Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature's individual traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and humbles at once.
Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the classic.
But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and pessimistic elements.
The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in self-forgetting devotion and surrender.
Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the world little behind the modern in sentimentality.
What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just given, applies with equal force to the others:
No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of existence and seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the poetry of Homer, it was another poetry.... It was in the new form of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian imagination could compete without disadvantage. It was there that that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of reverie and reflection, which penetrates man's heart and deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes.
Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, however dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set in opposition to each other.[[12]] St Chrysostom wrote:
If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the water's side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance?
The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says (13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see in a glass darkly,' and Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.'