Desine fata deum flecti sperare4/24/2023 This Christian expansion of the spirit did not, however, address itself to human relationships, but uplifted itself to God, its upward impulse spurning mortal loves. The words Jesus wept heralded a new dispensation under which the heart should quicken and the mind should guide through reaches of humanity unknown to paganism. No need to say that the Gospel of Jesus was addressed to the heart as well as to the mind and for times to come the Saviour on the Cross and at its foot the weeping Mother were to rouse floods of tears over human sin, which caused the divine sacrifice. This ascetic emotionalism of the Neo-Platonic summum bonum was strikingly analogous to the ideal of Christian living pressing to domination in the patristic period. That ecstasy, however, was to be super-sensual, and indeed came only to those who had long suppressed all cravings of the flesh. Rational self-control was disintegrating in the Neo-Platonic dialectic which pointed beyond reason to ecstasy. And though the Stoic could not consent to Juvenal's avowal that the sense of tears is the best part of us, Neo-Platonism soon was to uphold the sublimated emotion of a vision transcending reason as the highest good for man. But the emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like the shades by Acheron, were not to be restrained by philosophic admonition, or Virgilian Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando. Yet during the same period Stoicism, the most respected system of philosophy, kept its face as stone, and would not recognize the ethical value of emotion in human life. In the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era there took place a remarkable growth of the pathetic or emotional element in Greek and Roman literature.
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