In the adolescent age of the Greek genius, mankind, not having yet fully arrived at spiritual self-consciousness, was still as sinless and simple as any other race that lives and dies upon the globe, forming a part of the natural order of the world. The sensual impulses, within reasonable limits, like the intellectual and the moral, were then held void of crime and harmless. Health and good taste controlled the physical appetites of man, just as the appetites of animals are regulated by unerring instinct. In the same way a standard of moderation determined moral virtue and intellectual excellence. But in addition to this protective check upon the passions, a noble sense of the beautiful, as that which is balanced and restrained within limits, prevented the Greeks of the best period from diverging into Asiatic extravagance of pleasure. License was reckoned barbarous, and the barbarians were slaves by nature, φύσει δοῦλοι: Hellenes, born to be free men, took pride in temperance. Their σωφροσύνη, or self-restraint, coextensive as a protective virtue with the whole of their τὸ καλόν, or ideal of form, was essentially Greek—the quality beloved by Phœbus, in whom was no dark place nor any flaw. With the Romans, humanity, not having yet transcended the merely natural order, remaining unconscious of a higher religious ideal, and at the same time uncontrolled by exquisite Greek sense of fitness, began to wax wanton. To the state of paradisal innocence succeeded the fall. The bestial side of our mixed nature encroached upon the spiritual, and the sense of beauty was perturbed by lust. That true health, without which the unassisted tact is a false guide, failed; no fine law of taste corrected appetite. It was at this moment that Christianity convicted mankind of sin. The voice of God was heard crying in the garden. The unity of man with nature was abruptly broken. Flesh and spirit were defined and counterpoised. Man, abiding far from God in his flesh, sought after God in his spirit. His union with God was no longer an actual state of mundane innocence, but a distant, future, dim, celestial possibility, to be achieved by the sacrifice of this fair life of earth. "Your lives are hid with Christ in God." Together with this separation of the flesh and spirit wrought by Christianity, came the abhorrence of beauty as a snare, the sense that carnal affections were tainted with sin, the unwilling toleration of sexual love as a necessity, the idealization of celibacy and solitude. At the same time humanity acquired new faculties and wider sensibilities, those varied powers which make the modern man more complex and more mighty both for good and evil than the ancient. A profounder and more vital feeling of the mysteries of the universe arose. Our life on earth was seen to be a thing by no means rounded in itself and perfect, but only one term of an infinite and unknown series. It was henceforward impossible to translate the world into the language of purely æsthetic form. This stirring of the spirit marks the transition of the ancient to the modern world.
At the time of the Renaissance the travail was well-nigh over; the lesson had been learned and exaggerated; mankind began to resent the one-sidedness of monastic Christianity, and to yearn once more for the fruit and flowers of the garden which was Greece. Yet the spirit and the flesh still remained in unreconciled antagonism. Over the gate of Eden the arm of the seraph waved his terrible sword. But humanity in rebellion, while outcast from God and convicted of sin, would not refrain from plucking the pleasure of the sense. This was the time of the insolence of the flesh, when antichrist sat in St. Peter's chair, and when man, knowing his nakedness, submitted to the fascinations of the siren, Shame. The old health of the Greeks, their simple and unerring tact, was gone: to recover that was impossible. Christ crowned with thorns, the Sabbaths and ablutions of the Jews, the "thunderous vision" of St. Paul, had intervened and fixed a gulf between Hellas and modern Europe. In that age the love of beauty became a tragic disease like the plague which Aphrodite sent in wrath on Phædra. Even Michael Angelo, at the end of a long life spent in the service of the noblest art, felt constrained to write:
Now hath my life across a stormy sea,
Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all
Are bidden ere the final judgment fall,
Of good and evil deeds to pay the fee.
