CHAPTER XXVI
THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION
It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an altogether different art, built upon Babylonian and Hebrew foundations, instead of Greek and Roman. It meant an overthrowing of standards, and a setting-up of new values—a precedent of enormous importance to social revolutionists.
What exactly was the difference between Pagan and Christian art? The Greeks said: The human body is the most beautiful thing in the world. To which the Christians replied: All flesh is grass. The Greeks said: Because the body is beautiful, we immortalize it in statues. The Christians replied: We are iconoclasts—that is to say, breakers of marble idols. The Romans said: Material wealth is the basis of individual and national safety. The Christians replied: What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
These Christian sayings meant that mankind had discovered new satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of physical pleasure and domination over others. These new joys came from inside the self, and required a new word, spiritual. To the artist was set the task of making these inner qualities apprehensible, and for this he had to have a new technique. Where the Greeks had carved the body graceful, the Christians carved it with that ugliness which results from the ascetic life. Where the Romans had represented their great men muscular and mighty, the Christians represented them frail and sickly. The Christians reveled in wounds, disease and deformity, taking a perverse pleasure in defying old standards—a process known to the psychologist as “over-correction.” The two favorite themes of Christian art became a man-god who accepted all suffering and humiliation, and a woman-god who allowed the erring soul an unlimited number of new opportunities.
Because this new art was trying so often to express the inexpressible, it was driven to symbolism. The painters and sculptors invented outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the crown of thorns, the sacrificial lamb. The Virgin Mary would have a heart of radiant fire, with perhaps a white dove perched on top of it. The saints and martyrs wore halos of light about their heads, so as not to be mistaken for ordinary beggars, or for patients in the last stages of tuberculosis. One should hardly need to state that all this art was propaganda; it was permitted on that basis alone.
The significance of all this to social revolutionists lies in the fact that they also plan an art revolution. What the Christians did to Pagan art, the Socialists now seek to do to bourgeois art; metaphorically speaking, to smash the idols and burn the temples dedicated to the worship of individual and class aggrandizement, and to set up new art standards, based on the abolition of classes, and the assertion of brotherhood and solidarity. Just as the stone which was rejected of the Pagan builders became the cornerstone of the Christian temple, so those things which are despised and rejected of plutocratic snobbery will become the glory of revolutionary art; the very phrases of contempt will become battle-cries—the great unwashed, the vulgar herd, the common man. The revolutionary artist, clasping the toiling masses to his bosom—
“Over-correction?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“Partly that; but also the longing for solidarity, the enlargement of the personality through mass feeling.”
“But beauty came back into art,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Yes, and that is an interesting story; a drama of the conflict between God and Mammon, and the triumph of what I am calling Mammonart. I have pondered a title for the drama—something like this: Christianity as a Social Success; or the admission of the Martyr to the Four Hundred!”