slowly; that is one reason why the new force had not spent itself in six
hundred years. Another is that the revelation came to an age that was
constantly breaking fresh ground. Always there was a virgin tract at
hand to take the seed and raise a lusty crop. Between 500 and 1000
A.D. the population of Europe was fluid. Some new race was
always catching the inspiration and feeling and expressing it with
primitive sensibility and passion. The last to be infected was one of
the finest; and in the eleventh century Norman power and French
intelligence produced in the west of Europe a manifestation of the
Christian ferment only a little inferior to that which five hundred
years earlier had made glorious the East.

Let me insist once again that, when I speak of the Christian ferment or
the Christian slope, I am not thinking of dogmatic religion. I am
thinking of that religious spirit of which Christianity, with its dogmas
and rituals, is one manifestation, Buddhism another. And when I speak of
art as a manifestation of the religious spirit I do not mean that art
expresses particular religious emotions, much less that it expresses
anything theological. I have said that if art expresses anything, it
expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form
its extraordinary significance. So, when I speak of Christian art, I
mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which
the Christian Church is another. So far was the new spirit from being a
mere ebullition of Christian faith that we find manifestations of it in
Mohammedan art; everyone who has seen a photograph of the Mosque of Omar
at Jerusalem knows that. The emotional renaissance in Europe was not the
wide-spreading of Christian doctrines, but it was through Christian
doctrine that Europe came to know of the rediscovery of the emotional
significance of the Universe. Christian art is not an expression of
specific Christian emotions; but it was only when men had been roused by
Christianity that they began to feel the emotions that express
themselves in form. It was Christianity that put Europe into that state
of emotional turmoil from which sprang Christian art.

For a moment, in the sixth century, the flood of enthusiasm seems to
have carried the Eastern world, even the official world, off its feet.
But Byzantine officials were no fonder of swimming than others. The men
who worked the imperial machine, studied the Alexandrine poets, and