Volume 1 — III.

Taking, therefore, this comprehensive view of the state of society; considering the triumph of the Christian idea in history, the consciousness of Christianity as the principle of life in the newly-organized world, and the struggle of this element to mould and fashion everything according to its nature, we may easily answer the question as to the character of a poem which should thoroughly express the spirit of the age. It would not be hard to show that the Divine Comedy of Dante derived its matter, its form, its name, and its sentiment from the peculiar condition of the epoch. In fact, any poem that represents, the conquest of the Christian idea in all conditions of private and public life must ever exercise great influence over men. But in order to give a poetical representation of this thought, the poet should choose a framework sufficiently large to contain the vast picture in which God and man, heaven and earth, nature and grace, creation and redemption, past, present, and future, science and life, church and state, appear; and such a framework was offered to him in the Christian idea of the judgment, of God, and of the existence of the other world, in its three divisions of hell, purgatory, and paradise.

Now, only by carrying up ordinary facts to this higher, ideal sphere was it possible to overleap the limits of time and space, and give greater unity to the picture, and make it a masterpiece. But he who lives here below is ignorant of the future, and of the condition of the departed souls. Only by a supernatural revelation can we know their lot. Consequently, the form of a wonderful vision, in which the poet enters into communion with the spirits of the dead, and wanders through their regions, is the most natural manner of representing his idea in the poem; consequently, it should be called by right a "divine drama," a Divina Commedia, as the most appropriate title.

The true scope of the poem, therefore, must not be sought for either in a purely religious, or a purely political, or a purely scientific or personal point of view; but in the prosecution of a far more general, comprehensive, higher, philosophic, theological, and particularly moral or ethical object, to which all the details of the work are subordinated. Hence, he who examines these details from this or that stand-point may give them the most different explanations, as in fact many commentators of the poem do—not having fathomed its depths and perceived the general object of the sacred epic.

Dante himself leaves us no reason to doubt on this point. In his dedicatory epistle to Cardinal Grande della Scala, he speaks thus: "The meaning of this poem is not simple, but multiple. The first sense is in the words, the second in the things expressed: the one is called literal, the other moral or allegorical. Taken literally, the whole work is simple, and expresses the condition of souls after death, for this is expressed by the whole tenor of the poem. But taken in the higher sense, its object is man, either deserving rewards or chastisements through the exercise of his free will. And if we wish to name the kind of philosophy contained in the work, we must call it moral, or ethics. For the whole tends to practice and action, and is not content with simple contemplation and speculation."

Giacomo di Dante, the son of the poet, develops more clearly the scope of the work, in the preface to his {275} commentary. "The whole work," says he, "is divided into three parts; the first of which treats of hell, the second of purgatory, and the third of paradise. In order to understand the general allegorical bearing, I say that the object of the poet is to represent to us in figurative language the three several divisions of mankind. The first part considers vice in man, and is called hell, to show us that mortal sin by its depth of iniquity is directly opposed to the sublimity of virtue. The second contemplates those who detach themselves from vice and strive after virtue. His place for such persons he calls purgatory, or place of purification, to show the condition of the soul, which cleanses itself from its sins in time, for time is the medium in which all changes happen. The third considers perfect man, and is called paradise, in order to express the greatness of its bliss, and the elevation of mind connected with it; two things without which a knowledge of the supreme good cannot be attained. And thus the poet pursues his object through the three several parts of his poem by means of the figures and representations with which he surrounds himself."

But the poet, in order to realize his grand idea, should be gifted not only with the highest poetical genius in order to represent the philosophical principles of Christianity in the peculiar characters and types of Christian art, and give them a new, independent, and majestic appearance; but he should be also possessed, on the one hand, of a clear and perfect knowledge of Christian doctrine and ethics, and a deep and extensive knowledge of philosophy and theology; and, on the other, of a profound and extensive acquaintance with men and human life, as well as with the history of the human race. Both these requisites are found in Dante in the highest degree. Christian faith and morality is as well and correctly explained by him as by the best approved theologians. But this fact will not excite our surprise if we consider that, in his Vision, without however sacrificing his individuality, he adheres strictly to the great doctors of the age, Saints Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, as King John of Saxony clearly proves in his commentary on the Divine Comedy.

