RELIGIOUS ART EAST AND WEST — ROWLAND 573 



It is eminently worthy of note that, in both the Buddha and 

 Christ image, a youthful ephebic type is substituted for the mature 

 bearded faces of the orators. It has been suggested that the early 

 Christian representations of Christ as a young man with long hair 

 are taken over from earlier Apollonian prototypes. Our Lord's Resur- 

 rection is the sun's rising ; His descent into Hell the setting of the orb 

 beyond the Western rim. The analogy to the daily and eternal course 

 of Helios- Apollo is apparent at once. Beyond this there are many 

 descriptions in the Gospels and the writings of the church fathers 

 that, by the luciferous character attributed to Christ, must have sug- 

 gested the pagan images of the sun-god as models for representing 

 Him. I need mention only Our Lord's "glory," referred to so often 

 in the Gospels (John 1 : 14, etc.) or that His face "did shine as the 

 sun" (Matt. 7:2). Ambrose, indeed, addresses Christ directly as 

 "Sol": 



Splendor paternae gloriae 

 de luce lucem proferens, 



Primordiis lucis novae 

 diem dies illuminans. 



Verusque sol illabere, 

 micans nitore perpeti, . . . 



A similar choice of the classic sun-god as the type for the Buddha 

 may naturally have suggested itself to the Eurasian artisans who 

 carved the images at Gandhara from the frequent allusions to the 

 Buddha's solar character in the sutras. The following quotations will 

 illustrate this point : 



The Buddhas shine both by night and by day. 



Like the Sun bursting from a cloud in the morning, ... so he, too, when 

 he was born from his mother's womb, made the world bright like gold, . . . 

 dispelled the darkness. 



He shone like the young sun descended upon the earth. 



He will shine forth as a sun of knowledge to destroy the darkness of illusion 

 in the world. 



As far as we can say at the moment, Sakyamuni must have been 

 represented in the guise of Sophocles and Aeschinus at the same time 

 that Christ was given a similar anthropomorphic representation. "We 

 may be justified in assuming that the iconographic type was intro- 

 duced from the Roman Orient. Again the stylistic parallels between 

 this type in the East and West are as close as the spiritual similarities 

 suggested by the literary sources mentioned above: the Buddha in 

 our illustration (pi. 1, fig. 2) has — as is only to be expected — the same 

 sharp and linear caricature of the form-fitting robe of the Hellenistic 

 orator type that we find in the well-known example from Psamatia 

 (pl.l,fig.l). 



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