gossman_philhellenism & antisemitism

7/25/2019 Gossman_Philhellenism & Antisemitism

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LIONEL GOSSWhU

Philhellenism and

Antisemitism: Matthew

Arnold and his German

Models

S o o ne says it, hut every o ne knolvs

that pantlleisrn is an open secret in Gev-

many. We ha w, in fact, outgrown deism.

We are free and do n't want any thunder-

itlg tyrant. Me are of age and need no

parental care. Nor are lve the botches of

any great mechanic. Deisnl is a religion

for servants. for children, for the

Genevese; fbr .ivatcllmakers. .and every

deist is, after all, aJew.

Heinrich Heine'

I T H S O M E N O TA B LE E X C E P TI O N S

such as George Eliot,

W

virtually everyone who put pen to paper in the nineteenth cen-

tury, it seems, is vulnerable to the charge of antisemitism. It is not

easy to draw any other conclusion from Leon Poliakov's rich compen-

dium of opinions about Je~vs nd Judaism from Voltaire to Wagner.

Interest in Jews, it appears, almost invariably had an antisemitic slant.

Antisemitism has many strands, ho~vever, nd the term may be too

broad to be usefully applied. As there are degrees of racism-the re-

sidual prejudice that emerges in an occasional tasteless remark or

traditional ethnic joke being of a different order from deliberately

espoused, programmatic racism-so the re are degrees of

antisemitism. This is unlikely to have been any less the case at a time

~ ~ h e news enjoyed full civil rights only in very few places and were

Religion

dnd Philoso ph~n

germ an^

(1834) 181,223


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known to many people chiefly through folk legends about their reli-

gious practices an d popular accounts of their alleged part in the Cru-

cifixion. It may even 11e that modern

;tntisemitism-antisemitism

as

an ideology-de1:eloped only c$ iPr. tlte einancipation of the Jews in

the course of the nineteenth century. Isolated, derogatory remarks

about Jews should thus probably be viewed as the common currency

of

a

time when Jews were in fact. barely tolerated strangers atncl there

was less incentive than now to curb inconsiderate langua, re or to

check the expression of unreflected prejudice.

There are probably good grounds, moreover, for distinguishing

between antirJutfaisnl and antisemitism. Th e former, I ~vo ul d rgue.

is a philosophical and ideological posit.ion that might well be shared

by

emancipated Jews t1lemsel~:esanci that often went hand in hand

n-it11 enthrlsiasrll Sor the culture of' ancient Greece. Antisemitism, in

contrast, is directed toward l i~~ ing .Jewss social an d ethnic group

an d, in the nineteenth century, usually implied resistance to granting

them equal civil rights with Gentiles and recognizing them as citi-

zens. Both the young Hegel and Nietzsche, for instame, were anti-

~J ud ai cbu t arguably not antisemitic in the sense described. The

young Hegel disliked Juctaism as a religion, but supported Je ~vi sh

ernancipation. Nietzsche's contempt for the popular and demagogic

antisemitisill of his time is well known. Nevertheless. contempt for

Judaism as a religion of' servitllde, resentment, mechanical obedi-

ence to precept. an d hair-splitting, dry-as-dust rabbinical scholarship

was not always clistinct from distaste for certain alleged physical and

moral charact.eristics of J e ~ v s . ~

o r

did support for Jewish ernancipa-

'See Elisabrth dc Fonrctlan?;55 (whesc the ciain-, s lnade that "antiljudaismr," in

the sense of a critique ofludaism ns a religion, may go hand in hand with 'philo-

sirnitisme.'' in the scrlse of support for jet+-is11 cn ~a nc ip at io n) : nd

I ti

(whet-e the

distinction betwee11 ':jilifs philosophiquea" ;rnd "Juifs socio logiquc~," etween "anti-

judaisme" ant1 "anti-sCmitiqn~e"s hedged rorlnd with the caveat that

ccs

deux per-

spectives. I'une pluc il~(.taphysique, 'aut re plus sociologique, se recoi lprn t toujoura

en m?me temps qrt'c,llcs divergent." Fontcr~ay vokes the exalrlplr ol' tlcgel, who

"parlant p6jorativrnlent du jutlaisme, es1 vicnt insid ieusem e~ltB ~rleilrionner e

inalheul. herirk dcs Juifs actuels, lui qui d 'ailleu rs d6fetid lcu r tlroit 5

I'emancipation." 1-11? reference is no doubt to the passage in "The Spirit of Chris-

tianity" iwritteu 1798-99, itnpuhlished iri F-tcgei's lifetinre) where EIegel writes that

"the subsequent circumstances oI' the l c w i ~ h eopie u p to the mcan , abject.

I\-retchectcircuinstat~ces n ~v11ic.h he)- still :ire toctay, h a ~ ell

of

tlleril been sirnply

consequencer, and clabot-ationa of their original fatc" 0 7 2

X I - i s i i n n i f y

199).

Fontenay's attempt to spirir :away Mars's antiselnitism by presrnting 'Jews" in Uarx

as a "metonymy oi bou~.aeoi r,ociety" is criticized by Francia Kaplan

(61-62),

who also

elrlpllasizes the easc rvith which the "philosopllical" critique ofJudaisrn as a religion

can shade off into pl;iia, ;inticemitism. M'hen hlarx asks rhetorically " QLI~Iqt le fond5

profane drt juctaismc?" and answci-s "Le besoin pratique, I 'ut ili ti personnelle

.

I'abaissement effectif de la natrire, le mipt-is tie

I I

theorie, de l'art. d r i'histoirr,

rlt.


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PHII HEI I ENISM ANTISEMITISM

tion imply respect for or even tolerance of Jewisli religious beliefs

and practices. Anti-Judaism easily spilled over into antisemitism. A

fairly convincing case could even be made for the proposition that

anti-Judaism was only the respectable mask of an unavo~7ed

antisemitism. It is all tlie more striking that despite tlie vehemence of

his well-known criticism of excessive English and American

Hebraising, Matthew7 Arnold turns ou t to be considerably more at-

tached to the values of Hebraism and considerably less vulnerable

to the appeal of antisemitism than most of the German writers from

~7lionl ie borro~7ed ot only his celebrated antithesis of Hellenism

and Hebraism but also the twin ideals-wl-iich seem to have been al-

ways associated with the first term in that antithesis, never with the

second-of tlie fully developed harmonious individual and of the

state as the embodiment of culture.

,bno ld 's criticism of the excess of Hebraism in England an d his

advocacy of a stronger dose of Hellenism in the famous fourtll

chapter of Cultut P nd Amt chj put us on tlie track of ~7liat ppears to

be a historical coiinection between pliilliellenism and anti-Judaism.

Normally, the tern1 philhellenism is used to describe the upsurge of

support among liberal and educated Europeans, of whom Byron was

the most illustrious, for the Greek independence movement against

the Ot toman Enlpire in the third decade of the nineteenth century. I

use it here in a broader sense to include no t only tlie revival of inter-

est in and entl-iusiasm for ancient Greece, which began in Germany

in the second half of the eighteenth centuiy wit11 Winckelnlann and

\Irolf, and wliicli no doubt laid the foundations of the political

pl-iill-iellenismof the nineteenth, but also tlie entire neohumanist

movement in German literature, education, and politics. Growing

ou t of the work of Winckelmann and Wolf, neohumanism took

deeper root in Germany than in any other European country and

resulted in tlie sweeping educational reforms enacted by the Prussian

Department of Education under Willielm Iron Hunlboldt an d his as-

sistant Johan n Willielm Siivern. Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin , the

Humboldts, and Hegel were all nourislled at the neollumanist source

and contributed to it. Its effects were felt in Germany into the early

twentietli century, ~7 li en here ~7a s remarkable renewal of interest

in Winckelmann in the famous George Krei.5 tlie circle of writers, art-

I 'homme conaitli.ri. comme aon prop re but,'' at least par t of that reply. accorditlg to

ICaplan, can feed into the popular stereotype of the Jew as selfish. greedy, arld indif-

feren t to others 4.5).

For a brief gerleral account of arlcietlt Greek and Rolrlan hostility to Jutlaiam ant1

Jervs, see Carloa

Li.\?..
http:///reader/full/conaitli.rihttp:///reader/full/conaitli.ri


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ists, scholars, and philosophers that had formed around the poet

Stefan George.

Tlle basis of German pl-iill-iellenismor neol-iumanisnl was the con-

viction that ancient Greece represented an ideal condition of free-

dom and harmony: free an d l-iarmonious development of all human

capacities in each individual and free and llarnlonious development

of the

polis

or community. Having fallen away from that original con-

dition, modern man must strive to recover it by eliminating every-

thing that stood between llinl and it, including the distortions of a

misguided (predominan tly Roman Catl-iolic) baroque and rococo

classicism that imitated the external forms of antiquity without pen-

etrating to the original spirit that had animated them. This new Ref-

ormation would result, it ~7as oped, in the overcoming of all the

destructive dualisms that cllaracterize the life of modern man-mat-

ter and spirit, the ethical and the aesthetic, substance a nd form, rea-

son an d passion, the sacred an d the profane-and the restoration of

freedom, beauty, and l-iarmony to the individual and the conlnlu-

nity.' Tl'inckelmann's cult of antique statuary, and in particular of the

male nude , marked his rejection of the distinction between the inner

and the outer, spirit and matter. In their plastic representations of

the free, self-sufficient male body, the Greeks had symbolized for

Winckelmann the unity and harmony of nlan and nature, the human

and the divine. The symbol itself, being both the sign

nd

the thing

signified-in contrast to traditional neoclassical allegory, in which

sign and signified are clearly distinguished-was an expression of the

new ideal of unity as opposed to the old dualisms. Beauty was noth-

ing other than that harmonious unity of inner and ou ter, spirit and

form, the divine and the human, ~71iicll he ancients alone had

achieved. The foundation of higher study, Hegel declared in his

rectorial address at the Niirnberg Gymnasium in

1809,

nrust be arld relnairl Greek l iterature in the first place. Rolnatl in the aecond . Th e

perfection and glory of those inaaterpieces inust be the spiritual bath. the aecular

baptiam that first and itltlelibly atturles and tincturea the soul in reapect of taste an d

knorvledge. For this initiation a genera l, per fur~cto ry cquairltatlce with the ancients

is rlot sufficient; rve nrust take up o ur lodging with the in ao tha t rve can brea the the ir

air, absorb their ideas, their manners. one inight ever1 say their errora and preju-

dices. an d beconre at hoine in this world-the fairest that ever has been. While the

first paradise rvas that of humatl nniulv this ia the aecontl, the higher paradiae of the

human @it-it the paradise rvhere the human spirit emerges like a bride from her

chamber, erldowed with a fairer

naturalness,

with f reed om, de pth. arld sererlity

For a allort overview of the esserltials of neohumanism , see

y

article, The 'trvo

cultures ' it1 nineteenth century Baale

(99-105).

