But along with this they possessed a sensibility capable of fresh and vivid responses to the natural world, including its aesthetic qualities. To be sure, they tended to look upon nature as a reflection of the transcendent world, even as a barrier in front of it. To be sure, the Medievals respected the concepts which they had inherited and which appeared to them a deposit of truth and wisdom. This, however, is not an adequate picture of the medieval critical viewpoint. It has been said that, where aesthetics and artistic production are concerned, the Classical world turned its gaze on nature but the Medievals turned their gaze on the Classical world that medieval culture was based, not on a phenomenology of reality, but on a phenomenology of a cultural tradition. But all the same, there is a sense in which its thinking might be said to involve no more than the manipulation of an inherited terminology, one sanctified by tradition and by a love of system but devoid of any real significance. Medieval thinking on aesthetic matters was therefore original. Some medieval ideas derived also from the Bible and from the Fathers but again, these were absorbed into a new and systematic philosophical world. Christianity, however, conferred upon these issues a quite distinctive character. Most of the aesthetic issues that were discussed in the Middle Ages were inherited from Classical Antiquity.
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