Part 5 (1/2)

There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the first centuries A.D., as a work of G.o.d and an emblem of moral ideas.

Ebert observes[15]

In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the peculiarities and perfect originality of these Christian lyrics.

I do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which man appeared to be quite merged, and which makes them such profound expressions of feeling; but in man's relations.h.i.+p to Nature, which, one might say, supplies the colour to the painter's brush.[16] Nature appears here in the service of ideal moral powers and robbed of her independence;[17] the servant of her Creator, whose direct command she obeys. She is his instrument for man's welfare, and also at times, under the temporary mastery of the devil, for his destruction. Thus Nature easily symbolizes the moral world.

'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the time of night is past and gone, the daylight is suffused abroad, Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious sun, Thou very dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in his Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift his sinful eyes to the clear stars, he urges all the creatures, and heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to weep with him and lament the sinfulness of man.

In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is used symbolically; dark night pales, the light of the world is born again, and the new birth of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true sun, the source of light; 'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the noonday, let the mind know no twilight.'

And Prudentius sings in a Morning Hymn [18]: 'Night and mist and darkness fade, light dawns, the globe brightens, Christ is coming!'

and again: 'The herald bird of dawn announces day, Christ the awaker calls us to life.' And in the ninth hymn: 'Let flowing rivers, waves, the seash.o.r.e's thundering, showers, heat, snow, frost, forest and breeze, night, day, praise Thee throughout the ages.'[19]

He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured by clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam.

St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with cla.s.sic culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters, often shew a distinctly modern tone,[20] and go to prove that asceticism so deepened and intensified character that even literary style took individual stamp.[21] But the most perfect representative, the most modern man, of his day was Augustine.

As Rousseau's _Confessions_ revealed the revolutionary genius of the eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful character, fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the problems of the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of its own pa.s.sionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to a glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for translation. He said on one occasion:

For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of h.e.l.l, and dared to run wild in many a dark love pa.s.sage.... In the time of my youth I took my fill pa.s.sionately among the wild beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to the sh.o.r.es of matrimony....

Comfortless at the death of his friend:

I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even the light itself, were filled with shuddering.

Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal present du ciel qu'une ame sensible.'

He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing for it in Nature and solitude, though in vain.

The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, air, water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked and the mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that everything in heaven and earth was a part of G.o.dhead, gave him no comfort; it was rather the personal G.o.d of the Psalms whom he saw in the ordering of Nature.

The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully expressed than in his words:

I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy G.o.d, seek higher.' I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was at fault, I am not G.o.d.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the beauty of their form.

In another place:

Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all things in them from all sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give all men this message, so that they are without excuse. Sky and earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my G.o.d, I love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace of my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my G.o.d.

Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same time, the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to him.

The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, the poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep friends.h.i.+p expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the level of true poetry.

Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[22]

It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of original national material to serve as inspiration, as the aeneas Saga had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and describe scenery and travels. Nothing in cla.s.sic Roman poetry attests such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the small poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song.

Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23]

Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus does not answer his letters: