370 THE STONES OF VENICE

the code of the fifteenth century virtues was borrowed, and whose authority was then infinitely more revered by all the Doctors of the Church than that either of St. Paul or St. Peter.

§ 48. Although, however, this change in the tone of the Christian mind was most distinctly manifested when the revival of literature rendered the works of the heathen philosophers the leading study of all the greatest scholars of the period, it had been, as I said before, taking place gradually from the earliest ages. It is, as far as I know, that root of the Renaissance poison-tree, which, of all others, is deepest struck; showing itself in various measures through the writings of all the Fathers, of course exactly in proportion to the respect which they paid to classical authors, especially to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. The mode in which the pestilent study of that literature affected them may be well illustrated by the examination of a single passage from the works of one of the best of them, St. Ambrose, and of the mode in which that passage was then amplified and formulized¹ by later writers.²

§ 49. Plato, indeed, studied alone, would have done no one any harm. He is profoundly spiritual and capacious³ in all his views, and embraces the small systems of Aristotle and Cicero, as the solar system does the Earth. He seems to me especially remarkable for the sense of the great Christian virtue of Holiness, or sanctification; and for the sense of the presence of the Deity in all things, great or small, which always runs in a solemn under-current beneath his exquisite playfulness and irony; while all the merely moral virtues may be found in his writings defined in the most noble manner, as a great painter defines his figures, without

¹ [In the MS. “formalized,” but as ed. 1 reads “formulized” Ruskin presumably altered the word in revising: see note on § 51 below.]

² [See below, §§ 51 seq.]

³ [Ruskin wrote “capacious,” which is the reading in eds. 1 and 2. But some copies of ed. 3 misprinted “capricious,” and this error has been repeated in ed. 4 and all subsequent issues. For the “exquisite playfulness” of Plato, see again in the next volume, ch. iii. § 26, and for Ruskin’s study of Plato generally, see Vol. I. p. 494n. For his views on Aristotle, see below, § 51.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]