room whose inner walls correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical temple, the cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure East is the cupola building, the Mosque, which without doubt existed long before the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians and Chaldeans, the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples of Saba as well. The attempts to reconcile East and West in the Church Councils of the Byzantine period were finally symbolized in the mixed form of the domed basilica. For this item of the history of ecclesiastical architecture is really another expression of the great change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the last great champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from those of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian nationality, to which likewise the name of "Greek" passed in the end. And of this transition the domed basilica is the symbol.
