GKB
Enterprises

Culture and Crisis

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
— Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach (1867)

Matthew Arnold’s poetry admirably exemplifies that vein of wistful yet profoundly ambivalent regret for a lost spiritual certitude which pervades so much of high Victorian literature and cultural debate. In both his prose and his poetry, Arnold displayed an almost sensuous preoccupation with religious doubt – as indeed did so many of his Oxford contemporaries. From a wholly different perspective, Mallock’s satire, The New Republic, offers some flavour of how others, much less sympathetic to the fashionable expression of religious doubt, perceived the debate at the time, and there is value in briefly examining how Mallock mockingly transmits the views expressed by four of the book’s leading protagonists: “Dr Jenkinson” (Benjamin Jowett), “Mr Stockton” (John Tyndall), “Mr Luke” (Matthew Arnold) and “Mr Herbert” (John Ruskin).1

Deniers and doubters

Jowett (“not a man to be abashed by incongruities”2) is represented as delivering a sermon to the imaginary weekend party, in the course of which he presents the Platonic dualism of mind and matter (and thus the schism between the spiritual and the natural) as a prelude to the Aristotelian reconciliation of those polarities.3 “Fear”, despite being an evil, is the beginning both of wisdom and virtue, and is central, contends Jowett, to Christianity (whatever others may suggest to the contrary):

The human race, as soon as it became human, feared God before it loved Him. Its fear, as the Scripture puts it, was the beginning of wisdom; or as modern thought has put it, in slightly different words, the love of justice sprang out of the fear of suffering injustice. Thus the end is different from the beginning, and yet springs out of it. Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots. Our reverence for truth, all our sacred family ties, and the purest and most exalted forms of matrimonial attachment, have each their respective origins in self-interest, self-preservation, and animal appetite.4

Jowett (as Jenkinson) argues further that a mistaken notion of our personal dignity and relation to God has been a stumbling-block for many in the way of their acceptance of modern scientific discoveries, including evolution; and, in a neatly barbed shaft aimed at the ineradicable sexism which imbued all Victorian thinking, he (or rather Mallock) adds:

For is it not – to take, for instance, a man’s sublime faculty for reasoning and logical comprehension – far more wonderful that a reasoning man should have the same parents as a woman, than that they both should have the same parents as a monkey? Science and religion both alike teach us that with God all things are possible.5

The principle of moral evolution, similarly, is both Christian and scientific in its essence; and it is to be expected that Christianity itself should be systematically interpreted and explained in scientific terms:

Just as Plato looked upon mind as entirely distinct from matter, so used Christians to look on things sacred as entirely distinct from things secular. But now this middle wall of partition is being broken down by science, and by scientific criticism, and by a wider view of things in general. The primary way in which all this has affected Christianity is by the new spirit in which it has led us to study the Bible. We used to look upon the Bible as a book standing apart by itself, and to be interpreted by a peculiar canon of criticism. But now we have learned that it is to be studied just like all other books; and we are now, for the first time coming to understand what, in its true grandeur, a real revelation is.6

Mallock has Jowett interpret the history of Christianity, in evolutionary terms, as a slow and painful process of progressive development and revelation, wherein outworn notions and beliefs are eventually to be willingly and cheerfully discarded, for –

… in all this there is nothing to discompose us. We can be quite sure that He lived, and that He went about doing good, and that in Him we have, in the highest sense, everlasting life.
Let us then no longer fight against the conclusions of science and of criticism, but rather see in them the hand of God driving us, even against our will, away from beliefs and teachings that are not really those of His son.7

Creeds are outworn ecclesiastical constructs which nevertheless have served as “schoolmasters to bring men to God”. Even the Thirty-nine Articles, which seem, “humanly speaking to serve no good end at all,” should be suffered temporarily as part of God’s inexplicable plan8 – and, as if to emphasise his satirical argument that all human error is divinely ordained, the sermon ends with the words:

– And now – … I will ask you … to conclude this morning’s service by doing what I trust I have shown that all here may sincerely and honestly do. I mean, I will ask you to recite after me the Apostles’ Creed.9

