Chapter XLIII: The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante (1)

It lies before us to draw the lines of mediaeval development together. We have been considering the Middle Ages very largely, endeavouring to fix in mind the more interesting of their intellectual and emotional phenomena. We have found throughout a certain spiritual homogeneity; but have also seen that the mediaeval period of western Europe is not to be forced to a fictitious unity of intellectual and emotional quality--contradicted by a disparity of traits and interests existing then as now. Yet just as certain ways of discerning facts and estimating their importance distinguish our own time, making it an “age” or epoch, so in spite of diversity and conflict, the same was true of the mediaeval period. From the ninth to the fourteenth century, inter-related processes of thought, beliefs, and standards prevailed and imparted a spiritual colour to the time. While not affecting all men equally, these spiritual habits tended to dominate the minds and tempers of those men who were the arbiters of opinion, for example, the church dignitaries, or the theologian-philosophers. Men who thought effectively, or upon whom it fell to decide for others, or to construct or imagine for them, such, whether pleasure-loving, secularly ambitious, or immersed in contemplation of the life beyond the grave, accepted certain beliefs, recognized certain authoritatively prescribed ideals of conduct and well-being, and did not reject the processes of proof supporting them.

The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. As waves of barbarism washed over the somewhat decadent society of Italy and her Latin daughters, we saw a new ignorance setting a final seal upon the inability of these epigoni to emulate bygone achievements. Plainly there was need of effort to rescue the _disjecta membra_ of the antique and Christian heritages. The wreckers were famous men, young Boëthius, old Cassiodorus, the great pope Gregory, and princely Isidore. For their own people they were gatherers and conservers; but they proved veritable transmitters for Franks, Anglo-Saxons and Germans, who were made acquainted with Christianity and Latinity between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the period in the course of which the Merovingian kingdoms were superseded by the Carolingian Empire.

With the Carolingian period the Middles Ages unquestionably are upon us. The factors and material of mediaeval development, howsoever they have come into conjunction, are found in interplay. It was for the mediaeval peoples, now in presence of their spiritual fortunes, to grow and draw from life. Their task, as has appeared from many points of view, was to master the Christian and antique material, and change its substance into personal faculty. Under different guises this task was for all, whether living in Italy or dwelling where the antique had weaker root or had been newly introduced.

This Carolingian time of so much sheer introduction to the teaching of the past presented little intellectual discrimination. That would come very gradually, when men had mastered their lesson and could set themselves to further study of the parts suited to their taste. Nevertheless, there was even in the Carolingian period another sort of discrimination, towards which men’s consciences were drawn by the contrast between their antique and Christian heritages, and because the latter held a criterion of selection and rejection, touching all the elements of human life.

Whoever reflects upon his life and its compass of thought, of inclination, of passion, action, and capacity for happiness or desolation, is likely to consider how he may best harmonize its elements. He will have to choose and reject; and within him may arise a conflict which he must bring to reconcilement if he will have peace. He may need to sacrifice certain of his impulses or even rational desires. As with a thoughtful individual, so with thoughtful people of an epoch, among whom like standards of discrimination may be found prevailing. The ninth century received, with patristic Christianity, a standard of selection and rejection. In conformity with it, men, century after century, were to make their choice, and try to bring their lives to a discriminating unity and certain peace. Yet in every mediaeval century the soul’s peace was broken in ways demanding other modes of reconcilement.

What profiteth a man to gain the world and lose his eternal life? Here was the Gospel basis of the matter. And, following their conception of Christ’s teaching, the Fathers of the Church elaborated and defined the conditions of attainment of eternal life with God, which was salvation. This was man’s whole good, embracing every valid and righteous element of life. Thus it had been with Christ; thus it was with Augustine; thus it was with Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great; only in Benedict and Gregory the salvation which represented the true and uncorrupt life of man on earth, as well as the assured preparation for eternal life with God, had shrunken from the universality of Christ, and even from the fulness of desire with which Augustine sought to know God and the soul. In these later men the conception of salvation had contracted through ascetic exclusion and barbaric fear.

Yet with Benedict and Gregory, in whom there was much constructive sanity, and indeed with all men who were not maniacally constrained, there was recognition that salvation was of the mind as well as through faith and love, or abhorrent fear. It is necessary to know the truth; and surely it is absolutely good to desire to know the truth forever, without the cumbrances of fleshly mortality. This desire is a true part of everlasting life. Through it Origen, Hilary of Poictiers, Augustine largely, and after them the great scholastics with Dante at their close, achieved salvation.

But why should one desire to know the truth utterly and forever, were not the truth desirable, lovable? Naturally one loves that which through desire and effort one has come to know. Love is required and also faith by him who will have and know the salvation which is eternal life; the emotions must take active part. Yet salvation comes not through the unguided sense-desiderative nature. It is for reason to direct passionate desire, and raise it to desire rationally approved, which is volition.

Thus salvation not only requires the action of the whole man, but is in and of his entire nature. It presents a unity primarily because of its agreement with the will of God, and then because of its unqualified and universal insistence that it, salvation, life eternal, be set absolutely first in man’s endeavour. What indeed could be more irrational, and more loveless and faithless, than that any desire should prevail over the entire good of man and the will of God as well? Oneness and peace consist in singleness of purpose and endeavour for salvation. Herein lies the standard of conduct and of discrimination as touching every element of mortal life.

