Christ’s bodily Resurrection. But he insists that, while accepting this fact, Paul lays far more stress upon the spiritual interpretation of it. For Paul, death is living after the flesh; life is mortifying the flesh by the spirit; “resurrection is the rising, within the sphere of our earthly existence, from death in this sense to life in this sense.”

  But, though St. Paul so often uses the word Resurrection in this spiritual and mystical sense, it cannot be denied that he uses it also, uses it primarily, in its physical and literal sense. In that sense, it implies a physical and literal Death of Christ. And on that Death, what is St. Paul’s teaching? Not that it was a substitution, or a satisfaction, or an appeasement of wrath or an expiation of guilt — but that in it and by it “Christ parted with what, to men in general, is the most precious of things — individual self and selfishness; He pleased not Himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the Cross this death”; in all this seeking to show His followers that whosoever would cease from sin and follow Righteousness must be prepared to “suffer in the flesh.”

  Arnold thus sums up his general contention: “The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them — calling, justification, sanctification; they are rather these: dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ.” And thus he concludes his controversy with the theologians who have misinterpreted their favourite Apostle: “It is to Protestantism, and its Puritan Gospel, that the reproaches thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach. St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and ends with finding it; from first to last the practical religious sense never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have called ‘diseased about questions and word-battlings.’ He would have told Puritanism that every Sunday when in all its countless chapels it reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment it reads him right, a veil will seem to have been taken away from its heart; it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.... The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain covered; it will edify the Church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All, all, will be too little to pay half the debt which the Church of God owes to this ‘least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God.’”

  Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, from the Lawn

  The articles of which the foregoing pages give the substance were published in the Cornhill Magazine for October and November, 1869. On November 13, Arnold wrote with glee that the organs of the Independent and the Baptist Churches showed that he had “entirely reached the special Puritan class he meant to reach.” “Whether,” he said, “I have rendered St. Paul’s ideas with perfect correctness or not, there is no doubt that the confidence with which these people regarded their conventional rendering of them was quite baseless, made them narrow and intolerant, and prevented all progress. I shall have a last paper at Christmas, called Puritanism and the Church of England, to show how the Church, though holding certain doctrines like justification in common with Puritanism, has gained by not pinning itself to those doctrines and nothing else, but by resting on Catholic antiquity, historic Christianity, development, and so on, which open to it an escape from all single doctrines as they are outgrown.”

  That “last paper” appeared in due course, and it stated the position of the Church of England as t
he historical and continuous Church in this land, with an uncompromising directness which would have satisfied Bishop Stubbs or Professor Freeman. With equal directness, it affirmed that Protestantism, “with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul’s wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine.” It traced, briefly but very clearly, the history and development of the Universal Church, justified the Church of England in separating from Rome on account of Rome’s moral corruptions, condemned the Nonconformists for separating on the mere ground of opinion, extolled the comprehensiveness and simplicity of Anglican formularies, and suggested to the Dissenters that, if they would only swallow their objections to Episcopacy and rejoin the Church of England, they might greatly strengthen the national organization for promoting Religion. In doing this they would only obey the natural instinct which bids all Christians worship together. “Securus colit orbis terrarum” — those pursue the purpose best who pursue it together. For, unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church’s growth shows, to pursue it together.”

  The two papers on St. Paul and Protestantism together with that on Puritanism and the Church of England were published in 1870 in a single volume bearing the former title, and to this volume Arnold prefixed a preface, enforcing his doctrine with some vigorous hits at a dissenting Member of Parliament called Winterbotham, for glorying in an attitude of “watchful jealousy”; at Mill for his “almost feminine vehemence of irritation” against the Church of England, at Fawcett for his “mere blatancy and truculent hardness.” He concluded by re-affirming his main object in this theological controversy. “To disengage the religion of England from unscriptural Protestantism, political Dissent, and a spirit of watchful jealousy, may be an aim not in our day reachable, and still it is well to level at it.”