The more austere and ascetic of the Church Fathers believed that, as it is sinful to take pleasure in things of this world, so also sin must lurk in the breast of him who derives personal and esthetic satisfaction from scenes of natural beauty. This is one of the reasons why hermits retired to deserts and rugged mountains, where they might no longer be tempted either by things of the flesh or by the charm of green and level meadows or of rolling, cultivated hillsides. Among some of the hermits there arose an actual love for the grandeur of the very wildernesses to which they betook themselves. Jerome regarded the desert as a place of beauty: in deep valleys, rough mountains, and steep rocks he saw not only negative excellence, in so far as these were free from the pollutions of “civilization,” but also a congenial background for his work and thought.[284] The eremitic movement was primarily characteristic of the Eastern branch of Christendom, but it extended to the West, where its influence was powerful during the early centuries of our era.[285] Nevertheless an ascetic disdain for the haunts of man and glorification of the wilderness was, at best, alien to Western modes of thought. The normal habit of the Occidental Christian was, rather, to take joy in the immensity of earth and heaven and in the marvelous detail of the created world because these stand as manifestations of the unity and glory of the Deity, symbols of the omnipotence of God. REVIVAL OF ESTHETIC FEELING IN THE MIDDLE AGES On the other hand, pleasure in a landscape by reason of the merely personal satisfaction it affords the beholder was exceptional before the time of the Renaissance. But, though exceptional, an esthetic as distinguished from a religious or transcendental love of nature was by no means wholly lacking. Certainly from the eleventh century onward we find many poems and letters that testify to the existence of a truly pagan enjoyment of scenery. Whether this can be said of the earlier periods is more doubtful. Ganzenmüller, whose important study of the feeling for nature in the Middle Ages we are following in this connection, maintains that the term “Carolingian Renaissance” is more or less of a misnomer because under Charlemagne the classical spirit was lacking, even though classical forms of expression were revived; that the classical influence on descriptions of landscape was but rarely felt; and that we find at that time nothing of the subjective and pessimistic attitude of the Roman poets. In short Ganzenmüller concludes that the feeling for nature was altogether Christian.[286]