Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  The book produced a strong and immediate effect. As Culture and Anarchy first obtained for its author a hearing from politicians and social reformers, so St. Paul and Protestantism obtained him a hearing from clergymen, religious teachers, and amateurs of theology. Dr. Vaughan, then just appointed Master of the Temple, was moved to preach a sermon, pointing out — what indeed was true enough — that Arnold omitted from St. Paul’s teaching all reference to the Divine Pardon of Sin, or, as theologians would say, to the Atonement. But on the other hand, Bishop Fraser seems to have approved. “The question is,” wrote Arnold, “is the view propounded true? I believe it is, and that it is important, because it places our use of the Bible and our employment of its language on a basis indestructibly solid. The Bishop of Manchester told me it had been startlingly new to him, but the more he thought of it, the more he thought it was true.”

  He himself was delighted with this success. He hoped to exercise a “healing and reconciling influence” in the troubled times which he saw ahead; “and it is this which makes me glad to find — what I find more and more — that I have influence.” He delighted in finding that the “May Meetings” abounded in comments on St. Paul and Protestantism. “We shall see,” he exclaims gleefully, “great changes in the Dissenters before long.” “The two things — the position of the Dissenters and the right reading of St. Paul and the New Testament — are closely connected; and I am convinced the general line I have taken as to the latter has a lucidity and inevitableness about it which will make it more and more prevail.” The book soon reached a second edition, and he wrote thus about it to his friend Charles Kingsley: “I must have the pleasure of sending you, as soon as it is reprinted, a little book called St. Paul and Protestantism, which the Liberals and physicists thoroughly dislike, but which I had great pleasure and profit in thinking out and writing.”

  And now he was fairly embarked, for good or for evil, on his theological career. He had exalted the Church of England as the historic Church in this land: he had poured scorn on “hole-and-corner religions” of separatism; he had advised the Dissenters to submit to Episcopal government and return to the Church and strengthen its preaching power: and he had re-stated, in terminology of his own, what he conceived to be St. Paul’s teaching on Religion. This work was completed in 1870, and in 1871 he began to publish instalments of a book which appeared in 1873 under the title Literature and Dogma. The scope and purpose of this book may best be given in his own words. It deals with “the relation of Letters to Religion: their effect upon dogma, and the consequences of this to religion.” His object is “to reassure those who feel attachment to Christianity, to the Bible, and who recognize the growing discredit befalling miracles and the super-natural.”

  “If the people are to receive a religion of the Bible, we must find for the Bible some other basis than that which the Churches assign to it, a verifiable basis and not an assumption. This new religion of the Bible the people may receive; the version now current of the religion of the Bible they will not receive.”

  He sets out on this enterprise by repeating what he had said in St. Paul and Protestantism about the misunderstandings which had arisen from affixing to certain phrases such as grace, new birth, and justification, a fixed, rigid, and quasi-scientific meaning. “Terms which with St. Paul are literary terms, theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.” In saying this he goes no further than several of his predecessors and contemporaries on the Liberal side in theology. Even so orthodox a divine as Dr. Vaughan laid it down that “Nothing in the Church’s history has been more fertile in discord and error than the tendency of theologians to stereotype metaphor.” Bishop Hampden’s much-criticised Bampton Lectures had merely aimed at stating the accepted doctrines in terms other than those derived from schoolmen and mataphysicians. Dean Stanley’s unrivalled powers of literary exposition were consistently employed in the same endeavour. To call Abraham a Sheikh was only an ingenious attempt at naturalizing Genesis. But in Literature and Dogma Arnold applies this method far more fundamentally. According to him, even “God” is a literary term to which a scientific sense has been arbitrarily applied. He pronounces, without waiting to prove, that there is absolutely no foundation in reason for the idea that God is a “Person, the First Great Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe.” We are not to dream that He is a “Being who thinks and loves”; or that we can love Him or address our prayers to Him with any chance of being heard. What then, according to Arnold, is God? and here he answers with his celebrated definition. God is a “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for Righteousness,” or good conduct. Because this power works eternally and unchangeably, it is called “The Eternal,” which thus becomes a sort of nickname for God. And as for our relations with God, called by most people Religion, well— “Religion is morality touched by Emotion.” This, and nothing more.

  For the beginnings of religious history, he goes to the House of Israel. The Israelites, as he was always insisting, had a strong sense for Righteousness, or Conduct; and they found happiness in pursuing it. The idea of Righteousness was their God, and the enjoyment of Righteousness their religion. This simple conception held its own for generations; but, by the time of the Maccabees, the Israelites had become familiar with the idea of a resurrection from the dead and a final judgment. “The phantasmagories of more prodigal and wild imaginations have mingled with the product of Israel’s austere spirit.”

