Chapter IV: Part 4

This consideration accounts for a feature of the purgatorial discipline which at first sight would appear quite contrary to the Montessori spirit. On the lower slopes of the Mountain, below the gate of Purgatory proper, the souls whom Dante meets are grouped informally, or encountered individually; but within the gate, on each of the seven terraces where the seven capital sins are successively purged, the souls are engaged in groups on the same task, or similar ones. How is this consistent with free, spontaneous, individual development? Is not this simultaneous occupation at the same lesson more like a Froebel class, or even an old-fashioned Public School form than a Montessori group? The answer, surely, is in the negative. Collective work has indeed its permanent value, and simultaneous movements at intervals, their ample justification. In the _Purgatorio_, as in the Montessori School, the class-system in its extreme and rigid form has been superseded; though scope is given, in certain ways (as in the _revised_ Montessori scheme), for the expression of the social instinct.[209] When the pupil is inwardly fit for a move, he “feels it in his bones”; and then—and not till then—he moves. The task in which he is engaged in company with his fellows holds him just so long as it is needful and appropriate to his own case: the moment of its beginning and that of its ending are entirely independent of the doings of his fellow-learners.

Once more, the Terrace of Purgatory resembles a Montessori group rather than a Kindergarten class in its freedom from obvious direction. There is no attractive, central, dominating figure, like the Froebelian teacher, on whom all eyes are fixed in the spirit of Psalm cxxiii, _Ad te levavi oculos meos._ The grouping of the learners is apparently spontaneous, and different groups are sometimes engaged simultaneously on different tasks.

Again, the School of Purgatory is essentially modern in its emphasis on “expression work,” and its abundant supply of “didactic material.”

By expression work we mean the endeavour to enforce a lesson, to hasten its assimilation and ensure its retention, by means of some appropriate activity on the part of the learner. This is of course much older than Montessorism, as even our best Sunday school teachers can testify; it can be traced back also beyond Froebel. Its origin is, surely, lost in the prehistoric ages of pedagogy. But it was Froebel in the nineteenth century who first claimed for this factor the importance which it holds in modern education. Yet if we study Dante’s _Purgatorio_ we shall find expression work on every terrace of the Mountain, from the humble, stooping march of the cornice of Pride to the significant exclamations wherewith the once Lustful, on the uppermost terrace, punctuate the chanting of their hymn, _Summae Deus clementiae_. Purgatory is not for Dante, as for Aquinas, merely penal suffering—“something to be borne.” It must be (as Mr. Wicksteed observes)[210] something active—“something to be and to do”—somewhat more definite, more specific, more varied than mere suffering is needed for the building up of the new life which is to be at home once more in Eden.

As in the Montessori school, so in these mystic “cloisters” the learners are led to concentrate and focus on a single task a number of faculties and senses: eye, ear, voice, memory, attitude, gesture and movement all conspire to enforce the lesson. And this variety of expression work is rendered effective by an abundant supply of didactic material, an apparatus as carefully and scientifically thought out as that of Italy’s latest educational leader. One need only instance the famous wall-sculptures[211] and the inlaid pavement[212] of the Terrace of Pride, the description of which forms one of the loveliest passages in this most beautiful poem.

We have spoken of the Angels who preside over these terraces, engaged in the apparently superfluous task of controlling those whose will is bent manfully upon the task before them, lifted as they are for ever above the zone where temptation has any power.[213] What a task, we are inclined to say, for angelic faculties! What a sinecure! Yet the resemblance to the human “Guardian Angel” of the Montessori school is surely too striking to be without significance: and modern educational principles of which the Dottoressa is by no means the exclusive exponent, may help us to realise how—in this as in so many other things—we shall do well to range ourselves “on the side of the Angels.” The Montessori teacher—may we not say the truly modern teacher of whatever type?—submits to an arduous and exacting course of training—far more arduous and exacting than that which “qualified” previous generations of teachers ... and all for—what? To know what _not_ to do, what _not_ to say; to be able to practise at the right moment a fully qualified self-restraint, and so allow free scope to the inner forces of expansion in the pupil’s personality: an expansion which too heavy a hand, however lovingly laid upon the growing life, might crush or stunt or warp! A constant presence, inspiring but unobtrusive; realised but not dominant or over-insistent; not obviating or unduly curtailing those movements and processes which in education are infinitely more valuable than immediate results ... yet ever at hand when really needed.... Is not this a _rôle_ worthy of angelic power and dignity? Is it not precisely the traditional _rôle_ of the Guardian Angel in whose beneficent existence some of us are still childlike enough to believe?

Surely they were not mere figureheads, those “Birds of God,” whose stately grace and beauty Dante delights to portray? Even so is it with the “Guardian Angels” of the Montessori school—with the restrained efficiency and enthusiasm and the carefully calculated use of personal influence of the best teachers of all types and grades: their dignity and essentially angelic quality is apt to be in proportion to their unobtrusiveness. Education is, after all, not “forcible feeding” or “cramming”; its office is to educe—to draw forth. In Socrates’ homely phrase it is a midwife. “Sairey Gamp” was certainly not an angel; but there are those of her craft who are. More and more this _maieutic_ office of the Teacher is realised, and with its realisation Teachers grow less and less like the castigating demons of Inferno—more and more angelic.

Omai vedrai di sì fatti ufficiali.[214]

Another point which brings the _Purgatorio_, in its educational scheme, down to our own days, is the _orderly progression_ of its lessons. The tasks set for the penitents are carefully classified and, so to speak, “graded.” The very form of the Mountain, with its system of gigantic steps or terraces, signifies as much. It symbolises even more: for education even in the infant stage involves the conquest of external difficulties, and, still more, the arduous conquest of self. The prominence of this “joy of overcoming” is one of the happiest psychological phenomena of a Montessori school. And as relations with our fellows become more complex and responsibilities multiply, this “battle of life” is ever more consciously felt. The New Teaching aims at “breaking the back” of a soul’s troubles in the early stage, by inducing a habit of mind to which the appearance of difficulties, instead of depressing, at once suggests victorious effort. In this way the battle of the free will becomes, in a sense, most strenuous at the start, as Marco Lombardo says, “And freewill, which, tho’ it hath a hard struggle in its first encounter with the heavenly influences, in the end wins the day completely, if it be well supported.”

E libero voler; che, se fatica
Ne le prime battaglie col ciel dura
Poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica.[215]

And the same thought of a gradation, a succession of efforts, each of which, bravely faced, makes those that follow lighter, is symbolised in the shape of the mountain of Purgatory, which in reality would have rather the form of a rounded dome than that of the tall pyramid of the customary illustration. Says Virgil, in his comforting way, to Dante, breathless after his first steep climb: “The nature of this eminence is such, that ever at starting from below it is fatiguing, but in proportion as a man mounts, he feels it less; wherefore, when it shall appear to thee so gentle that the ascent is as easy as sailing downward with the stream, then shalt thou be at the end of this path; there mayest thou hope to rest thy weariness.”

... Questa montagna è tale
Che sempre al cominciar di sotto è grave:
E quant’ uom più va su, e men fa male.
Però, quand’ ella ti parrà soave
Tanto che il su andar ti fia leggero,
Com’ a seconda giù andar per nave,
Allor sarai al fin d’ esto sentiero:
Quivi di riposar l’ affanno aspetta![216]

There is a moral progression by which man enters gradually and by accumulation into the fulness of self-conquest, and so, of his inheritance of Freedom.

But “grading” also, in the more specific sense, seems to be symbolised in the _Purgatorio_. This principle was not born with Froebel, though its emphatic recognition to-day may be an outcome of his message that each stage of the child-life has its own absolute value and rights.

We are apt to wonder now how people were ever so psychologically impious as to attempt to teach in a single group, by means of the same cut-and-dried phrases, minds at every different stage of growth and of receptiveness; hurling ready-made truths at the devoted heads of pupils like so many tons of explosive bombs shot down from aircraft upon massed enemy battalions! Grading, and the individual point of contact—which, after all, is just Aristotle’s time-honoured principle of “beginning from that which we know”—these we recognise to be of the first importance, and that whether we be University professors or Sunday school teachers. And so we are prepared to appreciate a fourteenth century scheme which is dominated by the principle of graded progress.

We note that the souls which are not yet psychologically fit to begin the regular course of purgation are kept outside, in Antepurgatory, for a longer or shorter term of years, as each has need. The “Infants,” so to speak, are graded among themselves, and are not grouped with “Standard I.” Within the Gate, the seven terraces are arranged in an order corresponding (not, of course, to a psychological series that would be accepted as it stands to-day, but) to a very carefully-thought-out classification of the seven capital sins; and until the lesson of a given Terrace is completely mastered, there is no chance of moving up. When, on the other hand, the teaching in that particular grade has been thoroughly grasped and the pupil has nothing more to learn there, no power in heaven or earth—or anywhere else—can keep him back. In Dante’s School there are no mistakes in grading, and no wrong removes.

We have spoken of the “atmosphere” of the _Purgatorio_ as one of “naturalness,” meaning by that, that it is an environment not calculated to hamper or restrict normal and spontaneous development. It is “natural” also in a more literal sense, in that the Poet has seen fit to depart from the almost invariable tradition of his predecessors (who place Purgatory underground, side by side with Hell, and make it scarcely distinguishable therefrom save in the matter of duration) and to furnish his penitents with an “open-air cure.”

It is this background of noble scenery, of landscape and skyscape, of slope and scarp, of Flowery Valley and Divine Forest, of star-light and dawn, of sunrise and high noon and sunset—it is this that gives its peculiar beauty to the second _Cantica_ of the _Divine Comedy_. But this open-air Purgatory is more than a clever artifice, by which a fine dramatic contrast is produced after the murk and gloom of the _Inferno_. It is, as we have seen, essential to Dante’s conception of the perfect work of penitence in man, that it should draw his footsteps up to the Earthly Paradise, the primal home of Innocence. And so the background of the _Purgatorio_, as it were inevitably, completes the illusion of “naturalness” in the world beyond, and enforces the parallel between the upward struggle of those elect spirits and our own daily pilgrimage in this life. It suggests further, all that the magic phrase “Open Air” means to our modern ears: that healthy out-door life, nurse of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, that life of robust activities in close contact with external Nature of which the prime importance is recognised by all schools of thought in the world of modern education.

Finally (and here we touch upon one of the most beautiful features of Dante’s conception), the spiritual atmosphere, in spite of purgatorial framework of the Seven Sins, is not that of the Decalogue, but of the Beatitudes. The Sins themselves are interpreted as disordered Love, and the manifold love which goes up to make a Saint is expressed in sweetest harmony when each successive barrier is passed.[217] Love is the atmosphere, and Love the supreme lesson, the learning whereof continues beyond the grave.

The conception of Love as the universal motive power, expressed at length in _Purg._ xvii. 91 _sqq._—

Nè creator nè creatura mai
Cominciò el, figliuol, fu sanza amore ...

suggests a comparison of Dante’s psychology with that of the most modern school. In an age when (as a glance at Fra Salimbene’s pages will demonstrate)—pages written, it must be remembered, for the eye of a Sister of the Order of Sta Clara!—something more than Elizabethan broadness of speech was not uncommon, Dante pours out volumes of prose and verse, every line of which may be said to be suitable _pour les jeunes filles_. He would scarcely have subscribed to that domination of the Sex-instinct which is an axiom of the Freudian psychology. In the lines referred to above he more or less adumbrates the doctrine of “Libido”; but it does not occur to him to label that psychic force with so doubtfully reputable a name as “Libido.” The noble title “Amor” is for him, as for earlier philosophers, the more appropriate one.

