Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/153

VI] BEAUTY AND LOVE 135 the goal of life on earth. Even here let the believer's soul, purged of its dross, unite with God. The Chris- tian brought into this mystic union the element of love — a great reality. But otherwise this goal with Christians as with Plotinus involved the ignoring of life's realities. Christians as well as Neo-platonists were struggling in earthly life to reach beyond it, out of it, after what is for man on earth unreal. Here was an abnegation of this life's real loves and acts and knowledge. Whereas by a fulfilment of them all man does the will of God according to the gospel of Christ.^ 1 The underlying error lay here. The later systems of Greek philosophy were systems of renunciation. This is clearly true of later Stoicism; and Neo-platonism was a striving in the way of unreal fantasy after that which along the paths of actual hirnian life and knowledge men had abandoned. It, too, was a renuncia- tion — of the real. Similar ideals, which would suppress one side of human life or dream away from all of its realities, the Christian Fathers were bringing into Christianity, which was a gospel of ful- filment, attainment absolute. There could be no more comprehen- sive error than to direct the fulness of life, which was Christ's gos- pel, toward goals of apathy, of suppression of life's elements, of asceticism, or even toward goals of inactive mysticism. Yet this was done in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. Says Augustine : •'Thus two loves made these two cities: the love of self even to despising Qod made the earthly city; the love of Grod even to de- spising self made the heavenly " (Civ. Dei, XIV, 28). The love of God means not despising, but honoring self ; and for Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing earth's duties and living out earth's full life, and not in abandoning all for dreams, though the dreams be of Heaven.