LITERATURE AND DOGMA: MATTHEW ARNOLD’S VIEW OF THE BIBLE
LITERATURE AND DOGMA: MATTHEW ARNOLD’S VIEW OF THE BIBLE

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses Arnold’s Literature and Dogma in the context of the ZeitGeist, which includes a wholesale attack on Christianity, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s evolutionist theory, although the early Victorian period had witnessed a revival of religious life in Great Britain. Matthew Arnold’s writing is placed in the tradition of the liberal Broad Church (initiated by his famous father Dr Thomas Arnold, among others) which was ready to accomodate opposite , even contradictory, dogmatic opinions in order to achieve a Christian church of the whole nation . The article substantiates the idea that in his Literature and Dogma Arnold adapted Christianity to what science could swallow; the Bible becoming for him , “a term of poetry and eloquence”, the only reading suitable to a man of culture, culture being his chief value, as a supporter of the Hellenic spirit . It is demonstrated that Arnold shares a positivist attitude to science with the philosophical Liberals but considers that the common man needs the Bible for the emotional and imaginative support it gives him for the practice of morality. Arnold argues that the Jews gradually added, in the last centuries before our era, a compensatory extrabelief to the original thought of the Bible by anticipating a future triumph, ascribing only a poetical value to such accretions, not a scientific one In the presentation of Arnold’s picture of the figure and teachings of Christ, the article stresses that he considers the miraculous elements in the Bible a vast Aberglaube accruing to the new creed brought by Jesus an extra-belief in the “phantasmagorical advent of Jesus Christ, a resurrection and a judgment”, an everlasting glorification of Christ’s adherents and the everlasting punishment of his rejecters. The article also distinguishes between Arnold’s position regarding Christ as being human rather than divine, and that of the Unitarians. It also rejectsArnold’s classification as an agnostic, demonstrating that never, throughout his whole study, does he doubt the existence of God as an external power. The article emphasizes in conclusion that for Arnold the God of the Bible is independent of the Dogma and that it is the method and secret of Jesus that bring salvation to mankind.

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