The temple wherein is offered the perpetual sacrifice of the victim of expiation is a visible profession of faith. The most grand and characteristic expression of the architecture is displayed in the imitation which man fabricates of that temple of the universe which was built by the hands of God. And as its solidity typifies the duration which every one attributes to true religion, so it outlives the hands which raised it up. How much of what antiquity has bequeathed us consists of temples, such as the pile of Salsetta, the pagodas of Coromandel and Ellora, the Propylæi, the colossi of granite and porphyry, the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt—for sepulchres are religious—and the shrines which were discovered in the millennial forests of America. This great Rome, the capital of the universe, was a city of fanes and altars, when Horace reproached it, as a cause of its decay, with having neglected the worship of the gods. The more fully the idea of a religion is capable of adapting to itself the forms of the organic world, the more artistic will that religion become.[112] The symbol, which is an outward and material exposition of an idea, and the mystic representation of the divine essence, by means of external objects to which it is linked by ties that are arbitrary and remote analogies, ill accords with the beauty which is the representation of a specific idea to which it corresponds.
Among the Hindoos, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews, the beauty of form gave place to the requirements of the emblem. Thus art stood still, being forced to reproduce fixed types; its object was not to copy nature, but to inscribe ideas. The three-eyed Siva, the four-headed Brama, the elephant-headed Ganesa, the hundred-armed giants and hundred-breasted goddesses, can scarcely be called beautiful. In the religion of the Greeks, where the life of the deity was confused with the natural, and found its perfection in man, art holds the first place. The symbol vanished before the beautiful ideal, which was wrought after a rational measurement. They cut down those colossi of other peoples to the due proportions, and shaped their monstrous divinities into a human likeness. Extricating themselves from hieroglyphics, the choice of expression and attitude was left to the inspired imagination.
Corruption, ever widening since sin first broke the harmony between the intellect, the will, and the power of action, created a heaven of false gods, differing in form and in worship, and filled the earth with their temples. This variety favored art, and to it we owe those wonders of the Parthenon, the temple of Theseus, Pallas Athene, Olympian Zeus, the Didimeon. And though antiquity has handed down to us very few paintings, the greatest part of the statues which enrich the museums are those of the gods. Surely Phidias much have believed in “Zeus thundering in heaven” when he wrought that statue before which Greece was struck with wonder.[113] Hence with reason did Emericus David say that archæology might be defined as the recognition of religion in its connection with art.
Though the form grew more refined, the idea hidden beneath it grew more and more corrupt, until it became a worship of force, animate and animating, which had turned its back upon the Author of being, and wasted that spiritual breath which is the soul of the statue. Art materialized, like science, like life itself, called down the mercy of an unknown God to appease offended justice.
In the fullness of time, humanity was lifted up from its lowliness by God taking it to himself. Faith grew clear; hope, strong; charity lived again. Christendom became civilized even by means of its worship, when art and poetry united in rousing it to faith and enthusiasm. No longer, as in a religion that allured the senses, did art debase itself by flattering the passions and fanning the instincts; its aim now was to curb and purify them; not to multiply the enjoyments of the fortunate, but to comfort the unhappy; to lift up to heaven eyes weighed down by suffering, or dazzled by wealth, or wavering with doubt; to point out that sublime eternity which hides itself under seeming dissolution or waning beauty; to turn mind and action to that after-life wherein alone the present finds its significance.
This regeneration of art began in the Catacombs, where the persecuted children of Christ expressed, somewhat rudely perhaps, their dogmas and their hopes; the exploits of the martyrs, whose agony of shame and death they prepared themselves to imitate. There the vermilion with which they painted the throne of God triumphant signified “new conquests, and glory won after still greater trials.”
When from darkness it was able to step forth into the light of day, art, restored to the temple of its birth, set the feeling which produced above the mere beauty of the production. It lost in harmony, but gained in expression, in lifting up human nature even to the type of moral perfection, to the supreme ideal—God made man.
Then from every side, whatsoever had life came in answer to the call to play its part in the grand drama of Christianity. And art, aiming not merely at the beautiful, but at the true and the good, united with the whole of civilization in expressing that aspiration after perfection whose desire is never-failing but ever unfulfilled.
In the earliest artistic records which have reached us from the Catacombs, such as mosaics, miniature paintings, and certain pieces of sculpture, the idea is set above the form. There is a celestial purity in them, as though, producing the beautiful instinctively, they cared not to portray an enticing elegance of the members, the force and posture of outward life, but rather the expression of the soul, holiness of thought and deed, and
“That sweet light
Pointing the road which leads to heaven’s height.”[114]