The classical heritage of the middle ages

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY..

LIBRARY

Preface

The subject of this book is the transition from the Classical to the Mediaeval. It seeks to follow the changes undergone by classic thought, letters, and art, on their way to form part of the intellectual development of the Middle Ages, and to show how pagan tastes and ideals gave place to the ideals of Christianity and to Christian sentiments. The argument reaches backward to classic Greece and Eome and forward into the Middle Ages; but the discussion centres in the period extending from the fourth to the seventh century. This period was strikingly transitional in Italy and the western provinces of the Boman Empire ; before it had passed, the various elements of classic culture had assumed the forms in which they were to make part of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, and Christianity had taken on a mediaeval character.

In considering the antecedents of the transition period it is necessary to look to Greek as well as fioman sources, to the East as well as to the West. But the West of Europe is the province of this book, and the discussion tends always to turn from the

Vlll PREFACE

Hellenic East to the "Western and Latin phenomena of the transition period. These have a personal interest for us, making part of our own past. They have also the interest of that which lived and was to grow in life. Find what interest one may in mediaeval Byzantium, — and it is full of instruction, — still it is a tale of what had reached its zenith, of what was past its best strength, a tale of decadence postponed with skill and energy, and yet only postponed.

H. O. TAYLOR.

New York, January 19, 1901.

CHAPTER I PAGE iNTBODnCTIOM 1

CHAPTER n

THE PASSING OF TKE ANTIQUE MAN

Contrast between the classic and the mediseval character . 18

Distinctive Greek and Roman traits 19

Influence of Greece on Rome 22

The Greek-enlightened Roman 24

Later Greek types 26

Growth of emotion : Homer, the lyric and tragic poets,

the Alexandrians, Virgil 27

The new pagan religiousness 29

Neo-platonism 30

The pagan climacteric 31

CHAPTER in

PEASES OF PAGAN DECADENCE

General decay and literary decline 33

Oratory, rhetoric, and grammar 34

Debased uses of Virgil 37

The romance of Alexander 38

The tale of Troy 40

The Greek love-romances . . • : ■ • • .41

ix

X CONTENTS

CHAPTEE rV

THE ANTIQUE CULTURE

I. The Tkansmission op Letters

PAGB

Latin and Greek in the West 44

The preservation of classic works 45

Mediaeval education 47 ~

Summaries of the liberal arts : Martianus Capella . . 49

Summaries of philosophy : Boethius 51

II. Transmission of the Roman Law

Imperial codes . . 56

Barbarian codes of Roman law 59

Roman law and the Church ; canon law .... 61

Roman law in the early Middle Ages .... 64 The Bologna school and the new knowledge of the Roman

law in France, England, and Germany ... 66

CHAPTER V

PAGAN ELEMENTS CHRISTIANIZED IN TRANSMISSION

I. Ethics

Pagan and Christian ethics 71

Ambrose's De Officiis Ministrorum 74

Augustine ... 77

II. Stnesius or Ctkene 78

III. The Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies

OP the Counterfeit Diontsius the Areopagite 82

IV. Mysteries, Symbolism, Allegort "Mysteries," symbolism, and allegorical interpretation . 90 Pagan and Christian mysteries 93

CONTENTS XI

rAoz Allegorical interpretation with Greeks, Jews, and Christians 97

Effect on medisBval literature and art .... 106

CHAPTER VI IDEALS OF KNOWLEDGE, BEAUTT, LOVE

I. Philosophy and Doqma

The Greek and Christian ideal of knowledge . . . 107

Christian views of pagan literature 108

The Christian attitude toward philosophy .... 109 The dogmatic formulation of Christianity ; Greek philosophy and Roman law 116

Greek philosophy in mediseval scholasticism . . . 122

n. Beautt and Love

Christian conceptions of beauty : Augustine, Gregory of

Nyssa 123

Augustine's thoughts of love 128

The Christian attitude toward emotion in general . . 131

CHAPTER Vn

ABANDONMENT OF PAGAN PRINCIPLES IN A CHRISTIAN SYSTEM OF LIFE

[_ I. Obigins of Monasticism

The ascetic act 136

Greek, Egyptian, Indian, and Jewish antecedents of

monasticism 138

The conflict between Christ and the world . . . 142

Christian disparagement of marriage .... 143

Beginnings of monasticism 146

Xll CONTENTS

PAGE

Labor and obedience 148

Causes of the rapid spread of monasticism . . .150 The Christian contemplative life 153

