Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/141

 VI] BEAUTY AND LOVE 123 by the thirteenth his works were fully known : ^ proe- cursor Christi in naturcUibus sicut Joannes Baptista in gratuitis. II. Beauty and Love As the Christians abominated the idols of the heathen, it was natural that their aversion should extend to all images.* Moreover, such beauty as com- monly was sought by the plastic art of the Empire was meretricious in the eyes of Christians ^ who some- times refer to it in order to illustrate by contrast their own conceptions of true beauty. An early trend of Christian thought is seen in the common application to Christ's person of Isaiah's words, "He hath no form or comeliness." * For Christians the beauty of the body consisted in those physical qualities which suggested moral or spiritual qualities according with 1 Cf. Erdmann, Hist, etc., I, §§ 133, 146, 153, 191, 192, 203, 206; Uberweg, History of Philosophy, I, pp. 260 et seq. ; Maurice, Mediae- val Philosophy ; Haureaa, Histoire de la philosophic scholastique ; Jourdain, Richerches critiques sur Vage et langue des traductions latines d'Aristote (1843) ; L. Stein, " Das Princlpder Entwickeluog in der Geistesgeschicbte," Deutsche Rundschau, June, 1895; ib., "Das Erste Aufstanden der Griech. Phil, unter den Arabern," Archiv/tir Oesch. der Philos., Bd. VII, p. 361 (1894), and ib., In Archiv, etc., Bd. IX, p. 226 (1896). tria, passim. a matter of course. This habit the Christians generally continued, as is shown by the well-known Christian house on the Aventine and the earliest cataoomba. See post, p. 316. « Yet many Fatben maintained that Jeans waa noble and beauti- ful in person.
 * See, e.g., Origen, Contra Celsum, TV, 31 ; Tertollian, De Jcioto-
 * On the other hand, it was an age when pictorial decoration waa