Hellenism and Heraism
网上填报志愿模拟演练-真像造句
TOPIC 14: HEBRAISM vs. HELLENISM
The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism,
as of all great spiritual disciplines,
is no
doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation.
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see
things as they really are; the
uppermost idea
with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Nothing
can do away with
this ineffaceable difference.
The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires
is, that
they hinder right thinking, the
Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder
right
acting.' The governing idea of Hellenism
is spontaneity of consciousness; that of
Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
Of two
disciplines laying their main stress, the one, on
clear intelligence, the other,
on firm
obedience; the one, on comprehensively knowing the
grounds of one's duty,
the other, on
diligently practicing it; the one, on taking all
possible care (to use Bishop
Wilson's words
again) that the light we have be not darkness, the
other, that according
to the best light we
have we diligently walk,--the priority naturally
belongs to that
discipline which braces all
man's moral powers, and founds for him an
indispensable
basis of character. Hebraism and
Hellenism are, neither of them, the law of human
development, as their admirers are prone to
make them; they are, each of them,
contributions to human development, -- august
contributions, invaluable contributions;
and
each showing itself to us more august, more
invaluable, more preponderant over
the other
The nations of our modern world, children of that
immense and salutary
movement which broke up
the Pagan world, inevitably stand to Hellenism in
a
relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in
a relation which magnifies it. The
Reformation
has been often called a Hebraising revival, a
return to the ardour and
sincereness of
primitive Christianity.
In the sixteenth
century, therefore, Hellenism re-entered the
world, and again stood
in presence of
Hebraism,--a Hebraism renewed and purged. history
of an
Indo-European people vary from those of
a Semitic people. Hellenism is of
Indo-
European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth;
Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism
is of Semitic growth;
Fatal
war between Flesh & Spirit
Helenism Hebraism
Beauty Helenism and
virtuous and morals Hebraism
• Hebraism
and Hellenism, we give these two forces the names
from the two races of men
who have supplied
the most signal and splendid manifestations of
them.
• To get rid of one‘s ignorance, to see
things as they are, and by seeing them as they are
to
see them in their beauty, is the simple and
attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out
before human nature. But there is something
which thwarts and spoils all our efforts. This
something is sin which fills in Hebraism. Sin,
which is the main business of our lives to
hate and oppose, impedes man‘s passage
to perfection. There are difficulties in knowing
oneself and conquering oneself. The discipline
of the Old Testament may be summed up
as a
discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin;
the discipline of the New Testament,
as a
discipline teaching us to die to it.
• As
Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing
things in their essence and beauty, as a
grand
and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism
speaks of becoming conscious of
sin, of
wakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this
kind.
• At the bottom of both the Greek and
the Hebrew notion is the desire, native in man,
for
reason and the will of God, the feeling
after the universal order, -- in a word, the love
of
God. But, the governing idea of Hellenism
is spontaneity of consciousness, is to see
things as they really are; that of Hebraism,
strictness of conscience, conduct and
obedience.
• The final aim of both
Hellenism and Hebraism is the same: man‘s
perfection or salvation.
Here we mainly focus
on Jude the Obscure, in which they prevail
between the lines.
Sue Bridehead, who is
first seen working at Miss Fontover‘s Anglican
shop in Christminister,
should buy the statues
of the Venus and the Apollo and regard them as a
treasure. She quotes
Swinburne and has read
the chapter in Gibbon‘s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire on Julian
the Apostate, the Roman
emperor who tried to end Christianity and revive
paganism（异教徒）, his
dying words being reputedly
‗Thou hast conquered, O Galilean‘.
• When
Jude is rejected by Christminister, he moves to
the cathedral city of Melchester,
hoping to
qualify as a Church licentiate and become an
altruistic curate in some remote
parish or
city slum. Sue tells him that ‗intellect at
Christminister is new wine in old
bottles‘,
and that ‗the medievalism of Christminister must
go, be sloughed off, or
Christminister itself
will have to go‘. She contrasts the pagan sensuous
love lyricism of
the Song of Solomon with the
theological interpretation in its chapter-
headings, and tells
Jude flippantly that he is
‗in the Tractarian stage just now‘. Sue yearns for
the
enlightenment of mankind; ‗I did want and
long to ennoble some men to high aims‘, she
tells the initiate Jude.