  “Israel, who originally followed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might and did naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at His coming, and to share in the triumph of the Saints of the Most High.” This, says Arnold, was Extra-belief, “Aberglaube,” belief beyond what is certain and veritable. “Extra-belief is the poetry of life.” The Messianic ideas were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Jesus Christ came. When He came, Israel was looking for a Messiah; and, when He began to preach, the better conscience of Judaism recognized in His teaching a new aspect of religion which it had desired. National Righteousness had been the idea of the older Judaism. Personal righteousness was the idea of the New Teaching. “Jesus took the individual Israelite by himself apart, made him listen for the voice of his conscience, and said to him in effect: ‘If every one would mend one, we should have a new world.’” A Teacher so winning, so acceptable, so in unison with Israel’s higher aspirations must surely be the Messiah whom earlier generations had expected; and so, in virtue of the purity and nobility of His teaching, Jesus Christ attained His unique position. He became, in popular acceptance, the Great, the Unique Man, in some sense the Son of God, Prophet and Teacher of the new and nobler morality. So there grew up “a personal devotion to Jesus Christ, who brought the doctrine to His disciples and made a passage for it into their hearts.” And almost immediately after “Aberglaube” regathered; and devotion to Jesus took the form of an Extra-belief of some future advent in splendour and terror, the destruction of His enemies, and the triumphs of His followers. And this process of development, begun while Christ was still on earth, extended with great rapidity after His death. “As time went on, and Christianity spread wider and wider among the multitude, and with less and less of control from the personal influence of Jesus, Christianity developed more and more its side of miracle and legend; until to believe Jesus to be the Son of God meant to believe other points of the legend — His preternatural conception and birth, His miracles, His bodily resurrection, His ascent into heaven, and His future triumphant return to judgment. And these and like matters are what popular religion drew forth from the records of Jesus as the essentials of belief.”

  From this account, strangely inadequate indeed, but not positively offensive, of the origin and development of Christianity, he passes on to the attempts made by current theology to prove the truth of Christianity from Prophecy and Miracle. With regard to prophecy, he has little difficulty in showing that predictions have often miscarried,
and that passages in the Old Testament have been interpreted as relating to Christ, which probably had no such reference. Thus the first disciples clearly expected the Second Advent to occur in their own life-time; and it has not occurred yet. “The Lord said unto my Lord” is better rendered “The Eternal said unto my lord the King”; and is “a simple promise of victory to a royal leader.” So, in something less than four pages, he dismisses the proof from Prophecy, and goes on to the proof from Miracles. “Whether we attack them or whether we defend them, does not much matter. The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away from them. And for this reason: it sees, as its experience widens, how they arise.” Our duty, then, if we love Jesus Christ and value the New Testament, is to make men see that the claim of Christianity to our allegiance is not based upon Miracles, but rests on quite other grounds, substantial and indestructible. The good faith of the writers of the New Testament — the “reporters of Jesus,” as Arnold oddly calls them — is admitted; but, if we are to read their narratives to any profit, we must convince ourselves of their “liability to mistake.” Excited, impassioned, wonder-loving disciples surrounded the simplest acts and words of Christ with a thaumaturgical atmosphere, and, when He merely exercised His power of moral help and healing, the “reporters” declared that He cured the sick and drove out evil spirits. In brief, when the “reporters” narrated miracles wrought by Christ, they were deceived; but, in spite of that, they were excellent men, and our obligations to them are great. “Reverence for all who, in those first dubious days of Christianity, chose the better part, and resolutely cast in their lot with ‘the despised and rejected of men’! Gratitude to all who, while the tradition was yet fresh, helped by their writings to preserve and set clear the precious record of the words and life of Jesus!”

  And yet that record, as they wrote it, is, according to Arnold, brimful of errors, both in fact and in interpretation; and the Church, which has preserved their written tradition, and kept it concurrently with her own oral tradition, has fallen into enormous and fundamental delusion about those “words” and that “life.” “Christianity is immortal; it has eternal truth, inexhaustible value, a boundless future. But our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracles — and miracles do not happen.”

  The fact that, in the preface to the popular edition of Literature and Dogma, he italicized those last words would appear to show that he attached some special, almost “thaumaturgical,” value to them. Miracles do not happen. It has been justly observed that any man, woman, or child that ever lived might have said this, and have caused no startling sensation. But when Arnold uttered these words, emphasized them, and seemed to base his case against the Catholic creed upon them, it behoved his disciples to ponder them, and to enquire if, and how far, they were true.

  As far as we know, there never was but one human being to whom they proved overwhelming, and he is a character in a popular work of fiction. “Miracles do not happen” broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere’s faith. That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and “boyish innocence of mood,” and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany. “A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, could not find an articulate word to say in its defence.... What weapons the Rector wielded for it, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded.”

  A happily-conceived picture — was it in Punch? — represented the Rector on his knees before the Squire, ejaculating, with clasped hands, “Pray, pray, don’t mention another German author, or I shall be obliged to resign my living.” However, the ruthless Squire persisted; and Elsmere apparently read Literature and Dogma, and, when he came to “Miracles do not happen” he resigned; threw up his Orders, and founded what Arnold would have called “a hole-and-corner” religion of his own.