It would, of course, be absurd to credit Dante with the place of a pioneer of the twentieth century psychology of the Unconscious, which had its roots in the Psychical Research of F. W. Myers and his friends, and sprouted up to visible life and growth so recently under the hands of the Viennese Freud and the Switzer Jung. But it would probably not be too much to say, in view of his remarkably intelligent interest in mental processes, and especially in the phenomena of dreams and of the border-land between sleeping and waking, that, given the assets and the advantages of our modern thinkers, he would have taken no mean place among psychologists of the modern type.

From _Inf._ i. 10—Tant ’era pien di sonno—to _Par._ xxxiii. 58, we find this interest displayed; and before we pass on to consider his teaching on the more human aspect of Education, the personal relation between Teacher and Pupil, it may be worth while to direct attention to one or two passages which emphasise this point.

In the 30th Canto of _Inferno_[218] he uses as a simile that significant situation in which the dreamer hopes he is dreaming—

Qual è colui che suo dannaggio sogna,
Che sognando desidera sognare ...

In another passage[219] he sketches a case where the wakened dreamer forgets the “dream-cognition,” but is still dominated by the “affect”—

... Colui che somniando vede
Che dopo il sogno la passione impressa
Rimane, e l’ altro a la mente non riede....

Ere he quits the Terrace of Accidie, Dante falls asleep, and here he describes[220] in vivid and picturesque language the process of going to sleep, when thought follows thought in more or less inconsequent fashion—

Novo pensiero dentro a me si mise
Del qual più altri nacquero, e diversi;
E tanto d’un in altro vaneggiai,
Che gli occhi per vaghezza ricopersi,
E ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai.

At the opening of the next Canto[221] comes the dream—dream of the two symbolic Ladies—and the awakening. The dreamer is apparently roused by the intensity of a dream-stench; but his awakening is due as a matter of fact to the arresting voice of Virgil, whose person is projected into the “manifest content” of the dream a few lines earlier,[222] in the cry of the “Donna Santa”—

O Virgilio, o Virgilio, chi è questa?

“Three times,” says Dante’s Guide, “have I called you. Get up, and come along!”

... Il buon maestro, “Almen tre
Voci t’ ho messe,” dicea, “Surgi e viene!”

In the last Canto of _Purgatory_ proper[223] we have another picture of a going to sleep and an awaking. The sleepiness has been induced by a sort of natural self-hypnotism, the poet’s gaze steadily fixed on a few bright stars seen through the confined opening between the cliffs as he lies on the rocky stair.

Poco potea parer li del di fori;
Ma, per quel poco, vedev’ io le stelle
Di lor solere e più chiare e maggiori
Sì ruminando e sì mirando in quelle,
Mi prese il sonno; il sonno che sovente,
Anzi che ’l fatto sia, sa le novelle.

This time the awakening is not sudden or violent.[224] After the altogether lovely dream of Lia—the sublimation of Dante’s desire, suggested, or coloured, by the natural anticipations of one on the threshold of the earthly Paradise—he wakes up quite naturally, his sleep “breaking from him” with the breaking dawn.[225]

Le tenebre fuggian da tutti lati
E il sonno mio con esse; ond’ io leva’ mi.

Dante’s analysis of Dreams was naturally relative to the knowledge and tendency of his day. The presaging quality of Dreams—

... Il sonno che sovente
Anzi che ’l fatto sia, sa le novelle;

like the proverbial belief that the truest dreams are those that come before dawn—

... Presso al mattin del ver si sogna[226]

is not for him the fruit of scientific psycho-analysis; but rather the unscientific or quasi-scientific deduction of untold generations of men on whom the dreams that “came true” left a far deeper impress than the large majority that proved fallacious.

Dante was, however, a real psychologist of his own time and date, as many qualities of his thought and interest testify; and his discerning interest in the dream-consciousness supplies a definite link between the thinkers of the Trecento and our modern Masters.

III

It must not, however, be supposed that the somewhat specialised comparison of Dante’s purgatorial scheme with the Montessori Method sketched above[227] by any means exhausts the educational principles of the _Purgatorio_; still less that it covers the whole area of such principles enshrined in the _Divine Comedy_. The old-fashioned relation between Master and Pupil has still something to be said for it. The personal element cannot be eliminated, however great may be the need—especially in certain stages of self-restraint and self-effacement. This personal relation, in its permanently important aspects, is beautifully figured in the relation between Dante as learner and Virgil, Beatrice, and Statius as teachers.

Benedetto Croce[228] draws attention to the frequent _Intramesse didascaliche_ which mark the XXIst and following Cantos of the _Purgatorio_—notably the discourse of Statius on “generation” in _Purg._ xxv. “This poetry,” he says, “breathes throughout the spirit of the Master who knows, and desires to make clear the idea he is expounding; who stoops down towards the pupil to embrace him and lift him up towards the Truth.”[229] Beatrice, again, as Croce points out,[230] taking Virgil’s place in the journey through the skies, is like an elder sister patiently schooling her younger brother. She helps him to overcome his prejudices, to solve his problems, to conquer his doubts; now turning upon him the eye of a fond mother nursing a delirious child,[231] now laughing him out of his “childish notions,” the charm of her resplendent beauty and the illumination of her smile giving just that touch of romance to their relations that suggests the final stage of the transfiguration of the half-earthly love of the _Vita Nuova_ into something wholly celestial. But the type of this relation between Master and Pupil is most surely and most prominently drawn in that which subsists all through the first two cantiche between Virgil and Dante.[232] “Mia scuola,” Virgil calls this relation in the beautiful scene with Statius;[233] and a striking feature of this “School,” recurring in the same Canto[234] and elsewhere, is the close, intimate, easy and even playful mutual understanding between Teacher and Pupil. To this point we shall return; but first a word may be said on the sterner aspect of Education, from the pupils’ point of view.

