Thus monk and nun were consecrated to a calling which should contain their whole desire, as it certainly demanded their whole strength. Was the monk a celibate because carnal marriage was denied him? Rather he was wedded to Christ. If this is allegory, it is also close to literal truth. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Is not love the better part of marriage? And how if the Lord thy God has been a gracious loving figure here on earth, who loved thee humanly as well as divinely, and died for thee at last? Will not the complete love required by the commandment become very ardent, very heart-filling? Shalt thou not always yearn to see Him, fall at His feet, confess thy unworthiness, and touch His garment? Is there any end to the compass of thy loving Him, and musing upon Him, and dwelling in His presence? Dost thou not live with Him in a closer communion than the sunderances of mortality permit among men, or between men and women? And if it be thou art a nun, art thou not as close to Him in tears and washing of those blessed feet, as ever was that other woman, who had been a sinner? Thou shalt keep thy virginity for Him as for a bridegroom.[415]
But the great commandment to love the Lord thy God has an adjunct—“and thy neighbour as thyself.” As thyself—how does the monk love himself? why, unto Christ and his own salvation. He does not love his sinful pleasures, nor those matters of earth which might not be sins, had he not realized how they conflicted with his scheme of life. His love for a fellow could not recognize those pleasures which he himself had cast away. He must love his fellow, like himself, unto the saving, not the undoing, of him—be his true lover, not his enemy. This vital principle of Christian love had to recast pagan passion and direct the affections to an immortal goal. Under it these reached a new absoluteness. The Christian lover should always be ready to give his life for his friend’s salvation, as for his own. So love’s offices gained enlargement and an infinity of new relationship, because directed toward eternal life.[416]
Unquestionably in the monk’s eyes passionate love between the sexes was mainly lust. Within the bonds of marriage it was not mortal sin; but the virgin state was the best. Here, as we shall see, life was to claim its own and free its currents. Monasticism did not stop the human race, or keep men from loving women. Such love would assert itself; and ardent natures who felt its power were to find in themselves a love and passion somewhat novel, somewhat raised, somewhat enlarged. In the end the love between man and woman drew new inspiration and energy from the enhancement of all the rest of love, which came with Christianity.
Evidently the great office of Christian love in a heathen period was to convert idolaters to the Faith. So it had been from the days of Paul. Rapidly Christianity spread through all parts of the Roman Empire. Then the Faith pressed beyond those crumbling boundaries into the barbarian world. Hereupon, with Gregory the Great and his successors, it became clear that the great pope is always a missionary pope, sending out such Christian embassies as Gregory sent to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
If conversion was a chief office of Christian love, the great object of Christian wrath was unbelief. That existed within and without Christendom: within in forms of heresy, without in the practices of heathenism. Christian wrath was moved by whatever opposed the true faith. The Christian should discriminate: hate the sin, and love the sinner unto his betterment. But it was so easy, so human, from hating the sin to hate the obdurate sinner who could not be saved and could but harm the Church. One need not recount how the disputes of the Athanasian time regarding the nature of Christ came to express themselves in curses; nor how the Christian sword began its slaughter of heretic and heathen. Persecution seemed justified in reason; it was very logical; broad reasons of Christian statecraft seemed to make for it; and often a righteous zeal wielded the weapon. It had moreover its apparent sanction in Jehovah’s destroying wrath against idolaters within and without the tribes of Israel.
So the two opposites of love and wrath laid aside somewhat of grossness, and gained new height and compass in the Christian soul. A like change came over other emotions. As life lifted itself to further heights of holiness, and hitherto unseen depths of evil yawned, there came a new power of pity and novel revulsions of aversion. The pagan pity for life’s mortality, which filled Virgil’s heart, could not but take on change. There was no more mortality, but eternal joy and pain. Souls which had so unavailingly stretched forth their hands to fate, had now been given wings of faith. Yet death gained blacker terror from the Christian Hell, the newly-assured alternative of the Christian Heaven. The great Christian pity did not touch the mortal ebbing of the breath; that should be a triumphant birth. But an enormous and terror-stricken pity was evoked by sin, and the thought of the immortal soul hanging over an eternal hell. And since all human actions were connected with the man’s eternal lot, they became invested with a new import. So the Christian’s compassion would deepen, his sympathy become more intense, although no longer stirred by everything that had moved his pagan self. With him fear was raised to a new intensity by other terrors than had driven the blood from pagan cheeks. His sense of joy was deepened also; for a joy hitherto unrealized came from his new love of God and the God-man, from the assurance of his salvation, and the thought of loved human relationships never to end. So Christian joy might have an absoluteness which it never had under the pause-giving mortal limitations of paganism.
Within the compass of pagan joyfulness there had been no deeper passion than the love of beauty. That had its sensuous phases, and its far blue heights, where Plato saw the beauty of order, justice, and proportion. For the Christian, the beauty of the flesh became a veil through which he looked for the beauty of the soul. If a face testified to the beauty of holiness within, it was fair. Better the pale, drawn visages of monk and nun than the red lip too quickly smiling. Feeling as well as thought should be adjusted to these sentiments. Yet Plato’s realization of intellectual beauty found home within the Christian thoughts of God and holiness, indeed helped to construct them. This is clear with the Fathers. In the East, Gregory of Nyssa’s passion for divine beauty was Platonism set in Christian phrase; in the West, Augustine reached his thoughts of beauty through considerations which came to him from Greek philosophy.[417] “Love is of the beautiful,” said Plato; “Do we love ought else?” says Augustine. Both men shape their thoughts of beauty after their best ideals of perfection. Augustine’s burn upward to the beauty of a God as loving as He is omnipotent; Plato’s had been more abstract. Augustine’s Platonism shows the highest Greek thoughts of beauty and goodness changed into attributes of a personal God, who could be loved because He was loving.
In these ways the loftier Christian souls suppressed, or transformed and greatened, the emotions of their natures. It was thus with those possessed of a faith that brought the whole of life within its dominance. There were many such. Yet the multitude of Christians ranged downward from such great obsession, through all stages of human half-heartedness and frailty, to the state of those whose Christianity was but a name, or but a magic rite. Always preponderant in numbers, and often in influence and power, these nominal and fetichistic Christians would keep alive the loves and hates, the interests and tastes, the approvals and disapprovals, of paganism or barbaric heathenism, as the case might be.
II
The patristic synthesis of emotion passed on entire and authoritative to the Middle Ages. It exercised enormous influence (usually in the way of compulsion, but sometimes in the way of repulsion) upon emotional phenomena both of a religious and a secular nature. Yet it was merely the foundation, or the first stage, of mediaeval emotional development. The subsequent stages were dependent on the conditions under which mediaeval attitudes of mind arose, very dependent upon the maturing and blending of the native traits of inchoate mediaeval peoples and upon their appropriation of Latin Christianity and the antique education.