ful" is equally necessary with the ideas of the "true" and the "good." Indeed, these three, the true, the good, and the beautiful, may be regarded as the Holy Trinity of ideas, capable of isolation, yet closely related to and interpenetrating each other. Art has most especially to do with the beautiful; this is its fundamental idea. While the immediate design of an art work is to represent a subject, yet, lifted above the murkiness of the actual, it is pervaded and transfigured by the warmth of the sensitive spirit through which its relation to the infinity of things is made apparent; "in the material is seen the reflection of the highest laws of mind, and the most delicate relations in this world-life are revealed in the most beneficent harmony. Cousin well remarks, "Let us be thoroughly penetrated with the thought that art is also to itself a kind of religion. God manifests himself to us by the idea of the true, by the idea of the good, by the idea of the beautiful. Each one of them leads to God, because it comes from him. . . . True beauty is ideal beauty, and ideal beauty is a reflection of the Infinite. . . . Every work of art, whatever may be its form, small or great, figured, sung, or uttered; every work of art, truly beautiful or sublime, throws the soul into a gentle or severe reverie that elevates it toward the Infinite. The Infinite is the common goal to which the soul aspires upon the wings of imagination as well as reason-by the route of the sublime and beautiful as well as by that of the true and the good. The emotion that the beautiful produces turns the soul from this world; it is the beneficial emotion that art produces for humanity." We conclude, therefore, that mind can love only mind; the soul seeks a Creator in his works. So, also, an art work has a religious significance by revealing a harmony that proceeds from God as its author. Just as the physical world around us is best understood and is most deeply significant when viewed as a work of the great Artist, where he has impressed his own beautiful and harmonious thought, just so is a work of art truly great only as it becomes a revelation of the Divine. Even before the publication of his great history had Winklemann expressed the belief that all true art should and does rise higher than the merely agreeable; it should and must have an ethical element. Indeed, he bases all the earlier heathen art on religion. And Piper* most beautifully and justly "Einleitung," etc., p. 29.

remarks: "To express the Divine has ever been the highest problem of art, as to know the Divine has been the earnest struggle of philosophy. Each has been truly great just in that measure that it has kept in view this end, and to the attainment of which each has possessed sufficient power." This applies to both heathen and Christian art. Just so far as each has taken for representation subjects pervaded with the spiritual and seized upon by faith, or, in other words, just so far as art has been pervaded with the theologic notion, has it been really great and powerful in influence. Here, really, is where monumental art and theology join hands. These works express thoughts, religious, spiritual, connecting the subject with God, and pervaded with principles that lift the beholder to God and lead him to the contemplation of a hereafter. In so far as they do this have they a theologic character. But inasmuch as the monuments with which we have to do pertain to the Christian period, and to the Christian religion, and to forms of Christian worship, they have a specially theologic character, and possess a claim to be ranked among subjects pertaining directly to Christian theology.

The subject, then, presupposes the existence of a Christian. art. The inquiry next arises, Was there developed near the origin, and during the first centuries, of the Church an art we can characterize as distinctly Christian?

The theory that attributes the decline and downfall of the Roman empire to an eclipse and extinction of religions faith on the part of the people, if not fully adequate to account for all the phenomena, points to the chiefest cause of the great final catastrophe. If, then, the principle previously announced, that "To express the Divine has ever been the highest problem of art," is borne in mind, we should be prepared to expect with the waning of faith in the Divine a corresponding decadence in true art. It is unnecessary to say that this is the case. The historian of general art treats of no period more steady and universal in its downfall. The decline is all-embracing; sculpture, painting, music, poetry, and architecture all seem to have been touched with a consuming blight. Subsequently to the time of Marcus Aurelius the eyes of the heathen would turn backward as to a golden age. Upon the future is cast a pall of terrible doubt and gloom. Society seemed conscious of the

approaching doom, yet the efforts to escape were only fitful and unavailing.

Contrariwise, with the introduction of a new system of relig ion, in which faith in the supernatural and the Divine was the central element, we should be prepared to expect a conserving influence upon art itself. Yet it must not be forgotten that Christianity was born amid circumstances most hostile to its purity and progress. Announcing a system radically different from the heathen religions, it set itself over against that "philosophy, falsely so called," that had attempted to solve the great problems of sin and destiny by human reasoning. Still, heathen philosophy and heathen art had pre-occupied the ground; and it is but a natural expectation that art that had been prostituted to the basest services of polytheism, that had been chiefly used in illustrating heathen subjects and most polluting rites, as well as philosophy, which then stood in antagonism to some of the fundamental principles of the new religion, should most justly be regarded with strong suspicion by the early Church. Nevertheless, we are not to regard ancient Christianity as hostile to art per se, but only to a civilization that deified art, or debased it to idolatrous uses. On the other hand, it is not to be denied that plastic art and painting found little encouragement among the first Christian communities. Since statues and images of gods and deified heroes filled the heathen temples and the public squares, and the custom of the apotheosis even of basest men was still in vogue, the early Church was led to suppose that the absence of images from their places of assembly and their private houses must be distinctively characteristic. Hence, Clement of Alexandria cried in warning voice, "Images must not be tolerated!" Hence, in the earliest Christian art there is a total lack of the statue proper. This whole

opposition of the early Christian fathers to representative art arose from fear of a contaminating mixture of heathen and Christian elements. When we, see the Emperor Alexander Severus placing the image of Christ beside those of Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Orpheus, while the Gnostic sect of the Carpocratians represented the Saviour in connection with Plato and Aristotle, and some of the heathens adored equally Christ * Schnaase, "Geschichte," etc., vol. iii, p. 58.

† Holtzmann, "Deukmäler," etc., p. 17.

and Venus, (paying to each most abominable rites,*) it can be little wondered at that painting and sculpture especially were so little favored by those who were jealous of the honor of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, as it is the province of Christianity to restore the man to his normal condition, and the æsthetical is an essential element of this normal condition, the outward expression and visible embodiment of the truths dearest to the Christian heart could not long be suppressed. "The very glow of devotion of these men, and the care with which they dwelt upon the objects of their silent worship, must necessarily soon awaken a felt need for their representation. The doctrine of salvation, which interpenetrated their whole being, must find a visible form; the secrecy of the Christian fraternity made some sign of recognition necessary."

We see, then, how the heathen and the Christian art touch each other. The technical handling we should expect to be largely influenced by the heathen technics. And this is true both in sculpture and painting. Nor would it be contrary to antecedent expectation to find in the art of the early Church frequent traces of the heathen spirit. As in the study of the "History of Christian Doctrines" of this period it becomes indispensable to thoroughly understand the spirit and prevalence of heathen philosophy, so also in "Monumental Theology" must the technics, motives, and subjects of heathen art be most carefully noted.

What, then, are some of the distinctive characteristics of the Christian art of the first five centuries? Though largely dependent on the heathen art, this early Christian art is peculiar, 1. In the subjects treated.

The very genius of Christianity would suggest subjects of deep, absorbing interest; and their treatment would necessarily be all opposed to the bold, physical, objective manner of heathen art. Virtue in the heathen and Christian vocabularies embodied widely different ideas. To courage, physical prowess, and retaliation of injuries now succeed the opposing principles of humility, patience, love, and forgiveness. Also, instead of strong individualism, and egoistic thought and action, are now found a community of feeling, a recognition of the brotherhood of the race, an absorption of this egoistic *Schnaase, "Geschichte," etc., vol. iii, p. 59.

into the general. Specially in the art of the Christian catacombs, prior to the time of Constantine, there is, therefore, a struggle to avoid the charge of idolatry by hiding favorite subjects and distinctive doctrines under symbolic forms. We observe, therefore, during this period little if any attempt at portraiture. The type of countenance of the figures is invariable. The range of subjects is comparatively narrow, usually limited to the acts of Christ, to events in Old Testament history that prefigure his offices, or to objects in nature that symbolize his doctrines.

2. The early Christian art exchanged, therefore, a natural for a symbolic treatment.

By a symbol in art we understand an outward, corporeal form or representation, which, as a sign, suggests a spiritual significance, and through which a higher thought is awakened. "There are conditions of soul and subjects of art, when, proceeding not from nature, but from an ideal, we seek for this ideal a sensuous sign, which may be, not like, but similar to, or representative of, the same.' This style is the symbolic.

To hope for the perfect embodiment of ideas in material forms is vain. Yet in the best period of the Greek plastic the idea and the representation correspond most nearly. It is a revelation of the idea in the corporeal form. Beauty and thought here struggle to the light. The movement is outward; there is little of invitation to search beneath for hidden truths. True, the early Greek art was deeply religious, and emphatically subjective. This was the period of a firm faith of the people in the supernatural. But from the period of Alexander the Great Greek art became sensuous. The spirituality and depth are gone. The sensuous form alone is studied.

On the contrary, the oriental and romantic art, to which the early Christian is allied, abounds in symbolism. The thought is not revealed in the form; the idea does not fully, or chiefly, lie upon the surface. The oriental imagination, that was so inclined to indulge in metaphor and parable, had, through the sacred Scriptures, deeply impressed the Christian mind of the West. They, too, felt the inadequacy of material forms to represent Christian ideas. So momentous are the concerns of Chris

* Schnaase, vol. i, pp. 31-35.