Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/205

VII] THE MONASTIC CHARACTER 187 as it still is — transformed in the present. He draws this into himself, forms it anew and reexpresses it for the inspiration of the future. Homer expresses the ideal of the past heroic age as that ideal still lived in the life of his own time. Virgil sums up in himself and in his work the great Roman past as it lived in the power of the Augustan era. Dante is preeminently the scholastic poet, who apparently sums up an actual past, which ends in him. Nevertheless, Dante is of his present ; and in him, as in all great men, there is dawn as well as twilight. Augustine was not a poet ; yet as the supreme man of his time he summed up the past as it still lived, remoulded it, added to it from himself, and gave it a new unity and form wherein it was to live on. It was a fact of paramoimt importance for the Middle Ages that Augustine lived to purge and unify and complete his era^s understanding and appropriation of the first four Christian centuries. He embodied in himself and expressed in his writings a large and veritable Chris- tianity. He eliminated pagan ethics and substituted Christian love of God, with the principles which it involves. On the other hand, his personality held antecedents which v/ere not specifically Christian. His intellect was greatly Roman. The Roman law was inborn in him ; its spirit appears in his writings, occupied with God and man, with sin and grace. He prizes government and is impassioned for order. The Roman order, the pax Romanay the concord of citizens, is re-set in the kingdom of God : Pax civitatia, ordi- iiaia imperandi atque obediendi concordia civium. Pax coelestis civitatis, ordinatissiina et concordissima societas