From Baudelaire's Les Phares:
Michaelangelo
No man's land where every Hercules
becomes a Christ.
From Baudelaires La Muse malade:
Your Christian bloodstream coursing strong
and steadfast as the copious Classical vein.
[...]
I'd wish...
Your Christian blood to flow in waves that scan
With varied sounds of ancient syllables.
From Heinrich Heine's The City of Lucca (1831):
Then
he poured wine to all the other gods from right to left, ladling out
the sweet nectar from the bowl. And laughter unquenchable arose amid the
blessed gods to see Hephaistos bustling about the palace. So feasted
they all day till the setting of the sun; nor was their soul aught
stinted of the fair banquet, nor of the beauteous lyre that Apollo held,
and the Muses singing alternately with sweet voice.
Then suddenly
there came panting in a pale Jew, dripping with blood, a crown of
thorns upon his head and a great wooden cross upon his shoulders; and he
threw down the cross on to the high table of the gods, so that the
golden bowls trembled, and the gods fell silent and grew pale, and
became ever paler, until they finally dissolved away altogether into
mist. And now a sad time followed. The happy gods were gone, and Olympus
was turned into a lazar-house, where gods who had been flayed, roasted
and turned on the spit slunk boringly about, dressed their wounds and
sang dreary songs.
From Heinrich Heine's Ludwig Borne: A Memorial (1840):
I
say 'Nazarene,' to avoid either the expression 'Jewish' or
'Christian,' although I use both expressions as synonymous to designate
not a faith but a character. 'Jews' and 'Christians' are for me quite
close in meaning, in contrast to 'Hellenes,' a designation I use to
characterize, in the same manner, an inborn as well as learned
spiritual orientation and style of thinking rather than a certain
nation. In this relation I may say all men are either Hebrews with
tendencies to asceticism and to excessive spiritualization and with a
hatred of the plastic [arts], or Hellenes, with cheerful views of life,
with a pride in self-development and a love of reality. Thus there were
Hellenes in the families of German pastors, and Jews who had been born
in Athens... .
From Heinrich Heine's Letters (?):
"Shakespeare
is at one and the same time Jew and Greek, or rather elements of both
spiritualism and art have been reconciled in him,... and developed in
him a higher synthesis. Is perhaps the harmonious synthesis of both aspects not the goal of European civilization?"
From Matthew Arnold's Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment (1864):
...the poetry of Theocritus's hymn [fifteenth idyll] is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the senses; the poetry of St Francis's hymn [to the sun] is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the heart and imagination. The first takes the world by its outward, sensible side; the second by its inward, symbolical side. The first admits as much of the world as is pleasure-giving; the second admits the whole world,... painful and pleasure-giving, all alike, but all transfigured by the power of a spiritual emotion, all brought under a law of supersensual love, having its seat in the soul.
When we see Pompeii [i.e., the frescoes
depicting sexual love], we can put our finger upon the pagan sentiment
in its extreme. And when we read of Monte Alverno and the stigmata;
when we read of the repulsive, because self-caused, sufferings of the
end of St Francis's life; ...when we find him assailed, even himself, by
the doubt 'whether he who had destroyed himself by the severity of his
penances could find mercy in eternity', we can put our finger on the
medieval Christian sentiment in its extreme. Human nature is neither all
senses and understanding, nor all heart and imagination. Pompeii was a
sign that for humanity at large the measure of sensualism had been
over-passed; St Francis's doubt was a sign that for humanity at large
the measure of spiritualism had been over-passed. Humanity, in its
violent rebound from one extreme, had swung from Pompeii to Monte
Alverno; but it was sure not to stay there.
The Renascence is, in part, a return towards the pagan spirit... ; a return towards the life of the senses and the understanding. The Reformation, on the other hand, is the very opposite to this; in Luther there is nothing Greek or pagan; vehemently as he attacked the adoration of St Francis, Luther had himself something of St Francis in him... . The Reformation-- I do not mean the inferior piece given under that name, by Henry the Eighth... but the real Reformation, the German Reformation, Luther's Reformation-- was a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense against the carnal and pagan sense; it was a religious revival like St Francis's, but this time against the Church of Rome, not within her; for the carnal and pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church of Rome herself, its prime representative. But the grand reaction against the rule of the heart and imagination, the strong return towards the rule of the senses and understanding, is in the eighteenth century.
