Allegorical impersonations, such as that of Antioch, are religious conceptions of a high order compared to this. Nevertheless, one feels that such impersonations can have no separate divine existence apart from the city or the people whom they represent. They are on a different plane of religious belief from Athena, for example, as the goddess of the city. The goddess was, indeed, in some ways representative of what was best in her chosen people; but she was not a mere symbol of its character and its greatness. She existed before it, and would continue though it should disappear from the earth, unlike the Fortune of Antioch, whose very existence was bound up with that of the city she represented.
Another example of personification may be seen in the recumbent figures of river-gods—notably that of the Nile, with his sixteen cubits, as babies, playing around him. River-gods were indeed an object of worship from early times in Greece, and so appear on coins and elsewhere; but this figure of the Nile, a product of Alexandrian art, is not like the earlier gods, who were looked upon as the givers of increase and fertility; it is a mere allegorical impersonation of the river, such as might be made by a modern artist who made no pretence to believe in the existence of such an anthropomorphic river-god. It cannot be counted as religious art at all. And the attributes and accessories of such a figure, the crocodile and hippopotamus, the sphinx and corn and horn of plenty, are all of them symbolic allusions such as are suitable to such a frigid personification. The art of Alexandria is full of such devices; that of Pergamon is more vigorous and dramatic; but in both alike we find the influence of a learned study of mythology, full of quaint and far-fetched allusions and symbols. The culmination of this learned mythology is to be seen in the great altar of Pergamon, on which the gods who are in combat with the giants include not only all figures, appropriate and inappropriate, from the Hellenic pantheon, but many other deities whose right of admission to that pantheon is more than doubtful. The figures of the gods no longer correspond to the belief in any real divinities, but are either mere artistic types, repeated again and again in accordance with convention, or else they are regarded as symbols representing different aspects of divine power.
Symbolism of this kind is a common symptom of the decay of religious faith. The more thoughtful or educated classes, who follow the speculations of philosophers as to the nature of the deity, find it possible to reconcile these speculations with the forms of popular religion by accepting the forms in a symbolic sense. The common people, on the other hand, finding the old forms inadequate to satisfy their religious aspirations, import new and strange divinities, whose cult is often mixed with magic or mystic rites. Here, too, the symbols have a meaning other than what appears to the uninitiated eye, and the province of art, which approaches the mind through the senses, is closely circumscribed. A statue or other work of art which needs explanation of its allusions, which does not express an ideal that appeals directly to the imagination of the people, has lost touch with religion, and cannot to any appreciable extent influence it or be influenced by it. The age of idolatry in the higher sense, of a religious imagination that enables the artist to bring the people nearer to their gods, or even the gods nearer to the heart of the people, has passed away, and in its place we find either a superstitious clinging to the magic power of the early objects of worship, or a mere acceptance, as conventional symbols, of forms that bear no direct relation to anything that is believed in as real.
Our brief historical survey has shown us how the Greeks, starting from a belief, such as is common to many primitive religions, in the superhuman powers or sanctity of certain objects, were enabled by their vivid anthropomorphic imagination first to think of the gods as in like form to themselves, and then to make their images in human shape. And as their art progressed towards the power of making a physical type of perfect beauty to serve as the means of expression of this "human form divine," and also to skill in expressing character by means of human features and figures, it became possible for them to embody in their great statues the various ideals of divinity which belonged to their chief gods. Here the skill of the artist would have availed little or nothing if he had not shared with the people for whom he worked a belief in the reality of these ideals, not merely as philosophic aspects of the divine nature, but as real beings who were able to help and to inspire, and to manifest themselves to their worshippers in this human form. The next step is towards an even more vivid realisation of the personality of the gods; but by bringing them nearer to human level it made the worship of their images less easy to accept in a literal sense to the more thoughtful, while such worship tended, with the common people, to enter upon a more material and less exalted phase. The result was a tendency towards symbolism in which the symbol itself was regarded as a mere convention, and the inspiration and actual communion with men, vouchsafed by the gods through their ideal images, was no longer sought after. When any means of communion between god and man, whether by means of a solemn service or by means of an image which the god himself accepts as his earthly representative, ceases to be felt as anything more than a human device, its religious power must fail. When, on the other hand, we find a union of religion and art to provide a means for this divine intercourse, we may recognise idolatry in its highest form, the use of images not merely as accessories of religious service, but as providing in themselves a channel of worship and inspiration.
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH
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