terrible inscription on the infernal portal (_Inf._ iii. 1-9): “Leave
all hope, ye that enter.” The sense of the whole inscription is hard to
him, but Virgil gently leads him in. In the dark plain of Ante-Hell,
disdained alike by Mercy and by Justice, are those “who lived without
blame and without praise,” mingled with the Angels who kept neutral
between God and Lucifer. Here the pusillanimous, who, taking no side
in the struggle between good and evil, would follow no standard on
earth, now rush for all eternity after a banner, “which whirling ran
so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause.” Further on towards the
centre, flowing round the mouth of Hell itself, is Acheron; where the
souls of the lost assemble, and are conveyed across by Charon in his
boat. Unconsciously borne across, Dante with Virgil now stands on the
verge of the abyss, hearkening to the gathering thunder of endless
wailings.
STRUCTURE AND MORAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HELL.--Hell is a vast pit or funnel
piercing down to the centre of the earth, formed when Lucifer and his
Angels were hurled down from Heaven. It lies beneath the inhabited
world, whose centre is Jerusalem and Mount Calvary; its base towards
the surface, and its apex at the centre. It is divided into nine
concentric circles, the lower of which are separated by immense
precipices--circles which grow more narrow in circumference, more
intense and horrible in suffering, until the last is reached where
Lucifer is fixed in the ice at the earth’s centre, at the furthest
point from God, buried below Jerusalem, where his power was overthrown
on the Cross (_cf. Inf._ xxxiv. 106-126).
“There are two elements in sin,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas: “the
conversion to a perishable good, which is the material element in
sin; and the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the formal
and completing element of sin.” In Dante’s Purgatory the material
element is purged away. In his Hell sin is considered mainly on the
side of this formal element, its aversion from the Supreme Good;
and its enormity is revealed in the hideousness of its effects. The
ethical system of the _Inferno_, as set forth in Canto xi., combines
Aristotle’s threefold division of “dispositions” opposed to mortality
into Incontinence, Bestiality, Malice (_Ethics_ vii. 1), with Cicero’s
distinction of the two ways by which injury is done as Violence and
Fraud (_De Officiis_ i. 13). Dante equates the Aristotelian Bestiality
and Malice with the Ciceronian Violence and Fraud respectively. Thus
there is the upper Hell of sins proceeding from the irrational part of
the soul, divided into five circles. The lower Hell of Bestiality and
Malice is the terrible city of Dis, the true kingdom of Lucifer, in
which, after the intermediate sixth circle, come three great circles,
each divided into a number of sub-divisions, and each separated
by a chasm from the one above; the seventh circle of Violence and
Bestiality; followed by two circles of Malice--the eighth of simple
fraud, and the ninth of treachery. There is some doubt as to how
far Dante further equates this division with the seven capital sins
recognized by the Church. Although actual deeds are considered in
Hell, rather than the sinful propensities which lead to them, it seems
plausible to recognise in Incontinence the five lesser capital sins:
Luxury, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth (though the treatment of this vice in
the _Inferno_ is questionable), and Anger; and to regard the whole of
the three circles of the city of Dis as proceeding from and being the
visible effects of Envy and Pride, the sins proper to devils according
to St. Thomas--seen in their supreme degree in him whose pride made him
rebel against his Maker, and whose envy brought death into the world.
As an alternative, it may be held that Dante began the _Inferno_ with
the intention of basing its ethical system upon the seven capital sins,
but abandoned it in favour of a more ample treatment, and that the
earlier design has been preserved only in the passage through the upper
circles.[31]
LIMBO.--In “the first circle that girds the abyss,” Dante sees in
Limbo the unbaptised children and the virtuous heathen; without hope,
they live in desire; free from physical torment, they suffer the
pain of loss. Here Dante differs from Aquinas, who distinguishes the
Limbo of the Fathers from the Limbo of the Infants, and who represents
unbaptised children as not grieving at all for the loss of the Beatific
Vision, but rather rejoicing in natural perfection and a certain
participation of the Divine Goodness. The example of Rhipeus in the
_Paradiso_ shows that Dante could have saved any of the ancients whom
he chose, without any violence to his creed. “Any one,” says Aquinas,
“can prepare himself for having faith through what is in natural
reason; whence it is said that, if any one who is born in barbarous
nations doth what lieth in him, God will reveal to him what is
necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by sending a
teacher.” The reception of Dante by the five great classical poets as
sixth in their company is his own affirmation of poetical succession;
for the first time a poet in modern vernacular has attained equality
with the masters of antiquity who “wrote poetry with regulated speech
and art” (_V. E._ ii. 4). With them he enters the noble castle of Fame,
from which the light of wisdom shone upon the pagan world; within
are all the wise and virtuous spirits of antiquity, even Aristotle,
“the master of those who know,” whose philosophical authority is for
Dante supreme (_Inf._ iv. 131). Here, too, are certain moderns that
“worshipped not God aright”; the Saladin, and Averroës “who made the
great comment.”
UPPER HELL.--Out of Limbo Dante and Virgil descend into the darkness
of the second circle, where the carnal sinners are whirled round and
round, “through the nether storm-eddying winds.” At its entrance snarls
Minos, a type of the sinner’s disordered and terrified conception of
Divine Justice. The Virgilian “Mourning Fields” of the martyrs of
love are transformed into a region of active torment, and when, in a
lull in the storm, Francesca da Rimini pours forth her piteous story
in lines of ineffable pathos, the colouring becomes that of Arthurian
romance (_Inf._ v.). Down again through the third circle of putrid rain
and snow, where Cerberus (like the other hellish torturers, merely
the effect of the sin, and the sinner’s own creation) tortures the
gluttonous (_Inf._ vi.), and the fourth, where Plutus, demon god of
wealth, guards the avaricious and prodigal butting at each other for
all eternity, Dante is led to the dark waters of Styx, shortly after
midnight, as Friday is passing into the early hours of Saturday (_Inf._
vii. 97-99). The marsh of Styx represents the fifth circle. Fixed in
the slime below are souls, made visible only by the bubbles from their
sighs: “Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun,
carrying heavy fumes within our hearts: now lie we sullen here in the
black mire” (_Inf._ vii. 121-124). These souls are usually identified
as the _accidiosi_, or slothful. The material element in Sloth is lack
of charity; the formal element is sadness, the sadness which takes
away the spiritual life and withdraws the mind from the Divine Good.
Some commentators think that the slothful are placed in the Ante-Hell,
and that these sad souls are those guilty of sullen or sulky anger, in
contrast to the violent anger of those fiercer spirits who, naked and
miry, are rending each other on the surface of the marsh, over which
the poets are ferried by Phlegyas, the boatman of Dis, as Charon of
Upper Hell. The Florentine, Filippo Argenti, who bandies bitter words
with Dante during the passage, connects Anger with Pride (_Inf._ viii.
46) and with Bestiality (_ibid._ 62-63). As Anger leads to violence
and fraud for the sake of vengeance, so Phlegyas conveys them to the
entrance of the city of Dis, glowing red with eternal fire.
THE CITY OF DIS.--The gate of the city is defended by fiends, while
the Furies appear upon the turrets, girt with greenest hydras and with
serpents for hair, calling upon Medusa to come and turn Dante to stone.
The Furies are symbols of hopeless remorse, and Medusa of the despair
which renders repentance impossible. “A guilty deed is the death of
the soul; but to despair is to go down into Hell” (St. Isidore, _cf._
Virgil’s words to Dante, _Inf._ ix. 55-57). Virgil can guard Dante from
her, but he cannot open the gates; for the city of Dis is the mediaeval
counterpart of the Virgilian Tartarus, through which the Sibyl could
not lead Aeneas. With the sound of mighty tempest a messenger of Heaven
passes the Styx with dry feet, and opens the portal with a little
rod; he is a figure drawn from Mercury in the _Aeneid_ (iv.), but here
transformed to an Angel, akin to those two terrible beings who summon
the dead to rise in Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment.[32] Within the
gate, round the circuit of the walls and at the same level as the
last circle, the sixth circle confines the Heretics and Epicureans
in burning tombs. They seem to hold this intermediate position in
accordance with the teaching of St. Thomas that Infidelity, if reduced
to one of the capital sins, must be regarded as arising from Pride,
but may come also from cupidity or some fleshly illusion; and, in a
passage in the _Convivio_ (ii. 9), Dante appears to reduce one form
of Heresy to _bestialitade_. Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline
hero of Montaperti, heroic even in Hell, rises to address his fellow
countryman; and, from the same blazing sepulchre, Cavalcante de’
Cavalcanti, fondly believing that it is height of genius alone that
leads Dante thus scathless through this blind prison, seeks vainly
to see his own Guido with him. Emperor and Pope should lead man to
blessedness; but Frederick II. and Pope Anastasius are buried here with
the rest (_Inf._ x. 119, xi. 8). The horrible stench that rises from
the abyss forces Dante to delay his descent; and, in the pause, Virgil
explains the moral structure of Hell, equating the Ciceronian with the
Aristotelian division of vice (_Inf._ xi.), as already indicated, and
adding a special explanation of how Usury, the breeding of money from
money, is a sin against nature, and violence against the Diety.
SEVENTH CIRCLE.--They descend the precipice into the seventh circle, at
the entrance to which the Minotaur, emblem of Violence and Bestiality,
gnaws himself in bestial rage, on the top of the ruin formed by the
earthquake when the Redeemer entered Hell. Since we are now within
the Devil’s city, fiends begin to appear as torturers, but in this
seventh circle they take bestial forms, or forms which are half-bestial
and half-human. There are three rounds in this circle. In the first,
Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood, the violent against others
are immersed to varying depths, and tormented by the Centaurs (_Inf._
xii.). Murderers and tyrants are here; and Benvenuto supposes that the
Centaurs are types of their own hireling soldiers, the instruments of
their cruelty upon earth. In the second round, the violent against
themselves (_Inf._ xiii.) are punished in the pathless wood of the
Harpies; the suicides, imprisoned in trees and preyed upon by these
monsters, are regarded as bestial sinners, because, properly speaking,
a man cannot hate himself; the destroyers of their own substance,
similarly considered, are hunted by black hell-dogs. Yet in this round
is one of the noblest souls in the _Inferno_, Piero della Vigna, still
defending the memory of the imperial master who caused his death.
Enclosed by the wood is a third round, the burning plain (_Inf._
xiv.), where the violent against God are subjected to a slow rain of
dilated flakes of fire. Capaneus, the typical blasphemer, is tortured
even more by his own fury than by the flaming shower. It is in this
round that Dante learns what Virgil tells him is the most notable thing
he has yet seen in his pilgrimage (_Inf._ xiv. 88): the infernal rivers
are produced by the tears and sins of all human generations since the
golden age, and flow from rock to rock down the circles of Hell, back
to Lucifer at the earth’s core (_ibid._ 103, etc.). “The tears extorted
from the sinners, the blood shed by tyrants and murderers, all the
filth of the sinful world, flow down below by secret conduits, and are
then transformed into instruments of torment” (Witte). There are few
things in literature more poignant than Dante’s cry of recognition:
_Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto_ (_Inf._ xv. 30), “Are you here, Ser
Brunetto?” Nor is there, perhaps, anything that gives us a more
terrible conception of Dante’s claim to be the “preacher of justice,”
than the fearful doom he has inflicted upon “the dear and kind paternal
image” of the sage who had taught him how man makes himself eternal,
and upon the great Florentine citizens of the past, whose deeds and
honoured names he had ever “rehearsed and heard with affection” (_Inf._
xvi. 58-60). In the last group of this round are the Usurers, “on
the utmost limit of that seventh circle,” where violence passes into
fraud (_Inf._ xvii. 43); and it is worthy of note that the poet finds
examples of this sin, not among the persecuted Jews, but in the noble
houses of Padua and Florence.
MALEBOLGE.--A yawning abyss, down which the blood-stained Phlegethon
dashes with deafening noise, reaches from the seventh to the eighth
circle, Malebolge, the realm of Malice. Lured up by the cord which
Dante has girt round him and abandons, Geryon, “unclean image of
fraud,” a combination of the mythological monster with the apocalyptic
Angel of the bottomless pit, bears Dante and Virgil to the place below.
Malebolge is divided into ten valleys, with a gulf in the centre.
