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The Anglican Imagination of Matthew Arnold

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Matthew LaGrone
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Abstract

This essay is an attempt to write Matthew Arnold into the narrative of Anglican thought in the nineteenth century. Overviews of general religious thought in the Victorian era give an appropriate nod to Arnold, but the institutional histories of the Anglican Church have not acknowledged his contributions to defining Anglican identity. In many ways, this is quite understandable: Arnold broke with much of traditional Christian doctrine. But, and just as significant, he never left the Church of England, and in fact he was an apologist for the Church at a time when even part of the clergy seemed alienated. He sought to expand the parameters of permitted religious opinion to include the largest number of English Christians in the warm embrace of the national Church. The essay concludes that the religious reflections of Arnold must be anchored in an Anglican context.

Keywords

CatholicismChurch of EnglandDissentdoctrineMatthew ArnoldProtestantism
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , November 2010 , pp. 200 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2009

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Footnotes

1.

University of Delaware, Jewish Studies Program.

References

2. Parsons, Gerald (ed.), ‘Reform, Revival and Realignment: the Experience of Victorian Anglicanism’, in Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 14–66 (45).Google Scholar

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6. See Erikson, Kai, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966).Google Scholar

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9. Ibid.

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15. The Arnold family had a mixed relationship with Catholicism: Matthew’s father, the educational reformer Thomas Arnold, did not believe that Catholics could be part of a union of Christians, whereas Matthew’s brother, Tom, converted in 1856 to Catholicism (returning to the Anglican fold in 1865 and, finally, ending as a Catholic again in 1876). Both Arnold and his brothers were on warm terms with Newman.

16. Arnold, , ‘St. Paul and Protestantism’, p. 107.Google Scholar

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20. By such identification, it is easy to understand why so many critics have accused Arnold of trying to save the sacred by secularizing and then calling it sacred. This criticism runs from F.H. Bradley to T.S. Eliot and today to James Wood. In particular, see Wood’s, , The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).Google Scholar

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27. Ibid.

28. Chadwick, , The Victorian Church, p. 45.Google Scholar

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33. See Bowen, Desmond, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833–1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968), p. 358.Google Scholar

34. Arnold, , ‘Puritanism and the Church of England’, in ‘St. Paul and Protestantism’, p. 65.Google Scholar

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Berger, Peter, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 137.Google Scholar

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40. Ibid.

41. Arnold, , ‘St. Paul and Protestantism’, p. 6.Google Scholar

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46. I came across the image of the cathedral and bazaar in a famous discussion by Eric S. Raymond regarding computer code and open source software. See his Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001).

47. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 239.Google Scholar

48. Arnold, , ‘The Church of England’, p. 80.Google Scholar

49. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 239.Google Scholar

50. From the Latin prīvāre, to deprive.

51. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 197.Google Scholar

52. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 239.Google Scholar

53. Arnold, , ‘The Church of England’, p. 80.Google Scholar

54. Arnold, , ‘The Church of England’, p. 81.Google Scholar

55. Arnold, , ‘The Church of England’, p. 86.Google Scholar

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57. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 197.Google Scholar

58. Arnold, , ‘Culture and Anarchy’, p. 193.Google Scholar

59. Chesterton, G.K.. The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), pp. 76–77Google Scholar. He suggested a darker implication of Arnold’s embrace of state religion: ‘he was trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world. Arnold may have thought that he was building an altar to the Unknown God; but he was really building it to Divus Caesar.’

60. Arnold, , ‘A Last Word on the Burials Bill’, p. 90.Google Scholar

61. Arnold, , ‘A Last Word on the Burials Bill’, p. 91.Google Scholar

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65. Ibid.

66. Arnold, , ‘A Psychological Parallel’, p. 135.Google Scholar

67. Roberts, A.P., Arnold and God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 200.Google Scholar

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70. This point is certainly open to challenge. A recent biographer, Nicholas Murray, notes that the religious writings of Arnold ‘could scarcely have been written by a man to whom Christianity meant nothing. [He] remained a believer and a worshipper after his own fashion until — quite literally — the day he died.’ Murray, Nicholas, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar

71. Sagovsky, Nicholas, argues that the theology of the Catholic (formerly Anglican) priest George Tyrrell (1862–1909) had significant parallels to Arnold, concluding that both attempted to balance the needs of the day with the claims of tradition. See his Between Two Worlds: George Tyrell’s Relationship to the Thought of Matthew Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72. Of course, Arnold’s Anglicanism in no way resembles Anglicanism today, whether in thought, demographics and location. As the heart of Anglicanism has begun to move to points south (one thinks especially of Nigeria), the issue of an established Church with centuries of privilege disappeared as Anglican missions moved into areas where the Church was unknown. The Church of England is as much a part of what Philip Jenkins calls the ‘Global South’ as it part of England. See Jenkins, Philip, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).Google Scholar