I have said a great deal of harm of paganism; and... no more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end without reminding the reader that, before this state of things appeared, there was an epoch in Greek life-- in pagan life-- of the highest possible beauty and value; an epoch which alone goes far towards making Greece the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece,-- a country hardly less important to mankind than Judaea. The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason. And there is a century in Greek life,-- the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 to the year 430 B.C.,-- in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live. Of this effort, ...the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles... . [...] Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar's time, Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. [...] Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking-power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and Shakespeare, are enough for it. That I will not dispute; nor will I set up the Greek poets, from Pindar to Sophocles, as objects of blind worship. But no other poets so well show to the poetry of the present the way it must take; no other poets have lived so much by the imaginative reason... ; no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power, have so well satisfied the religious sense:
Let St Francis-- nay, or Luther either-- beat that!
The Renascence is, in part, a return towards the pagan spirit... ; a return towards the life of the senses and the understanding. The Reformation, on the other hand, is the very opposite to this; in Luther there is nothing Greek or pagan; vehemently as he attacked the adoration of St Francis, Luther had himself something of St Francis in him... . The Reformation-- I do not mean the inferior piece given under that name, by Henry the Eighth... but the real Reformation, the German Reformation, Luther's Reformation-- was a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense against the carnal and pagan sense; it was a religious revival like St Francis's, but this time against the Church of Rome, not within her; for the carnal and pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church of Rome herself, its prime representative. But the grand reaction against the rule of the heart and imagination, the strong return towards the rule of the senses and understanding, is in the eighteenth century.
I have said a great deal of harm of paganism; and... no more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end without reminding the reader that, before this state of things appeared, there was an epoch in Greek life-- in pagan life-- of the highest possible beauty and value; an epoch which alone goes far towards making Greece the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece,-- a country hardly less important to mankind than Judaea. The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason. And there is a century in Greek life,-- the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 to the year 430 B.C.,-- in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live. Of this effort, ...the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles... . [...] Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar's time, Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. [...] Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking-power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and Shakespeare, are enough for it. That I will not dispute; nor will I set up the Greek poets, from Pindar to Sophocles, as objects of blind worship. But no other poets so well show to the poetry of the present the way it must take; no other poets have lived so much by the imaginative reason... ; no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power, have so well satisfied the religious sense:
Oh! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old. [Sophocles]
Let St Francis-- nay, or Luther either-- beat that!
From Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1868):
Chapter IV
Hebraism and Hellenism
I said we show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness. This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force. And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals,—rivals not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history,—and rivals dividing the empire of the world between them. And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism,—between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.
Hebraism and Hellenism
I said we show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness. This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force. And these two forces we may regard as in some sense rivals,—rivals not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history,—and rivals dividing the empire of the world between them. And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism,—between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.
The final aim of both Hellenism and
Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same:
man's perfection or salvation. [...] that final end and aim is "that we
might be partakers of the divine nature." These are the words of a
Hebrew apostle, but of Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the
aim. When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it
is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose; the
speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he
uses the other only as a foil and to enable him the better to give
effect to his purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which
is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of Hebraism. There is a
sermon on Greece and the Greek spirit by a man never to be mentioned
without interest and respect, Frederick Robertson, in which this
rhetorical use of Greece and the Greek [145] spirit, and the inadequate
exhibition of them necessarily consequent upon this, is almost
ludicrous, and would be censurable if it were not to be explained by the
exigences of a sermon. On the other hand, Heinrich Heine, and other writers of his
sort, give us the spectacle of the tables completely turned, and of
Hebraism brought in just as a foil and contrast to Hellenism, and to
make the superiority of Hellenism more manifest. In both these cases
there is injustice and misrepresentation. The aim and end of both
Hebraism and Hellenism is, as I have said, one and the same, and this
aim and end is august and admirable.
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to
see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is
conduct and obedience. Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable
difference; the Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that
they hinder right thinking, the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they
hinder right acting. [...] The governing idea of Hellenism is
spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of
conscience.