Granted that the “Primrose Path” is the only appropriate one for infant steps to toddle on; that path itself has its ups and downs—slight gradients from the adult point of view, but for the infant involving a demand for real effort and adventure. And the end of man—our human Good—lies above the zone where primroses bloom, on the heights: as Tasso sings—

... In cima all’ erto e faticoso colle
Della virtù è riposto il nostro bene.[235]

Let us glance, then, at what Dante has to say about the sterner side of Education—the necessary sacrifices that must be made for Liberty—and about the responsibilities of the teacher in his relation to the pupil whom he would guide up to freedom of mind and soul.

To the former we have already referred above (p. 102) in connection with the Montessori principle of the joyous facing of difficulties. The hard initial battle[236] is symbolically represented by the place which the _Inferno_ holds in Dante’s quest of Liberty. For him indeed the “prime battaglie” are the hardest. No essential routine or inevitable drudgery which beset the path of learning can match in sheer distastefulness the weary horror of that first part of the Poet’s journey, of which his self-pitying anticipations are recorded in the lovely and pathetic opening lines of the second canto: “The day was departing, and the darkened air was relieving from their labours the animals on earth, and I was preparing all alone to sustain the struggle alike of the journey and of my piteous thoughts.”

Lo giorno se n’ andava, e l’ aere bruno
Toglieva gli animai che sono in terra
Dalle fatiche loro; e io sol uno
M’ apparecchiava a sostener la guerra
Sì del cammino e sì della pietate.[237]

The youthful scholar, in his quest for knowledge and truth and the freedom that is truth’s guerdon, has not, as a rule, to face this literal isolation in drudgery and painfulness. For him the social instinct and the companionship of fellow-victims, not to say the healthy stimulus of friendly rivalry and competition, are present to lighten his burden and sweeten his lot. Yet each, after all, has to tackle the drudgery and the difficulties for himself. There is no Royal Road. The Master may spur him on with the vision of the “gladsome mountain which is the origin and source of all joy.”

Dilettoso monte
Ch’ è principio e cagion di tutta gioia;

may encourage him to face the flames by the thought of the welcoming smile of Beatrice on the other side: “as you tempt a child with an apple!” “Mark you, my son, this barrier separates thee from Beatrice.”

Or vedi, figlio:
Tra Beatrice e te è questo muro;[238]

but, none the less, the grim journey has to be undertaken, the distasteful plunge to be made. It is largely the Teacher’s attitude and example that make this effort possible; that evoke the manly spirit in the pupil, and encourage him to persevere in face of difficulties.

All this is recognised by the best modern theory and practice. “The New Teaching,” says Professor Adams,[239] “does not seek to free the pupils from effort”—we have seen that this is really the case, even in its extremest form of Montessorianism, with its individualistic charter of Child-liberty—“not ... to free the pupils from effort, but to encourage them to strenuous work”; it “does not seek to get rid of drudgery, but to make it tolerable by giving it a meaning, and shewing its relation to the whole learning process in school, and to the whole process of living in the world.” This is exactly Virgil’s attitude towards Dante. He is, first of all, alert to cheer and encourage him in moments of special difficulty. He encourages Dante both by example and by precept to mount the grisly back of the monster Geryon, their sole means of descent into the Abyss[240]; and later, when the flame has to be faced before entering the Earthly Paradise,[241] he reminds him of the success of that past experiment of faith, much in the manner of the noble self-encouragement of that Homeric hero, who, known to Dante only at second-hand, yet captured his imagination. “Be of good cheer, my heart, we have suffered worse things ere this.”

τέτλαθι δὴ κραδίη, καὶ κύντερον ἄλλος ποτ’ ἔτλης.[242]

Or again, when at the foot of the mountain Dante is dismayed at its steepness, the Master explains: “It is ever easier as you ascend.”[243] When Dante is frightened as the Mountain trembles (_Purg._ xx. 135) Virgil interposes with a call to confidence—

Non dubbiar mentr’ io ti guido

But Virgil not only encourages; he explains. From time to time he pauses with the double object of giving his companion a breathing-space and of enheartening him by an exposition of the end and purpose of the drudgery—of the whole scheme, of which the experience they are now undergoing is an integral and necessary part. Thus he expounds to his disciple the topography of Hell when they have passed within the rampart of the City of Dis, and before they begin the steep and terrible descent, and encounter the Minotaur.[244] Again, after the uncomfortable ordeal of the suffocating fumes on the Terrace of Wrath, he diverts his pupil’s attention with a sketch of the order and inner meaning of the purgatorial terraces, and explains how Sin, in all its deadly forms, is just “disordered Love.”[245] And we may note in passing how this postponement of the explanation and the detailed scheme till the movement of learning is well on its course, is itself typical of the New Teaching,[246] and grounded on sound psychological principles. Virgil supplies, indeed, in the first Canto of the _Inferno_, a summary forecast of the journey, but does not sit down at the beginning and burden his Pupil’s mind with an elaboration of details. Nor can we leave the lecture on “Disordered Love” of _Purg._ xvii. without drawing attention to the ideal relations of Teacher and Pupil depicted in the following Canto, and especially to the masterly way in which Virgil suggests ever fresh problems to Dante’s mind and draws him on with an increasing “thirst to know.”[247]

The liberty which Education “goes seeking,” and in which its nobler forms live and move as in a bracing atmosphere, demands some sacrifice alike from Teacher and from Pupil. From the Pupil, especially in its earlier middle stages, it demands a degree of submissiveness and docility, and courage and perseverance to face distasteful drudgery; from the Teacher, that self-restraint of which we have already spoken—yet not mere self-effacement. Like the Divine Master, he must “begin to do and to teach.”[248] He must be a fellow-pilgrim, sharing the toils of the road, and over the roughest places a leader, even as Virgil volunteers to go first where the grim descent begins into the “cieco mondo”: “I will go first and thou shalt follow me.”

Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo.[249]

As fellow-pilgrim, he will not hesitate to let the Pupil witness something of his distress. The Master girds himself to the descent pallid with sympathetic suffering—_tutto smorto_[250]—nor does he hide the tokens of shame and confusion when he becomes conscious that he has been a party to an unwarranted delay.[251] And we note the effect of this frankness on the Pupil—an enhancement of loyal admiration for the Master; and, for his own conscience, a more delicate perception of moral values: “He appeared to me self-reproached. O noble, stainless, conscience, how bitter to thy taste is a trifling fault!”

El mi parea da se stesso rimorso;
O dignitosa coscienza e netta,
Come t’ è picciol fallo amaro morso!

Even so pleads the spirit of the New Teaching.[252] Let not the Teacher “put on airs of omniscience and solemnity. He must be a part of the gay company; he must not mind ‘giving himself away,’ he must be a human being, not a wooden stick; gladly must he learn, and then he will gladly teach.” Thus Virgil moves in Dante’s company as a fellow-learner, not omniscient, not infallible; ever ready to confess with frankness his own limitations, and to own up to his mistakes. In this spirit he apologises to Pier delle Vigne[253] for the inconsiderate act to which he was forced owing to his inability to convince Dante through the medium of his own verses. In the same spirit he gives place to Nessus when a description is needed of Nessus’ own region of the Inferno, reversing his _dictum_ about the original descent: “Regard him (Nessus) as thy prime authority, and me as secondary.”

Questi ti sia or primo, e io secondo.[254]

In like manner he gives way to Statius when an explanation is wanted of the emaciation of spirits no longer subject to bodily hunger,[255] and leads Dante to expect from Beatrice the completion of his own careful but yet not fully satisfying exposition of a heavenly matter: “And if this argument of mine doth not appease thy cravings thou wilt see Beatrice, and she will fully relieve thee of this and every other desire.”

E se la mia ragion non ti disfama
Vedrai Beatrice, ed ella pienamente
Ti torrà questa e ciascun altra brama.[256]

Dante in his portrait of Virgil reminds us that the quest of Truth demands “truth in the inward parts,” that a humble and limpid sincerity is essential. Finally, he shews us this humility transfigured into a Divine self-effacement, where the elder Poet hands over his disciple entirely into his own guidance and that of Beatrice, in humble acknowledgement of his own limitations.[257] This act of self-effacement has indeed been in his mind from the first. When the time shall come for Dante’s ascent to the realms of the _beate genti_, “a spirit more worthy than I shall be appointed thereto, with whom I will leave thee at my departure; for that Potentate who reigns in heaven above, because I was rebellious against His law, wills not that any by my guidance should enter His city.”

Anima fia a ciò più di me degna;
Con lei ti lascerò nel mio partire;
Chè quello imperador che là su regna
Perch’ io fu’ ribellante a la sua legge
Non vuol che ’n sua città per me si vegna.[258]

And so Virgil’s work is done, and the Teacher shews himself sublimest in the last act. “The hardest lesson,” says the apostle of the New Teaching, “for a clever teacher to learn, is to let a clever pupil be clever in his own way,” nor “has a teacher been really successful” until “he has, by skilful preparation, enabled his pupil to do without him.”[259] This final self-effacement of the Teacher, with its corollary, the achievement of self-mastery and self-determination in the Pupil—the achievement of that _liberty of soul_ which is the supreme aim of the pilgrimage—is best described in Virgil’s matchless words of farewell, which we may now quote in their fulness. His “skilful preparation” has all led up to this ... to make itself dispensable! “By force of wit and skill I have conducted thee hither; henceforward let thine own pleasure be thy guide; from both the steep and the narrow ways thou art now free.... No longer await either word or sign from me; free, sound, and upright is thy will, and it would be amiss not to do its bidding; wherefore over thyself I invest thee with supreme control.”

Tratto t’ ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;
Fuor sei de l’ erte vie, fuor sei de l’ arte.
...
Non aspettar mio dir più, nè mio cenno,
Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio
E fallo fora non far a suo senno:
Perch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio.[260]

VI

DANTE AND ISLAM

(_As represented by_ “THE GOSPEL OF BARNABAS”)

E solo in parte vidi il Saladino.

—_Inf._ iv. 129.

The aim of these Essays has been to present Dante in different aspects as the Apostle of Freedom: a man endowed with those profound convictions on which alone true tolerance can be built, a man whose deep and passionate earnestness is tempered and balanced by a saving sense of humour. The substantiation of this claim may perhaps justify us in carrying the reader into a remote by-way of Italian literature; in asking him to note points of contact and of contrast which emerge when the Poet is confronted, so to speak, with a document which we may be sure he never saw,[261] but which yet seems to bear, here and there, strange marks of the impress of his thoughts and of his phraseology. If the comparison of the two writers should seem at first sight gratuitous and far-fetched, it may yet succeed in throwing light on Dante’s genius and temper from an unfamiliar angle.

The Clarendon Press published in 1907 an _Editio princeps_ of the Mohammedan _Gospel of Barnabas_ from an unique MS. of the latter half of the sixteenth century in the Imperial Library at Vienna.[262] This document—apart from its theological and dogmatic importance—should prove to be of considerable interest to students of Italian literature, as well on account of its grammatical and orthographic peculiarities, as for the positive literary merits which not infrequently relieve a style in general somewhat rough and bald.

