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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human mind
that the great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be expressed in
some form of visible beauty, like the absolute purity and goodness which
Christian art has sought to realize in the person of the Madonna. But
although human nature has often attempted to represent outwardly what can
be only 'spiritually discerned,' men feel that in pictures and images,
whether painted or carved, or described in words only, we have not the
substance but the shadow of the truth which is in heaven. There is no
reason to suppose that in the fairest works of Greek art, Plato ever
conceived himself to behold an image, however faint, of ideal truths. 'Not
in that way was wisdom seen.'
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