← catalogue

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

by George Santayana · English · Gutenberg #48563 · 423,853 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

Author: George Santayana


        
Release date: March 23, 2015 [eBook #48563]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48563

Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION ***
INTERPRETATIONS

OF

POETRY AND RELIGION

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


1900




PREFACE


The following volume is composed of a number of papers written at
various times and already partially printed; they are now revised and
gathered together in the hope that they may lead the reader, from
somewhat different points of approach, to a single idea. This idea is
that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely
in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry
is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it
merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.

It would naturally follow from this conception that religious doctrines
would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters
of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of
religion with science and of the vain and bitter controversies of
sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion
in the soul, when it seeks its sanctions in the sphere of reality,
and forgets that its proper concern is to express the ideal. For the
dignity of religion, like that of poetry and of every moral ideal, lies
precisely in its ideal adequacy, in its fit rendering of the meanings
and values of life, in its anticipation of perfection; so that the
excellence of religion is due to an idealization of experience which,
while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily
false if treated as science. Its function is rather to draw from
reality materials for an image of that ideal to which reality ought
to conform, and to make us citizens, by anticipation, in the world we
crave.

It also follows from our general conception that poetry has a universal
and a moral function. Its rudimentary essays in the region of fancy
and pleasant sound, as well as its idealization of episodes in human
existence, are only partial exercises in an art that has all time and
all experience for its natural subject-matter and all the possibilities
of being for its ultimate theme. As religion is deflected from its
course when it is confused with a record of facts or of natural laws,
so poetry is arrested in its development if it remains an unmeaning
play of fancy without relevance to the ideals and purposes of life. In
that relevance lies its highest power. As its elementary pleasantness
comes from its response to the demands of the ear, so its deepest
beauty comes from its response to the ultimate demands of the soul.

This theory can hardly hope for much commendation either from the
apologists of theology or from its critics. The mass of mankind is
divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for
reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals,
but mad. The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting
ideals as ideals,--and this is all we propose,--although apparently
simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.
If, therefore, the champion of any orthodoxy should be offended at our
conception, which would reduce his artful cosmos to an allegory, all
that could be said to mitigate his displeasure would be that our view
is even less favourable to his opponents than to himself.

The liberal school that attempts to fortify religion by minimizing
its expression, both theoretic and devotional, seems from this point
of view to be merely impoverishing religious symbols and vulgarizing
religious aims; it subtracts from faith that imagination by which faith
becomes an interpretation and idealization of human life, and retains
only a stark and superfluous principle of superstition. For meagre and
abstract as may be the content of such a religion, it contains all
the venom of absolute pretensions; it is no less cursed than the more
developed systems with a controversial unrest and with a consequent
undertone of constraint and suspicion. It tortures itself with the
same circular proofs in its mistaken ambition to enter the plane of
vulgar reality and escape its native element of ideas. It casts a
greater blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous freedom
of thought. For the respect exacted by an establishment is limited and
external, and not greater than its traditional forms probably deserve,
as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth.
A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind remains, under
such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience is not
intimidated, the imagination is not tied up. But the preoccupations of
a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed,
bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest
of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the
soul. In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be
illusion. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in bulk, but
it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

On the other hand, the positivistic school of criticism would seem, if
our theory is right, to have overlooked in its programme the highest
functions of human nature. The environing world can justify itself to
the mind only by the free life which it fosters there. All observation
is observation of brute fact, all discipline is mere repression, until
these facts digested and this discipline embodied in humane impulses
become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination,
the firm basis for ideal constructions in society, religion, and art.
Only as conditions of these human activities can the facts of nature
and history become morally intelligible or practically important. In
themselves they are trivial incidents, gossip of the Fates, cacklings
of their inexhaustible garrulity. To regard the function of man as
accomplished when these chance happenings have been recorded by him or
contributed to by his impulsive action, is to ignore his reason, his
privilege,--shared for the rest with every living creature,--of using
Nature as food and substance for his own life. This human life is not
merely animal and passionate. The best and keenest part of it consists
in that very gift of creation and government which, together with all
the transcendental functions of his own mind, man has significantly
attributed to God as to his highest ideal. Not to see in this rational
activity the purpose and standard of all life is to have left human
nature half unread. It is to look to the removal of certain incidental
obstacles in the work of reason as to the solution of its positive
tasks. In comparison with such apathetic naturalism, all the errors
and follies of religion are worthy of indulgent sympathy, since they
represent an effort, however misguided, to interpret and to use the
materials of experience for moral ends, and to measure the value of
reality by its relation to the ideal.

The moral function of the imagination and the poetic nature of religion
form, then, the theme of the following pages. It may not be amiss to
announce it here, as the rather miscellaneous subjects of these essays
might at first sight obscure the common import of them all.




CONTENTS

      I.   UNDERSTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND MYSTICISM
     II.   THE HOMERIC HYMNS
    III.   THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM
     IV.   THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA
      V.   PLATONIC LOVE IN SOME ITALIAN POETS
     VI.   THE ABSENCE OF RELIGION IN SHAKESPEARE
    VII.   THE POETRY OF BARBARISM
   VIII.   EMERSON
     IX.   A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION
      X.   THE ELEMENTS AND FUNCTION OF POETRY




I


UNDERSTANDING, IMAGINATION, AND MYSTICISM


When we consider the situation of the human mind in Nature, its limited
plasticity and few channels of communication with the outer world, we
need not wonder that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence
and instability in human systems of ideas. The wonder rather is that we
have done so well, that in the chaos of sensations and passions that
fills the mind, we have found any leisure for self-concentration and
reflection, and have succeeded in gathering even a light harvest of
experience from our distracted labours. Our occasional madness is less
wonderful than our occasional sanity. Relapses into dreams are to be
expected in a being whose brief existence is so like a dream; but who
could have been sure of this sturdy and indomitable perseverance in the
work of reason in spite of all checks and discouragements?

The resources of the mind are not commensurate with its ambition. Of
the five senses, three are of little use in the formation of permanent
notions: a fourth, sight, is indeed vivid and luminous, but furnishes
transcripts of things so highly coloured and deeply modified by the
medium of sense, that a long labour of analysis and correction is
needed before satisfactory conceptions can be extracted from it. For
this labour, however, we are endowed with the requisite instrument.
We have memory and we have certain powers of synthesis, abstraction,
reproduction, invention,--in a word, we have understanding. But this
faculty of understanding has hardly begun its work of deciphering the
hieroglyphics of sense and framing an idea of reality, when it is
crossed by another faculty--the imagination. Perceptions do not remain
in the mind, as would be suggested by the trite simile of the seal
and the wax, passive and changeless, until time wear off their sharp
edges and make them fade. No, perceptions fall into the brain rather
as seeds into a furrowed field or even as sparks into a keg of powder.
Each image breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly and subterraneously,
sometimes (when a passionate train is started) with a sudden burst of
fancy. The mind, exercised by its own fertility and flooded by its
inner lights, has infinite trouble to keep a true reckoning of its
outward perceptions. It turns from the frigid problems of observation
to its own visions; it forgets to watch the courses of what should be
its "pilot stars." Indeed, were it not for the power of convention in
which, by a sort of mutual cancellation of errors, the more practical
and normal conceptions are enshrined, the imagination would carry men
wholly away,--the best men first and the vulgar after them. Even as it
is, individuals and ages of fervid imagination usually waste themselves
in dreams, and must disappear before the race, saddened and dazed,
perhaps, by the memory of those visions, can return to its plodding
thoughts.

Five senses, then, to gather a small part of the infinite influences
that vibrate in Nature, a moderate power of understanding to interpret
those senses, and an irregular, passionate fancy to overlay that
interpretation--such is the endowment of the human mind. And what is
its ambition? Nothing less than to construct a picture of all reality,
to comprehend its own origin and that of the universe, to discover
the laws of both and prophesy their destiny. Is not the disproportion
enormous? Are not confusions and profound contradictions to be looked
for in an attempt to build so much out of so little?

Yet the metaphysical ambition we speak of cannot be abandoned, because
whatever picture of things we may carry about in our heads we are bound
to regard as a map of reality; although we may mark certain tracts
of it "unexplored country," the very existence of such regions is
vouched for only by our representation, and is necessarily believed
to correspond to our idea. All we can do is, without abandoning
the aspiration to knowledge which is the inalienable birthright of
reason, to control as best we may the formation of our conceptions; to
arrange them according to their derivation and measure them by their
applicability in life, so prudently watching over their growth that we
may be spared the deepest of sorrows--to survive the offspring of our
own thought.

The inadequacy of each of our faculties is what occasions the intrusion
of some other faculty into its field. The defect of sense calls in
imagination, the defect of imagination calls in reasoning, the defect
of reasoning divination. If our senses were clairvoyant and able to
observe all that is going on in the world, if our instincts were
steady, prompting us to adequate reactions upon these observations, the
fancy might remain free. We should not need to call upon it to piece
out the imperfections of sense and reflection, but we should employ it
only in avowed poetry, only in building dream-worlds alongside of the
real, not interfering with the latter or confusing it, but repeating
its pattern with as many variations as the fertility of our minds
could supply. As it is, the imagination is brought into the service
of sense and instinct, and made to do the work of intelligence. This
substitution is the more readily effected, in that imagination and
intelligence do not differ in their origin, but only in their validity.
Understanding is an applicable fiction, a kind of wit with a practical
use. Common sense and science live in a world of expurgated mythology,
such as Plato wished his poets to compose, a world where the objects
are imaginative in their origin and essence, but useful, abstract, and
beneficent in their suggestions. The sphere of common sense and science
is concentric with the sphere of fancy; both move in virtue of the same
imaginative impulses. The eventual distinction between intelligence and
imagination is ideal; it arises when we discriminate various functions
in a life that is dynamically one. Those conceptions which, after
they have spontaneously arisen, prove serviceable in practice, and
capable of verification in sense, we call ideas of the understanding.
The others remain ideas of the imagination. The shortness of life,
the distractions of passion, and the misrepresentation to which all
transmitted knowledge is subject, have made the testing of ideas by
practice extremely slow in the history of mankind. Hence the impurity
of our knowledge, its confusion with fancy, and its painful inadequacy
to interpret the whole world of human interests. These shortcomings are
so many invitations to foreign powers to intervene, so many occasions
for new waves of imagination to sweep away the landmarks of our old
labour, and flood the whole mind with impetuous dreams.

It is accordingly the profounder minds that commonly yield to the
imagination, because it is these minds that are capable of feeling
the greatness of the problems of life and the inadequacy of the
understanding, with its present resources, to solve them. The same
minds are, moreover, often swayed by emotion, by the ever-present
desire to find a noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution
already hallowed by authority and intertwined inextricably, for those
who have always accepted it, with the sanctions of spiritual life.
Such a coveted conclusion may easily be one which the understanding,
with its basis in sense and its demand for verification, may not be
able to reach. Therefore the impassioned soul must pass beyond the
understanding, or else go unsatisfied; and unless it be as disciplined
as it is impassioned it will not tolerate dissatisfaction. From what
quarter, then, will it draw the wider views, the deeper harmonies,
which it craves? Only from the imagination. There is no other faculty
left to invoke. The imagination, therefore, must furnish to religion
and to metaphysics those large ideas tinctured with passion, those
supersensible forms shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great
sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects. Thus the stone
which the builder, understanding, rejected, becomes the chief stone
of the corner; the intuitions which science could not use remain the
inspiration of poetry and religion.

The imagination, when thus employed to anticipate or correct the
conclusions of the understanding, is of course not called imagination
by those, who appeal to it. The religious teachers call it prophecy or
revelation, the philosophers call it a higher reason. But these names
are merely eulogistic synonyms for imagination, implying (what is
perfectly possible) that the imagination has not misled us. They imply
on the contrary that in the given instances the imagination has hit
upon an ultimate truth. A prophet, unless he be the merely mechanical
vehicle of truths he does not understand, cannot be conceived as
anything but a man of imagination, whose visions miraculously mirror
the truth. A metaphysician who transcends the intellect by his reason
can be conceived only as using his imagination to such good purpose
as to divine by it the ideal laws of reality or the ultimate goals of
moral effort. His reason is an imagination that succeeds, an intuition
that guesses the principle of experience. But if this intuition were of
such a nature that experience could verify it, then that higher reason
or imagination would be brought down to the level of the understanding;
for understanding, as we have defined it, is itself a kind of
imagination, an imagination prophetic of experience, a spontaneity of
thought by which the science of perception is turned into the art of
life. The same absence of verification distinguishes revelation from
science; for when the prophecies of faith are verified, the function
of faith is gone. Faith and the higher reason of the metaphysicians
are therefore forms of imagination believed to be avenues to truth,
as dreams or oracles may sometimes be truthful, not because their
necessary correspondence to truth can be demonstrated, for then they
would be portions of science, but because a man dwelling on those
intuitions is conscious of a certain moral transformation, of a certain
warmth and energy of life. This emotion, heightening his ideas and
giving them power over his will, he calls faith or high philosophy, and
under its dominion he is able to face his destiny with enthusiasm, or
at least with composure.

The imagination, even when its premonitions are not wholly justified
by subsequent experience, has thus a noble role to play in the life
of man. Without it his thoughts would be not only far too narrow
to represent, although it were symbolically, the greatness of the
universe, but far too narrow even to render the scope of his own
life and the conditions of his practical welfare. Without poetry and
religion the history of mankind would have been darker than it is. Not
only would emotional life have been poorer, but the public conscience,
the national and family spirit, so useful for moral organization and
discipline, would hardly have become articulate. By what a complex
and uninspired argumentation would the pure moralist have to insist
upon those duties which the imagination enforces so powerfully in
oaths sworn before the gods, in commandments written by the finger of
God upon stone tablets, in visions of hell and heaven, in chivalrous
love and loyalty, and in the sense of family dignity and honour? What
intricate, what unavailing appeals to positive interests would have to
be made before those quick reactions could be secured in large bodies
of people which can be produced by the sight of a flag or the sound
of a name? The imagination is the great unifier of humanity. Men's
perceptions may be various, their powers of understanding very unequal;
but the imagination is, as it were, the self-consciousness of instinct,
the contribution which the inner capacity and demand of the mind makes
to experience. To indulge the imagination is to express the universal
self, the common and contagious element in all individuals, that
rudimentary potency which they all share. To stimulate the imagination
is to produce the deepest, the most pertinacious emotions. To repress
it is to chill the soul, so that even the clearest perception of the
truth remains without the joy and impetuosity of conviction. The
part played by imagination is thus indispensable; but obviously the
necessity and beneficence of this contribution makes the dangers
of it correspondingly great. Wielding a great power, exercising an
omnipresent function, the imagination may abuse a great force. While
its inspirations coincide with what would be the dictates of reason,
were reason audible in the world, all is well, and the progress of man
is accelerated by his visions; but being a principle _a priori_ the
imagination is an irresponsible principle; its rightness is an inward
rightness, and everything in the real world may turn out to be disposed
otherwise than as it would wish. Our imaginative preconceptions
are then obstacles to the perception of fact and of rational duty;
the faith that stimulated our efforts and increased our momentum,
multiplies our wanderings. The too hasty organization of our thoughts
becomes the cause of their more prolonged disorganization, for to the
natural obscurity of things and the difficulty of making them fit
together among themselves, we add the cross lights of our prejudices
and the impossibility of fitting reality into the frame we have made
for it in our ignorance of its constitution and extent. And as we love
our hopes, and detest the experience that seems to contradict them,
we add fanaticism to our confusion. The habits of the imagination, in
conflict with the facts of sense, thus come to cloud science with
passion, with fiction, with sentimental prejudice. Nor is this the
end of our troubles. For Imagination herself suffers violence in this
struggle; she seeks to reduce herself to conformity with existence,
in the hope of vindicating her nominal authority at the price of some
concessions. She begins to feign that she demanded nothing but what
she finds. Thus she loses her honesty and freedom, becomes a flatterer
of things instead of the principle of their ideal correction, and in
the attempt to prove herself prophetic and literally valid (as in a
moment of infatuation she had fancied herself to be) she forfeits that
symbolic truth, that inner propriety, which gave her a moral value.
Thus the false steps of the imagination lead to a contorted science and
to a servile ideal.

These complications not unnaturally inspire discouragement and a sense
of the hopeless relativity of human thought. Indeed, if there be any
special endowment of mind and body called human nature, as there seems
to be, it is obvious that all human experience must be relative to
that. But the truth, the absolute reality, surrounds and precedes
these operations of finite faculty. What value, then, we may say, have
these various ideals or perceptions, or the conflicts between them?
Are not our senses as human, as "subjective" as our wills? Is not the
understanding as visionary as the fancy? Does it not transform the
Unknowable into as remote a symbol as does the vainest dream?

The answer which a rational philosophy would make to these questions
would be a double one. It is true that every idea is equally relative
to human nature and that nothing can be represented in the human mind
except by the operation of human faculties. But it is not true that all
these products of human ideation are of equal value, since they are not
equally conducive to human purposes or satisfactory to human demands.

The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every product
of human art, because it is not indistinguishable from some alleged
external reality, does not perceive the serious self-contradictions
under which it labours. In the first place the notion of an external
reality is a human notion; our reason makes that hypothesis, and its
verification in our experience is one of the ideals of science, as its
validity is one of the assumptions of daily life. In throwing over all
human ideas, because they are infected with humanity, all human ideas
are being sacrificed to one of them--the idea of an absolute reality.
If this idea, being human, deserved that such sacrifices should be made
for it, have the other notions of the mind no rights? Furthermore, even
if we granted for the sake of argument a reality which our thoughts
were essentially helpless to represent, whence comes the duty of our
thoughts to represent it? Whence comes the value of this unattainable
truth? From an ideal of human reason. We covet truth. So that the
attempt to surrender all human science as relative and all human ideals
as trivial is founded on a blind belief in one human idea and an
absolute surrender to one human passion.

In spite of these contradictions, which only a dispassionate logic
could thoroughly unravel, the enthusiast is apt to rush on. The vision
of absolute truth and absolute reality intoxicates him, and as he
is too subtle a thinker, too inward a man, to accept the content of
his senses or the conventions of his intelligence for unqualified
verities, he fortifies himself against them with the consciousness of
their relativity, and seeks to rise above them in his meditations.
But to rise to what? To some more elaborate idea? To some object,
like a scientific cosmos or a religious creed, put together by longer
and more indirect processes than those of common perception? Surely
not. If I renounce my senses and vulgar intellect because they are
infected with finitude and smell of humanity, how shall I accept
a work of art, a product of reasoning, or an idol made originally
with hands and now encrusted all over, like the statue of Glaucus,
with traditional accretions? Poetry, science, and religion, in their
positive constructions, are more human, more conditioned, than are the
senses and the common understanding themselves. The lover of inviolate
reality must not look to them. If the data of human knowledge must be
rejected as subjective, how much more should we reject the inferences
made from those data by human thought. The way of true wisdom,
therefore, if true wisdom is to deal with the Absolute, can only lie
in abstention: neither the senses nor the common understanding, and
much less the superstructure raised upon these by imagination, logic,
or tradition, must delude us: we must keep our thoughts fixed upon the
inanity of all this in comparison with the unthinkable truth, with the
undivided and unimaginable reality. Everything, says the mystic, is
nothing, in comparison with the One.

This confusion, the logical contradiction of which we have just seen,
may, for lack of a more specific word, be called mysticism. It consists
in the surrender of a category of thought on account of the discovery
of its relativity. If I saw or reasoned or judged by such a category,
I should be seeing, reasoning, or judging in a specific manner, in
a manner conditioned by my finite nature. But the specific and the
finite, I feel, are odious; let me therefore aspire to see, reason and
judge in no specific or finite manner--that is, not to see, reason or
judge at all. So I shall be like the Infinite, nay I shall become one
with the Infinite and (marvellous thought!) one with the One.

The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly contrary to the ideal
of reason; instead of perfecting human nature it seeks to abolish it;
instead of building a better world, it would undermine the foundations
even of the world we have built already; instead of developing our mind
to greater scope and precision, it would return to the condition of
protoplasm--to the blessed consciousness of an Unutterable Reality. In
the primary stages, of course, mysticism does not venture to abolish
all our ideas, or to renounce all our categories of thought. Thus many
Christian mystics have still clung, out of respect for authority,
to traditional theology, and many philosophical mystics have made
some room for life and science in the post-scripts which they, like
Parmenides, have appended to the blank monism of their systems. But
such concessions or hesitations are inconsistent with the mystical
spirit which will never be satisfied, if fully developed and fearless,
with anything short of Absolute Nothing.

For the very reason, however, that mysticism is a tendency to
obliterate distinctions, a partial mysticism often serves to bring
out with wonderful intensity those underlying strata of experience
which it has not yet decomposed. The razing of the edifice of reason
may sometimes discover its foundations. Or the disappearance of one
department of activity may throw the mind with greater energy into
another. So Spinoza, who combined mysticism in morals with rationalism
in science, can bring out the unqualified naturalism of his system
with a purity and impressiveness impossible to men who still retain an
ideal world, and seek to direct endeavour as well as to describe it.
Having renounced all ideal categories, Spinoza has only the material
categories left with which to cover the ground. He thus acquires all
the concentrated intensity, all the splendid narrowness, which had
belonged to Lucretius, while his mystical treatment of the spheres
which Lucretius simply ignored, gives him the appearance of a greater
profundity. So an ordinary Christian who is mystical, let us say,
about time and space, may use his transcendentalism in that sphere to
intensify his positivism in theology, and to emphasize his whole-souled
surrender to a devout life.

What is impossible is to be a transcendentalist "all 'round." In that
case there would be nothing left to transcend; the civil war of the
mind would have ended in the extermination of all parties. The art of
mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim the heavy guns of your
transcendental philosophy against those realities or those ideas which
you find particularly galling. Planted on your dearest dogma, on your
most precious postulate, you may then transcend everything else to your
heart's content. You may say with an air of enlightened profundity
that nothing is "really" right or wrong, because in Nature all things
are regular and necessary, and God cannot act for purposes as if
his will were not already accomplished; your mysticism in religion
and morals is kept standing, as it were, by the stiff backing which
is furnished by your materialistic cosmology. Or you may say with a
tone of devout rapture that all sights and sounds are direct messages
from Divine Providence to the soul, without any objects "really"
existing in space; your mysticism about the world of perception and
scientific inference is sustained by the naive theological dogmas
which you substitute for the conceptions of common sense. Yet among
these partialities and blind denials a man's positive insight seems to
thrive, and he fortifies and concentrates himself on his chosen ground
by his arbitrary exclusions. The patient art of rationalizing the
various sides of life, the observational as well as the moral, without
confusing them, is an art apparently seldom given to the haste and
pugnacity of philosophers.

Thus mysticism, although a principle of dissolution, carries with it
the safeguard that it can never be consistently applied. We reach it
only in exceptional moments of intuition, from which we descend to our
pots and pans with habits and instincts virtually unimpaired. Life goes
on; virtues and affections endure, none the worse, the mystic feels,
for that slight film of unreality which envelops them in a mind not
unacquainted with ecstasy. And although mysticism, left free to express
itself, can have no other goal than Nirvana, yet moderately indulged
in and duly inhibited by a residuum of conventional sanity, it serves
to give a touch of strangeness and elevation to the character and to
suggest superhuman gifts. It is not, however, in the least superhuman.
It is hardly even abnormal, being only an exaggeration of a rational
interest in the highest abstractions. The divine, the universal, the
absolute, even the One, are legitimate conceptions. They are terms
of human thought having as such a meaning in language and a place
in speculation. Those who live in the mind, whose passions are only
audible in the keen overtones of dialectic, are no doubt exalted and
privileged natures, choosing a better part which should not be taken
from them. So the poet and the mathematician have their spheres of
abstract and delicate labour, in which a liberal legislator would not
disturb them. Trouble only arises when the dialectician represents
his rational dreams as knowledge of existences, and the mystic his
excusable raptures as the only way of life. Poets and mathematicians do
not imagine that their pursuits raise them above human limitations and
are no part of human life, but rather its only goal and justification.
Such a pretension would be regarded as madness in the mathematician
or the poet; and is not the mystic as miserably a man? Is he not
embodying, at his best, the analytic power of a logician, or the
imagination of an enthusiast, and, at his worst, the lowest and most
obscure passions of human nature?

Yes, in spite of himself, the mystic remains human. Nothing is
more normal than abstraction. A contemplative mind drops easily
its practical preoccupations, rises easily into an ideal sympathy
with impersonal things. The wheels of the universe have a wonderful
magnetism for the human will. Our consciousness likes to lose itself
in the music of the spheres, a music that finer ears are sometimes
privileged to catch. The better side of mysticism is an æsthetic
interest in large unities and cosmic laws. The æsthetic attitude is
not the moral, but it is not for that reason illegitimate. It gives us
refreshment and a foretaste of that perfect adaptation of things to
our faculties and of our faculties to things which, could it extend
to every part of experience, would constitute the ideal life. Such
happiness is denied us in the concrete; but a hint and example of it
may be gathered by an abstracted element of our nature as it travels
through an abstracted world. Such an indulgence adds to the value of
reality only such value as it may itself have in momentary experience;
it may have a doubtful moral effect on the happy dreamer himself. But
it serves to keep alive the conviction, which a confused experience
might obscure, that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds
us, like music, that there are worlds far removed from the actual
which are yet living and very near to the heart. Such is the fruit
of abstraction when abstraction bears any fruit. If the imagination
merely alienates us from reality, without giving us either a model for
its correction or a glimpse into its structure, it becomes the refuge
of poetical selfishness. Such selfishness is barren, and the fancy,
feeding only on itself, grows leaner every day. Mysticism is usually an
incurable disease. Facts cannot arouse it, since it never denied them.
Reason cannot convince it, for reason is a human faculty, assuming a
validity which it cannot prove. The only thing that can kill mysticism
is its own uninterrupted progress, by which it gradually devours every
function of the soul and at last, by destroying its own natural basis,
immolates itself to its inexorable ideal.

Need we ask, after all these reflections, where we should look for
that expansion and elevation of the mind which the mystic seeks so
passionately and so unintelligently? We can find that expansion, in
the first place, in the imagination itself. That is the true realm of
man's infinity, where novelty may exist without falsity and perpetual
diversity without contradiction. But such exercise of imagination
leaves the world of knowledge untouched. Is there no escape from the
prison, as the mystic thinks it, of science and history which shall
yet not carry us beyond reality? Is there no truth beyond conventional
truth, no life behind human existence?

Certainly. Behind the discovered there is the discoverable, beyond
the actual, the possible. Science and history are not exhausted. In
their determinate directions they are as infinite as fancy in its
indetermination. The spectacle which science and history now spread
before us is as far beyond the experience of an ephemeral insect as any
Absolute can be beyond our own; yet we have put that spectacle together
out of just such sensations as the insect may have--out of this
sunlight and this buzz and these momentary throbs of existence. The
understanding has indeed supervened, but it has supervened not to deny
the validity of those sensations, but to combine their messages. We may
still continue in the same path, by the indefinite extension of science
over a world of experience and of intelligible truth. Is that prospect
insufficient for our ambition? With a world so full of stuff before
him, I can hardly conceive what morbid instinct can tempt a man to look
elsewhere for wider vistas, unless it be unwillingness to endure the
sadness and the discipline of the truth.

But can our situation be made better by refusing to understand it? If
we renounced mysticism altogether and kept imagination in its place,
should we not live in a clearer and safer world, as well as in a
truer? Nay, are we sure that this gradually unfolding, intelligible,
and real world would not turn out to be more congenial and beautiful
than any wilful fiction, since it would be the product of a universal
human labour and the scene of the accumulated sufferings and triumphs
of mankind? When we compare the temple which we call Nature, built of
sights and sounds by memory and understanding, with all the wonderful
worlds evocable by the magician's wand, may we not prefer the humbler
and more lasting edifice, not only as a dwelling, but even as a house
of prayer? It is not always the loftiest architecture that expresses
the deepest soul; the inmost religion of the Pagan haunted his
hearth as that of the Christian his catacombs or his hermitage. So
philosophy is more spiritual in her humility and abstinence than in
her short-lived audacities, and she would do well to inscribe over her
gates what, in an ancient Spanish church, may be seen written near the
steep entrance to a little subterraneous crypt:--

    "Wouldst thou pass this lowly door?
    Go, and angels greet thee there;
    For by this their sacred stair
    To descend is still to soar.
    Bid a measured silence keep
    What thy thoughts be telling o'er;
    Sink, to rise with wider sweep
    To the heaven of thy rest,
    For he climbs the heavens best
    Who would touch the deepest deep."




II


THE HOMERIC HYMNS


We of this generation look back upon a variety of religious conceptions
and forms of worship, and a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls
attaches our attention to the spectacle. We observe how literally
fables and mysteries were once accepted which can have for us now only
a thin and symbolical meaning. Judging other minds and other ages
by our own, we are tempted to ask if there ever was any fundamental
difference between religion and poetry. Both seem to consist in what
the imagination adds to science, to history, and to morals. Men looked
attentively on the face of Nature: their close struggle with her
compelled them to do so: but before making statistics of her movements
they made dramatizations of her life. The imagination enveloped the
material world, as yet imperfectly studied, and produced the cosmos of
mythology.

Thus the religion of the Greeks was, we might say, nothing but poetry:
nothing but what imagination added to the rudiments of science, to
the first impressions of a mind that pored upon natural phenomena and
responded to them with a quick sense of kinship and comprehension.
The religion of the Hebrews might be called poetry with as good
reason. Their "sense for conduct" and their vivid interest in their
national destiny carried them past any prosaic record of events or
cautious theory of moral and social laws. They rose at once into a
bold dramatic conception of their race's covenant with Heaven: just
such a conception as the playwright would seek out in order to portray
with awful acceleration the ways of passion and fate. Finally, we have
apparently a third kind of poetry in what has been the natural religion
of the detached philosophers of all ages. In them the imagination
touches the precepts of morals and the ideals of reason, attributing
to them a larger scope and more perfect fulfilment than experience can
show them to have. Philosophers ever tend to clothe the harmonies of
their personal thought with universal validity and to assign to their
ideals a latent omnipotence and an ultimate victory over the forces of
unreason. This which is obviously a kind of poetry is at the same time
the spontaneous religion of conscience and thought.

Yet religion in all these cases differs from a mere play of the
imagination in one important respect; it reacts directly upon life;
it is a factor in conduct. Our religion is the poetry in which we
believe. Mere poetry is an ineffectual shadow of life; religion is,
if you will, a phantom also, but a phantom guide. While it tends to
its own expansion, like any growth in the imagination, it tends also
to its application in practice. Such an aim is foreign to poetry. The
inspirations of religion demand fidelity and courageous response on
our part. Faith brings us not only peace, not only the contemplation
of ideal harmonies, but labour and the sword. These two tendencies--to
imaginative growth and to practical embodiment--coexist in every
living religion, but they are not always equally conspicuous. In the
formative ages of Christianity, for instance, while its legends were
being gathered and its dogma fixed, the imaginative expansion absorbed
men's interest; later, when the luxuriant branches of the Church began
to shake off their foliage, and there came a time of year

    "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
    Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"

the energy of religious thought, released from the enlargement of
doctrine, spent itself upon a more rigid and watchful application of
the residuum of faith.

In the Pagan religion the element of applicability might seem at first
sight to be lacking, so that nothing would subsist but a poetic fable.
An unbiassed study of antiquity, however, will soon dispel that idea.
Besides the gods whom we may plausibly regard as impersonations of
natural forces, there existed others; the spirits of ancestors, the
gods of the hearth, and the ideal patrons of war and the arts. Even the
gods of Nature inspired reverence and secured a cultus only as they
influenced the well-being of man. The worship of them had a practical
import. The conception of their nature and presence became a sanction
and an inspiration in the conduct of life. When the figments of the
fancy are wholly divorced from reality they can have no clearness or
consistency; they can have no permanence when they are wholly devoid of
utility. The vividness and persistence of the figures of many of the
gods came from the fact that they were associated with institutions and
practices which controlled the conception of them and kept it young.
The fictions of a poet, whatever his genius, do not produce illusion
because they do not attach themselves to realities in the world of
action. They have character without power and names without local
habitations. The gods in the beginning had both. Their image, their
haunts, the reports of their apparitions and miracles, gave a nucleus
of empirical reality to the accretions of legend. The poet who came
to sing their praise, to enlarge upon their exploits, and to explain
their cultus, gave less to the gods in honour than he received from
them in inspiration. All his invention was guided by the genius of the
deity, as represented by the traditions of his shrine. This poetry,
then, even in its most playful mood, is not mere poetry, but religion.
It is a poetry in which men believe; it is a poetry that beautifies and
justifies to their minds the positive facts of their ancestral worship,
their social unity, and their personal conscience.

These general reflections may help us to approach the hymns of Homer
in a becoming spirit. For in them we find the extreme of fancy, the
approach to a divorce between the imagination and the faith of the
worshipper. Consequently there is danger that we may allow ourselves
to read these lives of the gods as the composition of a profane poet.
If we did so we should fail to understand not only their spirit as
a whole but many of their parts, in which notes are struck now of
devotion and affectionate pride, now of gratitude and entreaty. These
may be addressed, it is true, to a being that has just been described
as guilty of some signal vice or treachery, and the contradiction may
well stagger a Puritan critic. But the lusts of life were once for
all in the blood of the Pagan gods, who were the articulate voices of
Nature and of passion. The half-meant exaggeration of a well-known
trait in the divinity would not render the poets that indulged in it
unwelcome to the god; he could feel the sure faith and affection of
his worshippers even in their good-humoured laughter at his imaginary
plights and naughtiness. The clown was not excluded from these rites.
His wit also counted as a service.

The Homeric Hymns, if we may trust the impression they produce on
a modern, are not hymns and are not Homer's. They are fragments of
narrative in Ionic hexameter recited during the feasts and fairs at
various Greek shrines. They are not melodies to be chanted with a
common voice by the assemblage during a sacrifice; they are tales
delivered by the minstrel to the listening audience of citizens and
strangers. They usually have a local reference. Thus we find under the
title of a hymn to Apollo a song of Delos and one of Delphi. Delos is
a barren rock; its wealth was due to the temple that attracted to the
place pilgrimages and embassies, not without rich offerings, from many
Greek cities. Accordingly we hear how Leto or Latona, when about to
become the mother of Apollo, wandered about the cities and mountains
of Greece and Asia, seeking a birthplace for her son. None would
receive her, but all the islands trembled at the awful honour of such a
nativity, profitable as the honour might eventually prove,--

                        "Until at length
    The lovely goddess came to Delos' side
    And, making question, spake these wingèd words:
    'Delos, were it thy will to be the seat
    Of my young son Apollo, brightest god,
    And build him a rich fane, no other power
    Should ever touch thee or work ill upon thee.
    I tell thee not thou shalt be rich in kine
    Or in fair flocks, much fruit, or myriad flowers;
    But when Apollo of the far-felt dart
    Hath here his shrine, all men will gather here
    Bringing thee hecatombs.... And though thy soil be poor,
    The gods shall make thee strong against thy foes.'"

The spirit of the island is naturally not averse to so favourable a
proposition but, like some too humble maiden wooed by a great prince,
has some misgivings lest this promise of unexpected good fortune should
veil the approach of some worse calamity. "When the god is born into
the light of day," she says, "will he not despise me, seeing how barren
I am, and sink me in the sea

                        "That ever will
    Oppress my heart with many a watery hill?
    And therefore let him choose some other land,
    Where he shall please, to build at his command
    Temple and grove set thick with many a tree.
    For wretched polypuses breed in me,
    Retiring chambers, and black sea-calves den
    In my poor soil, for penury of men."[1]

Leto reassures the island, however, and swears to build a great
temple there which her son will haunt perpetually, preferring it to
all his other shrines. Delos consents, and Apollo is born amid the
ministrations of all the goddesses except Hera, who sits indignant
and revengeful in the solitudes of Olympus. The child is bathed in
the stream and delicately swaddled; but after tasting the nectar and
ambrosia which one of the nymphs is quick to offer him, he bursts his
bands, calls for his bow and his lyre, and flies upward into the sky
announcing that he will henceforth declare the will of Zeus to mortals.
Thereupon--

    "All the immortals stood
    In deep amaze....
    All Delos, looking on him, all with gold
    Was loaded straight, and joy'd to be extoll'd.
    For so she flourished, as a hill that stood
    Crown'd with the flower of an abundant wood."[2]

This legend, with all that accompanies it concerning the glories of
Delos and its gods, and the pilgrimages and games that enlivened the
island, was well-conceived to give form and justification to the
cultus of the temple, and to delight the votaries whom custom or vague
instincts of piety had gathered there. The sacred poet, in another part
of this hymn, does the same service to the even greater sanctuary of
Delphi. He tells us how Apollo wandered over many lands and waters,
and he stops lovingly to recall the names of the various spots that
claimed the honour of having at some time been visited by the god.
The minstrels, wanderers themselves, loved to celebrate in this way
the shores they had seen or heard of, and to fill at the same time
their listener's minds with the spell of sonorous names, the sense of
space and the thrill of mystery. In his journeys Apollo, the hymn tells
us, finally came to the dell and fountain of Delphusa on the skirts
of Parnassus. The nymph of the spot, fearing the encroachments of so
much more powerful a deity, deceived him and persuaded him to plant
his temple on another site, where Parnassus fronts the west, and the
overhanging rocks form a cavern. There Apollo established his temple
for the succour and enlightenment of mankind, while Trophonius and
Agamedes, sons of Erginus, men dear to the immortal gods, built the
approaches of stone.

Thus the divine origin of the temple is vindicated, the structure
described, and the human architects honoured, whose descendants,
very likely, were present to hear their ancestors' praise. But here
a puzzling fact challenges the attention and stimulates the fancy of
the poet: Apollo was a Dorian deity, yet his chief shrine was here
upon Phocian ground. Perhaps some traditions remained to suggest an
explanation of the anomaly; at any rate the poet is not at a loss
for an account of the matter. The temple being established, Apollo
bethought himself what race of priests he should make its ministers:
at least, such is the naïve account in the poem, which expects us
to forget that temples do not arise in the absence of predetermined
servants and worshippers. While pondering this question, however,
Apollo cast his eyes on the sea where it chanced that a swift ship,
manned by many and excellent Cretans, was merrily sailing: whereupon
the god, taking the form of a huge dolphin, leapt into the ship, to the
infinite surprise and bewilderment of those worthy merchants, who, as
innocent as the fishers of the Galilæan Lake of the religious destiny
that awaited them, were thinking only of the pecuniary profits of their
voyage. The presence of the god benumbed their movements, and they
stood silent while the ship sailed before the wind. And the blast,
veering at this place with the changed configuration of the coast, blew
them irresistibly to the very foot of Parnassus, to the little haven of
Crissa. There Apollo appeared to them once more, this time running down
to the beach to meet them in the form of

                    "A stout and lusty fellow,
    His mighty shoulders covered with his mane;
    Who sped these words upon the wings of sound:
    'Strangers, who are ye? and whence sail ye hither
    The watery ways? Come ye to traffic justly
    Or recklessly like pirates of the deep
    Rove ye, adventuring your souls, to bring
    Evil on strangers? Why thus sit ye grieving,
    Nor leap on land, nor strike the mast and lay it
    In your black ship? For so should traders do
    When, sated with the labour of the sea,
    They quit their painted galley for the shore,
    And presently the thought of needful food
    Comes gladsomely upon them.' So he spake,
    Putting new courage in their breasts. To whom
    The Cretan captain in his turn replied:
    'Since thou art nothing like to things of earth
    In form or stature, but most like the gods
    That ever live, Hail, and thrice hail, O Stranger,
    And may the gods pour blessings on thy head.
    Now tell me truly, for I need to know,
    What land is this, what people, from what race
    Descended? As for us, over the deep
    Broad sea, we sought another haven, Pylos,
    Sailing from Crete, for thence we boast to spring;
    But now our ship is cast upon this shore,
    For some god steered our course against our will.'
    Then the far-darter spoke and answered them.
    'Friends, in well-wooded Cnossus hitherto
    Ye have had homes, but ye shall not again
    Return to your good native town, to find
    Each his fair house and well-belovèd wife,
    But here shall ye possess my temple, rich
    And greatly honoured by the tribes of men.
    For I am son to Zeus. Apollo is
    My sacred name. 'Twas I that led you hither
    Over the mighty bosom of the deep,
    Intending you no ill; for ye shall here
    Possess a temple sacred to me, rich,
    And greatly honoured of all mortal men.
    The counsels of the deathless gods shall be
    Revealed to you, and by their will your days
    Shall pass in honour and in peace for ever.
    Come then and, as I bid, make haste to do.
    ... Build by the sea an altar; kindle flame;
    Sprinkle white barley grains thereon, and pray,
    Standing about the altar. And as first
    Ye saw me leap into your swift black bark
    In likeness of a dolphin, so henceforth
    Worship me by the name Delphinius,
    And Delphian ever be my far-seen shrine.'"

Thus the establishment of the Dorian god in Phocis is explained, and
the wealth and dignity of his temple are justified by prophecy and
by divine intention. For Apollo is not satisfied with repeatedly
describing the future temple, by an incidental epithet, as opulent;
that hint would not have been enough for the simplicity of those
merchant sailors, new as they were to the mysteries of priestcraft.
It was necessary for Apollo to allay their fears of poverty by a more
explicit assurance that it will be easy for them to live by the altar.
And what is more, Hermes and all the thieves he inspires will respect
the shrine; its treasures, although unprotected by walls, shall be safe
for-ever.

These were truly, as we see, the hymns of a levitical patriotism. With
Homeric breadth and candour they dilated on the miracles, privileges,
and immunities of the sacred places and their servitors, and they thus
kept alive in successive generations an awe mingled with familiar
interest toward divine persons and things which is characteristic of
that more primitive age. Gods and men were then nearer together, and
both yielded more frankly to the tendency, inherent in their nature, to
resemble one another.

The same quality is found in another fragment, the most beautiful and
the most familiar of all. This is the hymn to Demeter in which two
stories are woven together, one telling of the rape of Persephone, and
the other of the reception of Demeter, disguised in her sorrow, into
the household of Celeus, where she becomes the nurse of his infant son
Demophoon. Both stories belong to the religion of Eleusis, where this
version of them seems intended to be sung. The place was sacred to
Demeter and Persephone and its mysteries dealt particularly with the
passage of souls to the nether world and with their habitation there.
The pathetic beauty of the first fable--in which we can hardly abstain
from seeing some symbolical meaning--expresses for us something of the
mystic exaltation of the local rites; while the other tale of Celeus,
his wife, his daughters, and his son, whom his nurse, the disguised
goddess, almost succeeds in endowing with immortality, celebrates the
ancient divine affinities of the chiefs of the Eleusinian state.

The first story is too familiar to need recounting; who has not heard
of the gentle Persephone gathering flowers in the meadow and suddenly
swallowed by the yawning earth and carried away to Hades, the god of
the nether world, to share his sombre but sublime dominion over the
shades?--a dignity of which she is not insensible, much as she grieves
at the separation from her beloved mother; and how Demeter in turn
is disconsolate and (in her wrath and despair at the indifference of
the gods) conceals her divinity, refuses the fruits of the earth, and
wanders about in the guise of an old woman, nursing her grief, until
at last Zeus sends his messenger to Hades to effect a compromise; and
Persephone, after eating the grain of pomegranate that obliges her to
return yearly to her husband, is allowed to come back to the upper
world to dwell for two-thirds of the year in her mother's company.

The underlying allegory is here very interesting. We observe how the
genius of the Greek religion, while too anthropomorphic to retain any
clear consciousness of the cosmic processes that were symbolized by its
deities and their adventures, was anthropomorphic also in a moral way,
and tended to turn the personages which it ceased to regard as symbols
of natural forces into types of human experience. So the parable of
the seed that must die if it is to rise again and live an immortal, if
interrupted, life in successive generations, gives way in the tale of
Demeter and Persephone, to a prototype of human affection. The devotee,
no longer reminded by his religion of any cosmic laws, was not reduced
to a mere superstition,--to a fable and a belief in the efficacy of
external rites,--he was encouraged to regard the mystery as the
divine counterpart of his own experience. His religion in forgetting
to be natural had succeeded in becoming moral; the gods were now
models of human endurance and success; their histories offered sublime
consolations to mortal destiny. Fancy had turned the aspects of Nature
into persons; but devotion, directed upon these imaginary persons,
turned them into human ideals and into patron saints, thereby relating
them again to life and saving them from insignificance.

A further illustration of the latter transformation may be found in the
second story contained in our hymn. Demeter, weary of her wanderings
and sick at heart, has come to sit down beside a well, near the house
of Celeus. His four young daughters, dancing and laughing, come to
fetch water in their golden jars,--

    "As hinds or heifers gambol in the fields
    When Spring is young."

They speak kindly to the goddess, who asks them for employment. "And
for me," she says,--

    "And for me, damsels, harbour pitiful
    And favouring thoughts, dear children, that I come
    To some good man's or woman's house, to ply
    My task in willing service of such sort
    As agèd women use. A tender child
    I could nurse well and safely in my arms,
    And tend the house, and spread the master's couch
    Recessed in the fair chamber, or could teach
    The maids their handicraft."

The offer is gladly accepted, for Celeus himself has an infant son,
Demophoon, the hope of his race: The aged woman enters the dwelling,
making in her long-robed grief a wonderful contrast to the four
sportive girls:--

    "Who lifting up their ample kirtle-folds
    Sped down the waggon-furrowed way, and shook
    Their curls about their shoulders--yellow gold
    Like crocuses in bloom."

Once within the house, which she awes with her uncomprehended presence,
the goddess sits absorbed in grief, until she is compelled to smile
for a moment at the jests of the quick-witted maid Iambe, and consents
to take in lieu of the wine that is offered her, a beverage of beaten
barley, water, and herbs. These details are of course introduced to
justify the ritual of Eleusis, in which the clown and the barley-water
played a traditional part.

Thus Demeter becomes nurse to Demophoon, but she has ideas of
her duties differing from the common, and worthy of her unusual
qualifications. She neither suckles nor feeds the infant but anoints
him with ambrosia and lays him at night to sleep on the embers of the
hearth. This his watchful mother discovers with not unnatural alarm;
when the goddess reveals herself and departs, foiled in her desire to
make her nursling immortal.

The spirit that animates this fable is not that poetic frivolity which
we are accustomed to associate with Paganism. Here we find an immortal
in profoundest grief and mortals entertaining an angel unawares; we are
told of supernatural food, and of a burning fire that might make this
mortal put on immortality did not the generous but ignorant impulses of
the natural man break in upon that providential purpose and prevent its
consummation. Eleusis was the natural home for such a myth, and we may
well believe that those initiated into the mysteries there were taught
to dwell on its higher interpretation.

But there are other hymns in a lighter vein in which the play of
fancy is not guided by any moral intuition. The hymn to Hermes is one
perpetual ebullition of irresponsible humour.

Hermes is the child of Maia, a nymph of Cyllene whose cave Zeus has
surreptitiously visited while the white-armed Juno--for, unsympathetic
prude as this goddess may be, she must still be beautiful--slept
soundly in Olympus. The child is hardly born when he catches a
tortoise, kills it, scoops out the shell, and makes a lute of it, upon
which he begins to play delicious music. Not satisfied with that feat,
however, he escapes from his cradle, and drives from their pasture
the kine that Apollo has left feeding there. Accused afterward of this
mischief, he defends himself after the following fashion, while he lies
in his crib, holding his new-made lyre lightly in his hand under the
bedclothes. I quote Shelley's version:--

    "'An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong
        And I am but a little new-born thing
      Who yet, at least, can think of nothing wrong.
        My business is to suck, and sleep, and fling
      The cradle-clothes about me all day long,
        Or, half-asleep, hear my sweet mother sing
      And to be washed in water clean and warm
        And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.'"
      *       *       *       *       *       *
    "Sudden he changed his plan, and with strange skill
       Subdued the strong Latonian, by the might
     Of winning music, to his mightier will.
       His left hand held the lyre, and in his right
     The plectrum struck the chords: unconquerable
       Up from beneath his hand in circling flight
     The gathering music rose--and sweet as Love
     The penetrating notes did live and move

    "Within the heart of great Apollo. He
       Listened with all his soul, and laughed for pleasure.
     Close to his side stood harping fearlessly
       The unabashèd boy, and to the measure
     Of the sweet lyre there followed loud and free
       His joyous voice: for he unlocked the treasure
     Of his deep song, illustrating the birth
     Of the bright Gods, and the dark desert Earth;

    "And how to the Immortals every one
       A portion was assigned of all that is.
     But chief Mnemosyne did Maia's son
       Clothe in the light of his loud melodies.
     And, as each god was born or had begun,
       He in their order due and fit degrees
     Sung of his birth and being--and did move
     Apollo to unutterable love."

In fact, after the most enthusiastic encomiums on the young god's art,
and on the power of music in general, Apollo offers the child his
protection and friendship:--

    "Now, since thou hast, although so very small,
       Science of arts so glorious, thus I swear,--
     And let this cornel javelin, keen and tall,
       Witness between us what I promise here,--
     That I will lead thee to the Olympian hall,
       Honoured and mighty, with thy mother dear,
     And many glorious gifts in joy will give thee
     And even at the end will ne'er deceive thee."

Hermes is not insensible to this offer and its advantages; he accepts
it with good grace and many compliments, nor does he wish to remain
behind in the exchange of courtesies and benefits: he addresses Apollo
thus:--

    "Thou canst seek out and compass all that wit
       Can find or teach. Yet, since thou wilt, come, take
     The lyre--be mine the glory giving it--
       Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake
     The joyous pleasure out of many a fit
       Of tranced sound--and with fleet fingers make?
     Thy liquid-voiced comrade speak with thee,--
     It can talk measured music eloquently.

    "Then bear it boldly to the revel loud,
       Love-wakening dance, or feast of solemn state,
     A joy by night or day: for those endowed
       With art and wisdom who interrogate
     It teaches, babbling in delightful mood
       All things which make the spirit most elate.
     Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play,
     Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay.

    "To those that are unskilled in its sweet tongue,
       Though they should question most impetuously
     Its hidden soul, it gossips something wrong--
       Some senseless and impertinent reply.
     But thou, who art as wise as thou art strong,
       Canst compass all that thou desirest. I
     Present thee with this music-flowing shell,
     Knowing thou canst interrogate it well...."

Apollo is not slow to learn the new art with which he is ever after
to delight both gods and men; but he is not at first quite at ease in
his mind, fearing that Hermes will not only recapture the lyre but
steal his friend's bow and arrows into the bargain. Hermes, however,
swears by all that is holy never to do so, and the friendship of the
two artful gods is sealed for ever. The minstrel does not forget, at
this point, to remind his hearers, among whom we may imagine not a few
professional followers of Hermes to have been mixed, that the robber's
honour is pledged by his divine patron to respect the treasures of
Apollo's shrines. Let not the votary think, he adds, that Apollo's
oracles are equally useful to good and to bad men: these mysteries
are truly efficacious only for the pious and orthodox who follow the
established traditions of the temple and honour its servants. Apollo
says:--

                                 "He who comes consigned
     By voice and wings of perfect augury
     To my great shrine shall find avail in me:

    "Him I will not deceive, but will assist.
       But he who comes relying on such birds
     As chatter vainly, who would strain and twist
       The purpose of the gods with idle words,
     And deems their knowledge light, he shall have missed
       His road--whilst I among my other hoards
     His gifts deposit...."

The wildest fairy-story thus leads easily to a little drama not
without its human charm and moral inspiration; while the legend is
attached to the cultus, and the cultus is intertwined with the practice
and sanctions of daily life. Even here, in its most playful mood,
therefore, this mythological poetry retains the spirit and function
of religion. Even here sacerdotal interests are not forgotten. Delphi
shall be safe; the lyre is Apollo's by right although it be Hermes' by
invention. A certain amiable harmony is after all drawn from the riot
of foolishness. All is sweet and unmalicious and lovable enough, and
the patronage of both the friendly gods, the enthusiast and the wag,
may be invoked with confidence and benefit.

Not less remarkable, although for other reasons, is the hymn to
Aphrodite. Here we find a more human fable and a more serious tone:
while the poem, if we choose to consider it in its allegorical meaning,
touches one of the deepest convictions of the Greek conscience. All the
gods save three--Athena, Artemis, and Hestia,--are subject to the power
of Aphrodite, Zeus at least as much as the rest. In revenge for this
subjection, Zeus determines to make Aphrodite feel the passion which
she boasts to be able to inspire in others.

The fair shepherd Anchises feeds his flocks upon Mount Ida, and with
him Aphrodite is made to fall in love. She presents herself to him in a
human disguise, and meets his advances with a long account of her birth
and parentage, and begs him to take her back to her parents, and having
asked for her hand and fulfilled all customary formalities, to lead her
away as his lawful wife. The passion which at the same time, however,
she is careful to breathe into him cannot brook so long a delay: and
she yields to his impatience. When about to leave him she awakes him
from his sleep, turns upon him the full glance of her divinity, and
reveals her name and his destiny. She will bear him a son, Æneas, who
will be one of the greatest princes and heroes of Troy; but he himself
will be stricken with feebleness and a premature old age, in punishment
for the involuntary sacrilege which he has committed.

The description of the disguised goddess, with its Homeric pomp and
elaborate propriety, is a noble and masterly one, underlined, as
it were, with a certain satirical or dramatic intention; we have
the directness of a Nausicaa, with a more luxurious and passionate
beauty. The revelation of the goddess is wonderfully made, with that
parallel movement of natural causes and divine workings which is so
often to be admired in Homer. The divinity of the visitant appears
only at the moment of her flight, when she becomes a consecration and
an unattainable memory. The sight of deity leaves the eyes dull, like
those of the Platonic prisoners returning from the sunlight of truth
into the den of appearance. Nay more, a communion with the divinity,
closer than is consonant with human frailty, leaves the seer impotent
and a burden upon the world; but this personal tragedy is not without
its noble fruits to posterity. Anchises suffers, but his son Æneas, the
issue of that divine though punishable union, lives to bear, not only
the aged Anchises himself, but the gods of Ilium, out of the ruins of
Troy.

Such analogies carry us, no doubt, far beyond the intention of the hymn
or of the exoteric religion to which it ministers. The story-teller's
delight in his story is the obvious motive of such compositions, even
when they reflect indirectly the awe in which the divine impersonations
of natural forces were held by the popular religion. All that we may
fairly imagine to have been in the mind of the pious singer is the
sense that something divine comes down among us in the crises of our
existence, and that this visitation is fraught with immense although
vague possibilities of both good and evil. The gods sometimes appear,
and when they do they bring us a foretaste of that sublime victory of
mind over matter which we may never gain in experience but which may
constantly be gained in thought. When natural phenomena are conceived
as the manifestation of divine life, human life itself, by sympathy
with that ideal projection of itself, enlarges its customary bounds,
until it seems capable of becoming the life of the universe. A god
is a conceived victory of mind over Nature. A visible god is the
consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon
vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring
conflicts with hostile forces; but the momentary illusion of that
realized good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an
ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion.

That such a function was fulfilled by this Homeric legend, with all its
love of myth and lust of visible beauty, is witnessed by another short
hymn, which we may quote almost entire by way of conclusion. It is
addressed to Castor and Polydeuces, patrons of sailors no less than of
horsemen and boxers. It is impossible to read it without feeling that
the poet, however entangled he may have been in superstition and fable,
grasped that high essence of religion which makes religion rational. He
felt the power of contemplation to master the contradictions of life
and to overspread experience, sublime but impalpable, like a rainbow
over retreating storms:--

    "Ye wild-eyed Muses, sing the Twins of Jove
    ... Mild Pollux, void of blame,
    And steed-subduing Castor, heirs of fame.
    These are the powers who earth-born mortals save
    And ships, whose flight is swift along the wave.
    When wintry tempests o'er the savage sea
    Are raging, and the sailors tremblingly
    Call on the Twins of Jove with prayer and vow,
    Gathered in fear upon the lofty prow,
    And sacrifice with snow-white lambs--the wind
    And the huge billow bursting close behind
    Even then beneath the weltering waters bear
    The staggering ship,--they suddenly appear,
    On yellow wings rushing athwart the sky,
    And lull the blasts in mute tranquillity
    And strew the waves on the white ocean's bed,
    Fair omen of the voyage; from toil and dread
    The sailors rest, rejoicing in the sight,
    And plough the quiet sea in safe delight."[3]


[1] Chapman's version.

[2] Chapman's version.

[3] Shelley's translation.




III


THE DISSOLUTION OF PAGANISM


Greek religion seems to have contained three factors of unequal
prominence, but ultimately of about equal importance and longevity.
Most obvious, especially if we begin our study with Homer, is the
mythology which presents us with a multitude of gods, male and female,
often related by blood, and having social and even hostile relations
with one another. If we examine their characters, attributes, and
fables, we readily perceive that most of them are impersonations of
natural forces. Some, however, figure prominently as patrons of special
arts or special places, as Apollo of prophecy and music, of Delos and
Delphi; and yet others seem to be wholly personifications of human
powers, as Athena of prudence and of martial and industrial arts.

Underlying this mythology is another element, probably more ancient,
the worship of ancestors, local divinities, and domestic gods. With
these were naturally connected various ritual observances, and
especially the noblest and most important of rites, the sacrifice.
Such practices may be supposed to have belonged originally to the
tribal religion, and to have passed by analogy to the great natural
gods, when these had been once created by the poet and perhaps
identified with the older genius of that spot where their efficacy was
first signally manifested.

Finally, as a third element, we find the religion of the priests,
soothsayers, and magicians, as well as the rites of Orpheus, Bacchus,
and the Great Goddesses at Eleusis. These forms of worship showed
Oriental affinities and partook of a kind of nocturnal horror and
mystical enthusiasm. They were the Greek representatives of the
religion of revelation and of sacraments, and bore much the same
relation to the supernaturalistic elements in Christianity as does
the idea of a shade in Hades to the idea of a soul in heaven. The
fundamental intuitions were the same, but in Pagan times they remained
vague, doubtful, and incoherent.

These three forms of religion lay together in men's minds and habits
throughout the formative period of Greek literature. There was an
occasional rivalry among them, but the tolerance characteristic
of Paganism could reconcile their claims without much difficulty,
and admit them all to a share of honour. The history of the three
elements, however, differs essentially, as might be expected after a
consideration of their respective natures. The antique family religion
lived by inertia; it was obeyed without being justified theoretically,
and remained strong by its very obscurity. Many customs which a man
may have occasion to conform to only once or twice in his life endure
for ages and survive the ebb and flow of intellectual and political
systems. Nursery tales, trivial superstitions, customs connected
with weddings or funerals, or with certain days of the year, have a
strange and irrational persistence; they surprise us by emerging into
prominence after centuries of a sort of subterraneous existence. Thus
the deification of Roman emperors was not the sacrilegious innovation
which it might appear to be, but on the contrary a restoration of the
spirit of the most ancient faith, a revival called to the aid of a new
polity by the mingled statecraft and superstition of the times. Thus,
too, the Christian care in the burial of the dead (contrary as it is to
the theoretical spiritualism of Christianity), the feast of All Souls,
and the prayers for the departed are evidences of the same latent human
religion underlying the cosmic flights and public controversies of
theology.

The mysteries, on the other hand, had essentially a spirit of
self-consciousness and propaganda. They came as revelations or as
reforms; they pretended to disclose secrets handed down from remote
antiquity, from the primeval revelation of God to man, or truths
recovered by the inspiration of later prophets supernaturally
illumined. The history of these movements is, accordingly, the
history-of sects. They never constituted the normal and common religion
of the people, and never impressed their spirit on the national
literature. Æschylus or Plato may have borrowed something from them;
but they did so most when they assumed an attitude of open opposition
to the exoteric religion of their country. Thus when Plato makes his
Socrates propound a Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of transmigration,
he represents the very members of the Socratic circle as surprised,
or as incredulous: and when they are finally silenced by the proofs
advanced, it is only because they are overawed by the dogmatic unction
of a dying sage, who stimulates their imagination with poetic myths,
and confuses their intellect with verbal equivocations. When the mist
of the argument has cleared away, like incense after the sacrifice,
there remains indeed a profound emotion, a catharsis produced by the
sublimity and pathos, so artfully mingled, of both scene and argument;
but the bare doctrine enunciated, true and profound as it is in its
deeper meaning, is quite incapable of appealing to an undisciplined
mind, and could not pass for a religious dogma except for the priestly
robes in which it is dressed. Thus the function of the mysteries
of which Plato's Phædo may be regarded as a philosophic echo, was
to be the vehicle of revolutionary tendencies, tendencies which a
philosopher might privately shape in one way and a superstitious man in
another. Both could find in the spell of an occult ceremonial and in
the prophecies of an oracular creed an escape from the limitations of
the official religion. Mysticism and the claim to illumination found
in these mysteries their natural expression. The many fundamental
questions left unanswered and unasked by Paganism, the many
potentialities of religious emotion left unexercised by it, were thus
allowed to appear.

Independently of these two comparatively silent streams of religious
life, we may trace the current of polytheistic theology,--a current
which naturally left a plainer trace in literature, since it contained
all there might be in Greece of speculation and controversy in
religious matters. The moral sanctions of religion were embodied in the
domestic and civic worship; the pious imagination remained thereby all
the freer to follow the analogies of physical objects in its mythology.
Apollo was the father of Asclepius and the leader of the Muses; his
ideal dignity and beneficence were vouched for by those attributes.
He could well afford, therefore, as the Sun-god, to decimate the
Greek army with the same fatal shafts with which he slew the Python.
The moral function of the god was certain on other grounds, being
enshrined in the local religions of the people. The poet might follow
without scruple the suggestions of experience; he might attribute to
the god the various activities, beneficent and maleficent, observable
in the element over which he presided. This is a liberty taken even
in the most moralistic religions. In the Gospels, for instance, we
sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn
from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of
justice; as when we hear that to him that hath shall be given and from
him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such
characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the
God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God;
they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing
into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought
and endeavour. For we naturally seek to express his awful actuality,
his unchallengeable power, no less than his holiness and beauty. This
sense of the real existence of religious objects can only be maintained
by identifying them with objects of actual experience, with the forces
of Nature, or the passions or conscience of man, or (if it must come to
that) with written laws or visible images.

An instinctive recognition of this necessity kept Greek mythology
ever ready to return to Nature to gather its materials afresh from a
docile, if poetical, observation of reality. The character of the god
must be studied in the manifestations of his chosen element; otherwise
men might forget that, although the form of the god was poetical, his
essence was a positive reality of the most practical kind. Zeus must
still toss his ambrosial locks with a certain irritation, in order
that we may recognize him in the rumblings of the sky; he must still
be capable of wrath and deliberate malice, that his awful hand may be
thought to have hurled the thunderbolt. Cronos must not be forbidden
to devour his children, else we should no longer reverence in him the
inexorable might of time. Mythology was quite right in not shrinking
from such poetic audacities. They were its chief title to legitimacy,
the proof, amid the embroideries of fancy which over-lay the divine
idea, that the god was not an invention, but a fact. He had been found,
he was known. His character, like all character, was merely a principle
which reflection discovered in his observed conduct. The reality, then,
of the mythological gods was initially unquestionable; and the more
faithful the study of Nature by which the poet was inspired, the more
authority did his prophetic vision retain.

But the intense imaginative vitality that must have preceded Homer and
Hesiod, the prodigious gift of sympathetic observation to which we owe
Zeus and Pan and all their endless retinue, was too glorious to last.
No later interpreter could find so much meaning in his text. Mythology
was accordingly placed in a sad dilemma, with either horn fatal to
its life; it must either be impoverished to remain sincere, or become
artificial to remain adequate. The history of Greek religion, on its
speculative side, is nothing but the story of this double decadence.
Reflection upon the process of Nature and desire for philosophic truth
led inevitably to a blank pantheism and to the reduction of positive
traditions to moral allegories. This was the direction taken by the
Stoic theology. On the other hand, adherence to the traditional gods,
with no further vivifying reference to their natural functions in
the world, could lead only to arbitrary fictions, which, having no
foothold or justification in reality, were incapable of withstanding
the first sceptical attack. What an age of imagination had intuited as
truth, an age of reflection could preserve only as fable; and as fable,
accordingly, the religion of the ancients survived throughout the
Christian ages. It remains still the mother-tongue of the imagination
and, in spite of all revolutions and admixtures, is the classic
language of art and poetry, which no other means of expression has
superseded.

Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, the old Xenophanes,
the austerer minds, moralists, naturalists, and wits, united in
decrying the fanciful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was
in one sense unjust; it did not consider the original justification
of mythology in human nature and in the external facts. It was,
like all heresy or partial scepticism, in a sense superficial and
unphilosophical. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets and
assumptions were as groundless, without being as natural or adequate,
as the system it attacked. To a person sufficiently removed by time or
by philosophy from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always
appear right and heresy wrong; for he sees in orthodoxy the product of
the creative mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy only
the rebellion of some partial interest or partial insight against the
corollaries of a formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed
with hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates any
great product of art or mind must always appear short-sighted and
unamiable. Socrates, invoking; the local deities of brooks and meadows,
or paying the debt of a cock to Asclepius (in thanksgiving, it is said,
for a happy death), is more reasonable and noble to our mind than are
the hard denials of Xenophanes or Theodoras. But in their day the
revolt of the sceptics had its relative justification. The imagination
had dried up, and what had once been a natural interpretation of
facts now seemed an artificial addition to them. An elaborate and
irrelevant world of fiction seemed to have been imposed on human
credulity. Mythology was, in fact, already largely irrelevant; the
experience poetized by it had been forgotten and the symbol, in its
insignificance, could not be honestly or usefully retained.

The Greek philosophers, as a rule, proceeded cautiously in these
matters. They passed mythology by with a conventional reverence and
looked elsewhere for the true object of their personal religion. But
the old mythological impulse was not yet spent; it showed itself
still active in all the early philosophers who gave the godhead new
incarnations congruous with the character of their respective physical
systems. To the Socratic School the natural world was no longer the
sphere in which divinity was to be found. They looked for the divine
rather in moral and intelligible ideas. But not only did they carry the
mythological instinct with them into that new field, they also retained
it in the field of Nature, whenever they still regarded Nature as real.
Thus Aristotle, while he rejected the anthropomorphism of the popular
faith, attributing it to political exigencies, turned the forty-nine
spheres, of which he conjectured that the heaven might be composed,
into a pantheon of forty-nine divinities. Every primary movement,
he argued, must be the expression of an eternal essence by which
the movement is justified, as the movement of the mind in thinking
or loving is justified by the truth or excellence of the object of
thought or of love. Without such a worthy object, these spiritual
activities would be irrational; and no less irrational would be the
motion of the spheres, were each not obedient to the influence of some
sacred and immutable principle. Forty-nine gods accordingly exist;
but no more. For, since the essence of each is to be the governing
ideal of a motion, the number of motions in the sky determines the
number of divine first principles. The gods, we see, are still the
souls of Nature; a soul without a body would be a principle without an
application; there can be no gods, then, without a phenomenal function,
no gods that do not appear in the operations of Nature. This astronomic
mythology was surely not less poetical than that of Homer, even if, by
virtue of a certain cold and abstract purity, not unworthy of the stars
of which it spoke, it was more difficult and sublime. We may observe in
it a last application of the ancient mythological method by which the
phenomena of Nature became evidence of the existence and character of
the gods.

But the celestial deities of Aristotle, and the minor creative gods of
Plato that correspond to them, retained too much poetic individuality
for the still poorer imagination of later times. The most religious
of sects during the classical decadence was that of the Stoics; in
them the spirit of conformity, which is a chief part even of the
religions of hope, constituted by its exclusive cultivation a religion
of despair. The name of Zeus, and an equally equivocal use of the word
"reason" to designate the regularity of Nature, served to disguise the
alien brutality of the power or law to which all the gods had been
reduced. Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which
Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one,
the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the
reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience
pure although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his
need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms. The
fables he turned into ethical allegories, the oracles, auspices, and
other superstitious rites, he transformed into quasi-scientific ways of
reading the book of Nature and forecasting events.

This possibility of prophecy constituted the Stoic "providence" which
the sentimentality of modern apologists has been glad to confuse
with the _benevolent_ Providence of Christian dogma, a Providence
making for the salvation of men. The Stoic providence excluded that
essential element of benevolence; it was merely the fact that Nature
was prophetic of her own future, that her parts, both in space and in
time, were magically composed into one living system. Mythology thus
ended with the conception of a single god whose body was the whole
physical universe, whose fable was all history, and whose character
was the principle of the universal natural order. No attempt was made
by the ancient Stoics to make this divinity better or more amiable
than the evidence of experience showed it to be; the self-centred,
self-sufficient Stoic morality, the recourse to suicide, and the
equality in happiness and dignity between the wise man and Zeus, all
prove quite conclusively that nothing more was asked or expected of
Nature than what she chose to give; to be virtuous was in man's power,
and nothing else was a good to man. The universe could neither benefit
nor injure him; and thus we see that, despite a reverential tone and
an occasional reminiscence of the thunderbolts of Zeus, the Stoic's
conscience knew how to scorn the moral nothingness of that blank deity
to which his metaphysics had reduced the genial company of the gods.

Thus the reality which the naturalistic gods had borrowed from the
elements proved to be a dangerous prerogative; being real and manifest,
these gods had to be conceived according to our experience of their
operation, so that with every advance in scientific observation
theology had to be revised, and something had to be subtracted from
the personality and benevolence of the gods. The moral character
originally attributed to them necessarily receded before the clearer
definition of natural forces and the accumulated experience of
national disasters. Finally, little remained of the gods except their
names, reduced to rhetorical synonyms for the various departments of
Nature; Phoebus was nothing but a bombastic way of saying the sun;
Hephæstus became nothing but fire, Eros or Aphrodite nothing but love,
Zeus nothing but the general force and law of Nature. Thus the gods
remained real, but were no longer gods. If belief in their reality
was to be kept up, they could not retain too many attributes that
had no empirical manifestation. They must be reduced, as it were, to
their fighting weight. All that the imagination had added to them by
way of personal character, sanctity, and life must be rejected as
anthropomorphism and fable.

Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. If Nature manifests
the existence of a god, she must to that extent manifest his character;
if she does not manifest his character, she cannot involve his
existence. We observe to-day a process exactly analogous to that by
which the natural divinities of Greece were reduced again to the
physical or social forces from which poetry had originally evoked
their forms. Many minds are grown too timid to build their religious
faith unblushingly on revelation, or on that moral imagination or
inward demand which revelation comes to express and to satisfy. They
seek, therefore, to naturalize the Deity and to identify it with some
principle of history, of Nature, or of logic. But this identification
cannot be made without great concessions on both sides. The
accommodations which ensue inevitably involve many equivocations, and
some misrepresentations of the heterogeneous principles, now natural,
now moral, which it is sought to unify. Confused and agonized by
these contradictions, the natural theologian, if he keep his honesty,
can only rest in the end in a chastened recognition of the facts of
experience, toward which he will, no doubt, exercise his acquired
habits of acquiescence and euphemism. But these habits, the survival
of which gives his philosophy some air of being still a religion, will
not be inherited by his disciples and successors; a pious manner may
survive religious faith, but will not survive it long. The society
to whom the reformer teaches a reticent and embarrassed naturalism
will discard the reticence and avow the naturalism with pride. The
masses of men will see no reason why they should not live out their
native impulses or acquired passions without fear of that environing
power of which they are, after all, the highest embodiment; while a
few thinkers, devout and rational by temperament, will know how to
maintain their dignity of spirit in the face of a universe of which
they ask no favour save the revelation of its laws. Thus irreligion for
the many and Stoicism for the few is the end of natural religion in the
modern world as it was in the ancient.

But natural religion (that is, the turning of the facts and laws of
Nature or of experience into an object of worship) is by no means a
primitive nor an ultimate form of religion; it is rather of all the
forms of religion the most unnatural and the least capable of existing
without a historical and emotional setting, independent of its own
essence and inconsistent with its principle. No nation has ever had
a merely natural religion. What is called by that name has been the
appanage of a few philosophers in ages of religious disintegration,
when the habit of worship, surviving the belief in any proper object
of worship, has been transferred with effort and uncertainty to the
natural order which alone remained before the mind,--to the cosmos,
the self, the state, or humanity. Mythology, of which natural religion
is the last and most abstract phase, was originally religious only in
so far as it was supernatural in so far, I mean, as the analogies of
outer Nature led the poet to conceive some moral ideal, some glorious
being full of youth and serenity, of passion and wisdom. Only when
thus transfigured into the human could the natural seem divine. The
Greeks were never idolaters, and no more worshipped the sun or moon
or the whole of Nature than they did statues of bronze or marble; they
worshipped only the god who had a temporal image in the temple as he
had an eternal image in the sun or in the universe.

It happened, therefore, that in the decay of mythology the gods could
still survive as moral ideals. The more they were cut off from their
accidental foothold in the world of fact, the more clearly could they
manifest their essence as expressions of the world of values. We have
mentioned the fact that the greater gods of Greece were almost wholly
detached from the cosmographical hints which had originally suggested
their character and fable. Thus emancipated, these nobler gods could
survive in the consciousness of the devout, fixed there by their
purely moral significance and poetic truth. Apollo or Athena showed
little or nothing of a naturalistic origin; they were patrons of life,
embodiments of the ideal, objects of contemplation for souls that by
prayer would rise to the semblance of the god to whom they prayed. This
transformation into the moral had been going on from the beginning in
the religious mind of Greece. It was really the legitimate fulfilment
of that translation into the human to which mythology itself was due.
But mythology had merely turned the physical into the personal and
impassioned; religion was now to turn the psychical into the good.
This tendency came to a vivid and rational expression in Plato. The
gods, he declared, should be represented only as they were, _i.e._ as
moral ideals. The scandal of their fables should be removed and they
should be regarded as authors only of the good, in their own lives as
in ours. To refer all things to the efficacy of the gods should be
accounted impiety. They, like the supreme and abstract principle of all
excellence which they embodied, could be the authors only of what is
good.

Had this remarkable doctrine been carried out fully it would have led
to important results. We should have had goodness as the criterion of
divinity, to the exclusion of power. God would have become avowedly an
ideal, a pattern to which the world might or might not conform. Such
potential conformity would have remained dependent on causes, natural
or free, with which God, not being a power, could have nothing to do.
Plato and Aristotle did, in fact, construct a theology on these lines,
but they obscured its purity in their well-meant attempts to connect
(more or less mythically or magically) their own Socratic principle
of excellence with the cosmic principles of the earlier philosophers.
The elements of confusion and pantheism which were thus introduced
into the Socratic philosophy made it more acceptable, perhaps, to the
theologians of later times, in whose religion a pantheistic tendency
was also latent. In the hands of Jewish, Christian, or Mohammedan
commentators the mythical and magical part of the Greek conceptions
was naturally emphasized and the rational part reinterpreted and
obscured. Plato had spoken, in one of his myths, of a Demiurgos, a
personification of the Idea of the Good, who directly or indirectly
made the world in his own image, rendering it as perfect as the
indeterminate Chaos he worked on would allow. Aristotle had spoken of
an intelligence, happy and self-contemplative, who was the principle of
movement in the heavens, and through the heavens in the rest of Nature.
Such expressions had a sound far too congruous with Mosaic doctrine not
to be seized upon with joy by the apologists of the new faiths, who
were glad to invoke the authority of classic poets and philosophers in
favour of doctrines that in their Hebrew expression might so easily
seem crude and irrational to the Gentiles. This assimilation gave to
the casual myths of Plato and to the meagre though bold argumentation
of Aristotle a turn and a significance which they hardly had to their
authors. If we approach these philosophers as we should from the point
of view of Greek literature and life, and prepare ourselves to see
in them the disciples of Socrates rather than (what Plato was once
actually declared to be) the disciples of Moses, we shall see that
they were simply, mythologists of the Ideal; they refined the gods of
tradition into patrons of civic discipline and art, the gods of natural
philosophy into principles of intelligibility and beauty.

The creation described in the Timæus is a transparent parable. Elements
which ethical reflection distinguishes in the field of experience
are turned in that dialogue, with undisguised freedom of fancy, into
so many half-personified primitive powers; the Ideas, the Demiurgos,
Chaos, the Indeterminate, and the "gods of gods." Plato has not
forgotten the lessons of Socrates and Parmenides. He distrusts as much
as they any natural or genetic philosophy of existence. He virtually
tells us that, if we must have a history of creation, we can hardly
do better than to take ideal or moral principles, combine them as we
might so many material elements, and see how the intelligible part
of existence may thus receive a quasi-explanation. God remains the
creator of the good only, because what he is mythically said to create
is merely that in Nature which spontaneously resembles him or conforms
to his idea; only this element in Nature is intelligible or good, and
therefore the principle of goodness may be said to be its cause. Thus,
for example, if we chose to write an Anatomy of Melancholy, we might
attribute to the Demon of Spleen or to the Blue Devils only the sombre
elements of that soulful compound, which, however, the evil imps would
eternally tend to make as absolutely dyspeptic and like unto themselves
as its primordial texture would allow. In exactly such a way Plato,
in his allegorical manner, constructed a universe with a poetical
machinery of moral forces, personified and treated as agents. When
the thin veil of allegory is drawn aside, there remains nothing but a
splendid illustration of the Socratic philosophy; we are taught that
the only science is moral science, and that, if we wish to understand
the world, we must bend our minds to the definition of its qualities
and values, which are all that is intelligible in it. Essences and
values alone are knowable and fixed and amenable to science. If we
insist on history and cosmogony, we must be satisfied with having them
presented to us in allegorical form, and made to follow ethics as the
Timæus follows the Republic. Natural philosophy can be nothing but a
sort of analytic retrospect by which we trace the first glimmerings
and the progressive manifestation in Nature of those ideas which have
authority over our own minds.

Phenomena had for Plato existence without reality, that is, without
intelligibility or value. They were a mere appearance. We need not be
surprised, then, that he refused altogether to construct a theology
by the poetic interpretation of phenomena and preferred to construct
one allegorically out of his moral conceptions, the good and the
ideal. Aristotle, too, while adhering incidentally, as we have seen,
to a purified astronomical theology, capped this with a purified moral
theology of his own. The Platonic picture-gallery of ideas, with
the abstract principle of excellence that unified them, gave place
in his philosophy to an Ideal realized in the concrete and existing
as an individual. We may venture to say that among the thinkers of
all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what
may fitly be called God. Neither the national deity of the Hebrews,
as then conceived, nor the natural deities of the Gentiles, nor
the half-physical, half-logical abstractions of the earlier Greek
philosophers really corresponded to the notion of a being spiritual,
personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent
without effort and without degradation. Aristotle first constructed
this ideal, not out of his fancy, but by building on the solid ground
of human nature and following to their point of union the lines
which moral aspiration and effort actually follow. Nay, the ideal he
pointed to was to be the goal not of human life only but of natural
life in all its forms. The analytic study of Nature (a study which at
the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to
the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their
proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment
would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the
fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and
attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the
intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour,
the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the
clarification of love.

A being, then, whose life should be a life of pure and complete
knowledge, would embody the goal toward which all Nature strives.
When we ponder duly the short phrases in which Aristotle propounds
his conception of God we find that he has called up before us the
noblest possible object of human thought, the presentiment of that
thought's perfect fulfilment. There is no alloy of naturalism in this
conception, and at the same time no suspicion of irrelevancy. This
God is not a mere title of honour for the psycho-physical universe,
confusedly conceived and lumped together; he is an ultra-mundane ideal,
to be an inviolate standard and goal for all moving reality. Yet he
is not irrelevant to the facts and forces of the world, not the dream
of an abstracted poet. He is an idea which reality everywhere evokes
in evoking its own deepest craving and need. Nothing is so pertinent
and momentous in life as the object we are trying to attain by thought
or action, since that object is the source of our inspiration and
the standard of our success. Thus Aristotle's God is not superfluous,
not invented. This theology is a true idealism, I mean an idealism
itself purely ideal, which establishes the authority of human demands,
ethical, and logical, without impugning the existence or efficacy of
that material universe which it endows with a meaning and a standard.

Yet this rational conception, the natural out-growth of the Socratic
philosophy, establishes a dualism between the actual and the ideal
against which the human mind easily rebels. Aristotle himself was
hardly faithful to it. He tried to prove the existence of his God, and
existence is something quite irrelevant to an ideal. This confusion is
very excusable, especially in an age when the strictly mechanical view
of Nature still seemed hopelessly inadequate. Aristotle consequently
tried to understand the natural world by viewing it systematically
from the point of view of moral science, as Plato had done less
coherently in his myths; and hence came what we must regard as the
great error of Aristotle's philosophy, the belief in the efficacy
of final causes and in the preëxistence of entelechies. But, apart
from this unhappy question of existence, which is, as we have said,
irrelevant to an ideal, Aristotle's conception of God remains, perhaps,
the most philosophical that has yet been constructed. Without any
concessions to sentiment or superstition, it presents us with a sublime
vision of the essentially human, of a nature as free from an unworthy
anthropomorphism as from an inhuman abstractness. It is made both human
and superhuman by the same principle of idealization. It is the final
cause of Nature and man, the realization of their imminent upward
effort, the essence that would contain all their values and escape all
their imperfections.

We may well doubt, however, whether men in general will ever be ready
to accept so austere a theology in guise of a religion; they were
certainly not ready to do so at the end of the classical period. The
inheritance of Paganism fell instead to Christianity, in which ethical
and naturalistic elements were again united, although united in a new
way. For, while the scheme of Paganism, and of all the philosophies
that sought to rationalize Paganism, was cosmic and static, the scheme
of Christianity was historical. They spoke of the dynamic relations of
heaven and earth, or of the immutable hierarchy of ideas and essences;
even Aristotle's God was somehow in spatial relations to the Universe
which he set in motion. The religion of the Hebrews, on the other
hand, had been essentially historical and civic: it had been concerned
with the moral destinies of Israel and the dealings of Jehovah with
his people. Christianity inherited this historical character; its
mysteries occurred in time. Not only the redemption of the world but
the vocation and sanctification of the individual were progressive,
and when the habits and problems of Christian theology were carried
over by the German idealists into the region of pure metaphysics, the
systems they conceived were still systems of evolution. God was to be
manifest in the development of things. For Christianity in its own way
had spoken from the beginning of a gradual and yet to be completed
descent of the divine into the natural by the agency of prophecy, law,
and sacramental institutions; it had represented the relations of God
to man in a vast historic drama, of which creation constituted the
opening, the fall and redemption the nexus, and the last judgment the
unravelling.

Thus appeared a new scheme for the unification of the natural and the
moral. The harmony which the old religion had failed to establish
in space and in Nature, the new sought to establish in history and
in time. It was hoped that life and experience, sin and redemption,
might manifest that divinity which had fled out of the sea and sky,
and which it seemed sacrilege to identify any longer with the animal
vitality of the universe. Whether the same criticism that disintegrated
mythology and isolated its elements of science and of poetry would
not be fatal to the new combination of the moral and the factual in
the history of man, is hardly a question for us here. Suffice it to
point out the problem and to register the solution which was found
in the ancient world to the analogous problem that presented itself
there. The first impulse of the imagination is always to combine
in the object all the elements which lie together in the mind, to
project them indiscriminately into a single conception of reality,
enriched with as many qualities as there are phases and values in our
experience. But these phases and values have diverse origins and do not
permanently hang together. It becomes after a while impossible to keep
them attached to a single image; they have to be distributed according
to their true order and connections, some objectified into a physical
universe of mechanism and law, others built into a system of rational
objects, into a hierarchy of logical and moral ideas. So the lovely
pantheon of the Greeks yielded in time to analysis and was dissolved
into abstract science and conscious fable. So, too, the body and soul
of later religions may come to be divided, when they render back to
earth what they contain of positive history and to the heaven of man's
indomitable idealism what they contain of aspiration and hope.




IV


THE POETRY OF CHRISTIAN DOGMA


The deathbed of Paganism was surrounded by doctors. Some, the Stoics,
advised a conversion into pantheism (with an allegorical interpretation
of mythology to serve the purposes of edification); others, the
Neo-Platonists, prescribed instead a supernatural philosophy, where the
efficacy of all traditional rites would be justified by incorporation
into a system of universal magic, and the gods would find their
place among the legions of spirits and demons that were to people
the concentric spheres. But these doctors had no knowledge of the
patient's natural constitution; their medicines, prescribed with the
best intentions, were in truth poisons and only hastened the inevitable
end. Nor had the unfortunate doctors the consolation of being heirs.
Parasites that they were, they perished with the patron on whose
substance they had fed, and Christianity, their despised rival, came
into sole possession.

Yet Neo-Platonism, for all we can see, responded as well as
Christianity to the needs of the time, and had besides great external
advantages in its alliance with tradition, with civil power, and with
philosophy. If the demands of the age were for a revealed religion and
an ascetic morality, Neo-Platonism could satisfy them to the full.
Why, then, should the Hellenic world have broken with the creations
of its own genius, so plastic, eloquent, and full of resource, to
run after foreign gods and new doctrines that must naturally have
been stumbling-blocks to its prejudices, and foolishness to its
intelligence? Shall we say that the triumph of Christianity was a
miracle? Is it not a doubtful encomium on a religion to say that only
by miracle could it come to be believed? Perhaps the forces of human
reason and emotion suffice to explain this faith. We prefer to think
so; otherwise, however complete and final the triumph of Christianity
might be, it would not be justified or beneficent.

Neo-Platonism arose in the midst of the same conditions as
Christianity. There was weariness and disgust with the life of nature,
decay of political virtue, desire for some personal and supernatural
good. It was hardly necessary to preach the doctrine of original
sin to that society; the visible blight that had fallen on classic
civilization was proof enough of that. What it was necessary to preach
was redemption. It was necessary to point to some sphere of refuge and
of healthful resort, where the ignominies and the frivolities of this
world might be forgotten, and where the hunger of a heart left empty
by its corroding passions might be finally satisfied. But where find
such a supernatural world? By what revelation learn its nature and be
assured of its existence?

Neo-Platonism opened vistas into the supernatural, but the avenues of
approach which it had chosen and the principle which had given form
to its system foredoomed it to failure as a religion. This avenue was
dialectic, and this principle the hypostasis of abstractions. Plato
had pointed out this path in his genial allegories. He had, by a
poetical figure, turned the ideas of reason into the component forces
of creation. This was, with him, a method of expression, but being
the only method he was inclined to employ, it naturally entangled
and occasionally, perhaps, deceived his intelligence; for a poet
easily mistakes his inspired tropes for the physiology of Nature. Yet
Platonic dogma, even when meant as such, retained the transparency
and significance of a myth; philosophy was still a language for the
expression of experience, and dialectic a method and not a creed. But
the master's counters, current during six centuries of intellectual
decadence, had become his disciples' money. Each of his abstractions
seemed to them a discovery, each of his metaphors a revelation. The
myths of the great dialogues, and, above all, the fanciful machinery
of the Timæus, interpreted with an incredible literalness and naive
earnestness, such as only Biblical exegesis can rival, formed the
starting point of the new revelation. The method and insight thus
obtained were then employed in filling the _lacunæ_ of the system and
spreading its wings wider and wider, until a prodigious hierarchy of
supernatural existences had been invented, from which the natural world
was made to depend as a last link and lowest emanation.

The baselessness and elaboration of this theology were, of course, far
from being obstacles to its success in such an age. On the contrary,
the less evidence could be found in common experience for what a man
appeared to know, the more deeply, people inferred, must he be versed
in supernatural lore, and the greater, accordingly, was his authority.
Nor was the spell of personal genius and even holiness wanting in the
leaders of the new philosophy to lend it colour and persuasiveness with
the many, to whom metaphysical conceptions are less impressive than
is an eloquent personality, or a reputation for miraculous powers.
Plotinus, to speak only of the greatest of the sect, had, in fact, a
notable success in his day. His lectures at Rome, we are told, were
attended by all the fashion and intellect of the capital; and his large
and systematic thought, his subtlety and precision, his comparatively
sober eloquence, and his assurance, if we may say so, in treading the
clouds, have made him at all times a great authority with those persons
who look in philosophy rather for impressive results than for solid
foundations. His contemporaries were eminently persons of that type. A
hungry man, when you bring him bread, does not stop to make scrupulous
inquiries about the mill or the oven from which you bring it.

But the trouble was that the bread of Plotinus was a stone. The heart
cannot feed on thin and elaborate abstractions, irrelevant to its
needs and divorced from the natural objects of its interest. Men will
often accept the baldest fictions as truths; but it is impossible
for them to give a human meaning to vacuous conceptions, or to grow
to love the categories of logic, interweaving their image with the
actions and emotions of daily life. Religion must spring from the
people; it must draw its form from tradition and its substance from
the national imagination and conscience. Neo-Platonism drew both
form and substance from a system of abstract thought. Its gods were
still-born, being generated by logical dichotomy. Only in the lower
purlieus of the system, filled in by accepting current superstitions,
was there any contact with something like vital religious forces. But
those minor elements--hopes and fears about another world, fasts and
penances, ecstasies and marvels--had no necessary relation to that
metaphysical system. Such practices could be found in every religion,
in every philosophical sect of the time. The Alexandrian dialectic of
the supernatural accordingly remained a mere schema or skeleton, to be
filled in with the materials of some real religion, if such a religion
should arise. As such a schema the Neo-Platonic system actually passed
over to Christian theology, furnishing the latter with its categories,
its language, and its speculative method. But that dialectic served in
Christianity to give form to a religious substance furnished by Hebrew
and apostolic tradition, a religious substance such as, after the Pagan
religion was discredited, Neo-Platonism necessarily lacked and was
powerless to generate.

We have mentioned apostolic tradition. It is fortunately not requisite
for our purpose to discuss the origin of this tradition, much less to
decide how much of what the Christian Church eventually taught might
be traced to its Founder. That is a point which even the most thorough
scholars seem still to decide mainly by their prejudices, perhaps
because other material is lacking on which to base a decision. For our
present object we may admit the most extreme hypotheses as equally
possible. The whole body of Catholic doctrine may have been contained
in the oral teaching of Christ; or, on the other hand, a historical
Jesus may not have existed at all, or may have been one among many
obscure Jewish revolutionists, the one who, by accident, came afterward
to be regarded as the initiator of a movement to which all sorts of
forces contributed, and with which he had really had nothing to do. In
either case the fact remains which alone interests us here; that after
three or four centuries of confused struggles, an institution emerged
which called itself the Catholic Church. This church, possessed of
a recognized hierarchy and a recognized dogma, triumphed, both over
the ancient religion, which it called Paganism, and over its many
collateral rivals, which it called heresies. Why did it triumph? What
was there in its novel dogma and practice that enchained the minds that
Paganism could retain no longer, and that would not be content with
Neo-Platonism, native, philosophical, and pliable as that system was?

The answer, to be adequate, would have to be long; but perhaps we
may indicate the spirit in which it ought to be conceived. Paganism
was a religion, but was discarded because it was not supernatural:
Neo-Platonism could not be maintained because it was not a religion.
Christianity was both. It had its roots in a national faith, moulded
by the trials and passions of a singularly religious people; that
connection with Judaism gave Christianity a foothold in history, a
definite dogmatic nucleus, which it was a true instinct in the Church
never to abandon, much as certain speculative heresies might cry out
against the unnatural union of a theory of redemption with one of
creation, and of a world-denying ascetic idealism, which Christianity
was essentially, with the national laws, the crude deism, and the
strenuous worldliness of the ancient Jews. However, had the Gnostic
or Manichæan heresies been victorious, Christianity would have been
reduced to a floating speculation: its hard kernel of positive dogma,
of Scripture, and of hieratic tradition would have been dissolved. It
would have ceased to represent antiquity or to hand down an ancestral
piety: in fine, by its eagerness to express itself as a perfect
philosophy, it would have ceased to be a religion. How essential an
element its Hebraism was, we can see now by the study of Protestantism,
a group of heresies in which the practical instincts and sentimental
needs of the Teutonic race found expression, by throwing over more or
less completely the Catholic dogma and ritual. Yet in this revolution
the Protestants maintained, or rather increased, the intensity of their
religious consciousness, chiefly by absorbing the elements of Hebrew
law and prophecy which they could find in the Bible and casting into
that traditional form their personal conscience or their national
ideals.

How inadequate, on the other hand, this Hebraic element would have
been to constitute the supernatural religion that was now needed,
appears very clearly from the case of Philo Judæus. Here was a man,
heir to all the piety and fervour of his race, who at the same time
was a Neo-Platonist three hundred years before Plotinus and, as it
were, the first Father of the Church. But his religion, being national,
was not communicable and, being positivistic, was at fundamental odds
with the spirit of his philosophy. It remained, therefore, as a merely
personal treasure and heirloom, the possession of his private life:
his disciples, had he had any, must either have been Jews themselves
or else must have been the followers merely of his philosophy. His
religion could not have passed to them; they would have regarded it, as
we might regard the Christianity of Kant or the wife-worship of Comte,
as a private circumstance, a detached trait, less damaging, perhaps, to
his philosophy than favourable to his loyal heart.

Philo, in his commentaries on the Bible, sought to envelop and
transform every detail in the light of Platonic metaphysics. His
interpretations are often violent, but the ingenuous artifice of them
would have delighted his contemporaries as much as himself, and was
adopted afterward by all the Fathers and theologians of the Church.
Philo's theology was thus a success, even a model; yet he failed,
because of the inadequacy of his religion. What interest, what
relevance, could it have for any Gentile to hear about the deliverance
of Israel out of Egypt or out of Babylon, or about circumcision and
prescribed meats, or about the sacrifices in the Temple? What charm or
credibility could he find in further promises of glorious kingdoms,
flowing with milk and honey? Such images might later appeal to the
imagination of New England Puritans and make a religion for them: but
what meaning could they have to the weary Pagan? No doubt the Jews
carried with them an ideal of righteousness, and prosperity; but the
Gentile was sick of heroes and high priests and founders of cities.
Stoic virtues were as vain in his eyes as Sybaritic joys. He did not
wish his passions to be flattered, not even his pride or the passion
for a social Utopia. He wished his passions to be mortified and his
soul to be redeemed. He would not look for a Messiah, unless he could
find him on a cross.

That is the essence of the matter. What overcame the world, because
it was what the world desired, was not a moral reform--for that was
preached by every sect; not an ascetic regimen--for that was practised
by heathen gymnosophists and Pagan philosophers; not brotherly love
within the Church--for the Jews had and have that at least in equal
measure; but what overcame the world was what Saint Paul said he
would always preach: Christ and him crucified. Therein was a new
poetry, a new ideal, a new God. Therein was the transcript of the
real experience of humanity, as men found it in their inmost souls
and as they were dimly aware of it in universal history. The moving
power was a fable--for who stopped to question whether its elements
were historical, if only its meaning were profound and its inspiration
contagious? This fable had points of attachment to real life in a
visible brotherhood and in an extant worship, as well as in the
religious past of a whole people. At the same time it carried the
imagination into a new sphere; it sanctified the poverty and sorrow at
which Paganism had shuddered; it awakened tenderer emotions, revealed
more human objects of adoration, and furnished subtler instruments of
grace. It was a whole world of poetry descended among men, like the
angels at the Nativity, doubling, as it were, their habitation, so that
they might move through supernatural realms in the spirit while they
walked the earth in the flesh. The consciousness of new loves, new
duties, fresh consolations, and luminous unutterable hopes accompanied
them wherever they went. They stopped willingly in the midst of their
business for recollection, like men in love; they sought to stimulate
their imaginations, to focus, as it were, the long vistas of an
invisible landscape.

If the importunity of affairs or of ill-subdued passions disturbed
that dream, they could still return to it at leisure in the solitude of
some shrine or under the spell of some canticle or of some sacramental
image; and meantime they could keep their faith in reserve as their
secret and their resource. The longer the vision lasted and the
steadier it became, the more closely, of course, was it intertwined
with daily acts and common affections; and as real life gradually
enriched that vision with its suggestions, so religion in turn
gradually coloured common life with its unearthly light. In the saint,
in the soul that had become already the perpetual citizen of that
higher sphere, nothing in this world remained without reference to the
other, nor was anything done save for a supernatural end. Thus the
redemption was actually accomplished and the soul was lifted above the
conditions of this life, so that death itself could bring but a slight
and unessential change of environment.

Morbid as this species of faith may seem, visionary as it certainly
was, it is not to be confused with an arbitrary madness or with
personal illusions. Two circumstances raised this imaginative piety
to a high dignity and made it compatible with great accomplishments,
both in thought and in action. In the first place the religious world
constituted a system complete and consistent within itself. There was
occasion within it for the exercise of reason, for the awakening and
discipline of emotion, for the exertion of effort. As music, for all
that it contains nothing of a material or practical nature, offers
a field for the development of human faculty and presents laws and
conditions which, within its sphere, must be obeyed and which reward
obedience with the keenest and purest pleasures; so a supernatural
religion, when it is traditional and systematic like Christianity,
offers another world, almost as vast and solid as the real one, in
which the soul may develop. In entering it we do not enter a sphere
of arbitrary dreams, but a sphere of law where learning, experience,
and happiness may be gained. There is more method, more reason, in
such madness than in the sanity of most people. The world of the
Christian imagination was eminently a field for moral experience; moral
ideas were there objectified into supernatural forces, and instead of
being obscured as in the real world by irrational accidents formed an
intelligible cosmos, vast, massive, and steadfast. For this reason the
believer in any adequate and mature supernatural religion clings to
it with such strange tenacity and regards it as his highest heritage,
while the outsider, whose imagination speaks another language or is
dumb altogether, wonders how so wild a fiction can take root in a
reasonable mind.

The other circumstance that ennobled the Christian system was that
all its parts had some significance and poetic truth, although they
contained, or needed to contain, nothing empirically real. The system
was a great poem which, besides being well constructed in itself, was
allegorical of actual experience, and contained, as in a hieroglyph,
a very deep knowledge of the world and of the human mind. For what
was the object that unfolded itself before the Christian imagination,
the vision that converted and regenerated the world? It was a picture
of human destiny. It was an epic, containing, as it were, the moral
autobiography of man. The object of Pagan religion and philosophy had
been a picture of the material cosmos, conceived as a vast animal and
inhabited by a multitude of individual spirits. Even the Neo-Platonists
thought of nothing else, much as they might multiply abstract names for
its principles and fancifully confuse them with the spheres. It was
always a vast, living, physical engine, a cosmos of life in which man
had a determinate province. His spirit, losing its personality, might
be absorbed into the ethereal element from which it came; but this
emanation and absorption was itself an unchanging process, the systole
and diastole of the universal heart. Practical religion consisted in
honouring the nearest gods and accepting from them man's apportioned
goods, not without looking, perhaps, with a reverence that needed
no ritual, to the enveloping whole that prescribed to gods and men
their respective functions. Thus even Neo-Platonism represented man as
a minor incident in the universe, supernatural though that universe
might be. The spiritual spheres were only the invisible repetitions of
the visible, as the Platonic ideas from the beginning had been only a
dialectic reduplication of the objects in this world. It was against
this allotment that the soul was rebelling. It was looking for a
deliverance that should be not so much the consciousness of something
higher as the hope of something better.

Now, the great characteristic of Christianity, inherited from Judaism,
was that its scheme was historical. Not existences but events were the
subject of its primary interest. It presented a story, not a cosmology.
It was an epic in which there was, of course, superhuman machinery,
but of which the subject was man, and, notable circumstance, the Hero
was a man as well. Like Buddhism, it gave the highest honour to a
man who could lead his fellow-men to perfection. What had previously
been the divine reality--the engine of Nature--now became a temporary
stage, built for the exigencies of a human drama. What had been before
a detail of the edifice--the life of man--now became the argument and
purpose of the whole creation. Notable transformation, on which the
philosopher cannot meditate too much.

Was Christianity right in saying that the world was made for man? Was
the account it adopted of the method and causes of Creation conceivably
correct? Was the garden of Eden a historical reality, and were the
Hebrew prophecies announcements of the advent of Jesus Christ? Did the
deluge come because of man's wickedness, and will the last day coincide
with the dramatic denouement of the Church's history? In other words,
is the spiritual experience of man the explanation of the universe?
Certainly not, if we are thinking of a scientific, not of a poetical
explanation. As a matter of fact, man is a product of laws which
must also destroy him, and which, as Spinoza would say, infinitely
exceed him in their scope and power. His welfare is indifferent to
the stars, but dependent on them. And yet that counter-Copernican
revolution accomplished by Christianity--a revolution which Kant should
hardly have attributed to himself--which put man in the centre of the
universe and made the stars circle about him, must have some kind of
justification. And indeed its justification (if we may be so brief on
so great a subject) is that what is false in the science of facts may
be true in the science of values. While the existence of things must
be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical,
their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their
results, in other words, by their relation to human nature and to
human happiness.

The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic rendering of this side
of the matter, a side which Socrates had envisaged by his admirable
method, but which now flooded the consciousness of mankind with
torrential emotions. Christianity was born under an eclipse, when the
light of Nature was obscured; but the star that intercepted that light
was itself luminous, and shed on succeeding ages a moonlike radiance,
paler and sadder than the other, but no less divine, and meriting no
less to be eternal. Man now studied his own destiny, as he had before
studied the sky, and the woods, and the sunny depths of water; and as
the earlier study produced in his soul--_anima naturaliter poeta_--the
images of Zeus, Pan, and Nereus, so the later study produced the
images of Jesus and of Mary, of Heaven and Hell, of miracles and
sacraments. The observation was no less exact, the translation into
poetic images no less wonderful here than there. To trace the endless
transfiguration, with all its unconscious ingenuity and harmony, might
be the theme of a fascinating science. Let not the reader fancy that in
Christianity everything was settled by records and traditions. The idea
of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response
to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points
of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols; and
nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the
watch for all that might embody its dreams.

The crucifixion, for example, would remain a tragic incident without
further significance, if we regard it merely as a historical fact; to
make it a religious mystery, an idea capable of converting the world,
the moral imagination must transform it into something that happens for
the sake of the soul, so that each believer may say to himself that
Christ so suffered for the love of him. And such a thought is surely
the objectification of an inner impulse; the idea of Christ becomes
something spiritual, something poetical. What literal meaning could
there be in saying that one man or one God died for the sake of each
and every other individual? By what effective causal principle could
their salvation be thought to necessitate his death, or his death to
make possible their salvation? By an [Greek: usteron proteron] natural
to the imagination; for in truth the matter is reversed. Christ's death
is a symbol of human life. Men could "believe in" his death, because
it was a figure and premonition of the burden of their experience.
That is why, when some Apostle told them the story, they could say to
him: "Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet: thou hast told me all
things whatsoever I have felt." Thus the central fact of all Christ's
history, narrated by every Evangelist, could still be nothing but a
painful incident, as unessential to the Christian religion as the death
of Socrates to the Socratic philosophy, were it not transformed by
the imagination of the believer into the counterpart of his own moral
need. Then, by ceasing to be viewed as a historical fact, the death of
Christ becomes a religious inspiration. The whole of Christian doctrine
is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry, because
only then is it the felt counterpart of personal experience and a
genuine expansion of human life.

Take, as another example, the doctrine of eternal rewards and
punishments. Many perplexed Christians of our day try to reconcile
this spirited fable with their modern horror of physical suffering and
their detestation of cruelty; and it must be admitted that the image
of men suffering unending tortures in retribution for a few ignorant
and sufficiently wretched sins is, even as poetry, somewhat repellent.
The idea of torments and vengeance is happily becoming alien to our
society and is therefore not a natural vehicle for our religion. Some
accordingly reject altogether the Christian doctrine on this point,
which is too strong for their nerves. Their objection, of course, is
not simply that there is no evidence of its truth. If they asked for
evidence, would they believe anything? Proofs are the last thing
looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginative
fitness of its faith and knows instinctively that, in such a matter,
imaginative fitness is all that can be required. The reason men reject
the doctrine of eternal punishment is that they find it distasteful
or unmeaning. They show, by the nature of their objections, that they
acknowledge poetic propriety or moral truth to be the sole criterion of
religious credibility.

But, passing over the change of sentiment which gives rise to
this change of doctrine, let us inquire of what reality Christian
eschatology was the imaginative rendering. What was it in the actual
life of men that made them think of themselves as hanging between
eternal bliss and eternal perdition? Was it not the diversity, the
momentousness, and the finality of their experience here? No doubt
the desire to make the reversal of the injustices of this world as
melodramatic and picturesque as possible contributed to the adoption
of this idea; the ideal values of life were thus contrasted with its
apparent values in the most absolute and graphic manner. But we may
say that beneath this motive, based on the exigences of exposition
and edification, there was a deeper intuition. There was the genuine
moralist's sympathy with a philosophic and logical view of immortality
rather than with a superstitious and sentimental one. Another life
exists and is infinitely more important than this life; but it is
reached by the intuition of ideals, not by the multiplication of
phenomena; it is an eternal state not an indefinite succession of
changes. Transitory life ends for the Christian when the balance-sheet
of his individual merits and demerits is made up, and the eternity that
ensues is the eternal reality of those values.

For the Oriental, who believed in transmigration, the individual
dissolved into an infinity of phases; he went on actually and
perpetually, as Nature does; his immortality was a long Purgatory
behind which a shadowy Hell and Heaven scarcely appeared in the form
of annihilation or absorption. This happened because the Oriental mind
has no middle; it oscillates between extremes and passes directly from
sense to mysticism, and back again; it lacks virile understanding and
intelligence creative of form. But Christianity, following in this
the Socratic philosophy, rose to the conception of eternal essences,
forms suspended above the flux of natural things and expressing the
ideal suggestions and rational goals of experience. Each man, for
Christianity, has an immortal soul; each life has the potentiality of
an eternal meaning, and as this potentiality is or is not actualized,
as this meaning is or is not expressed in the phenomena of this
life, the soul is eternally saved or lost. As the tree falleth, so
it lieth. The finality of this brief and personal experiment, the
consequent awful solemnity of the hour of death when all trial is over
and when the eternal sentence is passed, has always been duly felt
by the Christian. The Church, indeed, in answer to the demand for a
more refined and discriminating presentation of its dogma, introduced
the temporary discipline of Purgatory, in which the virtues already
stamped on the soul might be brought to greater clearness and rid of
the alloy of imperfection; but this purification allowed no essential
development, no change of character or fate; the soul in Purgatory was
already saved, already holy.

The harshness of the doctrine of eternal judgment is therefore a
consequence of its symbolic truth. The Church might have been less
absolute in the matter had she yielded more, as she did in the doctrine
of Purgatory, to the desire for merely imaginary extensions of human
experience. But her better instincts kept her, after all, to the
moral interpretation of reality; and the facts to be rendered were
uncompromising enough. Art is long, life brief. To have told men they
would have infinite opportunities to reform and to advance would have
been to feed them on gratuitous fictions without raising them, as it
was the function of Christianity to do, to a consciousness of the
spiritual meaning and upshot of existence. To have speculated about the
infinite extent of experience and its endless transformations, after
the manner of the barbarous religions, and never to have conceived
its moral essence, would have been to encourage a dream which may by
chance be prophetic, but which is as devoid of ideal meaning as of
empirical probability. Christian fictions were at least significant;
they beguiled the intellect, no doubt, and were mistaken for accounts
of external fact; but they enlightened the imagination; they made
man understand, as never before or since, the pathos and nobility of
his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity,
the transcendence and the humanity of the divine. For the divine
was reached by the idealization of the human. The supernatural was
an allegory of the natural, and rendered the values of transitory
things under the image of eternal existences. Thus the finality of
our activity in this world, together with the eternity of its ideal
meanings, was admirably rendered by the Christian dogma of a final
judgment.

But there was another moral truth which was impressed upon the believer
by that doctrine and which could not be enforced in any other way
without presupposing in him an unusual philosophic acumen and elevation
of mind. That is the truth that moral distinctions are absolute. A
cool philosophy suffices to show us that moral distinctions exist,
since men prefer some experiences to others and can by their action
bring these good and evil experiences upon themselves and upon their
fellows. But a survey of Nature may at the same time impress us with
the fact that these goods and evils are singularly mixed, that there
is hardly an advantage gained which is not bought by some loss, or any
loss which is not an opportunity for the attainment of some advantage.
While it would be chimerical to pretend that such compensation was
always adequate, and that, in consequence, no one condition was ever
really preferable to any other, yet the perplexities into which moral
aspiration is thrown by these contradictory vistas is often productive
of the desire to reach some other point of view, to escape into what
is irrationally thought to be a higher category than the moral. The
serious consideration of those things which are right according to
human reason and interest may then yield to a fanatical reliance on
some facile general notion.

It may be thought, for instance, that what is regular or necessary
or universal is therefore right and good; thus a dazed contemplation
of the actual may take the place of the determination of the ideal.
Mysticism in regard to the better and the worse, by which good and bad
are woven into a seamless garment of sorry magnificence in which the
whole universe is wrapped up, is like mysticism on other subjects; it
consists in the theoretic renunciation of a natural attitude, in this
case of the natural attitude of welcome and repulsion in the presence
of various things. But this category is the most fundamental of all
those that the human mind employs, and it cannot be surrendered so
long as life endures. It is indeed the conscious echo of those vital
instincts by whose operation we exist. Levity and mysticism may do all
they can--and they can do much--to make men think moral distinctions
unauthoritative, because moral distinctions may be either ignored or
transcended. Yet the essential assertion that one thing is really
better than another remains involved in every act of every living
being. It is involved even in the operation of abstract thinking, where
a cogent conclusion, being still coveted, is assumed to be a good, or
in that æsthetic and theoretic enthusiasm before cosmic laws, which is
the human foundation of this mysticism itself.

It is accordingly a moral truth which no subterfuge can elude, that
some things are really better than others. In the daily course of
affairs we are constantly in the presence of events which by turning
out one way or the other produce a real, an irrevocable, increase of
good or evil in the world. The complexities of life, struggling as it
does amidst irrational forces, may make the attainment of one good
the cause of the unattainableness of another; they cannot destroy
the essential desirability of both. The niggardliness of Nature
cannot sterilize the ideal; the odious circumstances which make the
attainment of many goods conditional on the perpetration of some evil,
and which punish every virtue by some incapacity or some abuse,--these
odious circumstances cannot rob any good of its natural sweetness, nor
all goods together of their conceptual harmony. To the heart that has
felt it and that is the true judge, every loss is irretrievable and
every joy indestructible. Eventual compensations may obliterate the
memory of these values but cannot destroy their reality. The future can
only furnish further applications of the principle by which they arose
and were justified.

Now, how utter this moral truth imaginatively, how clothe it in an
image that might render its absoluteness and its force? Could any
method be better than to say: Your eternal destiny is hanging in
the balance: the grace of God, the influences of others, and your
own will reacting upon both are shaping at every moment issues of
absolute importance. What happens here and now decides not merely
incidental pains and pleasures--which perhaps a brave and careless
spirit might alike despise--but helps to determine your eternal
destiny of joy or anguish, and the eternal destiny of your neighbour.
In place of the confused vistas of the empirical world, in which the
threads of benefit and injury might seem to be mingled and lost, the
imagination substituted the clear vision of Hell and Heaven; while
the determination of our destiny was made to depend upon obedience to
recognized duties.

Now these duties may often have been far from corresponding to those
which reason would impose; but the intention and the principle at least
were sound. It was felt that the actions and passions of this world
breed momentous values, values which being ideal are as infinite as
values can be in the estimation of reason--the values of truth, of
love, of rationality, of perfection--although both the length of the
experience in which they arise and the number of persons who share
that experience may be extremely limited. But the mechanical measure
of experience in length, intensity, or multiplication has nothing to
do with its moral significance in realizing truth or virtue. Therefore
the difference in dignity between the satisfactions of reason and
the satisfactions of sense is fittingly rendered by the infinite
disproportion between heavenly and earthly joys. In our imaginative
translation we are justified in saying that the alternative between
infinite happiness and infinite misery is yawning before us, because
the alternative between rational failure or success is actually
present. The decisions we make from moment to moment, on which the
ideal value of our life and character depends, actually constitute in a
few years a decision which is irrevocable.

The Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments is thus in harmony
with moral truths which a different doctrine might have obscured.
The good souls that wish to fancy that everybody will be ultimately
saved, subject a fable to standards appropriate to matters of fact,
and thereby deprive the fable of that moral significance which is its
excuse for being. If every one is ultimately saved, there is nothing
truly momentous about alternative events: all paths lead more or less
circuitously to the same end. The only ground which then remains
for discriminating the better from the worse is the pleasantness or
unpleasantness of the path to salvation. All moral meanings inhere,
then, in this life, and the other life is without significance. Heaven
comes to replace life empirically without fulfilling it ideally. We are
reduced for our moral standards to phenomenal values, to the worth of
life in transitory feeling. These values are quite real, but they are
not those which poetry and religion have for their object. They are
values present to sense, not to reason and imagination.

The ideal of a supervening general bliss presents indeed an abstract
desideratum, but not the ideal involved in the actual forces of life;
that end would have no rational relation to its primary factors; it
would not be built on our instinctive preferences but would abolish
them by a miraculous dream, following alike upon every species of
activity. Moral differences would have existed merely to be forgotten;
for if we say they were remembered, but transcended and put to rest,
we plunge into an even worse contradiction to the conscience and the
will. For if we say that the universal bliss consists in the assurance,
mystically received, that while individual experiences may differ in
value they all equally conduce to the perfection of the universe, we
deny not merely the momentousness but even the elementary validity of
moral distinctions. We assert that the best idea of God is that least
like the ideal of man, and that the nearer we come to the vision of
truth the farther we are from the feeling of preference. In our attempt
to extend the good we thus abolish its essence. Our religion consists
in denying the authority of the ideal, which is its only rational
foundation; and thus that religion, while gaining nothing in empirical
reality, comes to express a moral falsehood instead of a moral truth.

If we looked in religion for an account of facts, as most people do,
we should have to pass a very different judgment on these several
views. The mechanical world is a connected system and Nature seems
to be dynamically one; the intuitions on which mysticism feeds are
therefore true intuitions. The expectation of a millennium is on the
other hand quite visionary, because the evidence of history, while it
shows undeniable progress in many directions, shows that this progress
is essentially relative, partial, and transitory. As for the Christian
doctrine of the judgment, it is something wholly out of relation to
empirical facts, it assumes the existence of a supernatural sphere, and
is beyond the reach of scientific evidence of any kind. But if we look
on religion as on a kind of poetry, as we have decided here to do,--as
on a kind of poetry that expresses moral values and reacts beneficently
upon life,--we shall see that the Christian doctrine is alone
justified. For mysticism is not an imaginative construction at all but
a renunciation or confusion of our faculties; here a surrender of the
human ideal in the presence of a mechanical force that is felt, and
correctly felt, to tend to vaguer results or rather to tend to nothing
in particular. Mysticism is not a religion but a religious disease.
The idea of universal salvation, on the other hand, is the expression
of a feeble sentimentality, a pleasant reverie without structure or
significance. But the doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments
is, as we have tried to show, an expression of moral truth, a poetic
rendering of the fact that rational values are ideal, momentous, and
irreversible.

It would be easy to multiply examples and to exhibit the various parts
of Christianity as so many interpretations of human life in its ideal
aspects. But we are not attempting to narrate facts so much as to
advance an idea, and the illustrations given will perhaps suffice
to make our conception intelligible. There is, however, a possible
misunderstanding which we should be careful to avoid in this dangerous
field of philosophic interpretation. In saying that a given religion
was the poetic transformation of an experience, we must not imagine
that it was thought to be such--for it is evident that every sincere
Christian believed in the literal and empirical reality of all that the
Christian epic contained. Nor should we imagine that philosophic ideas,
or general reflections on life, were the origin of religion, and that
afterward certain useful myths, known to be such by their authors, were
mistaken for history and for literal prophecy. That sometimes happens,
when historians, poets, or philosophers are turned by the unintelligent
veneration of posterity into religious prophets. Such was the fate of
Plato, for instance, or of the writer of the "Song of Solomon"; but 110
great and living religion was ever founded in that way.

Had Christianity or any other religion had its basis in literary or
philosophical allegories, it would never have become a religion,
because the poetry of it would never have been interwoven with the
figures and events of real life. No tomb, no relic, no material
miracle, no personal derivation of authority, would have existed to
serve as the nucleus of devotion and the point of junction between
this world and the other. The origin of Christian dogma lay in historic
facts and in doctrines literally meant by their authors. It is one of
the greatest possible illusions in these matters to fancy that the
meaning which we see in parables and mysteries was the meaning they had
in the beginning, but which later misinterpretation had obscured. On
the contrary--as a glance at any incipient religious movement now going
on will show us--the authors of doctrines, however obvious it may be to
every one else that these doctrines have only a figurative validity,
are the first dupes to their own intuitions. This is no less true of
metaphysical theories than of spontaneous superstitions: did their
promulgator understand the character of their justification he would
give himself out for a simple poet, appeal only to cultivated minds,
and never turn his energies to stimulating private delusions, not to
speak of public fanaticisms. The best philosophers seldom perceive the
poetic merit of their systems.

So among the ancients it was not an abstract observation of Nature,
with conscious allegory supervening, that was the origin of mythology,
but the interpretation was spontaneous, the illusion was radical, a
consciousness of the god's presence was the first impression produced
by the phenomenon. Else, in this case too, poetry would never have
become superstition; what made it superstition was the initial
incapacity in people to discriminate the objects of imagination from
those of the understanding. The fancy thus attached its images, without
distinguishing their ideal locus, to the visible world, and men became
superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because
they were not aware that they had any.

In what sense, then, are we justified in saying that religion expresses
moral ideals? In the sense that moral significance, while not the
source of religions, is the criterion of their value and the reason
why they may deserve to endure. Far as the conception of an allegory
may be from the minds of prophets, yet the prophecy can only take
root in the popular imagination if it recommends itself to some human
interest. There must be some correspondence between the doctrine
announced or the hopes set forth, and the natural demands of the
human spirit. Otherwise, although the new faith might be preached, it
would not be accepted. The significance of religious doctrines has
therefore been the condition of their spread, their maintenance, and
their development, although not the condition of their origin. In
Darwinian language, moral significance has been a spontaneous variation
of superstition, and this variation has insured its survival as a
religion. For religion differs from superstition not psychologically
but morally, not in its origin but in its worth. This worth, when
actually felt and appreciated, becomes of course a dynamic factor and
contributes like other psychological elements to the evolution of
events; but being a logical harmony, a rational beauty, this worth is
only appreciable by a few minds, and those the least primitive and the
least capable of guiding popular movements. Reason is powerless to
found religions, although it is alone competent to judge them. Good
religions are therefore the product of unconscious rationality, of
imaginative impulses fortunately moral.

Particularly does this appear in the early history of Christianity.
Every shade of heresy, every kind of mixture of Christian and other
elements was tried and found advocates; but after a greater or less
success they all disappeared, leaving only the Church standing. For the
Church had known how to combine those dogmas and practices in which
the imagination of the time, and to a great extent of all times, might
find fitting expression. Imaginative significance was the touchstone
of orthodoxy; tradition itself was tested by this standard. By this
standard the canon of Scripture was fixed, so as neither to exclude the
Old Testament, which the pure metaphysicians would have rejected, nor
to accept every gospel that circulated under the name of an apostle,
and which might please a wonder-loving and detail-loving piety. By
the same criterion the ritual was composed, the dogma developed, the
nature of Christ defined, the sacraments and discipline of the Church
regulated. The result was a comprehensive system where, under the
shadow of a great epic, which expanded and interpreted the history
of mankind from the Creation to the Day of Doom, a place was found
for as many religious instincts and as many religious traditions as
possible; while at the same time the dialectic proficiency of an age
that inherited the discipline of Greek philosophy, introduced into the
system a great consistency and a great metaphysical subtlety. Time
mellowed and expanded these dogmas, bringing them into relation with
the needs of a multiform piety; a justification was found both for
asceticism and for a virtuous naturalism, both for contemplation and
for action; and thus it became possible for the Church to insinuate her
sanctions and her spirit into the motives of men, and to embody the
religion of many nations during many ages.

The Church's successes, however, were not all legitimate; they were
not everywhere due to a real correspondence between her forms and the
ideal life of men. It was only the inhabitants of the Græco-Roman
world that were quite prepared to understand her. When the sword, or
the authority of a higher worldly civilization, carried her influence
beyond the borders of the Roman Empire we may observe that her
authority seldom proved stable. She was felt, by those peoples whose
imaginative traditions and whose moral experience she did not express,
to be something alien and artificial. The Teutonic races finally threw
off what they felt to be her yoke. If they reconstructed their religion
out of elements which she had furnished, that was only because religion
is bound to be traditional, and they had been Christians for many
hundred years. A wholly new philosophy or poetry could not have taken
immediate root in their minds; even the philosophy which Germany has
since produced, when the national spirit was reaching, so to speak, its
majority, hardly seems able to constitute an independent religion, but
takes shelter under some form of Christianity, however much the spirit
of that religion may be transformed.

At first, indeed, the new movement took the Bible for its
starting-point. So heterogeneous a book, which was already habitually
interpreted in so many fanciful ways, was indeed an admirable basis
for the imagination to build upon. The self-reliant and dreamy Teuton
could spin out of the Biblical chronicles and rhapsodies convictions
after his own heart; while his fixed persuasion that the Bible was the
word of God, was strengthened (not illegitimately) by his ability to
make it express his own moral ideals. The intensity of his religion was
proportionate to the degree in which he had made it the imaginative
rendering of his own character.

Protestantism in its vital elements was thus a perfectly new, a
perfectly spontaneous religion. The illusion that it was a return to
primitive Christianity was useful for controversial purposes and helped
to justify the iconoclastic passions of the time; but this illusion
did not touch the true essence of Protestantism, nor the secret of its
legitimacy and power as a religion. This was its new embodiment of
human ideals in imaginative forms, whereby those ideals became explicit
and found a remarkable expression in action. These ideals were quite
Teutonic and looked to inner spontaneity and outward prosperity; they
were more allied to those of the Hebrews than to those of the early
Christians, whose religion was all miracles, asceticism, and withdrawal
from the world. Indeed we may say that the typical Protestant was
himself his own church and made the selection and interpretation of
tradition according to the demands of his personal spirit. What the
Fathers did for the Church in the fourth century, the Reformers did for
themselves in the sixteenth, and have continued to do on the occasion
of their various appearances.

If we judge this interpretation by poetic standards, we cannot
resist the conclusion that the old version was infinitely superior.
The Protestant, with his personal resources, was reduced to making
grotesquely and partially that translation of moral life which the
Fathers had made comprehensively and beautifully, inspired as they
were by all the experience of antiquity and all the hopes of youthful
Christendom. Nevertheless, Protestantism has the unmistakable character
of a genuine religion, a character which tradition passively accepted
and dogma, regarded as so much external truth, may easily lose; it
is in correspondence with the actual ideals and instincts of the
believer; it is the self-assertion of a living soul. Its meagreness
and eccentricity are simply evidences of its personal basis. It is in
full harmony with the practical impulses it comes to sanction, and
accordingly it gains in efficiency all that it loses in dignity and
truth.

The principle by which the Christian system had developed, although
reapplied by the Protestants to their own inner life, was not
understood by them in its historical applications. They had little
sympathy with the spiritual needs and habits of that Pagan society in
which Christianity had grown up. That society had found in Christianity
a sort of last love, a rejuvenating supersensible hope, and had
bequeathed to the Gospel of Redemption, for its better embodiment and
ornament, all its own wealth of art, philosophy, and devotion. This
embodiment of Christianity represented a civilization through which
the Teutonic races had not passed and which they never could have
produced; it appealed to a kind of imagination and sentiment which
was foreign to them. This embodiment, accordingly, was the object of
their first and fiercest attack, really because it was unsympathetic
to their own temperament but ostensibly because they could not find
its basis in those Hebraic elements of Christianity which make up the
greater bulk of the Bible. They did not value the sublime aspiration
of Christianity to be not something Hebraic or Teutonic but something
Catholic and human; and they blamed everything which went beyond the
accidental limits of their own sympathies and the narrow scope of their
own experience.

Yet it was only by virtue of this complement inherited from Paganism,
or at least supplied by the instincts and traditions on which Paganism
had reposed, that Christianity could claim to approach a humane
universality or to achieve an imaginative adequacy. The problem was to
compose, in the form of a cosmic epic, with metaphysical justifications
and effectual starting-points for moral action, the spiritual
autobiography of man. The central idea of this composition was to be
the idea of a Redemption. Around this were to be gathered and moulded
together elements drawn from Hebrew tradition and scripture, others
furnished by Paganism, together with all that the living imagination
of the time could create. Nor was it right or fitting to make a merely
theoretical or ethical synthesis. Doctrine must find its sensible echo
in worship, in art, in the feasts and fasts of the year. Only when
thus permeating life and expressing itself to every sense and faculty
can a religion be said to have reached completion; only then has the
imagination exhausted its means of utterance.

The great success which Christianity achieved in this immense
undertaking makes it, after classic antiquity, the most important phase
in the history of mankind. It is clear, however, that this success was
not complete. That fallacy from which the Pagan religion alone has
been free, that [Greek: proton pseudos] of all fanaticism, the natural
but hopeless misunderstanding of imagining that poetry in order to
be religion, in order to be the inspiration of life, must first deny
that it is poetry and deceive us about the facts with which we have
to deal--this misunderstanding has marred the work of the Christian
imagination and condemned it, if we may trust appearances, to be
transitory. For by this misunderstanding Christian doctrine was brought
into conflict with reality, of which it pretends to prejudge the
character, and also into conflict with what might have been its own
elements, with all excluded religious instincts and imaginative ideals.
Human life is always essentially the same, and therefore a religion
which, like Christianity, seizes the essence of that life, ought to be
an eternal religion. But it may forfeit that privilege by entangling
itself with a particular account of matters of fact, matters irrelevant
to its ideal significance, and further by intrenching itself, by
virtue of that entanglement, in an inadequate regimen or a too narrow
imaginative development, thus putting its ideal authority in jeopardy
by opposing it to other intuitions and practices no less religious than
its own.

Can Christianity escape these perils? Can it reform its claims, or
can it overwhelm all opposition and take the human heart once more by
storm? The future alone can decide. The greatest calamity, however,
would be that which seems, alas! not unlikely to befall our immediate
posterity, namely, that while Christianity should be discredited no
other religion, more disillusioned and not less inspired, should come
to take its place. Until the imagination should have time to recover
and to reassert its legitimate and kindly power, the European races
would then be reduced to confessing that while they had mastered the
mechanical forces of Nature, both by science and by the arts, they had
become incapable of mastering or understanding themselves, and that,
bewildered like the beasts by the revolutions of the heavens and by
their own irrational passions, they could find no way of uttering the
ideal meaning of their life.




V


PLATONIC LOVE IN SOME ITALIAN POETS


When the fruits of philosophic reflection, condensed into some phrase,
pass into the common language of men, there does not and there cannot
accompany them any just appreciation of their meaning or of the long
experience and travail of soul from which they have arisen. Few
doctrines have suffered more by popularization than the intuitions
of Plato. The public sees in Platonic sayings little more than
phrases employed by unpractical minds to cloak the emptiness of their
yearnings. Finding these fragments of an obsolete speech put to bad
uses, we are apt to ignore and despise them, much as a modern peasant
might despise the fragment of a frieze or a metope which he found
built into his cottage wall. It is not only the works of plastic art
that moulder and disintegrate to furnish materials for the barbarous
masons of a later age: the great edifices of reason also crumble, their
plan is lost, and their fragments, picked where they happen to lie,
become the materials of a feebler thought. In common speech we find
such bits of ancient wisdom embedded; they prove the intelligence of
some ancestor of ours, but are no evidence of our own. When used in
ignorance of their meaning, they become misplaced flourishes, lapses
into mystery in the businesslike plainness of our thought.

Yet there is one man, the archæologist, to whom nothing is so
interesting as just these stones which a practical builder would have
rejected. He forgives the ignorance and barbarism that placed them
where they are; he is absorbed in studying their sculptured surface
and delighted if his fancy can pass from them to the idea of the
majestic whole to which they once belonged. So in the presence of a
much-abused philosophic phrase, we may be interested in reconstructing
the experience which once gave it meaning and form. Words are at least
the tombs of ideas, and the most conventional formulas of poets or
theologians are still good subjects for the archæologist of passion. He
may find a treasure there; or at any rate he may hope to be rewarded
for his labour by the ideal restoration of some once beautiful temple
of Athena.

Something of this kind is what we may now attempt to do with regard to
one or two Platonic ideas, ideas which under the often ironical title
of Platonic love, are constantly referred to and seldom understood.
These ideas may be defined as the transformation of the appreciation
of beautiful things into the worship of an ideal beauty and the
transformation of the love of particular persons into the love of God.
These mystical phrases may acquire a new and more human meaning if we
understand, at least in part, how they first came to be spoken. We
shall then not think of them merely as the reported sayings of Plato
or Plotinus, Porphyry or Proclus; we shall not learn them by rote, as
the unhappy student learns the enigmas, which, in the histories of
philosophy, represent all that survives of the doctrine of a Thales or
a Pythagoras. We shall have some notion of the ideas that once prompted
such speech.

And we shall be the better able to reconstruct those conceptions
inasmuch as the reflection by which they are bred has recurred often
in the world--has recurred, very likely, in our own experience.
We are often Platonists without knowing it. In some form or other
Platonic ideas occur in all poetry of passion when it is seasoned with
reflection. They are particularly characteristic of some Italian poets,
scattered from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These poets
had souls naturally Platonic; even when they had heard something of
Plato they borrowed nothing from him. They repeated his phrases, when
they did so, merely to throw the authority of an ancient philosopher
over the spontaneous suggestions of their own minds. Their Platonism
was all their own: it was Christian, mediæval, and chivalrous, both
in origin and expression. But it was all the more genuine for being a
reincarnation rather than an imitation of the old wisdom.

Nothing, for example, could be a better object-lesson in Platonism than
the well-known sentimental history of Dante. There is no essential
importance in the question whether Dante could have read anything of
Plato or come indirectly under his influence. The Platonism of Dante,
is, in any case, quite his own. It is the expression of his inner
experience moulded by the chivalry and theology of his time. He tells
us the story himself very quaintly in the "Vita Nuova."

At the age of nine he saw, at a wedding-feast in Florence, Beatrice,
then a child of seven, who became, forthwith, the mistress of his
thoughts. This precocious passion ruled his imagination for life, so
that, when he brings to an end the account of the emotions she aroused
in him by her life and death, he tells us that he determined to speak
no more about her until he should be able to do so more worthily, and
to say of her what had never been said of any woman. In the "Divine
Comedy," accordingly, where he fulfils this promise, she appears
transfigured into a heavenly protectress and guide, whose gentle
womanhood fades into an impersonation of theological wisdom. But this
life-long devotion of Dante to Beatrice was something purely mental
and poetical; he never ventured to woo; he never once descended or
sought to descend from the sphere of silent and distant adoration;
his tenderness remained always tearful and dreamy, like that of a
supersensitive child.

Yet, while his love of Beatrice was thus constant and religious, it
was by no means exclusive. Dante took a wife as Beatrice herself had
taken a husband; the temptations of youth, as well as the affection
of married life, seem to have existed beneath this ideal love, not
unrebuked by it, indeed, but certainly not disturbing it. Should we be
surprised at this species of infidelity? Should we regard it as proof
of the artificiality and hollowness of that so transcendental passion,
and smile, as people have done in the case of Plato himself, at the
thin disguise of philosophy that covers the most vulgar frailties of
human nature? Or, should we say, with others, that Beatrice is a merely
allegorical figure, and the love she is said to inspire nothing but a
symbol for attachment to wisdom and virtue? These are old questions,
and insoluble by any positive method, since they cannot be answered by
the facts but only by our interpretation of them. Our solution can have
little historical value, but it will serve to test our understanding of
the metaphysics of feeling.

To guide us in this delicate business we may appeal to a friend of
Dante, his fellow-poet Guido Cavalcanti, who will furnish us with
another example of this same sort of idealization, and this same sort
of inconstancy, expressed in a manner that will repay analysis. Guido
Cavalcanti had a Beatrice of his own--something of the kind was then
expected of every gentle knight and poet--and Guido's Beatrice was
called Giovanna. Dante seems to acknowledge the parity of his friend's
passion with his own by coupling the names of the two ladies, Monna
Vanna and Monna Bice, in one or two of the sonnets he addresses to
Guido. Now it came to pass that Guido, in the fervour of his devotion,
at once chivalrous and religious, bethought him of making a pilgrimage
to the tomb of Saint James the Apostle, at Compostela in Spain.
Upon this journey--a journey beguiled, no doubt, by thoughts of the
beautiful Giovanna he had left in Florence--he halted in the city of
Toulouse. But at Toulouse, as chance would have it, there lived a
lovely lady by the name of Mandetta, with whom it was impossible for
the chivalrous pilgrim not to fall in love; for chivalry is nothing
but a fine emblazoning of the original manly impulse to fight every
man and love every woman. Now in an interesting sonnet Guido describes
the conflict of these two affections, or perhaps we should rather say,
their union.

