Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/136

 118 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. Eoman conceptions of justice and right kept their legal form because the sense of legal responsibility- made up so much of the Roman temperament. Ter- tullian's writings are an example. He had been a lawyer, and his legal education gave him command over a terminology suited to express juristic thoughts of righteousness and religion. But the cause of his legal modes of reasoning lay deeper; for, beneath his education, he was a Latin, a Eoman-minded man, like Augustine, who also reasons juridically although his education was chiefly in rhetoric and philosophy. On the other hand, legal conceptions were absent from Greek thoughts of right and justice; for the Greeks reached their ethical conceptions in part through philosophical speculation as to the universe and man and God, matter and mind, and in part through their sense and understanding of the beau- tiful, that is, through the aesthetic and artistic side of their nature, which sought everywhere harmony, fitness, and proportion. So the Greek would formulate Christian doctrine in terms of cosmological specula- tion and of the beautiful and fit; while the Roman would proceed rather with juristic thoughts, yet would have to take the data of his knowledge from Greek philosophy. The Roman legal spirit, as well as Greek philosophy, sought to define, and so was part of the general tendency to dogmatize the Christian faith. But in that great process of formulation, ending say in the Council of Chalcedon (451 a.d.), Greek philoso- phy was the overwhelmingly important factor, not only because it furnished the elements of knowledge, but because the majority of early Christian theolo-