The Body and Its Desires

for Matthew Arnold

The gods consume nectar and ambrosia on Olympus
and amuse themselves by looking down on us
dispassionately. Cool detachment is a sardonic business.
Hellenism insists we see things as they are.
For right thinking, the body and its desires are a barrier;
we are cautioned to keep the mind completely clear.

Hebraism counters that the body and its desires
are a barrier to right action. The Lord requires
clarity of thought chastened by strictness of conscience.
The principal rubric of the Law is studied obedience
to the will of God. The Lord has a vertical presence—
aloof except to chastise with corrective fires.

In the time it takes a Sierra redwood in the ageing
of two thousand rings, many gods have come
and gone in the public square. Further, we become
weary of our own fungible ground of being—
the dreary march of certainties by which we cling—
as we amble toward the dust from which we came.

More crucial over the years than definitions of the divine
are behavioral tendencies toward either thought
or action when it comes to the body and its desires.
The tension between Hellenism and Hebraism defines
every age, and will continue, like it or not,
to shape our every outcome of action or thought.

NOTE: The first two stanzas of this poem are identical to What Kind of God? in which I posted on October 17, 2024. There are two versions of this poem. What Kind of God? is for the fourth Sunday of the Epiphany, Year A. This second version is the secular version in which I look at Matthew Arnold’s contrasting of Hebraism and Hellenism. See chapter 4 of Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy,” published in 1869.