Classical Scholarship and Neo-Hellenism

Classical scholarship developed into Altertumswissenschaften , founded by Winckelmann, who gave a new meaning to the humanities. A whole

[1] Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Erinnerungen 1848–1914 (Leipzig: Koehler, 1928), p. 246. I have dealt with this centenary speech in my essay "Die Antike als Leitbild der deutschen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Bedrohte Lebensordnung. Studien zur humanistischen Soziologie (Zurich: Artemis, 1978), pp. 93–105.

generation of German intellectuals, inspired by his work, found in antiquity a spiritual home in which national self-consciousness could arise. This new approach to classical antiquity sprang from the new conception of history. Winckelmann was not interested primarily in human triumphs as displayed in literary and artistic works. Rather he found in these works, especially in the concreteness of sculpture, religious revelation of divine forces and transcendent ideals. In this light, to imitate the ancients does not refer to style and form; Winckelmann explicitly defines imitation as becoming intimate with inimitable and therefore divine images. This intimacy should be so perfect that a scholar could make his own what a Greek said to an ignoramus about Zeuxis's portrait of Helena: "Take my eyes and a goddess will appear to you."^[2] To use his eyes to discover and reveal the divine aspect of worldly phenomena is the task of the scientist, the goal of his research.

Winckelmann discovered in Greek art the famous "noble simplicity and serene greatness."^[3] These ideals could be identified with the ideal of youth. In fact, Greek art represented youth as harmony in the same way that Greek poetry and philosophy were seen by Herder and Hegel as harmonious products of a nation in the youth of human history. The German nation was taken to be young in comparison with others.

Youth, natural beauty, harmony, originality, freedom, and patriotism were the principles by which the Greeks could help to shape a fresh German Volkstum . This would be purified of the artificial, unoriginal, and rhetorical Roman tradition and its offspring, French civilization. Professors of classics such as Friedrich Ast (Landshut), Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann (Danzig), Franz Passow (Weimar), Friedrich Jacobs (Munich) found in this affinity of Germans and Greeks the philosophical and historical rationale for a German national education based on learning Greek.^[4]

This neo-Hellenism, as Rudolf Pfeiffer accurately designates the new epoch of classical scholarship,^[5] was in the Platonic idealist tradition. But in contrast to earlier forms of idealism, the new scholarship did not take its image of man from a transcendental world of ideas or the heavens. Nineteenth-century neo-Hellenism, which spread out from Germany, found its ideal embodied in the historical model of Greek youth. Therefore,

[2] Johann Winckelmann, "Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerskunt [1755]," Sämmtliche Werke , vol. 1, ed. Josef Eiselein (Donauöschingen, 1825), p. 8.

[3] Ibid., p. 30.

[4] See Friedrich Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universitäten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters his zur Gegenwart. Mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den klassischen Unterricht , vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1921), pp. 229–241; Ast, Jacobs, Evers, Jachmann, eds., Dokumente des Neuhumanismus I , 2d ed., (Weinheim: Beltz, 1962), p. 9; Franz Passow, Vermischte Schriften (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1843), pp. 15–19.

[5] Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 167.

to develop into an authentic modern man one had to know through research the concrete realizations of the Greek Volksgeist as found in its history, geography, law, philosophy, literature, language, fine arts, medicine, and so on.^[6]