The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times | Page 9

our
pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage places.'
We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the
conditions under which a conscious feeling for Nature develops, and
the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course this
feeling has followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews, Greeks,
and Romans. The movement toward the modern, toward the subjective
and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its gradual
development along lines which are always strictly analogous to those of
culture in general, through the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER I
CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM
When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative
power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with her
riddle guessed,--and mediæval civilization arose, founded upon
Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history
when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all
things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the
old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever failing
and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into the ever
emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was so with
Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, like a phoenix,
from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon
the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of
its age, and a result of gradual development--a river with sources partly
in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied the
traces of its double origin.
Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to matter
upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to form upon
the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are only separable in
the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through and through with

both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.
But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling for
Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and
Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the
world, Creator and created.
'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any man
love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which John
meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above the
clouds.
Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the
world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through the
entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly existence had
only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the eternal Kingdom.
While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its
downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth
flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of earth
vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the Infinite
arose upon the ruins of the finite.'
The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil;
and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms.
Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the
visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of
deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life,
animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his
landscape was absorbed by the gods.
To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as far
as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of
spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation between
God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the heaven on
which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one.

The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic;
Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to Nature.
And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in relation to its
Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all things,' but merely
an instrument in the hands of Providence.
The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible variety,
rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature as a work
of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only the
importance of a link in a chain.
As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a
conception of life in which nothing retained independent significance,
but everything referred to or symbolized something else.' But yet, the
idea of individuality, of the importance of the ego, gained ground as
never before through this introspection and merging of material in
spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive sway; and Christianity,