because man is a symbol.

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the
artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development.
Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences,
just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that
reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE
EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life
of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word.
But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator
indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle
of life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the
poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too
much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary
to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.

I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true
life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen
pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days
her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN
that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and
absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the
shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the
painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the
world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat
together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little
real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfilment.