In this company, where are assembled the most cultivated of the Athenian
citizens, they discuss love and jealousy of a kind that the moral
instinct of modern society can with difficulty comprehend. But these
dissertations are of no aid in the solution which I seek.
And yet the spirit of Socrates at times attained to great heights. He
puts into the mouth of a woman of Mantinea the theory which saps the old
doctrine and presents monotheism. It is but one step thence to
Christianity, and it was Apollonius of Tyana, disciple of Pythagoras,
who established a connection between the idealism of the later Greek
philosophy and the spirituality of the new religion taught by Jesus of
Nazareth.
Socrates, after a discussion upon those intermediate deities, whom he
called _daimons_, and among whom he places love, assigns to love an
origin and strange attributes which, to a certain extent, explain the
remarkable workings of this passion at that time. He at once exalts and
seeks to make comprehended the new god--"Beauty eternal, uncreated and
imperishable, a beauty having nothing sensuous, nothing
corporeal,--which exists absolutely and eternally." This is all.
Perhaps this ideal of love, as that of philosophy, may have been
expressed in the foundation of the religious ideal of Delsarte, but this
encounter in the ethereal regions of theology and psychology--where the
human consciousness perceives nothing tangible, and whence it derives
only vague aspirations--implies no knowledge, of anything like a law, a
science or a method, such as our artist-innovator of the nineteenth
century conceived and taught.
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