Christianity changed nothing in this
essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest,
self-devotion, the following not our own individual will, but the will
of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form, also, of the
discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism.
So long as we do not forget that both
Hellenism and Hebraism are profound and admirable manifestations of
man's life, tendencies, and powers, and that both of them aim at a like
final result, we can hardly insist too strongly on the divergence of
line and of operation with which they proceed. It is a divergence so
great that it most truly, as the prophet Zechariah says, "has raised up
thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece!" [...] Language may be
abundantly quoted from both Hellenism and Hebraism to make it seem that
one follows the same current as the other towards the same goal. They
are, truly, borne towards the same goal; but the currents which bear
them are infinitely different. It is true, Solomon will praise
knowing: "Understanding is a well-spring of life unto him that hath
it."+ And in the New Testament, again, Christ is a "light,"+ and "truth
makes us free." [...] It is true, Plato, in words which are almost the
words of the New Testament or the Imitation, calls life a learning to
die. But underneath the superficial agreement the fundamental divergence
still subsists. The understanding of Solomon is "the walking in the way
of the commandments;" this is "the way of peace,"+ and it is of this
that blessedness comes. In the New Testament, the truth which gives us
the peace of God and makes us free, is the love of Christ constraining us to crucify, as he did, and with a like purpose of moral
regeneration, the flesh with its affections and lusts, and thus
establishing, as we have seen, the law. To St. Paul it appears possible
to "hold the truth in unrighteousness,"+ which is just what Socrates
judged impossible. The moral virtues, on the other hand, are with
Aristotle but the porch and access to the intellectual, and with these
last is blessedness. That partaking of the divine life, which both
Hellenism and Hebraism, as we have said, fix as their crowning aim,
Plato expressly denies to the man of practical virtue merely, of
self-conquest with any other motive than that of perfect intellectual
vision; he reserves it for the lover of pure knowledge, of seeing things
as they really are,—the philomathês.
Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of
the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those
wants. But their methods are so different, they lay stress on such
different points, and call into being by their respective disciplines
such different activities, that the face which human nature presents
when it passes from the hands of one of them to those of the other, is
no longer the same. To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things
as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty,
is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before
human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal,
Hellenism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a
kind of aërial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what we
call sweetness and light. Difficulties are kept out of view, and the
beauty and rationalness of the ideal have all our thoughts. "The best
man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he
who most feels that he is perfecting himself,"—this account of the
matter by Socrates, the true Socrates of the Memorabilia, has something
so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to
fill us with clearness and hope when we hear it. But there is a saying
which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlyle about Socrates,—a very
happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlyle's or not,—which
excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from
Hellenism. "Socrates," this saying goes, "is terribly at ease in Zion"
Hebraism,—and here is the source of its wonderful strength,— has
always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the
impossibility of being at ease in Zion; of the difficulties which oppose
themselves to man's pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which
Socrates talks so hopefully, and, as from this point of view one might
almost say, so glibly. It is all very well to talk of getting rid of
one's ignorance, of seeing things in their reality, seeing them in their
beauty; but how is this to be done when there is something which
thwarts and spoils all our efforts? This something is sin; and the space
which sin fills in Hebraism, as compared with Hellenism, is indeed
prodigious. This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, and
perfection appears remote and rising away from earth, in the background.
[...] The discipline of the [153] Old Testament may be summed up as a
discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the
New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it. As Hellenism
speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty,
as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of
becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of
this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing
tendencies, actively followed, must lead.