The task of preparing for the press a translation of this remarkable document could not fail to bring before one’s mind certain points of contact with Dante, more especially as the curious archaic Italian in which the “Gospel” is written lends itself, in a certain measure, to verbal coincidences and quasi-coincidences with passages in the Poet’s writings. The points of contact which will be adduced in the present paper are none the less interesting because the date of the original _Gospel of Barnabas_ still remains to a certain extent an open question, and with it also the nature of the relations, direct or indirect, that may have subsisted between its compiler and the author of the _Divina Commedia_.[263]

But first a word is due about the character and scope of this very apocryphal Gospel. The MS., as we have already suggested, is of comparatively recent date. Paper, binding, and orthography all combine with the script to place it—not, as its eighteenth century critics supposed, in the fifteenth century, or earlier, but—in the latter half of the sixteenth century.[264] It is, however, of course possible that the Vienna Codex may be a copy of an earlier MS.; and, curiously enough, one of the strongest arguments for this earlier original arises, as we shall shortly see, out of an apparent reference to the famous Jubilee of 1300 A.D. which looms so large in Dante’s life and writings.

The book is a frankly Mohammedan Gospel, giving a full, but garbled, story of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, from a Moslem point of view. It claims to have been written by Saint Barnabas (who figures in it as one of the Twelve—to the exclusion of poor Saint Thomas!) at the injunction of his Master, for the express purpose of combating the errors taught by Saint Paul and others. These errors are summed up under three heads: (1) the doctrine that Jesus is Son of God, (2) the rejection of Circumcision, and (3) the permission to eat unclean meats. Of these three errors the first is regarded as of the greatest importance; and not only is the Gospel narrative contorted and expurgated to suit the writer’s purpose, but Christ Himself is made repeatedly to deny his own Divinity and even his Messiahship, and to predict the advent of Mohammed, the “Messenger of God.”

About two-thirds of the material is derived, without question, from our four Canonical Gospels, of which a decidedly unscientific “harmony” forms the framework of Barnabas’ narrative; the remaining third, which takes the form of discourses put into the mouth of Christ, is purely oriental in character, and largely an elaboration of germs or hints to be found in the Koran or in Jewish tradition. It is on this section of the book that the Dantist’s interest will be concentrated.

The brief words of awful solemnity in which the Gospels speak of the doom of the lost are supplemented in Barnabas by elaborate descriptions of infernal torments which, whencesoever ultimately derived, are expressed in terms which exhibit remarkable coincidences with the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ of Dante. Mohammed’s two favourite themes were, the final Judgment and the horrors of Hell on the one hand, and, on the other, the delights of Paradise. And the second theme is treated in Barnabas almost as fully as the first. The Paradise of Barnabas has perhaps little in common with the Earthly Paradise of Dante, and still less with the Celestial; but it gives our author scope for an excursion into the realms of astronomy, whereby he finds himself (perhaps unconsciously), at the end of his journey, much nearer to Dante’s scheme of the Ten Heavens than to the normal tradition of the Jews and Arabs.

It will be convenient to deal first with this teaching on Paradise, secondly with the _Inferno_ of Barnabas, and thirdly with certain verbal and other points of contact between Barnabas and Dante; concluding with some more general considerations regarding the tone and colouring of the “Gospel.”

It would be strange if the Paradise of Barnabas had not some features in common with Dante’s. Man’s dreams of an ideal resting-place, whether past or future, have a tendency to express themselves in terms of greensward and flowers and luscious fruits, cool streams and sunshine tempered by refreshing shade. The name “Paradise” itself means “park” or “plaisance” as we know, and though Barnabas is not conspicuously happy when he poses as an etymologist,[265] the connotation of the word was too securely established alike in Moslem and in Christian tradition to admit of much variation. Paradise, of course, has two different meanings in Dante, and the same is true of its use in Barnabas; but inasmuch as the distinction in the latter is not expressly marked, it will be convenient for our purpose to group together the conceptions of the Earthly and the Celestial Paradise. In Barnabas, as in Dante, the name is applied to the scene of man’s creation—

il loco
Fatto per proprio dell’ umana spece,[266]

and of his temptation, fall and expulsion.[267] In both again it is used also of the eternal home of God, the good angels and redeemed mankind.[268] Speaking generally, the main features of the Paradise of Barnabas resemble more closely those of Dante’s Earthly Paradise; while its position in the scheme of the universe corresponds rather to that of the Celestial Paradise of Dante. Thus the four perfumed rivers[269] of this “Gospel,” though derived, almost certainly, from the Koran, correspond, in a sense, to the miraculously clear and limpid stream which arrested the poet’s progress[270]; while its profusion of flowers and fruits[271] recall the scene portrayed in Virgil’s parting words—

... l’ erbetta, i fiori e li arbuscelli,[272]

and—

La gran varïazion de’ freschi mai.[273]

which drew Dante’s wondering eyes across the stream to where Matelda tripped singing through the painted meadow—

Cantando ed iscegliendo fior da fiore
Ond’ era pinta tutta la sua via.[274]

Again, a somewhat terse definition of Paradise in Barnabas reminds one of a still shorter phrase of Dante’s. The author of the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ describes the home which man forfeited by his first sin as “delitiarum patria[275]” while for Barnabas, “Il parradisso he chassa doue DIO chonsserva le sui delitie[276]”; or, as he puts it further on “DIO ha chreato il parradisso per chassa delle sui delitie.”[277]

But the heavenly Paradise of the Empyrean is also described by Dante in material phrase as “God’s garden.” “Questo giardino”[278] is the name by which Saint Bernard designates the Mystic Rose, as he unveils its mysteries to Dante; and already in the Eighth Heaven Beatrice had essayed to divert the Poet’s gaze from her own loveliness—

... al bel giardino
Che sotto i raggi di Cristo s’ infiora.[279]

Here we may note that in Barnabas[280] GOD (not Christ, of course) is the sun of Paradise, while Mohammed is its moon.

