MILTON'S HEBRAISM
It was Matthew Arnold who gave currency to the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism as antagonistic "disciplines" struggling for supremacy in the spirit of mankind, and especially in that of the English nation. Hellenism, as he defined it, is "spontaneity of conscience," Hebraism, "strictness of conscience"; Hellenism is "sweetness and light"—beauty and intelligence; Hebraism, strength, duty and obedience; Hellenism is thought; Hebraism, conduct. England in his day had, he believed, too much of Hebraism, too much intensity of moral fervor with consequent narrowness of judgment, and would do well to get more Hellenism, more sweetness and light, more love of beauty and of clear thinking and more catholicity of judgment.
The manifestations of Hebraism in English life to which Arnold referred is known historically by the name of Puritanism. But Puritanism was a much narrower thing than Hebraism. Arnold himself gave expression to the Hebraic spirit when he said, "Conduct is three-fourths of life." Puritanism was an anxious distortion of this spirit. The Calvanistic belief, that if any man was to escape eternal punishment it would be by the skin of his teeth, was Hebraism, if Hebraism at all, suffering from morbid fears. Jonathan Edwards' conviction that the bulk of mankind was "reserved for burning"; that God could choose whom he would save, leaving the rest "eternally to perish and to be tormented eternally in hell," was Puritan theology, but not Hebraism.
Neither was Paul, whom Arnold cites as a typical representative of Hebraism, in contrast to Plato, the Hellenist, a normal specimen. Hebraism in Paul was painfully complicated with an excess of that very Greek thought, for lacking which in his
own day Arnold arraigns it. Paul had drunk too much at the wells of Greek speculation. Hebraism is, indeed, the passion for keeping the law of right conduct, for being at one with God and doing His commandment. It is not anxiety as to one's personal salvation. In his Master, rather than in Paul, did Hebraism become clearly manifest.
The reaction against the English form of Hebraism, against Puritanism, has, since Arnold wrote, made great headway. It has become merged, however, in that broader reaction against Hebraism that is now in progress the world over. Hellenism, if we may still call the enemy of Hebraism by the old name—the desire to invest life “with aerial ease, clearness and radiancy,” to escape from the everlasting control of conscience—now aims its blows not against the twisted branches, but against the trunk itself. Not this or that phase of “moralism,” but “moralism” itself is to be eradicated. In England and America the philosophers of this movement have spoken chiefly from the dramatic stage—in the plays of Shaw, for example, and Ibsen, his master. On the continent of Europe the extremely Hellenistic Nietzche leads the attack. The Anglo-Saxon strongholds of Puritanism themselves are being invaded by his thought, and it now seems not so impossible as formerly even “in God’s own country,” to look at life from a point of view that is “beyond good and evil.”
Nietzche goes to work in a far different spirit from that in which Matthew Arnold delivered his admonitions to his countrymen. He, too, lays the responsibility for "moralism" upon the Jews, but in his scheme of reform compromise does not exist. Morality must be uprooted if mankind is to make progress. Morality is the re-