§ 164. BASIL THE GREAT. 897
eating proc f of the transfiguring power of the spirit of Christianity even upon our views of nature.
A breath of sweet sadness runs through them, which is entirely foreign to classical antiquity. This is especially manifest in Gregory of JSTyssa, the brother of Basil. " When I see," says he, for example, " every rocky ridge, every valley, every plain, covered with new-grown grass; and then the variegated beauty of the trees, and at my feet the lilies doubly enriched by nature with sweet odors and gorgeous colors; when I view in the distance the sea, to which the changing cloud leads out — my soul is seized with sadness which is not without delight. And when in autumn fruits disappear, leaves fall, boughs stiffen, stripped of their beauteous dress — we sink with the perpetual and regular vicissitude into the harmony of wonder-working nature. He who looks through this with the thoughtful eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man in the greatness of the universe." ' Yet we find sunny pictures also, like the beautiful description of spring in an oration of Gregory ISTazianzen on the martyr Manias.'^
A second characteristic of these representations of nature, and for the (church historian the most important, is the reference of earthly beauty to an eternal and heavenly principle, and that glorification of God in the works of creation, which transplanted itself from the Psalms and the book of Job into the Christian church. In his homilies on the history of the Creation, Basil describes the mildness of the serene nights in Asia Minor, where the stars, " the eternal flowers of heaven, raised the spirit of man from the visible to the invisible." In the oration just mentioned, after describing the spring in the
prove from the universal order and from the beauty of nature the greatness and goodness of the Creator. Such a tendency, to glorify the Deity from His works, occasioned a prepension to descriptions of nature." The earliest and largest picture of this kind he finds in the apologetic writer, Slinucius Felix. Then he draws several examples from Basil (for whom he confesses he had " long entertained a special predilection"), Epist. xiv. and Epist. ccxxiii. (tom. iii. ed. Gamier), from Gregory of Nyssa, and from Chrysostom.
' From several fragments of Gregory of Nyssa combined and translated (int« Serman) by Humboldt, 1. c. p. 29 f.
' Sec Ullmann's Gregor von Nazianz, p. 210 fil
898 TniRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
most lovely and life-like colors, Grcg'orv Nazianzen proceeds* "Everything praises God and glorifies llini with unutterable tones; for everything shall thanks be offered also to God by me, and thus shall the song of those creatures, whose song of praise I here utter, be also ours. . . . Indeed it is now [alluding to the Easter festival] the spring-time of the world, the spring-time of the spirit, spring-time for souls, spring-time for bodies, a visible spring, an invisible spring, in which w^e also shall there have part, if we here be rightly transformed, and enter as new men upon a new life." Thus the earth becomes a vestibule of heaven, the beauty of the body is consecrated an image of the beauty of the spirit.
The Greek fathers placed the beauty of nature above the works of art, having a certain prejudice against art on account of the heathen abuses of it. " If thou seest a splendid building, and the view of its colonnades would transport thee, look quickly at the vault of the heavens and the open fields, on which the flocks are feeding on the shore of the sea. Who does not despise every creation of art, when in the silence of the heart he early wonders at the rising sun, as it pours its golden (crocus-yellow) light over the horizon ? when, resting at a spring in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick trees, he feeds his eye upon the dim vanishing distance? " Sc Chrysostom exclaims from his monastic solitude near Antioch, and Humboldt ' adds the ingenious remark : " It was as if eloquence had found its element, its freedom, again at the fountain of nature in the then wooded mountain regions of Syria and Asia Minor."
In the rough times of the first introduction of Christianity among the Celtic and Germanic tribes, who had worshipped the dismal powers of nature in rude sjnnbols, an opposition to intercourse wnth nature appeared, like that which we find in Tertiillian to pagan art ; and church assemblies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at Tours (11G3) and at Paris (1209), forbid the monks the sinful reading of books on nature, till the renowned scholastics Albert the Great {■\ 7280), and the gifted
' L. c. p. 80.