II. Westerk Monasticism

Eastern and Western monasticism ... . 155

Influence of the four Latin Fathers ... . 158

Cassian's Institutes and Conlationes ; monastic vices and

their remedies 160

The Benedictine regula ... ... 164

III. The Monastic Character

General traits 178

Western examples from the transition centuries : Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Benedict of Nursia, Gregory the Great 183

CHAPTER VIII CHRISTIAN PROSE

I. Chkistianization op Style

Contrasts between classical and primitive Christian writings 198

Formlessness of the latter 200

Effect of the new religion upon literary Latin . . . 202

Tertullian and the Sermo Pleheius 203

The new Christian vocabulary 204

II. The First Four Centuries op Christian Prose

Letters : Paul, Ignatius, Cyprian, Augustine, Jerome . 207

Apologies, Greek and Latin 213

The Civitas Dei 217

Apologetic History ; Orosius ...... 219

Polemics; sermons 223

CONTENTS xili

PAGE

Apocryphal Gospels and Acts 225

Their influence in the Middle Ages 230

IIL Medi^valizing op Latin Pbose and Forms op

Composition 231

CHAPTER IX

CHRISTIAN POETRY

I. Classic Metre and Christian Emotion

Metrical qualities of Greek verse 235

Characteristics of Greek emotion 236

Hexameter and elegiac 237

Lyric metres ; the dramatists 240

Metrical decadence 242

Metre and emotion with the classic Latin poets . . 243

Christian emotion unsuited to classic metres . . . 244

The medisetal hymn 246

II. Greek Christian Poetry

The first Christian songs 247

The Oracula Sibyllina 250

The hymn ascribed to Clement of Alexandria . . . 253

The hymn of Methodius 255

Metrical hymns of Synesius and Gregory Nazianzen . . 256

The origin and rise of Greek accentual hymns . . . 257

Eomanos 260 m. Early Latin Christian Poetry

Relations to the Greek . ....

The change from quantity to accent in Latin hymns Prudentius and the martyr-ballad . . . . Paulinus of Nola and the Christian elegy . Didactic or polemic poems . . . .

The Psychomachia .

262 263 269 272 276 278

XIV CONTENTS

PASS

Narrative poems 280

Avitus' "Paradise Lost" 282

rV. The Transition to Mediaeval Latin Pobtbt

Development of accentual and rhymed verse . . . 284

Epic and other antique forms of poetry .... 287

Classic phrase and pagan commonplace .... 291

Fortunatus and the passing of the antique spirit . . 293 French, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and German traits in Latin

poetry 297

CHAPTER X CHRISTIAN ART

L The Transition prom Antique to Hedisivai. Architecture

The classic orders 302

The Christian basilica 303

The Byzantine dome 305

Through Bomanesque to Gothic 308

Gothic and classic 313

IL Antique Christian Painting and Sculpture

Gradually distinguishable from pagan .... 316

The subjects and interpretation of catacomb painting . 318

Antique Christian sculpture 324

The Christian revival of art in the fourth and fifth centuries; mosaics 325

III. Byzantine Painting

Progress to the Byzantine style in Italy .... 332

Bavenna . . 336

Mosaics . . 337

Characteristics of Byzantine art 340

CONTENTS XV

PAeB

Ita covirse and decline 242

Art in Italy becomes Italian 345

IV, The Antique in Medlstal Abt

The antique art and the Northern races .... 348

Carolingian art . . . .... 350

Modes of antique surrival 363

The transfoimation of the antique in the evolution of

mediaeval art 355

BlBLIOOBAPEICAL APFBNSIX 359

THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

CHAPTER I

INTEODUCTIOH'

No date marks the passing of tlie ancient world and tlie iDeginning of the Middle Ages. The transition from one to the other was a process of spiritual change, during which antique characteristics gradually ceased and were replaced by much that was ineipiently mediaeval. There no longer existed men whose education and intellectual traits, whose moods, tastes, sentiments,, and views of life were those of the time of Augustus, or Trajan, or Marcus Aurelius. The older possessors of antique culture in Italy and the provinces were transformed ; within and without the Empire new races had come upon the stage ; through decade and century went on a ceaseless blending of the new, the old, and the transitional.

