Mystics as Builders
We order the temples still standing destroyed that in their exact place may be raised the sign of the Christian religion. Decree of Valentinian III.
In the tribunal of history the Christian iconoclasts have been dealt with somewhat in the manner of defendants in damage suits. If a cow is killed by a railroad, is it not naturally assumed to have been a Durham? If a statue was destroyed by a fanatic why not put in a claim for a Phidias? As a matter of fact, by the time the early Christians came into power the art of the day of Pericles had been copied for over seven hundred years. Of art, what worse could be said!
Grecian art neither rose nor fell in a generation nor was it childless; original, though minor schools, Hellenic to the core, sprang up in the Grecian colonies and to the end the art and artists of Rome were Greeks. But during the later Roman Empire the degenerate Grecian artist commissioned by the degenerate Roman patron was simply cumbering the earth. Oh, yes, in those luxurious days they patronized art as rich men should, as rich men do. The houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii teemed with articles of virtu. It was not statues the world of art needed, it was ideals.
In art, it is the individual point of view that counts even if it be only that of the destroyer. Since art reflects life and life means change, the iconoclast has his place. A race, or more often the meeting of two races, may develop a school of art; it reaches its perfection in the work of a few genii of its golden age; to them it is given to embody the highest and best that was in the myriad of artists who have taught them and their teachers. Spellbound by its own perfection, this art can move no farther. The multitude seek to preserve it, for its value has been interpreted to them in quotations of the exchange. Artists are satisfied to copy it, and thereby artists they gradually cease to be. The destroyer comes,—fire, fanatic, whirlwind, victor or worm—the bulk and body of that art perishes, but the ideal, being a fruit of the spirit, lives. The final ruling of Grecian architecture is still proclaimed from the Parthenon, while headless and armless the lone “Winged Victory” might immortalize the action of Grecian sculpture, the poetry of Grecian thought.
Since architecture is the most national of the arts, its movements are the easiest to trace. Sometimes we actually detect the designer following in the footsteps of the iconoclast. Indeed, the most successful patron architecture has known, the Catholic Church, commenced as a destroyer.
In the south of France ecclesiastical architecture remained essentially classic until the Renaissance. This was largely due to one great sixth century bishop, Patiens de Lyons, who repaired the old temples and rebuilt anew on their lines so successfully that the people proudly said they could not tell the new from the old; but in the north of Gaul, where Martin of Tours and his followers had made a clean sweep of the pagan temples and their old influence, architectural and spiritual, an absolutely new style of church building developed. It is there that to this day we turn for the purest Gothic.
Of this Martin we have some little history, hazy though it be. He was a rude barbarian of the Roman legion, under the Emperor Julian, who embraced Christianity and brought the glad tidings to Tours. With a soldier’s idea of conquest he demolished the temples of false gods, like other superstitious converts; but he contended that to make the victory complete, at least an altar to the true God should mark the very spot; and he is credited with six religious foundations, one having been a church for the laity in the town of Tours. The present age might canonize Martin for a deed overlooked by his most ardent, early eulogists. He and Saint Ambrose protested against the “new heresy” of two Spanish bishops who put a gnostic to death for his heretical opinions.
Hagiology, however, abounds in records of Saint Martin, for he became the best beloved saint of old Gaul.