After Sue has
been released by her husband Phillotson, Jude
(legally married to Arabella, who had
left
him) renounces the Church and lives with her.
Arabella who returned from Australia observes
the pair, ‗almost the two parts of a single
whole‘, with some envy at the Great Wessex
Agricultural
Show. One little effect
demonstrates their happiness. In the pavilion of
flowers, she puts her face
within an inch of
various kinds of roses to smell them. She tells
Jude she would like to put her
face ‗quite
into them‘, but suppose it is against the rules.
He gives her a playful push to effect her
wish, and she good-humorously rejoins, ‗The
policemen will be down to us, and I shall say it
was
my husband‘s fault!‘ The policeman is the
sign of Victorian constraints in this novel. When
Jude
asks her if she is happy and why, she
replies
‗I feel that we have returned to Greek
joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness
and
sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-
five centuries have taught the race since their
time, as one
of your Christminister luminaries
says.‘
The luminary is Matthew Arnold,
who, while Professor of Poetry at Oxford, had
written in
‗Pagan and Medieval Religious
Sentiment‘, ‗The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan
life is not sick or
sorry‘, and declared that
the sentiment of this religion of pleasure‘ has
‗much that is natural in it‘,
and that
‗humanity will gladly accept it if it can live by
it‘.
There were those, such as
Tennyson in Idylls of the King, who feared it
would lead to licence.
Christminister cannot
accept it; after the loss of her Children. While
still in her right mind, Sue
says:
‗We
went about loving each other too much-indulging
ourselves to utter selfishness with each
other! We said-do you remember? –that we would
make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature‘s
intention, Nature‘s law and raison detre that
we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded
us-instincts which civilization had taken upon
itself to thwart.‘
• The unenlightened
medievalism of Christminister persists to the
tragic end, the
‗crucifixion‘ of Sue and Jude.
The loss of her children is seen as a sign of
God‘s anger
that she and Jude have ignored
ecclesiastical conformity by living together
without being
officially married. Her
prostration below the Cross in the ‗ceremonial‘
church of St Silas,
and her declaration that
‗Arabella‘s child killing mine was a judgement -
the right slaying
the wrong‘ makes Jude
explode with hatred of ‗Christianity, or
mysticism, or
Sacerdotalism, or whatever it
may be called‘. Sue‘s intellect has sinned against
God, she
must do penance by prostituting
herself in re-marriage to Phillotson. Her wedding
is a
funeral. Jude‘s conformity in re-marrige
to Arabella is a satirical caricature. He is
‗gin-drunk‘; Sue is ‗creed（教条）-drunk‘.
The assumption that ultimate ideal is a
life spent soley in pursuit of piety and
righteouness: the
belief in the Puritan
doctrine----Hebraism
To those who condemed
this existence base on sensuality and aesthetics,
and entertainment was
sinful
Hellenism was
the opposite of Hebraism. The former term stood
for ―spontaneity,‖ and for ―things
as they
really are; the latter term stood for‖ strictness
of conscience,‖ and for ―conduct and
obedience.‖ Human history always oscillated
between there two models.
Philosophical
Conflicts
Two philosophies:to strive to now
beauty( Hellenism) VS to endeavor to be virtuous
and
moral(Hebraism).
Victorian lifestyles
in England exhibited conflicting philosophical
viewpoints, The success of
imperialism has
contributed to wealth, decadence, and frivolity of
many upper class citizens.
Philosophical
Conflicts
Jude, a dealy war waged between
flesh and spirit---- H vs H
Under the pressure
of poverty and social disapproval of the
relationship, and overtaken by the
tragedy in
death of their Children---- (a reminder?)., Sue
returns to Philotson and the church; and
Jude
deeply shocked by her abandoning her free thinking
principles, is inveigled back by Arabella,
and
dies wretchedly, not yet 30.
Hardy‘s Fatalism
& Christian Mysticism
Man—the victim of forces
predominantly malicious, projections of his own
spirit which, weighing
the scale of human
destiny towards the sinister and evil, form a kind
of democracy of the whole
human spiritual life
in which the bad forces are almost certain always
to form a parliamentary
majority. (1009)
Obviously, my study adopts the
former methods. Thus, this methodology guides us
to
discover some quotation of both biblical
doctrines and stories and Greek Myths in
Jude
the Obscure so that we can put further efforts on
the reflection of two schools of
philosophical
thoughts on the conflicts in the novel.