Themes
Ibsen called the play a "world drama in two parts", addressing the world order, the state of faith and what constitutes an ideal government, intertwining these three issues together with each other, with Julian's personality and with an artistic reconstruction of that historical era. It originates the idea of a "Third Empire", put into the mouth of the philosopher Maximus, as a moral and political ideal formed by a kind of synthesis between the realm of the flesh in paganism and the realm of the spirit in Christianity. The author wrote that the future had to be marked by such a synthesis, seeing that future as a community of noble, harmonious development and freedom, producing a society in which no person can oppress another and that that future had to be reached by a revolution in the spirit and an internal rebirth. However, the real life he presents in the play suggests that these ideas are just idealistic dreams and that the clash of paganism and Christianity creates only suffering.
Read more about this topic: Emperor And Galilean
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)