But there is another passage in the _Paradiso_, where Dante himself is speaking in answer to Saint John’s catechizing: a passage which may well detain us a little longer. Here Paradise is described in so many words as the “Garden of the Eternal Gardener”—

Le fronde onde s’ infronda tutto l’ orto
De l’ ortolano etterno, am’ io cotanto,
Quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.[281]

Is it fanciful to see a subtle resemblance—in thought, perhaps, more than in phrase (though Dante’s symbolic meaning is wanting)—in Barnabas’ description of Paradise as a place “doue ... ogni chossa he _frutuossa, di fruti proportionati ha cholui che lo ha choltiuato_?”[282]

There emerge, at any rate, from both passages, the thought of the Divine Gardener ... and of a _proportion_ for which He is in some way responsible. But perhaps a more striking coincidence—if coincidence it be—is that between the answer given to a problem raised by Saint Bartholomew in Barnabas and the assurance vouchsafed by Piccarda[283] in resolution of Dante’s difficulty concerning degrees of glory in Heaven.

“O Master,” says Bartholomew,[284] “shall the glory of Paradise be equal for every man? If it be equal, it will not be just, and if it be unequal, the lesser will envy the greater.” Jesus answers: “Non sera equalle perche dio he iusto he ogniuno si chontentera perche hiuui non he inuidia,” and again, There shall be “tutta una gloria sebene sara ha chi più ha chi meno. Non portera alloro inuidia ueruna.” So, when Dante questions the beatified Piccarda, in her earth-shadowed sphere—

Desiderate voi più alto loco ...?[285]

the spirit replies, in words which, though more beautiful and more profound, are inevitably called up by the passage of Barnabas just quoted—

Si che, come noi sem di soglia in soglia
Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace
Com’ allo re ch’ a suo voler ne invoglia:
En’ la sua voluntade è nostra pace.[286]

Turning now to the geographical or rather astronomical aspect of the subject, we find in Barnabas a definite divergence from the doctrine of the _Koran_, and adoption of a Ptolemaic scheme closely resembling that of Dante’s _Paradiso_. There are nine heavens, not counting Paradise, _i.e._ ten heavens in all. “Noue sono li cielli li quali sono distanti luno dal altro chome he distante il primo cielo dala terra. Il quale he lontano dalla terra cinquecento hanni di strada.”[287] In the “five hundred years’ journey” there is a reminiscence of Jewish tradition: but the seven heavens of the Talmud and of the _Koran_ have become ten. And though these heavens are not definitely stated to be arranged, like Dante’s, as a series of concentric spheres with earth as the centre, they form a graduated series, in which each is to the next as a “punto di ago,”[288] or as a grain of sand.[289] The planets, again, have their place in the scheme. They are not, apparently, identified with the several “cieli,” as in Dante’s arrangement, but are “set between” or “amongst” them: “li cielli fra li qualli stano li pianeti.”[290]

The point of resemblance is to be found in a graduated series of ten (and not seven) heavens, characterised by an ascending scale of magnitude, and culminating in the Paradise of the Blessed.

The resemblances are indeed striking; but though ‘Barnabas is vastly superior to previous Moslem writers in the richness of his conception of Heaven,’ (they in common with their Christian contemporaries shewing much more spontaneity and exuberance of fancy in describing the torments of Hell), Dante excels markedly in the glowing wealth of his picture of Paradise—its radiance, its variety, its peace, its activity, its all-pervading love.[291]

So far, it may be said, the suggested points of contact between Barnabas and Dante have been somewhat vague and hypothetical. They may, perhaps, be adequately accounted for on the basis of a common tradition—the practically universal tradition of a Garden-Paradise, and the Aristotelo-Ptolemaic scheme of astronomy common to all the civilised West, whether Christian or Mohammedan, till the days of Copernicus and Galileo. But in the Inferno of Barnabas we may discover more definite and more convincing resemblances to features and passages of the _Divina Commedia_.

Islam, except in its later developments,[292] has no place for a Purgatory. There is no mention of a Purgatorio in the Koran or in this “Gospel,” though Barnabas gives even the Faithful a probationary residence of torment in Hell, varying from Mohammed’s own brief term of “the twinkling of an eye” to a duration of 70,000 years![293] But the Barnaban arrangement of Hell itself furnishes an almost exact parallel to the scheme of Dante’s Purgatorio. The framework of the arrangement is that of the seven capital sins. Hell is divided[294] into seven circles or “centri” wherein are punished respectively (1) lo irachondo, (2) il gollosso, (3) lo acidiosso, (4) il lusuriosso, (5) lo hauaro, (6) lo inuidiosso, (7) il superbo. The order of the sins differs considerably from that adopted by Dante, and indeed is not repeated in any of the typical arrangements given in Dr. Moore’s well-known Table;[295] coming nearest to that of Aquinas. In common, however, with Dante’s arrangement it has the juxtaposition of Pride and Envy and their position at the lower end of the series: a point which is perhaps the more significant in that Barnabas approaches his Inferno from the bottom (not, as one would have expected, from the top), beginning with “il più basso centro” of Pride. There is another point also, in which the Inferno of Barnabas resembles both the Inferno and the Purgatorio of Dante—the principle which runs through all its torments “per quae peccat quis ... per haec et torquetur.” The proud shall be “trampled under-foot of Satan and his devils,”[296] the envious shall be tormented with the delusion that even in that joyless realm “ogniuno prendi allegrezza del suo malle he si dolgia che lui non habia peggio”;[297] the slothful shall labour at tasks like that of Sisyphus,[298] and the gluttonous be tantalised with elusive dainties.[299] Nor can we fail to notice here how in the story of the serpent’s doom[300] there comes out the idea of all pollutions of human sin—especially repented sin—streaming back eventually to Satan: the conception which underlies the system of Dante’s rivers of Hell, including the “ruscelletto” that trickles down from Purgatory.[301]

