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Nineteenth century English poet Matthew Arnold created a basis for analyzing literature and life from what he believed to be the two foundations of all modern culture Hellenism and Hebraism. Arnold characterized Hellenism, typified best by the ancient Greeks who supplied the name, as sweetness and light. Hellenistic influence on culture is manifest in appreciation for the apparent gentleness in the beauty of nature, coupled with acknowledgment of its power and wildness. Hebraism, the tradition of the Hebrews and subsequent Jews and Christians, is built on fire and strength. Its focus is primarily conduct and morality, and tradition rather than custom. These two foundations, Arnold says, ought to be balanced in ones adherence to them. Evil follows as a result of an imbalance of the two, and conflict results from the tension they can generate together. Just such a tension or imbalance often propels the plot of The Scarlet Letter. Let it be known that we speak of the terms Hellenism and Hebraism as characteristics in people in things, manners of action and thought, or ways of life; the terms as such, while maintaining religious connotation, are divorced from the religious denotations they carry with them. Hellenism must not be equated with Paganism, and Hebraism with Judaism and Christianity. Through the characters of Hester, Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, Hawthorne effects the message that a balance of Hellenism and Hebraism, however he may have described them, is the condition in which one is enabled to pursue moral perfection.

Hawthorne develops the contrast of Hellenism and Hebraism in the first chapter of the novel. He writes that the founders of a new colony. . .have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison (5). The reference to virgin soil, so close syntactically to cemetery and prison generates a sense of violation of something pure and beautiful. His assertion that these allotments are the earliest necessities creates an immediate and damning characterization of the colony; they are practiced violators of the innocent virginity of nature, which presents the irony of their punishing Hester for a crime of sexuality. The message of the imagery is clear life in the Puritan community yields imprisonment and death. But Hawthorne plants a seed of hope in the midst of such harshness. The rose-bush beside the prison door provides a sense of hope to the criminal that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him (6). This hope is embodied in Hester Prynne, and it is her deep heart that will be kind and merciful, even to those who oppress her. Hawthorne does not trust his reader to discover this, and invites us to hope that this bush will symbolize some sweet moral blossom (6). Hence the sweetness of Hellenistic, nature-loving life, when added to the strictness of the Puritan community is a means to moral blossoming.

But Hesters redemption is through Pearl. The relentless attack from the God-fearing Puritans would be unbearable for her without Pearl. Pearl links herself with the symbol of moral blossoming by saying later in the book that she has no father, but was picked from the rose-bush outside the prison door. She is thereby simultaneously the symbol for Hesters moral transgression, and the catalyst for her moral reparation and blossom. Hester and Dimmesdales union was so foreign and unknown to the Puritan society that its product, Pearl, was equally foreign. As the union is sinful and cannot last, Pearl benefits Hester by maintaining the wild characteristics that one needs in order to neutralize the acidity of unmixed Hebraism that punishes Hester, and imprisons and paralyzes all the community. The paralysis with which the dark, fire-and-brimstone attitude infects the Puritans is countered for Hester in Pearls sweet, mythological communion with nature and her endless supply of energy. Having already within her a sense of the gravity of her actions and the responsibility for their consequences, Hester can balance her outlook on life to an almost perfect degree by allowing Pearls Hellenistic sweetness to course through her veins. She sees herself neither as a carriage of sin, nor as a beast of nature. Hester has the power of communion with both society and nature, but though the sun shrinks from her; she is neither utterly rebellious, nor utterly submissive in her conduct. This balance allows Hester to realize some form of peace with the past, and to begin perfecting her morality.

While Pearl is the instrument of her mothers balance, she herself is as yet incomplete. She is untamed to such an extent that her natural home seems to be in the state of nature, away from the presence of any civilized society. When she enters the woods with her mother, the flowers on the forest floor appeared to whisper, adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me! and she was gentler there than in the grassy-margined streets of the settlement, or in her mothers cottage (1). Her inability to commune with other people results from her utter lack of moral responsibility. She is a daughter of Hester, and of Nature, and nothing else. She is not student, or a friend, or a parishioner, or anything else. She therefore does not have a role in which she can form her moral character. Likewise, she does not have a role that confines or limits her. When asked by Hester, child, what art thou? Pearl replies O, I am your little Pearl! (68). The answer is half correct. She is Hesters little Pearl, and Natures little Pearl, and as yet nothing else. But this imperfection in Pearl is temporary, and the final stages of the book reveal her incipient introduction to human society, the balancing of her Hellenism with a touch of Hebraism. She achieves this introduction by discovering and being able to recognize Dimmesdale as a father figure. Pearl is tamed on the scaffold by her genuine emotion for her father, an emotion which makes her not just a daughter, but part of a family--something she demonstrated a desire for throughout the novel by asking Dimmesdale to meet them in public. Her tears on the scaffold are that of a daughter for her father, for the tradition of Family and union with other people, and they are her admission into the world of society, into the perfect balance in which one can achieve moral greatness.

Though Dimmesdale is Pearls entrance into a balanced life, he himself cannot benefit as Hester does from Pearls untamed energy. Unable to maintain the precious spark of rebellion that he began in his union with Hester, he sees, rightfully, its sinfulness. But he sees only its sinfulness, and cannot but make himself a slave to the Hebraistic tradition that surrounds him. This tradition that punished Hester rightfully, continues to punish Dimmesdale entirely within his own mind. The strength and fire of the strict Puritan tradition neither strengthen nor purge him, as they did for Hester, because he cannot see the sweetness and light to which they intend to guide him. He becomes crippled and weakened by his indefatigable guilt, and Chillingworths calculated perpetuation of it. Dimmesdale becomes so weak that he cannot even bring himself to see that he needs to escape Chillingworth, despite his intuition over the years. Hester needs to tell him, thou must dwell no longer with this man (14), and she later recognizes that has been crushed under this seven years weight of misery (15). If Dimmesdale is to be redeemed, it will not be by the escape for which Hesters seven years balance of punishment and forgiveness has prepared her. Dimmesdale also lacks the ability to see anything other than his one fault. He falsely believes that by keeping this fault hidden, he can do good for others which would otherwise be impossible. What he does not recognize is that despite keeping it hidden, his sin is the very reason he is able to do good for others, and that by hiding this fact, he is negating his own good effects, and maintaining the imbalance in the Puritan community which paralyzes him. The role Dimmesdale performs as empathetic preacher makes impossible the method of escape that Hester suggests, and that he at first accepts.

Dimmesdale does escape, however, in a different sense, and Hester unknowingly provides him with both the energy and the vision--the two things he lacks--to do so. Hester, underestimating Chillingworths effect, is amazed at Dimmesdales inability to see anything but the dark side of his nature. She exclaims in the woods, is the world then so narrow? (14), and though she points him in the wrong direction, she succeeds in shaking Dimmesdale from his course to self-destruction. Refreshed by the renewed love for Hester in the woods, and made to consider the possibility of reconciliation, Dimmesdale returns to his house with the ability to share in the peace that Hester has earned. It is unclear from his words whether at his death he has truly realized the sweetness of forgiveness, but the action he took was the means to achieve this. We have two hints from the text that may resolve this uncertainty. The first is that for the first time in the book, despite the Christian setting, we hear the words God is merciful (171), and it is Dimmesdale himself who speaks them. The significance would not be much, but for the fact that the words are nowhere else in the text, suggesting that perhaps this is more of a profound insight than it might at first appear. The second and more obvious hint is that Chillingworth acknowledges that there was no place so secret,--no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me, --save on this very scaffold! (171), and later reverts into repeating thou hast escaped me! (17).

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