The reappearance of God: Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot in dialogue

Despite the fact that Matthew Arnold was a staunch humanist and T. S. Eliot a rather orthodox Christian, in their cultural criticism both offered surprisingly similar responses to the socio-cultural phenomenon of the crisis of religious doubt experienced by Western society during the late Victorian and Modern periods. The internal conflict each experienced in his personal religious crisis came face-to-face with his social responsibility as cultural critic. Arnold's desire to retain a standard of cultural perfection and Eliot's fear of the disintegration of society led them to literary-cultural efforts to re-Christianize Western civilization that involved social means for social ends yet, their respective projects paradoxically and unwittingly emphasized the significance of the individual Christian and of a Christian ethos. Hence, their projects contained inherent contradictions that, in the end, brought their efforts to failure. Arnold insisted on freeing Christianity of all its supernatural qualities, and Eliot, in his turn, negated the relevance of the individual consciousness in religious matters with both God and the individual conscience out of the picture, little remained to Christianity with which to re-enchant the world.