See the invaluable study of Betlgt Surensen.


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PHILHELLENISM NTISEMITISM

The hunran spirit ~nanifeststs profundity here n o longer in c on f~ ~s io n,loonr, or

arrogance, but in perfect clarity. Its serenity is no t like the play of childre n; it is

ra ther a veil spread over the mela~lcho ly hich is Familiar rvith the cruelty of fate but

is no t the reby driver1 to lose its freetlorll an d noder ration If rve nrake

ourselves

at

hom e in such an eleme nt, all the powera of the soul are sti~ nu lat ed , eveloped, and

exerci sed. ( On Classical Studies 321-23)

In the reconstruction of man and the polis proposed by tlie

neoliumanists-partly, no doubt, as an alternative to the purely ma-

terial political ideals of the French Revo1ution tkie study of Greek

language and culture was to play a crucial role. For the old grammati-

cal study of the ancient languages, whicl-i concentrated on external

forms, the neol-iumanists wanted to substitute the study of language

as a unity of form and creative spirit. The works of tlie ancients,

Hegel explained, contain the most noble food in the most noble

form: golden apples in silver bo~vls.They are incomparably richer

than all the works of any other nation and of any other time These

riches, however, are intimately connected with the language, and

only tllrougll and in it, do we obtain them in all their special signifi-

cance. Tlleir content can be approximately given us by translations,

but not their form, not their ethereal soul. What tlie student was to

appropriate was no t tlie rules of Greek grammar or composition, but

the creative genius of the Greek people which was held to be chiefly

accessible tl-irougli their language. Imitation of the Greeks, in art,

in language, in ethics and politics ~vould hus result not in tlie me-

chanical and slavish reproduction of tlie old, but in tlie production of

new and original work in the spirit of the Greeks, that is to say, in that

spirit of beauty and harmony that centuries of alienated culture had

all but eradicated from the human consciousness. It is necessary, in

Hegel's view, that we appropriate the world of antiquity not only to

possess it, but even more to digest and transform it ( On Classical

Studies

326-27 .

How Christianity, or even Enlightenment deism, or the Kantian

pl-iilosophy wl-iich strongly influenced a number of the neohumanists

could be made compatiblk with this f~indamentally mmanentist vi-

sion of man an d the ~vorldwas not always clear. To some, like Heine,

it could not. In Concerning The History of Philosophy and Theol-

ogy in Germany he denounced not only Christianity but deism as

fundamentally hostile to beauty, joy, and man 's inner harmony. But

M

are fighting not for the huma n rights of the people bu t for the divine rights

of mank ind, He ine rvas to write in the early thirtiea; we do not rvant to be sans-

culottes, nor simple ci t i~ens, or ~ e n a lresidents; r2.e rvant to found a democracy of

gods. equal in majesty, in sanctity, and in bliss ( Religion and Philosophy in Ger-

many 180).


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CO MPA RA T IV E L 1 T E R; l T U RE

the

irreconcilable

enemy of Greek harmony and of the Greek sense

of beauty was Jewish spiritualism and dualism. The Jews looked on

the body as something inferior, as a wretched cloak for the mn c h

hnlrodeslr

the holy breath, the spirit, and only to the latter clicl they

award their attent ion, their reverence, their ~vorship . No wonder

the Jews, the Swiss guard of deism, had been inexorable in their

hounding of the pantheist in their midst, Benedict Spinoza. As for

tlle Christians, they went much further even than the Jews and re-

garded [the body] as something objectionable, soinething bad, as

evil itself. Inevitably, in the ar t and literature influenced by Chris-

tianity, there is no obvious harmony between form and idea as with

the Greeks (177,174,177, 163).

The young Hegel of The Spirit of Christianity found a way of ac-

commodating Christianity by representing it as the reconciliation of

Greek religion, the soul of which is beauty, and Kantian reason, the

core of ~vllicl-is morality. Love, the moral principle of the Gospel, is

the beauty of the heart , a spiritual beauty combining the Greek soul

and Kant's moral reason. In this conception it was Judaism that be-

came the villain of tlle piece, as Richard Kroner pu t it

(9 ) .

Abraham wanted

no /

to love, Hegel tells us, wanted to be free by

not loving ( The Spirit of Christianity

185).

MThile Hegel recog-

nizes that for culture to exist, man must be able to work on nature

and spirit and must therefore transform them into his object, h e

distinguishes bet~veen radical an d destructive alienation-that of

the Je~vs-and a milcl and productive on e, that of the Greeks.

The substance of Kature and Spirit 1nust have confronted us. must hale taken the

shape of so~ ne th in g lien to ua. before it can becollie our

object.

Cnhappy he ~vhose

iln~rlediatezrorld of feelings has been alienated froin him-for this means nothing

leaa than the snapping of thoae bonda of faith. love. and trnst which unite heart and

head in a holy friendship. Th e alienation ~vh ic hs the condition of theoretical erudi-

tion does not re quire this moral pa in, or the sufferinga of the heart, but onlv the

easier pain and atrain of the

imagination which is ocrnp ied with ao~net hin g ot given

in immediate experience, aolnething foreign, something pertaining to recollection.

to memory and the thinking milld. ( On Clasairal Stndies 327-28

The patriarch of Judaism appears in Hegel's early writings as h a p

ing deliberately chosen the most extreme and inhuman form of

alienation:

;\braham, bor n in Chaldea , had in youth already left a fatherland in hia fath er's

company. No\zr, in the plains of I\llesopotamia. he tore hirnself free altogether frorn

his family as xvell, in order to be a \zrholly self-subsistent. inde pend ent rnan, to be an

overlord hinuel f. He did thia without having been injnred o r disowned. without the

grief which after a wrong

01-

an outrage signifies love's enduring need, when love.

injured but not lost, goea in quest of a new fatherland in or der to flourish and el jo y

itself there. Th e firat art ~vh ichnade ;\braham the progenitor

of

the ilatiorl is

a

dis-


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PHILHEI I ENISR~l

c

ANTISEM ITISM

severance which s n a p the bo ~l ds f cotlltllu~lalife and ]ol e. The entirety of relation-

ships in which he had hitherto lived with rnen and nature, theae beautif111

relationships of hia yot1t11 (Joshua 24 .2 ). he spurned. ( The Spirit of Christianitv

185)

As a result, the world was forever disenchanted. Tlie Jews never

knew the harmonious second paradise of the Greeks. They lived in

a world that tliey regarded as utterly alien to them, to wl-iich tliey had

no ties, and for which they had no love. Witli no sense of the imma-

nence of the divine, they had no feeling for beauty. An image of God

was just stone or ~vo odo them; tliey despise the image because it

does no t manage them, and tliey have no inkling of its deification in

the enjoyment of beauty or in a lover's intuition ( The Spirit of

Christianity 192).Judaism so understood might well seem to be in

league with modern science or wit11 the utilitarianism of tlie de-

spised, practical, pl-iilistine Englisl-1.

Hegel constantly contrasts the Greeks and the Jews, invariably to

tlie disadvantage of tlie latter. In tlieir representations of man's

struggle ~vi th ature, the Greeks seek reconciliation, an e nd to dual-

ism: Deucalion an d Pyrrl-la, after the flood in tlieir time, invited

men once again to friendship witl-1 tlie world, to nature, made them

forget their need and their hostility in joy an d pleasure, made a peace

of

1071e

were the progenitors of more beautiful peoples, and made

tlieir age the mother of a newborn natural life whicl-i maintained its

bloom of youth. Noah, in contrast, sought ma sten over nature at the

price of submission to an all-po~verfulorce alien to both himself an d

nature. Likewise Abraham, as we saw, left liis fatherland but refused

to become attached to any new land. Tlie groves which often gave

him coolness and shade lie soon left again; in them lie had

theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but lie did

not tarry in them ~vithhe love wl-iich ~v ou ld ave made tliem ~vortliy

of the Divinity and part icipant in Him. H e was a stranger on earth, a

stranger to the soil and to men alike He entered into no ties

He steadily persisted in cutting himself off from others, an d he made

this conspicuous by a physical peculiarity imposed o n himself and liis

posterity. Cadmms and Dana~ls,n contrast, who also forsook their

fatlierland, 'ivent in quest of a soil ~vlier-ehey would be free and tliey

sougl-it'it that they might love In order to live in pure, beautiful

unions, as was no longer given to tliem in their own land, [they] car-

ried their gods fort11 wit11 them [and] by their gentle arts and

manners won over the less civilized aborigines and intermingled witli

them to form a l-iappy an d gregarious people ( The Spirit of Cliris-

tianity 182-86).


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COMPA RATIVE 1 ITERATURE

Since theJews insist on maintaining tl-ieir distance from natu re an d

others and have removed their perfect Object on High far ou t of

the world, the divine for them is never incarnate, it is never

, ~ I - P S P ? Z ~

n

the world, even in the holiest of holies. For them, according to Hegel,

the sacred a nd the profane are two unconnecting realms, ~vkiereas or

the Greeks the one informs the other . The concealment of God in

the Holy of Holies had a significance quite different from the

arcanum of the Eleusinian gods. From the pictures, feelings, inspira-

tion, and devotion of Eleusis, from these revelations of god, no one

was excluded; but they might no t be spoken of, since words would

have desecrated them. But of their objects and actions, of the la~vs f

their service, the Israelites might ~vel l hatter (Deuteronomy 30.1l ,

for in these there is nothing holy. The ho


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symb o l : I t is t ru e o n ly o f o b jec ts , o f t h in g s li fe l ess , Heg e l n o te s in a

passage o f T h e S p ir it o f Ch r is tian i ty co n cern in g th e T r in i t y , t h a t

t h e w l-io le is o t h e r t h a n t h e p ar ts ; i n t h e liv in g t h i n g , o n t h e o t h e r

h a n d , t h e part o f t h e w h o l e is o n e a n d t h e s a m e as t h e w h o l e . f par-

t icular o b jec t s , as su bs ta n ces, a re l in ked to g e th er wh il e ea c h o f h e m

yet re ta in s i ts ch ara cter a s a n in d iv id u a l (a s n u mer ica l l y o n e ) , t h e n

t h e i r c o m m o n c h ar ac te ri st ic , t h e i r u n i t y , is o n l y a c o n c e p t , n o t a n

esse nce , no t somet l l ing be in g . Liv ing th ings , l -iowever , are essences ,

ev en i f the y are separa te, and their u n i t y is still a un i ty o f esse nce .

T ~ f l ia ts a c on t ra d ic t io n i n t h e r e a l m o f t h e d e a d is n o t o n e i n t h e

r ea lm o f if e ( T h e S pi ri t o f Christianity 2 6 1 ) .

By t h e m i d d l e o f t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y , a c co rd in g t o t h e a u t h o rs

o f a n i l lu m i n a t i ng s tu dy o f a n ti s e m i t is m i n N i e t z sc h e , t h e a n ti th e s is

o f H e l l e n e s a n d J e ws w as part o f t h e r e p e rt o ry o f a n t i s e m i t is m

a m o n g t h e ed u ca ted c la sses i n Germ a n y . Over a ga in st p la stic a r t , t h e

b ea u ty o f yo u t h , e ro t i c i sm , a n d crea ti v it y were se t t h e p ro h ib i t io n o f

ima g es , or ig ina l s in , t h e m o r t i f i ca t io n o f th e b o d y; o ver a g a in s t t h e

n o b l e a n d h ero ic l i f e , e l eva ted b y d yo n is ia c ex ta sy a n d t h e sen se o f

th e t ra g ic , was se t everyt l- ling th a t co u ld b e d i sp a ra g ed as d em o -

cra tic , ph i l i s tine , p leb eia n ( H ub ert Ca ncik and Hi ldegard Cancik-

L i n d e m a i e r )

.

L i ke t h e y o u n g H e g e l , a n u m b e r o f w r it er s s o u g h t t o d is t in g u is h

be tw ee n Ju da is m and Ckir is tian ity, so as to save th e la t ter f r o m t he

c o n d e m n a t i o n o f t h e f o r m e r . S o m e , l ik e W a g n e r an d L a ga rd e i n

Ge rm a n y o r Emi le B u r n o u f in Fra nce , ima g in ed a Chr is tian i ty co m-

p le te ly c leansed o f J u d a i s m ( U r i e l T a l 2 2 3 - 8 9 ) . T h i s m o v e m e n t c u l-

m i n a t e d i n t h e h e r es y o f t h e s o- ca lle d

1)~utsclre h7-istm

i n t h e 1 93 0s .

B y t h e e n d o f t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n tu r y , t h e c rit ic is m o f m o no tl -i ei sm

a n d i ts repress ive a n d sen i l e mo ra l co d e ha d b e co m e so vocal a n d

p erva sive th a t , t o d e f en d Ch r i s t ia n i ty f r o m i t , even h ig h ly resp ec ted

l ibera l t l - ieo logians, sucl i as A do l f vo n H arna ck, argued for th e in de -

pe nd en ce o f Christ ian i ty f r o m a petr if ied and lega list ic Ju da ism and

a dv oc at ed t h e r em o v a l o f h e O l d T e s t a m e n t f r o m t h e Bible.'

An o th e r g ro u p , wh i ch in c lu d ed Feu erb a ch a n d N ie t z sch e , as we ll

as the no tor iously an t i semi t ic E ug en Di ihr ing , lum pe d Christ ian i ty

wi th Ju da ism and re jec ted b o th . For D ul lr ing , the s t rugg le agains t

Robert P Ericksen; see alao Tal 1'31-92. 200-201, 217-18. .According to Jenkyna

(7 2) , Kelvman in England held a aornewhat aimilar poaition a t one point in his ca-

reer : Newman's per~era ely ystematic mind had not only divided Hellenism aharply

from Hebraism, but had aeparated Christianity no leas sharply from both. Christ xvaa

neither Greek norJew. . . Jenkyns also quotes a cornrnent by George Eliot about her

contemporaries: They hardly know that Christ was a Je\v.


10/39

COMP R TIVE LITERITITRE

Judaism was bound up with the struggle against nlonotheistic reli-

gion and hence also against the forces suppressing the free and natu-

ral impulse in life itself. The religious systems, lie wrote in ~ te.5

Lebens

(1877),

are a chapter in tlle study of tlie diseases of the univer-

sal history of tlie spirit, for religion, including Christianity, is tlle

quintessence of tlie 'hatred of life' and tlle eradication of tlie

natura l instincts. There was no point in combatting Judaism with

Christianity. Christian antisemitism ignores tlie basic truth that

Christianity itself is semitic, a truth which should be tlie po int of de-

pa rt ur e of all tr ue anti-Hebraism. 'That was also, basically,

Nietzsche's view, according to Hubert and Hildegard Cancik.

Nietzclie's antisemitism, they claim, must be understood as

antisemitism raised to tlie second power, more subtle, less vulgar,

deepened by historical and philosophical arguments and expressed

in brilliant language . Nietzsche's position was that Christian

antisemitism is a pure and simple stupidity, since Christianity itself is

a heigh tened Judaism

MThoever would combat Judaism and its

morality, cannot, in Nietzsche's view, be Christian

(42)

.;

Both

passages

the second from a text of 1882, are quoted by Tal (264-63). n the

early decades of the twentieth century in France, th e ~ie rvs f Charles Maurras. chief

ideologiat of the radical right-rving and antisemitic

Action j m~z(ais(:

rvere aimilar,

though Maurras's ernphasis falls rnore on restraint and order (which he aswciated

with classical antiqnit)) than on energy and life: Admirateur d e l'a nti q~ iit k

classique, LIaurras ne se sent l'aise que dans le paganisrile. 11 connai t LucrSce par

coenr. Le polythkiame grec lui a toujours paru u n chef d'oeuare de mesure, d' ord re

et d'harrnonie puisqu'il aasigne

a

chaque dkair humain une divinitk preciae. ;\insi

l'orientation du dkair, diirnent canaliske ne riaqne-t-elle pas de p ren dre le c he ~n in e

1'Infini. Dans le paysage mi.di terranken, la lumic?re du soleil desaine nettement lea

contour s et les ombres : l'h omm e d'y pre ndr e aa place. sans r@reani chi~nsrea

insenskes. en acceptant de ae soumettre cet ord re pret.tabli. C'est la condition d u

bonheur. L'esprit biblique. les Evangiles d e 'quatre juifs obscurs,' Jkrusalem et la

synagogue aont Yenus rornpre ce be1 equilibre. Le chr isti anis~ne st aussi da ngereux

que le judaisrne pou r le maintien d e la ci~ilisa tion

. .

L'aire de l'humaniti. civiliske

ne dkb ord e guc?re lea rivages d e la Mkditerr anke (e nc or e faut-il prkciaer

k1editerrani.e occidentale ju squ ' i la Grece incluae, rnaia pas au -d el i) (Jacquea

Pr6rotat 250-32).

'.As the irnplicationa of late nineteenth -centu ry anti-Judaism and antisetnitiam be-

came unmistakably clear in the trventieth century. many Chriatians came to the de-

fenae of Judaiam. Kicolaa Rerdyaer, for

instance,

emphasi7ed the Judaic roots of

Christianity, arguing that in ita human origina, [Christianity] is a religion of rnessi-

anic an d prophet ic type. the apirit of rvhich, as utterly foreign to Graeco-Roman spiri-

tual culture as to Hindu culture, rvas introduced into rvorld religioua thought by the

Jervish propl e. T he ' I\ryan' spirit ia nei the r meaaianic nor prophetic . . . (1-2). On

the o the r han d, aome Jervish thinkers ha re maintained that the dnaliam rvhich the

Gertnan philhellenes so detested is Chr istian, not Jerviah. Roaen7rveig claimed that

the Jerv is destined by his religion to remain in the Jervish rvorld of his birth and is

expected only to perfect his Judaiam. Th e Christian , on the other h and, being by

natur e pagan, has to rvithdrarvfrorn the rvorld to rvhich he belonga, repeal hia nature,


11/39

P H I L H E L L E N I S M

c

ANTISEMITISM

Increasingly, tlle attacks on Semitic repression of the natural in-

stincts an d on tlie servile morality of Jews and Christians alike were

made in the name of Aryan or Nordic-Germanic l-ieroism and

manliness. Diihring argued that the Nordic idols and tlle Nordic

God contain a natural kernel and no thousand-year-old distraction

can remove it from the world . Here has reigned an imaginative

spirit incomparably sup erior to tlle Jewish slave imagination

(quoted in Tal

266 .

But tlle underlying reference was ultimately to

the anc ient Greeks, witli whom, since 'r$'inckelmann and M'olf, tlie

Germails had felt a special affinity. To this affinity tlle early sociolo-

gist Will-ielm Heinricli Riel11 bears unaffected testimony in his

recollections of student life at a German Gymnasium around mid-

century:

We regarded Greece as our second ho~neland;or it was the aeat of all nobility of

thought and feeling, the home of har~n oni ou s

umanity.

