The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form 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 only possible inspiration of Art.  The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out.  Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real:—­“Your scandalous figures,” said he, “stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues.”  It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality.  Matter is gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,—­and material existence tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it.  It belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the Buddhist heaven of annihilation.