Paganism and Christianity existed side by side in the Grseco-Roman world of the fourth and fifth centuries, the one with its great steadying traditions, and the other with its power of new-found faith and its fresh moral stimulus. Christians had pagan educations, and pagans, like the emperor Julian and his

B 1 friend Libanius, derived suggestions from the religion they despised. In these obviously transitional centuries, both pagan and Christian men arose who were not quite antique.^ Some of them eclectically refashioned pagan ethics, some made useful if vapid compendiums of antique culture, some turned epics into grammars ; others unconsciously remoulded primitive Christianity or produced strange creations, compounds of Christianity and paganism. Together they form the link between the earlier pagan and Christian types and the more mediaeval men of the sixth and seventh centuries. The modification of antique pagan and Christian types is one side of the change. Another is represented by the barbarian races who, often with destructive violence, were pressing into the Empire and coming under the influence of whatever existed there. They were affected by intercourse with Italians and provincials, and soon began to absorb knowledge. As their intelligence increased, through their contact with a higher civilization, they drew from the antique according to their understandings and appreciations. The old matters thus absorbed into new natures were transformed, and sometimes gained fresh life. But these barbarian men were not metamorphosed into antique persons, nor even into those pagan or Christian semi-antique types which made the Grseco-Eoman world of the fourth and fifth centuries. From the

I The word " classical " refers to the characteristics of Greek art and Greek or Boman literature at their best; "antique" refers more generally to the characteristics of Greek and Roman civilization, without special reference to period or quality; "pagan" means the same, hut with the added idea of opposition to Christian tboaght.

i] INTRODUCTION 3

beginning of the sixth century, however, the barbarians are not to be sharply set over against Eomans and provincials ; they represent all stages of civilization, from barbarism to the best culture afforded by the time.

These processes of overthrow, progress, and change were complex. But it is noticeable that each succeeding generation of the mingled denizens of the Empire is further removed from the antique type and nearer to the mediseval. The Empire remained geographically the source of religion and culture for peoples within it and without; and Christianity, as well as much from the pagan classic past, was passing to the new peoples in forms continually modified and ever nearer to the level of the early mediseval centuries. Eor example, Augustine was a Roman Christian; he was not mediaeval. One hundred and fifty years after him comes Gregory the Great, who is partly Roman still, yet is touched with the new ignorance, the new barbarism. He is, however, close enough to Augustine to appropriate his doctrines and hand them on in modes nearer the level of the seventh and eighth centuries. This is an example of the Christian side of the matter. On the other hand, the classic spirit was dead before Gregory was born, and classic literature was degraded by the way in which it was understood. Virgil, for instance, was no longer Virgil, but incarnate grammar and authoritative history. Antique culture was also undergoing desiccation in compositions of the transition centuries, whose authors took what was spiritually closest to them and made it over in accordance with their own intelligence and character.

From the third to the fifth century the Grseco- Roman world presents conditions of decadence. Military courage, civic devotion, intellectual energy, are declining. Decay shows itself in literature and art. The phenomena of this pagan decadence present analogies in the various provinces of philosophy, ethics, law, rhetoric, and grammar, as well as in art and poetry. Philosophy and ethics are eclectic : organic principles which give consistency are frequently ignored, while inconsistent sources are drawn from, and there is a tendency to summarize. In law the tendency is to conserve and compile, then to epitomize ; the creative energy to make an organic system is lacking. In rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, there is merely an arranging of the old and trite examples and a summarizing. Consequently resemblances will appear throughout the decadent forms in which these various branches of culture pass over into the Middle Ages. In poetry and art there was not the same palpable summarizing of previous works ; yet the failure of creative faculty appears in the mediocrity of poetic compositions, in their lack of freshness, their insipid use of borrowed phrase and trite image. The openly pagan poetry of the fourth and fifth centuries was not as current in the Middle Ages as the semi-pagan verse written by Christians. In this there was some modification of pagan elements, and it may be said generally, as to the paganism carried over into the Middle Ages in Christian writings, that the Christian spirit altered whatever it drew from paganism ; and Christian modifications of borrowed pagan elements show analogies among themselves, whether the pagan element happens i] INTRODUCTION 5

to be carried over in theological, ethical, or historical writings or in more strictly literary compositions. For example, the pagan matter is apt to be allegorized or treated mystically or symbolically, and novel and more spiritual meaning is given to what is taken.^ Moreover, the later and partially decadent pagan sources are usually employed.

