I’ve been up since 3:30 AM. Perhaps due to that anomaly, I find myself intellectually adrift. It’s one of those mornings when vagrant ideas and references clatter through the mind like trains on rough, uneven tracks. Now and then two of them meet, albeit seldom peacefully.
What has the most enduring hold on my thoughts just now is Matthew Arnold’s old poem “Dover Beach:”
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.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.Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s a personal favorite, but it embeds a profound irony. For Matthew Arnold had no faith. He promoted Christianity, but not because he deemed it true. Indeed, note this passage from Wikipedia:
[Matthew Arnold] rejected the supernatural elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. In the preface to God and the Bible, written in 1875, Arnold recounts a powerful sermon he attended discussing the "salvation by Jesus Christ", writing, "Never let us deny to this story power and pathos, or treat with hostility ideas which have entered so deep into the life of Christendom. But the story is not true; it never really happened".
He continues to express his concern with the historicity of the Bible, explaining that "The personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations." He also wrote in Literature and Dogma: "The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness—a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs." He defined religion as "morality touched with emotion".
However, he also wrote in the same book, "to pass from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."
Though it’s often criticized for the predominance of left-leaning political views on contemporary issues, Wikipedia tends to be reliable on biographical and other purely factual subjects. What we see in Matthew Arnold is a man who denied the factual basis for Christianity while endorsing it for the value of its ideas. The man who wrote so feelingly in “Dover Beach” of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith was a man of no faith.
C. S. Lewis, himself a scholar of considerable depth, wrote thus of such “Christianity:”
Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game.
(Remember, Gentle Reader: that’s a devil speaking to his nephew.)
The demotion of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, to a useful fable, factually untrue but “good for the hoi polloi,” would kill the Christian faith. People will not subscribe to an ethos that’s been divorced from fact.
There’s a characteristic arrogance in a man who would advocate such a thing. He’s set himself above others of “inferior understanding.” He knows “what’s good for you,” and he’ll batter you with it until it comes out your ears. But will he deal with it as factual rather than aspirational? No, thank you; that’s for the credulous and easily led.
Such men allow themselves liberties they would deny to us “inferiors.” If we examine Victorian England, we quickly note the prevalence of vice of all kinds among the nobility and the gentry. Yet those men were apostles of Christian virtue to (and for) the “lower classes.” They routinely condemned in public the very indulgences they permitted themselves in private.
The disjunction was noticed. The practices of the privileged could not be hidden for long. After all, they needed servants to tidy up after their bacchanals and orgies. Word got out, for the common folk of Victorian England were not fools.
When it comes to faith, preachments contradicted by practice are impotent. In this venue more than any other, hypocrisy undermines the message. If you won’t live it, you can’t preach it.
I could go on about this, but I’ll spare you. Have a nice day.
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