Chapter 2 continues.
Section B: The Impression of Men
Part 3: The Idea of Beauty
Boman starts off here with a word-salad. Any attempt to discuss beauty is very challenging. We all know what it is when we see it, but it’s very difficult to describe what it is in the abstract. You can assess any visual presentation as beautiful, but the moment you start to point out elements, you lose the focus of the whole. As he notes, the individual elements themselves aren’t necessarily beautiful. He also notes that the viewer must be able to comprehend something of the presentation in order to its beauty to be recognized.
Therein lies at least one key: It must trigger a sense of what is good in those who behold beauty. Those who don’t like something will not see its beauty. For Greeks, it was anything that spoke to their sense of harmony, tranquility and order. As one begins to experience beauty on one level, it sharpens the appreciation of beauty by types, not just one example. If they continue in developing an appetite for beauty in the world around them, it carries them to a sense of universal appreciation for the beauty in reality itself. Plato treated this as progress in self-development.
Thus, Boman starts trying to pull the Hebrew world into this by equating blessings from above as equivalent to the goodness Greek men see in the material world. Again, he sometimes tries so hard to blend the Hebrew and Greek that he slips away too far from one or the other, almost making it unrecognizable. Equating mental and spiritual is, I think, going a bit too far.
He does try to distinguish them again, by pointing out that the Greek sense of beauty would point to the Hebrew sense of beauty as somewhat barbaric and lacking a high development. In the Song of Solomon, the sense of what is beautiful is that which is as it should be in terms of moral valuation. Greeks believed one should discover what beauty was or could be, while the Hebrew came with preconceived notions, with the definitions already established by revelation.
But Boman doesn’t say it like that. Hebrew culture is revealed from Heaven, not built by men. It is drawn from a God who is entirely unlike us, and yet paradoxically familiar to us if we seek Him. Greek culture is just the opposite, making their gods nothing more than supermen who aren’t radically different in their behavior and value system than fairly ordinary Greek people. These are pretty basic statements about the differences that you might learn in classical studies programs going back centuries, but Boman skips past that.
One thing that we would struggle to grasp beyond it being a mere intellectual recognition: It appears that an ancient Hebrew would have no appreciation for the kind of thing that so enraptures our western minds in something like well-staged photography of natural wonders. We are seized by such things, and Hebrew people would have probably not have given it much thought unless it was some place they knew, some place in which they had blessed experiences of God’s favor. Their appreciation would be on entirely different grounds, entirely different terms. Boman struggles to tell us that.
He does note that Hebrews seemed to have an obsession with both red and white colors. Further, they didn’t seem to distinguish much between red shading into brown and gold. Part of that is because they didn’t have our color-wheel and the analytical structure that was possible only with artificially produced colors. For Israelis, red dye was very expensive, as was the process of getting anything close to true white. Of course, gold was also quite expensive. The point would be just how unobtainable those colors were when valued against any blessing God chose to do for them.
I’m frankly disappointed that Boman’s work lacks basic comparative civilizations studies.
Any intentional reading of classical literature was over two decades ago for me, and now I only encounter things like Plato or Aristotle incidentally through other stuff I am reading, like this book, so I have to ask you a question that probably does not have a simple answer because there was so much development or change in Greek thought/religion over time.
I have been taught that the Greeks had no actual (as in functional or ‘real’ in the Biblical sense) concept of spirit at all. Human beings were soul and body, the ‘gods’ were basically superhumans as Bowman says, and if this is indeed the case, then why would Bowman say the Greeks had any kind of spiritual perspective at all? Is is simply a matter of equivocation? He seems to lack the transcendent/paradoxical flavor that would tell of his own faith if it was of a certain quality, but on the other hand, he is writing mainly for academics, and faith/spirit has no place in such an atmosphere.
It is well established that the Greeks did not believe in an eternal realm. The most fundamental statements (Philosophy 101) about the Greek philosophers is that they insisted that this realm is all there is. This was the whole point of their reaction to Paul at Mars Hill. Any kind of resurrection was impossible in Greek minds because there is no eternal spirit to bring back. When we die, that’s it.
This kind of thinking is fundamental to western epistemology. Any Christian notions of eternity are injected into this matrix, and it’s not very well received. Most church people struggle with any eastern notions of eternity; church doctrine itself is often worded in ways that sound more like pagan mythology than genuine biblical mysticism. Boman seems genuinely confused about the issue, and actually believes the two are not that different. I get the feeling Boman was not actually trying to inject a valid Hebrew conception into the Greek; I believe he is trying to pull down the Hebrew conception to a more Greek level, because he simply didn’t have a grasp of the Hebrew mindset.
I remember reading about a study concerning some indigenous tribes, I think in South America, and their perception of color. They could perceive many shades of green that most of us would regard as all one shade by our naked eye. The implication is that environmental pressures require the tribesmen to distinguish between different plants for survival….different plants had different uses for them. Their language probably reflects that as well, I am guessing.
There was a similar article noting the Greeks had no word for blue, assuming because they never saw blue eyes or blue flowers.