The Language of Criticism in Arnold's Religious Writings

This article attempts to reconstruct the principles underlying Matthew Arnold's literary criticism through an examination of his writings on Christianity and the Bible. As a number of critics have pointed out, the trilogy of biblical studies Arnold produced between 1869 and 1875--St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, and God and the Bible--represent his most sustained and detailed exercise in textual analysis; and as such they call into question the dominant view that his criticism is characterized by naive empiricism and arbitrary anti-intellectualism. The critical principles developed by Arnold in these texts are shown to anticipate the work of I.A. Richards, William Empson and other members of the 'Cambridge School' of the first half of the twentieth century, and to be consistent with many of the assumptions about the nature of criticism still current in the field of philosophical aesthetics. ********** To such a degree do words make man, who invents them, their sport! (God and the Bible). When Matthew Arnold issued a "popular edition" of St. Paul and Protestantism in 1887, he marvelled at the waning of the narrow and sectarian Puritanism against which the first edition had been directed: "Where is the doctrine of predestination?--gone! Where are the doctrines of original sin, imputed righteousness, and justification by faith?" (VIA). (l) These doctrines were, for Arnold, the most offensive parts of the barbarous" and "grotesque" theology erected by contemporary Protestantism upon the words of St. Paul--"a machinery of covenants, conditions, bargains and parties-contractors, such as could have proceeded from no-one but the born Anglo-Saxon man of business, British or American" (VI.14)--and his primary impulse in writing St. Paul and Protestantism had been, as he admits in his letters, the desire to undermine the "Protestant Dissenters" dominating the Liberal Party: "I am doing what will sap them intellectually, and what will also sap the House of Commons intellectually, so far as it is ruled by the Protestant Dissenters; and more and more I am convinced that this is my true business at present" (Letters II.20). By 1876, however, when he issued his Last Essays on Church and Religion, Arnold seems to have felt that his "true business" in the theological sphere had been accomplished. The power of Dissent in domestic politics was in decline, and this was, he suggested, part of an irresistible "tendency" in European thought "to reject the whole anthropomorphic and miraculous religion of tradition, as unsound and untenable" (VIII.152). The Zeitgeist could be left to do the work on its own. He was particularly struck by the words of the Italian critic de Gubernatis, who asked in a review of Arnold's theological writings what we would now think 'se Platone avesse fondata [sic] la sua Repubblica sopra un testo d"Esiodo" --if Plato had founded his Republic on a text of Hesiod's (VIII.151). His own attempts to construct a non-supernatural Christianity to replace the misapprehensions of dogmatic theology began to appear equally quixotic to him, and were scaled down in favor of more purely literary endeavors. (2) Arnold's theological writings are the part of his output that seems most obviously entwined with obsolete concerns and dead controversies, and it is perhaps for this reason that they have been comparatively neglected. There has, however, been a slight resurgence of interest in them in recent years from a critical rather than a theological point of view, with a number of commentators suggesting that they constitute Arnold's most sustained and detailed exercise in literary criticism. David Riede, for instance, notes that Arnold's "first and almost only 'close reading' of a text, is his analysis of Paul's Epistle to the Romans in St. Paul and Protestantism" (21); Stefan Collini suggests that Literature and Dogma is Arnold's "most extended single work of literary criticism (98); and Ruth apRoberts argues that "[the] Bible was for him the greatest textual challenge," adding: "[It] is in his Bible criticism that he does his most systematic literary criticism" (vii). …