Now know I well how that fond fantasy,
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul, that turns to his great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
In his work sculpture is forced to express what lies beyond its province—the throes and labor of the spirit. Michael Angelo was not a plastic character in the sense in which Hegel used this phrase. His art reflects the combat of his nature and his age; whence comes what people call its extravagance and emphasis. Raphael from the opposite side introduced pagan form and feeling into his purely religious work of art; whence came what people call his decadence. Puritan England, inquisition-ridden Spain, and critical Germany offer still more permanent signs of this deep-seated division in the modern world between the natural instincts and the spiritual aspirations of humanity. Even to the present day this division distorts our sense of beauty and prevents our realizing an ideal of art.
After all, the separation between the Greeks and us is due to something outside us rather than within—principally to the Hebraistic culture we receive in childhood. We are taught to think that one form of religion contains the whole truth, and that one way of feeling is right, to the exclusion of the humanities and sympathies of races no less beloved of God and no less kindred to ourselves than were the Jews. At the same time, the literature of the Greeks has for the last three centuries formed the basis of our education; their thoughts and sentiments, enclosed like precious perfumes in sealed vases, spread themselves abroad and steep the soul in honey-sweet aromas. Some will always be found, under the conditions of this double culture, to whom Greece is a lost fatherland, and who, passing through youth with the mal du pays of that irrecoverable land upon them, may be compared to visionaries, spending the nights in golden dreams and the days in common duties.
Has, then, the modern man no method for making the Hellenic tradition vital instead of dream-like—invigorating instead of enervating? There is, indeed, this one way only—to be natural. We must imitate the Greeks, not by trying to reproduce their bygone modes of life and feeling, but by approximating to their free and fearless attitude of mind. While frankly recognizing that much of their liberty would for us be license, and that the moral progress of the race depends on holding with a firm grasp what the Greeks had hardly apprehended, we ought still to emulate their spirit by cheerfully accepting the world as we find it, acknowledging the value of each human impulse, and aiming after virtues that depend on self-regulation rather than on total abstinence and mortification. To do this in the midst of our conventionalities and prejudices, our interminglement of unproved expectations and unrefuted terrors, is no doubt hard. Yet if we fail of this, we miss the best the Greeks can teach us. Nor need we fear lest, in the attempt, we should lose what Christianity has given us. Those who believe sincerely in the divine life of the world, who recognize the truth that there can be nothing vitally irreconcilable between the revelations made to the great races that have formed our past, will dismiss such fears with a smile. It was not against the spirit of the Greeks that St. Paul preached, but against the vices of a decadent society in Hellas. It is not against the spirit of Christianity that modern reformers lift their voices, but against the corruption and exaggeration of its precepts in monasticism and Puritanism. The problem of the present and the future is to bring both spirits into due accord, to profit by both revelations while avoiding their distortion and abuse.
In the struggle of the adverse forces, felt so strongly ever since the reactionary age of the Renaissance, there is, however, now at least a hope of future reconciliation. The motto
Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben,
is not a strictly Christian sentence. St. Paul had said: "To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." But it is essentially human. The man who lives by it is restored to that place in the world which he has a right to occupy, instead of regarding himself as an alien and an outcast from imagined heaven. Science must be our redeemer. Science which teaches man to know himself, and explains to him his real relation to nature. The healthy acceptance of the physical laws to which we are subordinated need not prevent our full consciousness of moral law. It is true that the beautiful Greek life, as of leopards and tiger-lilies and eagles, cannot be restored. Yet neither need we cling to the convent or the prison life of early Catholicity. The new freedom of man must consist of submission to the order of the universe as it exists. The final discovery that there is no antagonism between our physical and spiritual constitution, but rather a most intimate connection, must place the men of the future upon a higher level and a firmer standing-ground than the Greeks. They by experience and demonstration will know what the Greeks felt instinctively. Their αἴσθησις, permeated and strengthened by the ever-during influence of Christianity, will be further fortified by the recognition of immutable law. The tact of healthy youth will be succeeded by the calm reason of maturity.