Non-fiction: Literature and Dogma

Overview
Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma (1873) mounts a sustained challenge to the religious orthodoxies of Victorian England by bringing literary sensibility and critical intelligence to bear on the Bible and on Christian doctrine. The book seeks to redefine what religious language can legitimately claim, arguing that the value of sacred texts lies less in metaphysical certainties than in their moral and spiritual power. Its tone is both sermonic and scholarly, aimed at readers anxious to reconcile faith with modern intellectual life.

Arnold's central case
Arnold refuses the easy binary of blind faith versus atheistic dismissal and proposes a third way: a religion shaped by critical insight, aesthetic judgment, and ethical purpose. He contends that many traditional dogmas are verbal formulas that have outlived their literal credibility and that the insistence on metaphysical proofs or historical literalism damages religion's moral influence. Instead of asking whether every doctrinal statement can be proved as fact, Arnold urges examination of whether religious language awakens conscience, enlarges sympathy, and promotes right living.

Reading the Bible as literature
A key move is the insistence that the Bible be read like literature: as a collection of varied "utterances" that record particular religious experiences and moral ideals rather than as a unified scientific or historical manual. Arnold advocates a literary-historical sensibility that recognizes genre, context, metaphor, and moral intent. This approach liberates readers to appreciate the Bible's poetic power and ethical vision while allowing critical scholarship to correct or reinterpret passages that reflect ancient assumptions now obsolete.

Critique of dogma and orthodoxy
Arnold attacks rigid doctrinal systems, such as narrow creeds and literalist interpretations, not primarily to destroy religion but to preserve its living force. He argues that doctrines become harmful when they are detached from conscience and used as test-questions of membership rather than as means to moral formation. The book presses for a religion whose truths are judged by their capacity to promote "righteousness" and humane conduct rather than by their conformity to archaeological or metaphysical claims.

Style and rhetoric
The prose mixes pastoral urgency with erudition: Arnold uses critical examples, classical touchstones, and rhetorical contrast to make his case accessible to educated lay readers. His method is interpretive and prescriptive at once; he demonstrates how certain biblical passages can be reappraised and then suggests a constructive alternative vision of faith. That rhetorical blend made the book a provocative intervention, earnest, combative, and at times polemical.

Reception and legacy
The immediate reaction was contentious. Clerical reviewers accused Arnold of undermining Christian foundations, while liberal intellectuals praised his courage and clarity. Over time Literature and Dogma helped fuel liberal theology and modern biblical criticism by legitimizing ethical and literary readings of scripture. Its insistence that religious language be judged by moral and educative effects rather than by literalistic proof continues to influence debates about the relationship between faith, culture, and critical modernity.