Since they punish Fraud, _de l’uom proprio male_, “the vice peculiar
to man,” the demon tormentors have usually something of the human form
(the serpent torturers of the thieves are an exception)--degraded
Angels partaking of humanity’s lowest features. Disgusting though
many details of this circle may seem to modern taste, they are only
terribly realised images of the sins themselves. Panders and seducers
(_Inf._ xviii.), flatterers, simoniacs (xix., Pope Nicholas III.),
diviners and sorcerers (xx.), barrators or sellers of justice in public
offices (xxi. and xxii.), hypocrites (xxiii.), thieves (xxiv. and
xxv.), fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.), sowers of scandal
and schism (xxviii.), falsifiers of every kind (xxix. and xxx.)--each
class occupies one of the ten valleys of Malebolge, and to each is
awarded a special form of punishment representing the crime, observing
the _contrapasso_ (_Inf._ xxviii. 142), the law of retribution. In
the meanwhile the sun has risen in the world above, though this makes
no difference in Hell where the sun is silent (_Inf._ xx. 124); it is
the morning of Holy Saturday for the Church; the bells have been rung
again after the silence of Good Friday, and the _Gloria in excelsis_
sung in anticipation of the morrow’s feast--while Dante is rebuking
Pope Nicholas for simony, and hearkening to Guido da Montefeltro’s
bitter tale of Pope Boniface’s treachery (_Inf._ xxvii.). There are
few nobler utterances of mediaeval Catholicity than that famous
outburst of Dantesque indignation in Canto xix., against the unworthy
and simoniacal holders of the papal chair, though restrained by the
“reverence for the Great Keys.” In one instance only does Dante seem
in personal danger, and, curiously enough, it is in the region of
the Barrators (_Inf._ xxi. and xxii.), with whose sin his ungrateful
countrymen had tried to render him infamous; Virgil himself is almost
deceived, that is, Dante’s reason is bewildered and his philosophy at
fault; but, although hunted as a criminal, not a drop of the boiling
pitch lights upon him, nor do the rakes and hooks of the “Evil-claws”
as much as graze his skin. Here and there images from external nature
relieve the horror: the country shining white with the hoar-frost
before the spring (xxiv. 1-15); the fire-flies gleaming below the hill
after the long summer day (xxvi. 25-30). The two cantos depicting
the fate of the fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.) seem on a
different plane from the rest; the sense of increasing degradation in
the passage downwards through Malebolge is checked; the story of the
last voyage of Ulysses with its spiritual nobility and imaginative
splendour, the whole episode of Guido da Montefeltro with its dramatic
intensity, are among the greatest creations of poetry. But so repulsive
is much of the matter of Malebolge that Dante represents his own moral
sense as becoming clouded; in the last valley he listens without
disgust, almost with pleasure, to an unsavoury quarrel between the
Greek Sinon and the coiner Adam of Brescia (_Inf._ xxx.), until a sharp
rebuke from Virgil restores him to himself: _Chè voler ciò udire è
bassa voglia_, “for to wish to hear that is a base desire.”
NINTH CIRCLE.--In the centre of Malebolge yawns a huge chasm, like an
immense well, where the precipice falls to the ninth and last circle.
Like towers round the margin of this pit appear the upper parts of
captive Giants, both of Scripture and mythology; Nimrod, Ephialtes,
Briareus--the Paladins of the Emperor of Hell defending the last and
most secret chamber of his palace. The Giants connect this last circle
with Pride (_Purg._ xii. 28-36), as the mention of Cain does with
Envy (_Purg._ xiv. 133), and Lucifer himself with both Pride and Envy
(_Inf._ vii. 12; _Purg._ xii. 25; _Par._ ix. 129, xix. 46, etc.).
Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which “is forgotten that
love which nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added,
giving birth to special trust” (_Inf._ xi. 61-63); hence the guardians
of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape. Antaeus
(_Inf._ xxxi.), less guilty, and therefore less fettered than the
others, hands Virgil and Dante down into this last circle, where the
traitors are eternally consumed in the river Cocytus, which is frozen
to a vast dark lake of ice, sloping down to Lucifer. Nowhere else is
Dante so utterly pitiless. Hardly can we recognise the man who had
fainted with pity at the story of Francesca (_Inf._ v. 141) in the
ruthless inquisitor, who is ready to add to the torture of Bocca degli
Abati (_inf._ xxxii. 97), but will not stretch out his hand to afford
a moment’s alleviation to Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi (_Inf._ xxxiii.
149).
There are four concentric rings in this ninth circle, increasing in
pain as they diminish in circumference. In Caina (_Inf._ xxxii. 58),
the treacherous murderers of their kindred are chattering with their
teeth like storks. In Antenora (88), traitors to country or party are
still more deeply frozen into the ice. Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed
the Guelfs to the Ghibellines at Montaperti, is side by side with
Buoso da Duera, who, five years later, betrayed the Ghibellines to the
lieutenant of Charles of Anjou. Frozen into one hole, Count Ugolino
della Gherardesca is gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa;
and the terror and pity of Dante’s lines have made the tale of the
dying agonies of the old noble and his children perhaps the most famous
episode in the _Commedia_. The terrible imprecation against Pisa adapts
Lucan’s curse upon Egypt after the murder of Pompey to the different
geographical conditions of the Tuscan city.[33] In Tolomea (_Inf._
xxxiii. 124), those who slew treacherously, under mask of hospitality,
have only their faces showing above the ice, their tears frozen into a
crystalline mask; on earth their bodies ofttimes still seem to live,
tenanted by a demon until their time is full, while the soul has
already gone down into the ice. In Giudecca (xxxiv. 117) are souls of
traitors to their lords and benefactors: “Already I was there (and with
fear I put it into verse) where the souls were all covered, and shone
through like straw in glass. Some are lying; some stand upright, this
on its head, and that upon its soles; another, like a bow, bends face
to feet” (_Inf._ xxxiv. 10-15); silent and immovable, in agonised and
everlasting adoration in the court of the Emperor of the dolorious
kingdom, who, gigantic and hideous, “from mid-breast stood forth out
of the ice.” The most radiant of God’s Angels has become the source
of evil, the symbol of sin’s hideousness. His three faces, red,
yellow-white, black, are an infernal parody of the Power, Wisdom, Love
of the Blessed Trinity. Under each face are two huge bat-like wings,
whose helpless flappings freeze all the lake of Cocytus. Tormented
by his teeth and claws are the three arch-traitors: Judas Iscariot,
who betrayed the Divine Founder of the Church; Brutus and Cassius,
who murdered the imperial founder of the Empire. The condemnation of
the two latter is an instance of how, while accepting the testimony
of his sources as to facts, Dante preserves independence of judgment
concerning their moral value; in Lucan’s _Pharsalia_, Brutus and
Cassius are the destined avengers of right, the champions of Roman
liberty, Brutus bearing the character with which we are familiar in
Shakespeare.
OUT OF THE DEPTHS.--It is the night of Easter Eve in our world (_Inf._
xxxiv. 68) when the poets leave the accursed place. Virgil carries
Dante like a child, for man will readily submit himself to the
guidance of reason and philosophy when once the nature of sin has been
thoroughly comprehended. Down by Lucifer’s shaggy sides, they pass the
centre of the universe (lines 76-81, 106-117). Virgil turns with Dante
completely round (conversion from sin), so that they find themselves in
a chasm left at Lucifer’s fall, below the opposite hemisphere to that
which man inhabits. But here it is morning (lines 96, 105, 118), the
morning of Easter Eve of the southern hemisphere, which is twelve hours
behind the time of its antipodes.[34] Through this space, opposite to
“the tomb of Beelzebub,” a rivulet descends, bringing the memory of sin
that has been purged in Purgatory back to Lucifer. By a strange and
arduous way, typical of the persevering struggle out of vice, Dante
with his guide mounts upwards to the clear air; and, on the shores of
Purgatory in the southern hemisphere, they “issued forth to rebehold
the stars.”
Like the Redeemer of mankind, Dante has been dead and buried part of
three days, and it is not yet daybreak on Easter Sunday, “in the end of
the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week.”
3. _The “Purgatorio”_
STRUCTURE AND ALLEGORICAL MEANING.--Purgatory is a steep mountain
of surpassing height, on the only land rising out of the sea in the
southern hemisphere. Like Hell, it was formed when Lucifer and his
followers were cast out of Heaven. To escape him the earth rushed up
to form this mountain, and left void the cavern through which Dante
ascended (_Inf._ xxxiv. 125). It is the exact antipodes of Jerusalem
and Mount Calvary, rises beyond atmospheric changes, and is crowned by
the Earthly Paradise, scene of man’s fall and symbol of blessedness of
this life.
In the literal sense the Purgatorio is the essential Purgatory of
separated spirits, expiating and exercising, paying the debt of
temporal punishment that remains after the guilt has been forgiven;
purging away the material element of sin, after the formal element
has been remitted. In the allegorical sense it represents the moral
purgatory of repentant sinners in this world; and has for subject
man, by penance and good works, becoming free from the tyranny of
vice, attaining to moral and intellectual freedom. Thus it becomes
a symbol of the whole life of man from conversion to death; man, no
longer sunk in ignorance and sin, as in the _Inferno_; not yet soaring
aloft on heights of impassioned contemplation, as in the _Paradiso_;
but struggling against difficulties and temptations, making amends for
misuse of Free Will, conforming with the practices of the Church, and
obeying the imperial authority, until the time comes to pass to the
blessedness of another world.
Dante’s open-air treatment of Purgatory seems peculiar to him. Very
wonderful is the transition from the dark night of Hell to the “sweet
colour of oriental sapphire,” where the star of Love comforts the
pilgrim soul, and the four stars of the Southern Cross, which symbolise
the cardinal virtues, make all the sky rejoice in their flame--until
Easter Day dawns, and from afar the poet “knew the quivering of the
sea” (_Purg._ i. 117). Throughout this second Cantica the sun is our
guide by day, and at night the stars are over our head; we behold the
glory of sunrise and of sunset as upon earth, but with added beauty,
for it is attended by celestial songs and the softly beating wings of
angelic presences. Dante spends part of four days, with three nights,
in this portion of his pilgrimage; for Purgatory is the symbol of the
life of man, and the life of man has four periods. At the end of each
day Dante rests and sleeps; before dawn on each day, except the first,
a vision prepares him for the work of the day--the work which cannot
begin or proceed save in the light of the sun, for man can advance no
step in this spiritual expiation without the light of God’s grace. But
the fourth day does not close, like the other three, in night; for it
corresponds to that fourth and last stage of man’s life, in which the
soul “returns to God, as to that port whence she set out, when she came
to enter upon the sea of this life” (_Conv._ iv. 28).
There are three main divisions of the mountain. From the shore to the
gate of St. Peter is Ante-Purgatory, still subject to atmospheric
changes. Within the gate is Purgatory proper, with its seven terraces
bounded above by a ring of purifying flames. Thence the way leads up to
the Earthly Paradise; for by these purgatorial pains the fall of Adam
is repaired, and the soul of man regains the state of innocence.
ANTE-PURGATORY.--In Ante-Purgatory Dante passes Easter Day and the
following night. Here the souls of those who died in contumacy of the
Church are detained at the foot of the mountain, and may not yet begin
the ascent; and the negligent, who deferred their conversion, and who
now have to defer their purification, are waiting humbly around the
lower slopes. For here purgation has not yet begun; this is the place
where time makes amends for time (_Purg._ xxiii. 84).
Upon the face of Cato, the guardian of the shore and mountain, so
shines the light of the four mystical stars, that he seems illumined
with the very light of the sun of Divine Grace (_Purg._ i. 37-39).
Cato, “the severest champion of true liberty,” “to kindle the love of
liberty in the world, gave proof of how dear he held her by preferring
to depart from life a free man, rather than remain alive bereft of
liberty” (_Mon._ ii. 5). He was one of those who “saw and believed that
this goal of human life is solely rigid virtue” (_Conv._ iv. 6). Thus
from Lucan’s _Pharsalia_, Dante has recreated this austere and glorious
figure to be the warden of the spiritual kingdom where virtue is made
perfect by love and true liberty attained.
At sunrise the white-robed and white-winged Angel of Faith brings the
ransomed souls over the ocean from the banks of the Tiber, where the
redeemed gather, as the lost do upon the shores of Acheron (_Purg._
ii.). The _In exitu Israel_ of their psalm signifies mystically, in
Dante’s allegory, the passing of the holy soul from the bondage of
this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory (_Epist._ x. 7). His
own song of love on the lips of Casella has peculiar fitness at the
entrance of the realm of hope and purgation; for, in the eyes of
that mystical lady, of whom Love discourses, is the anticipation of
Paradise, and yet she is the example of humility--the humility in sign
of which Dante has girded himself with a rush. As they turn towards
the ascent, the excommunicated draw near, led by Manfred; cut off from
the body of the Church by the Pontiff’s curse, they were reunited to
its soul by tardy repentance. The episode of Manfred is a counterpart
to that of Celestine in the corresponding canto of the _Inferno_. Dante
would clearly show the difference of God’s judgment from that of man.
The figure of the canonised pope-hermit, whom the world extolled as
a perfect type of Christian renunciation, and who died in the odour
of sanctity, is contrasted with that of the worldly king who died
excommunicate, and whose name was tainted with suspicion of incest and
parricide: “Horrible were my sins, but Infinite Goodness has such wide
arms that it takes whatever turns to it” (_Purg._ iii. 121-123).
Through a narrow gap they begin the ascent, which is so hard at the
outset, but grows ever lighter as man ascends. Among the negligent
through indolence, Belacqua seems as lazy as upon earth (_Purg._
iv.); but his laziness is now its own punishment. At midday Virgil’s
swift rebuke (_Purg._ v. 10-15) cures his pupil of one fatal obstacle
to following philosophy in the search of moral and intellectual
liberty--human respect. Among those cut off by violent deaths is
Buonconte da Montefeltro, the story of whose fate, Canto v., is in
designed contrast with the soul’s tragedy that came from his father’s
lips out of the torturing flames of Malebolge (_Inf._ xxvii.). The
_lacrimetta_ of the dying knight--the “little tear” that saved his
eternal part from the fiend (_Purg._ v. 107)--has become one of the
priceless pearls in the treasury of the world’s poetry. All these souls
ask for remembrance in prayer, that their delay may be shortened,
and Virgil’s explanation centers upon the power of love to reach for
expiation from beyond the grave (vi. 37-39). In these earlier cantos of
the _Purgatorio_, there are constant traces of the deep impression made
upon Dante by the story of Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas, in Books v.
and vi. of the _Aeneid_.
THE VALLEY OF THE PRINCES.--They come to the solitary and lion-like
soul of Sordello, whose loving greeting to his Mantuan countryman gives
occasion to Dante’s superb and famous outburst of Italian patriotism:
_Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello_ (_Purg._ vi. 76 _et seq._); which
shows a striking correspondence with the great passage where Lucan
laments the overthrow of Roman liberty at Pharsalia (_Phars._ vii. 440
_et seq._). The part of Sordello is very similar to that of Musaeus in
the _Aeneid_, Book vi.; he leads Virgil and Dante to the Valley of the
Princes, which corresponds to Elysium, the verdant vale where Aeneas
met Anchises. Dante probably reconstructed the troubadour’s personality
from his own famous poem on the death of Blacatz, a Provençal hero of
the thirteenth century, in which he upbraids and derides the kings
and princes of Christendom, beginning with Frederick II., and ends
with a proud assertion that he will speak the whole truth in spite
of the powerful barons whom he may offend. So here, in the Valley of
the Princes, where those are detained who neglected some peculiarly
lofty mission, or postponed their spiritual welfare to worldly and
political care, Sordello, beginning with the Emperor-elect, Rudolph of
Hapsburg (_Purg._ vii. 94), points out the descendants or successors
of those whom he had rebuked in the other life. Here, singing together
to the Queen of Mercy, the deadliest foes sit side by side, consoling
each other; Rudolph of Hapsburg with Ottocar of Bohemia, Charles of
Anjou with Peter of Aragon; a motive found previously in the vision
of Tundal, where, however, the kings are naturally Irish. On Henry of
England Sordello had been more severe when he lived. After sunset, in
the light of three brighter stars, that symbolise the three theological
virtues, Dante has pleasant talk with Nino Visconti and Currado
Malaspina (_Purg._ viii.). And, as evening closes in, two golden-haired
Angels, green-clad and green-winged, the Angels of Hope with the
flaming but blunted swords of justice tempered with mercy, defend the
noble souls from the assault of an evil serpent. In the literal sense,
this episode (which seems a relic from earlier mediaeval visions) may
imply that souls in Purgatory have not the intrinsic impossibility
of sinning that is possessed by the blessed of Paradise, but are
kept absolutely free from any sin by the Divine Providence. In the
allegorical sense, the meaning clearly is that the way to moral and
intellectual freedom is a hard one, and temptations to fall back in
despair are many. The tempter would draw man back from regaining the
Earthly Paradise, from which he has once caused his expulsion.
THE MYSTIC EAGLE AND THE GATE OF PURGATORY.--Just before the dawn Dante
dreams of a golden eagle snatching him up to the sphere of fire, and,
waking when the sun is more than two hours high, finds that Lucia has
brought him to the Gate of Purgatory. Mystically, the eagle seems to
represent the poet’s own spirit, dreaming that he can soar unaided to
the very outskirts of Paradise; but he wakes to realise that Divine
grace indicates the preliminary stage of purification. The gate of
St. Peter with its three steps, of white marble, exactly mirroring
the whole man, of darkest purple cracked in the figure of the Cross,
of flaming red porphyry, represents the Sacrament of Penance with its
three parts: Contrition, Confession, Satisfaction based upon the love
of God. The mournfully robed Angel of Obedience seated on the rock of
diamond, with dazzling face and flashing sword, is the confessor. His
silver and gold keys, of judgment and absolution, open the gate to
Dante; the seven P’s traced by his sword on the poet’s forehead are to
be effaced one by one in his ascent (_Purg._ ix.).
MORAL TOPOGRAPHY.--Within the gate is Purgatory proper with its seven
terraces, each devoted to the purgation of one of the seven capital
sins, “out of which other vices spring, especially in the way of final
causation” (Aquinas). Whereas in the _Inferno_ sin was considered in
its manifold and multiform effects, in the _Purgatorio_ it is regarded
in its causes, and all referred to disordered love. The formal element,
the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the essence of Hell,
has been forgiven; the material element, the conversion to the good
that perishes, the disordered love, is now to be purged from the soul.
In the allegorical or moral sense, since love, as Aquinas says, is “the
ultimate cause of the true activities of every agent,” it is clear
that man’s first duty in life is to set love in order; and, indeed,
the whole moral basis of Dante’s Purgatory rests upon the definition
of St. Augustine that virtue is _ordo amoris_, “the ordering of love.”
In the first three terraces, sins of the spirit are expiated; in the
fourth terrace, sloth, which is both spiritual and carnal; in the
fifth, sixth, seventh terraces, sins of the flesh. This purgation,
which involves both pain of loss for a time and punishment of sense, is
effected by turning with fervent love to God and detesting what hinders
union with Him. Therefore, at the beginning of each terrace, examples
are seen or heard of virtue contrary to the sin, in order to excite the
suffering souls to extirpate its very roots; and, at the end, examples
of its result or punishment (the “bit and bridle”). These examples are
chosen with characteristic Dantesque impartiality alike from Scripture
and legend or mythology; but, in each case, an example from the life
of the Blessed Virgin is opposed to each capital sin. At the end of
each terrace stands an Angel--personification of one of the virtues
opposed to the sins or vices. These seven Angels in their successive
apparitions are among the divinest things of beauty in the sacred poem.
It is only when sin is completely purged away that man can contemplate
the exceeding beauty, the “awful loveliness” of the contrary virtue.
FIRST TERRACE.--Steep and narrow is the path up to the first terrace,
where Pride is purged away (_Purg._ x). Carved upon the mountain
side are fair white marble images of wondrous beauty, setting forth
great examples of Humility, alike in “them of low degree” (Mary at
the Annunciation) and in “the mighty” (David and Trajan, rulers
respectively of the chosen people of the two dispensations, the Jews
and the Romans). Wearily and painfully the souls of the proud pass
round, pressed down by terrible weights, reciting a paraphrase of the
Lord’s Prayer, for themselves and those they have left on earth. And
seldom has the Catholic doctrine of prayer for the dead been more
winningly set forth than in Dante’s comment (xi. 31-36). A partaker in
some degree of their punishment, Dante, all bowed down, goes with these
souls; he speaks with Omberto Aldobrandesco, who is expiating pride
of birth, and Oderisi of Gubbio, the miniaturist, who is purifying
his soul from pride of intellect. The latter points out the great
Ghibelline burgher statesman of Siena, Provenzano Salvani, expiating
pride of dominion--the sin which turned so many an Italian patriot of
the Middle Ages into a tyrant. Figured upon the pavement below their
feet are examples of Pride’s punishment, like the designs on the
pavement of the Duomo of Siena (_Purg._ xii.). Noon has passed when the
Angel of Humility shows the way up to the next terrace, and with the
waving of his wing removes the first P from Dante’s forehead. “Blessed
are the poor in spirit,” celestial voices sing, as, with almost all
weariness gone since Pride is expiated, Dante ascends the steep way.
SECOND TERRACE.--In the second and narrower circle Envy is purged.
Examples of charity, “courteous invitations to the table of Love,”
are cited by invisible spirits flying past. The envious, clothed in
haircloth, lean helplessly shoulder to shoulder against the rock,
their eyelids sewn up with iron stitching. Sapia of Siena, the
kinswoman of Provenzano Salvani, at whose fall and the defeat of her
countrymen she rejoiced, tells her history in lines of singular beauty
(_Purg._ xiii.). Guido del Duca denounces the evil dispositions of the
inhabitants of Tuscany, and bewails the degeneracy of the noble houses
with the consequent decay of chivalry in his own province of Romagna;
envious on earth of prosperity of others, these souls mourn now for
its decline (xiv.). Like peals of thunder the cries of spirits follow
each other in citing Envy’s punishment. As they go towards the sunset,
the dazzling Angel of Fraternal Love removes the mark of Envy. “Blessed
are the merciful,” “Rejoice thou that conquerest.” As they mount Virgil
expounds the difference between material goods, which are diminished by
sharing and beget envy, and the infinite good of Paradise, where love
increases with every soul that enters into the joy of the Lord, and its
communication is measured only by the charity of each soul that is made
its mirror (_Purg._ xv.).
THIRD TERRACE.--On reaching the third terrace where Anger is purged,
Dante sees examples of meekness and forgiveness in vision. From the
black, pungent, and tormenting smoke which envelopes the souls of the
once wrathful, who now call upon the Lamb of God for peace and mercy,
the Lombard Marco reconciles Free Will with stellar influence, and
ascribes the evil condition of Italy and the world to the neglect of
law, the confusion of the spiritual and temporal power, and the papal
usurpation of imperial rights (_Purg._ xvi.). In this terrace Dante
again partakes of the pains of the penitent souls. As the sun is
setting, he issues from the dark mist. A most significant passage on
the power of the imagination to form images not derived from the senses
(xvii. 13-18) introduces the visions of Anger’s punishment, from which
the poet is roused by the dazzling splendour of the Angel of Peace or
Meekness, who fans away the third P and shows the way up: “Blessed are
the peacemakers who are without evil wrath.”
FOURTH TERRACE.--The stars are appearing as they reach the fourth
terrace, where souls are purged from Sloth. We saw that, in the
_Inferno_, the Aristotelian division of things to be morally shunned
was discussed, and the ethical structure of the first canticle
expounded, in the circle intermediate between Incontinence and Malice
(_Inf._ xi.); so, in the _Purgatorio_, a compulsory pause in the
terrace intermediate between sins of spirit and sins of flesh is
selected by Virgil for his great discourse upon Love, on which is based
the moral system of the second realm (_Purg._ xvii. 91-139, xviii.
13-75). It is practically a sermon on the text of Jacopone da Todi,
_Ordena questo amore_, _tu che m’ami_, “Set this love in order, thou
that lovest me”; since in rational beings disordered love produces the
seven capital vices. Pride, Envy, Anger are regarded as distorted love;
Sloth as defective love; Avarice, Gluttony, Luxury as excessive love.
Love is the golden net whereby God draws back to Himself all creatures
that He has made, whether inanimate, sensitive, or rational--by the
tendencies or inclinations He has given them to make them seek the end
for which they are ordered and disposed, according to the Eternal Law.
Rational beings alone have Free Will, by which man merits or demerits
from the Divine Justice, according as he inclines to good or evil
loves. Love’s tendency to good is the precious material upon which Free
Will acts like the craftsman’s hand, to fashion a satyr’s mask or a
crucifix.
At the end of this discourse, the slothful rush by at full speed in
the moonlight, so full of longing to lose no time through too little
love, that the Abbot of San Zeno cannot stop while he answers Virgil’s
question; those in front cry out examples of alacrity in Mary and
Caesar; those behind chant Sloth’s punishment in the chosen people of
the Old Testament and the Trojan ancestors of the Romans.
THE SIREN AND THE ANGEL OF ZEAL.--Before the dawn of the third day
in Purgatory, Dante has in his sleep a marvellous dream of the Siren
(sensual seduction, concupiscence of the flesh), from which he is
delivered by a holy and alert lady who calls upon Virgil (prevenient
grace, or the wisdom and prudence of Proverbs vii.). The Siren is the
dream-prelude to the purgation of sins of the flesh, as the Eagle had
been to that of sins of the spirit. The sun has risen; and the Angel
of Zeal (or of Spiritual Joy) cancels the fourth P and shows the way
up to the next terrace. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall
have their souls wed to consolation.” Sloth is a heaviness and sadness
which weighs down the soul, a sadness at spiritual good, to be fought
by thinking on spiritual things. Most fitly then do the wings of the
Angel of Zeal point upwards, and his words tell of a nobler sorrow, a
mourning which shall be followed by Divine consolation (_Purg._ xix.).
FIFTH TERRACE.--In the fifth terrace, the avaricious and prodigal,
whose souls on earth cleaved to the dust, lie face downwards to earth;
unable to move hand or foot until the sin of Covetousness is purged
away, the sin which, according to Aquinas, “although not absolutely
the greatest of sins, yet has in some sense a greater deformity than
the rest, since by it the human heart is subjected even to external
things.” Pope Adrian V. tells the story of his tardy conversion, and
has tender words for his niece Alagia, the wife of Moroello Malaspina
(_Purg._ xix.). It is a companion episode to that of Nicholas III.
in the corresponding canto of the _Inferno_. In this circle the
souls themselves cry out the examples and warnings, by day and night
respectively. The soul of Hugh Capet, “the root of the evil plant which
overshadows all the Christian earth,” pours forth bitter sarcasm and
scathing invective upon all the royal house of France, the great Guelf
power that opposed the Empire, oppressed Italy, and wrought scandal
in the Church. A monument of poetic infamy is especially raised to
Philip the Fair and the three Carlos; and there are few more glorious
examples of Christian magnanimity than the burning words in which
Dante, distinguishing the man from the office, brands the sacrilege
of Anagni, the outrage committed upon him whom the poet held as his
own deadliest foe, and yet the unworthy Vicar of Christ. Nowhere else,
save in the reference to the Jubilee (_Purg._ ii. 98, 99), does Dante
treat Boniface as lawful pope (_cf. Inf._ xix. 52-57; _Par._ ix. 142,
xxvii. 22-24). It has been thought that Canto xx. was composed while
the Church was ostensibly supporting the policy of Henry VII.; before
attacking the Templars, the French king had endeavoured to renew the
outrage of Anagni by inducing Pope Clement to condemn the memory of
Boniface. With a mighty earthquake, a universal chorus of _Gloria in
excelsis_ from the suffering souls, the poet Statius is liberated, and
joins Dante and Virgil (_Purg._ xxi.). He explains how the pains of
Purgatory are voluntarily endured, since, against the hypothetic or
absolute will with which they desire the bliss of Paradise, the souls
suffer these purifying pains with the conditional or actual will, the
same inclination or impulse or desire (_talento_) which they formerly
had to sin. Thus it is free will itself that imposes the purgatorial
process, and that alone shows the soul when purification is complete.
The delicious scene of the recognition of Virgil by Statius is full
of that peculiarly tender Dantesque playfulness that informs the two
Eclogues; Dante’s affectionate humour in dealing with those he loved is
one of the most attractive aspects of his character, and one perhaps
too often missed.
SIXTH TERRACE.--The Angel of Justice has removed the fifth P from
Dante’s forehead, opposing in his song the thirst of justice to that
of gain. As they mount, Statius explains to Virgil how he was converted
from prodigality by a line in the _Aeneid_, and led to Christianity
by the fourth Eclogue (_Purg._ xxii.). The conversion of a pagan to
Christianity through reading Virgil occurs in a story told by Vincent
of Beauvais; Dante was probably influenced in applying this to Statius,
representing him as a secret convert to the true faith, by his study
of the _Thebaid_; for there, in the last book, Statius describes the
Altar of Mercy at Athens in language which harmonises with the words
of Christ in the Gospels and the address of his own contemporary, St.
Paul, to the Athenians in the Acts. The poets pursue their way with
greater confidence now that Statius is with them, and reach the sixth
terrace, where unseen spirits cry out examples of temperance from the
tree beneath which drunkenness and gluttony are purged. The spirits,
terribly wasted, suffer intense torments of hunger and thirst in the
presence of most tempting food and drink; but the sanctifying pain is
a solace, desired even as Christ willed to die for man. With the soul
of Forese Donati, Dante holds loving converse; the memory of their
dissolute lives together is still grievous; the poet makes amends for
his old slander of Forese’s wife Nella, by the tender lines now placed
upon her husband’s lips (_Purg._ xxiii. 85-93). Forese darkly foretells
the death of Corso Donati, which appears to be the latest event in
Florentine history mentioned in the poem (xxiv. 82-90). Whatever the
friendship of these two had been on earth, it was fair and lovely
indeed on the Mount of Purgation.
Amongst many others are Pope Martin IV. and the poet Bonagiunta of
Lucca, whose talk with Dante upon the _dolce stil nuovo_, the “sweet
new style,” is one of the landmarks for the student of poetry (_Purg._
xxiv. 49-60). Dante’s famous definition of his own position expresses,
in another form, the truth that all great poetry is the “transfigured
life” of its author:[35] “I am one who, when Love inspires me, note,
and give utterance in that fashion which he dictates within.” It is
already anticipated in the prose passage prefixed to the _Donne che
avete_ in the _Vita Nuova_ (xix.), and completes the conception of
poetry set forth in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_.
THE SEVENTH TERRACE.--Passing another tree, a shoot from the tree of
knowledge, beneath which the purging pangs are renewed, and from whose
branches spirit voices proclaim examples of gluttony’s punishment, they
are summoned upwards by the glowing and dazzling Angel of Abstinence,
fragrant with grass and flowers as the air of May. As they ascend the
narrow stairs towards the last terrace, Statius explains the generation
of the body and the infusion of the rational soul, which exists, after
the body’s death, invested with an aerial body as a shade (_Purg._ xxv.
31 _et seq._). Apparently it is because revelation has some voice
in these high matters that the Christian Statius gives Dante this
exposition, instead of Virgil, and at the latter’s request; until the
seventh terrace is reached, where sensual passion is expiated in the
bosom of the great burning. Singing to the God of Supreme Clemency,
crying aloud examples of chastity or of lust’s punishment, two bands
of souls, divided according to the nature of their sin, pass through
the fire in opposite ways (_Purg._ xxvi.). Here is Guido Guinizelli
of Bologna, father of the poets of the _dolce stil nuovo_, whom
Dante gazes upon in rapt admiration, and addresses with impassioned
love and worship. But Guinizelli--with that humility which is so
characteristically Dante’s own--indicates as _miglior fabbro del parlar
materno_, a “better craftsman of his mother-tongue,” Arnaut Daniel,
the cunning Provençal song-smith, who invented the sestina, and whose
metrical skill and originality won for him a higher place in the
estimation of the poet of the _rime pietrose_ than modern students of
the troubadours are usually disposed to concede.
THE PURGING FIRE.--At sunset the Angel of Purity, singing “Blessed
are the clean of heart,” bids the poets pass through the flames that
lie between them and the last stairway--the purging fire that is the
wall between Dante and Beatrice. Dante endures the “burning without
measure”; and they reach the ascent, greeted by dazzling light and
celestial strains of _Venite benedicti Patris mei_. The Cherubims with
the flaming sword, “turning every way to keep the way of the tree
of life” (Gen. iii. 24), are thus welcoming man’s restoration to the
Garden of Eden, as the serpent had endeavoured to impede it in the
Valley of the Princes. Now it is a delight to mount; but night comes
on, and Dante, watched over by Statius and Virgil, falls asleep on the
stairs (_Purg._ xxvii.).
LEAH AND LIBERTY.--Just before dawn, prelude to the new day, he dreams
of Leah, a young and lovely lady gathering flowers in a meadow. The
theologians took Leah as type of the active life, and Rachel, her
sister, of the contemplative; a symbolism to which Richard of St.
Victor gave a more mystical colour, by interpreting Leah as “affection
inflamed by divine inspiration, composing itself to the norm of
justice.” Leah may then represent the affection, thus inflamed and
ordered, which is the perfection of the active life. At sunrise the
topmost stair of Purgatory is reached, and Virgil, who can himself
discern no further, resigns his guidance at the entrance to the Garden
of Eden. Dante’s judgment has been made free, right, and whole; _per
ch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio_, “wherefore I crown and mitre
thee over thyself” (xxvii. 142). It has been supposed that Virgil is
here resigning to Dante the crown and mitre of the Emperor; _mitratus
et coronatus_ was the expression used for the coronation of an
Emperor when the Pope placed upon his head a mitre and a crown, which
afterwards were united in the mitred crown, as seen in the great fresco
at Santa Maria Novella. Others refer the crown to temporal or imperial
authority, and the mitre to spiritual or ecclesiastical; for (_Mon._
iii. 4) “if man had remained in the state of innocence in which he was
made by God, he would have had no need of such directive regimens,”
which are “remedial against the infirmity of sin.” Dante, purified
from sin, has regained this state of innocence, and has attained
that liberty through which “we have our felicity here as men and our
felicity elsewhere as Gods” (_Mon._ i. 12). In any case, Virgil is
confirming the freedom which Dante has sought and gained by the passage
through Purgatory.
THE EARTHLY PARADISE AND MATELDA.--The Earthly Paradise represents
“blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s
natural powers” (_Mon._ iii. 16). This blessedness is found in the
twofold exercise of the mind: the practical, which “consists in
ourselves working virtuously, that is, in integrity, with prudence,
with temperance, with fortitude, and with justice”; and the
speculative, which consists “in considering the works of God and of
nature” (_Conv._ iv. 22). In this Earthly Paradise, the music of whose
birds and trees has surely passed into the wonderful six cantos that
close the _Purgatorio_, Dante meets, amidst the flowers on Lethe’s
banks, the glorified realisation of the Leah of his dream (_Purg._
xxviii.). She has been taken as symbolising the glorified active life
in the state of recovered Eden, realising in the Church of Christ what
Leah had dimly prefigured in the Old Testament; the active Christian
life; _innocentia bonorum operum_, the virtuous use of earthly things,
directly ordered to the love of our neighbour; the temporal felicity of
the Earthly Paradise. Since the purgatorial process is the freeing of
the soul from disordered love, we may follow Richard’s interpretation
of Leah, and take her as representing love rightly ordered and inflamed
by divine inspiration. Presently she is called Matelda (xxxiii. 119),
and it is probable that she is the idealised presentment of a real
person. All the earliest commentators, excepting the _Ottimo_, identify
her with the great Countess of Tuscany, in support of which view might
be urged the historical work of the Countess in the revival of the
study of Roman Law at Bologna--Roman Law being, for Dante, the secular
counterpart of the “perfect law of liberty.” Some modern commentators
prefer to seek her prototype in one or other of the ladies of _Vita
Nuova_; for instance, in that lady of very sweet speech who had rebuked
Dante at the crisis of his “new life.” Others have attempted to
identify her with Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn, two
German mystical writers of the latter part of the thirteenth century
whose works show occasional analogies with the _Commedia_. It may be
observed that her counterpart, as Rachel to Leah, is not Beatrice,
as sometimes supposed, but St. Bernard, in the closing cantos of the
_Paradiso_. Matelda explains her joyous aspect by referring Dante to
the Psalm _Delectasti_ (Ps. 92, 91 Vulgate), and her discourse of Eden
and its rivers (realising the Golden Age sung by the classical poets)
communicates to Virgil and Statius her own celestial joy: “Thou has
given me, O Lord, a delight in what Thou hast made: in the works of Thy
hands I shall rejoice.” She points out to Dante’s gaze the wondrous
pageant, which astonishes Virgil as much as his pupil, the mystical
procession that represents the triumphal march of the Church (_Purg._
xxix.).
THE PAGEANT OF THE CHURCH.--With brilliant light and ineffable melody,
the triumph advances: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband” (Rev. xxi. 2). Headed by seven candlesticks of gold as
standards, followed by the twenty-four elders, white-robed and crowned
with lilies, singing Mary’s praises; between the four living creatures
of Ezekiel and St. John, crowned with green, comes a triumphal chariot,
more glorious than the sun, upon two wheels; drawn by a Griffin, half
lion and half eagle, whose golden wings stretch up far out of sight,
through the seven luminous bands that form the processional canopy.
By the right wheel dance three maidens, symbolic of the theological
virtues; by the left wheel dance four, who represent the cardinal
virtues, following the measure of Prudence, as the others take their
step from the song of Charity. The seven candlesticks are the gifts
of the Holy Spirit; the twenty-four elders, either the patriarchs and
prophets, or the books of the Old Testament; the four living creatures,
the four Evangelists, or their four Gospels; the Griffin, Christ
Himself in His Human and Divine Natures. Lastly, follow seven more
elders, white-robed but crowned with flaming red flowers; a physician,
and one with shining sword; four of humble appearance; an old man
“sleeping with face alert.” According to Benvenuto da Imola, these
represent St. Peter (who had intrusted to him the power of healing
souls) and St. Paul, the four great Latin doctors, and St. Bernard.
More usually they are regarded as personifying the books of the New
Testament--the Acts, St. Paul’s Epistles, the Epistles of St. Peter,
James, John, and Jude, the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John. Upon
the chariot, amidst a hundred Angels singing and scattering flowers,
Beatrice appears, clad in the mystical colours, red, white, green,
crowned with the olive of wisdom and of peace over her snow-white
veil. And, at the advent of the Wisdom divinely revealed to man,
Virgil silently vanishes; he has tasted of the delights of the Earthly
Paradise, has witnessed the triumph of the Church from which he is
for ever cut off, the Faith he never knew, and has gone back to his
mournful dwelling-place (_Purg._ xxx.).
BEATRICE AND DANTE.--The precise significance of the reproaches which
Beatrice pours upon Dante for his mode of life after her death, with
the poet’s own bitter shame and intense repentance (xxx., xxxi.),
depends upon the view taken of his character and the nature of the
wanderings represented in the dark wood. That these aberrations were
mainly philosophical and intellectual, as sometimes supposed, appears
highly improbable. We would regard Dante’s confession here as one of
his most personal utterances, and hold that the cherubically inspired
singer of righteousness is deliberately casting aside the allegorical
veil which, in the _Convivio_, he had attempted to throw over the
things in the past which still severed him from the ideal life when
he wrote: “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion.”
It is a personal episode, in which Beatrice is the woman loved and to
whose memory the poet has been unfaithful, standing out clearly from
the allegorical mystery by which it is surrounded and in which it is
set. After Matelda has drawn Dante through Lethe, the four cardinal
virtues, which “perfect the intellect and appetite of man according
to the capacity of human nature,” lead him to the breast of the
mystic Griffin; and, in response to the song of the three theological
virtues, which perfect man supernaturally, Beatrice at last unveils her
countenance to his gaze: “O splendour of living light eternal.”
CONCLUDING ALLEGORIES OF THE “PURGATORIO.”--The allegory is resumed.
In the light of this revelation, now that he is purified and free from
sin, Dante beholds a vision of the Church and Empire (_Purg._ xxxii.).
That glorious procession had first presented an ideal of the Church as
Divine Providence intended it to be, before it became the vessel that
the serpent of simony broke; the Bride that the Divine Spouse ordained
for the guidance of the world. Such being the ideal, Dante beholds
in a series of allegorical visions its history, in conjunction with
the Empire, from the first coming to Rome down to the transference of
the papal chair to Avignon. The great procession moves on through the
divine forest, the Griffin still drawing the chariot with Beatrice
seated upon it; Matelda with Dante and Statius following after the
right wheel. Even as the divine origin of the Church has been seen in
the triumphal car, so now the divine origin of the Empire is indicated
in the desolate and despoiled tree which they reach. The tree of
knowledge of good and evil, since the prohibition to eat of that tree
was the beginning of law and the duty of obedience, represents Natural
Law or Natural Justice, what Dante calls _ius_; which “in things is
nought else than the similitude of the divine will” (_Mon._ ii. 2). The
expression of this natural justice and the means for its effectuation
in human society is Law, which Dante identifies with the Empire, and
thus the tree becomes the symbol of the Empire and of the obedience due
to it. The tree is destitute of flowers and foliage till the Griffin
comes to it, who plucks nothing from it: “Thus is preserved the seed of
all justice” (_Purg._ xxxii. 48; _cf._ our Lord’s words to St. John,
Matt. iii. 15). Justice can alone be fulfilled when the Church follows
this example of her Divine Founder, and usurps none of the temporal
rights of the Empire. After the chariot has been bound to the tree,
the previously bare plant breaks out into purple leaves and flowers.
The Griffin and his train return to Heaven, leaving Beatrice to guard
the chariot of the Church, seated beneath the shadow of the Imperial
Tree, upon its root, which is Rome. In a new series of visions Dante
beholds the sequel; he sees the conflict of the past, contemplates
the corruption of the present, hearkens to the hope of the future.
The persecution of the Church by the early Roman Emperors is followed
by the inroad of the first heresies; and the donation of Constantine
by the rising of the dragon of schism or simony. By more assumption
of secular power and dignities, the chariot becomes monstrously
transformed, and shamelessly usurped by the harlot, who represents the
corrupt ecclesiastical authority enthroned in the place of Revelation,
a false and degraded theology based upon the Decretals instead of the
true divine science of the Scripture and the Fathers. By her side a
giant appears who, after alternate caressing and scourging of the
usurper, unbinds the transfigured chariot from the tree, and drags it
away through the forest--symbolical of the interference of the royal
house of France, ending in the transference of the Papacy from Rome to
Avignon.
A DELIVERER ANNOUNCED.--But to the mournful psalm that the maidens
around her raise, _Deus venerunt gentes_, Beatrice answers in words of
hope; “a little while,” and the spiritual guide shall rise again from
the black tomb of Avignon. And, as they move on, she utters to Dante
a further prophecy (_Purg._ xxxiii.). “The vessel that the serpent
broke was and is not,” so completely has corruption and simony degraded
the chariot of the Bride of Christ. But vengeance shall fall upon the
guilty parties, and the eagle shall not for ever be without an heir;
for already a favourable disposition of the stars is at hand, under
which a messenger of God shall come, who shall slay the harlot and the
giant. It is probably the same event as the coming of the _Veltro_.
Dante is to repeat her words “to those that live the life which is a
running to death,” and not to conceal what he has seen of the tree.
Apparently (_Purg._ xxxiii. 58-72) he is to make manifest that the
Empire is of divine origin, and to recognise that the precept given by
God to our first parents corresponds now with the duty and obedience
man owes to the Empire. The law under which Adam lived was the
prohibition to eat of the tree; the law under which his descendants,
the commonwealth of the human race, live is the Empire. As Parodi puts
it, it is not a new sense superimposed upon the first; “it is simply
the same single meaning, the historical circumstances alone appearing
changed.” The sin of Adam is repeated when the Empire is usurped of
its rights or its authority attacked, for God created it holy for the
purpose of leading man to temporal felicity--the goal, here and now, of
the human race.[36]
LETHE AND EUNOË.--At noon they come to where the rivers of Lethe and
Eunoë issue from one mystical fountain, the fountain of the grace of
God. Here Beatrice refers Dante to Matelda, who leads him and Statius
to drink of Eunoë, which quickens dead virtue and restores memory of
every good deed in those who have first been bathed in Lethe, which
takes away the memory of sin. According to St. Thomas Aquinas (_Summa_,
iii. 89, 5), works done in charity, although in a sense dead through
sin, are brought to life through penance. Through repentance they
regain their efficacy of leading him who did them into eternal life.
Therefore Dante writes: “I returned from the most holy stream, remade
even as young trees renewed with new foliage, pure and disposed to
ascend to the stars.”
4. _The “Paradiso”_
STRUCTURE.--Dante’s Paradise consists of the nine moving heavens,
according to Ptolemaic astronomy, crowned by the tenth motionless and
divinest Empyrean heaven, “according to what Holy Church teacheth,
who cannot lie” (_Conv._ ii. 3, 4). The nine moving spheres revolve
round our globe, the fixed centre of the Universe, each of the lower
eight being enclosed in the sphere above itself. The seven lowest are
the heavens of the planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn. The eighth or stellar heaven, the sphere of the Fixed
Stars or Firmament, is the highest visible region of the celestial
world, and to some extent corresponds to the Earthly Paradise in the
lower realms. Above this visible firmament, the ninth or Crystalline
heaven, the _Primum Mobile_, directs with its movements the daily
revolution of all the others. In it nature starts; from it proceed
time and motion, with all celestial influence for the government of
the world (_Par._ xxvii. 106-120). It is “the royal mantle of all the
volumes of the world, which is most fervent and most living in God’s
breath, and in His ways” (_Par._ xxiii. 112-114); and it communicates
in different degrees some participation in this quickening breath of
God to the other sphere which it encloses, and to all the Universe. It
moves swiftest of all, from the fervent desire of all its parts to be
united to the Empyrean, the spaceless and motionless ocean of Divine
love, where God beatifies the saints and Angels in the vision of His
Essence. This Empyrean is the true intellectual Paradise, for which the
lower heavens are merely sensible preparations. “This is the sovereign
edifice of the world, in which all the world is included, and outside
of which is nothing; and it is not in space, but was formed only in
the First Mind” (_Conv._ ii. 4); “The heaven that is pure light; light
intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy, joy that
transcendeth every sweetness” (_Par._ xxx. 39-42).
GRADATIONS.--Each of the nine lower spheres represents a step higher
in knowledge, in love, in blessedness, until in the true Paradise
the soul attains to perfect knowledge, supreme love, and infinite
blessedness in union with the First Cause, in the Beatific Vision of
the Divine Essence. The ascent is marked by the increased loveliness
of Beatrice, as she guides Dante upwards from heaven to heaven; it is
marked, too, by gradations in the brilliancy of the blessed spirits
themselves, by their ever increasing ardour of charity towards the
poet, and by the growing spirituality of the matters discussed in each
sphere--veil after veil being drawn aside from the mysteries of the
Divine treasure-house.
THE SAINTS.--“To show forth the glory of beatitude in those souls,”
says the letter to Can Grande, “from them, as from those who see all
truth, many things will be sought which have great utility and delight”
(_Epist._ x. 33). All the saints without exception have their home and
glorious seats with Mary and the Angels in that Empyrean heaven, where
they are finally seen as glorified spirit likenesses of what they were
on earth. But into each preparatory sphere, excepting the ninth, these
citizens of eternal life descend to meet Dante as, with Beatrice,
he approaches the gates of the celestial city--like the noble soul
returning home to God in the fourth and last part of life:
“And even as its citizens come forth to meet him who returns from a
long journey, before he enters the gate of the city, so to the noble
soul come forth, as is fitting, those citizens of eternal life. And
thus they do because of her good works and contemplations; for, being
now rendered to God and abstracted from worldly things and thoughts,
she seems to see those whom she believes to be with God” (_Conv._ iv.
28).
In all these spheres, excepting the first, and to some extent the
second, the spirits of the blessed appear clothed in dazzling light,
which hides their proper semblances from Dante’s gaze, making them
appear as brilliant stars or flaming splendours. In the tenth Heaven
of Heavens he is supernaturally illumined, and enabled thereby to
behold them in their glorified spirit forms “with countenance unveiled”
(_Par._ xxii. 60, xxx. 96, xxxi. 49).
In the three lower heavens, to which earth’s shadow was supposed to
extend (_Par._ ix. 118, 119), appear the souls whose lives were marred
by inconstancy in their vows, who were moved by vain glory, or yielded
to sensual love. They descend into these lower spheres to give Dante a
sensible sign of the lesser degree of the perfection of their beatitude
in the Empyrean. _Domus est una, sed diversitas est ibi mansionum_;
“The house is one, but there is a diversity of mansions there.”