  Well, but, it may be urged, Elsmere is after all only a fictitious character, taken from a novel purporting, as Bishop Creighton said, to describe a man who once was a Christian and ceased to be one, but really describing a man who never was a Christian, and eventually found it out. This, of course, is true, but it must be presumed that the Reverend Robert is not absolutely the creature of a vivid imagination, but stands for some real men and women who, in actual life, came under the author’s observation. If that be so, we must admit that Arnold’s dogma about Miracles had a practical effect upon certain minds. An Elsmere of a different type — a flippant Elsmere, if such a portent could be conceived — might have answered that, if miracles happened, they would not be miracles; in other words, that events of frequent occurrence are not called miracles; and that it belongs to the idea of a miracle that it is a special and signal suspension of the Divine Law, for a great purpose and a great occasion. If, again, Robert, eschewing flippancy, had retired on abstract theory, he might have said that an event so unique and so transcendent as the assumption of human nature by Eternal God seems to demand, in the fitness of things, a method of entry into the material world, and a method of departure from it, wholly and strikingly dissimilar to the established order — in common parlance, miraculous. Answers conceived in these two senses — some rough and popular and declamatory, some learned and argumentative and scientific — appeared in great numbers. “Grave objections are alleged against the book.... Its conclusions about the meaning of the term God, and about man’s knowledge of God, are severely condemned; strong objections are taken to our view of the Bible-documents in general, to our account of the Canon of the Gospels, to our estimate of the Fourth Gospel.” To these criticisms Arnold might have added one yet more cogent. It was felt by many of his readers, and even by some of his most attached disciples, that the “sinuous, easy, unpolemical method” which he vaunted, and which he applied so happily to criticism of books and life, was not grave enough, or cogent enough, when applied to the criticism of Religion. From first to last his method was arbitrary. ½Äy Ʊ — the Master said it. This was excellent when he criticised literature. To say that a verse of Macaulay’s was painful, or a line of Francis Newman’s hideous, was well within his province. To say that one author wrote in the Grand Style and that another showed the Note of Provinciality — that also was his right. To pronounce that a passage from Sophocles was religious poetry of the highest and most edifying type, whereas the Eternal Power was displeased by “such doggerel hymns as

  Sing Glory, Glory, Glory, to the Great God Triune,”

  this again was all very well; for matters of this kind do not admit of argument and proof. But, when it comes to handling Religion, this arbitrary method — this innate and unquestioning claim to settle what is good or bad, true or false — provokes rebellion. No one was more severe than Arnold on the folly of Puritanism in founding its doctrine of Justification on isolated texts borrowed from St. Paul; yet no one was more confident than he that man’s whole conception of God could be safely based on the fact that at a certain period of their history the Jews took to expressing God by a word which signifies “Eternal.” “Rejoice and give thanks,” “Rejoice evermore,” are certainly texts of Holy Writ; but he seems to think that, by merely quoting them, he has abrogated all the sterner side of the Bible’s teaching about human life and destiny. An even more curious instance of literary self-confidence may be cited from his treatment of the Lord’s commission to the Apostles. “It is extremely improbable that Jesus should ever have charged his Apostles to ‘baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’” But “He may perfectly well have said: ‘Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted; whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained.’” The one formula seems to Arnold anachronistic and unlikely, the other perfectly natural. This is all very interesting and may be very true; but it is too dogmatic to be convincing. In such a case one may respectfully cry out that Letters are overstepping their province; and that one man
’s sense of fitness, style, and literary likelihood is not sufficient warrant for discrediting a well-tested and established document.

  Matthew Arnold, 1884

  Photo Elliott & Fry

  Yet, after all, documents, however well-tested and established, are not the backbone of the Christian religion. It may well be that to minds inured from infancy to the worship of the letter; to believers in “the Bible and the Bible only” as the ground of their religion; Arnold’s solvent methods and free handling of the sacred text were alarming and revolutionary. But they fell harmless on the minds which had long schooled themselves in the Christian tradition; which took the Bible from the Church, not the Church from the Bible; and which realized that what had sufficed for the life of Christians before the Canon was contemplated would suffice again, even if every book contained in the Canon were resolved into mere literature.

  Yet again, a criticism brought freely and justly against his biblical disputations was that in his appeal to Letters and to what he conceived to be human nature, he overlooked the at least equally important appeal to History. He seems indeed to have avoided coming to close quarters with the historical defenders of the Christian Creed. It was easy enough to poke fun at Archbishop Thomson, Bishop Wilberforce, and Bishop Ellicott; Mr. Moody, and the Rev. W. Cattle, and the clergymen who write to the Guardian. But Bishop Lightfoot he left severely alone, with Bishop Westcott and Dr. Sanday and students of the same authority; and he would probably have justified his neglect of their contentions by saying, as he had said twenty years before, in his light and airy fashion, that “it was not possible for a clergyman to treat these matters satisfactorily.”