With mediaeval men, the application of the criterion of salvation depended on how the will of God for man, and man’s accordant conduct, was conceived. What kind of conduct, what elements of the intellectual and emotional life were proper for the Kingdom of Heaven? What matters barred the way, or were unfit for the eternal spiritual state? The history of Christian thought lies within these queries. An authoritative consensus of opinion was represented by the Church at large, holding from century to century a _juste milieu_ of doctrine, by no means lax and yet not going to ascetic extremes. Seemingly the Church maintained varying standards of conduct for different orders of men. Yet in truth it was applying one standard according to the responsibilities of individuals and their vows.

The Church (meaning, for our purpose, the authoritative consensus of mediaeval ecclesiastical or religious approvals) always upheld as the ideal of perfect living the religious life, led under the sanction and guidance of some recognized monastic _regula_. So lived monks and nuns, and in more extreme or sporadic instances, anchorites and _reclusae_. The main peril of this strait and narrow path was its forsaking, the breaking of its vows. Less austerely guarded and exposed to further dangers were the secular clergy, living in the world, occupied with the care of lay souls, and with other cares that hardly touched salvation. The world avowedly, the flesh in reality, and the devil in all probability, beset the souls of bishops and other clergy. In view of their exposed positions “in the world,” a less austerely ascetic life was expected of the seculars, whose lapses from absolute holiness God might--or perhaps might not--condone.

Around, and for the most part below, regulars and seculars were the laity of both sexes, of all ages, positions, and degrees of instruction or ignorance. They had taken no vows of utter devotion to God’s service, and were expected to marry, beget children, fight and barter, and fend for themselves amid the temptations and exigencies of affairs. Well for them indeed if they could live in communion with the Church, and die repentant and absolved, eligible for purgatory.

For all these kinds of men and women like virtues were prescribed, although their fulfilment was looked for with varying degrees of expectation. For instance, the distinctly theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially the first, could not be completely attained by the ignorance and imperfect consecration of laymen. The vices, likewise, were the same for all, pride, anger, hypocrisy, and the rest; only with married people a venial unchastity was sacramentally declared not to constitute mortal sin. For this one case, human weakness, also mankind’s necessity, was recognized; while, in practice, the Church, through its boundless opportunities for penitence and absolution, mercifully condoned all delinquency save obstinate pride, impenitence, and disbelief.

These were the bare poles ethical of the orthodox mediaeval Christian scheme. How as to its intellectual and emotional inclusiveness? The many-phased interest of the mind, _i.e._ the desire to know, was in principle accepted, but with the condition that the ultimate end of knowledge should be the attainment of salvation. It was stated and re-emphasized by well-nigh every type of mediaeval thinker, that Theology was the queen of sciences, and her service alone justified her handmaids. All knowledge should make for the knowledge of God, and enlarge the soul’s relationship to its Creator and Judge. “He that is not with me is against me.” Knowledge which does not aid man to know his God and save his soul, all intellectual pursuits which are not loyal to this end, minister to the obstinacy and vainglory of man, stiff-necked, disobedient, unsubmissive to the will of God. Knowledge is justified or condemned according to its ultimate purpose. Likewise every deed, business, occupation, which can fill out the active life of man. As they make for Christ and salvation, the functions of ruler, warrior, lawyer, artisan, priest, are justified and blessed--or the reverse.

But how as to the appetites and the emotions? How as to love, between the sexes, parent and child, among friends? The standard of discrimination is still the same, though its application vary. Appetite for food, if unrestrained, is gluttony; it must be held from hindering the great end. One must guard against love’s obsession, against sense-passion, which is so forgetful of the ultimate good: concupiscence is sinful. Through bodily begetting, the taint of original sin is transmitted; and in all carnal desire, though sanctioned by the marriage sacrament, is lust and spiritual forgetfulness. When in fornication and adultery its acts contravene God’s law, they are mortal sins which will, if unabsolved, cast the sinner into hell.

Few men in the Middle Ages were insensible to their future lot, and therefore the criterion of salvation unto eternal life would rarely be rejected. But often there was conflict within the soul before it acquiesced in what it felt compelled to recognize; and sometimes there was clear revolt against current convictions, or practical insistence that a larger volume of the elements of human nature were fit for life eternal.

Conflict before acquiescence had agitated the natures of sainted Fathers of the Church, who marked out the path to salvation which the Middle Ages were to tread. One thinks at once of Jerome’s never-forgotten dream of exclusion from Paradise because of too great delight in classic reading. Another phase was Augustine’s, set forth somewhat retrospectively in his _Confessions_. Therein, as would seem, the drawings of the flesh were most importunate. Yet not without sighs and waverings did the _mind_ of Augustine settle to its purpose of knowing only God and the soul. At all events the chafings of mortal curiosity, the promptings of cultivated taste, and the cravings of the flesh, were the moving forces of the Psychomachia which passed with Patristic Christianity to the Middle Ages. Thousands upon thousands of ardent souls were to experience this conflict before convincing themselves that classic studies should be followed only as they led heavenward, and that carnal love was an evil thing which, even when sacramentally sanctioned, might deflect the soul.

The revolt against the authoritatively accepted standard declared itself along the same lines of conflict, but did not end in acquiescence and renunciation. It contended rather for a peace and reconcilement which should include much that was looked upon askance. It was not always violent, and might be dumb to the verge of unconsciousness, merely a tacit departure from standards more universally recognized than followed.

There were countless instances of this silent departure from the standard of salvation. With cultivated men, it realized itself in classical studies, as with Hildebert of Le Mans or John of Salisbury. It does not appear that either of them experienced qualms of conscience or suffered rebuke from their brethren. No more did Gerbert, an earlier instance of catholic interest in profane knowledge, though legends of questionable practices were to encircle his fame.