Mischievous as it was intended to be, Mallock’s caricature is by no means a grossly unfair or unduly distorted picture of Jowett’s somewhat verbose and not always consistent argument as set out in Essays and Reviews, though it completely fails to do justice, of course, to his personal sincerity. As Peter Hinchliff has noted, Jowett’s awareness of German critical scholarship was relatively limited, if not out of date;10 yet he deserves credit for having brought what were then such novel hermeneutical issues before the English-speaking world in 1860. The whole essay (much longer than any other contribution to Essays and Reviews) was a methodical and resolute attempt to draw theology, by a process of “common-sense” reasoning, into harmony with the findings of modern science.11 Many of the views expressed must have influenced the young Robertson Smith, albeit indirectly and in some respects subliminally: for example, Jowett’s careful distinction between the meaning of Scripture as opposed to its “inspiration”;12 his low opinion of contemporary apologetics;13 his denunciation of the prevalent sermonising tendency to find, everywhere in the Old Testament, hidden references to the New;14 and his impatience with the ostrich-like denial by the orthodox of the manifest contradictions and interpretative difficulties which existed within the pages of Scripture.15 As in Smith’s case, moreover (to quote Hinchliff’s words):

He [Jowett] honestly thought that common sense views could discover in the New Testament a Jesus Christ with whom a close personal ‘friendship’ was possible. His early Evangelical upbringing doubtless played a large part in his determination to retain this warmly personal element in his liberal theology… Whenever he wrote or spoke of Christ, he conceived himself to be dealing with an actual historical person whom he loved rather than a metaphysical abstraction.16

Two of the lesser contributors to Essays and Reviews (Rowland Williams and Henry Wilson) were arraigned before the archaic Court of Arches and were convicted ecclesiastically on charges of heresy but acquitted on appeal to the Privy Council in 1864. Jowett himself escaped this particular indignity17 and went on to become the highly respected Master of Balliol College in 1870, despite attracting considerable obloquy from his more conservative fellow-ecclesiastics and academic peers, of whom Pusey was to prove the most persistent and virulent. Like his friend and supporter, A.P. Stanley, Jowett had been a pupil of Thomas Arnold and both, like their mentor, regarded the preservation of Christianity, liberated substantially of its vapid accretions, its spurious interpretations and its out-moded supernaturalism, as necessary for society’s moral and ethical well-being.18 Already, so Jowett implied in his essay, much of theology’s literalist doctrine and dogma had been overturned, and it would be futile to try to revivify them:

It is true that there are a class of scientific facts with which popular opinions on theology do not seem to conform in all respects to the severer forms of inductive science: such especially are the facts relating to the formation of the earth and the beginnings of the human race. But it is not worth while to fight on this debatable ground a losing battle in the hope that a generation will pass away before we sound a last retreat.19

That was not an argument to which Robertson Smith ever consciously aligned himself, but he would have been much more sympathetic to Jowett’s other principal (and very forward-looking) tenet:

The meaning of the Canon “non nisi ex Scriptura Scriptorum potes interpretari,” is only this, “That we cannot understand Scripture without becoming familiar with it”. Scripture is a world by itself, from which we must exclude foreign influences, whether theological or classical. To get inside that world is an effort of thought and imagination, requiring the sense of a poet as well as a critic – demanding much more than learning a degree of original power and intensity of mind. Any one who, instead of burying himself in the pages of the commentators, would learn the sacred writings by heart, and paraphrase them in English, will probably make a nearer approach to their true meaning than he would gather from any commentary.20

Jowett’s concluding words contain an admonitory message to would-be theologians which one may justly regard as prescriptive of the peculiar aptitude that only a Robertson Smith could bring to the task:

No man should busy himself with them [theological enquiries] who has not clearness of mind enough to see things as they are, and a faith strong enough to rest in that degree of knowledge which God has really given; or who is unable to separate the truth from his own religious wants and experiences.

And he continues, in terms that were to prove aptly prophetic:

… the suspicion or difficulty which attends critical inquiries is no reason for doubting their value. The Scripture nowhere leads us to suppose that the circumstances of all men speaking well of us is any ground for supposing that we are acceptable in the sight of God. And there is no reason why the condemnation of others should be witnessed to by our own conscience. Perhaps it may be true that, owing to the jealousy of some, the reticence of others, the terrorism of a few, we may not always find it easy to regard these subjects with calmness and judgment. But, on the other hand, these accidental circumstances have nothing to do with the question at issue; they cannot have the slightest influence on the meaning of words, or on the truth of facts. No one can carry out the principle that public opinion or church authority is the guide to truth, when he goes beyond the limits of his own church or country. That is a consideration which may well make him pause before he accepts of such a guide in the journey to another world.
… But he who bears a part in [true theological inquiry] may feel a confidence, which no popular caresses or religious sympathy could inspire, that he has by a Divine help been enabled to plant his foot somewhere beyond the waves of time. He may depart hence before the natural term, worn out with intellectual toil; regarded with suspicion by many of his contemporaries; yet not without a sure hope that the love of truth, which men of saintly lives often seem to slight, is, nevertheless, accepted before God.21

