Edward Chauncey Baldwin (1870-1940) was for years professor of English at the University of Illinois. A New Englander with a traditional love for Hebrew law and literature, he was preoccupied with their influence on Western culture. Dismayed by the lack of familiarity his Jewish students revealed with the Bible and Jewish values in general, he repeatedly urged Jewish community leaders to provide special educational facilities for Jewish students on American campuses. As a result of his persistent efforts Professor Baldwin became the most potent Christian influence in the establishment of the Hillel Foundation. And it was in recognition of this service that the National Hillel Commission established the Edward Chauncey Baldwin Memorial Fellowship at the University of Illinois, to be awarded each year to the student making significant contribution to inter-faith understanding.

The essay below was first published in The Biblical World in 1910. Professor Baldwin also wrote Our Modern Debt to Israel (1913) and The Prophets (1927).—Moses Jung.

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Matthew Arnold’s famous distinction between “Hebraism and Hellenism” is misleading, and rests upon a fundamental misconception of the spirit of the ancient Hebrews. In Culture and Anarchy he discusses what he calls the “two points of influence” between which “moves our world.” These he calls the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism, the one representing the effort to win peace by self-conquest, a moral impulse; the other, the effort to see things as they really are, an intellectual impulse. The essential difference between Hebraism and Hellenism, as Arnold distinguishes them, is that “Hebraism has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion.” All through the essay he implies that the Hebrew spirit was one of somber gloom, in contrast to the joyous spontaneity that he attributes to the Greek.

Now such a distinction as this, in order to be valid, must be based upon conclusions drawn from a comparative examination of the literatures of the two peoples, for literature is the only authentic record of the life of a race. Such a comparative examination of Hebrew literature with that of Hellas clearly demonstrates that the spirit of Hebraism was in no sense the antithesis of that of Hellenism.

In the attempt to test the validity of Arnold’s distinction, it was found advisable to limit the investigation to a comparison of the Greek and Hebrew spirit as shown in the habitual attitude of mind of the two peoples toward life, toward inanimate nature, and toward the Supreme Being. Obviously it will hardly be possible, within the limits of such an article as this, to do more than state the results of the investigation. . . .

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Upon a comparison of the Greek with the Hebrew attitude toward life, it was found that the Greeks, in contrast to the Hebrews, were not a particularly hopeful people. This statement does not refer to their belief in a future life, but merely to their attitude toward what the future had in store for them here on the earth. Their sense of man’s helplessness in the hands of a mysterious fate accounts in part for the peculiar way in which the Greek authors speak of hope. They nearly always speak of it as a delusive phantom—an illusion born of an uncertain future. Thus Theognis (540-500 B.C.E.) speaks of Hope and Peril as deities closely associated, equally dangerous to men. To the Greek, hopes were, as Pindar is said to have called them, “dreams of waking men.” To the Greek, hope might be “the poor man’s wealth,” but while it thus might become the consolation of the weak, it could not be a source of additional strength to the strong.

Such a prevalent distrust of the future is clearly reflected in Greek history. Among Greek historians of the classical age there is absolutely no trace of the idea that the human race as a whole, or any single nation, is progressing toward the fulfillment of a divinely ordered destiny. Herodotus’ history, for example, seems as if written to illustrate the insecurity of mortal happiness. Throughout their history it is in the hour of men’s impious triumph, when they seem most secure in the possession of life and happiness, that Fate brings them to misery, or slits the thin-spun life. To the Greek the future was full of dire possibilities—poverty, exile, sickness, death. In the face of such uncertainties, the virtue of the Greek was a resignation rather than hope—a calm acceptance of the will of the gods, without any joyful anticipations. Consequently, though often, and perhaps usually, a man of cheerful yesterdays, he was never a man of confident tomorrows. In the absence of hope for the future the Greeks turned for inspiration mainly to the past, to the mythical heroes of song and legend, and to the deeds of their ancestors in the far-off Golden Age.

