Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/34

 16 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. Greek ethical reasoning could not remain undistorted when forced to hold Christian precepts; nor could Greek metaphysics escape perversion when used by the Church Fathers in the formulation of Christian dogma. A God-created world, with men God-created, God-beloved, and God-redeemed, could not be held in the categories of Greek philosophy. Beyond the region of dogma and metaphysics, the new freedom of the human spirit will show itself with power in the freeing of the Christian ideal of love from thoughts of measure and mortality. It will show itself in the monk's dismissal of pagan proportion and comprehensiveness from his principles of life. He no longer weighs the goods and ills of earth, or seeks to make his life humanly complete. He has broken with the mortal and the finite. He knows that his soul is immortal, and can be blessed only in the everlasting love of God. The passion of this infinite love is his joy, and its measurelessness is the measure of his freedom. Finally, very interesting is this freeing of the spirit — again often accompanied by the destruction of what had been great — in the spheres of literature and art. It is seen in the disintegration of the balanced periods of classic prose, and in the growth of new kinds of prose compositions having scant relationship with classic forms. In poetry, with emotional impulses creative in their strength, it displays itself in the abandonment of classic metres and the devising of freer forms of verse, which shall be capable of voicing the Christian soul. But sometimes it shows itself barbarously in the misapplication and abuse of those narrative and