There is a vivid description in _Barnabas_ of the “Harrowing of Hell” at the coming of God’s Messenger, which though it has nothing in common with the account of the Saviour’s Descent as related by Virgil in Limbo, is strongly suggestive of a later scene where at the advent of the much-debated “Messo del ciel,”[302] who comes to open the gates of Dis, both banks of the Styx tremble, and more than a thousand “anime distrutte” fly headlong like frogs before a water-snake.[303] “Onde tremera,” says Barnabas, “lo infferno alla sua pressenzza[304] ... quando elgi ui andera tutti li diauoli stridendo cercherano di asscondersi sotto le ardente brasse dicendo luno allo altro: scampa scampa che elgi uiene machometo nosstro innimicho.”[305]

While the general atmosphere of Hell in _Barnabas_, with its “neui he giazi intollerabili,”[306] its torturing fiends, its biting serpents, its Sisyphus-labours and Tantalus-pains, its harpies, its burning filth and nameless horrors, has the same “reek” as that of Dante’s Inferno, there are passages which present an almost verbal parallel. In his description of the cries of the lost, Barnabas says: “malladirano ... il loro padre he madre he il loro chreatore.” Who can but recall Dante’s words about the dismal spirits assembled on the bank of Acheron, who—

Bestemmiavano Dio e lor parenti?[307]

This brings us to the subject of actual verbal coincidences, of which we must confess we have found but two, though a more systematic investigation might well yield a much larger number.

Barnabas’ recurring characterisation of the idols of the heathen as “dei falsi he bugiardi”[308] is surely too remarkable to be without significance, and is enforced and supported by the occurrence of another cadence of the same canto of the _Inferno_ in the phrase “rabbiosa fame,” which in Barnabas, however, applies not to the symbolic lion of the _Divina Commedia_,[309] but to the torments of the Lost.

There remains one more point to be adduced—an incidental and a somewhat subtle one which makes, not so much for a relation between Dante’s writings and the _Gospel of Barnabas_ as for a relation of contemporaneity between the two writers. The inference which it would suggest is so definite and precise, that it is only fair to remark that there are puzzlingly contradictory arguments to be drawn from the language and style of Barnabas.

Our point, then, is as follows. Barnabas puts into the mouth of our Lord, as we have observed above, numerous predictions of the future advent of Mohammed as “Messiah” and “Messenger of GOD.” In one of these a “Jubilee” is spoken of as recurring every hundred years: “il iubileo ... che hora uiene ogni cento hanni.”[310] The writer or compiler here, as often, fails to throw himself back into the Palestine of the first century, in which, as his very considerable knowledge of the Old Testament[311] should have reminded him, the Hebrew Jubilee of fifty years would have been in force. Whence, then, comes this Jubilee? He cannot have derived it from the _Koran_. We are almost forced to the conclusion that the “hora” of the passage quoted is a literal “now” and refers to a contemporary institution—to the Jubilee as conceived of at the moment when the lines were penned; and that, the Jubilee of Western Christendom. This carries us back beyond the twenty-five years’ Jubilee of modern times—beyond the year when Clement VI, for his own ends, instituted a Jubilee of fifty years after the Hebrew model; and would give us as our _terminus ad quem_ the year 1349. For the upper limit—the _terminus a quo_ of the original Barnabas we must turn to the famous Jubilee of 1300, the ideal date of Dante’s pilgrimage. For though the Bull[312] by which that Jubilee was promulgated alleged antecedent tradition, and the contemporary chroniclers naturally followed suit,[313] there seems to be no sufficient historical evidence for a precedent. Thus, between the years 1300 and 1350—and, apparently, only during that period—it would have been possible to speak of the centennial Jubilee as an established institution. If this be so, the writing of this passage in _Barnabas_ is relegated to the years in which the _Divina Commedia_ took its final shape, or those just after the poet’s death in 1321 when the poem so swiftly took its place among the classics of the world’s literature.

The foregoing sketch does not pretend to be exhaustive;[314] it does not even claim to have proved anything of a substantial nature: but it may perhaps suggest to some more competent mind a line of study which has at least the merit of freshness, and it may serve to introduce to those who are not acquainted with it, a document of no ordinary interest and of no little beauty.

It is sometimes stated that Dante places Mohammed not among pagans nor among heretics but with the schismatics: as though he shared the optimistic view of some of his contemporaries, that the Moslems were but an extreme form of Christian “sect.”

But Dante distributes his pagans without prejudice throughout the successive circles, from the “Nobile Castello” in Limbo[315] to the central seat of infamy in the Giudecca; and, as a matter of fact, a pagan, Curio, is partner of Mohammed’s doom in the penultimate “bolgia” of Malebolge. Obviously “scisma” must not be taken too technically from Mohammed’s lips, supplemented as it is by the more general phrase “seminator di scandalo.”[316] The “schism” of which the False Prophet is guilty is rather that introduction of discord and strife into the civilised world which makes “Macometto cieco” in the eighteenth canzone a personification of the factious spirit of Florence.

Yet if it had fallen to Dante’s lot to judge the Founder of Islam by the spirit of this Mohammedan Gospel, he might have shared that milder and more optimistic view of Mohammedanism which, according to a recent writer,[317] inspired Saint Francis when he set out upon his Egyptian mission. For here he would have found, side by side with the inevitable denial of our Lord’s Divinity, an attribution to him not only of the Gospel miracles, but of others beside. He would have found deep teachings on prayer and fasting and almsgiving; on humility, penitence[318] and self-discipline; on meditation and mystic love. He would have found an asceticism in some ways as extravagant as any to be discovered in mediaeval legend, yet tempered with saving humour and common sense; a tolerant and charitable spirit which rivals even that of the “Cristo d’ Italia,” and “a succession of noble and beautiful thoughts concerning love of God, union with God, and God as Himself the final reward of faithful service, which it would be difficult to match in any literature.”[319]

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