Children left their parents,
husband and wife separated, dignitaries forsook their office to seek
solitude and prepare their souls for the world beyond the grave. The
first convents--the outcome of Christian individualism and
asceticism--were founded; and the anti-social extreme of this
individualism acquired such ominous proportions that the Emperor Valens
in the year of grace 365, was forced to legislate against the monastic
life.
This hatred of the world, which was quite in harmony with the spirit of
Christianity, was only overcome by the profounder concepts of German
mysticism, for in the primitive dualistic view of the first millenary
the renunciation of the world was the only possibility of avoiding sin.
The Emperor Justinian decreed that any man who induced a consecrated nun
to marry him should be punished by death. The thought that personal
greatness did not consist in renouncing the world but in living in it
and overcoming it, had not yet been conceived.
The delight in the human form, characteristic of antiquity, was
extinguished, a crude dualism denied all antique values.
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