Apparently it was the Hellenic
conception of human nature which was unsound, for the world could not
live by it. Absolutely to call it unsound, however, is to fall into the
common error of its Hebraising enemies; but it was unsound at that
particular moment of man's development, it was premature. The
indispensable basis of conduct and [154] self-control, the platform upon
which alone the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into bloom, was
not to be reached by our race so easily; centuries of probation and
discipline were needed to bring us to it. Therefore the bright promise
of Hellenism faded, and Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that
astonishing spectacle, so well marked by the often quoted words of the
prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages of the nations took hold of
the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying:—"We will go with you, for we
have heard that God is with you."+ And the Hebraism which thus received
and ruled a world all gone out of the way and altogether become
unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the later, the more spiritual,
the more attractive development of Hebraism. It was Christianity; that
is to say, Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall
of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by
conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world
stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered its spectacle of an
inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it
showed one who refused [155] himself everything;—"my Saviour banished
joy" says George Herbert. When the alma Venus, the life-giving and
joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the Pagan world,
could not save her followers from self- dissatisfaction and ennui, the
severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly: "Let no man
deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the
wrath of God upon the children of disobedience."+ Throughout age after
age, and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our
race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death;+
and endeavoured, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this
endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions of early Christianity,
the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great
historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each, in its own
way, incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St.
Augustine's Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of
the Imitation.
...it is justly said of the Jewish people, who were charged with setting powerfully forth that side of the divine order to which the words conscience and self-conquest point, that they were "entrusted with the oracles of God;"+ as it is justly said of Christianity, which followed Judaism and which set forth this side with a much deeper effectiveness and a much wider influence, that the wisdom of the old Pagan world was foolishness compared to it. No words of devotion and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to these beneficent forces which have so borne forward humanity in its appointed work of coming to the knowledge and possession of itself; above all, in those great [157] moments when their action was the wholesomest and the most necessary.
But the evolution of these forces,
separately and in themselves, is not the whole evolution of
humanity,—their single history is not the whole history of man; whereas
their admirers are always apt to make it stand for the whole history.
Hebraism and Hellenism are, neither of them, the law of human
development, as their admirers are prone to make them; they are, each of
them, contributions to human development,—august contributions,
invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us more august,
more invaluable, more preponderant over the other, according to the
moment in which we take them, and the relation in which we stand to
them. The nations of our modern world, children of that immense and
salutary movement which broke up the Pagan world, inevitably stand to
Hellenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a relation
which magnifies it. They are inevitably prone to take Hebraism as the
law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it,
however precious. And yet the lesson must perforce be [158] learned,
that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces
which bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism
itself is, like Hellenism, but a contribution.
...by alternations of Hebraism and
Hellenism, of man's intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to
see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by
self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds, and each of these two forces
has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great
movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man's moral
impulses, so the great movement which goes by the name of the
Renascence* was an uprising and re-instatement of man's intellectual
impulses and of Hellenism. We in England, the devoted children of
Protestantism, chiefly know the Renascence by its subordinate and
secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation has been often called
a Hebraising revival, a return to the ardour and sincereness of
primitive [160] Christianity. No one, however, can study the development
of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into
the Reformation too,—Hebraising child of the Renascence and offspring of
its fervour, rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was,—the
subtle Hellenic leaven of the Renascence found its way, and that the
exact respective parts in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of Hellenism,
are not easy to separate. But what we may with truth say is, that all
which Protestantism was to itself clearly conscious of, all which it
succeeded in clearly setting forth in words, had the characters of
Hebraism rather than of Hellenism. [...] Whatever direct superiority,
therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a
superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness,—at
the moment of its apparition at any [161] rate,—in dealing with the
heart and conscience; its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are
in general quite illusory. For Hellenism, for the thinking side in man
as distinguished from the acting side, the attitude of mind of
Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the attitude
of mind of Catholicism towards the Church. The mental habit of him who
imagines that Balaam's ass spoke, in no respect differs from the mental
habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked; and
the one, who says that God's Church makes him believe what he believes,
and the other, who says that God's Word makes him believe what he
believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and
truly knowing, when they say God's Church and God's Word, what it is
they say, or whereof they affirm.
In the sixteenth century, therefore,
Hellenism re-entered the world, and again stood in presence of
Hebraism,—a Hebraism renewed and purged. Now, it has not been enough
observed, how, in the seventeenth century, a fate befell Hellenism in
some respects analogous to that which befell it at the commencement of
our era. The Renascence, that [162] great re-awakening of Hellenism,
that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as
they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics, produced such
splendid fruits, had, like the anterior Hellenism of the Pagan world, a
side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral
fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness,
but which in France, England, and other countries was very apparent too.
Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive preponderance
given to man's perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural defect of his
feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction. Let us trace that
reaction where it most nearly concerns us.
Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo- European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man than the affinities we can [163] perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another; and no affinity of this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre, which, notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us English, and of our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, which has been so great a power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English nation, was originally the reaction, in the seventeenth century, of the conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renascence. It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism; and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by its humour, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus getting itself unfixed from its own over- [164] certainty, of smiling at its own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renascence which we see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits; undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that order of ideas which we call by the name of Hellenism, and gave the first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of the former defeat of Hellenism, if Hellenism was defeated, this shows that Hellenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency at that moment would not have been for the world's good.
Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renascence by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance and usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism; primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendent force in the world at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through Hellenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world's progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with the essential difference between the main stream of man's advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation, has been towards strictness of conscience. They have made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual courses of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves; everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.
From Frederick Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1883):
"Twas
once—methinks year one of our blessed Lord,—Drunk without wine, the
Sybil thus deplored:—'How ill things go! Decline! Decline! Ne'er sank
the world so low! Rome now hath turned harlot and harlot-stew, Rome's
Caesar a beast, and God—hath turned Jew!'"
From Frederick Nietzsche's The Geneology of Morals (1887):
"All
truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave
ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an 'outside,' an
'other,'... and that no is its creative act. This reversal of direction
of the evaluating look... is a fundamental feature of rancor."
"The
two sets of valuations have waged a terrible
battle on this earth, lasting many millennia... . It might... be claimed
that by being raised to a higher plane the battle has become much more
profound. Perhaps there is today not a single intellectual worth his
salt who is not divided on that issue, a battleground for those
opposites. The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which
have remained legible thought human history, read: 'Rome vs. Israel,
Israel vs Rome.' No battle has ever been more momentous that this one.
Rome viewed Israel as a monstrosity; the Romans regarded the Jews as
convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind... . But how did the
Jews, on their part, feel about Rome? A thousand indications point to
the answer. It is enough to read once more the Revelations of St. John,
the most rabid outburst of vindictiveness in all recorded history. [...]
The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived.
[...] The Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly, rancorous nation par
excellence, though possessed of an unequal ethical genius... . Has the
victory so far been gained by the Romans or by the Jews? Rome, without a
doubt, has capitulated. It is true that during the Renaissance men
witnessed a strange and splendid awakening of the classical ideal; like
one buried alive, Rome stirred under the weight of a new Judaic Rome
that looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called the Church. But
presently Israel triumphed once again, thanks to the plebeian rancour of
the German and English Reformation, together with its natural corollary,
the restoration of the Church- which also meant the restoration of
ancient Rome to the quiet of the tomb. In an even more decisive sense
did Israel triumph over the classical ideal through the French
Revolution. For then the last political nobleness Europe had known, that
of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, collapsed under the
weight of vindictive popular instincts. A wilder enthusiasm was never
seen. And yet, in the midst of it all, something tremendous, something
wholly unexpected happened: the ancient classical ideal appeared
incarnate and in unprecedented splendour before the eyes and conscience
of mankind. [...] Like a last sign post to an alternative route Napoleon
appeared, most isolated and anachronistic of men, the embodiment of the
noble ideal."
"Was it all over then? Had that greatest
conflict of ideals been shelved for good? Or had it only been
indefinitely adjourned? might not the smouldering fire start up again one
day, all the more terrible because longer and more secretly nourished?
[...] If the reader at this point begins to develop his own train of
thought, he is not likely to soon to come to the end of it."
From Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, Vol. IX (1954):
(7) RENAISSANCES OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS
In Jewish eyes, Christianity's allegedly miraculous captivation of the Hellenic society was by no means 'the Lord's doing'. The posthumous triumph of a Jewish rabbi who had been saluted by his followers, in Gentile style, as the son of a god by a human mother was a pagan exploit of the same order as the earlier triumphs of kindred legendary 'demigods' such as Dionysus and Heracles. Judaism flattered herself that she could have anticipated Christianity's conquests if she had stooped to conquer by descending to Christianity's level. Though Christianity had never repudiated the authority of the Jewish Scriptures-- indeed, she had bound them up with her own-- she had made her facile conquests by betraying, as Jewish eyes saw it, the two cardinal Judaic principles, the First and Second of the Ten Commandments, Monotheism and Aniconism (no 'images'). So now, in face of a still impenitent Hellenic paganism, plainly visible under a veneer of Christianity, the watchword for Jewry was to persevere in bearing witness to the Lord's everlasting Word.