Like the Greeks, the Hebrews also looked backward to a Golden Age when God had walked and talked with men, when men and animals had lived at peace. So well had they understood their poor relations, the animals, in that far-off time that they had held converse with the beasts of the field, even with the serpent, the lowest, albeit the subtlest, of them all. But, unlike the Greeks, the Hebrews looked not only backward but forward to a Golden Age. They were the only people of antiquity who conceived of a Golden Age as the beginning and end of human history. This future Golden Age was to be no less ideal, though less primitive, than the first had been. Apparently it was not thought of in a uniform way in any age, nor always consistently by the same writers, yet they all agree in describing its beginning. It was to be introduced by the advent of the Lord himself (Isaiah 40: 9-12; 52: 7-12) or of the Messiah (Isaiah 9: 9-10). .The conditions of the new era are variously described, sometimes in language that implies no more than the establishment of redeemed Israel in the first place among the nations (Jeremiah 33: 17-22; Ezekiel 37: 25); at other times in words that suggest that they looked forward to a change in Nature itself, and the creation of a new earth (Daniel 2: 44; 7: 14 and 27). .Often they spoke of it as a time when the happiness of Eden would be restored. Men will be exempt from the ills that flesh is heir to, “the inhabitant shall not say I am sick.” The harmony between men and their surroundings will be of a kind to reproduce the conditions suitable to long life such as the patriarchs enjoyed. So much will longevity be the rule that one dying a hundred years old will be thought to have met an untimely end (Isaiah 65: 2). .Once more in that future time will there be a truce of God, when the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion eat straw like the ox, when they shall not hurt nor destroy in all God’s holy mountain.

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The degree to which this hope affected the Hebrews’ political outlook is hard to overestimate. It sustained them even during the long exile, when the scepter seemed forever to have departed from Judah. It comforted them while they groaned under the oppression of the Greek, and the yet more galling yoke of Roman domination, for to them, they believed, God had pledged his word that a blessed future was in store for the nation, and had added, “I the Lord will hasten it in his time.” Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the political pessimism of Plato, for example, and the exultant optimism of some of the prophets. Such a difference is not to be accounted for by any superiority over the Greeks in point of continued national prosperity. Indeed, what difference there was in this respect was all in favor of the Greeks. No people ancient or modern ever had more to dishearten them in their thought of their national future than had the Hebrews; and yet no people looked so exultantly.

The exultation with which the Hebrews thought of their political future was the logical result of their conception of God’s relation with them. The nation had been rebellious and had sinned; therefore God as a God of righteousness must punish them. Hence arose the ideas first expressed by the prophets of the 8th century [B.C.E.], that the fall of the nation Israel was to be the triumph of their God—the victory of righteousness over sin. When the Hebrews in the course of their spiritual development finally attained to this conception of their political history, their religion broke for the first time through the bonds of nationality and became a universal religion, instead of the religion of a single people. In the second chapter of Isaiah and in Jeremiah this conception of Israel’s as a world-religion found complete expression. In their thought the kingdoms of the world are destined to become the kingdom of God; and in this destiny they saw the final aim as well as the crowning glory of Israel’s mission. That God’s house should be called “the house of prayer unto all nations” was to be the consummation of God’s purpose toward which he was directing human history. This purpose was to be attained by Israel’s becoming perfect through suffering, and hence fit to be the evangelist of the world.

Nor does the political hopefulness of the Hebrew, in contrast to the lack of it in the Greek, appear alone in his vision of a future glory for the nation at large. It is evidenced also in the differences between the Greek and the Hebrew ideal of citizenship. The Greek ideal of the kalos kagathos was an aristocratic one. It could be approached only by the favored few, by the wise, the noble, and the strong. It was wholly unattainable by the ignorant, the fallen, the feeble of the earth. Such an ideal tended persistently toward the intensification of existing inequalities. The Hebrew prophets, on the other hand, filled with the hope of seeing established in the world a reign of universal justice, were impatient of social inequalities. Their ideal of citizenship was one that could be attained by the poor and the oppressed, for it required only to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

So far as the attitude of the Greek and the Hebrew toward life present and future here on the earth can be determined, it would appear that the latter was “more at ease in Zion,” to employ Arnold’s phrase, than was the former, and that he was so because his political outlook for the nation and for the individual was a more hopeful one.

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The Greek was not only less hopeful, but less appreciative of natural beauty than the Hebrew. At least his appreciation of natural beauty was less catholic. Within certain well-defined limits, the Greek enjoyment of Nature was intense; outside those limits, Nature was to him an object of distrust. She then became Calypso the concealer, and Circe the sorceress. Nature to the Greek, as Mr. Mabie has pointed out in speaking of Nature in Greek and mediaeval thought, emphasized her beauty, and kept her terrors in the background. But the fact that the vast and awful forces of Nature were kept in the background, while the emphasis was put persistently upon the benignant aspects of Nature resulted in a limitation of the range of the Greek’s appreciation. As a result, only the cultivated landscape appealed to him as beautiful. Only once in all classical Greek literature (in the Critias of Plato) are mountains spoken of explicitly as possessing beauty. Ruskin in Modern Painters has noted the fact that every Homeric landscape intended to be beautiful is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a grove. Rivers are sometimes in Greek literature spoken of as beautiful; but the adjective was applied only to gently flowing streams, which were looked upon as distributors of fertility. Turbulent rivers had for the Greek no beauty; to him they suggested only anger and strength. Thus we find Homer using the ravages of a swollen river as a simile for destructive force. Somewhat so it was with the Greek feeling for the sea. The majesty and loveliness of the sea, the Greek delighted to portray; but its somber moods frightened him. It was his fear that caused him to adopt the principle of euphemism. The Black Sea, for instance, the Greeks had called Pontos Akseinos (“the inhospitable sea”) from the supposed terrors of its navigation, but later they altered the name to Pontos Eukseinos (“the hospitable sea”), not because they feared it less than formerly, but because they wished to avoid using words of evil omen.