Hence, at an early period Dante's work became a favorite theme of scholastic study, and under the portal of the cathedral at Florence there is seen an old statue of the poet near that of the patron saint of the city, with this inscription: Theologus Dante, nullius dogmatis expers—"Dante the theologian, to whom no dogma was unknown." In the Raphael chamber in the Vatican, he is represented crowned with laurel on the famous painting of the disputa, among the popes, bishops, and doctors assembled round the holy sacrament of the altar.

An occasional writer has suspected the faith of Dante, because in his poem he deplores several abuses in the Church, such as the corruption of some of the clergy and monks, and lashes some of the popes and the relation of the papacy to the secular power in his time. But such a suspicion is unwarranted when we consider that many Catholic reformers, even saints like Peter Damien, Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Saint Bernard, Saint Hildegard, Jacopone, and others, have spoken even more strongly than Dante against abuses; and that he never confounds the use with the abuse, excrescences of an institution with the institution itself, or persons with principles.

Dante's thorough knowledge of human life and of history is fully shown in his surprising explanations, and by the manner in which with one trait he paints the famous characters and facts in the Commedia, as well as by the examples and narrations which he takes from all times, regions, and nations of the earth. But in his judgment of persons and facts in the past and present, Dante is not always impartial or just, for, being {276} subject to human frailties and prejudices, he is often guilty of great injustice to those against whom he had motives of hatred. Consequently, in order to appreciate Dante's poem on this point, we must consider the character of his life and fortunes, as well as the history of his native city and country.

Dante Alighieri was born at Florence in the year 1265, and received in baptism the name of Durante, which was shortened to that of Dante. Early in his youth an event happened which determined his life, and to which posterity is indebted for his great work. In the year 1274, in the ninth year of his age, Dante saw, at a church festival, the daughter of Falco Portinari, Beatrice, a child eight years old, whom he says, in one of his poems, no one could see without crying out, "This is not a woman, but one of the most beautiful of the heavenly angels!" He conceived for her, on the spot, the most violent passion, but, at the same time, one so pure and holy that Beatrice, even on earth and wedded to another, became for him and his muse a perfect ideal that inspired all his first and tenderest poems, and moved him to high and holy thoughts. But after Beatrice's untimely death, she became, in the imagination of the poet, a holy spirit, whose glory he undertook to exalt after a wonderful vision which he had, and who became, in all the sorrows of his life, a star of hope and anchor of safety to him. A few years after the decease of his beloved, Dante espoused Gemma di Donati, a lady of a noble family in Florence, and through this marriage, as well as by his profound theological and philosophical studies, he was drawn into the vortex of the politics of his native city, in which, after many struggles, the Guelph party gained the ascendency, toward the end of the thirteenth century.

Sprung from a Guelph family and surrounded by Guelph influences, and prominent by his genius in the party, although keeping clear of its excesses, Dante, from 1293 to 1299, filled many posts of honor, especially many places of ambassador, and was elected, with five others, in the year 1300, to the priorate, the highest office in the republic. But soon after his prosperous career was changed to one of misfortune. In 1292 a division was made in the Guelph party, when, under the tribune Giano della Bella, the constitution of the state was changed, the nobles driven from the magistracy, and the government of the city given entirely into the hands of the plebeians; and this division led gradually to an open rupture between the parties called the Blacks and the Whites "Neri" and "Bianchi." The latter were by far the more moderate, and the Ghibellines, both nobles and plebeians, joined them. Dante belonged to the Whites, who stood at the head of affairs. But by the interference of Charles of Valois, whom the Blacks called to Florence in order to seize the government with his aid, the Whites lost their power, and Dante, who was then on an embassy to Rome, together with the other chiefs of the party, was exiled by a decree, which was repealed in the year 1302.

This trial was important in two ways to our poet. It excited his hatred against one party of the Guelphs, and then against them all; and evoked his inclination for the Ghibellines and his dislike toward the popes, who gave assistance to the Guelph party, and finally made him a strong partisan of the Ghibellines and their operations against Florence, and of the empire against the papacy. On the other hand, he became, by his misfortunes, more devoted to virtue, his studies, and his poem, from the prosecution of which he had been distracted by political cares; so that the whole history of his exile is nothing else than the history of his scientific life and the execution of the Divine Comedy. After having wandered from city to city, from country to country, to Verona, Bologna, Padua, Paris, and England, and dwelt for a time in Pisa, and in {277} Lucca at the monastery of Fonteavelluna and in Udine, and after having finished his great works—"The Banquet," "De Vulgari Eloquio," "De Monarchia"—and the three parts of his great poem, he rested at last in Ravenna, where, in the year 1321, he fell sick and died, in the 56th year of his age, after having received, as Boccacio tells us, the last sacraments with humility and piety, and become reconciled to God by true repentance for all he had done contrary to his holy will. The poet was buried in the Franciscan church, where his ashes still repose.

This sketch of his life and fortunes gives us the key to the solution of many peculiarities of the Divine Comedy. We can now understand why politics play so conspicuous a rôle in the great poem, in spite of its higher philosophico-theological and ethical scope; and why some should have considered the work as of a purely political character. This sketch of his life also shows the partial truth contained in the assertion of Wegele, a German commentator on Dante. This writer says the leading thought of the poet was to work out his own salvation by considering the state of the world at his time; and in fact Dante found consolation and strength against earthly misfortune, found the way of virtue and eternal salvation, in the execution of his poem. For similar reasons, others considered the poem as purely didactic, and this view has a foundation in the confession of the poet himself.

But above all, the life of Dante explains his ideas about the relations between the papacy and the empire, expressed not only in his book on monarchy, but also in the Divine Comedy; and his strange judgments about persons and circumstances, especially of his own age. It is true Dante never for a moment disputes the primacy and divine appointment of the popes in the Church; and even in hell he describes those pontiffs whom he condemns to it as having certain distinctions. He maintains in the clearest manner the freedom and independence of the divine power in regard to the secular, and acknowledges a certain superiority in the former, for he requires that Caesar should have that reverence for Peter which the first-born son should have to his father, so that Caesar, illuminated by the light of paternal grace, might shine more brilliantly over the earth. But as Dante was possessed with the Ghibelline idea, and as he saw in the temporal power of the popes, who were the head of the Guelph party, the greatest obstacle to the success of his principles, we must not be surprised to find him the enemy of the pope's temporal power, and, in his judgment of men and things, to see him frequently led away by party rage and revenge for injuries received.

Dante, however, was noble and Christian enough to keep his eyes open even to the faults of his own party, and he spared not even the heads of the Ghibellines, as Frederic II. and other noble and popular persons, if they seemed to him deserving of blame. Nor must we imagine that Dante really thought all those were in hell whom he places there, any more than he thought the real pains of hell were such as he described them: only the vulgar could believe this. Those persons were only such as in his eyes were guilty of mortal sins; and the punishments inflicted were such as his fancy conceived to be adequate to the guilt. But we must bear in mind that his judgments must always be received with caution when there is question of facts, persons, and circumstances connected with the opposite party; and we have the right to examine and correct the criticisms of Dante by the light of history. Dante, for instance, goes so far as to put in hell even Pope Celestine, who, after governing the Church for six months, tired of the tiara, went into solitude; because, in the opinion of the poet, Celestine renounced the pontificate through timidity and weakness, and made way {278} for the hated Boniface, VIII. The Church, on the contrary, puts Celestine among the saints on account of his extraordinary virtues.

But let us now turn from the dark side of the picture, and from the weakness of the great man, to take a view of the fortunes of the Commedia in the course of six centuries. We have already in the beginning of this essay spoken of the great number of editions, translations, and commentaries on the great work, and in this respect no other work can compare with it except the Holy Scripture and the Following of Christ. But these proofs of admiration and study of the Divine Comedy are not equally divided among the centuries, and the recent and renowned writer of Dante's life, Count Caesar Balbo, justly remarks that, at those periods in which an earnest religious and truly patriotic feeling pervaded the fatherland of the poet and Christian Europe in general, those proofs are to be found in greater number than when the knowledge and study of supreme truth had grown less, love of religion and country had died or gone astray, and the minds of men sunk in the earthly and the sensible. Thus, in the fifteenth century, after the invention of the art of printing, nineteen or twenty editions of Dante appeared; in the sixteenth century, forty; in the seventeenth, only three; in the eighteenth, thirty-four; in the nineteenth, up to 1839, over seventy, and perhaps up to the present year one hundred. This is a striking proof of the increasing love of the spiritual in our century, in spite of the great influence of materialism.

