“Sweetness and Light”
There have been several recent attempts to reignite the culture wars in the United States–I don’t think they will be successful, in large part because people are still focused on economic survival. At the same time, it’s worth noting the limitations of the prophetic rhetoric of condemnation in achieving social reform. I came across this passage from English poet and social critic Matthew Arnold (d. 1888), who was protesting the influence of a too narrow and negative conception of religion as avoiding sin and obeying divine law among the middle class in nineteenth century England.
It’s a salutary reminder not to reduce religion to mere negative moralism. Ultimately, as Arnold notes, it’s “sweetness and light”– goodness, truth, and beauty– that attracts and transforms people. And one of the strengths of the Catholic tradition has always been its ability to situate the moral rules in the context of a broader and rich view of human flourishing. Incidentally, that’s why I like Evangelium Vitae so much–the “culture of life” is fully, and positively, described therein–it’s not reduced simply to opposition to the “culture of death.”
“Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: and how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your religious organisation as you yourself reflect it, to conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness?“ (Culture and Anarchy, para. 30.)
How indeed.
And yet Matthew Arnold certainly believed in courageous moral leadership, as we read in his elegy to his father:
See! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending?—A God
Marshall’d them, gave them their goal.
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks
Rising all round, overawe;
Factions divide them, their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.
—Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
Sole they shall stray; in the rocks
Stagger for ever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.
Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172857
Kathy with a K: How does that Matthew Arnold selection contradict or merit a “and yet” qualifier to what Cathy with a C wrote?
David with a D: Prophetic rhetoric is of several kinds. Sometimes it is encouraging, a sign of a vigorous religion. It participates in the salvation of the many, while irking the few. It can be generous.
Could be, sure, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the “the prophetic rhetoric of condemnation.”
And yet sometimes it is a sign of intellectual fragility and terror.
Intellectual strength can be demonstrated by making proper distinctions. For example: ecclesial discipline is not equivalent to condemnation, although, as I’ve mentioned several times before, our Calvinist civil context suggests otherwise.
There’s a whiff of the self-righteous about the quote from Arnold, no? Were the people who went to Epsom on Derby day mostly from “the middle class”?
So was Arnold. Incidentally, he argued that the U.S. was particularly susceptible to such tendencies because of its lack of a religious establishment– without an establishment, each religion has to struggle for survival, to maintain its place in society, to protect its basic ideas, and to attract new recruits. It’s only with the security of an establishment, in his view, that a religious tradition has the security and the leisure to develop and refine its thought, to balance “fire and strength” of moral commitment with “sweetness and light”. So, although a non-believer (in the conventional sense), he found himself defending the Church of England against the Protesting Protestants–the Nonconformists, the bastion of the middle class, whom he referred to as Philistines. (His three categories were Barbarians (the upper class), Philistines, and (quite boringly, for the lower class), the Populace..
He also got into some trouble mentioning Cardinal Newman favorably in Boston.
Arnold recognized the necessity of the “fire and strength” of unwavering moral commitment, which he views as indebted to the Hebrew Bible, as well as the language of sweetness and light–to see things as they really are, in all their complexity, which he attributed to the Greeks. (He called them Hebraism and Hellenism).
It’s that in his society, dominated as it was by the Puritan sensibility (broadly construed, see Weber), the former had taken over, and assumed a distorted form. He viewed the US as far more influenced by a Puritan sensibility than even England was.
“Sweetness and Light, Goodness, Truth and Beauty” can transform us because such is the essence of Divine Law. The Word Of God Who Is Love, to begin with.
Nancy, why don’t you re-read Culture and Anarchy? You will see that Arnold says essentially the same thing.
Being interested in Arnold because of his views on translating Homer I came a few years ago to read Culture and Anarchy and my impression at the time was that the ideas in it were still very relevant and very well expressed. I did not know that he had been influenced by Cardinal Newman. I suspect that anyone who had not learned from Newman, directly or indirectly, has a serious element missing in her/his mental tool box. I mention no names, or groups, but some come readily to mind.
Arnold has one of the best descriptions of Newman’s preaqhing. “Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still, saying: ‘After the fever of life, after weariness and sickness, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state,—at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.”’
I like that “subtle, sweet, mournful.” But they were poles apart theologically.
I think Arnold is profitably read alongside O’Malley’s Four Cultures of the West.
It is only with steel in the spine that we will be able to resist the false dichotomy of sweetness and unfeeling rigidity. There is no dichotomy. Sweetness and Uprightness are both united as One in the face of He who gave us His son.
Are you identifying “uprightness” with “unfeeling rigidity”? I hope not.
No. Are you?
Mr. Schwartz: You wrote:about “the false dichotomy of sweetness and unfeeling rigidity,” and then commented that “There is no dichotomy,” and in what I took to be your justification of this statement, you said: “Sweetness and Uprightness are both united …” So that while “sweetness remained in your sentence, “unfeeling rigidity” was replaced by “uprightness,” which led me to think that, if your denial of a dichotomy was to hold, “unfeeling rigidty” and “uprightness” were being equated. I am glad to hear that you don’t identify the latter with the former.
Fr. Komonchak—
I hesitate to speak for someone else, but my guess is that Mr. Schwartz, far from equating uprightness and unfeeling rigidity, was saying that they are worlds apart, but that, sadly, sometimes people mistake one for the other. Course, I could be completely wrong about that.