Yes, we even thought that

ancient Greece belonged to Gerrnany because. of all the rnodern peoples, the Ger-

Inana had deleloped the deepest underatanding of the Hellenic spirit, of Hellenic

art, an d of the harmonioua Hellenic way of life.

M

thought this in the exubera nce of

a national pride, in virtue of which we proclaimed the Gerrnan people the leading

culture of the modern world and the Germana the mode rn Hellenes. M-e announced

that Hellenic art and nature had been reborn more completely in German poetry

and rnusic than in the poetry and music of any other people of the contemporary

world Ou r enthus ias~n or Greece rvas inseparable from our enthusiasm for our

fatherland IVe looked back to classical antiquity as to a lost paradise.

In Nietzsclie's

A7zti C/crist

the link is between'tlle Hyperborean creed

of power, strength, and joy, on the one hand, and, on tlie other, the

archaic, aristocratic Greece of tlie Dorians, rather than tlle popular

an d liberal Hellenism beloved of early pliill~ ellenes like

Winckelmann.

and break rvith his original paganism, in order to carry out the precepta of his faith

(see Berdyaev 23 ).Josue Jehonda claima that the Christians are rebellious, the Jews

traditional. The Christians created the opposition betrveen

Jerusalem.

the city of

God 's juatice, a nd Athens and Rome, the political city. Thua la vraie cause de tou t

anti -ae~niti smeeat le duali a~ne hr6tien. Pagan antisernitism was in reality directed

against the Chriatiana. They were seen as sub vers i~es. h e J e w , in contraat, were

recognized as a national gr oup . Thua in ou r

own

times, N a ~ intisetnitistn aimed to

deatroy, throu gh the Jervs, the ent ire Christian world (Jehonda 108-110) .

o

Kzilturgcsc.hic.hllic.hr

Chnrnklrr/ti;lfc

(1891),quote d in Frit7 Rlattner 161-62.

Th e poin t is rnmade forcefully by Hube rt Cancik, Philhellenism and Anti-

Semitisrn in Gerrnany (11) 7-10. The rehabilitation of the Dorians began torvard the

cloae of the eighteenth century with the Greek Relival in architectu re, for which

IVinckehnann himself had prepare d the gro und . In England, the aecond ~ o l u r n e f

Stuart and Relett's

i l t iqzi i t ics of2 llhrnr

(1787) revealed a Greek architecture unlike

anything rnen had imagined, and the lo gu e of the Greek style to which it gave rise

prompte d eatabliahed architects like Sir Williarn Cha ~n be rao attack the gouty col-

umns and

disproportionate

architrales of the Doric. Th e editor of the third


12/39

C O M P A R A T I V E 1 , I T E R A T C R E

Th e identification of Germans and Hellenes was thus an essential

aspect of the struggle for the German soul against Hebraism in the

nineteenth centurv. Feuerbacll clainled that science and art origi-

na ted only in polytl-ieism, since polytl-ieism is tlie open, unresentful

feeling for everything that is good, without differentiation; tlie feel-

ing for the ~vor ld , or the universe. F\:hereas tlie Greeks contem-

plated nature ~v ithlie theoretical seilses heard heavenlv music in

the l-iarmonious course of the stars and saw pictures emerge in tlie

shape of Venus Xnadvomene from tlie foam of tlie ocean, the Tews

only enjoyed nature through their palate. They only became men of

God tlirougli the enjoyment of manna. Eating is the most solemn act

. .

of the Jewisl-i religion In eating man declares nature to be a

nullity in itself. ':'

If Jud ais m and Christianity had stupefied the Germans and

blunted their senses, impaired the understanding and the spirit,

vigor and life would be restored to them th rough the aristocratic and

tragic culture of ancient Greece . That was the essential message of

Nietzsche and of his followers. Tlle attack on \t7ilamowitz bv

Nietzscl-ie and his sympathizers was an attack on a classical scholar

r o l u ~ n e .U'illey Releley. leape d to the d efens e of th e style tha t possessed, h e claimed,

a rnaaculine boldnesa, an arvfi~l ignity an d gra nde ur (aee Jenk yns

1 2 .

But it was

in Germany that the Doric antl then t he Dorians enjoyed tile greatest rogue . Goe the

recorded his disorientation and arve before the ruina of Paeatutn in a

\veil-knorvn

paasage of th e Italian Joumry In the diatance appeared sotne huge quadrilateral

Inasaes, and rvhen we finally reached them. rve were at first uncertain ~vhetherve

were driving throug h rocks or ruina. The n we recognized rvhat they were, th e re-

rnains of temples.

.

k l i e p quickly choose a favourable s pot frotn rvhich to draw this

lery unpicturesque landscape . At first sight [t he temples] excited nothing but

stupefaction. I foun d ~nyaelfn a \vorld which was cornpletelr; atrange to me . In their

evolution from austerity to cha rm , the centuri es har e simnltaneously sha ped an d

even created a different man. Our eyes antl, through them, our whole sensibility

hare becorne so conditioned to a more blender style of architecture that these

crolvded maasea of stumpy conical col umns appe ar offenaire a nd even te rri ei ng

. . .

(209-10). In the work of Carl Otfried hliiller (Dir Dorirr, 1824) an d in t hat of his

stud ent, Ernst Curtius, the au th or of a mu ch translated a nd widely read Histo)? of

C;l cccc (1857-(il), it was t he inla din g Korthel.11 Hellenes o r Dorians (t he na me

Ilorian is said to be d e r i ~ e drorn I lorua, one of the sons of Hellen), ~ v l ~ o .hrusting

sout h to\vard the Peloponnese, were th e actire, manly power that fecunda ted the

somnole nt, fe~ninilie Pelasgians, an d forged the greatness of ancient Greece.

From the Hellenes spran g entirely new curr ents of life, according to Curtius. The

Pelasgian titnes lie in the background-a vast perio d of mon otony : irnpulse an d mo-

tion are firat co~n~ nun icn te dy Hellen an d hia aona; and rvith thei r a r r i ~ a l istory

commences. I\ccordingly we tnust int erpr et t hem to signify tribes which, endow ed

with apecial gifta, an d an irnated by special powers of act ion, issue for th fro tn t he Inasa

of a great people , an d exte nd themaelres in it aa warriors (41) . Miiller's an d

Curtiua'a view of the Dorians was taken over in Britain, where there waa a strong

ternptation to associate the Dorian highlanders .ivith the Scots (see Jenkyns

167).

I.li.sm d s (,.hnslrnlums, c h. 12, qu oted in Poliakov 415


13/39

w h o , i t was a l l eg ed , was in ca p a b le o f u n d e rs ta n d in g th e g lo r io u s, h e -

r o ic , a n d tr ag ic c u l t u r e o f G r e e c e a n d w h o k e p t i m p o r t i n g i n t o h i s

in terp re ta t io n o f i t a l ien , p h i li s tin e n o t io n s o f v i r tu e , s in , a n d re-

pen tan ce. S i n is M'ilamowitz's favori te word , o n e crit ic declar ed in a

review o f Wi la rn o wit z 's t ra n sla tio n o f th e G ree k t ra gic wr it e rs . H e

u ses i t t o t ra n slate a wh o le ra n g e o f Gr eek t e rm s . It ca n b e said a

priori tha t th is is a mis ta ke i n th e case o f th e o ld er c lass ical t ragedy.

T h e i d e a o f s in is so c lo se ly b o u n d u p f o r u s w it h n o t i o n s o f p u ni sh -

m e n t a n d t h e i n -j u nc t io n t o r e p e n t , t h a t i t o u g h t t o b e k e p t w ell aw ay

f r o m th i s t ra gic a r t. co n t r i t e a n d sub miss ive h ea r t ma p h a ve b e e n

pleasing to th e Jewish-Chris t ian god . T h e tragic sense i s qu i te d i f fe r-

e n t . K e p e n t a n c e a n d p e na n c e w o u l d h a v e s e e m e d e n ti r el y o u t o f

p la ce to t h e t ra gic h er o . T h e h e ro i s n o t a b o u rg eo i s i n th eat ri ca l

c o s t u m e ; a n d t h e h e r o i c e t h o s h a s n o t h i n g t o d o w i t h o u r o ffic ia l

mo ra l i t y ( I< L~- ti ld eb ra n d 1 4 3 ;m y t r a n s l a t io n ) .

N in e teen th -cen tu ry cr it ic i sm o f th e repress ive a sp ec ts o f Ch r i s tia n

a n d b o u rg eo i s cu l tu re so m et im es c la imed a f f in i t i e s w i th a n ea r li e r

t ra d it io n o f o p p o si ti o n t o t h e a u th o ri ty o f C h u r c h a nd S ta te i n t h e

ancie n re g im e. ( I n act , tha t opp osi t ion was bour geo is as well as ar is -

to cra ti c .) H en ce N ie t z sch e ' s a d mira t io n fo r cer ta in wr it er s o f h e a ge

o f Fren ch c la ss ic ism-La Ko ch e fo u c a u ld , C h a m fo r t ,and ev en Pascal.

