An odd thing happened yesterday in my dissertation research. Charles Taylor was telling the story of some in the Victorian Age that lost their faith, and yet deeply lamented the loss. On such individual was Matthew Arnold, an important thinker and critic of the late 19th century. I need/want to learn more about Arnold, but alas time is a precious commodity.
In any case Arnold, whose ideas have in many ways fallen out of favor, was religious in youth, but in later life turned from his faith. He felt the deep need for something beyond the world he saw, and sought for some sort of “religious” experience in art, literature, and education. the tale of his loss, and the lament of his loss moved me. Here is the section that I found moving:
“Arnold’s profound ambivalence, his sense of the impossibility of faith, whose departure has nonetheless left a great void, comes out most forcefully in the ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”. The speaker feels, for all his powerful sense of sympathy, that he cannot return to the world in which the monastery’s life of prayer played such an important part.
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign’d—
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side” (A Secular Age, 382-383).
