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Updated: May 24, 2025
And hence came the strong reaction against Greek ideas among the bulk of the people, which prevented any permanent fusion of cultures in the land of Israel. The Hellenism of Alexandria was a more genuine product. The liberal policy of the early Ptolemies made their capital a centre of art, literature, science, and philosophy.
But I think that, in the intoxication of a quick success, much that is required for a true understanding of the universe has been forgotten. Something of Hellenism, something, too, of Oriental resignation, must be combined with its hurrying Western self-assertion before it can emerge from the ardour of youth into the mature wisdom of manhood.
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. They are inevitably prone to take Hebraism as the law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it, however precious.
It was not merely a local triumph of Hebraism over Hellenism, but it represents the re-entry of the East into the civilisation of the West. Alexander the Great had occidentalised the Orient. But with the success of the Judaeans against the Seleucids and of the Parthians against the Romans, the East reasserted itself. And the newly recovered influence has never again been surrendered.
The same unhealthy appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head.
This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to many people. Those who disagree with the philosophy will not quarrel with the beauty itself. Hellenism is one of the forces which are continually being buried and re-found, and which, like talismans, have a disturbing power when they fall afresh into human hands.
This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power of re-enforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement. That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men.
He could not believe that it would ever be superseded, and he wished to contribute to its better administration. He had, in fact, a much more conservative outlook than Plato, who was inclined to think with Isocrates, that the revival of monarchy was the only thing that could preserve Hellenism as things were then.
And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one little wink of sleep over. "Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reformation too, Hebraising child of the Renascence and offspring of its fervour, rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was, the subtle Hellenic leaven of the Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective parts in the Reformation, of Hebraism and of Hellenism, are not easy to separate.
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