Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/32

 14 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. as the pagan empire closes and Constantine comes to the throne, is the earliest Christian author who has any mediaeval vogue. Yet he was not influential. The great Latin Christian personalities of the fourth and fifth centuries were most potent in moulding or rather in creating mediaeval thought. Ambrose, Je- rome, Augustine, Hilary of Poictiers, these founders of Latin Christianity, recast the Christian thought of the first centuries; and it is through these mighty powers — through Augustine, the giant of them all — that early Christian writings indirectly -affect the Middle Ages. Mention has been made of certain analogies notice- able among the various forms of decadence and change. Beyond these, there will be seen, throughout the fol- lowing chapters, the freeing of the human spirit — both its intellect and its passion — from the limita- tions of the antique temperament and modes of thought. More especially this will characterize the transition from pagan to Christian. True, the Middle Ages will manifest less self-reliant human freedom than antiquity, and will even take on new spiritual bondage in fear of God and the fate of man's immortal soul. But they will know no bondage to any restrict- ing principles of human finitude or to any philosophic weighings of the good and ill or even the rights and wrongs of mortal life. The spiritual liberation, distinguishing the transi- tion through which the antique ceased and the mediae- val began, was a liberation from the inherent limits of self-reliance, and consequently from the limitations of that freedom which is established in human