    "There is a lady in Toulouse so fair,
       So young, so gentle, and so chastely gay,
     She doth a true and living likeness bear
       In her sweet eyes to Love, whom I obey."

The word I have, to avoid confusion, here rendered by "Love" is in the
original "la Donna mia," "my Lady"; so that we have our poet falling in
love with Mandetta on account of her striking resemblance to Giovanna.
Is this inconstancy or only a more delicate and indirect homage? We
shall see; for Guido goes on to represent his soul, according to his
custom, as a being that dwells and moves about in the chambers of
his heart; and speaking still of Mandetta, the lady of Toulouse, he
continues:--

    "Within my heart my soul, when she appeared,
       Was filled with longing and was fain to flee
     Out of my heart to her, yet was afeared
       To tell the lady who my Love might be.
     She looked upon me with her quiet eyes,
       And under their sweet ray my bosom burned,
     Cheered by Love's image, that within them lies."

So far we have still the familiar visible in the new and making its
power; Mandetta is still nothing but a stimulus to reawaken the memory
of Giovanna. But before the end there is trouble. The sting of the
present attraction is felt in contrast to the eternal ideal. There is
a necessity of sacrifice, and he cries, as the lady turns away her
eyes:--

    "Alas! they shot an arrow as she turned,
     And with a death-wound from the piercing dart
     My soul came sighing back into my heart."

Perhaps this merely means that the lady was disdainful; had she been
otherwise the poet might never have written sonnets about her, and
surely not sonnets in which her charms were reduced to a Platonic
reminiscence of a fairer ideal. But it is this turning away of the
face of love, this ephemeral quality of its embodiments, that usually
stimulates the imagination to the construction of a supersensible ideal
in which all those evaporated impulses may meet again and rest in an
adequate and permanent object. So that while Guido's "death-wound" was
perhaps in reality nothing but the rebuff offered him by a prospective
mistress, yet the sting of it, in a mind of Platonic habit, served
at once to enforce the distinction between the ideal beauty, so full
of sweetness and heavenly charm, which had tempted the soul out of
his heart on its brief adventure, and the particular and real object
against which the soul was dashed, and from which it returned bruised
and troubled to its inward solitude.

So the meditative Guido represents his experience: a new planet swam
into his ken radiant with every grace and virtue; yet all the magic
of that lady lay in her resemblance to the mysterious Giovanna, the
double of Beatrice, the ideal of the poet's imagination. The soul, at
first, went out eagerly to the new love as to an image and embodiment
of the old, but was afraid, and justly, to mention the ideal in the
presence of the reality. There is always danger in doing that; it
breaks the spell and reduces us again to the old and patient loyalty to
the unseen. The present thing being so like the ideal we unhesitatingly
pursue it: but we are quickly disappointed, and the soul returns
sighing and mortally wounded, as the new object of passion fades away.

We may now understand somewhat better that strange combination of
loyalty and disloyalty which we find in Dante. While the object of
love is any particular thing, it excludes all others; but it includes
all others as soon as it becomes a general ideal. All beauties attract
by suggesting the ideal and then fail to satisfy by not fulfilling
it. While Giovanna remained a woman, Guido, as his after life plainly
showed, had no difficulty in forgetting her and in loving many others
with a frank heart; but when Giovanna had become a name for the
absolute ideal, that sovereign mistress could never be forgotten, and
the thought of her subordinated every particular attachment and called
the soul away from it. Compared with the ideal, every human perfection
becomes a shadow and a deceit; every mortal passion leaves, as Keats
has told us,

    "A heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
     A burning forehead and a parching tongue."

Such is the nature of idealization. Like the Venus of Apelles, in
which all known beauties were combined, the ideal is the union of
all we prize in all creatures; and the mind that has once felt the
irresistible compulsion to create this ideal and to believe in it has
become incapable of unreserved love of anything else. The absolute
is a jealous god; it is a consuming fire that blasts the affections
upon which it feeds. For this reason the soul of Guido, in his sonnet,
is mortally wounded by the shaft of that beauty which has awakened a
vehement longing for perfection without being able to satisfy it. All
things become to the worshipper of the ideal so many signs and symbols
of what he seeks; like the votary who, kneeling now before one image
and now before another, lets his incense float by all with a certain
abstracted impartiality, because his aspiration mounts through them
equally to the invisible God they alike represent.

Another aspect of the same process is well described by Shakespeare, in
whom Italian influences count for much, when he says to the person he
has chosen as the object of his idealization:--

    "Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
       Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead,
     And there reigns love and all love's loving parts
       And all those friends which I thought buried.
     How many a holy and obsequious tear
       Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
     As interest for the dead, which now appear
       But things removed, which hidden in thee lie.
     Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
       Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
     Who all their parts of me to thee did give:
       That due of many now is thine alone.
     Their images I loved I view in thee,
     And thou, all they, hast all the all of me."

We need not, then, waste erudition in trying to prove whether Dante's
Beatrice or Guido's Giovanna or any one else who has been the subject
of the greater poetry of love, was a symbol or a reality. To poets and
philosophers real things are themselves symbols. The child of seven
whom Dante saw at the Florentine feast was, if you will, a reality. As
such she is profoundly unimportant. To say that Dante loved her then
and ever after is another way of saying that she was a symbol to him.
That is the way with childish loves. Neither the conscious spell of the
senses nor the affinities of taste and character can then be powerful,
but the sense of loneliness and the vague need of loving may easily
conspire with the innocence of the eyes to fix upon a single image and
to make it the imaginary goal of all those instincts which as yet do
not know themselves.

When with time these instincts become explicit and select their
respective objects, if the inmost heart still remains unsatisfied, as
it must in all profound or imaginative natures, the name and memory
of that vague early love may well subsist as a symbol for the perfect
good yet unattained. It is intelligible that as time goes on that
image, grown thus consciously symbolic, should become interchangeable
with the abstract method of pursuing perfection--that Beatrice, that
is, should become the same as sacred theology. Having recognized that
she was to his childish fancy what the ideals of religion were to his
mature imagination, Dante intentionally fused the two, as every poet
intentionally fuses the general and the particular, the universal and
the personal. Beatrice thenceforth appeared, as Plato wished that our
loves should, as a manifestation of absolute beauty and as an avenue of
divine grace. Dante merely added his Christian humility and tenderness
to the insight of the Pagan philosopher.

The tendency to impersonality, we see, is essential to the ideal. It
could not fulfil its functions if it retained too many of the traits
of any individual. A blind love, an unreasoning passion, is therefore
inconsistent with the Platonic spirit, which is favourable rather to
abstraction from persons and to admiration of qualities. These may, of
course, be found in many individuals. Too much subjection to another
personality makes the expression of our own impossible, and the ideal
is nothing but a projection of the demands of our imagination. If
the imagination is over-powered by too strong a fascination, by the
absolute dominion of an alien influence, we form no ideal at all. We
must master a passion before we can see its meaning.

For this reason, among others, we find so little Platonism in that
poet in whom we might have expected to find most--I mean in Petrarch.
Petrarch is musical, ingenious, learned, and passionate, but he is
weak. His art is greater than his thought. In the quality of his mind
there is nothing truly distinguished. The discipline of his long and
hopeless love brings him little wisdom, little consolation. He is
lachrymose and sentimental at the end as at the beginning, and his best
dream of heaven, expressed, it is true, in entrancing verse, is only to
hold his lady's hand and hear her voice. Sometimes, indeed, he repeats
what he must have read and heard so often, and gives us his version of
Plato in half a sonnet. Thus, for instance, speaking of his love for
Laura, he says in one place:--

    "Hence comes the understanding of love's scope
     That seeking her to perfect good aspires,
     Accounting little what all flesh desires;
     And hence the spirit's happy pinions ope
     In flight impetuous to the heaven's choirs,
     Wherefore I walk already proud in hope."

If we are looking, however, for more direct expressions of the idealism
of feeling, of love, and the sense of beauty passing into religion,
we shall do well to turn to another Italian, not so great a poet as
Petrarch by any means, but a far greater man--to Michael Angelo.
Michael Angelo justly regarded himself as essentially a sculptor, and
said even of painting that it was not his art; his verses are therefore
both laboured and rough. Yet they have been too much neglected, for
they breathe the same pathos of strength, the same agony in hope, as
his Titanic designs.

Like every Italian of culture in those days, Michael Angelo was in the
habit of addressing little pieces to his friends, and of casting his
thoughts or his prayers into the mould of a sonnet or a madrigal. Verse
has a greater naturalness and a wider range among the Latin peoples
than among the English; poetry and prose are less differentiated. In
French, Italian, and Spanish, as in Latin itself, elegance and neatness
of expression suffice for verse. The reader passes without any sense of
incongruity or anti-climax from passion to reflection, from sentiment
to satire, from flights of fancy to homely details: the whole has a
certain human sincerity and intelligibility which weld it together.
As the Latin languages are not composed of two diverse elements, as
English is of Latin and German, so the Latin mind does not have two
spheres of sentiment, one vulgar and the other sublime. All changes
are variations on a single key, which is the key of intelligence. We
must not be surprised, therefore, to find now a message to a friend,
now an artistic maxim, now a bit of dialectic, and now a confession of
sin, taking the form of verse and filling out the fourteen lines of a
sonnet. On the contrary, we must look to these familiar compositions
for the most genuine evidence of a man's daily thoughts.

We find in Michael Angelo's poems a few recurring ideas, or rather the
varied expression of a single half æsthetic, half religious creed.
The soul, he tells us in effect, is by nature made for God and for
the enjoyment of divine beauty. All true beauty leads to the idea of
perfection; the effort toward perfection is the burden of all art,
which labours, therefore, with a superhuman and insoluble problem.
All love, also, that does not lead to the love of God and merge into
that love, is a long and hopeless torment; while the light of love is
already the light of heaven, the fire of love is already the fire of
hell. These are the thoughts that perpetually recur, varied now with
a pathetic reference to the poet's weariness and old age, now with an
almost despairing appeal for divine mercy, often with a powerful and
rugged description of the pangs of love, and with a pious acceptance
of its discipline. The whole is intense, exalted, and tragic, haunted
by something of that profound terror, of that magnificent strength,
which we admire in the figures of the Sixtine Chapel, those noble
agonies of beings greater than any we find in this world.

What, we may ask, is all this tragedy about? What great sorrow,
what great love, had Michael Angelo or his giants that they writhe
so supernaturally As those decorative youths are sprinkled over the
Sixtine vault, filled, we know not why, with we know not what emotion,
so these scraps of verse, these sibylline leaves of Michael Angelo's,
give us no reason for their passion. They tell no story; there seems to
have been no story to tell. There is something impersonal and elusive
about the subject and occasion of these poems. Attempts have been made
to attribute them to discreditable passions, as also to a sentimental
love for Vittoria Colonna. But the friendship with Vittoria Colonna
was an incident of Michael Angelo's mature years; some of the sonnets
and madrigals are addressed to her, but we cannot attribute to her
influence the passion and sorrow that seem to permeate them all.

Perhaps there is less mystery in this than the curious would have us
see in it. Perhaps the love and beauty, however base their primal
incarnation, are really, as they think themselves, aspirations toward
the Most High. In the long studies and weary journeys of the artist,
in his mighty inspiration, in his intense love of the structural
beauty of the human body, in his vicissitudes of fortune and his
artistic disappointments, in his exalted piety, we may see quite enough
explanation for the burden of his soul. It is not necessary to find
vulgar causes for the extraordinary feelings of an extraordinary man.
It suffices that life wore this aspect to him; that the great demands
of his spirit so expressed themselves in the presence of his world.
Here is a madrigal in which the Platonic theory of beauty is clearly
stated:--

    "For faithful guide unto my labouring heart
     Beauty was given me at birth,
     To be my glass and lamp in either art.
     Who thinketh otherwise misknows her worth,
     For highest beauty only gives me light
     To carve and paint aright.
     Rash is the thought and vain
     That maketh beauty from the senses grow.
     She lifts to heaven hearts that truly know,
     But eyes grown dim with pain
     From mortal to immortal cannot go
     Nor without grace of God look up again."

And here is a sonnet, called by Mr. Symonds "the heavenly birth of love
and beauty." I borrow in part from his translation:--

    "My love's life comes not from this heart of mine.
     The love wherewith I love thee hath no heart,
     Turned thither whither no fell thoughts incline
     And erring human passion leaves no smart.
     Love, from God's bosom when our souls did part,
     Made me pure eye to see, thee light to shine,
     And I must needs, half mortal though thou art,
     In spite of sorrow know thee all divine.
     As heat in fire, so must eternity
     In beauty dwell; through thee my soul's endeavour.
     Mounts to the pattern and the source of thee;
     And having found all heaven in thine eyes,
     Beneath thy brows my burning spirit flies
     There where I loved thee first to dwell for ever."

Something of this kind may also be found in the verses of Lorenzo de'
Medici, who, like Michael Angelo, was a poet only incidentally, and
even thought it necessary to apologize in a preface for having written
about love. Many of his compositions are, indeed, trivial enough, but
his pipings will not seem vain to the severest philosopher when he
finds them leading to strains like the following, where the thought
rises to the purest sphere of tragedy and of religion:--

    "As a lamp, burning through the waning night,
     When the oil begins to fail that fed its fire
     Flares up, and in its dying waxes bright
     And mounts and spreads, the better to expire;
     So in this pilgrimage and earthly flight
     The ancient hope is spent that fed desire,
     And if there burn within a greater light
     'Tis that the vigil's end approacheth nigher.
     Hence thy last insult, Fortune, cannot move,
     Nor death's inverted torches give alarm;
     I see the end of wrath and bitter moan.
     My fair Medusa into sculptured stone
     Turns me no more, my Siren cannot charm.
     Heaven draws me up to its supernal love."

From such spontaneous meditation Lorenzo could even pass to verses
officially religious; but in them too, beneath the threadbare metaphors
of the pious muse and her mystical paradoxes, we may still feel the
austerity and firmness of reason. The following stanzas, for instance,
taken from his "Laudi Spirituali," assume a sublime meaning if we
remember that the essence to which they are addressed, before being a
celestial Monarch into whose visible presence any accident might usher
us, was a general idea of what is good and an intransitive rational
energy, indistinguishable from the truth of things.

    "O let this wretched life within me die
       That I may live in thee, my life indeed;
     In thee alone, where dwells eternity,
       While hungry multitudes death's hunger feed.
     I list within, and hark! Death's stealthy tread!
     I look to thee, and nothing then is dead.

    "Then eyes may see a light invisible
       And ears may hear a voice without a sound,--
     A voice and light not harsh, but tempered well,
       Which the mind wakens when the sense is drowned,
     Till, wrapped within herself, the soul have flown
     To that last good which is her inmost own.

    "When, sweet and beauteous Master, on that day,
       Reviewing all my loves with aching heart,
       I take from each its bitter self away,
     The remnant shall be thou, their better part.
     This perfect sweetness be his single store
     Who seeks the good; this faileth nevermore.

    "A thirst unquenchable is not beguiled
       By draught on draught of any running river
     Whose fiery waters feed our pangs for ever,
       But by a living fountain undefiled.
     O sacred well, I seek thee and were fain
     To drink; so should I never thirst again."

Having before us these characteristic expressions of Platonic feeling,
as it arose again in a Christian age, divorced from the accidental
setting which Greek manners had given it, we may be better able to
understand its essence. It is nothing else than the application to
passion of that pursuit of something permanent in a world of change,
of something absolute in a world of relativity, which was the essence
of the Platonic philosophy. If we may give rein to the imagination
in a matter which without imagination could not be understood at
all, we may fancy Plato trying to comprehend the power which beauty
exerted over his senses by applying to the objects of love that
profound metaphysical distinction which he had learned to make in his
dialectical studies--the distinction between the appearance to sense
and the reality envisaged by the intellect, between the phenomenon
and the ideal. The whole natural world had come to seem to him like
a world of dreams. In dreams images succeed one another without
other meaning than that which they derive from our strange power
of recognition--a power which enables us somehow, among the most
incongruous transformations and surroundings, to find again the objects
of our waking life, and to name those absurd and unmannerly visions by
the name of father or mother or by any other familiar name. As these
resemblances to real things make up all the truth of our dream, and
these recognitions all its meaning, so Plato thought that all the truth
and meaning of earthly things was the reference they contained to a
heavenly original. This heavenly original we remember and recognize
even among the distortions, disappearances, and multiplications of its
earthly copies.

This thought is easily applicable to the affections; indeed, it is not
impossible that it was the natural transcendence of any deep glance
into beauty, and the lessons in disillusion and idealism given by that
natural metaphysician we call love, that first gave Plato the key to
his general system. There is, at any rate, no sphere in which the
supersensible is approached with so warm a feeling of its reality, in
which the phenomenon is so transparent and so indifferent a symbol of
something perfect and divine beyond. In love and beauty, if anywhere,
even the common man thinks he has visitations from a better world,
approaches to a lost happiness; a happiness never tasted by us in
this world, and yet so natural, so expected, that we look for it at
every turn of a corner, in every new face; we look for it with so much
confidence, with so much depth of expectation, that we never quite
overcome our disappointment that it is not found.

And it is not found,--no, never,--in spite of what we may think when
we are first in love. Plato knew this well from his experience. He
had had successful loves, or what the world calls such, but he could
not fancy that these successes were more than provocations, more
than hints of what the true good is. To have mistaken them for real
happiness would have been to continue to dream. It would have shown
as little comprehension of the heart's experience as the idiot shows
of the experience of the senses when he is unable to put together
impressions of his eyes and hands and to say, "Here is a table; here
is a stool." It is by a parallel use of the understanding that we put
together the impressions of the heart and the imagination and are
able to say, "Here is absolute beauty: here is God." The impressions
themselves have no permanence, no intelligible essence. As Plato said,
they are never anything fixed but are always either becoming or ceasing
to be what we think them. There must be, he tells us, an eternal and
clearly definable object of which the visible appearances to us are the
manifold semblance; now by one trait now by another the phantom before
us lights up that vague and haunting idea, and makes us utter its name
with a momentary sense of certitude and attainment.

Just so the individual beauties that charm our attention and enchain
the soul have only a transitive existence; they are momentary visions,
irrecoverable moods. Their object is unstable; we never can say what
it is, it changes so quickly before our eyes. What is it that a mother
loves in her child? Perhaps the babe not yet born, or the babe that
grew long ago by her suffering and unrecognized care; perhaps the man
to be or the youth that has been. What does a man love in a woman?
The girl that is yet, perhaps, to be his, or the wife that once chose
to give him her whole exist

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/48563