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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
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.
University of Delaware, Jewish Studies Program.
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36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
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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).
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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