Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/36

CHAPTER II THE PASSING OP THE ANTIQUE MAN With all the individual and racial differences among the men of the Middle Ages there were also common characteristics. The mediaeval man was not spiritu- ally self-reliant, his character was not consciously- wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose. He was neither rationally self-controlled nor rationally free. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty. He relied on God or, more commonly, upon the supernatural. He also looked up to what he imagined the past to have been, and was prone to accept its authority.^ He was crushed in the dust with a sense of sin ; he was ascetic in his deeper thought. He was also emotional, and with heights and depths of emotion undreamed of by antiquity. He had no clear-eyed perception of the visible world. What he saw he looked upon as a symbol ; what he heard he understood as an allegory. For him reality lay behind and beyond, in that which the symbol symbolized and the allegory veiled. The contrast between the mediaeval and the classic Greek and Roman types seems absolute. Yet it is possible to follow the change from the classic to the 1 On the great fame of Rome in the Middle Ages, see Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle imaginazioni del Medio Evo, Cap. I. 18