This 'patient deep disdain' with which a sensationally successful Christianity continued to be regarded by an unimpressed and unshaken Jewry would have been less embarrassing for Christians if Christianity herself had not combined a sincere theoretical loyalty to a Jewish legacy of Monotheism and Aniconism with those practical concessions to the polytheism and idolatry of Hellenic converts for which she was arrainged by her Jewish critics. The Christian Church's reconsecration of the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament of the Christian Faith was a weak spot in Christianity's armour through which the shafts of Jewish criticism pierced the Christian conscience.
After the nominal conversion, en masse, of an Hellenic Gentile world in the course of the fourth century of the Christian Era, the domestic controversy within the bosom of the Church tended to overshadow the polemics between Christians and Jews; but the theological warfare on this older front seems to have flared up again in the sixth and seventh centuries in consequence of a puritanical house-cleaning in Jewry which, in the Palestinian Jewish community, had been taken in hand towards the close of the fifth century. This domestic campaign, within Jewry, against a Christian-like laxity in the matter of mural decoration of synagogues had its repercussions on the Jewish-Christian battlefront. But, when we turn to the parallel controversy within the Christian Church between iconophiles and iconophobes, we are struck with its persistence and ubiquity. We find this 'irrepressible conflict' bursting out in almost every provence of Christendom and in almost every succeeding century of the Christian Era.
In the seventh century of the Christian Era a new factor was introduced into the argument in the shape of a new actor who made a sensationally brilliant appearance on the historical stage. Yet another religion now sprang, as Christianity had sprung, but this one full-grown, from the loins of Jewry. Islam was as fanatically monotheist and aniconist as any Jew could desire, and the sensational successes of its devotees in the military-- and soon also in the missionary-- field gave Christendom something new to think about. ...the triumphs of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors supplied fresh fuel for the controversies that had long been smouldering round the problem of Christian 'idolatry'.
In A.D. 726 the ghost of a Judaic iconophobia, long hovering in the wings, was brought into the centre stage by the Iconoclastic Decree of the great East Roman Emperor, Leo Syrus. This attempt to impose what amounted to a renaissance in the religious field by means of political authority proved a failure. The Papacy identified itself enthusiastically with the popular 'idolatrous' opposition, and thereby took a long step towards emancipating itself from Byzantine authority. [...] The West had to wait nearly eight centuries more for its Judaic renaissance; and when this came it was a movement from below upwards; its Leo Syrus was Martin Luther.
In the Protestant Reformation in Western Christendom, Aniconism was not the only Judaic ghost that succeeded in reasserting itself. [...] The Protestants' professed objective was a return to the pristine practice of the Primitive Church; yet here we see them obliterating a difference between Primitive Christianity and Judaism on which the Primitive Church had insisted. [...] Could it have escaped their notice that Paul, whom they delighted to honour, had made himself notorious by repudiating the Mosaic Law? The explanation was that these religious enthusiasts, in Germany, England, Scotland, New England, and elsewhere, were in the grip of one of the most potent of renaissances and were bent on turning themselves into imitation-Jews, as enthusiastic Italian artists and scholars had been bent on turning themselves into imitation-Athenians. Their practice of inflicting on their children at baptism some of the most unTeutonic sounding proper names to be found in the Old Testament was a revealing symptom of this mania for calling a dead world back to life.
We have already introduced, by implication, a third element in the Judaic renaissance of Western Protestantism, namely bibliolatry, the idolization of a sacred text as a substitute for the idolization of sacred images.