Other men pursued knowledge, rational or physical, in such a way as to rouse hostile attention to its irrelevancy or repugnancy to saving faith, and this even in spite of formal demonstration by the investigator--Roger Bacon is in our mind--of the advantage of his researches to the Queen Theology. Bacon might not have been so suspect to his brethren, and his demonstration of the theological serviceableness of natural knowledge would have passed, had he not put forth bristling manifestos denouncing the blind acceptance of custom and authority. Moreover, the obvious tendencies of methods of investigation advocated by him countered methods of faith; for the mediaeval and patristic conception of salvation, whatever collateral supports it might find in reason, was founded on the authority of revelation.

Indeed it was the lifting up of the standard of rational investigation which distinguished the veritable revolt from those preliminary inner conflicts which often strengthened final acquiescence. And it was the obstinate elevation of one’s individual wisdom (as it appeared to the orthodox) that separated the accredited supporters of the Church among theologians and philosophers, from those who were suspect. We mark the line of the latter reaching back through Abaelard to Eriugena. Such men, although possibly narrower in their intellectual interests than some who more surely abode within the Church’s pale, may be held as broader in principle. For inasmuch as they tended to set reason above authority, it would seem that there was no bound to their pursuit of rational knowledge, wherewith to expand and fortify their reason.

But if the intellectual side of man pressed upon the absolutism of the standard of salvation, more belligerent was the insistency of love--not of the Crucified. To the Church’s disparagement of the flesh, love made answer openly, not slinking behind hedges or closed doors, nor even sheltering itself within wedlock’s lawfulness. It, love, without regard to priestly sanction, proclaimed itself a counter-principle of worth. The love of man for woman was to be an inspiration to high deeds and noble living as well as a source of ennobling power. It presented an ideal for knights and poets. It could confer no immortality on lovers save that of undying fame: but it promised the highest happiness and worth in mortal life. If only knights and ladies might not have grown old, the supremacy of love and its emprize would have been impregnable. But age must come, and the ghastly mediaeval fear of death was like to drive lover and mistress at the last within some convent refuge. Fear brought compunction and perhaps its tears. Renunciation of the joy of life seemed a fit penance to disarm the Judge’s wrath. So at the end of life the ideal of love was prone to make surrender to salvation. Asceticism even enters its literature, as with the monkish Galahad. There was, however, another way of reconcilement between the carnal and the spiritual, the secular and the eternal, by which the secular and carnal were transformed to symbols of the spiritual and eternal--the way of the _Vita nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_, as we shall see.

So in spite of conflicts or silent treasons within the natures of many who fought beneath the Christian banner, in spite of open mutinies of the mind and declared revolts of the heart, salvation remained the triumphant standard of discrimination by which the elements of mediaeval life were to be esteemed or rejected. What then were these elements to which this standard, or deflections from it, should apply? How specify their mediaeval guise and character? It would be possible to pass in review synoptically the contents of this work. We might return, and then once more travel hitherward over the mediaeval path, the many paths and byways of mediaeval life. We might follow and again see applied--or unapplied--these standards of discrimination, salvation over all, and the deviations of pretended acquiescence or subconscious departure. We might perhaps make one final attempt to draw the currents of mediaeval life together, or observe the angles of their divergence, and note once more the disparity of taste and interest making so motley the mediaeval picture. But this has been done so excellently, in colours of life, and presented in the person of a man in whom mediaeval thought and feeling were whole, organic, living--an achievement by the Artist moving the antecedent scheme of things which made this man Dante what he was. We shall find in him the conflict, the silent departures, and the reconcilement at last of recalcitrant elements brought within salvation as the standard of universal discrimination. Dante accomplishes this reconcilement in personal yet full mediaeval manner by transmuting the material to the spiritual, the mortal to the eternal, through the instrumentality of symbolism. He is not merely mediaeval; he is the end of the mediaeval development and the proper issue of the mediaeval genius.

Yes, there is unity throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof. For the elements of mediaeval growth combine in him, demonstrating their congruity by working together in the stature of the full-grown mediaeval man. When the contents of patristic Christianity and the surviving antique culture had been conceived anew, and had been felt as well, and novel forms of sentiment evolved, at last comes Dante to possess the whole, to think it, feel it, visualize its sum, and make of it a poem. He had mastered the field of mediaeval knowledge, diligently cultivating parts of it, like the Graeco-Arabian astronomy; he thought and reasoned in the terms and assumptions of scholastic (chiefly Thomist-Aristotelian) philosophy; his intellectual interests were mediaeval; he felt the mediaeval reverence for the past, being impassioned with the ancient greatness of Rome and the lineage of virtue and authority moving from it to him and thirteenth-century Italy and the already shattered Holy Roman Empire. He took earnest joy in the Latin Classics, approaching them from mediaeval points of view, accepting their contents uncritically. He was affected with the preciosity of courtly or chivalric love, which Italy had made her own along with the songs of the Troubadours and the poetry of northern France. His emotions flowed in channels of current convention, save that they overfilled them; this was true as to his early love, and true as to his final range of religious and poetic feeling. His was the emotion and the cruelty of mediaeval religious conviction; while in his mind (so worked the genius of symbolism) every fact’s apparent meaning was clothed with the significance of other modes of truth.

Dante was also an Italian of the period in which he lived; and he was a marvellous poet. One may note in him what was mediaeval, what was specifically Italian, and what, apparently, was personal. This scholar could not but draw his education, his views of life and death, his dominant inclinations and the large currents of his purpose, from the antecedent mediaeval period and the still greater past which had worked upon it so mightily. His Italian nature and environment gave point and piquancy and very concrete life to these mediaeval elements; and his personal genius produced from it all a supreme poetic creation.

