No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of existence and seeking to find rest in faith....  It was not the poetry of Homer, it was another poetry....  It was in the new form of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian imagination could compete without disadvantage.  It was there that that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of reverie and reflection, which penetrates man’s heart and deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes.

Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, and to that end they extolled Nature; man’s handiwork, however dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the handiwork of the Creator.  Culture and Nature were purposely set in opposition to each other.[12] St Chrysostom wrote: 

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 soul 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?

The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says (13th of the 1st Corinthians):  ‘Here we see in a glass darkly,’ and Goethe:  ‘Everything transitory is but a similitude.’

God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in a royal palace gleaming with gold and precious stones; but the wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of stone, but of far costlier material; he has not lighted up a golden candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the roof of the palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an object of great delight.[13]

The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not this depth of thought and sadness; but from them too we have notable descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are evident motives as well as religious feeling.

In the little Octavius of Minucius Felix, a writing full of genuine human feeling of the time of Commodus, the mixture of the heathen culture and opinions of antiquity with the Christian way of thinking has a very modern ring.  The scenery is finely sketched.