[Footnote 321:  Or rather of power and dignity; for in some early Byzantine works even Satan is represented with a nimbus.]

[Footnote 322:  Emerson says rightly, “Mysticism (in a bad sense) consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.”]

[Footnote 323:  The distinction which Ruskin draws between the fancy and the imagination may help us to discern the true and the false in Symbolism.  “Fancy has to do with the outsides of things, and is content therewith.  She can never feel, but is one of the most purely and simply intellectual of the faculties.  She cannot be made serious; no edge-tool, but she will play with:  whereas the imagination is in all things the reverse.  She cannot but be serious; she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, ever to smile....  There is reciprocal action between the intensity of moral feeling and the power of imagination.  Hence the powers of the imagination may always be tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion....  Imagination is quiet, fancy restless; fancy details, imagination suggests....  All egotism is destructive of imagination, whose play and power depend altogether on our being able to forget ourselves....  Imagination has no respect for sayings or opinions:  it is independent” (Modern Painters, vol. ii. chap. iii.).]

[Footnote 324:  Cf.  Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. ii. p. 144:  “What we nowadays understand by ‘symbols’ is a thing which is not that which it represents; at that time (in the second century) ‘symbol’ denoted a thing which, in some kind of way, is that which it signifies; but, on the other hand, according to the ideas of that period, the really heavenly element lay either in or behind the visible form without being identical with it.  Accordingly, the distinction of a symbolic and realistic conception of the Lord’s Supper is altogether to be rejected.”  And vol. iv. p. 289:  “The ‘symbol’ was never a mere type or sign, but always embodied a mystery.”  So Justin Martyr uses [Greek:  symbolikos eipein] and [Greek:  eipein en mysterio] as interchangeable terms; and Tertullian says that the name of Joshua was nominis futuri sacramentum.]

[Footnote 325:  So some thinkers have felt that “the Word” is not the best expression for the creative activity of God.  The passage of Goethe where Faust rejects “Word,” “Thought,” and “Power,” and finally translates, “In the beginning was the Act,” is well known.  And Philo, in a very interesting passage, says that Nature is the language in which God speaks; “but there is this difference, that while the human voice is made to be heard, the voice of God is made to be seen:  what God says consists of acts, not of words” (De Decem Orac.  II).]

[Footnote 326:  Aquinas says of the sacraments, “efficiunt quod figurant.”  The Thomists held that the sacraments are “causae” of grace; the Scotists (Nominalists), that grace is their inseparable concomitant.  The maintenance of a real correspondence between sign and significance seems to be essential to the idea of a sacrament, but then the danger of degrading it into magic lies close at hand.]