The Italian part of Dante comes between the mediaeval and the personal, as species comes between the genus and the individual. The tremendous feeling which he discloses for the Roman past seems, in him, specifically Italian: child of Italy, he holds himself a Latin and a direct heir of the Republic. Yet often his attitude toward the antique will be that of mediaeval men in general, as in his disposition to accept ancient myth for fact; while his own genius appears in his beautifully apt appropriation of the Virgilian incident or image; wherein he excels his “Mantuan” master, whose borrowings from Homer were not always felicitous. Frequently the specifically Italian in Dante, his yearning hate of Florence, for example, may scarcely be distinguished from his personal temper; but its civic bitterness is different from the feudal animosities or promiscuous rages which were more generically mediaeval. As a lighter example, there are three lines in the fourth canto of the _Purgatorio_ which do not reflect the Middle Ages, nor yet pertain to Dante’s character, but are, we feel, Italian. They are these: “Thither we drew; and there were persons who were staying in the shadow behind the rock, as one through indolence sets himself to stay.”

Again, Dante’s arguments in the _De monarchia_[672] seem to be those of an Italian Ghibelline. Yet beyond his intense realization of Italy’s direct succession to the Roman past, his reasoning is scholastic and mediaeval, or springs occasionally from his own reflections. The Italian contribution to the book tends to coalesce either with the general or the personal elements. Dante argues that the rewards or fruits of virtue belonged to the Roman people because of the pre-eminent virtue, high lineage, and royal marriage-connections, of their ancestor Aeneas.[673] Here, of course, the statements of Virgil are accepted literally, and one notes that while the argument is mediaeval in its absurdity, it will be made Italian in its application. Likewise his further arguments making for the same conclusion, however Italianized in their pointing, are mediaeval, or patristic, in their provenance: for example, that the Roman Empire was divinely helped by miracles; that the divine arbitrament decided the world-struggle or _duellum_ in its favour; and that Christ was born and suffered legally to redeem mankind under the Empire’s authority and jurisdiction.[674] Moreover, in refuting the very mediaeval papal arguments from “the keys,” from “the two swords,” and from the analogy of the sun and moon, Dante himself reasons scholastically.[675]

The _De vulgari eloquentia_ illustrates the difference between Dante accepting and reproducing mediaeval views, and Dante thinking for himself. In opening he speaks of mixing the stronger potions of others with the water of his own talent, to make a beverage of sweetest hydromel--we have heard such phrases before! Then the first chapters give the current ideas touching the nature and origin of speech, and describe the confusion of language at the building of Babel: each group of workmen engaged in the same sort of work found themselves speaking a new tongue understood only by themselves; while the sacred Hebrew speech endured with that seed of Shem who had taken no part in the impious construction. After this foolishness, the eighth chapter of Book I. becomes startlingly intelligent as Dante discusses the contemporary Romance tongues of Europe and takes up the _idioma_ which uses the particle _si_. Out of its many dialects he detaches his thought of a _volgare_, a mother tongue, which shall be the illustrious, noble, and courtly speech in Latium, and shall seem to be of every Latian city and yet of none, and afford a standard by which the speech of each city may be criticized. The mediaeval period offers no such penetrating linguistic observation; and in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, as in the _Convito_, Dante is deeply conscious of the worth of the Romance vernacular.

Written in the _volgare_, the style of the latter nondescript work bears curious likeness to scientific Latin writing. The Latin scholastic thought shows plainly through this involved and scholastic _volgare_, while the scholastic substance is rendered in a scarcely altered medium. The _Convito_ is indeed a curious work which one need not lament that Dante did not carry out to its mediaeval interminableness in fourteen books. The four that he wrote suffice to show its futility and apparent confusion in conception and form. Besides incidentally explaining the thought of the idyllic _Vita nuova_, it professed to be a commentary upon fourteen of Dante’s canzone, the meaning of which had been misunderstood. Indeed they had been suspected of disclosing a passion bearing a morganatic relationship to the love of Beatrice. Truly understood they referred to that love which is the love of knowledge, philosophy to wit; and their commentary should expound that, and might properly set forth the contents of the Seven Liberal Arts and the higher divine reaches of knowledge. The _Convito_ seems also to mark a stage in Dante’s life: the time perhaps when he turned, or imagined himself as turning, to philosophy for consolation in youthful grief, or the time perhaps when his nature looked coldly upon its early faith and sought to stay itself with rational knowledge. The book might thus seem a _De consolatione philosophiae_, after the temper, if not the manner, of Boëthius’ work, which then was much in Dante’s mind. Yet it was to be a setting forth of knowledge for the ignorant, a sort of _Summa contra Gentiles_, as is hinted in the last completed chapter. These three purposes fall in with the fact that the work was apparently the expression of Dante’s intellectual nature, and of his spiritual condition between the experience of the _Vita nuova_ and the time or state of the _Commedia_.[676]

Certainly the _Convito_ gives evidence touching the writer’s mental processes and the interests of his mind. Except for its lofty advocacy of the _volgare_ and its personal apologetic references, it contains little that is not blankly mediaeval. And had it kept on to its completion, so as to have become no torso, but a full _Summa_ or _Tesoro_ of liberal knowledge, its whimsical form as a commentary upon canzone would have made it one of the most bizarre of mediaeval compositions. One should not take this most repellent of Dante’s writings as an adequate expression of the intellectual side of his nature; though a significant phrase may be drawn from it: “Philosophy is a loving use of wisdom (_uno amoroso uso di sapienza_) which chiefly is in God, since in Him is utmost wisdom, utmost love, and utmost actuality.”[677] A loving use of wisdom--with Dante the pursuit of knowledge was no mere intellectual search, but a pilgrimage of the whole nature, loving heart as well as knowing mind, and the working virtues too. This pilgrimage is set forth in the _Commedia_, perhaps the supreme creation of the Middle Ages, and a work that by reason of the beautiful affinity of its speech with Latin,[678] exquisitely expressed the matters which in Latin had been coming to formulation through the mediaeval centuries.

The _Commedia_ (_Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_) is a _Summa_, a _Summa salvationis_, a sum of saving knowledge. It is such just as surely as the final work of Aquinas is a _Summa theologiae_. But Aquinas was the supreme mediaeval theologian-philosopher, while Dante was the supreme theologian-poet; and with both Aquinas and Dante, theology includes the knowledge of all things, but chiefly of man in relation to God. Such was the matter of the _divina scientia_ of Thomas, and such was the subject of the _Commedia_, which was soon recognized as the _Divina Commedia_ in the very sense in which Theology was the divine science. The _Summa_ of Thomas was _scientia_ not only in substance, but in form; the _Commedia_ was _scientia_, or _sapientia_, in substance, while in form it was a poem, the epic of man the pilgrim of salvation. In every sense, Aristotelian and otherwise, it was a work of art; and herein if we cannot compare it with a _Summa_, we may certainly liken it to a Cathedral, which also was a work of art and a _Summa salvationis_ wrought in stone. For a Cathedral--it is the great French type we have in mind--was a _Summa_ of saving knowledge, as well as a place for saving acts. And presenting the substance of knowledge in the forms of art, very true art, the matter of which had long been pondered on and loved or hated, the Cathedral in its feeling and beauty, as well as in the order of its manifested thought, was a _Commedia_; for it too was a poem with a happy ending, at least for those who should be saved.

The Cathedral had grown from dumb barrel-vaulted Romanesque to Gothic, speaking in all the terms of sculpture and painted glass. It grew out of its antecedents. The _Commedia_ rested upon the entire evolution of the Middle Ages. Therein had lain its spiritual preparation. To be sure it had its casual forerunners (_precursori_): narratives, real or feigned, of men faring to the regions of the dead.[679] But these signified little; for everywhere thoughts of the other life pressed upon men’s minds: fear of it blanched their hearts; its heavenly or hellish messengers had been seen, and not a few men dreamed that they had walked within those gates and witnessed clanging horrors or purgatorial pain. Heaven they had more rarely visited.

Dante gave little attention to any so-called “forerunners,” save only two, Paul and Virgil. The former was a warrant for the poet’s reticence as to the manner of his ascent to Heaven;[680] the latter supplied much of his scheme of Hell. Yet there were one or two others possessed of some affinity of soul with the great Florentine, who perhaps knew nothing of them. One of these was Hildegard of Bingen, with her vision of the spirits in the cloud, and her pungent sights of the bitterness of the pains of hell.[681] Another sort of affinity is disclosed in the allegorical _Anticlaudianus_ of Alanus de Insulis, in which Reason can take _Prudentia_ just so far upon her heavenly journey, and then gives place to Theology, even as Virgil, symbol of rational wisdom, gives place to Beatrice at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.[682] Dante might have drawn still more enlightenment from the _De sacramentis_ of Hugo of St. Victor, in which the rational basis of the universal scheme of things is shown to lie in the principle of allegorical intendment. Yet one finds few traces of Hugo in Dante except through Hugo’s pupil, Richard, whose works he had read. That such apt forerunners should scarcely have affected him shows how he was taught and inspired, not by individuals, but by the entire Middle Ages.

One observes mediaeval characteristics in the _Commedia_ raised to a higher power. The mediaeval period was marked by contrasts of quality and of conduct such as cannot be found in the antique or the modern age. And what other poem can vie with the _Commedia_ in contrasts of the beautiful and the loathsome, the heavenly and the hellish, exquisite refinement of expression and lapses into the reverse,[683] love and hate, pity and cruelty, reverence and disdain? These contrasts not only are presented by the story; they evince themselves in the character of the author. Many scenes of the _Inferno_ are loathsome:[684] Dante’s own words and conduct there may be cruel and hateful[685] or show tender pity; and every reader knows the poetic beauty which glorifies the _Paradiso_, renders lovely the _Purgatorio_, and ever and anon breaks through the gloom of Hell.

Another mediaeval quality, sublimated in Dante’s poem, is that of elaborate plan, intended symmetry of composition, the balance of one incident or subject against another.[686] And finally one observes the mediaeval inclusiveness which belongs to the scope and purpose of the _Commedia_ as a _Summa_ of salvation. Dante brings in everything that can illuminate and fill out his theme. Even as the _Summa_ of St. Thomas, so the _Commedia_ must present a whole doctrinal scheme of salvation, and leave no loopholes, loose ends, broken links of argument or explanation.

The substance of the _Commedia_, practically its whole content of thought, opinion, sentiment, had source in the mediaeval store of antique culture and the partly affiliated, if not partly derivative, Latin Christianity. The mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and of the contents of ancient philosophy, is not to be so very sharply distinguished from the attitude of the fifteenth or sixteenth, nay, if one will, the eighteenth, century, when the _Federalist_ in the young inchoately United States, and many an orator in the revolutionary assemblies of France, quoted Cicero and Plutarch as arbiters of civic expediency. Nevertheless, if we choose to recognize deference to ancient opinion, acceptance of antique myth and poetry as fact,[687] unbounded admiration for a shadowy and much distorted ancient world, as characterizing the mediaeval attitude toward whatever once belonged to Rome and Greece, then we must say that such also is Dante’s attitude, scholar as he was;[688] and that in his use of the Classics he differed from other mediaeval men only in so far as above them all he was a poet.

Lines of illustrative examples begin with the opening canto of the _Inferno_, where Dante addresses Virgil as _famoso saggio_, an appellative strictly corresponding with the current mediaeval view of the “Mantuan.” Mediaeval also is the grouping of the great poets who rise to meet Virgil, first Homer, then _Orazio satiro_, and Ovid and Lucan.[689] More narrowly mediaeval, that is, pertaining particularly to the thirteenth century, is Dante’s profound reverence for the authority of Aristotle, _il maestro di color che sanno_.[690] It may be that the poet’s sense of the enormous, _elect_, importance of Aeneas,[691] and his putting Rhipeus, most righteous of the Trojans, as the fifth regal spirit in the Eagle’s eye,[692] belonged more especially to Dante as the Ghibelline author of the _De monarchia_. But generically mediaeval was his acceptance of antique myth for fact, a most curious instance of which is his referring to the consuming of Meleager with the consuming of the brand, to illustrate a point of physiological psychology.[693] Antique heroes, even monsters, seem as real to him as the people of Scripture and history. It is not, however, his mediaevalism, but his own greatness that enables him to lift his treatment of them to the level of their presentation in the Classics. Noble as an antique demigod is the damned Jason, silent and tearless, among the scourged;[694] and Ulysses is as great in the tale he tells from out the lambent flame as he was in the palace of Alcinoos, telling the tale which Dante never read.[695]

The poet, especially in the _Purgatorio_, constantly balances moral examples alternately drawn from pagan and sacred story. This propensity was quite mediaeval; for throughout the Middle Ages the antique authority was used to fortify or parallel the Christian argument. Yet herein, as always, Dante is Dante as well as a mediaeval man; and his moral examples, for the aid of souls who are purging themselves for Heaven, are interesting and curious enough. On the pavement of the first ledge of Purgatory, Lucifer is figured falling from Heaven and Briareus transfixed by the bolt of Jove; then Nimrod, Niobe, Saul, Arachne, Rehoboam, Eriphyle and Sennacherib, the Assyrians routed after Holophernes’ death, and Troy in ashes.[696] On the third ledge, as instances of gentle forgivingness, he sees in vision the Virgin Mary, and then appear Peisistratus (tyrant of Athens) refusing to avenge himself, and Stephen asking pardon for his slayers.[697] But the most wonderful instance of this combining of the Christian and the antique, each at its height of feeling, occurs in the thirtieth canto of the _Purgatorio_, where angels herald the appearance of Beatrice with the chant, _Benedictus qui venis_, and, as they scatter flowers, sing _Manibus o date lilia plenis_. This unison of the hail to Christ upon His sacrificial entry into Jerusalem and the Virgilian heartbreak over the young Marcellus, shows how Dante rose in his combinings, and how potent an element of his imagination was the antique.[698]

Of course the plan of Hell reflects the sixth Book of the _Aeneid_, and throughout the whole _Commedia_ the Virgilian phrase rises aptly to the poet’s lips. “Thou wouldst that I renew the desperate grief which presses my heart even before I put it into words,” says Ugolino, nearly as Aeneas speaks to Dido.[699] And in the _Paradiso_ the power of the Dantesque reminiscence rouses the reader, spiritually as it were, to emulate the glorious ones who passed to Colchos.[700] A more desperate passage was the lot of those who must drop from Acheron’s bank into Charon’s boat;--the whole scene here is quite reminiscent of Virgil. The simile:

“Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo
Lapsa cadunt folia,”

is even beautified and made more pregnant with significance in Dante’s

“Come d’autunno si levan le foglie
L’una appresso dell’altra....”[701]

On the other hand, the threefold attempt of Aeneas to embrace Anchises is stripped of its beautiful dream-simile in Dante’s use.[702] A lovelier bit of borrowing is that of the quick springing up again of the rush, the symbol of humility, _l’umile pianta_, with which the poet is girt before proceeding up the Mount of Purgatory.[703]

With Dante the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters symbolized, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.[704] We may be jarred by the apostrophe:

“... O sommo Giove,
Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso.”[705]

But this is a kind of Christian-antique phrase by no means unexampled in mediaeval poetry. And we feel the poetic breadth and beauty of the invocation in which Apollo symbolizes or represents, exactly what we will not presume to say, but at all events some veritable spiritual power, as Minerva does, apparently, in another passage.[706] In such instances the antique image which beautifies the poem is transfigured to a Christian symbol, if it does not present actual truth.

Yet however universally Dante’s mind was solicited by the antique matter and his poet’s nature charmed, he was profoundly and mediaevally Christian. The _Commedia_ is a mediaeval Christian poem. Its fabric, springing from the life of earth, enfolds the threefold quasi-other world of damned, of purging, and of finally purified, spirits. It is dramatic and doctrinal. Its drama of action and suffering, like the narratives of Scripture, offers literal fact, moral teaching, and allegorical or spiritual significance. The doctrinal contents are held partly within the poem’s dramatic action and partly in expositions which are not fused in the drama. Thus whatever else it is, the poem is a _Summa_ of saving doctrine, which is driven home by illustrations of the sovereign good and abysmal ill coming to man under the providence of God. One may perhaps discern a twofold purpose in it, since the poet works out his own salvation and gives precepts and examples to aid others and help truth and righteousness on earth. The subject is man as rewarded or punished eternally by God--says Dante in the letter to Can Grande. This subject could hardly be conceived as veritable, and still less could it be executed, by a poet who had no care for the effect of his poem upon men. Dante had such care. But whether he, who was first and always a poet, wrote the _Commedia_ in order to lift others out of error to salvation, or even in order to work out his own salvation,--let him say who knows the mind of Dante. No divination, however, is required to trace the course of the saving teaching, which, whether dramatically exemplified or expounded in doctrinal statement, is embodied in the great poem; nor is it hard to note how Dante drew its substance from the mediaeval past.