Ruskin’s aesthetic and strongly anti-materialist stance has already been exemplified in the account of his passages of arms with Tyndall, quoted from Fors Clavigera. Lightly disguised as “Mr Herbert” in The New Republic, Ruskin is made to deliver the concluding set piece of the book, a secular lecture which parallels the earlier Jowett sermon and which opens in terms that admirably characterise Ruskin’s literary style and public image:

“Well – to begin, then. You think me – you need not deny it, for I know you think me – a somewhat crotchety and melancholy individual, averse to modern progress, and seeing, as a rule, everything very yellow indeed, with his jaundiced eyes.”22

The peroration is an impassioned and fervid denunciation of all his fellow-guests’ utopian ideas:

“You are all deniers or doubters, I tell you, every one of you. The deniers, I know, will not contradict me; so at present I need not speak to them. It is to you – the majority, you who will contradict me; you who are so busy with your various affirmations, with your prayers, your churches, your philosophies, your revivals of old Christianities, or your new improvements on them; with your love of justice, and humanity, and toleration; it is to you that I speak. It is to you that I say that, however enlightened and however sure you may be about all other matters, you are darkened and uncertain as to this – whether there really is any God at all who can hear all the prayers you utter to Him, or whether there is really any other life at all, where the aspirations you are so proud of will be realised, and where the wrongs you are so pitiful over will be righted”.23

Universal education for the common man will only inspire discontent – “You will but be removing a cataract from his mind’s eye that he may stare aghast and piteous at his own poverty and nakedness …” – while the self-gratifying theorisings in which he and his fellow-guests of the leisured classes have been engaged are simply illusory pastimes, diverting them from an awareness of the approaching Armageddon:

“Lovely, indeed, to look upon are the faiths, the philosophies, the enthusiasms of the world – the ancient products of the ages – as the sunshine of the modern intellect falls on them. See, they look clearer, and brighter, and more transparent – see, they form themselves into more exquisite and lucid shapes, more aerial structures. But why? Do not deceive yourselves; it is for a terrible reason. It is because, like a fabric of snow, they are one and all dissolving”.24

Doubter or denier, believer or atheist, all stand condemned:

“Yes,” cried Mr Herbert, his voice rising to a kind of threatening wail, “though you have made me miserable, I am not yet content with my misery. And though I too have said in my heart that there is no God, and that there is no more profit in wisdom than in folly, yet there is one folly that I will not give tongue to. I will not say, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. I will not say we are still Christians, when we can sip our wine smilingly after dinner, and talk about some day defining the Father; and I will only pray that if such a Father be, He may have mercy alike upon those that hate Him, because they will not see Him; and on those who love and long for Him, although they no longer can see Him.”25

Ruskin’s rhetoric, in Mallock’s caricature, answers nothing: it simply represents an extreme example of romanticising and self-inflating individualism. Tyndall and Matthew Arnold26 play smaller rôles in the book but respectively typify the deniers and the doubters. John Tyndall (as Mr Stockton) is lampooned for stealing Arnold’s (Mr Luke’s) thunder by paying lip-service to Christian morality while undermining its dogmatic foundations:

“Let us agree heroically to follow truth – ay, truth; let us follow that, I say, picking our way step by step, and not looking where we are going. Let us follow – what can I add to this? – the incomparable life of the great Founder of Christianity … I say the incomparable life. Such is the message of science to the world; such is the instinct of culture when enriched and quickened by science.”
This was literally taking the bread out of Mr Luke’s mouth. Not only was it repeating what he had said before, but it was anticipating, in a formless, undisciplined way, the very thing that he was going to say again. And the man who had robbed him thus was a mere Philistine – a mere man of science who was without even a smattering of Greek or Hebrew, and who thought sensori-motor nerves and spontaneous generation more important subjects than Marcion’s Gospel or the Psalms of David. For once in his life, Mr Luke was for the moment completely silenced.27

Mallock’s portrait of “Mr Luke” is an equally shrewd and wickedly observant representation of the magisterial figure of Matthew Arnold, whose elegiac yearning for a lost faith in Christian dogma so dominates and typifies mid-Victorian literature and whose voluminous writings sum up the widespread search for a reconstruction of Christianity which would preserve both its moral tenets and its beauty, while discarding the mythical framework that scientific discovery could no longer sanction.28

It took a considerable time for these tensions to disturb the Scottish scene. The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, the academic epitome of that spirit which Arnold described as “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,”29 certainly vented its unmitigated fury upon Essays and Reviews in 1862, by which time the publication was already in its fifth edition:

These Essays and Reviews have done more than any book which has appeared since the publication of Strauss’s “Life of Jesus,” now twenty-five years ago, to startle and alarm the Christian public, at least within the pale of the Church of England.30

The book (so the anonymous reviewer asserted) was no less than a manifesto of materialistic rationalism by a school of thought which, shamefully, was “not English” in tone or character but was akin rather to the writings of the French Encyclopaedists in its cultivation of a negative theology culled from the “destructive theology of Germany” and the precepts of Hegelian philosophy:31

Every essay in the volume is more or less tainted with the school of Tübingen, which may be called the Medusa head that threatens to turn Oxford into stone. And the essays, it must be farther added, are composed with a keenness which argues the resolute effort which the writers have used to put out the light.32

Jowett’s contribution, the writer acknowledges, is the best of the essays;33 hence it is (so the writer believes) all the more dangerous and damaging in its tendency to deprave and corrupt:

He knows better than any of them how to exercise a cool self-control in the statements of his sentiments, to proceed with caution, and above all, to hide under the guise of grand and imposing phraseology derived from scripture but denuded of significance, the idealised nihilism which he continues to call by the name of Christianity.34

The essay by Mark Pattison is “not so offensive in tone, and every way more English,” yet nevertheless manages to insinuate, “that the old apologetics in which our literature is so rich … are out of date, and no more adequate to meet the wants of the present day.”35 But it is Professor Jowett whom the reviewer undoubtedly regards as the most culpable of all seven writers – for promulgating pantheistic views which contradict received doctrine on God, the Trinity and Sin, and which constitute in essence, “open war against Christianity itself”.36 Indeed, any heresy whatsoever which the writers have failed to voice explicitly is (so the distinctly paranoid reviewer asserts) merely a demonstration on their part of an ominous prevarication, of which “the public have right and reason to complain”.37

Of Jowett’s principle, “interpret the Scripture like any other book,” the writer comments:

We might not be unwilling to admit this principle to a large extent, if we had a definite understanding with him on two points; first, that it is not a heathen but a Christian who interprets; and secondly, that Christianity is a historical phenomenon having a present corresponding to the past … and he who attempts interpretation without this only betrays his disqualification, a striking illustration of which will be found in Professor Jowett himself, who, with all his undoubted scholarship, no more apprehends the meaning of St Paul’s Epistles than a person without the musical sense can appreciate or enter into the enjoyment of the finest music.38

Since Jowett’s precept, itself a distant echo of Erasmus,39 was destined, within a very few years, to be commended as a fundamental principle of biblical criticism by Professor A.B. Davidson to Robertson Smith and his fellow students at New College, there plainly existed, in Scotland, a fault line between contemporary critical scholarship and traditional doctrine that was capable of precipitating cataclysmic consequences, given a suitable conjunction of circumstances.40 And so it proved. Scotland’s relative geographical isolation, coupled with the characteristically inward-looking preoccupations of both the Established Church and the Free Kirk, had helped maintain an attitude of broad and somewhat lofty detachment, if not indifference, towards ecclesiastical controversies south of the Border.41 Smith’s protracted trial at the bar of the Free Church General Assembly may be seen, in retrospect, as a Scottish re-enactment, in yet more dramatic and internecine form, of the bitter confrontation between theological liberalism and conservatism which had been triggered within the Church of England by the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860 and which was to be exacerbated by John William Colenso’s enormous and iconoclastic seven-part disquisition on the Pentateuch from 1862 to 1879.42

Sweetness and light

Arnold’s exceptional influence upon religious opinion may be said to originate with the publication in book form of Culture and Anarchy in 1869,43 reaching its peak in the 1870s with Literature and Dogma. The earlier book, memorable for its striking slogans and its application of cruelly apposite eponymns to the English class structure,44 is remarkable for its unwittingly prophetic insight into those same temperamental polarities within the Scottish Free Church which were to be so rawly exposed by the Robertson Smith affair seven years later.

Culture and Anarchy carried the epigraph, estote ergo vos perfecti, betraying Arnold’s deep admiration for the New Testament and at the same time signalling the theme of the whole book, which was to offer nothing less than a prescription for the salvation of the British race through a proper appreciation of Culture – defined as the harmonious and properly proportioned admixture of those two fundamental determinants of the national character which Arnold chose to identify as Hellenism and Hebraism.45 Hellenism (as Tyndall would have wholeheartedly agreed) imparted “sweetness and light” to life, through the innate impulse to understand and the consequent exercise of the intellect; above all, for Arnold, Hellenism represented the urge “to see things as they really are”. Hebraism, on the other hand, epitomised morality, energy, persistence, self-control and right conduct: all the essential features underpinning the Victorian middle-class ethic. It could, Arnold proposed, be summed up in the phrase “strictness of conscience”; its counterpart, Hellenism, was “spontaneity of consciousness”. Both were pathways followed by men in the search “to make reason and the will of God prevail”46 yet neither, of itself, offered a sure and certain passage to perfection. The imperfection of Hellenism lay in its “lack of moral fibre”; that of Hebraism, in its overweening preoccupation with sin and its excessive reliance (in Protestantism) upon the authority of the Word:

For Hellenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the attitude of mind of Catholicism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam’s ass spoke, in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says that God’s Church makes him believe what he believes, and the other, who says that God’s Word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say God’s Church and God’s Word, what it is they say, or whereof they affirm.47

Both elements, therefore, required to co-exist within the human spirit and to form therein a harmonious balance; for each constituted a necessary check upon the potential excesses of its counterpart (much as Walter Bagehot had defined48 the supposed political checks and balances of Victorian democracy). Sadly, individuals and religious organisations were habitually in a state of disequilibrium: “They have made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary.”49 Such individuals or groups held firmly to the delusional belief that they alone knew “the one thing needful”.50 For the Hebraists within the nation, that conviction took the form of an unshakable but uncritical and ultimately stultifying reliance upon the Bible as “law”:

They have fancied themselves to have in their religion a sufficient basis for the whole of their life fixed and certain for ever, a full law of conduct and a full law of thought, so far as thought is needed, as well; whereas what they really have is a law of conduct, a law of unexampled power for enabling them to war against the law of sin in their members and not to serve it in the lusts thereof. The book which contains this invaluable law they call the Word of God, and attribute to it, as I have said, and as, indeed, is perfectly well known, a reach and sufficiency co-extensive with all the wants of human nature.51

What Arnold described as this “fatal notion” – this cherished belief in the Bible as both sacrosanct and as pre-eminently the sole and sufficient guide to living for all unreconstructed Hebraists – was indeed to prove the rock upon which Robertson Smith was to founder so dramatically within the space of a few years after the publication of Culture and Anarchy. As a theoretical construct designed to illustrate the tragic imbalances within the social, cultural and religious structures of Victorian Britain, Arnold’s metaphor was a powerful, persuasive and influential tool; as a scientific hypothesis, it was naturally quite incapable of empirical demonstration. Worse still, its polar eponyms, Hebraism and Hellenism, carried potentially dangerous connotations, capable of dividing rather than unifying a nation. For all his ostensible even-handedness, Matthew Arnold’s true sympathies lay with Hellenism as the road to perfection; and when his guard slips and the metaphor becomes concretized, he reveals the true extent of his prejudices:

And, immense as is our debt to the Hebrew race and its genius, incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly important sides of our human nature, the statutes of the divine and eternal order of things, the law of God, – who, that is not manacled and hoodwinked by his Hebraism, can believe that, as to love and marriage, our reason and the necessities of our humanity have their true, sufficient, and divine law expressed for them by the voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews?52

Yet, to do justice to Arnold, such prejudices were the common currency of his day; to use one of his favourite terms, they were integral to the Victorian Zeitgeist, and they do not invalidate the force of his argument for the establishment of a better balance of “right thinking and strong doing”.53 The Nonconformist churches, Scottish, Irish and English alike, were preoccupied, as Arnold rightly saw it, with achieving their own narrow practical ends – voluntaryism, disestablishment and a sterile separation from the world – when they ought rather to be employed in clearing their minds, in encouraging the free play of consciousness and in pursuing sweetness and light.54

In 1869, Robertson Smith was of course completely unknown beyond the narrow confines of Edinburgh and Aberdeen; but even when his work began to come to Arnold’s notice through his part in the Revised Version of the Old Testament, Smith would still have been stigmatised by the former as “provincial”. In his preface to Culture and Anarchy, Arnold made the sweeping assertion that, within the field of theology, “men of mark” were produced only “within an Establishment”:

Men of genius and character are born and reared in this [Nonconformist] medium as in any other. From the faults of the mass such men will always be comparatively free, and they will always excite our interest; yet in this medium they seem to have a special difficulty in breaking through what bounds them, and in developing their totality. Surely the reason is, that the Nonconformist is not in contact with the main current of national life, like the member of an Establishment.

