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. The body must be hated, so that the soul could flourish. But as the Hellenic period was preceded by vague, unindividualised, material life, so the impersonal, chaotic, spiritual life of the first thousand years of Christianity matured the individual soul. It found its climax in Dante and Eckhart, the greatest poet of the Neo-Latin race, and the most illumined religious genius of Germany. These two men, who were contemporaries (Dante died in 1321 and Eckhart in 1329), finally revealed the character of two kindred nations, completing and fructifying each other. In Dante the great artistic power of the Neo-Latin race appeared for the first time in its full intensity; it took possession of the whole visible universe, and poured new beauty into the traditional myths of Christendom. Eckhart experienced and recreated the shapeless depths of the soul, the regions of the blending of the soul with God. With these two men Europe definitely severed herself from antiquity and barbarism, henceforth to follow her own star.