CHAPTER XIV
The Growth of Medieval Emotion
| I. | The Patristic Chart of Passion. |
| II. | Emotionalizing of Latin Christianity. |
The characteristic passions of a period represent the emotionalized thoughts of multitudes of men and women. Mediaeval emotional development followed prevailing ideas, opinions, convictions, especially those of mediaeval Christianity. Its most impressive phases conformed to the tenets of the system which the Middle Ages had received from the Church Fathers, and represented the complement of passion arising from the long acceptance of the same. One may observe, first, the process of exclusion, inclusion, and enhancement, through which the Fathers formed a certain synthesis of emotion from the matter of their faith and the circumstances of their environment; and, secondly, the further growth of emotion in the Middle Ages.
I
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. 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.[1] But the emotional elements of paganism, which were stretching out their hands like the shades by Acheron, were
- ↑ Cf. Taylor, Ancient Ideals, chaps, xv., xvi.; The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chaps. ii., iii.
