Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/146

 128 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. When the soul by purgation becomes free from emo- tional relation to the brute creation, there will be nothing to impede its contemplation of the beautiful. The only habit of the soul, which will remain, is love ; and that clings by natural aiBBnity to beauty. " The life of the Supreme Being is love, seeing that the Beautiful is necessarily lovable to those who recog- nize it, and the Deity does recognize it, and so this recognition becomes love, that which he recognizes being essentially beautiful. The insolence of satiety cannot touch this true Beauty.^' ^ This is Platonism set in Christian phrase. Augustine's yearning for the beauty of God, and Gregory of Nyssa's adaptation of Plato's fantasy which held so much ideal reality, accord with much of the deeper and more devotional feeling for beauty in Christian art through the Middle Ages, and harmo- nize with the spirit of Christian allegorism. The visible form is valid only as suggestion of the spirit ; let it suggest beauties, not blemishes ; holiness, rather than fleshly incitement j purity, rather than lust ; the power of the spirit, rather than the soul's tempta- tions. "Love is of the beautiful," said Plato. Do we love anything except the beautiful ? asked Augustine, as his soul was wandering deviously on.^ With Plato love was desire and motive; for Christians, besides being desire and motive, love was itself to be fulfil- ment, a reaching God, a bringing unto Him of all the elements of the individual's life, thereby perfected in 1 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection. a Ante, p. 124.