There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating exposition of the Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of robed choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases, the priests chaunted, marching and bowing, the censer swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and unremittingly as God sustains the universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe. There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling thunder of prayer seem waste.

Yet as I go through these innumerable dark churches of Italy, these heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the sense of faded frescoes and worm-eaten pictures, and vaults and crypts, and mouldering frippery and mildewed relics, and saintly bones mocked by jewelled shroudings, and dim-burning oil-lamps—the blue sky of Italy shut out as in a pious perversity—and more, when I see the subjects of the paintings and gravings, these Crucifixions and Entombments and Descents from the Cross, varied by the mimetic martyrdoms of the first believers, it is borne in on me depressingly how the secret of Jesus has been darkened, and a doctrine of life—“Walk while ye have the light ... that ye may be the children of light”—has been turned to a doctrine of death. St. Sebastian with his arrows, St. Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no doubt, sublime spectacles; but had not the martyr’s life been noble, and had he not died for the right to live it, his death would have been merely ignominious. The death of Socrates owes its value to the life of Socrates. Many a murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble experimenters with RÖntgen rays, or the explorers who perish in polar wastes, recording with freezing fingers the latitude of their death.

Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration on the Passion, with its strong lights and shadows. Indeed, the artistic strength of the mere story is so tremendous that it has wiped out the message of the Master and thrown Christianity quite out of perspective. Tintoretto’s frescoes in San Rocco—indeed, most sacred pictures—are like a picture-book for the primitive. (PicturÆ sunt idiotarum libri.) The anecdotal Christ alone survives. And the painters were the journalists, the diffusers and interpreters of ideas.

The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of romance and the pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with unction the fine wood and the decorative nails of the Cross; even the winding-sheet is treated by Giulio Clovio for its decorative value. Where in all these galleries and legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the parables and the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet of righteousness, the lover of little children? The living Christ was overcast by the livid light of the tomb. He was buried in the Latin of the Church, while every chapel and cloister taught in glaring colour the superficial dramatic elements, and Calvaries were built to accentuate it, and men fought for the Cross and swore by the Holy Rood, and collected the sacred nails and fragments of the wood and thorns of the crown.

The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the blood; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Holy Winding-sheet. Strange mementoes of the plein air Prophet who drew his parables and metaphors from the vineyard and the sheepfold! The Santo Volto for which pilgrims stream to Lucca is not the holy face of loving righteousness, but a crucifix miraculously migrated from the Holy Land and preserved in a toy tempietto. Of the fifteen mysteries of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five are of Birth, five of Death, five of Glory. But none are of Life. There are also the rosaries of the Five Wounds and the Seven Dolors.

No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the Cross owed its power over gross minds to its very repudiation of the joy of life, but the soul cannot healthily concentrate on death, nor can “Holy Dying” replace “Holy Living.” Those early purple and gold mosaics of the Master with His hand on the Book of Life, placed over altars—as in the cathedral of Pisa—taught, for all their naÏvetÉ, the deeper lesson: “Ego sum lux mundi.” The rude stone sculptures on the portals of Parma Baptistery depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap, yet active in works and words of love, and Duccio’s panels on that reredos in Siena in the dawn of Italian art equally emphasise the life of Christ, and not its mere ending. In fact, the earlier the art the less the insistence on darkness and death. The Christians of the Catacombs, for whom death and darkness were daily realities, turned all their thoughts to light and life. They enjoyed their crypts more than the Christians of to-day enjoy their cathedrals. “The Acts of the Apostles,” says Renan in his St. Paul, “are a book of joy.” It was the later ages, which found the battle won, that took an artistic and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and created those pictorial concepts that tend to caricature Christianity. It is worth remarking that Tempesta, who brought pictorial martyrology to its disgusting climax in S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late that he lived to see the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary necessities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour to the misconception of Christianity as a religion of death. Toleration or triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and left to him a subtler and severer imitatio Christi. Buried so long beneath his own Cross, the true Christ will rise again—to the cry of “Ecce Homo!”

On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate nature of Christ, or the modal trinitarianism of Sabellius by which the same God manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, may cease to be a heresy, or Joachim of Flora’s expectation of a Super-Gospel of the Spirit may find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its heresies, the thought of the great souls who, instead of receiving it passively, wrestled for themselves with its metaphysical and spiritual problems, and passed through the white fires and deep waters of the cosmic mystery. There is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than the acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of Athanasius triumphant contra mundum.

Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who rules in glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates and pervades St. Mark’s; but this Christ who presides in so many pictures at the Last Judgment, His foot on the earth-ball, His angel-legions round Him, and who, indeed, in some is actually represented as creating Adam or giving Moses the Law; this Christ who—by a paradoxical reversion to the Pagan need for a human God—has superseded His Father with even retrospective rights, is still further removed than the crucified Christ from the Christ of life.

This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to his true presidence over the centuries that followed his death! And this death, how infinitely more tragic than the conventional theory of it! Naught that man has suffered or man imagined, no Dantesque torture nor Promethean agony, can equal the blackness of that ninth hour when “Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Where be the twelve legions of angels, where the seat for the Son of Man at the right hand of power? Why this mockery, this excruciation?

Purblind must be the dry-as-dust who can read this passage and doubt that Jesus was an historical person. As if, despite Psalm xxii, the writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so wonderful a touch, or would, had they understood its full import, have inserted so flagrant a contradiction of the Christian concept—a contradiction that can only be counteracted by an elaborate theory of kenosis. The dying cry of Jesus stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints of the Israelites against their leader guarantee Moses and the Exodus.

What a colossal theme—Ormuzd broken by Ahriman, the incarnation of light and love agonising beneath the heel of the powers of darkness and goaded into the supreme cry: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I have seen only one Crucifixion that adequately renders this dreadful moment—the supreme loneliness, the unrayed blackness—for most Crucifixions are populated and bustling, like Tintoretto’s or Altichieri’s or Foppa’s or Spinello Aretino’s, or that congested canvas of the brothers San Severino, when they are not also like Michele da Verona’s, a translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio romance of trumpeters and horsemen and dogs and lovely towered cities and mountain bridges, not to mention the arms of the magnificent Conte di Pitigliano. But what painter it is who has caught the true essence and quiddity of the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw his picture in Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.

Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely figure, but in Italian art before our own day I can only recall it in an obscure picture of the Parmese school, and in a small painting of the eighteenth-century Venetian, Piazzetta. Tura’s impressive, sombre study is only a fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests the loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic, besides sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-century Italian, Giocondo Viglioli, places the lonely Christ against the shadowy background of the roofs and towers of Jerusalem. But the picture I have in my mind is Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at the figure in the centre, who, unillumined even by a halo, uncompanioned even of thieves, hangs nailed upon a lonely cross in a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this tremendous moment is alone—however vast the crowd—alone against the universe, and this universe has turned into a darkness that can be felt; felt as a torment of body as well as a shattering of the spirit.

When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Farnesina at Rome as designed by Raphael, it was borne in on me how the primitive Greek, penetrated by the certainty and beauty of his body, had made the world and the gods in its image. But the race of Jesus, evolved to a higher thought, had demanded that the universe should answer to its soul. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” asks Abraham severely of God in another epochal passage of the Bible. And now here is a scion of Abraham who has staked his all upon the innermost nature of things being one with his own, upon a universe aflame with love and righteousness and pity, and lo! in this awful hour it seems to reveal itself as a universe full of mocking forces, grim, imperturbable, alien. It is an epic moment—the tragedy not only of Jesus, but of man soaring upwards from the slime?—

—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot, even find the satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:

Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The universe had not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the media for his eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos. But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of whom we might say, in the words of Sannazaro,

It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that the equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye have sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the atonement offered ran: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Here, then, in the Old Testament, and not in the New, first appears the notion of vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly rejects it; “Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book.” Beside which trenchant repudiation the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play of the theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the germ of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the logos to Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to the Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or “Hyperion” of Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this same Museum of Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had been pre-figured? I mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of Zeus the Father.

It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion, come in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to yearn for something beyond—

The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself by a Jewish heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced by Greek Alexandrian philosophy, and organised by a Greek-speaking tent-maker of Jerusalem named Saul or Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent, after the fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a Christ. Some fourteen centuries later old Greek thought is rediscovered, and operates as the great liberator of the mind from the constriction of this Church which has obscured and overgloomed Nature. But only subconscious of itself, this movement back to Nature, this renewed joie de vivre, finds its expression in the adornment of altars for the worship of sorrow, and under the ribs of death a new soul of loveliness is created that can vie with the art of the Greeks. And finally this new Nature-worship grows conscious again of its inadequacy to the soul of man, there is a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation, and then both are outgrown and humanity stands to-day where the old Greeks stood at the dawn of Christianity. The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millenniums of heresy, unbroken by the persecution, still patiently awaiting the day when “God shall be One and His Name One.” What are the fantasies of literature to the freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit?