Philhellenism and antisemitism: Matthew Arnold and his German models

Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Gossman, Lionel

The substance of Nature and Spirit must have confronted us, must have taken the shape of something alien to us, before it can become our object. Unhappy he whose immediate world of feelings has been alienated from him--for this means nothing less than the snapping of those bonds of faith, love, and trust which unite heart and head in a holy friendship. The alienation which is the condition of theoretical erudition does not require this moral pain, or the sufferings of the heart, but only the easier pain and strain of the imagination which is occupied with something not given in immediate experience, something foreign, something pertaining to recollection, to memory and the thinking mind. ("On Classical Studies" 327-28)

The patriarch of Judaism appears in Hegel's early writings as having deliberately chosen the most extreme and inhuman form of alienation:

Abraham, born in Chaldea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father's company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. He did this without having been injured or disowned, without the grief which after a wrong or an outrage signifies love's enduring need, when love, injured but not lost, goes in quest of a new fatherland in order to flourish and enjoy itself there. The first act which made Abraham the progenitor of the nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth (Joshua 24.2), he spurned. (he Spirit of Christianity" 185)

As a result, the world was forever disenchanted. The Jews never knew the harmonious "second paradise" of the Greeks. They lived in a world that they regarded as utterly alien to them, to which they had no ties, and for which they had no love. With no sense of the immanence of the divine, they had no feeling for beauty. "An image of God was just stone or wood to them;...they despise the image because it does not manage them, and they 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 with the utilitarianism of the despised, practical, "philistine" English.

Hegel constantly contrasts the Greeks and the Jews, invariably to the disadvantage of the latter. In their representations of man's struggle with nature, the Greeks seek reconciliation, an end to dualism: "Deucalion and Pyrrha,... after the flood in their time, invited men once again to friendship with the world, to nature, made them forget their need and their hostility in joy and pleasure, made a peace of love, were the progenitors of more beautiful peoples, and made their age the mother of a newborn natural life which maintained its bloom of youth." Noah, in contrast, sought mastery over nature at the price of submission to an all-powerful force alien to both himself and nature. Likewise Abraham, as we saw, left his fatherland but refused to become attached to any new land. "The groves which often gave him coolness and shade he soon left again; in them he had theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but he did not tarry in them with the love which would have made them worthy of the Divinity and participant in Him. He 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, and he made this conspicuous by a physical peculiarity imposed on himself and his posterity." Cadmus and Danaus, in contrast, who also forsook their fatherland, "went in quest of a soil where they would be free and they sought it that they might love...In order to live in pure, beautiful unions, as was no longer given to them in their own land, [they] carried their gods forth with them...[and] by their gentle arts and manners won over the less civilized aborigines and intermingled with them to form a happy and gregarious people" ("The Spirit of Christianity" 182-86).