Without the humanising, moderating and leavening influence of such a social and cultural link, and without consequent access to “the best that is thought and known in the world”, a man of potential genius could not fully develop, zealously and perpetually preoccupied as he was bound to be with the defence of his sectarian idiosyncrasies, to the expense of self-cultivation. Moreover:

… he has no great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities connected with the national Church, to invite him; but only such institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion, he may have invented under the sway of the narrow and tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have seen. Thus, while a national establishment of religion favours totality, hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive popular word) inevitably favour provincialism.55

Applied to the case of William Robertson Smith, Arnold’s seemingly rash generalisation proves to be astonishingly percipient. Unquestionably, Smith faced enormous obstacles in “breaking through” the bounds set by the conditions of his background and upbringing; and it was only in consequence of events, some entirely fortuitous and others set in train by his own ambitious, driving temperament, which enabled him to forge those wider contacts with a world that lay beyond the Free Church and which eventually allowed him (in Arnold’s words) to develop his totality. Edinburgh, and more especially the link forged with Tait and the scientific world, began the process of intellectual liberation; his appointment to the Revision Committee of the Old Testament in 1874 was to be yet a further step along the way; but it was, above all, his involvement with the Encyclopaedia Britannica which brought him into contact with “the best that is known and thought in the world”.

There is no evidence that Arnold and Smith ever met one another, though it is almost certain that they corresponded in 1885-86 over the matter of Arnold’s article on Sainte-Beuve for EB9.56 However, Smith’s involvement with the Old Testament revisers was well-known to Arnold, who had begun work in 1871 or earlier57 on a version for schoolchildren of Isaiah 40-65. He continued to work on Isaiah until 1883, when (as if pre-empting the Revisers) he published a complete version of the Book of Isaiah.58 The Introductions to both books present a fascinating discussion of those dangers and difficulties of biblical translation, from which Arnold was naturally no more exempt than anyone else. In the earlier publication he is critical of T.K. Cheyne’s “prosaic” version, published the preceding year;59 in the later, he refers only slightly less critically to Robertson’s Smith’s style of translation, as instanced by the comment:

Professor Robertson Smith brings us an amended translation [of Isaiah 9:5]: “For the greaves of the warrior that stampeth in the fray, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be cast into the fire as fuel for the flames” Yes, we understand; but the charm of the thing is rudely shaken. Mr Cheyne brings us a translation more close and correct still: “For every boot of him that trampleth noisily, and the cloak rolled in blood, are for burning, the fuel of fire”. The charm has altogether vanished, if we receive these words to supersede the old words; the charm has vanished, never to return.60

Arnold’s point – that perfection in translation is unattainable but that beauty of expression and spiritual refreshment should never be sacrificed to technical accuracy – is important but in this context is less significant than the indication that Robertson Smith’s name was, by 1883, becoming very familiar to the educated Victorian in scholarly circles south of the Border.

Colenso

Matthew Arnold’s genuine admiration for the moral fruits of Christianity, for the precious heritage of the Bible and for the importance of the religious sentiment itself, lasted throughout his life, as did his desire to effect a reconciliation of religion, science and humanist culture. At the same time, his searching critical approach to Christianity, together with his own fundamental doubt, resulted in an ambivalence which could prove deeply paradoxical and perplexing to his readers. It also led to a degree of inconsistency, well illustrated in his scathing onslaught on Bishop Colenso in his 1863 paper, “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” shortly after the publication in October, 1862, of the first part of Colenso’s mammoth work on The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined. Yet, ten years later, Arnold was to write, in God and the Bible:61

The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next, and the Christian world will certainly learn to transform beliefs which it now thinks to be untransformable. The way will be found. And the new Christianity will call forth more effort in the individual who uses it than the old, will require more open and instructed minds for its reception; and this is progress. But we live at the beginning of a great transition which cannot be accomplished without confusion and distress.62

That could be construed as a favourable augury for Robertson Smith, and indeed for the future of biblical criticism generally; but it was belated comfort for John William Colenso, who had undergone the traumas of ecclesiastical vituperation, the withdrawal of financial support from his funding body (the S.P.G.) and a subsequent trial in South Africa, leading to deposition from his bishopric. In his original attack on Colenso, Arnold had employed all his powerfully satirical skills to ridicule this mere writer of arithmetical textbooks for daring to thrust upon the public such a naive, narrow and hopelessly inadequate essay in biblical criticism. Colenso’s book, wrote Arnold, was nothing more than “a series of problems in this his favourite subject, the solution to each of which is to be the reductio ad absurdum of that Book of the Pentateuch which supplied its terms”.63 Colenso had produced an “avalanche of rule-of-three sums” but no answers:

The Bishop talks of the “multitude of operatives” whose spiritual condition we must care for: he allows that to the pious operatives his proceedings must give a terrible shock; but will the pious operative be softened or converted by them? He cannot seriously think so; for softening and converting are positive processes, and his arithmetical process is a purely negative one. It is even ruthlessly negative; for it delights in nothing so much as in triumphing over attempts which may be made to explain or attenuate the difficulties of the Bible narrative.64

For Arnold, the fundamental and fatal weakness of Colenso’s work was that it failed either to edify the unlearned or to inform the educated. Those were, for Arnold, the literary criteria by which any published work of this nature required to be judged – and Colenso failed miserably on both counts:

The Bishop of Natal keeps going round for ever within the barren sphere of these contradictions [in the Pentateuch] themselves; he treats them as if they were supremely interesting in themselves, as if we had never heard of them before, and could never hear enough of them now. Spinoza touches these verbal matters with all possible brevity, and passes on to the more important. It is enough for him to give what is indispensably necessary of them.65

By the same criteria, according to Arnold, Essays and Reviews also failed, though he acquits both Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett: the former’s essay did possess both literary and informative merit, while Jowett, though he provided “neither milk for babes nor strong meat for men” at least wrote with “unction” – “For a court of literature, it is enough that the somewhat pale stream of Mr Jowett’s speculation is gilded by the heavenly alchemy of this glow”.66

The charge of naivety was one that was also to be levelled at Robertson Smith, and in either case there is some legitimacy in the accusation.67 Each failed to discern how unready his fellow clerics were for a public exposé of Pentateuchal inconsistencies. Both could be said to have lacked due sensitivity for the prejudices and fears of their colleagues; and neither was inhibited from writing by the prevalent assumption that the free and open discussion of such matters was bound to lead to confusion and alienation from faith amongst the uneducated. But Colenso’s offence could be regarded in some ways as more heinous than Robertson Smith’s: he was an older man whose episcopal position and experience ought to have imparted some “soundness” and prudence in such matters, yet here was someone whose obsession with the literal arithmetical solecisms in the Pentateuch seemed to betray a cast of mind that was fatuously quibbling and thoroughly jejune;68 a man so ingenuous that he had been deflected from orthodox belief by the questions put to him by a simple-minded member of his black flock.69 The somewhat erroneous impression was thus given that Colenso had given no thought whatsoever to the subject until then. One could never have called Robertson Smith’s scholarship into question in this way: only on grounds of teaching ideas of “an unsettling tendency” was he ultimately to prove vulnerable.

Colenso’s plight led directly to James Anthony Froude’s celebrated and penetrating plea for greater tolerance in the matter of theological discussion:70

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or inquiry, the judicious questioning of received opinions has been the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress and truth.71

Froude went on to observe that if scientific laws (some of which appeared contrary to commonsense) were to become required articles of orthodox belief, underpinned by legislation, there would inevitably occur a sceptical reaction which would invite repression by authority. Fortunately such foolishness no longer occurred; but theology presented especial difficulties:

As phenomena become more complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is as sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he inquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It is in vain to point out the thousand forms of opinion for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed.72

Froude unerringly identified the contemporary ecclesiastical dilemma: theological dogma, for the majority of the orthodox, was sacrosanct and thus incapable of modification. As the repository of divinely revealed truths, the Church could not do otherwise (in public at least) than express its utter certainty and conviction as to their eternal validity and inviolability:

For fifteen centuries of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the State took it upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be taught to the people … Everybody was intolerant by principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince.73

On this basis, both Colenso and the writers of Essays and Reviews had (in clerical eyes) broken faith with the Church to which they owed allegiance; it was quite another matter for lay sceptics like Huxley, Clifford or John Stuart Mill to parade openly their doubts or denials. Yet “the enemies refuse to be exorcised … and a Colenso coming fresh to the subject, with no more than a year’s study, throws the Church of England into convulsions”.74 Froude well summed up the current perplexities of his day:

At this moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building, the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were educated yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe; but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe, they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural occurrence.75

Old panaceas, whether of dogma, or of consolation, or of apology, were no longer sufficient; and neither the “tentative scepticism” of Essays and Reviews nor the idiosyncratic questionings of Colenso were a satisfactory remedy. An open discussion of all the issues, through the modern medium of a free press, was necessary, without the threat of ecclesiastical sanction and without stigmatising honest doubt as sin.

Fate, Fate, engag’d the strife76

Ten years later, Matthew Arnold presented his definitive personal proposals for the reconstruction of Christianity in Literature and Dogma, building upon the foundations he had established so trenchantly in Culture and Anarchy. Justly evaluated today as “a pioneer work in the field of religious hermeneutics,”77 Literature and Dogma attempted a synthesis of religious and scientific values at a time when all values appeared to be in flux. Vulnerable as he was to charges of aestheticism and reductionism, and attacked alike by agnostic positivists such as Frederic Harrison and conservative writers such as J.C. Shairp (biographer of James Forbes and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1877), Arnold nevertheless mounted the most intellectually powerful and spiritually sincere campaign of anyone of that era for the humanistic reconciliation of religion and rationalism. Yet there is a sense in which he attempted, like Saint Paul, to be “all things to all men” and thus endeared himself to neither side. His intense interest in the moral value of Christianity and his profound admiration for the Bible did not deter him from attempting to “demythologize” the Christian tradition (as J. C. Livingston notes78) and, in doing so, he fired the wrath of theologians such as Principal Tulloch, who sought to dismiss him as a “theological amateur”79 – one of a class of “literary theologians [who] have espoused naturalistic theories as beyond question, and, while wishing to save religion, they enunciate principles subversive of all that has hitherto been supposed essential in religion.”80 Tulloch nevertheless took Arnold very seriously as a threat: Literature and Dogma was important because its author was influential, had such facility with “apothegm” rather than argument, and was so audaciously contemptuous of an obsolescent faith which clung superstitiously to creeds, miracles and the belief in an anthropomorphic or “personal” deity. In Tulloch’s eyes, Arnold could satisfy neither scientist nor theologian by his insistence on testing out the accumulated truths of religion through critical assessment or by seeking to challenge the unchallengeable dogmatic core of the Christian faith:

Dogmatic Theology will survive Mr Arnold’s witticisms, and even the touch of that “Ithuriel’s spear of the Zeit-geist” which he evidently thinks he wields with no little effect. But apart from any higher considerations, we may surely urge again the absurdity of conceiving the development of religious thought, or any other mode of thought after such a manner.81

In retrospect, Tulloch seems to have misread the contemporary Zeitgeist badly: Literature and Dogma, with all its literary sophistication and erudition, may be construed as nothing less than a direct anticipation of John Tyndall’s appeal, in his Address to the British Association a year later, for the preservation and honouring of that “religious sentiment” which was both an essential component of human culture and an efflorescence of that self-same spirit of imagination which was essential for the progression of all scientific thought and discovery. Consciously, Robertson Smith would, at that time, have no more accepted Matthew Arnold’s argument for liberation from the shackles of dogma than he could tolerate Tyndall’s much more brashly expressed materialism. Yet, quite unconsciously, he was moving slowly towards the same conclusions as Arnold. When Tulloch, with heavy irony, identified Arnold with “the extreme left of the Leyden School, of which Dr Kuenen is so distinguished an ornament,”82 he was to prove more insightful than he could possibly have realised, for it was towards the critical writings of Kuenen, and the other Continental leaders of the new criticism, that Smith was gradually being drawn, initially with obvious distaste but later with increasing admiration and approbation.

Arnold and Smith seem at first sight singularly opposed in temperament and background, yet on closer examination it becomes plain that they do possess features in common. Both were sons of progressive, liberal-minded pedagogues who took the deepest interest in their children’s education and whose personal influence had abiding effects upon the ideals and ambitions of their offspring. Both Smith and Arnold were imbued, by upbringing and example, with a deep moral earnestness, coupled with zeal for the highest standards of intellectual scholarship; and both eventually set their sights upon achieving the radical reconstruction of contemporary belief structures which no longer adequately met the needs of educated people within the new scientific era. Both sought to say “a new thing” to their contemporaries; and both remained unabashed when misunderstood or maligned. There remain, however, obvious and significant differences. Robertson Smith possessed neither the social nor the cultural advantages accorded to Arnold by virtue of his birth and educational milieu; the context of his early life was strikingly narrow and cramping by comparison with Arnold’s and it was to prove very difficult indeed for him to escape the constricting bonds of his Free Church nurture. Indeed, it may plausibly be argued that Smith never truly broke free, retaining as he did until his death an unresolved conflict between personal faith and intellectual persuasion. But the same must equally be said of Matthew Arnold, whose poignantly regretful yet stoical abandonment of the traditional anchor-points of faith is masked by that outwardly confident dialectic which Tulloch so deplored. Both Smith and Arnold nevertheless found eventual wholeness after many vicissitudes and the manifest father-son complexes of Sohrab and Rustum, which carry unmistakable theological as well as human overtones, may bear as much relevance for Robertson Smith’s story as for Arnold’s:

And though thou thinkest that thou knowest sure
Thy victory, yet thou cannot surely know.
For we are all, like swimmers in the sea,
Pois’d on the top of a huge wave of Fate,
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall.83