CHAPTER XIV
THE GROWTH OF MEDIAEVAL EMOTION
I. The Patristic Chart of Passion.
II. Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity.
The characteristic passions of a period represent the emotionalized thoughts of multitudes of men and women. Mediaeval emotional development followed prevailing ideas, opinions, convictions, especially those of mediaeval Christianity. Its most impressive phases conformed to the tenets of the system which the Middle Ages had received from the Church Fathers, and represented the complement of passion arising from the long acceptance of the same. One may observe, first, the process of exclusion, inclusion, and enhancement, through which the Fathers formed a certain synthesis of emotion from the matter of their faith and the circumstances of their environment; and, secondly, the further growth of emotion in the Middle Ages.
I
In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era there took place a remarkable growth of the pathetic or emotional element in Greek and Roman literature. Yet during the same period Stoicism, the most respected system of philosophy, kept its face as stone, and would not recognize the ethical value of emotion in human life.[410] But the emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like the shades by Acheron, were not to be restrained by philosophic admonition, or Virgilian Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando. And though the Stoic could not consent to Juvenal’s avowal that the sense of tears is the best part of us, Neo-Platonism soon was to uphold the sublimated emotion of a vision transcending reason as the highest good for man. Rational self-control was disintegrating in the Neo-Platonic dialectic which pointed beyond reason to ecstasy. That ecstasy, however, was to be super-sensual, and indeed came only to those who had long suppressed all cravings of the flesh. This ascetic emotionalism of the Neo-Platonic summum bonum was strikingly analogous to the ideal of Christian living pressing to domination in the patristic period.
No need to say that the Gospel of Jesus was addressed to the heart as well as to the mind; and for times to come the Saviour on the Cross and at its foot the weeping Mother were to rouse floods of tears over human sin, which caused the divine sacrifice. The words Jesus wept heralded a new dispensation under which the heart should quicken and the mind should guide through reaches of humanity unknown to paganism. This Christian expansion of the spirit did not, however, address itself to human relationships, but uplifted itself to God, its upward impulse spurning mortal loves. In its mortal bearings the Christian spirit was more ascetic than Neo-Platonism, and its élan of emotion might have been as sublimated in quality as the Neo-Platonic, but for the greater reality of love and terror in the God toward whom it yearned with tears of contrition, love, and fear.
Another strain very different from Neo-Platonism contributed to the sum of Christian emotion. This was Judaism, which recently had shown the fury of its energy in defence of Jerusalem against the legions of Titus. Christians imbibed its force of feeling from the books of the Old Testament. The passion of those writings was not as the humanly directed passions of the Greeks. Israel’s desire and aversion, her scorn and hatred, her devotion and her love, hung on Jehovah. “Do I not hate them, O Jehovah, that hate thee?” This cry of the Psalmist is echoed in Elijah’s “Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” Jewish wrath was a righteous intolerance, which would neither endure idolatrous Gentiles nor suffer idolaters in Israel. Moses is enraged by the sight of the people dancing before the golden calf; and Isaiah’s scorn hisses over those daughters of Israel who have turned from Jehovah’s ways of decorum: “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet; therefore Jehovah will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret parts.”
Did a like scorn and anger find harbourage in Him who likened the Pharisees to whitened sepulchres, and with a scourge of small cords drove the money-changers from His Father’s house? At all events a kindred hate found an enduring home in the religion of Tertullian and Athanasius, and in the great Church that persecuted the Montanists at Augustine’s entreaty, and thereafter poured its fury upon Jew and Saracen and heretic for a thousand years.