There are different mansions of beatitude in God’s house, proceeding
from inequality in the soul’s capacity of the Divine Charity; but in
that house all are fulfilled with the Vision of the Divine Essence,
and each perfectly beatified according to his own capacity of love
and knowledge. In the spheres of the four higher planets appear the
souls of great teachers and doctors, of Jewish warriors and Christian
knights, of just rulers, of ascetic monks and hermits; they appear as
types of lives perfected in action or in contemplation, as a sign of
the different ways in which perfection may be reached on earth and
beatitude attained in Paradise. These successive manifestations in
the seven spheres of the planets obviate what might otherwise have
proved the monotony of a single heaven, and suggest that, although
each soul partakes supremely according to its individual capacity of
the Beatific Vision, which is essentially one and the same in all, yet
there are not only grades but subtle differences in the possession of
it, in which the life on earth was a factor. In the eighth, the Stellar
Heaven, still under sensible figures and allegorical veils, Dante sees
“the host of the triumph of Christ, and all the fruit gathered by the
circling of these spheres” (_Par._ xxiii. 19-21), representing the
Church in which these various modes and degrees of life are brought
into unison. In the ninth, the Crystalline, the angelic hierarchies are
manifested with imagery symbolical of their office towards God and
man, representing the principle of Divine Order, the overruling and
disposition of Divine Providence in which the celestial intelligences
are the agents and instruments. The Empyrean Heaven depicts the soul
_in patria_, with all the capacities of love and knowledge actualised
in the fruition of the Ultimate Reality, the supreme and universal
truth which is the object of the understanding, the supreme and
universal good which is the object of the will.
THE ANGELS.--Each of the nine moving spheres is assigned to the care
of one of the nine angelic orders: Angels, Archangels, Principalities;
Powers, Virtues, Dominations; Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. And the
character of the blessed spirits that appear to Dante in each heaven,
and the subjects discussed, seem in almost every case to correspond
more or less closely with the functions assigned by mystical
theologians, especially Dionysius, St. Gregory and St. Bernard, to
the special angelic order which presides over the sphere in question.
There are two fundamental principles in the life of the soul: nature
and grace. The one is represented in the _Paradiso_ by the astronomical
order of the heavens and their influence upon individual disposition,
furnishing man with a natural aptitude for the moral and intellectual
virtues; the other by the bounty of Divine Grace, which reveals itself
in the perfecting of the natural and the infusion of the supernatural
virtues, whereby souls become assimilated to the angelic orders.[37]
It is through these Angels (the name is applied generally to all, as
well as to the lowest order) that God disposes the visible world; in
the hands of the celestial intelligences the heavens are as hammers, to
stamp the Divine ideas upon material creation and carry out the Divine
plan in the government of the Universe (_cf._ _Par._ ii. 127-129). And,
by means of the influence of the stars, these Angels have impressed
certain men with their own characteristics; perhaps to fill up the
vacant places in their ranks left by the fall of Lucifer’s followers,
certainly to co-operate on earth in their work. Dante himself was born
beneath the constellation of the Gemini, the glorious stars impregnated
with the virtue of the Cherubim who rule the eighth sphere (_Par._
xxii. 112-123). The Cherubim represent the Divine Wisdom; their name
signifies plenitude of knowledge. According to St. Bernard, they “draw
from the very fountain of wisdom, the mouth of the Most High, and pour
out the streams of knowledge upon all His citizens.” Their special
prerogatives are fullness of Divine light, and contemplation of the
beauty of the Divine order of things; they see most into the profound
mysteries of the hidden things of God, and spread the knowledge of
Him upon all beneath them. By their inspiration Dante co-operated in
this cherubical work by writing the _Divina Commedia_. The Seraphim
especially represent the Divine Love. No soul appears in the ninth
heaven which they guide and in which the angelic hierarchies are
manifested; Beatrice is the sole interpreter between the poet and
the Angels, as she had been the revealer to him on earth of Love’s
“possible divinities and celestial prophecies.”
TIME IN PARADISE.--The action of the _Paradiso_ begins at noon,
immediately after Dante’s return from Eunoë; that is, noon on Wednesday
in Easter week in the Earthly Paradise and (the following) midnight at
Jerusalem (_Par._ i. 37-45). The time-references in this third Cantica
are rather doubtful (_Par._ xxii. 151-153, xxvii. 77-87), but it seems
probable that Dante takes twenty-four hours to ascend through the nine
material heavens to the Empyrean, which is beyond time and space, where
“the natural law in nought is relevant” (_Par._ xxx. 123). When Dante
woke from his “mighty trance” to the “sound of the importunate earth,”
it was perhaps about dawn on the morning of Friday in Easter week in
our world, thus completing the seven days of his ecstatic pilgrimage,
which had begun at about the same hour on Good Friday.
CANTO I.--In a lyrical prologue of stately music (_Par._ i. 1-36),
the poet sings of the glory of the First Mover, and prays for light
and inspiration to complete this third most arduous portion of his
divine poem. Then, in the noblest season of the year and noblest hour
of the day, as Beatrice gazes upon the sun and Dante upon her, his
mind becomes godlike, and he ascends to Heaven swifter than lightning.
To explain his ascent, Beatrice discourses upon the form and order
of God’s visible image, the Universe; and on His Eternal Law, the
sovereign plan of government existing in the Divine Mind, to which all
movements and actions of nature are subject (_ibid._ 103-141). To all
created things God has given an instinct, or principle of inclination,
by which, in different ways according to their nature, He draws them
all back to Himself over the great sea of being. Rational beings alone
can resist the order of the Universe and defeat the Eternal Law by sin,
which is expiated by temporary or eternal suffering, as Dante has seen
in the lower realms; but the purified soul, in accordance with this
order and law, inevitably mounts up to find its rest in union with the
First Cause. It is the doctrine of spiritual gravitation (derived from
St. Augustine), according to which the soul is moved by love as bodies
are by their weight, and all things find their rest in order.
THE HEAVEN OF THE MOON.--They are received into the eternal pearl of
the Moon (_Par._ ii.); where Beatrice first confutes Dante’s former
theory concerning the luminous substance of the celestial bodies,
and, by explaining how everything in the visible world depends upon
the angelic movers of the sphere, gives a mystical interpretation
of a natural phenomenon, on this first step of his ascent to the
suprasensible. Within this eternal pearl appear faint but divinely
beautiful forms of women; the souls of those who had yielded to
violence and broken their solemn vow (_Par._ iii.). Piccarda Donati,
sister of Corso and Forese, sets forth the perfection of celestial
charity, where all wills are made absolutely one with the will of God,
who has awarded different degrees or mansions of beatitude to all His
chosen ones:
E la sua volontade è nostra pace,
“And His will is our peace.”[38] Transfigured now with ineffable joy,
Piccarda tells the pathetic story of her frustrated life on earth;
and points out to Dante the Empress Constance, mother of Frederick
II., torn, like her, from the convent’s shelter. Beatrice explains to
the poet the place of all the saints in the Empyrean--the “heaven of
humility where Mary is,” as Dante had sung long before of Beatrice
herself in the _Vita Nuova_--and the reason of this temporary
apparition in the moon (_Par._ iv.). The other questions solved in
this sphere are all connected with Free Will. Rectitude of will is
necessary for the gaining of Paradise, and nothing whatever can take
away that freedom of the will. “As regards the proper act of the will,
no violence can be done to the will”; and, since Piccarda and Constance
yielded through fear of greater evil, they fell voluntarily from the
state of perfection to which they were called. Freedom of the will
is God’s greatest gift to man (_Par._ v. 19-24); hence the sanctity
of an accepted vow, wherein this supreme gift is offered to God as
victim, although Holy Church has power to commute, save, apparently,
in the case of solemn vows of perpetual chastity. It will be observed
that this heaven is moved by the Angels, who are severally assigned to
individuals as guardians, and who are the bearers of tidings of God’s
bounty to men; and, corresponding to this, the questions solved relate
to the salvation and guidance of individual souls, and to the great
gift of liberty, whereby God’s bounty is specially shown.
THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY.--In the second sphere, the heaven of Mercury,
appear the souls of those who did great things for humanity or for
special nations, but who were actuated by mixed motives; personal
ambition, desire of fame and honour, made “the rays of true love
mount upwards less vividly” (_Par._ vi. 117); and they have thus the
next lowest mansion of beatitude to the spirits that appeared in the
inconstant Moon. The Emperor Justinian recites the proud history of
the Roman Eagle, and shows how Divine Providence established the sway
of the Roman people over all the earth, made the Eagle the instrument
of the Atonement offered by Christ for all mankind, the avenger of His
death, the protector of His Church. As the monarch who reformed and
codified Roman Law, of which he is for Dante the personification, and
who restored Italy to the Empire (the work which the _Veltro_ is to
renew under altered conditions of Christendom), Justinian lifts the
imperial ideal far above the factious politics of the Middle Ages,
condemning Guelfs and Ghibellines alike as traitors and sowers of
discord. Here, too, is Romeo of Villanova, who did in a lesser degree
for Provence what Justinian did for the Empire, thus appearing with
him in the sphere that is moved by the Archangels, whose function is
to guide and protect particular nations. The figure of Romeo--unjustly
accused of corrupt practices in office, supporting with magnanimous
heart the poverty and humiliations of voluntary exile--is perhaps an
unconscious portrait of Dante himself. Even as the Archangels announce
messages of special import and sacredness, as Gabriel did to Mary,
so Beatrice explains to Dante the mystery of man’s redemption by the
Incarnation and Crucifixion, the supremest work at once of Divine
Justice and Divine Mercy (_Par._ vii.), and touches somewhat upon the
immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.
THE HEAVEN OF VENUS.--The third heaven, the sphere of Venus, is
moved by the celestial Principalities, whose office is to influence
earthly rulers to imitate the principality of God, by uniting love
with their lordship. They are those, according to St. Bernard, “by
whose management and wisdom all principality on earth is set up,
ruled, limited, transferred, diminished, and changed.” Into this
sphere descend the souls of purified lovers, brilliant lights moving
circle-wise and hidden in the rays of their own joy. Carlo Martello,
son of Charles II. of Naples, and son-in-law of Rudolph of Hapsburg,
who, by reason of his marriage with Clemenza, might have healed the
feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, pictures the realms over which he
should have ruled, denounces the misgovernment of his own house, and
explains the influence of the celestial bodies for the constitution of
society and the government of states (_Par._ viii.). Cunizza da Romano,
the famous sister of Ezzelino, rebukes the anarchy of the March of
Treviso; a “modern child of Venus,” she here appears as the type of
a perfect penitent (_Par._ ix.). Like her, Folco of Marseilles, poet
then prelate, but here recorded only as troubadour, remembers the love
sins of his youth, not with sorrow, but with gratitude to the Divine
Mercy and wonder at the mysteries of Providence. Rahab of Jericho,
the highest spirit of this sphere, is a type of the Church, saved by
Christ’s blood from the ruin of the world; and, with a fine thrust at
the loveless avarice of the Pope and his cardinals, Dante passes with
Beatrice beyond the shadow of the earth.
THE HEAVEN OF THE SUN.--To mark this higher grade of bliss and
knowledge, Dante pauses on his entrance into the fourth sphere, the
heaven of the Sun, to sing again of the Creation, the work of the
Blessed Trinity, and the order of the Universe, the visible expression
of the perfection of Divine art (_Par._ x. 1-21). The Sun is ruled
by the celestial Powers, the angelic order that represents the
Divine majesty and power, combats the powers of darkness, and stays
diseases. Here, in two garlands of celestial lights surrounding Dante
and Beatrice, appear the glorious souls of twenty-four teachers and
doctors, who illuminated the world by example and doctrine; the twofold
work of co-operation with the celestial Powers, which is seen in its
supereminent degree in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the
champions who led the armies of Christ against the powers of darkness
and healed the spiritual diseases of the Christian world. St. Thomas
Aquinas, the great light of the Dominicans, after naming the other
eleven spirits of his circle (Albertus Magnus, Gratian, Peter Lombard,
Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boëthius, Isidore, Bede, Richard of St.
