Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

Renascence, Winter 2001 by Ward, David A

But England's historic Church, grounded in order, dignity, and tradition, could have a refining and instructive influence on them. Presumably, the prospect of a rise in social status and increased material prosperity would be sufficient motivation for many Dissenting ministers to join the Church, if it were true, as Arnold frequently asserted, that Nonconformity was shot through with jealousy of the Establishment. But worldly motives notwithstanding, such a union of believers was vitally important: by including Dissenters and by enforcing a certain measure of uniformity in ritual and ceremony-Arnold was less flexible than his father when it came to the external forms of religious worship-the Anglican Church could be a bulwark against the anarchic tendencies of Victorian life. State-sanctioned "unity and continuity in public religious worship" would counter the vulgarizing influence of the proliferation of "ignorant and fanatical little sects" (Last Essays 110, 97). In 1877 Arnold observed that there were over one hundred such groups in Britain, including "Ranters, Recreative Religionists, and Peculiar People" (Last Essays 96), who presented, among other things, an onslaught of bad music (Arnold hated popular Christian hymns) and ridiculous language and imagery. By contrast, the noble forms and time-honored traditions of Anglicanism nourished the mind and spirit in extraordinarily important ways. By participating in historic rituals not of his own making, the Dissenter would not only fulfill his desire for worship but enter a process of mental growth:

Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the indefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well. (Culture and Anarchy 15)

In his preface to the popular edition of Literature and Dogma (1883), he pronounced, "The Church is necessary, the clergy are necessary; the future of Christianity is hardly conceivable without them" (146).

In democratic societies, strong national institutions were indispensable, therefore, not simply for political order but for the greater moral and intellectual good of the nation. Nineteenth-century America was the great monitory example of a people left to themselves-of the backwardness and chaos that result from the open and unregulated expression of ideas in a country without any authoritative arbiters of intelligence and values. It had no Establishment and "no effective centres of high culture" to counter its rampant individualism (Culture and Anarchy 36) and, consequently, it had become a byword for crass materialism and provinciality. Religious movements like Mormonism and Shakerism, which had gained sizeable followings, were prominent manifestations of the unhealthy mental attitudes that were developing, to Arnold's dismay, on both sides of the Atlantic. "America is just ourselves," he observed, "with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly" (20); in other words, it was a nation of middle-class Philistines, whose cultural barrenness was matched only by its Puritan rigidity. "From Maine to Florida, and back again, all America Hebraises," he sweepingly pronounced (20), employing his nowfamiliar dichotomy between the narrow spirit of the Old Testament Jews (Hebraism) and the expansive consciousness of the Greeks (Hellenism), who strove to remove ignorance and to see all things "in their essence and beauty" (135).