Fine as far as it goes, but don’t forget the religious limitations, and bad influence, of Arnold, scathingly set forth in T. S. Eliot’s 1930 essay “Arnold and Pater”.
Joseph O’Leary, you are going to get me into trouble. (Insert smiley face icon). Thanks to you, I want to read this:
http://www.victorianweb.org/books/delaura/introduction.html
But I don’t have time to read it!
I have an itch to do something on Newman and Arnold for the former’s beatification.
Can’t, mustn’t, shouldn’t scratch it.
There are more Newman-Arnold connexions. F. W. Newman, brother of J.H., translated the Iliad into English using ballad metres. M. Arnold in his essay on translating Homer offers a stern but, I think, sound critique of that translation and that mode of translation in particular. But there’s more. Thomas Arnold, younger brother of Matthew, became a Roman Catholic in Tasmania, where he was a civil servant, lost his job and returned to England where among other things he headed the classics department at Newman’s school in Birmingham. After a dispute over salary he began again to attend Anglican services, but eventually was reconciled to the R.C. church. I don’t know if Newman had influenced his becoming a Roman Catholic initially or anything about the relation of the two sets of brothers, but I suspect Fr. K. does. I might add that Thomas Arnold later taught James Joyce at University College Dublin. Penultimately I do recall the Arnold Pater Essay from my college days and I remember it approving enough that I will reread it now. Finally TCM is showing The Importance of Being Earnest at 8:00 pm EST. No one should miss a truly golden opportunity such as that.
Perhaps it would be easier to begin by clarifying what you are referring to when you state that “there have been several recent attempts to reignite the culture wars in the United States”, and how this statement relates to the “limitations of the prophetic rhetoric of condemnation in achieving social reform”.
Mark Pruska:
Thanks for the leg up. Your analysis of what I meant was spot on, and I realize that i failed to make that point
Cathy,
A few questions…
(1) What are the “several recent attempts” to which you refer? Who? Where? What?
(2) How do we distinguish a culture “war” from the type of cultural conflicts and disagreements which are inherent in, and indeed essential to, an open and democratic society?
(3) Third, is it possible to live in the United States (or any flourishing democracy) without any culture wars? Our democratic system supports the expansion of ideas and viewpoints, and the dominant view of truth denies any priority to any particular idea or viewpoint. Given that the plurality of people and ideas will necessarily result in opposition, is an end to the culture wars achievable? Is it even desirable?
Arnold was a great admirer of Newman, and a major shaper of the Newman myth; though he did not have many opportunities of meeting him — perhaps only one, on which occasion the aged Newman asked about his brother Thomas. David de Laura’s book, which I was looking at lately for an essay on Pater, is wonderful; delighted to see it is available online.
Nancy and Matt–the point was about the effectiveness of the type of rhetoric–not the substantive merits of any one particular example. I wanted in this post to keep the focus on Arnold and the good example provided by a major source and impetus for all this–EV.
Genuine culture war, in my view, prophetic indictment, military imagery, sometimes even apocalyptic language is not helpful to democratic deliberation per se–. It doesn’t invite the systematic and calm examination of premises, arguments, and conclusions.
I don’t agree with your description of the dominant view of truth as a crude relativism, Matt. I think most disputes in the country are about particular contested issues, about which there disagreement, not primarily about whether there is a truth, but what it is. If A disagrees with B’s claim that, say contraception or torture is always morally wrong, A isn’t necessarily a relativist–A may simply think the truth value of that particular proposition is not the same that B does.
“Relativism is the theory that truth and moral values are not absolute but are pertinent to the persons or groups holding them.” Would Matthew Arnold agree that “the best that has been known and said in the World”, was revealed by He Who Is “Sweetness and Light, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty”, The Way, The Truth, and The Life of Love, to begin with?
Any time we are given Matthew Arnold to read, it improves my day. So thank you. I recollect in one of his critical essays claiming that Shakespeare and Milton were from the great Age of English Poetry, whereas later writers were from the Age of English Prose Fitting, because I like his prose better than his poetry. He was an educator, wasn’t he? Or perhaps a school inspector? I seem to recall that he spent a great deal of time travelling about to various schools. No doubt the train rides gave him time to reflect on social conditions.
Cathy –
I find Arnold’s comments about the U.S. Particularly interesting.
I think that this still is in parts a Puritan country. Consider the currently popular “prosperty Gospel” churches. They emphasize a connection between work, prosperity and salvation plus church services which largely consist in prophetic rhetoric. (The original American Puritans also emphasized the necessity for effective preaching.) However, prosperity Gospel seems to cherry-pick texts from Scripture in support of their views. (Don’t we all. Sigh.)
Anyway, given the new economic circumstances, I wonder how those churches will fare if the economy takes ten years to recover. I saw a bit of Rick Warren on CNN yesterday, and I was struck by his use of some Catholic terminology including “common ground”. He, of course, stressed listening to opposing views even before the last election. Maybe that is a lesson yet to be learned in Christianity– prophetic rhetoric,Yes, but also listening to opponents.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see which clergy start to listen as well as declaim.
This does not change the fact that those Truths that are self-evident because they are endowed to each one of us from our Creator, do not depend upon examining premises, arguments and conclusions because they are self-evident to begin with. They are endowed to each one of us from our Creator, for the Common Good and not by virtue of common ground.