and
meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but
it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was
the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene,
but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp
ideas,--this is the thoroughly _artistic_ character of that people.
Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the
Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the
images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and
expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is
gone;--the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or
illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that
they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene
Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only
his human nature to be represented,--a strange decree, if the Church had
realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his
divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for
the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,--that
its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its
form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very
unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a
pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.

The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility,
weakness, labor,--to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the
world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the
forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by
religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial
world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently
to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge
of a persecuted sect,--their use as places of worship continued long
after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point
nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made
it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the
vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward
could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth
and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal,
was the o