ABSTRACT
Where Hebraism is intensely single-minded and rigidly monotheistic in its painful response to the Fall, the Greeks favoured the many-sided development of all the rich potentialities in the human disposition. Hebraism versus Hellenism meant the Imperfect or the Beautiful; Conduct or Culture; Fire and Strength, or Sweetness and Light; the quest for the One or the development of the Many; the tension of intolerable Conflict or the possibility of calm and peaceable Harmony. To Matthew Arnold, Hellenism's 'spontaneity of consciousness' offered more than 'strictness of conscience'; Culture could raise spirits above the set gloom of the Fall; the free flow of open-minded contemplation was greater than the narrow single-mindedness of practical action. Though sharing some of Arnold's anxieties about distortion and imbalance, this chapter speaks on behalf of the Hebraic as a necessary and prophetic reminder in the balance of our own times: the robust way of those who are not at home in the world.