The _Inferno_, which is the most dramatic and realistic, “Dantesque,” part of the _Commedia_, and replete with terrestrial interest, is doctrinally the least rich. Its doctrine chiefly lies in its scheme of punishment, or divine vengeance, for different sins. Herein Dante followed no set series like the seven deadly sins expiated in Purgatory. Neither the Church nor authoritative writers had laid out the plan of Hell. Dante had in mind Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, also Cicero’s _De officiis_,[707] and, structurally, Virgil. His scheme also was affected by his own character, situation, and aversions, and assuredly by the movement of its own composition. At the mouth of Hell the worthless nameless ones and the neutral angels receive their due. Then after the sad calm of the place of the unbaptized and the great blameless heathen, the veritable Hell begins, and the series of tortures unfold, the lightest being such as punish incontinence, while the most awful are reserved for those fraudulent ones who have betrayed a trust. Dante’s power of presenting the humanly loathsome does not let the progress of hellish torment fail in climax even to the end, where Brutus, Cassius, and Judas are crunched in the dripping mouths of Lucifer at the bottom of the lowest pit of Hell.

The general idea of hell torments came to the poet from current beliefs and authoritative utterances, ranging from the “outer darkness” of the Gospel to the lurid oratory of St. Bernard. Dante’s thoughts were drawn generically from the stores of mediaeval convictions, approvals, and imaginings: they were given to him by his epoch. Of necessity--innocently, one may say--he made them into concrete realities because he was Dante. Terrifying phrases and crude ghastliness were raised through his dramatic power to living experiences. The reader goes through Hell, sees with his own eyes, hears with his own ears, and stifles in the choking air. Doubtless the narrative brought fear and contrition to the men of Dante’s time. But for us the disproportion of the vengeance to the crime, the outrage of everlasting torments for momentary, even impulsive sin, is shocking and preposterous.[708] The torments themselves present conditions which become unthinkable when we try to conceive them as enduring eternally. Human flesh, or implicated spirit could not last beneath them. And as for our impulses, there is many a tortured soul with whom we would keep company, for instance, with the excellent band of Sodomites--Priscian (!) Brunetto Latini, and those three Florentines whose “honoured names” the poet greets with reverence and affection.[709] One might even wish to make a third in the flame which enwraps Diomede and Ulysses. In fact, Dante’s dramatic genius has brought the mediaeval hell to a _reductio ad absurdum_, to our minds.

The poet is of it too. He can pity those who touch his pity. And how great he can be, how absolute. There is compacted in the story of Francesca all that can be thought or felt over unhappy love. Yet Dante never doubts the justice of the punishment he describes; sometimes he calmly or cruelly approves. _Nel mio bel San Giovanni!_ How many thousands have quoted these detached words to show the poet’s love of his beautiful baptistery. But, in fact, he refers to the little cylindrical places where stood the baptizing priests, in order to bring home to the reader the size of the holes in the burning rock from which protruded the quivering feet of Simoniacs![710] It appears that the souls of all the damned will suffer more when they shall again be joined to their bodies after the resurrection.[711]

The _Inferno_ fully exemplifies the doctrinal statement obscurely set over the gate which shut out hope: moved by justice, the Trinity, “divine power, supreme wisdom, primal love, created me (Hell) to endure eternally.” Dante follows this current authoritative opinion, stated by Aquinas. Here one may repeat that Dante is the child of the Middle Ages, rather than a disciple of any single teacher. If he follows Aquinas more than any other scholastic, he follows Bonaventura also with breadth and balance. These two, however, were themselves final results of lines of previous development. Both were rational and also mystically contemplative, though the former quality predominates in Thomas and the latter in Bonaventura. And in Dante’s poem, at the end of the _Paradiso_, Theology, the rational apprehension of divine truth, gives place to contemplation’s loftier insight. Dante is kin to both these men; but when he thinks, more frequently he thinks like Thomas, and the intellectual realization of life is dominant with him. This was evident in the _Convito_; and that the intellectual vision constitutes the substance of the _Commedia_, becomes luminously apparent in the _Paradiso_.[712] It is even suggested at the gate of Hell, within which the wretched people will be seen, who have lost the good of the Intellect,[713] by which is meant knowledge of God.

The _Purgatorio_ presents more saving doctrine than the cantica of damnation. Its Mount with the earthly paradise at the top, may have been his own, but might have been taken from the Venerable Bede or Albertus Magnus.[714] The ante-purgatory appears as a creation of the poet, influenced by certain passages of the _Aeneid_ and by ancient disciplinary practices which kept the penitents waiting outside the church.[715] The teaching of the whole cantica relates to the purgation of pride, envy, anger, _accidia_ (sloth), avarice, gluttony, lust. These are the seven deadly sins whose _provenance_ is early monasticism.[716] Through their purgation man is made pure and fit to mount to the stars.

