V. The concluding lines of the poem (336-353) contain a curiously suggestive contrast between the influences of an effete pagan culture, and of Christianity in its infancy. On the one hand, the Greek philosopher surrounded by evidences of marvellous physical and intellectual achievements, admitting the experience of an overwhelming horror, in face of the approach of “a deadly fate.” On the other hand, “a mere barbarian Jew” and “certain slaves,” pioneers of that faith which should offer solution to the problems before which Greek learning shrank confessedly powerless. A contrast between two stages of that development in the life of man, indicated by the theory of St. John’s teaching, given in the interpolated note introductory to the main arguments of A Death in the Desert:
The doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul.
(1) The lower or animal life, distinguished as “What Does,” (2) The intellect inspiring which “useth the first with its collected use,” and is defined as “What Knows,” that which Cleon calls Soul. (3) Finally, the union of both for the service of the third and highest element, which is in itself capable of existence apart from either:
Subsisting whether they assist or no,
designated as “What Is,” that which Browning calls Soul in Old Pictures in Florence.
Life, in the person of Cleon, would appear to have reached the second of the stages thus distinguished—physical development, combined with intellectual pre-eminence, marking “an age of light, light without love.” With Paulus life has passed beyond, and the spiritual energy has attained to its position of predominance over the lower elements constituting this Trinity of human nature. The barbarian Jew heralds a new phase in the world’s history. The entire conclusion may well serve as commentary on the lines already quoted from Old Pictures in Florence:
The first of the new in our race’s story
Beats the last of the old.[51]