Victor, and Siger), sings the glorious panegyric of St. Francis,
the seraphic bridegroom of Poverty, laments the backsliding of the
Dominicans (_Par._ xi.). St. Bonaventura, once minister-general of the
Franciscans, extols the marvellous life of St. Dominic, the cherubical
lover of Faith, the great paladin in Holy Church’s victorious battle
where St. Francis bore the standard of the Crucified (_Par._ xii.).
Lamenting the degenerate state of the Franciscans, he names the eleven
spirits that accompany him; two of the followers of St. Francis,
Illuminato and Agostino; Hugh of St. Victor; Peter Comestor, Peter
of Spain (the logician whose elevation to the papacy as John XXI.
may be ignored in Paradise), Nathan, Chrysostom, St. Anselm, Aelius
Donatus (the Latin grammarian), Rabanus Maurus, and the Calabrian
abbot Joachim. Lovers of poverty, rebukers of corruption, historians,
mystics, theologians, writers of humble text-books are here associated
in the same glory, as servants of truth in the same warfare against
the powers of darkness. They illustrate what St. Bonaventura calls the
broadness of the illuminative way. Each group closes with a spirit
whose orthodoxy had been at least questioned. Siger of Brabant, the
champion of Averroism at the university of Paris, had “syllogised
invidious truths,” and met with a violent death at the Papal Court at
Orvieto about 1284. Joachim of Flora, “endowed with prophetic spirit,”
had foretold the advent of the epoch of the Holy Ghost, in which the
Everlasting Gospel, the spiritual interpretation of the Gospel of
Christ, would leave no place for disciplinary institutions; his later
followers among the Franciscans had been condemned at the Council of
Anagni in 1256.
St. Thomas further explains to Dante the grades of perfection in God’s
creatures, from the Angels downwards; whereby His Divine light is more
or less imperfectly reflected, and the likeness of the Divine ideas
more or less imperfectly expressed--perfectly only when the Trinity
creates immediately, as in the case of Adam and the humanity of
Christ (_Par._ xiii.). Solomon, whose peerless wisdom St. Thomas had
explained as “royal prudence,” instructs Dante concerning the splendour
of the body after the resurrection, when human personality will be
completed and the perfection of beatitude fulfilled (_Par._ xiv.). In a
mysteriously beautiful apparition of what seems to be another garland
of spirits in the Sun, this vision of the fourth heaven closes; and
Beatrice and her lover are “translated to more lofty salvation” in the
glowing red of Mars.
THE HEAVEN OF MARS.--The fifth heaven, the sphere of Mars, is ruled
by the angelic Virtues. This is the order which images the Divine
strength and fortitude; their name, according to Dionysius, signifies
“a certain valiant and unconquerable virility.” According to St.
Bernard, they are those “by whose command or work signs and prodigies
are wrought among the elements, for the admonition of mortals,” and it
is through them that the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven
as foretold in the Gospel.[39] Therefore, in Mars, Dante beholds a
great image of the Crucified, blood-red, formed by stars which are the
souls of the warrior saints, whom the Virtues impressed at their birth
with the influence of the planet (_Par._ xvii. 76-78), to be strongly
and manfully valiant, and to do notable things on earth (_ibid._ 92,
93), even as the Virtues, according to St. Bernard, work signs and
prodigies among the elements.
Cacciaguida passes from the right arm of the Cross to greet his
descendant, like Anchises to Aeneas in Elysium. In his long discourse
with the poet (_Par._ xv. and xvi.) we dimly discern a splendidly ideal
picture of a free Italian commune of the twelfth century, before what
Dante regards as the corrupting influence of wealth and illegitimate
extension of its boundaries had fallen upon it, and before the
hostility of the Church to the Empire, with the resulting confusion
of persons in the city, had involved the Florentines in the feuds of
Guelfs and Ghibellines. Then, having bitterly lamented the decay of
the old Florentine families and the corruption of their successors,
Cacciaguida co-operates with the Virtues by inspiring Dante with
endurance and fortitude to suffer unjust exile and perform his life’s
work (_Par._ xvii.). In the famous and most noble lines, to which
reference has already been made in touching upon this epoch of Dante’s
life, Cacciaguida foretells the poet’s banishment, the calumnies of
his enemies, his sufferings in exile, his forming a party to himself,
the future greatness of Can Grande, Dante’s own certainty of eternal
fame. And let him be no timid friend to truth, but make manifest his
whole vision, and especially assail corruption in highest places (_cf.
Mon._ iii. 1). It is Dante’s apologia for his own life, first as
citizen, then as poet. The keynote of the closing years of his life is
struck at the opening of Canto xviii.: “And that Lady who was leading
me to God said: ‘Change thy thought; think that I am near to Him who
unburdens every wrong.’” Gazing upon her, his affection “was free from
every other desire.” Then, with a charge of celestial chivalry across
the sky, this vision of warriors closes; Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus,
Charlemagne and Orlando, William of Orange still with Renoardo, Godfrey
de Bouillon and Robert Guiscard, flash through the Cross, and are
rejoined by Cacciaguida in their motion and their song.
THE HEAVEN OF JUPITER.--The silvery white sphere of Jupiter, the sixth
heaven, is ruled by the Dominations, the angelic order which images
the archetypal dominion in God as the source of true dominion. “We
must consider in the Dominations,” writes St. Bernard, “how great
is the majesty of the Lord, at whose bidding empire is established,
and of whose empire universality and eternity are the bounds.” This,
then, is the sphere of ideal government, the heaven of the planet that
effectuates justice upon earth (_Par._ xviii. 115-117). The souls of
faithful and just rulers appear as golden lights, singing and flying
like celestial birds. They first form the text, _Diligite iustitiam que
iudicatis terram_, “Love justice, you that are the judges of the earth”
(_Wisdom_, i. 1, Vulgate), tracing successively the letters until they
rest in the final golden M, the initial letter of Monarchy or Empire,
under which alone can justice be paramount on earth, and then, with
further transformations, become the celestial Eagle (_Par._ xviii.
100-114). This is the “sign which made the Romans reverend in the
world” (xix. 101); no emblem of material conquest, but the image of the
sempiternal justice of the Primal Will, the type of dominion on earth
ordained by God. It is the allegorical representation of the doctrines
of the _Monarchia_. And, since justice is obscured and good government
rendered abortive by the simony of the pastors of the Church, which
leads them to oppose the Empire, Dante has a bitter word in season for
the reigning pontiff, John XXII (_Par._ xviii. 130-136).
In the perfect concord of its component spirits the Eagle, speaking
with one voice, discourses upon the immutability and absolute justice
of the Divine Will, which is inscrutable and incomprehensible to
mortals (_Par._ xix.). Having rebuked the wickedness of all the kings
and princes then reigning, from the Emperor-elect (Albert of Austria
in 1300) to the King of Cyprus, it sets forth in contrast to them
the example of just and righteous monarchs and rulers of olden time,
the six noblest of whom now form its eye--David, Trajan, Hezekiah,
Constantine, the Norman William II. of Sicily, and Rhipeus the Trojan
(_Par._ xx.). Three exquisite lines (73-75)--introduced as a mere
image--render the flight and song of the skylark with a beauty and
fidelity to nature which even Shelley was not to surpass. The salvation
of Trajan, through the prayers of St. Gregory, and Rhipeus, by
internal inspiration concerning the Redeemer to come, unveils yet more
wondrous mysteries in the treasury of Divine Justice, which suffers
itself to be overcome by hope and love. Rhipeus, the justest among the
Trojans and the strictest observer of right (Virgil, _Aen._ ii. 426,
427; _cf._ Acts x. 35), by his presence solves Dante’s doubt concerning
the fate of the just heathen who die without baptism, and indicates
that the race which gave the ancestors to the Roman people was not
without Divine light.
HEAVEN OF SATURN.--The last of the seven heavens of the planets is
the sphere of Saturn, over which the Thrones preside. According to
Dionysius, the Thrones are associated with steadfastness, supermundane
tendency towards and reception of the Divine. They represent, according
to St. Bernard, supreme tranquillity, most calm serenity, peace which
surpasses all understanding; and upon them God sits as judge (_cf.
Par._ ix. 61, 62). In Saturn appear the contemplative saints, and the
monks who kept firm and steadfast in the cloister. They pass up and
down the celestial Ladder of Contemplation (_Par._ xxi. and xxii.), the
stairway by which the soul mystically ascends to the consideration of
the impenetrable mysteries of God which transcend all reason. In this
high stage of progress towards the suprasensible Beatrice does not
smile, for Dante’s human intellect could not yet sustain it, and the
sweet symphonies of Paradise are silent. St. Peter Damian discourses
upon the impenetrable mysteries of Divine predestination, and rebukes
the vicious and luxurious lives of the great prelate and cardinals.
St. Benedict describes the foundation of his own great order, and
laments the shameless corruption of contemporary Benedictines. Thus in
this, and, above all, in the cry like thunder which bursts from the
contemplatives at the conclusion of Peter Damian’s words, threatening
the Divine vengeance which is to fall upon the corrupt pastors of
the Church, the saints of the seventh sphere unite themselves with
the celestial Thrones, whose office is purification, and who are the
mirrors of the terrible judgments of God.
THE GEMINI.--At Beatrice’s bidding, Dante follows the contemplatives
up the celestial ladder, entering the Firmament at the sign of the
Gemini or Twins, beneath which he was born (_Par._ xxii. 112-123). To
his natal stars, and thus to the Cherubim with whose virtue they are
animated, he appeals for power to complete the work for which they have
inspired him. In a momentary vision, with the capacity of his inward
soul enlarged, he looks down upon the whole Universe, and estimates
aright the relative value of all things in heaven and earth, now that
he is prepared to witness the true glories of Paradise.
THE STELLAR HEAVEN.--The Firmament or stellar heaven, the eighth
sphere, is ruled by the Cherubim, who represent the Divine Wisdom; it
is the celestial counterpart of the Garden of Eden. Here the fruit
of man’s redemption is mystically shown in a vision of the triumph of
Christ, the new Adam, surrounded by myriads of shining lights which
draw their light from Him and represent the souls of the blessed whom
He has sanctified (_Par._ xxiii.). After Christ has ascended from this
celestial garden, where Mary is the rose and the Apostles the lilies,
the Archangel Gabriel descends with ineffable melody and attends upon
the new Eve, “the living garden of delight, wherein the condemnation
was annulled and the tree of life planted,”[40] in her Assumption.
The four spheres of the higher planets had set forth a celestial
realisation of the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude,
Justice, and Temperance, with perfect man according to the capacity
of human nature; now, in this sphere of the Cherubim whose name
indicates plenitude of the knowledge of God, Dante is examined upon
the three theological virtues, which have God for their object as He
transcends the knowledge of our reason, and which put man on the way to
supernatural happiness. “If we would enter Paradise and the fruition of
Truth,” writes St. Bonaventura, “the image of our mind must be clothed
with the three theological virtues, whereby the mind is purified,
illumined, and rendered perfect, and thus the image is reformed and
made fit for the Jerusalem which is above.” Dante’s answers to St.
Peter upon Faith (_Par._ xxiv.), to St. James upon Hope (_Par._ xxv.),
to St. John upon Charity (_Par._ xxvi.), contain the essence of the
devout wisdom of the schoolmen upon those three divine gifts, whereby
man participates in the Deity, and “we ascend to philosophise in that
celestial Athens, where Stoics and Peripatetics and Epicureans, by the
art of the eternal Truth, harmoniously concur in one will” (_Conv._
iii. 14). For the object of Faith and Love alike Dante, even in
Paradise, can appeal to the _Metaphysics_ of Aristotle (_Par._ xxiv.
130-132, xxvi. 37-39); and all the celestial music cannot quite drown
the poet’s sigh for that fair Florentine sheepfold, from which he is
still barred out, though Hell and Heaven have opened for him their
eternal gates (_Par._ xxv. 1-12). Within a fourth light the soul of
Adam appears, to instruct Dante upon the proper cause of his fall and
upon his life in the Earthly Paradise, now that the poet has seen the
triumph and ascent of the new Adam. Adam, in whom was directly infused
all the light lawful to human nature to have (_Par._ xiii. 43), is the
last soul that appears to Dante until the consummation of the vision
in the Empyrean. On the close of his discourse, a hymn of glory to the
Blessed Trinity resounds through Paradise, a laugh of the Universe in
joy of the mystery of Redemption (_Par._ xxvii. 1-9). Then, while all
Heaven blushes and there is a celestial eclipse as at the Crucifixion,
St. Peter utters a terrible denunciation of the scandals and corruption
in the Papacy and the Church, wherein Dante, as in the Epistle to the
Italian Cardinals, takes his stand as the Jeremiah of Roman Catholicity.