H en ce a lso th e l in k th a t th e Geo rge-Kre is fo rg ed b e tw ee n i tse l f a n d

W i n c k e l m a n n . T h e t o n e o f se re nit y a nd c o n f i d e n c e th a t m a rk s t h e

ea rl ie r wr i t in g i s a b sen t f r o m th e la ter , h o w eve r , wh i l e th e p h i lo -

s op hic al n i h i li s m a n d t h e e m p h a s i s o n t h e r o le o f e x c e p t io n a l i n d i-

v id u al s a nd l ea d ers a re n ew . In a n imp o r ta n t rev iew o f DerDickter als

liiilrrer i n der deu fsche n Klassik

b y S te fa n Geo rg e ' s fa vo r it e d i sc ip le , Ma x

K o m m e r e l l ( 1 9 2 8 ) ,MTalterB e n j a m i n d e m o n s t ra t ed h o w t h e b asic u n -

der ta king o f Kom rnerel l ' s bo o k was t o co-op t G er m an c lassicisrrl b y

rein te rpre t ing i t as th e firs t canonica l case o f a G er m an upris ing

a ga in st th e t im es , o f a h o ly war o f Ge rm a n s a g ains t th e a g e , su ch as

Ge org e was la ter to call for. G er m an classicism was thu s prese nted as

a precursor o f Ge or ge 's po l it ico-poet ica l program. In th is way, ac-

c o r di n g t o B e n j a m i n ( 2 5 2 - 5 9 ) ,Ko n ln lere ll h o p e d to co n cea l th e Ro -

m a n t ic r oo ts o f Ge o rg e ' s p roject .

.

P h i lh e ll e n is m , i n s u m , se e m s t o h a ve b e e n o n e o f t h e m o r e i ng e -

n ious and decep t ive gu ises adopted by the Romant ic revo l t aga ins t

t h e E n l i g h te n m e n t , a n d it s e em s a lso t o h a ve b e e n o n e o f t h e m o r e

e n d u r i n g : t h e i n to x ic a ti n g R o m a n t i c t o p o s o f t h e s pec ia l l in k b e -

t w e e n H e ll as a n d G e rr na ni a, o f G e r m a n c u l t u r e as t h e f u lf il lm e n t o f

G re ek c u l tu re , rem ained v igorously al ive as late as th e post -World


14/39

War I1writings of Heidegger." And one may legitimately consider in

what measure the "postmodern" re-jection of the transcendent nature

of truth and the conternporaly emphasis on the ludic as against the

ethical are the outcome of an authentic conling to grips with the fail-

ures of the modernist prolect-and of rationalisnl in general-and in

what measure they are yet another version of the same Romantic re-

volt that was once presented as the struggle of Judaism an d Helle-

nism.

I would like now to turn back to Matthew Arnold. England had also

known a Greek revival. As in Germany, it appears to have been closely

connected with a desire to overcome the dualism of Inan and nature

and to rehabilitate the body and the senses. \t70rdsworth swore he

would ra ther be

A

Pagan strckled in a creed outrzorn;

So might I atanding on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that rvould make me leas for lorn;

Hare aight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blorv hia rvreathed horn.

Byron grieved over the death of the old gods:

Oh ! rvhere, Dodona! is thine aged grove,

Prophetic fotrnt and oracle divine?

The Chorus in Shelley's

ellas

laments the defeat of Apollo, Pan,

andJove by the "killing Tru th" of Christianity:

The Po~vers f earth and air

Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem:

.Apollo, Pan, and L o ~ e ,

And even Cllmmpian Jove

Grewweak, for killing Tru th had glared on them;

(hrr hills and seas and streama,

Ilispeoplcd of their d reams,

Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,

Tl'ailed for the golden years.

Leigh Hunt wrote to Hogg-injest, it is true-that "if you go on so,

there will be a hope that a voice will be heard along the water saying

'The great God Pan is alive again""--upon which the villagers will

leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing

ag ain. "' %~ ~n t' seference to Pall is noteworthy. More than the Olym-

pian Gods, "Pan," as Richard Jenkyns observes, "had become the god

;%ee the striking article by Nicholas Rand.

,411 four passages quoted in Jenkrna 177-78. Th e Shelley passage is cited more

f ~ ~ l l rere than in Jenkyns.


15/39

of the pantheis tsW(l79). ven Kuskin, who warned against investing

the Ancients' religious view of nature with moderil sentiment, some-

times thought it could be revived. "M7ith us," he wrote, the idea

of the Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; and

imagining ou r God far above the earth, and not in the flowers or

waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are

dead; governed by physical laws, and so forth." Kuskin longed to

repeople with divine spirits the rivers and hills of an England already

scarred by the industrial revolution. The scientific, utilitarian, ex-

ploitative relation to nature "fails." In Jenkyns's words: "Christian be-

liefs in transcendence an d monotheism seem inadequate" (184-8.3).

Philhellenism was thus, at least in part, a rejection of Enlightenment

rationalism and deism, Judeo-Christian monotheism, religious and

philosophical dualism, and the mixture of prosaic utilitarianism and

literalist Christian f~~ndarnentalismhat Victorian Englishmen saw as

the prevailing ideology of hard-nosed middle-class businessrrlell and

industrialists.

Though an implicit opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism was

thus already in the air in his own Victorian world, most scholars who

have studied the matter are in agreement that Arnold took the basic

idea of the fourth chapter of Cultu r-eand Anarclzj from Heine. Heine

was well aware, of course, of Hegel's comments on Judaisnl an d sub-

scribed to them in large measure:

.As the pr op he t of the East called thern [the Jervs] t he "People of the Book," so the

pr oph et of the TCeat, in hia Ph~lorophyof fIirtory characterizes them as the "People of

the Spiri t." Already in thei r earl iest beginnings-as rve observe

in

the Pentateuch-

they manifest a predilection for the abstract, and their \vhole religion ia not hin g bu t

an a ct of dialectics, by means of which mat ter a nd apirit are aundere d, a nd t he abao-

lute is acknorvledged only in the u ni que forrn of Spirit. Tl'hat a terribly isolated role

they rvere forced to play amo ng t he nationa of antiqu ity, which, devoting themaelyea

to the most exu ber ant worship of nat ure , understood apirit rathe r as material phe-

no me na , as irnage an d symbol TChat a striking antithesis they repre sen ted to

multicolored Egypt, teaming with hieroglyphics; to Phoe nicia, the great pleasure-

temple of Astarte, or e le n to t hat beautiful sinn er, lovely fragrant Babylonia-and,

finall>-, o Greece, burgeon ing horne of art ("Lud\vig Biirne: .A ~ ~ I em o ri a l "6.5

Heine's poem "Die Gotter Griechenlands" ( "T he Gods of

Greece"), with which Arnold was almost certainly familiar, cornmuni-

cates the ambivalence of the GermanJewish poet's relation to both

the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The poet laments the

passing of the ancient gods, now "verdrangt und verstorben" ("driven

out and wasted awzay") and reflects that even the gods are subject to

the iron law of historical existence. "Auch die Gotter regieren nicht

ewig, Die jungen verdrangen die alten" ("Even the gods d o no t rule


16/39

C O M P ~ L R T I \ ~ EIT ER TU RE

f o re v e r; t h e y o u n g d r iv e o u t t h e o l d " ; m y t r a n sl a ti o n , as a re t h e o t h e r

e x ce r pt s f r o m t hi s p o e m ) . A s Z e u s d ro ve o u t t h e T i t an s , h e h as i n

t u r n b e e n d e t h r o n e d , h is t h u n d e rb o l ts e x t i n g u is h e d . T h e V i r g i n ha s

d is pl ac ed o n c e h a u g h t y J u n o : " H a t d o c h e i n e a n d r e d as Z e p t e r

g e w o n n e n , " t h e p o e t t el ls t h e a n c i e n t g o d d e s s ,

Und du bist nic ht rne hr die Hirnmelskii11igi11,

Un d de in grosses Aug ist erstar rt,

Und dei ne Lilienarrne sind kraftlos,

Und nirn~nermehrrifft dein e Rache

Die gottbefriichtete J ~ ~ n g f r a u

Und d en rvundertatigen Gottesso hn.

(A no ther haa rvon the aceptre,

.And >-ou re n o longe r the que en of heaven,

.And your gre at e>-e s glazed ,

And your lily-white arin s rvithout streng th,

.And your vengeance will never rea ch

The divinely irnpreg nate d virgin

.And t he tnirac le working son of the go d.)

For c e n tu r ie s n o w t h e i n e x t i n g u is h a b l e l a ug h te r o f t h e g o ds o f

G r e e c e ha s b e e n e x t i n g u i s h e d .

T h e l a m e n t is s u d d e n l y i n t e r r u p t e d b y t h e s ta rtlin g l in e s : " I c h h a b e

e u c h n i e m a l s g e l i e b t , i h r G i it te r D e n n w i d e n va r t ig s in d m i r d i e

G r i e c h e n

( I

have never loved you , you g ods For th e Greeks are

r ep u gn a nt t o m e " ) .T h e fa c t is , t h e p o e t r ec alls , th a t t h e G r e e k g o d s

had l it tl e compa ss ion fo r h u m a n su f f e r ing and a lways sided w i th t h e

v ic to rs . M a n , h o w e v e r , c a n b e m o r e g e n e r o u s t h a n t h e y a n d m a y fe e l

c o m p a s s i o n f or t h e m - " T o te , n a c h t w a n d e l n d e S c h a t t e n " ( " D e a d ,

noc turna l ly wa nder ing shadesn ) - in t he i r ab an do nm en t . Especia ll y,

t h e poe t c r ie s , i n pet ano the r sh i f t i n pos it i on ,

rvenn ich b edenke , rvie feig und windig

Die Giitter sind, die euc h beaiegten,

Die neu en, herrs chende n, tristen Giitter,

Die ach adenfrohe n irn Schafspelz der Demut.

. Tl'hen I reflect horv corvardly an d insubstant ial

.Are th e goda who co nquered you,

Th e new, ruling, joyless gods,

IVearing th e sheepakin of humility a nd exulting in suffering.)

A t su ch m o m e n t s o f a w a re n es s, o v e r c o m e w i t h a n g e r , t h e p o e t w o u l d

g la dly d es tr oy t h e n e w t e m p l e s, t ak e u p a r m s o n b e h a l f o f h e a n c ie n t

gods and the i r "ambrosia l law," and s ink d ow n i n prayer be fo re the i r

a l tars, h i s arms outs t re tch ed i n suppl ica t ion .

