As the new cosmopolitanism deepened the gulf between the citizen and the individual, and immeasurably widened the sphere of the latter, in the same proportion did the teaching of Plato fail to bridge over that gulf, and provide activity for that sphere. To tell the super-civic man now that his function was to contemplate divine things and oracularly deliver laws for the guidance of the world, would have argued an absence of humor not common in those days. Besides, those persons who claimed to have contemplated divine things showed no such fitness for legislation as to induce practical men to accept their guidance. The sober fact was, that the contemplation of divine things, which more and more absorbed the energy of Greek thought, was, except for Aristotle, a mere vague asperation without moral value, and became ever more a sort of mystic ecstasy, in which the individual, instead of acquiring insight and power to live worthily and beneficently in the world, was thrown back upon himself, with his will paralyzed. Nor could this be otherwise, seeing the nature of the divine things, the contemplation of which was reckoned so important. Instead of being personal attributes, or a person imposing a moral law seen to be binding, they were mere abstractions, increasing in emptiness the higher they were in the series, the highest being absolute vacancy. In vain had Aristotle protested that all reality is individual: the Platonic theory, that all knowledge is of ideas or universals, prevailed, with the result that the highest knowledge was held to be knowledge of that which is absolutely universal, viz. indeterminate being or, as Plotinus held, something lacking even the determination of being—the Supreme Good. That the super-civic man should find satisfaction in gazing into vacancy, or be any more valuable in the world after he had done so, no matter how spotless his life and ecstatic his look, is inconceivable.
But while, in the Greek world, the sphere of activity of the super-civic man was vanishing into nothingness, among a small and obscure band of restored exiles of Semitic race, that sphere had come to claim the entire man and all his relations, practical and spiritual. Isaiah's little band of faithful followers (see [p. 133]) had grown into a nation, living by no law save that of Jehovah, a very real, very awful, and very holy personality, whom the heaven of heavens could not contain, but who yet watched the rising up and the sitting down of every son of man. Long before Quintilian wrote his elegant treatise on rhetoric, or Plotinus his pantheistic Enneads, there had sprung from the bosom of this people a man who, bursting, at the expense of his life, the narrow bounds of his nationally, elevated the theocracy of his people into a Kingdom of Heaven, which he had bade proclaim to all the world. It was proclaimed, and then (though to some it seemed a stumbling-block, and to others foolishness) the super-civic man, who for hundreds of years had been wandering in darkness, in search of his fatherland, suddenly became aware that he had found it in the Church of Christ. He now no longer tries to escape from the visible world into the emptiness of an abstract first principle; but, in the service of a First Principle who is the most concrete of realities, and who numbers the very hairs of his head, he goes down into the most loathsome depths of the material world to elevate and redeem the meanest of the sons of men. There is no question of bond or free, ruler or ruled, now. In the Kingdom of Heaven there are no such relations. The only greatness recognized there is greatness in service; the only law, the Law of Love. Love! yes, the whole secret is in that one word. By adding love to the conception of the God of his people, by exemplifying it in his own life, and demanding it of his followers, Jesus accomplished what had baffled all the wisdom of the Greek sages. He restored the moral unity of man, abolished the old world, and made a new heaven and a new earth. In vain have the advocates of an indeterminate, self-evolving first principle, whether calling themselves Neoplatonists, mystics, materialists, evolutionists, Hegelians, or Theosophists, striven to bring back the old world with its class distinctions and institutional ethics; in vain have they sought to sink the individual God and man of reality in the universal ideas of thought. The Law of Love, which is the ground of individuality, as well as of true society, has bidden, and will bid them, defiance.
APPENDIX
APPENDIX
THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS
The Greeks originally recognized two branches of liberal education[6] (1) Gymnastics, for the body, and (2) Music, for the soul. Out of music grew, in process of time, not only the so-called Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that go to constitute the education of every freeman, but also what was regarded as a superfluous luxury (περιττή), Philosophy. It is the purpose of this appendix to trace, as far as possible, this gradual development.