Must
God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our
humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal
pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual
bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are
rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of
the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial,
the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the
idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human
models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The
mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it
is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the
intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the
creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the
narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know
that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life
is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us.
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