The fifth century concludes the course of the decadence of independent self-existent paganism. Already Christianity was showing itself a new power and inspiration in thought, letters, and art. Yet its spirit and its principles differed so essentially from those of the classical antique that some of its elements of strength corresponded with what were defects according to classical standards. Self-control, measure, limit, proportion, clarity, and definiteness were principles of the antique ; the Christian spirit broke through them all. Its profound spirituality, often turning to mysticism, had not the clarity of classic limitation. It did not recognize limit. Its reach was infinite, and therefore its expressions were often affected with indefiniteness. Classic self-control meant measure, nothing in excess. Christian self-control soon came to mean the exclusion of a part of life ; it knew no measure ; of what it condemned it could not have too little, of what it approved it could not have enough. The higher paganism sought to weigh and proportion the elements of mortal life according to their intrinsic values and their relations to the economy of human happiness. Christianity scarcely regarded these mortal balancings. It had its own universal principle of proportionment, 1 The myth of the Phoenix is an example, see post, p. 279.

— that love of God which comprehended love for all men and for self in conformity with God's love of His creatures.

Inspired by so different a spirit the creations of Christian thought and feeling could not be like the classic, and their excellence could not be the classic excellence. Classic principles of literary and artistic form and definite unity of composition could never become organic with the spirit of Christianity which overleaped the finite and the mortal."- Consequently the art and literature of the transition centuries present a conflict, of which the Christian artists and authors are not always

1 The contrast between the (late) classical and the Christian spirit may be seen in the lines on Hope attributed to Seneca : " Deceitful hope, hope sweet evil, the one solace of ills for wretched men, whereby they bear their lots. Silly thing, which no turn of fortune can put to flight, hope stays, anxious to please to the last gasp," etc. This pagan conception of spes is definite and unspiritualized, quite wingless, pessimistic, and void of high assurance. It lacks all that animates Christian hope and gives it wings to bear it up to God.

' Spes fallax, spes dulce malum, spes una malorum

Sola perit numquam, sed venit atque redit. . . . — Baehbens, Poetae Latini Minores, Vol. IV, p. 65.

Compare also the Pervigilium Veneris, that last soft note of pagan sexual love, with Augustine's conception of the love of God {post, p. 129) and with the mystical love of Christ which was springing up within monasticism {post, p. 153).

I] INTEODUCTION 7

conscious, — a conflict between the new spirit of Christianity, with its inspirations, its infinite reaches and its requirements of expression, and the antique culture, its tastes and aversions, and its definite literary and artistic rules and forms.

In the fourth and fifth centuries great works of Christian theology and polemics were produced, as well as writings more properly literary, both poetry and prose, and also works of art. The Christian authors had renounced the pagan religion, they condemned its idolatry, some of them disapproved pagan literature. But one and all were educated in standards of artistic taste and principles of literary composition which were the fruit of pagan culture. They knew no other canons to follow when they tried for literary excellence. Therefore they could not but endeavor to give their Christian writings the excellences which had distinguished the antique pagan literature and art. But these classic rules were profoundly irreconcilable with the spirit and demands of the new Christian matter, as may be readily seen in Christian poetry ; antique form and metre were not suited to Christian feeling, and the Christian soul did not reach full poetic expression until it abandoned classic forms and created new ones. As for Christian art, the technical skill and principles of composition inherited from the antique were its foundations and its first source of excellence ; these aided vastly more than they retarded. Nevertheless in architecture, sculpture, and painting, the Christian spirit reaches its full expression only in the Middle Ages when the classic heritage has been forgotten or abandoned.

In other respects classic knowledge deflected or embarrassed the development of Christian thought. Inconsistent elements from pagan metaphysics entered Christian theology. And pagan ethics for a time held Christian ethics from their true principles. This appears, for instance, in the ethical writings of so profound a Christian as Ambrose. On the other hand, the works of his younger contemporary, Augustine, show the casting aside of pagan ethical reasoning and the creation of a veritable Christian scheme.

