Western and Christendom roots wind back to Athens and Jerusalem and this excellent article from the Imaginative Conservative explores those.
An excerpt.
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Greek quest for excellence and order and beauty to do with the Hebrew quest for the living God? This is the question the Church Fathers asked themselves, a query that we still must raise from time to time. And in our day in particular, it is the question that Christian educators in the West should make their primary concern. For the liberal arts are indisputably Greek in their orientation: and yet those bright gods on Mt. Olympus, who mingled with men (and women!), jealously coveted sacrifices, and accepted official commemoration in marble temples and olive groves, have little to do with the hidden presence who spoke from a burning bush and forbade David to build him a temple. And the center of our faith—that lonely one who hung on the cross at Golgotha and redefined the purposes of life—took as his earthly ancestry the Hebrew tradition, with its pervasive tendency to regard as idolatry any representation such as we in the West have called art. Writing a poem or painting a picture is a little like fashioning a golden calf. Hence, at first glance, nothing seems further from the concerns of art and human culture than the Scriptural heritage with which Jesus Christ aligned himself. And yet the Western intellectual tradition contains a Hebrew strain even more surely than a Hellenic one. Perhaps, then, educators need to take a look at the peculiar contradictions and the wide inclusiveness of this much maligned and greatly misunderstood “master narrative,” as its detractors have called the Western tradition.
“More than a century ago, in his essay “Hebraism and Hellenism,” Matthew Arnold addressed the contradictions the West has faced in inheriting two such diverse strains, attributing much of our cultural difficulties to these conflicting ideas of the good. The object of the Greek way of thought, as he said, is to know rightly; the object of the Hebrew is to do rightly. Perhaps we could rephrase his statements to say that the highest calling of the Greeks is to pass by appearances and “hit the mark” of intellectual truth, whereas the supreme obligation of the Hebrews is to walk in the way of the Lord and on his law to meditate day and night. It has been the complicated task of Christian culture to bring these two imperatives together, and in these changing times it is dangerous to allow either tradition to be lost or to be narrowed into private concerns. No doubt one of the great strengths of Western civilization has been its ability to draw on these two heritages and produce artists and thinkers of sometimes outrageous paradox—witness such thinkers and artists as Augustine, Dante, El Greco, Donne, Milton, Goya, Beethoven, Goethe, Melville, Kierkegaard, Hopkins, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Mahler, Rouault, and Faulkner, among others. All of these manifest a Greek sense of form combined with a Hebraic sense of restlessness and a haunting sense of that darkness we call sin.
“The Greek mode of thought gave rise not only to philosophy, but to the quest for harmony and beauty. It invented philosophy and provided the models for epic, tragedy, and comedy. In their art the Greeks discovered myth and symbol as modes of human imagination that arise from the earth like a cloudy veil wafting up toward the sky, rather than coming down like manna from heaven. The Coleridgean symbol, in particular, proves to be a Greek mode of thought, with its ability to reveal the transcendent in the phenomenal.
“The Israelites had no such figure: For them, the numinous was not to be found in indirection. The glory of the heavens and the wide stretch of the firmament of which the psalmist sang were not mere symbols of something else: They were creations of God, awesome realities which He had made. And Yahweh himself, speaking from the whirlwind to Job, brings home the realization that the creature cannot rival the creator: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you draw Leviathan with a hook? Could you make the mighty nostrils of the horse? And confronted with this mysterium tremendum, Job is abashed, as well he might be. He had heard of Yahweh, he says, but now that he sees him he repents in dust and ashes. He does not actually see God, of course; he is made to “see” only his creation. But in the more intimate mode of Hebraic thought, he hears his word. He knows the artist from the artwork—and is forcibly made aware that God, not he, is the maker. And as a matter of fact, hardly any Old Testament figure is allowed to create, except of course in some of the most gorgeous poetry of praise the world has known. David, who is a man after God’s own heart, is a musician and a singer and—at least one time—a dancer. Deborah and Miriam raise songs of praise. The prophets utter powerful poetry inspired directly by Yahweh. The psalms are ecstatic love poems to a God who is both dominating and reticent—and essentially unknowable. But on the whole, the Israelite was not portrayed as homo faber. For the ancient Hebrews it is not the things one makes that count; rather, it is one’s relation to the God that made all things. How different the Promethean view, which may be taken to represent the Greek attitude toward the status of humankind. According to Aeschylus, after Prometheus taught mortals “all the arts,” they were expected to use their skills to create and to advance civilization. But the Israelites, as the noted Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber comments, made no real contributions to painting or sculpture or architecture. Their task, as he points out, was to work with a more recalcitrant medium: human hearts and wills. And the end of their work was not a monument, but a community.
“But the Israelites gave us the concept of the book and in Exodus the unforgettable liberation epic of the world. They set the pattern for narrative and bequeathed to us a sense of the desert experience and a divine discontent with the things of civilization. They established the norms for lyric poetry. And they passed down to us something radically new: not myth but history, a movement forward in time, and therefore, the sense of an ending. Further, their dominant paradigm was not the lonely masculine hero, as in classical culture, but marriage, man and woman standing side by side as partners—Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel. These are the ancestors: two people working together and, amazingly in the Abraham story, journeying together in Odyssean fashion, surviving by their wits across the many miles that lead from Ur to the land of Canaan. Marriage is the figure the prophets use for Yahweh’s love for his people. A passionate marriage lyric, “The Song of Songs,” with its frank eroticism, can be interpreted by the rabbis as fitting to describe the love of God for humankind, just as it can later be taken by Christian mystics to delineate Christ’s love for his bride, the Church. The awesome God of the Hebrews loves his chosen people passionately, is jealous of them, hurt by them, reproachful of them, sometimes even petulant, but always faithful to them.
“What Greek myth implies is somewhat different: That the gods are children of earth (Gaia) and sky (Uranos), and though mortals are thoroughly second-rate, they are called upon to be as like the gods as they can. Though gods sometimes mix with mortals (Zeus has an indefatigable attraction to beautiful maidens), nonetheless, an “iron sky,” in Pindar’s phrase, divides the two realms. In the very nature of things, humanity is limited by certain natural ties that bind individuals to different orders of being: to the earth, the family, the city, the dead, the divine. They are assigned their moira, their portion, their fate—though they are free to react to it as they will. In the face of their mortality, they endure by what Prometheus calls “blind hopes.” Magnanimity (great-souledness) is the highest virtue; a noble humanism pervades Hellenic art and thought. In striking contrast to the Greek, Hebrew literature assigns immense significance to humankind, made in the image of God, though it enjoins a necessary humility in the face of the creator’s majesty and power. It affirms that mortals are not simply offspring of nature or of Mother Earth but children of the God beyond gods—and obligated through the very fact of their existence. In creating humankind and promising to be present to his people, God has made a covenant with the human race through those who will hear his voice. Thus, in the Hebraic tradition God is to be found by means not so much of human eros as God’s agape, his overwhelming hesed, to use the Hebrew word. And his first act of covenant was creation: all of creation was undertaken from an outpouring generosity, issuing in a creature like himself, in his own image, one that could know and understand and love.”
Retrieved September 18, 2020 from https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/06/jerusalem-claim-louise-cowan-timeless.html
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