M a n y s ch o la r s b e l i e v e t h a t t h e i m rr le d ia te s o u r c e o f A r n o l d ' s

Hellenism Hebraism op po s i t i on is a cr it ica l passage in H ein e 's h le -


17/39

PHILH LL NISM LZNTIS MITISM

mo ria l to L u d wig Bo r n e , th e l e f t-w in g Germa n -Jewishwriter and pub-

licist.' I n h i s c o m m e n t s o n G o e t h e as i n h is j u d g m e n t s o f ot he r writ-

ers, He iile writes,

Biirne betraya the narrolvnesa of rnind of the Kazarene. I aay Nazarene, in orde r

to use neither the term 'Jewish nor the tertn Christian, although the two terrns are

a>-nonymous or me and are used by me to designate not a faith but a natural diaposi-

tion. ?e\vs'' and Christians are for tne closely related in opposi tion to Hellenes,

by which I likewise do not mean a particular people, but a turn of mind and an

outlook, both inborn and acquired. Frotn tha t point of li eu ,

I

could say that all rnen

are either Jews or Hellenes, rnen motivated by asceticism, hostility to graven i~n age a,

and a deep desire for the

spiritual,

or men ~vhoae asential being is delight in life,

pride in the development of their capacities, and realiam. In this sense, there hale

been Hellenea arnong those Gerrnan pastors ~vhoorne frorn farnilies of pastors and

among Jerva born in .Athens and perhaps descended frotn Theseus. ( Ludwig Biirne:

Eine Denkachrift

94 95;

1117translation)

H e i n e s pe c ul at ed w h e t h e r t h e h a r m o n i o u s f u s i on o f t h e t w o e l e-

m e n ts m i g h t n o t b e t h e task o f all Eu ro pe an civilization. Bu t wh ile

th er e were ra re in s ta n ces in wh ich a reco n c il iat io n ap p ea rs to h ave

o ccu rred ( S h a kesp ea re is a t o n ce Je w a n d G re ek ) , n g en era l ''we

a re still very fa r remo ved f r o m th is g oa l . G o e th e t h e Gre ek (a n d th e

wh o le p o et ic p ar ty a lo n g w i th h i m ) h a s in rece n t t ime s exp ressed h i s

a n t i pa t h y t o J e r u s a l e m i n a n a l m o s t p as sio na te m a n n e r ( L u d w i g

B o r n e : A M e m or ia l 2 7 0- 7 1) . T h o u g h H e i n e ' s p os i ti o n was c o m p l e x ,

as c an b e s e e n f r o m T h e G o d s o f G r e e ce , a n d t h o u g h i n l at er pears

especia l ly , bed-r idden and ra cked b y pa in , h e descr ibed h im se l f as

d i s i ll u s i on e d w i t h m e t a ph y s i c s a n d c l i n g i n g f as t t o t h e B i bl e

(Ges f i indnisse 1 3 8 ) , h e a lso a lw ays c on s id e re d h i m s e l f a H e l l e n e i n

s ec re t ( A M e m or ia l 2 6 4 ) . T h e r e w as n o d o u b t w h o s e s id e h e was

o n i n t h e ac c ou n t h e gave o f B o r n e 's u d g m e n ts o f G o e t h e , w h i c h h e

rea d as a n ew sk i rm ish i n th e uwresolve d a n d perfzaps neve r to be resolved

due l b e tw ee n Jewish sp i r itua li sm a n d He l l en ic g lo r if i cat ion o f l i f e

( it al ic s a d d e d ) . Bo rn e is p resen ted h e re , w i th a lmo s t N ie t z sch ea n ve -

j The esaay on Heine (read aa a lecture in 1863) in lz Funct ion o (,.~.iticic?nand

the poetn Heine's Grave (probably cotnpleted by 1863 but not published until

1867) are eloquent teatimony to .Arnold's long-standing admiration for Heine. The

exact relationship of I\rnold'a contraat of Hellenism and Hebraisrn to Heine'a writ-

ings ia, holvever, a matter of some scholarly dispute. Lionel Trilling, R.H. Super (th e

editor of I\rnold'a

Co?nplclc

Prosc

Il'orkc),

and most other English-speaking scholars

(b ut not, apparently, David J. DeLaura in his no\\.-clasaic study) hold that .Arnold

derived the Hellenism-Hebraisrn opposition frorn Heine'a rnemorial essay on Biirne.

But it haa been questioned whether Arnold had read that essay, and aotne of

Trilling's assertions in particular have been effectively invalidated. More pertinently,

it has been argued that .Arnold altered the meaning that the opposition of Jews and

Hellenes had for Heine , while retaining He ine' s idea that hiatory ia rnarked by the

struggle and alternance of forces represented by the trvo tertna Hebraism and Helle-

nism. See Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf, especially 43-36, 138-69.


18/39

COMP R TIVE

L I T E M T U R E

hemence, as "the little Nazarene full of hate for the great Greek, who

was a Greek god into the.bargain " Werke u n d Briefe 694) .And while

longing for the return of "Harmony," Heine neJer questioned that it

meant above all "making the world healthy again by curing it of the

one-sided striving for spiritualization, the crazy error that makes soul

as well as body sick " In reawakening a feeling for Greek art in his

countrymen

and creating works of great solidity and concreteness to

which they could cling, "as if to marble representations of the Gods,"

Goethe-according to Heine-had done his bit to achieve this end

W erke u n d B ~ i e f e :120).

In Arnold's view of him, Heine was certainly on the side of Helle-

nism. "No man has extolled.

. .

the pagan extreme more rapturously"

Essa js i n Cri ti ci sm 207). Yet one of the reasons for Arnold's enduring

admiration for Heine may well have been that he found in Heine both

the Hellenic and the Hebraic. "No account of Heine is complete

which does not notice the Jewish element in him," he wrote in the

Heine essay.

His race he treated with the same fre ed o~ nwith which he treated eveivthing else,

but h e der iled a great force frorn it, and no o ne kne\z~his better than he hirnself. He

has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double rena-

scence,-a Hellenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence,-and how both have

been great powera el er since. He himaelf had in hiti1 bo th the spirit of Greece an d

the spirit of Jud aea ; both these spirits reach the infinite , which is the t rue goal of all

poetry an d all art,-the Greek apirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sub li~ ni ty . y his

perfection of literal? form, by his lore of clearness, by hia lore of beauty, Heine is

Greek; by hia intensity, by hia untamableneas, by hia "longing which c anno t be ut-

tered," he is Hebrew.

fis jsn Crilzc.ic?n 179)

What Arnold seems to be pointing to in the combination of

"Greek" and "Hebrew" elements he discerned in Heine is a coming

together or reconciliation (admittedly an imperfect one, as his criti-

cisms of Heine suggest) of classical beauty of form and Enlighten-

ment wit with Romantic imagination. For Heine himself, however, as

the passagesjust quoted indicate unequivocally, such a reconciliation

could be expected-at very best-only in the distant future, at the far

end of a long dialectical process. The relation of the two elements

was one of "unresolved and perhaps never to be resolved" conflict. In

addition, the meanings Arnold attributed to "Greek" and "Hebrew"

or to "Hellenism" and "Hebraism" are not quite those that the terms

"Greek" and "Nazarene" had for Heine.

The parallel between the title Arnold gave to the collection of ar-

ticles known as C u l t u r ~an d Anarc l zj and the title he gave to the fourth

of the articles in the collection, "Hebraism and Hellenism," inevita-


19/39

PHILHELLENISM ANTISEMITISM

bly invites reflection on the possible relations among the four terms

in the two titles. Is Culture connected with Hellenisrn, for in-

stance, an d Hebraisrn with Anarchy ?

Culture and Anarclzy was Arnold's response to the ovenvhelrning

sense, which he shared with earlier poets like Byron and Shelley as

well as with contenlporaries like Kuskin, of living in a withered and

decaying world. i\'hen he took over the ideal of the harmonious, fully

developed human person from Hunlboldt and the German

neohumanists, it was in order to hold it up against what he felt was

the pressing, ugly reality of mid-l'ictorian England: misshapen, paro-

chial individuals removed from intercourse with nature and the ex-

perience of beauty, enslaved to specialized tasks-be it runn ing a

business or senring a machine-and fanatically committed to idiosyn-

cratic and-in his eyes-arbitrary varieties of religion. But it was no

longer simply the disenchantment of the world, the radical separa-

tion of the sacred from the profane, and the alienation of men from

nature and from their own humanity that disturbed Arnold. It was an

intense conviction that the center was already, visibly, not holding,

that the world increasingly lacked, in his own words, no t only unity

but a sound centre of authority (Cultu'r-e nd Anarclzy

119).

Unlike most of his liberal countrymen, who were traditionally far

more concerned with individual freedoms than with culture or to-

tality or the State, Arnold was haunted by the specter of order dis-

integrating into anarchy. In fact, there is probably an elenlent of

challenge or provocation in the very title of his volume. With their

inveterate enlpiricisrrl and pragmatism, Arnold's English contempo-

raries-on the critic's own

admission-viewed

culture with suspi-

cion. Frederic Harrison, the distinguished legal scholar and charn-

pion of trade union legislation, derided the cant about ~ u l t u r e . ' ~

Perhaps the mockers of culture saw it as a foreign concept in tune

with abstruse German philosophies and alien political regimes and

having nothing to do with familiar British concerns such as moral

and religious truth, the principles of political economy, or the

Englishman's right to think as he likes, say what he likes, worship as

he likes, and, above all, trade as he likes. Arnold can only have rein-

forced their suspicions by constantly praising Continental practices

as superior to British ones and flaunting his Continental connec-

tions: with the Gernlan neohumanists in the first instance-Goethe,

'r$'ilhelrn von Hurnboldt , Schiller, and Schleiermacher (who111he had

learned to admire in the house of his father, Thonlas Arnold, the

' Quoted

y

Arnold himself

i n

,.zlltulr,

a i d Ai~al clzy

9 (hereafter

Cr l ) .

