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Page 24
With this warning of the connection which exists between the honest
intellect and the healthy imagination; and using henceforward the
shorter word 'Fancy' for all inventive vision, I proceed to consider
with you the meaning and consequences of the frank and eager exertion
of the fancy on Religious subjects, between the twelfth and sixteenth
centuries.
Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion
of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of
uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood,
before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist.
This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present
lecture. To-day I only describe it,--in my next lecture I will discuss
it.
Observe, however, that in giving such a history of the mental
constitution of nascent Christianity, we have to deal with, and
carefully to distinguish, two entirely different orders in its
accepted hierarchy:--one, scarcely founded at all on personal
characters or acts, but mythic or symbolic; often merely the revival,
the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the personified
omnipresence of a Christian virtue;--the other, a senate of Patres
Conscripti of real persons, great in genius, and perfect, humanly
speaking, in holiness; who by their personal force and inspired
wisdom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such noble form
as in each of their epochs it was able to receive; and on the right
understanding of whose lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions
which magnified and illumined their memories, must absolutely depend
the value of every estimate we form, whether of the nature of the
Christian Church herself, or of the directness of spiritual agency by
which she was guided.[24]
[Footnote 24: If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his
understanding of the first letters in the Alphabet of History depends
on his comprehending rightly the tempers of the people who _did_.]
An important distinction, therefore, is to be noted at the outset,
in the objects of this Apotheosis, according as they are, or are not,
real persons.
Of these two great orders of Saints, the first; or mythic,
belongs--speaking broadly--to the southern or Greek Church alone.
The Gothic Christians, once detached from the worship of Odin and
Thor, abjure from their hearts all trust in the elements, and all
worship of ideas. They will have their Saints in flesh and blood,
their Angels in plume and armour; and nothing incorporeal or
invisible. In all the Religious sculpture beside Loire and Seine, you
will not find either of the great rivers personified; the dress of the
highest seraph is of true steel or sound broadcloth, neither flecked
by hail, nor fringed by thunder; and while the ideal Charity of Giotto
at Padua presents her heart in her hand to God, and tramples at the
same instant on bags of gold, the treasures of the world, and gives
only corn and flowers; that on the west porch of Amiens is content to
clothe a beggar with a piece of the staple manufacture of the town.
On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to find in the imagery of
the Greek Church, under the former exercise of the Imagination, a
representation either of man or beast which purports to represent
_only_ the person, or the brute. Every mortal creature stands for an
Immortal Intelligence or Influence: a Lamb means an Apostle, a Lion an
Evangelist, an Angel the Eternal justice or benevolence; and the most
historical and indubitable of Saints are compelled to set forth, in
their vulgarly apparent persons, a Platonic myth or an Athanasian
article.
I therefore take note first of the mythic saints in succession, whom
this treatment of them by the Byzantine Church made afterwards the
favourite idols of all Christendom.
I. The most mythic is of course St. Sophia; the shade of the Greek
Athena, passing into the 'Wisdom' of the Jewish Proverbs and Psalms,
and the Apocryphal 'Wisdom of Solomon.' She always remains understood
as a personification only; and has no direct influence on the mind
of the unlearned multitude of Western Christendom, except as a
godmother,--in which kindly function she is more and more accepted as
times go on; her healthy influence being perhaps greater over sweet
vicars' daughters in Wakefield--when Wakefield _was_,--than over the
prudentest of the rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium.
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