(7) RENAISSANCES OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS
In Jewish eyes, Christianity's allegedly miraculous captivation of the Hellenic society was by no means 'the Lord's doing'. The posthumous triumph of a Jewish rabbi who had been saluted by his followers, in Gentile style, as the son of a god by a human mother was a pagan exploit of the same order as the earlier triumphs of kindred legendary 'demigods' such as Dionysus and Heracles. Judaism flattered herself that she could have anticipated Christianity's conquests if she had stooped to conquer by descending to Christianity's level. Though Christianity had never repudiated the authority of the Jewish Scriptures-- indeed, she had bound them up with her own-- she had made her facile conquests by betraying, as Jewish eyes saw it, the two cardinal Judaic principles, the First and Second of the Ten Commandments, Monotheism and Aniconism (no 'images'). So now, in face of a still impenitent Hellenic paganism, plainly visible under a veneer of Christianity, the watchword for Jewry was to persevere in bearing witness to the Lord's everlasting Word.
This 'patient deep disdain' with which a sensationally successful Christianity continued to be regarded by an unimpressed and unshaken Jewry would have been less embarrassing for Christians if Christianity herself had not combined a sincere theoretical loyalty to a Jewish legacy of Monotheism and Aniconism with those practical concessions to the polytheism and idolatry of Hellenic converts for which she was arrainged by her Jewish critics. The Christian Church's reconsecration of the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament of the Christian Faith was a weak spot in Christianity's armour through which the shafts of Jewish criticism pierced the Christian conscience.
After the nominal conversion, en masse, of an Hellenic Gentile world in the course of the fourth century of the Christian Era, the domestic controversy within the bosom of the Church tended to overshadow the polemics between Christians and Jews; but the theological warfare on this older front seems to have flared up again in the sixth and seventh centuries in consequence of a puritanical house-cleaning in Jewry which, in the Palestinian Jewish community, had been taken in hand towards the close of the fifth century. This domestic campaign, within Jewry, against a Christian-like laxity in the matter of mural decoration of synagogues had its repercussions on the Jewish-Christian battlefront. But, when we turn to the parallel controversy within the Christian Church between iconophiles and iconophobes, we are struck with its persistence and ubiquity. We find this 'irrepressible conflict' bursting out in almost every provence of Christendom and in almost every succeeding century of the Christian Era.
In the seventh century of the Christian Era a new factor was introduced into the argument in the shape of a new actor who made a sensationally brilliant appearance on the historical stage. Yet another religion now sprang, as Christianity had sprung, but this one full-grown, from the loins of Jewry. Islam was as fanatically monotheist and aniconist as any Jew could desire, and the sensational successes of its devotees in the military-- and soon also in the missionary-- field gave Christendom something new to think about. ...the triumphs of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors supplied fresh fuel for the controversies that had long been smouldering round the problem of Christian 'idolatry'.
In A.D. 726 the ghost of a Judaic iconophobia, long hovering in the wings, was brought into the centre stage by the Iconoclastic Decree of the great East Roman Emperor, Leo Syrus. This attempt to impose what amounted to a renaissance in the religious field by means of political authority proved a failure. The Papacy identified itself enthusiastically with the popular 'idolatrous' opposition, and thereby took a long step towards emancipating itself from Byzantine authority. [...] The West had to wait nearly eight centuries more for its Judaic renaissance; and when this came it was a movement from below upwards; its Leo Syrus was Martin Luther.
In the Protestant Reformation in Western Christendom, Aniconism was not the only Judaic ghost that succeeded in reasserting itself. [...] The Protestants' professed objective was a return to the pristine practice of the Primitive Church; yet here we see them obliterating a difference between Primitive Christianity and Judaism on which the Primitive Church had insisted. [...] Could it have escaped their notice that Paul, whom they delighted to honour, had made himself notorious by repudiating the Mosaic Law? The explanation was that these religious enthusiasts, in Germany, England, Scotland, New England, and elsewhere, were in the grip of one of the most potent of renaissances and were bent on turning themselves into imitation-Jews, as enthusiastic Italian artists and scholars had been bent on turning themselves into imitation-Athenians. Their practice of inflicting on their children at baptism some of the most unTeutonic sounding proper names to be found in the Old Testament was a revealing symptom of this mania for calling a dead world back to life.
We have already introduced, by implication, a third element in the Judaic renaissance of Western Protestantism, namely bibliolatry, the idolization of a sacred text as a substitute for the idolization of sacred images.