See also

72

19


20/39

celebrated headmaster of Kugby and a strong Germanophile), but

also with French writers such as Michelet, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, an d

Tocqueville. In the end, Arnold was questioning the idiosyncratic

and-according to him-increasingly provincial path of the native

tradition in politics and religion since the time of the Puritan revolu-

tion. Radical, consistent, English-style liberalism, he was arguing, can

only lead to anarchy, the dissolution of all traditional social bonds

an d institutions.

Culture, in contrast, is the cement that holds society together and

founds it. Neither the rational, natural-law principles of the Enlight-

enment-ideas of justice or equality-nor the pragmatic principles

of the Utilitarians-ideas such as the greatest happiness of the great-

est number-can provide a firm foundation for social life, according

to Arnold. On the contrary, they are likely to tear it apar t, by setting

one group against another, one interpretation against another, one

interest against another. Culture, in contrast, is not debatable: it is

not based on principles that can be disputed. It is an accumulated,

historically produced, and shared tradition which, despite its being a

product of historical development, claims universal validity. In this

respect it is fundamentally at odds ~vith he narrow, one-sided con-

cerns of particular morrlents and particular groups. Nothing could be

further from the epherrlerism and pseudo-culture of politics and the

newspaper (a particular target of Arnold's, as it was also of his con-

ternporaq.Jacob Burckhardt , who in far-off Base1 was struggling with

the same threat, as he perceived it, to the old culture of Europe ). In

addition, for Arnold-who in this respect is far closer to the German

neohurrlanists than to the

Romantics-culture

is the result of a care-

ful process of selection, enhancement, and preservation by an elite, a

priesthood or clergy of humanity. For that reason, culture is no t na-

tional. It is catholic and universal- the best that has been thought

an d written by all human beings in all times and all languages

(though, with the single exception of the Bible, Arnold's culture is

effectively restricted to the Greek, Latin, and other Western Euro-

pean languages an d lite ratures). Arnold appears to have expected

this culture, man-made and historically produced, to substitute for

a no longer attainable Truth (~ vh et l~ ereligious or philosophical) as

the foundation of individual conduct and social orde r. From this per-

spective, British science, British literature, an d especially British poli-

tics and British religion (which far from being unifying were con-

ceived as an arena of debate an d clashing convictions an d interests)

had to appear narrow, provincial, divisive, even aberrant, and above

all destructive of that centre of authority which was so important to


21/39

the critic and which he believed was no longer provided by reason or

even by faith.

Arnold's view of his own countrymen was strikingly similar to that

of Michelet-notoriously no Anglophile. The English, according to

Michelet, are the aristocratic people of world history: the people

whose idea of liberty is anarchic, arrogant, exclusive, Byronic, and

daernonic, and whose heroic struggle to win liberty was, and contin-

ues to be, marked by violence, parricide, revolt, and exploitation

both of nature and of their weaker fellows. In Michelet's vision of

history, the English-like the Jews-represent an essential an d recur-

rent moment in the evolution of society, but one that is destined to

be overcome by a less austere and exclusive, more harmonious an d

comprehensive form of sociability, a form of sociability which

Michelet, drawing on Vico, considered democratic. For Michelet,

as to a large extent for Arnold, that higher form of sociability was

represented by France, which, since the Kevolution, had harmonized

better than any other society the competing claims of the part and

the whole, the individual and the state. The argument of Cultu r-e

a n d

Ann r r k j was, in short, that British individualism- the dissidence of

dissent an d the Protestantism of the Protestant religion, as Arnold

put it disdainfully CA .56 et passim)-would have to yield to a more

comprehensive vision of society and that a greater role would have to

be conceded to both the state an d a national church if Britain was not

to collapse in anarchy.

It is essential to Arnold's understanding of culture that in modern

times it must inevitably be the product of formal education. The with-

ered, sickly condition of society can be cured. Culture can be re-

stored. But for a while at least, until it is so reintegrated into the life

of society that it again becorrles a second nature, culture, as sorne-

thing learned and acquired rather than organically connected with

all aspects of life in the way it once was, will be second-best-not so

much an ersatz of the real thing as a kind of forced hot-house seed-

ling which might be expected to grow sturdier later in the open air.

In this important respect, as already noted, Arnold is far closer to the

German neohumanists than to the

Romantics,

for while the Rornan-

tics looked back nostalgically to organic folk-cultures or tried to pre-

serve them, the neohumanists aimed to resurrect ancient culture

through education by having students progressively internalize

Greek culture along with the inner forms and energies of the Greek

language. Arnold in fact refers explicitly to Goethe in one of several

fine passages where he discusses the difference between organic

culture and culture as he understands it in the modern world:


22/39

C O k l P h I lA T I V E L I T E R A T U R E

111 the Greece of Pinda r an d Sophoc les, i11 the England of Shakespeare, t he po et

lived in a cur re nt of ideaa i11 the highest degr ee an imat ing an d nour ishi ng to th e

creative power; society was, in the fulleat rneaaure, permeate d by fresh tho ugh t, intel-

l igent, and a l i ~e .\ild this atate of things is the true basis for th e c re at i ~ e ower's

exercise, in thia it finds its data, its materiala, truly ready for its hand; all the books

and read ing in t he \vorld are only ~ a l u a b l e s they are helpa to thia. Even when this

does no t actually exist, books an d reading may ena ble a ma n to construct a kind of

aernblance of it in hia own rnind

Thia ia by no tneans equ ivalent to the artist for

th e nationally diffused life and tho ugh t of the epocha of Sophoclea or Shakespeare;

but, beaidea that it rnay be a rneans of preparation for auch epochs, it does really

constitute,

if many share in it, a quickening and

sustaining

atmosphere of great

~ a l u e .Such a n atm osphe re the rna~ly-aided earn ing and the long a nd widely corn-

bine d critical effort of Germany fortned for Goet he The re was n o national glow

of life and th oug ht the re as in the -Athens of Pericles or t he Engl and of Elizabeth.

Th at was the poet'a weakness. But there rvas a sort of eq ui ~ al e ntor it in th e cornplete

culture a nd unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. Th at was his stre ngth .

( The Funct ion of Criticisrn 240

Arnold inlplies that the aim of education is to bring about the

eventual return of the nationally diffused life and thought which he

associated with the glorious days of Pindar and Shakespeare. The re-

alization of that goal could only be expected in a remote and rather

ideal future, however. So while Arnold has no doubt that ages like

those are the true life of literature the prorrlised land, toward

which criticisrrl can only beckon, he is no less certain of the melan-

choly reality that that pronlised land will not be ours to enter,

and we shall die in the wilderness ( The Function of Criticism 267 .

On many occasions, in fact, the goal he presents is not so much the

restoration of the true life of literature as the achievement of a

more modest general culture, a middle-class aurea mediocritas. Over

and over again, whether he is writing about the virtue of academies

or about democracy, he argues for the superior merit of a more even

distribution of culture, in the French manner , over an unruly combi-

nation of virtually uncultured masses and idiosyncratic geniuses, in

the English manner. It even seems that it was such a general distribu-

tion of culture that he had in mind when he wrote about democ-

racy, rather than any notions of political or economic rights or free-

doms. His chief concern in the essay on Democracy was not how

to achieve democracy (following Tocqueville, whom he quotes ap-

provingly as a philosophic observer, with no love for democracy, but

rather with a terror of it, he simply saw it as inevitable) but how to

Democracy is a force in which t he co ncer t of a grea t num ber of Inen makes up

for the weakness of each m an taken by hirnself; de mocrac y accept s a relative rise in

their con diti on, obtainable by this conce rt for a grea t num be r, as sotnething desir-

able in itself, because

thoitg. ~ this is und oithte dly

far

belo tu pandeur ,

it is yet a good

deal above insignificance (italics ad de d) , n Drmoc~.acy 48.


23/39

prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of de-

mocracy, Americanised --in other words, how to ensure that democ-

racy would not result in the overthrow or radical transformation of

culture, as Arnold had defined it. It was necessary to find an accom-

modation of culture an d democracy, ust as it was necessaq to find an

accommodation of culture an d religion, of Hellenism an d

Hebraism ( Democracy

44344,452).

As Dover Wilson makes abundantly clear in the introduction to his

edition,

hilture

and Anarchy was in fact a response to a particular po-

litical situation. It was no tjus t the disenchantment of the world that

had prompted Arnold to take up his pen : it was the enfranchisement

of vast new sectors of the British population proposed in the Second

Reform Bill of

1567;

the violent agitation, provocative flouting of au-

thority, an d rioting (a t Kidderminster, Hyde Park, and elsewhere)

that accompanied the parliamentary debates; and the prospect of a

spate of f ~ ~ r t h e radical legislation following passage of the bill. This

was the time, Dover Wilson reminds us, of Carlyle's notorious essay

Shooting Niagara with its call for a well-armed elite of heroes to

defend culture against the advancing hordes. A concrete political

situation is thus the context of Arnold's work a t least as much as the

more general problem of the alienation of the modern world. It is

not hard to identify the ignorant armies clashing by night o n the dar-

kling plain of Dover Beach. Certainly they are the mindless forces

of historical action in a world revealed as purposeless, but they are

also the liberal and dissenting commercial class and the increasingly

aggressive proletariat of mid-Victorian England.18

It was in the face of this disturbing situation, which to many

seemed to mark a real crisis of culture and society, that Arnold pro-

posed his solution: a re-emphasizing of culture and totality, as he

pu t it,'%gainst the destructive forces of individual enterprise, the

mechanistic spirit of positivist and materialist thought, the alienat-

ing, impoverishing effects of liberal economics and industrialism,

the parochialism of dissent and protestant sectarianism, the

ephernerism of politics and the culture of the newspaper, the narrow-

ness, ignorance, and vulgarity of democracy in the English-speaking

~ o u n t r i e s . ~

' ee D ov rr Tl ' ilson 's In tro du ct io n to

CA

xxii-xxxiv.

