Part 4 (2/2)
Of these two great orders of Saints, the first; or mythic, belongs--speaking broadly--to the southern or Greek Church alone.
The Gothic Christians, once detached from the wors.h.i.+p of Odin and Thor, abjure from their hearts all trust in the elements, and all wors.h.i.+p of ideas. They will have their Saints in flesh and blood, their Angels in plume and armour; and nothing incorporeal or invisible. In all the Religious sculpture beside Loire and Seine, you will not find either of the great rivers personified; the dress of the highest seraph is of true steel or sound broadcloth, neither flecked by hail, nor fringed by thunder; and while the ideal Charity of Giotto at Padua presents her heart in her hand to G.o.d, and tramples at the same instant on bags of gold, the treasures of the world, and gives only corn and flowers; that on the west porch of Amiens is content to clothe a beggar with a piece of the staple manufacture of the town.
On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to find in the imagery of the Greek Church, under the former exercise of the Imagination, a representation either of man or beast which purports to represent _only_ the person, or the brute. Every mortal creature stands for an Immortal Intelligence or Influence: a Lamb means an Apostle, a Lion an Evangelist, an Angel the Eternal justice or benevolence; and the most historical and indubitable of Saints are compelled to set forth, in their vulgarly apparent persons, a Platonic myth or an Athanasian article.
I therefore take note first of the mythic saints in succession, whom this treatment of them by the Byzantine Church made afterwards the favourite idols of all Christendom.
I. The most mythic is of course St. Sophia; the shade of the Greek Athena, pa.s.sing into the 'Wisdom' of the Jewish Proverbs and Psalms, and the Apocryphal 'Wisdom of Solomon.' She always remains understood as a personification only; and has no direct influence on the mind of the unlearned mult.i.tude of Western Christendom, except as a G.o.dmother,--in which kindly function she is more and more accepted as times go on; her healthy influence being perhaps greater over sweet vicars' daughters in Wakefield--when Wakefield _was_,--than over the prudentest of the rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium.
II. Of St. Catharine of Egypt there are vestiges of personal tradition which may perhaps permit the supposition of her having really once existed, as a very lovely, witty, proud, and 'fanciful' girl. She afterwards becomes the Christian type of the Bride, in the 'Song of Solomon,' involved with an ideal of all that is purest in the life of a nun, and brightest in the death of a martyr. It is scarcely possible to overrate the influence of the conceptions formed of her, in enn.o.bling the sentiments of Christian women of the higher orders;--to their practical common sense, as the mistresses of a household or a nation, her example may have been less conducive.
III. St. Barbara, also an Egyptian, and St. Catharine's contemporary, though the most practical of the mythic saints, is also, after St.
Sophia, the least corporeal: she vanishes far away into the 'Inclusa Danae,' and her ”Tunis aenea” becomes a myth of Christian safety, of which the Scriptural significance may be enough felt by merely looking out the texts under the word ”Tower,” in your concordance; and whose effectual power, in the fort.i.tudes alike of matter and spirit, was in all probability made impressive enough to all Christendom, both by the fortifications and persecutions of Diocletian. I have endeavoured to mark her general relations to St. Sophia in the little imaginary dialogue between them, given in the eighth lecture of the 'Ethics of the Dust.'
Afterwards, as Gothic architecture becomes dominant, and at last beyond question the most wonderful of all temple-building, St.
Barbara's Tower is, of course, its perfected symbol and utmost achievement; and whether in the coronets of countless battlements worn on the brows of the n.o.blest cities, or in the Lombard bell-tower on the mountains, and the English spire on Sarum plain, the geometric majesty of the Egyptian maid became glorious in harmony of defence, and sacred with precision of symbol.
As the buildings which showed her utmost skill were chiefly exposed to lightning, she is invoked in defence from it; and our pet.i.tion in the Litany, against sudden death, was written originally to her.
The blasphemous corruptions of her into a patroness of cannon and gunpowder, are among the most ludicrous, (because precisely contrary to the original tradition,) as well as the most deadly, insolences and stupidities of Renaissance Art.
IV. St. Margaret of Antioch was a shepherdess; the St. Genevieve of the East; the type of feminine gentleness and simplicity. Traditions of the resurrection of Alcestis perhaps mingle in those of her contest with the dragon; but at all events, she differs from the other three great mythic saints, in expressing the soul's victory over temptation or affliction, by Christ's miraculous help, and without any special power of its own. She is the saint of the meek and of the poor; her virtue and her victory are those of all gracious and lowly womanhood; and her memory is consecrated among the gentle households of Europe; no other name, except those of Jeanne and Jeanie, seems so gifted with a baptismal fairy power of giving grace and peace.
I must be forgiven for thinking, even on this canonical ground, not only of Jeanie Deans, and Margaret of Branksome; but of Meg--Merrilies. My readers will, I fear, choose rather to think of the more doubtful victory over the Dragon, won by the great Margaret of German literature.
V. With much more clearness and historic comfort we may approach the shrine of St. Cecilia; and even on the most prosaic and realistic minds--such as my own--a visit to her house in Rome has a comforting and establis.h.i.+ng effect, which reminds one of the carter in 'Harry and Lucy,' who is convinced of the truth of a plaustral catastrophe at first incredible to him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill on which it happened. The ruling conception of her is deepened gradually by the enlarged study of Religious music; and is at its best and highest in the thirteenth century, when she rather resists than complies with the already tempting and distracting powers of sound; and we are told that ”cantantibus organis, Cecilia virgo in corde suo soli Domino decantabat, dicens, 'Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum immaculatum, ut non confundar.'”
(”While the instruments played, Cecilia the virgin sang in her heart only to the Lord, saying, Oh Lord, be my heart and body made stainless, that I be not confounded.”)
This sentence occurs in my great Service-book of the convent of Beau-pre, written in 1290, and it is ill.u.s.trated with a miniature of Cecilia sitting silent at a banquet, where all manner of musicians are playing. I need not point out to you how the law, not of sacred music only, so called, but of _all_ music, is determined by this sentence; which means in effect that unless music exalt and purify, it is not under St. Cecilia's ordinance, and it is not, virtually, music at all.
Her confessed power at last expires amidst a hubbub of odes and sonatas; and I suppose her presence at a Morning Popular is as little antic.i.p.ated as desired. Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints for ever the greatest; and the child in its nurse's arms, and every tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify in itself,--as the eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing,--may still, whether behind the Temple veil,[25] or at the fireside, and by the wayside, hear Cecilia sing.
[Footnote 25:”But, standing in the lowest place, And mingled with the work-day crowd, A poor man looks, with lifted face, And hears the Angels cry aloud.
”He seeks not how each instant flies, One moment is Eternity; His spirit with the Angels cries To Thee, to Thee, continually.
”What if, Isaiah-like, he know His heart be weak, his lips unclean, His nature vile, his office low, His dwelling and his people mean?
”To such the Angels spake of old-- To such of yore, the glory came; These altar fires can ne'er grow cold: Then be it his, that cleansing flame.”
These verses, part of a very lovely poem, ”To Thee all Angels cry aloud,” in the 'Monthly Packet' for September 1873, are only signed 'Veritas.' The volume for that year (the 16th) is well worth getting, for the sake of the admirable papers in it by Miss Sewell, on questions of the day; by Miss A.C. Owen, on Christian Art; and the unsigned Cameos from English History.]
It would delay me too long just now to trace in specialty farther the functions of the mythic, or, as in another sense they may be truly called, the universal, Saints: the next greatest of them, St. Ursula, is essentially British,--and you will find enough about her in 'Fors Clavigera'; the others, I will simply give you in entirely authoritative order from the St. Louis' Psalter, as he read and thought of them.
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