ANTAEUS AND ATLAS 149

of Saint Francis of Assisi, to his evocation of the spirit of Christ. An
imitatio Christi which would have been intolerably presumptuous if it
had not been unselfconsciously humble was proved to have been no
mechanical act of mimesis by the light of the leaping flame that seared
the saint's body with the stigmata of its lightning-like passage as it
kindled Christ's spirit in his soul. In the histories of the civilizations of
the third generation it would be hard to descry any other soul that had
won such grace from so hazardously high a spiritual venture; but, when
we pass from this unique evocation of Christ's own spirit to evocations
of the spirit of His Apostles, we find more than one example of the
Antaean rebound from this still lofty yet not quite Everestian spiritual
altitude. This creative reaction is exemplified in the souls of those other
Western saints who set themselves to lead an apostolic life, both outside
the fold of the Western Christian Church of the day, as heretics, and in-
side it, as friars of the Orders of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Christian Era;1 and it is ex-
emplified again in the souls of a John Wesley and his companions and
successors, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were moved
with the same compassion2 for shepherdless sheep scattered abroad in
urban wildernesses.

An Antaean rebound was likewise the sequel to the evocation of a ghost
of Jewish Aniconism in the Protestant fraction of a fissured Modern
Western Christian Church; for this resuscitated tabu on the representa-
tion of the Godhead in visual form was a reminder of the greatness of the
spiritual gulf across which the encounter between God and Man takes
place; and, the keener the human soul's sense of the distance between
these two spiritual poles, the higher the tension of the current that
streams between them in a vaulting arc.

Iconoclasm, however, is not enough in itself to ensure an Antaean
rebound—as is attested by its Atlantean outcome in the history of a
sister Christian Church. Though the Iconoclastic Movement in Ortho-
dox Christendom petered out, as we have seen, in a compromise in which
the Iconodules had the best of the bargain, it did not fail to fulfil its first
imperial patron Leo Syrus's purpose of disciplining the Orthodox
Christian Church into becoming an obedient humble servant of an East
Roman imperium redivivum* Nor was this bitted and bridled Church
afterwards any more happily inspired when it evoked the ghost of a
Jewry in diaspora4 in order to keep itself still in existence after its sub-
jugation by an East Roman Imperial Government had resulted in the
breakdown and disintegration of the Orthodox Christian Civilization
and the imposition of peace on the main body of Orthodox Christendom
by an alien universal state in the shape of the Ottoman Empire. In
eventually consenting to serve in an Ottoman regime as a millet, as in
previously consenting to serve in an East Roman regime as a department
of state, the Orthodox Church was accepting the sentence passed on
Atlas by Zeus in the Hellenic myth.

* See IV. iv. 369-71, 558-60, 562, and 652-6.

* Matt, ix, 36 and aciv. 14; Mark vi. 34-
3 See IV. iv. 346-53 and 592-633.

+ This diasporan organization of Jewry has been noticed in IX. viii. 272-313'