'V2'A 19. See also 21: Cu ltu rr . a n d wha twe c al l to ta l i ty . . .

(I

Se e 48 -49 ; a l so 17 -18 , 19 , 22 on No r th Am e r ic a . Am r r ic a , tha t c hos e n hom e

of ne rvs pa per s a n d po l i ti c s , is w i thou t ge n r r a l in te l l ige nc e , a c c o r d ing to Re na n ,

a n d ~ - \ r no ld el i e v rs i t l ikely f r om the c i r c ums ta nc e s o f the c a s r , tha t th i s is so ; a n d

tha t , in th r th ings o f th r m in d , a nd in c u l tu r e a nd to ta l ity , Ame r ic a , in s tea d o f s u r


24/39

OMPIFLkTIVE LITERATURE

Arnold's critique of liberal optimism, like Heine's, is often effec-

tive and in the post-Thatcher an d post-Reagan years, still surprisingly

pertinent . He points with unerring perceptiveness to the weak spots

of both economic liberalism-it has created publice t3ge,stus,pm vutim

opuZf;ntiu,he declares, quoting Sallust 2A186-87)-and political lib-

eralism: demagoguery and populism, lil~ertal-ianismt home and op-

pression abroad-in Ireland, for instance A80-81). Th e pathos of

some of his descriptions of the lives of the poor reinforces the effec-

tiveness of the critique of liberalisnl as a whole." As usual with

Arnold, the argument is conducted on a high plane of generality and

spiritual significance. The class conflicts of nineteenth-century En-

gland are represented in idealized, uni\:ersalized form as conf lic~se-

tween different universal values or tendencies of the human psyche.

Thus the "populace" is no t exactly thc proletariat; it is an eternal as-

pect of humankind-its cruelty and animality-which happens

1 0

dominate among proletarians C:ii 107). Th e terms "Barbarians,"

"Philistitles," "Populace" transform a concrete his~orical truggle into

a psychoinachy, an allegory of the "eter-nal"conflict in human history

between competing

force^.^

C:ultu,-c

artd Anurclzj turns essentially on the conflict between two

opposing sets of values: the whole and the part, order and absolute

individual freedom, the state and the individual. On one side: the

total, harmonious, f ~ ~ l l yeveloped individual human being of the

German neohumanists, the ideal of C;oethe, Schiller, M'ilhelm -\,on

Humboldt

( CA

11, 126-27); the State-"organ of our collective best

Self, of our national right reasonn(07) viewed as standing above all

particular interests and classes and embracing them all, as essentially

classless (70)

the Sacred ("the very framework and exterior order of

the state,"we are told, is sacred, 204) "I-Iunlanity" as a kind of univer-

sal Church or Communion (192); eternal Truth;" universal and un-

changing norms; a classically trained elite of disinterested servants of

the state, concerned only for the conimon weal, such as Humboldt

had hoped to create for Prussia; finally, the idea of a hierarchy or

sacred order, which excludes nothing, hut on the contrary includes

pasing us all, falls short"

( 19 ) .

To A~.nolc , onlr the first grncration of Puritans-

hfilton, Raxter. Wesley-had had any greatness, cllieflr; because rl~cytill enjoyed the

legacy of the catholic culture that thev rejected ("were trained ~ vithin he pale of the

Establi~l~ment"). ( 1

3

ince then, they had all been r~l ~di ocr iti es

? See, Sor instance, CA

189-98.

Xlichelet; ~\-ho11141-noldadmired, tended to do the sarrlr thing in his histories,

most blarancl~n his po\verrnll\ schematic I.?i/i.oii7izlioit ii I h ist oir f, 1 o z i 7 ~ ~ l ~ ~ l Z ~ o f

831.

?

One thinks of Burckhal.dt's expressioil: "L'n/eitung."


25/39

PHILHELLENISSI NTISESIITISSI

everything

i n

i ts

p r o p e r p l u ~ ~ . '

On the opposite side: against the aes-

thetic neohumanist ideal of the harmonious, f ~ ~ l l younded indi-

vidual, the moral ideal of the individual passionately dedicated to a

single overriding imperative, a single calling or task, the specialist,

the religious fanatic, the dissenter, the protestant; against the State as

the organ of our collective best Self, the idea of society as an arena of

competition, debate, and struggle between rival classes and interests,

out of which the best solution is supposed to emerge, but which

Arnold tended to see as a darkling plain where ignorant armies

clash by night ; against the view of the State as sacred, in some way

still invested with the power and authority of the divine, a mechanical

and profane conception of society as pure historical fact in a

postlapsarian world from which God has withdrawn; against the ideal

of Humanity as a Communion, a fragmented vision of individuals,

generations, and peoples isolated from each other in both space and

time; against the notion of eternal Truth, the relativism or pragma-

tism of adaptation to the demands of the particular time and occa-

sion (CA 12 0) ; against eternal norms, the value of continuous re-

search and experimentation (CA 124);against the ideal of a classical

elite, the practice of representational democracy, in which every

one of our governors has all possible temptation, instead of setting

up before the governed who elect him, and on whose favor he de-

pends, a high standard of right reason, to accommodate himself as

much as possible to their natural taste for the bathos

X

113-114);

and finally, against hierarchy or sacred order, anarchical competi-

tion and distorted overdevelopment of particular individual traits

and tendencies.

Th e opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism is part of this more

comprehensive set of oppositions in Arnold's text, and in his work in

general. As a result, its meaning, though not entirely unrelated to the

meaning it had for Heine, is by no means the same as it was for

Heine. Hellenism designates for Arnold not so much sensualism,

~vorldliness,and love of life as the contemplative, playful, free consid-

eration of all aspects of reality. It is an ideal of aesthetic comprehen-

siveness, closely related to theory and intellectual speculation (CA

132) . Hebraism, n contrast, is closer to

p m x i s .

It is the term used to

designate not so much othenvorldliness and spirituality as the pri-

macy of moral commitment, of the existential moment of choice or

decision, which is always, by definition, exclusive and limiting or nar-

rowing. It has to do with conduct and action. Arnold's Hellenism is

Thu s culture admits th r nrcrssitv of fortune making and industrialism, cul-

ture does not set itsrlf against gam rs and sports

(C;1

GI).


26/39

related to "culture and totality," his "Hebraism" to division and con-

flict.

M'hereas tlle two terms, as eve saw, ar e in an unendin g an d

unresolvable dialectical relation to each other for Heine, Arnold's

thesis is that it is necessary, and possible, to find a golden mean that

evil1 accommodate both. His advocacy of "Hellenism" against

"Hebraism," he makes clear, is pragmatic and tactical, by no means

principled. It is entirely a matter of adjustments and degrees, ofbal-

ancing competing and equallyjustified claims rather than resolving a

dialectical opposition by means of some Hegelian "L4ufhebung."'"

For

the rlc~ysofIsi-uel a?-eznnzim~t-c~Dle;

nd in its bl a~ n e f Hebraising too, and in its

praise of Hellenising, culture Inust not f.ail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its

judgm ents that passing a nd provisional character which we have seen it impose o n its

prefe rences and rejections of machinery. Xow, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise,

and to praise knowing; for Tve have Hebraised too mu ch , and have over-valued doing.

But the habits and discipline received f?om Hebraism remain for ou r race an e ternal

possession; and , as humanity is constitu ted, one must never assign to them the sec-

on d rank to-day, \vithout being prep ared to restore them to the first rank to -~ no rr o~ v.

CA

37)

Had Arnold been writing about Prussia, rather than England, in

other cvords, he might have chosen a different empha~is .~ 'fter the

debacle of 1870, he did in f jc t fault tlle French, whom he normally

held up as models to his countqlmen, for their lack of "Hebraism."

Reviewing Renan's

La Rqo rme intelbctuelle et morale in 1872, he took

issue with Renan's view that France's defeat cvas the result of le

manque de foi la science. "No one feels more than eve do the harm

which tlle exaggeration of Hebraism has do ne in England ; but

[Renan 's proposal to concentrate more on schooling] is Hellenism

with a vengeance Nloral conscience, self-control, seriousness,

steadfastness, are no t the \vhole of human life certainly, b u t . with-

out them-and this is the very burden of the Hebrew prophets

nations cannot stand. France does not enough see their importance"

Jenkyns underlines the deliberately non-dialectical nature of Arnold's thou ght

on the subject of Hellenism a nd Hebra ism. "It was characteristic of t he age, or of its

more enquiring ~nembers.o feel that benveen faith In Christianity and the love of

Greece th ere Inust be a tensio n. Arnold Tvas being consc~ously ete rod ox when he

argued that Hellenis~n nd Heb rais ~n ould be painlessly comb ined"

7 0 ) .

The con-

trast between the dialectical character of Heine's opposition of Greeks and

Sazar enes an d th e undialectical character of Arnold's opposition of Hellenism an d

Hebraism is one ofthe chief themes of Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf.'~

Dir Auseinandei-setzung

~l lnttilrwArnolds ,nit Heinriciz Hrine.

Tesdorpf argues convincingly that while

Arnold's Hellenism and Hebraism is no t the same as Heine's Greeks and X a~ ar en es ,

his philosophy of history is borrowed from Heine. As a result there is a sign~ficant

degree of inconsistency in Arnold's ideas (see especially 16 8) .

"'See Park Ho na n 331 o n Arnold's reservations about Prussia


27/39

;omp let e Prose VI7o7-ks

7:44-45). The implication of this a rgument is

that Hebraism, if it can be curbed and brought into llarmolly with

culture, will make Protestant England a more successfill nation an d

a better model for others, in the end , than Catholic and Kevolution-

ary France.

Thoug h Arnold sometimes presents Hellenism and Hebraism, in

the manner of Heine or Michelet, as the tcvin motors of histoql and

civilization-by their alternations, he suggests, the human spirit

proceeds; and each of' these two fbrces has its appointed hours of

culmination an d seas

gossman_philhellenism & antisemitism

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