If pagan form and substance thus hampered the Christian development, it may be inferred that Christian productions were ill suited to the preservation of antique elements unchanged and uncorrupted. ■ Antique form is soon distorted in Christian literature, while the substantial elements of antique ethics and philosophy are often changed by the mixture of what is foreign to them, or are distorted through their application in schemes and to purposes alien to their nature. The larger Christian Latin poems from the time of Commodian afford examples of the distortion of antique form. Many of them, whatever may be their purpose or their topic, make an indiscriminate use of the hexameter or the elegiac metre, and disregard literary unity and pertinency at will. Examples of the misapplication of pagan substance may be found in the use of Stoical methods of reasoning as a frame for Christian ethics ; also in the use of Greek philosophy for the formulation of Christian dogma, or in the manner of employing certain parts of Aristotle in the early Middle Ages. And yet the somewhat distorted manner in which classical elements were used in Chrisi] INTRODUCTION 9

tian literature represents mucli besides decay. For the genius of Christianity could make use of antique pagan elements only by altering and breaking them, or by misapplying them, and all this in ways that were sheer debasement, judged by any classical standard. It was through their distortion that pagan elements became part of the new growth of the human spirit coming with Christianity.

There were several ways in which the antique elements of culture passed over to the Middle Ages, or were superseded by Christian ideals. There was, of course, intercourse between the citizens of the Empire and the barbarians. One result of this may be observed in the bits of anonymous pagan opinion subsisting scattered and impersonal through the Middle Ages, and another in the magic of the great name of Rome and the deathless thought of the Roman Empire. These ideas lived in the consciousness of the people, though they were also fostered by literature. The same may be said of the Roman Law. Some popular knowledge of it survived among the inhabitants of Italy and Gaul, where it was also preserved in codes and abridgments. In England and Germany, save as an element of Canon Law, the influence of Roman Law was slight until after the rise of the Bologna school. As to the currents of literary influence, the writings of classical Latin authors still survived and were read. Antique culture was also summarized or otherwise remodelled in pagan works of the transition centuries, and so passed on in forms suited to the comprehension of the Middle Ages. Chief examples of this are the De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of

Martianus Capella and the De Consolatione of BoetMus.

These pagan refashionings of the antique were not complicated by the introduction of anything foreign to paganism. But a great mass of pagan culture and philosophy passed over into the Middle Ages modified or transformed in the works of Christians of the transition centuries. In these Christian writings pagan and Christian thoughts sometimes are crudely mingled, as in the poems of Synesius. Again, the pagan and Christian elements are more closely united; instead of a mechanical mixture, as it were, there is a chemical compound, the ingredients of which are altered by their union. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius are an example : although their inspiration was Christian, their constructive principles were drawn from Neo-platonism. Greek philosophy likewise supplied the principles for the formulation of Christian dogma, and thus passed into Christianity and on into the Middle Ages. It was afterward to have a new career, when in scholasticism it was applied to prove and systematize dogmatic Christianity. Pagan philosophy was the mediaeval storehouse of reason. Finally, elements of paganism survive, sometimes as vague and sometimes as definite influences in predominantly Christian works ; as, for example, the writings of the Church Fathers.

Pagan literary form survived in early Christian prose literature; but here again the transition from pagan to Christian and mediaeval form is noticeable. Equally interesting is the passage of the antique forms from pagan into Christian poetry ; and then most strikr] INTRODUCTION 11

ing is their disappeaxance and the evolution of new Christian forms of verse as the genius of Christianity masters the art of poetry so as to express itself and the emotions of the Christian soul through this medium. Likewise in art : the genius of Christianity long follows its antique lessons, yet conquers them at last and evolves its own artistic forms in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Form is as important as substance in considering poetry and the fine arts in their transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Christianity itself was changed in its passage from apostolic times to the Middle Ages. Changes sprang from the introduction of pagan elements, and other changes from its imperial triumph in becoming the religion of state. But monasticism is the great instance of the recasting of primitive Christianity by the transition centuries in the form which was to be the mediaeval ideal of the Christian life. In these same centuries the primitive Christian records were superseded or changed, actually or through the way in which they were understood. Here again, as monasticism came to be the ideal Christian life, it became a factor in the transformation of the narratives of the Old and New Testaments. Under its influence Elijah and Elisha become monks, and Joseph is made a married celibate.^ Besides the Scriptures, early Christian

1 See, e.g., Cassian, Inst. I, 1. Ou the other hand, the lives of the heroes ol monasticism were refacimenti of the lives of scriptural characters, including Jesus. The scriptural characters were first refashioned to the understanding and views of the transition and mediaeval centuries, as, for example, by making monks of them. The imitation of these mediaevally conceived scriptural personages was then a twofold process, actual and imaginative. It was actual writings, both G-reek and Latin, needed the recasting of the transition period to adapt them to mediaeval comprehension. Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, and the great Tertullian were not to the mediaeval taste. The works of the Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, never became intelligible to the Eoman-minded West. Greek Christian writers of the fourth century drew largely from

in so far as the saint imitated the Biblical characters, and reproduced in his own life features of their careers ; it was imaginative as his " legend " went beyond the fact in likening his life to theirs. The imaginative side of the process was largely occupied with the miracles which faithful tradition readily ascribed to its hero in mailing his life like that of Biblical persons. Otherwise, in this conformation of lives of saints to the prevalent conceptions of ancient types, it is difficult to distinguish the actual from the imaginative.