But in this age of surprises and contradictions, a new glory of which he had never dreamt has been added to Dante's name. For some time in Italy that political party which aims at the subversion of the existing order of things, and the establishment of a single republic or monarchy, and which finds in the papacy or States of the Church the principal obstacle to the carrying out of its plans, has made use of commentaries on the Divine Comedy, among other means, to spread its principles among the people. Hence, two Italian refugees, Ugo Foscolo and Rosetti, during their sojourn in England, undertook the dreary task of explaining Dante's poem in a purely political point of view, and with learning and wit they have attempted to prove that the poet was opposed to the temporal power of the pope, and the head, or at least a member, of a secret society.

In Italy, however, and in Germany, especially by the great critic, Schlegel, this theory has been refuted. It falls to the ground by the simple consideration of the fact, that if the Divine Comedy was as clear in every point as where he speaks against the popes of his time and their earthly possessions, no commentary on the poem would be necessary. Yet, no sooner was war against Rome proclaimed at Paris and Turin, than recourse was had to Dante, and an attempt made to conjure up his spirit as a partisan in the fight. Rosetti already occupies a chair in the Sardinian capital, from which he expounds Dante in the interest of Italian unity, and in Germany the secret societies applaud his course; so that, if in 1865 there be in Italy a celebration of Dante's six hundredth birthday, as in Germany there is of Schiller, we may expect to find the politicians make use of it to further their ends.

So then we have lived to see the day when Dante, the Ghibelline and fanatical adherent of the German empire; who was opposed to the temporal power of the pope only because it stood in the way of a universal secular monarchy; who invoked the wrath of heaven on the German Albert because he delayed coming to subjugate Italy; and who wrote the famous letter to the Emperor Henry VII., inviting him to come and chastise his native city; when that Dante, I say, has become the herald and standard-bearer of a party which calls itself the old national Guelph party, whose {279} watch-word is "Death to the Germans and foreign rulers," and which, like the ancient Guelphs, is aided by French soldiers in its struggle against the German emperors.

In spite of his Ghibelline proclivities, Dante was filled with lively faith, and he had so great a veneration for the power of the keys entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors that even in hell he bowed with respect before one of those who had borne them, and even in his narration of the arrest and ill-treatment of Boniface VIII., whom he hated and placed in hell, he breaks out into the following strains:

So we have lived to see the day when the author of the above lines is represented as the herald of a party which has treated so shamefully the gentle successor of Boniface VIII., Pius IX., whose only fault was to have opened the prison doors to his enemies, and recalled them from exile with too great indulgence. They have made him drink the chalice of humiliation to the dregs, and, leagued with a French despot, they renew in the Vicar of Christ all the insults heaped of old on the Saviour by the Roman soldiers, when, putting on him the mantle of purple and the crown of thorns, they mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" Dante was no such Christ-killer.

And what folly is it not to imagine Dante, the haughty aristocrat, whose pride of birth shows itself everywhere in his poem, a partisan of a faction which, like that which governed Florence during the middle ages, is made up of the rabble and of levelers, haters of all nobility.

In another age, when it was not the principle of public life to have no principle at all, such contradictions as those of which we write would have been incomprehensible; but in our own century, in which truth wages an unequal conflict with falsehood, not so much because men do not know how to separate truth from falsehood, as because men find truth less useful for their purposes than falsehood, the conduct of the so-called national party in Italy is easily explained. But if Dante were to rise up from the grave, how strongly he would rebuke those who are making such an unwarrantable use of his name! He would quote for them, perhaps, as he does in many parts of his great work, an apt text of the Holy Scriptures; and none, probably, would come sooner to his mind than the following:

"Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?

"The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against his Christ.

"Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us.

"He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them; and the Lord shall deride them. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage."

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