Of all natural objects, it was with trees alone that the Greeks felt a sympathy that was almost human, and that knew no limitations. They shared with other primitive peoples—the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Persians, the Scandinavians—the belief that in trees there existed a mysterious life. All the ancient peoples about whose mythology we know anything believed in a tree of life, that is in a plant or tree whose fruit partaken of in a purely physical way was able to bestow immortality. Such in Greek mythology were the apples of the Hesperides. They grew on an island of the ocean whither no ship could penetrate, in the orchards of the Hesperian Fields. Earth gave them to Juno upon her marriage to Jove; and whoever ate of them attained eternal youth.

The Hebrew feeling for Nature was as intense as that of the Greek, and was far more inclusive. Not limited to an enjoyment of the mild aspects of nature, it included such scenes as in the Greek inspired only fear. The greater catholicity of the Hebrew appreciation of Nature was due to a fundamental difference in the way the two peoples thought of Nature in relation to God. To both the Greek and the Hebrew, Nature was divine. They differed only in their understanding of the relation between the material and the spiritual. The Greek, keenly susceptible to natural beauty within limits already indicated, thought of Nature as the elemental reality, the soul of whose beauty was embodied in the divinities who haunted it. The thought of the gods was, then, the artistic completion of his thought of Nature.

Quite different was the Hebrew view of the relation of Nature to God. To the Hebrew, God was the primary reality; Nature was secondary. Not only was it true that without him was not anything made that was made, but the continued existence of Nature was dependent on his will. The Hebrew thought of Nature as a mere shadow, finding the essence of its beauty as well as the sustaining power of its life in one whose providential care watched over the great things and the small—”who brought forth constellations in their season and provided for the raven his food” (Job 38: 32, 41).

It is characteristic of Hebrew poetry (Humboldt said in his Cosmos) that as a reflex of monotheism, it always embraces the whole world in its unity, comprehending the life of the terrestrial globe as well as the shining regions of space. It dwells less on details of phenomena, and loves to contemplate great masses. Nature is portrayed, not as self-subsisting, or glorious in her own beauty, but ever in relation to a higher, an over-ruling, a spiritual power. The Hebrew bard ever sees in her the living expression of the omnipresence of God in the works of the visible creation.

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Because of this, we find in the Old Testament no landscape descriptions as such. There is no description of the sunrise; no picture of the sea. Only when we consider the wealth of poetic material strewn among the pages of the Old Testament and used by the Hebrew poets simply in the way of allusion and incidental illustration, can we realize how deep and inclusive their appreciation of natural beauty really was, considered as a revelation of the divine. Though there is no description of the sunrise, can one doubt the delight of the poet when he compares it to “a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,” and to “a strong man rejoicing to run a race”? Nor can we question that of the author of the comparison of the just ruler, who “shall be” he says, “as the light of the morning when the sun ariseth, even as a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth in the clear shining after rain.” And though there is no picture of the sea, the passing image: “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. . . .There is no peace, saith my God to the wicked” is, as Carlyle would say, significant of much. The sea had no terrors for the Hebrew, for he believed inplicitly that “the sea is His, and He made it” (Psalms 95:5), and that “the deep also obeys God” (Psalms 94:7). .Nay, even the roar of its voice was to the Hebrew not the sound of anger, but of acclamation. There is in Greek mythology no such sublime personification of the sea as that in the third chapter of Habakkuk, where describing the accompaniments of the theophany, the prophet describes the sea as uttering his voice and lifting up his hands on high. In that single statement we have a wealth of poetic suggestion that makes the Greek mythology seem by comparison petty; Aphrodite “born in the foam of the sea,” and Thetis with her “tinsel-slippered feet” cannot for a moment compare in sublimity with this image of the sea, greeting with an inarticulate Te Deum the Creator coming to judge the earth; and lifting before him in adoration the white hands of its foam-capped waves. Nor were the Hebrews less susceptible than the Greeks to the beauty of the trees. The cedars that waved on Lebanon were not less but more beautiful in their eyes for being “the cedars which he hath planted” (Psalms 104:16). .The growth of the tree became to them the symbol of spiritual growth: “The righteous shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon” (Psalms 92: 12) and “shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of waters” (Psalms 1:1). So great was their regard for trees that by the provisions of the Deuteronomic code they were forbidden to cut them down even in an enemy’s country, “for the tree of the field is man’s life” (Deuteronomy 20: 19).

The Hebrew never considered natural objects as beautiful in and for themselves, but as beautiful or majestic symbols of God. Though this way of looking at them may seem to imply a limitation of his appreciation of natural beauty, it really increased it by rendering visible the spiritual significance of things which to the Greek had excited fear, or at most had aroused but a languid interest. Thus the mountains round about Jerusalem came to symbolize God’s protecting care for his people; and the fact of their being such, a symbol of the coming of Jehovah to punish the wicked and to save his people. “He shall come as a rushing stream which the Breath of the Lord driveth” (Isaiah 59:19).

More inclusive and more spiritual than the feeling of the Greek for Nature was that of the Hebrew. To him all nature was, as it were, the garment of God, hiding and yet revealing his personal presence. Or it was a symphony of praise filling the earth, as on solemn feast-days the music of Israel’s Te Deums filled the Temple courts. With such a conception of Nature, the Hebrew felt a security in her more awful manifestations which the Greek could not have known.

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The Greek and the Hebrew thought of God was closely allied to their thought of Nature. Indeed, their thought of Nature was part of their thought of God. We have just seen that the Hebrew looked upon the earth as a temple filled with the harmony of a mighty orchestra whose music was the gladness of the world. “In his temple everything saith glory,” sang the Hebrew poet (Psalms 29:9). .The Greek conception of Nature was also closely connected with his worship. But, unlike that of the Hebrew, his worship was tinged with distrust. For his lack of confidence in the deity there was abundant justification. The most reliable authority from which to ascertain the nature of Greek theological beliefs is Homer. He, with Hesiod, was regarded by the Greeks themselves as the founder of the national religion. It is to Homer, then, that we must turn for authentic information about early Greek theological beliefs. Here we find that the nature of the gods was far from being such as to inspire implicit confidence. Though immortal, they are not omnipotent. There was a point beyond which they could not give to man the help he needed. For every man’s destiny was controlled by a fate to which even the gods were subject, and which neither men nor gods could alter. Moreover, the gods were thought to be to a certain extent capricious. To secure and retain their favor men could not afford to neglect them, but must observe the omens by which they were thought to make known their wishes. Above all, man should be reverent, and religiously practice moderation in his conduct and in his thoughts. Otherwise the gods might easily become offended or jealous, and withdraw their favor. Nor were the gods indissolubly connected with the moral order of the world. This is shown by the fact that the punishment of crime, both in this world and the next, was committed to the Furies, or Erinyes. Such gods, with their limitations, their caprices, and their deviations from moral rectitude, could never have fully satisfied the deeper needs of the human spirit, nor ever have exercised any strong moral influence. That they were found inadequate is proved by the changes that Greek theology underwent in the 6th century B.C.E., when Greek religion became more monotheistic, and when Aeschylus and Sophocles by their criticism of existing beliefs voiced the new spirit of rationalism. Yet, in spite of the rise in Greece of the rationalistic, and even of the philosophic spirit, the Greeks never attained to a complete realization of a god who “ruleth by his power forever; his eyes behold the nations” (Psalms 66:7); whose “faithfulness is unto all generations” (Psalms 119:90); who, as the Judge of all the earth, cannot but do right (Genesis 18:25).

In the universal presence of the deity both the Greek and the Hebrew implicitly believed. The conception of an absentee God, ruling the world by a cunningly devised system of interferences, it was left for later theologians to formulate. Both peoples believed heartily in what has since been called the immanence of God, but the accompaniments of this belief were in the case of the two peoples somewhat different. Plutarch in the Morals wrote:

“Polycrates was formidable at Samos, and so was Periander at Corinth; but no man ever feared either of them that had escaped to an equal and free government. But he that dreads the divine government. . . .Whither can he remove? Whither can he fly? What land, what sea can he find where God is not?”

Similarly, and yet in how different a spirit, the Hebrew poet sings (Psalms 139:7-9):

Whither shall I go from thy spirit,
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.

The difference is due to the greater confidence the Hebrew poet felt in the presence of the deity, a confidence due to his exultant belief that he could not escape the Lord’s loving care.

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Certain correspondences and differences have been pointed out between the Greek and the Hebrew attitude toward life, and toward Nature; and an explanation for these differences has been sought in the fundamental theological conceptions of the two peoples. Arnold’s distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism is totally misleading in that he attributes to Hebraism an austerity and somber gloom which really did not characterize it.

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