We shall not follow Dante through the _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, or observe in detail the teachings set forth and the sources whence they were derived.[717] But a brief reference to the successive incidents and topics of instruction will show how the _Commedia_ touches every key of saving doctrine. The soul entering Purgatory goes seeking liberty from sin,[718] and as a first lesson learns to detach itself from memories of the damned.[719] It receives some slight suggestion of the limits of human reason;[720] and is told that according to the correct teaching there is one soul in man with several faculties.[721] It learns the risk of repentance in the hour of death;[722] and the efficacy of the prayers of others to help souls through their purifying expiation; also, that, after death, souls can advance only by the aid of grace.[723] The symbolism of the gate of Purgatory teaches the need of contrition and confession. Upon the first ledge, the proud do penance, disciplined with examples of humility, and through the Lord’s Prayer are taught man’s entire dependence upon God. It is fitting that Pride should be the first sin expiated, since it lies at the base of all sins in the Christian scheme. Much doctrine is inculcated by the treatment of the different sins and the appositeness of the hymns sung by the penitents.[724]

Ascending the second ledge, Virgil, _i.e._ human reason, expounds the first principles of the doctrine of that love which is of the Good.[725] Next is set forth the theory of human free-will and the effect of the spheres in directing human inclination--all in strict accord with the teaching of Thomas;[726] and then, still in accord with Thomas, the fuller nature of love (or desire) is expounded, and the allotment of purgatorial pains in expiation of the various modes of evil desire or failure to love aright.[727] These fitting pains are as a solace to the soul yearning to accomplish its purgation.[728] Next, generation is explained, the creation of the soul, and the manner of its existence after separation from the body, according to dominant scholastic theories.[729] In the concluding cantos of the _Purgatorio_, much Church doctrine is symbolically set forth by the Mystic Procession and the rivers of the earthly paradise, Lethe and Eunoe--the latter representing sacramental grace through which good works, killed by later sins, are made to live again.[730] The earthly paradise symbolizes the perfect happiness of life in the flesh, and the state wherein man is fit to pass to the heavenly Paradise.

Besides doctrine directly bearing on Salvation, the _Commedia_ contains explanations by the way, needed to understand Dante’s journey through the earth and heavens, and give it verisimilitude. Apparently these explanations were also intended to afford a sufficient knowledge of the structure of the universe. The _Paradiso_ abounds in this kind of information, largely physical and astronomical. Its first canto offers a general statement, beautifully put, of the ordering of created things. In this instance, the instruction is not exclusively astronomical or physical,[731] but touches upon animated creatures, and follows Thomist teaching. Another interesting instance is the explanation in the second canto of the spots on the moon and then of the influence of the heavens. Here the astronomical matter runs on into elucidations touching human nature, even that human nature which is to be saved through saving doctrine. In this way the Christian-Thomist-Dantesque scheme of knowledge holds together. The _Commedia_ is the pilgrimage of the soul after all wisdom, and includes, implicitly at least, the matter of the _Convito_.

The _Paradiso_ contains the chief store of saving knowledge. It sets forth the ultimate problems of human life and divine salvation, with due emphasis laid upon the limitations of human understanding. Dante, conscious of the strenuousness of his high argument, warns off all but the chosen few.

A first point learned in the heavenly voyage is that no soul in Paradise desires aught save what it has; since such desire would contravene the will of God. Paradise is everywhere in Heaven, though the divine grace rains not upon all in one mode.[732] Beatified souls do not dwell in any particular star, though Plato seems to say so. Scripture condescends to figure the intelligible under the guise of sensible forms, as Plato may have done.[733] Broken vows and their reparation are now considered. Then the history of the Roman Eagle brings out the fact that Christ was crucified under Tiberius and His death avenged by Titus, which leads on to the explanation of the Fall and the Redemption, occupying the seventh canto. The next offers comment upon the divine goodness and the diversity of human lots; and shows how the bitter may rise from the sweet. With deep consistency the poet exclaims against the insensate toilsome reasonings through which mortals beat their wings downward, away from God.[734]

In canto thirteen the reader is enlightened regarding the wisdom of Adam, of Solomon, and of Christ; and then as to the existence of the beatified soul before and after it is clothed with the glorified body of the Resurrection.[735] Incidentally the justice of eternal punishment is adverted to.[736] The depth of the divine righteousness is next presented,[737] and its application to the heathen, with illustrations of God’s saving ways, in the instances of certain princes who loved righteousness, including Trajan and the Trojan Rhipeus.[738] The incomprehensibility of Predestination next receives attention.

Now intervenes the marvellous and illuminative beauty of canto twenty-three, preceding Dante’s declaration of his creed, upon interrogatories from the apostles, Peter, James, and John. In this way he states the dogmatic fundamentals of the Christian Faith, and the substantiating rôles of philosophic argument and authority.[739] After this, the vision of the hierarchies of angels leads on to discourse upon their creation and nature, the immediate fall of those who fell, the exaltation of the steadfast with added grace, and the mode and measure of their knowledge. Thomas is followed in this scholastic argument.

With the vision of the Rose, rational theology gives place to mystic contemplation;[740] and further visions of the divine ordering precede the prayer to the Virgin, with which the last canto opens--that prayer so beautiful and so expressive of mediaeval thought and feeling as to the most kind and blessed Lady of Heaven. This prayer or hymn is made of phrases which the mediaeval mind and heart had been recasting and perfecting for centuries. It is almost a great _cento_, like the _Dies Irae_. After the Lady’s answering benediction, there comes to Dante, in grace, the final mystic vision of the Trinity, enfolding all existence--substance, accidents and their modes, bound with love in one volume. Supreme dogmatic truth is set forth, and the furthest strainings of reason are stilled in supersensual and super-rational vision, which satisfies all intellectual desire. This vision, vouchsafed through the Virgin’s grace, assures the pilgrim soul: the goal is reached alike of knowledge and salvation.