COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

896 COSMOS.
earlier ages of their new belief, and owing to the peculiar bent
of their minds, full of contempt for all works of human art.
Thus Chrysostom. abounds in passages like the following:
" If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would
lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven,
and around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by
the water's side; who does not despise all the creations of art,
when in the stillness of his spirit he watches with admiration
the rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face
of the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the
murmuring spring,
or beneath the sombre shade of a thick
and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far receding and hazy
"
distance * ? Antioch was at that time surrounded by hermit-
ages, in one of which lived Chrysostom. It seemed as if
eloquence had recovered her element, freedom, from the
fount of nature in the mountain regions of Syria and Asia
Minor, which were then covered with forests.
But in those subsequent ages so inimical to intellectual
culture when Christianity was diffused amongst the Germanic
and Celtic nations, who had previously been devoted to the
worship of nature, and had honoured under rough symbols its
preserving and destroying powers,
intimate intercourse with
nature, and a study of its phenomena were gradually considered
suspicious incentives to witchcraft. This communion
with nature was regarded in the same light as Tertullian,
Clement of Alexandria, and almost all the older fathers of the
church, had considered the pursuit of the plastic arts. In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Councils of Tours (1163)
and of Paris (1209) interdicted to monks the sinful reading of
works on physics. f Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon were
* See Joannis Clirysostomi Op. omnia, Par. 1838, (8vo. t. ix. p. 687
A, t. ii. p. 821 A, and 851 E, t. i. p. 79); compare
also Joannis Philo-
poni in cap. 1, Oenescos de creatione Mundi libri septem, Viennas
Aust. 1630, p. 192, 236, and 272; as also Georgii Pisidce Mundi opificium,
ed. 1596 v. 367-375, 560, 933, and 1248. The works of Basil
and of Gregory of Kazianzum soon arrested my attention, after I began
to collect descriptions of nature; but I am indebted to my friend and
colleague H. Hase, Member of the Institute, and Conservator of the
King's Library at Paris, for all the admirable translations of Chrysostom
and Thallasius, that I have already given.
t On the Concilium Turonense, under Pope Alexander III., see
Ziegelbauer, Hist. Rei Utter, ordinis S. Benedicti, t. ii. p. 248, ed.