Trying to read the tide

“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…”

So begins the third stanza of “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold (1822-1866), one of the best-known poems of Victorian England, thought to have been composed in 1851 but not published until 1865. The poem opens with a scene of both natural and domestic tranquility: “The sea is calm tonight.” A loving couple, most likely the poet and his wife, quietly enjoying each other’s presence, a moonlit night at Dover Beach, the tide slowly retreating, “…on the French coast the light / Gleams and is gone; the cliffs on England stand, / Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.” And yet, and yet…the retreating tide brings with it “the eternal note of sadness.”

But why “the eternal note of sadness”? As the beginning of the third stanza suggests, the high tide at Dover Beach is a metaphor for the high tide of all-embracing Christian faith in Victorian England, which was at the time beginning to ebb; that ebbing tide was withdrawing with it the comforting, though clichéd, certainty that “God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world.” (Robert Browning, 1841)

At first glance, Arnold seemed to be insisting in “Dover Beach” that the Sea of Faith – the warm, embracing faith of Christianity as practiced in Victorian England – was an ebbing tide; the certainties of Christian dogma were being eclipsed by the uncomfortable certainties of an emerging scientific evidence that by now has seemed to infuse the secular reality of our 21st century. Several years ago, when my wife Sandy and I had the privilege of visiting numerous churches and cathedrals throughout the European continent, we were overwhelmed by their physical splendor; the buildings were overflowing with tourists, but almost empty of worshippers.

On the other hand, in the Nov. 6 issue of “The New York Review of Books,” Harvard professor Peter E. Gordon calls the question: Is the tide of religious life ebbing in Western culture, as portrayed in “Dover Beach,” or has the situation become much more complex? Gordon devotes his essay to a review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise Social Science.”

Early on, Gordon reports: “In the US, despite the enduring appeal of evangelical Christianity, data from the Pew Research Center indicate that nearly 30 percent of the population is unaffiliated.”

Nevertheless, Gordon points out that “Appiah asks us to think more carefully when we call something a religion. As many sociologists and historians of religion will confirm, the word “religion” has become a point of controversy in recent years because it serves for so many things. It can seem hard to define because it is so expansive in meaning.”

We owe this expansion of the meaning of the word “religion” to the 19th-early 20th-century pioneers of the discipline of sociology: the Frenchman Emil Durkheim, as well the Germans Max Weber and Georg Simmel. For these seminal thinkers, religion is no longer considered to be a matter of faith between an individual and God, but rather, according to Durkheim, “religion is simply society’s representation of itself.”

During my 33 years in Barrington as rabbi of Temple Habonim, I developed what might be called a subliminal “tide consciousness.” Since the synagogue sits atop a small hill across New Meadow Road from the Barrington River, I almost always knew more or less where the water stood – high tide or low.

However, should the water be standing at about its midlevel, I rarely had the time, to wait long enough at river’s edge to determine whether the tide was coming in or flowing out into Narragansett Bay, through the bay waters and into the “harborless immensities” of the Atlantic Ocean.

Unlike Matthew Arnold in the mid-1800s, I am not able to tell at this moment of religious confusion – autumn, 2025 – which way the tide of faith is flowing. Like Kwame Anthony Appiah, I must withhold my judgment now that the very meaning of the word “religion” has become so difficult to define as to render it, for all practical purposes, meaningless. I suspect that my generation will not live long enough to know for certain in which direction the tide of faith is flowing. Nor will future generations ever be able to agree upon what the word “religion” means. I for one do not know how to read the tide.

Peter Gordon concludes his review of Appiah’s “Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science” with both a hint of hope and a word of warning: “Today, Appiah writes, we hardly suffer from a scarcity of religion; it would be more accurate to say that we confront a surplus. But while religion can hold us together, it can also tear us apart.”

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritius@tmplehabonim.org.