THE CITY
same legalistic actions. All of these beliefs, in one way or another, prevent us from growing fully into the men and women that God created us to be. They either retard our growth, making us less than human, or they pervert our growth, making us something other than human. And they all spring from an impulse that drives a wedge between the physical and spiritual sides of our being. Throughout this essay, I have, rather loosely, labeled these two impulses as humanism without Christianity and Christianity without humanism; however, as I prepare to close, I would suggest two alternate labels for these misguided (or, better, half-true) impulses: Hellenism and Hebraism. In the final section of Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold draws a well-known distinction between two historical and philosophical forces to which he gives the names Hellenism and Hebraism. Hellenism, which prefers thinking to doing, strives always to “see things as they really are,” and to foster within a “spontaneity of consciousness.” Hebraism, on the other hand, prefers doing to thinking, and, through legalistic “conduct and obedience,” seeks to develop a “strictness of conscience.” To the Hellenist (for whom ignorance is the main obstacle), man is a “gentle and simple being, showing the traces of a noble and divine nature”; to the Hebraist (for whom sin is the obstacle), he is “an unhappy chained captive, labouring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death.” It is clear by the end of his discourse that Arnold prefers Hellenism to Hebraism, and hopes to see it achieve the ascendancy in England, but for the humanist Christian neither of these forces alone will raise up man to the high state of dignity for which he was created. Unless we come to view ourselves as both noble and chained (made in God's image but fallen), we will either underestimate or overestimate our potential. Neither the Hellenist nor the Hebraist really wants God to take an active role in his life—one is too busy thinking, the other too busy working—and neither will ever fully accept his grace: for the former doesn't think he needs it, and the latter thinks he can earn it on his own. But the truth is that neither clear thought nor hard work, if we trust only to those things, will draw us to the higher truths of Christ. Arnold argues that Hellenism reached its zenith in the Renaissance while Hebraism reached its zenith in Christianity. He would have done better to say that the two forces can only reach true fulfillment when they merge to form a Renaissance (humanist) Chris64