The great mediseval instance is the life of Francis of Assisi, which that sweetest of saints conformed so closely to the life of his master Christ, report and tradition adding further points of likeness. Similarly, Benedict fulfilled the precepts of Scripture, and conformed his life to his understanding of Biblical examples. Tradition carries out his endeavor for him, till the writer of his legend, Gregory, consciously finds in his hero's career a catholic inclusion of the deeds of scriptural saints. In the Dialogues, after Gregory has been telling the marvellous deeds of Benedict, his interlocutor, the Deacon Peter, answers and exclaims: "Wonderful and astonishing is what you relate. For in the water brought forth from the rock (i.e. by Benedict) I see Moses, in the iron which returned from the bottom of the lake I see Elisha (2 Kings vi. 7), in the running upon the water I see Peter, in the obedience of the raven I see Elijah (1 Kings xvii. 6) , and in his grief for his dead enemy I see David (1 Kings i. 11). That man, as I consider him, was full of the spirit of all the just " (Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi, II, 8). The preceding chapters tell these miracles of Benedict. The rest of the second book contains other miracles like those told in the Bible. The life of a later saint may also follow earlier monastic types. Francis kisses the wounds of lepers, as Martin of Tours had done. See Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini.

I] INTEODUCTION 13

them. By that time Greek -was no longer generally understood in Italy and the Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire, and many Greek Christian ■writings ■were translated into Latin, and usually were abridged or otherwise modified.

Translations thus overcame the barrier of language. Other reasons were to keep early Latin as well as Greek Christian authors from being read in the Middle Ages, to wit, their antique tone, and because the circumstances under which they lived and wrote were different from any situation that the Middle Ages were to experience or could understand. Non licet esse vos was substantially what the pagan government said to the Christians.^ What could a later time really know of this condition of the Church, illicit, legally unrecognized, forbidden to exist? So the Middle Ages, with all their cult of martyrs, did not read the writings of a time when there was need to defend Christianity before the pagan government or to justify it in the eyes of the pagan people. Another goodly part of these early writings was directed against pagan-Christian heresies (Gnosticism) of which the Middle Ages knew nothing. One notes with interest that Lactantius, who "writes just

1 "You are not permitted to exist" (Tertullian, Apologeticus) . Tertullian's writings are so difficult, his use of words is so individual, that the Middle Ages could hardly have understood him. But his phrases seared themselves into Latin Christendom in the third and fourth centuries, and passed into the language of dogma, and his writings were a store for later Apologists. He also was an influence ■with the important poet Prudentius (Ebert, Allge. Ges. der Lit. des Mittelalters, 2d ed., I, pp. 51, 276, 287). Through these media he is indirectly influential in the later periods, when his works were no longer read.

as the pagan empire closes and Oonstantine comes to the throne, is the earliest Christian author who has any mediaeval vogue. Yet he was not influential. The great Latin Christian personalities of the fourth and fifth centuries were most potent in moulding or rather in creating mediaeval thought. Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Hilary of Poictiers, these founders of Latin Christianity, recast the Christian thought of the first centuries; and it is through these mighty powers — through Augustine, the giant of them all — that early Christian writings indirectly affect the Middle Ages.

Mention has been made of certain analogies noticeable among the various forms of decadence and change. Beyond these, there will be seen, throughout the following chapters, the freeing of the human spirit — both its intellect and its passion — from the limitations of the antique temperament and modes of thought. More especially this will characterize the transition from pagan to Christian. True, the Middle Ages will manifest less self-reliant human freedom than antiquity, and will even take on new spiritual bondage in fear of God and the fate of man's immortal soul. But they will know no bondage to any restricting principles of human finitude or to any philosophic weighings of the good and ill or even the rights and wrongs of mortal life.