The idea of literary criticism as cultural criticism gets much of its early momentum from St Augustine's method. The biblical texts were believed by all parties in his time to have subverted the religious and political value structures of Roman culture. Matthew Arnold was appointed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford only in 1857, and that he was the first in a long line of chair holders to practise primarily in the area of English literature, or great texts translated into English and held to be foundational. Hegel's, Absolute Idealism, made natural his identification of what he called the Infinite or the Absolute with the God of the Bible. A book by which Arnold and most English readers in the later nineteenth century came to know Hegel's thought more proximately was the Scottish Hegelian J. H. Stirling's two-volume The Secret of Hegel. In Western intellectual tradition the juxtaposition of religion and cultural criticism is foundational.