THE NINTH HEAVEN.--When the saints have returned to their places in
the Empyrean, Dante, after a last look to earth, passes up with his
lady into the ninth sphere, the Crystalline heaven. Beatrice discourses
upon the order of the heavens and the want of government upon earth,
prophesying that, before very long, deliverance and reformation will
come, even as St. Peter had announced in the sphere below. Here,
where nature begins, Dante has a preparatory manifestation of the
nine angelic orders, the ministers of Divine Providence, who ordain
and dispose all things by moving the spheres. They appear as nine
circles of flame, revolving round an atomic Point of surpassing
brilliancy, which symbolises the supreme unity of God, the poet again
having recourse to the _Metaphysics_ of Aristotle: “From that Point
depends heaven and all nature” (_Par._ xxviii. 41, 42). Each angelic
circle is swifter and more brilliant as it is nearer to the centre,
each hierarchy striving after the utmost possible assimilation to God
and union with Him. Swiftest and brightest of all are the Seraphim,
who move this ninth sphere; the angelic order that, representing the
Divine Love, loves most and knows most. “In the Angels,” says Colet
on Dionysius, “an intensity of knowledge is love; a less intense love
is knowledge.” The relation of the Seraphim to the Cherubim is that
of fire to light; their special office is perfecting, as that of the
Cherubim is illumination. All the orders contemplate God, and manifest
Him to creatures to draw them to Him. Receiving from God the Divine
light and love that makes them like to Him, the higher orders reflect
this to the lower, like mirrors reflecting the Divine rays; and these
lower orders reflect it to men, so rendering all things, as far as
possible to each nature, like to God and in union with Him. After
distinguishing between the different orders according to Dionysius,
Beatrice speaks of their creation as especially illustrating the Divine
Love, which the Seraphim represent (_Par._ xxix.), and their place in
the order of the Universe, the fall of the rebellious, the reward of
the faithful, and their immeasurable number. Each Angel belongs to a
different species, and each differs from every other in its reception
of Divine light and love.
THE EMPYREAN.--Dante and Beatrice now issue forth of the last material
sphere into the Empyrean, the true Paradise of vision, comprehension,
and fruition, where man’s will is set at rest in union with universal
Good, and his intellect in the possession of universal Truth. In
preparation for this Divine union, Dante is momentarily blinded by
the Divine light which overpowers him with its radiance--a blindness
followed by a new celestial sight and new faculties for comprehending
the essence of spiritual things. The first empyreal vision is still
a foreshadowing preface: a river of light, the stream which makes
the city of God joyful, the wondrous flowers of celestial spring,
the living sparks of angelic fire. This river of Divine grace is the
fountain of wisdom from which, according to Bernard, the Cherubim
drink, to pour out the streams of knowledge upon all God’s citizens;
and of this fountain Dante, too, drinks with his eyes, that he may
more fully see the vision of God which he has to relate, to diffuse
His knowledge upon earth as the Cherubim do from Heaven. By the light
of glory his mind is rendered capable of seeing those spiritual things
which the blessed behold with immediate intuition, and of ultimate
union with the Divine Essence (_Par._ xxx. 100-102). The river seems
to change to a circular ocean of light; the saints and Angels appear
in their true forms, all united in the sempiternal Rose of Paradise.
Even at this height of ecstatic alienation from terrestrial things,
Dante can turn in thought to Pope and Emperor who should be leading men
to beatitude; a throne is prepared for Henry in this convent of white
stoles, while the hell of the simoniacs is gaping for Boniface and
Clement.
Eternity, as defined by Boëthius, is “the complete and perfect
simultaneous possession of unlimited life”; and Dante is one who has
come from time to the eternal: _a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto_
(_Par._ xxxi. 38).[41] Beatrice has returned to her throne, her
allegorical mission ended; and for this supreme revelation of the
Divine beauty in the mystical Rose, where there is no medium to
impede the poet’s sight of the Divine light (for his is now that of a
separated spirit), but blessed souls and flying Angels are absorbed
in love and vision, St. Bernard completes her work, even as that of
Virgil had been completed by Matelda in the Earthly Paradise. St.
Bernard may represent the glorified contemplative life in our heavenly
country, as Matelda may symbolise the glorified active life in the
state of restored Eden; or, perhaps better, if Matelda is taken as
the love rightly ordered to which the _Purgatorio_ leads, Bernard
represents the loving contemplation or contemplative love, attained
by the mystic in brief moments here and now, in which the eternal and
unchanging life of the soul in the hereafter consists. In an exquisite
lyrical inter-breathing Dante addresses Beatrice for the last time,
thanking her for having led him from servitude to liberty, praying to
her for final perseverance (_Par._ xxxi. 79-90). Under the guidance of
Bernard, he prepares himself for the vision of the Divine Essence, by
disciplining his spiritual sight in contemplation of the glory of the
saints and of the ineffable beauty of Mary, surrounded by her Angels,
and clothed, as Bernard himself puts it elsewhere, in the Sun by whose
fire the prophet’s lips were cleansed and the Cherubim kindled with
love.
Throughout the Rose two descending lines divide the redeemed of the
old law from the redeemed under the new. The one line passes down
from Mary’s throne, composed of holy women, ancestresses of Christ
or types of His Church: Eve, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth
(_Par._ xxxii.). With Rachel, in the third row, Beatrice is seated.
The opposite line passes down from the seat of the Baptist, Christ’s
precursor; and begins with St. Francis, His closest and most perfect
imitator, St. Benedict (in the third row opposite to Rachel and
Beatrice), St. Augustine. The lower sections of each half of the Rose
are occupied by the little children who died before attaining use of
reason; and who yet have different degrees of bliss, according to the
inscrutable mysteries of predestination and Divine Justice, which
willed to give grace differently to each. Another vision of Mary, the
supreme of created things, “the face that is most like to Christ, whose
beauty alone can dispose thee to see Christ” (_Par._ xxxii. 85-87), is
the prelude to the vision of the Deity. Before her hovers her chosen
knight, Gabriel, the “strength of God,” the pattern of celestial
chivalry, _leggiadria_. Round her are Adam and St. Peter, Moses and St.
John the Divine; opposite the two latter are St. Anne and St. Lucy.
Thus the three Ladies who took pity upon Dante in the dark wood, when
the mystical journey opened, have been seen in their glory at its
close.
MARY AND THE DIVINE ESSENCE.--And the poet turns finally to the Primal
Love, by Mary’s grace and Bernard’s intercession, in the lyrical prayer
that opens the wonderful closing canto of the _Commedia_:
Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
“Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son.” Setting forth her predestination
from eternity to bring the Redeemer into the world, her office of love
and hope to Heaven and earth, her infinite excellence and dignity, her
power and never-failing love, St. Bernard implores of her grace for
Dante to rise to the vision of the Divine Essence now, in ecstatic
contemplation, and then for his final perseverance that, on his return
to earth, her loving protection may strengthen him against the assaults
of passion, until he rejoice once more in the Beatific Vision for all
eternity. Human love becomes one with the divine where Beatrice--joined
with him now in the union of fruition--is named for the last time in
the poem as he draws near to his mystical goal.
In answer to Mary’s intercession, an anticipation is granted to Dante
of the vision wherein the last and perfect beatitude of man consists.
The supreme experience of the soul, recognised by the great mystics
from Plotinus and Augustine to Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventura,
is rendered into unsurpassable poetry with the impassioned conviction
that it has been the writer’s own. All ardour of desire dies away.
Entering into the Divine light, uniting his intellectual gaze with
the Divine Essence, he actualises all potentialities of spiritual
vision therein. In the Divine light, he beholds all nature, all Being
scattered in leaves throughout the Universe here united by love
into one volume; the vision of the First Cause which satisfies the
understanding becomes that of the Supreme Goodness which fulfils the
will; and this First Cause, this Supreme Goodness, itself remaining
unchanged, becomes revealed to the poet’s ever strengthening intuition
as the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, in which the Person of the Word
took Human Nature.
A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
“Here power failed the lofty phantasy”--the inspired imagination of
the prophet; but it left the desire and will assimilated in perfect
harmony with the will of God--the Divine will revealed as universal,
all-pervading, and all-moving love, “the love that moves the sun and
the other stars”:
L’AMOR CHE MOVE IL SOLE E L’ALTRE STELLE.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] “Della insufficienza del titolo è prova ed effetto il pronto e
universale accoglimento, che, messo una volta sul frontespizio, trovò
l’epiteto _divina_, che al generico _Commedia_ diede determinatezza e
colore” (P. Rajna, _Il titolo del poema dantesco_, in _Studi danteschi
diretti da_ M. Barbi, vol. iv.).
[29] For details of structure and scansion, the reader should consult
P. E. Guarnerio, _Manuale di versificazione italiana_; G. Federzoni,
_Dei versi e dei metri italiani_; F. D’Ovidio, _Versificaizone italiana
e arte poetica medioevale_.
[30] _Cf._ G. Livi, _op. cit._, pp. 26, 27.
[31] Traces of an earlier design have been tentatively found in various
places of the first seven cantos, and associated with Boccaccio’s story
of Dante having begun the poem before his exile and resumed it after
the recovery of his manuscript when the guest of Moroello Malaspina. In
Boccaccio’s commentary upon the opening of _Inf._ viii., Andrea Poggi
and Dino Perini are represented as rival claimants for the honor of
having recovered the manuscript for Dante.
[32] _Cf. Conv._ ii. 5.
[33] _Cf. Inf._ xxxiii. 79-84 with _Phars._ viii. 827-830.
[34] See Moore’s _Time-References_.
[35] _Cf._ Sonnets lx. and lxi. of _The House of Life_.
[36] See in particular Parodi, “L’Albero dell’Impero,” in his _Poesia e
storia nella Divina Commedia_.
[37] In _Purg._ xxx. 109-117, Dante thus distinguishes between the
_ovra de le rote magne_ and the _larghezza di grazie divine_ in his
own case. St. Gregory the Great, speaking of the correspondence of men
with the angelic orders, uses the phrase: _divinae largitatis munere
refecti_ (_Hom. in Evangelia_, ii. 34).
[38] I venture to retain this reading, although the _testo critico_ now
gives: _E’n la sua volontade_.
[39] The Vulgate has _virtutes caelorum_, in Matt. xxiv. and Luke xxi.,
where the English Bible reads “the powers of the heavens.”
[40] St. John of Damascus.
[41] Note the scansion of the previous line (37): _Io che al divino
da l’umano_. There is no syneresis in _ïo_, no elision of the _e_ in
_che_; thus emphasising Dante’s personal experience, his wonder that
it should be vouchsafed to him, and producing the slow movement, the
solemn intonation of the line.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
The following notes do not attempt to give a full bibliography, but
merely a selection of works that will be found useful by the readers of
this Primer.
A. TEXT OF COMPLETE WORKS OF DANTE, DICTIONARIES AND CONCORDANCES
_Le Opere di Dante, testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana_, a
cura di M. Barbi, E. G. Parodi, F. Pellegrini, E. Pistelli, P. Rajna,
E. Rostagno, G. Vandelli. Con indice analitico dei nomi e delle cose di
Mario Casella. Florence, 1921. The “Sexcentenary Dante.”
_Le Opere di Dante Alighieri_, a cura del Dr. E. Moore, nuovamente
rivedute nel testo dal Dr. Paget Toynbee. Fourth edition. Oxford, 1923.
_A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of
Dante_, by Paget Toynbee. Oxford, 1898.
_A Concise Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works
of Dante_, by Paget Toynbee, Oxford, 1914.
_Concordance of the “Divina Commedia.”_ By E. A. Fay. Boston, 1888.
_Concordanza delle opere italiane in prosa e del Canzoniere di Dante
Alighieri._ By E. S. Sheldon and A. C. White. Oxford, 1905.
_Dantis Alagherii Operum Latinorum Concordantiae._ By E. K. Rand and E.
H. Wilkins, Oxford, 1912.
B. HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF DANTE’S TIMES