complementary study of the Poet—no longer as the inspirer of nineteenth
and twentieth century ideals, but as the supreme representative of
the thought and feeling of his own century, the thirteenth. Like
Shakespeare, Dante never grows old. There is a quality of universality
about his genius, and a broad and deep human appeal in his writing which
renders it the proper heritage of every generation. And, haughty and
aloof as was his spirit during life, with an aloofness intensified by
bitter exile and by the sickness of ever-deferred hope, he was not one of
those great ones who are entirely out of touch with their contemporaries,
living in an age not yet born. Scarcely had he passed from mortal sight
when a chorus of appreciation made itself heard, which, though it has
waned in ages of waning taste, has never ceased to sound.
In a very true sense, Dante sums up in himself all that is best in
mediaeval thought.
So Mr. Henry Osborne Taylor, in his formidable study of _The Mediaeval
Mind_, significantly heads the forty-third and last chapter “The
Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante.” “There is unity,” he affirms, “throughout
the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof of it.”[163] It
is pre-eminently as a religious thinker that Dante holds this place, and
supplies this synthesis.
Theology as conceived in the thirteenth century was not only the
“Queen of Sciences”; the religious conception of knowledge embraced
and included all else. To Dante, the theologian-poet, as to Thomas
Aquinas, the theologian-philosopher, all knowledge whatsoever was
ultimately _one_; its end and purpose, its ground and justification,
its key and explanation were to be found in the mystery of the Blessed
Trinity-in-Unity.
Theology was not one among many departments of knowledge; it was the
sum of knowledge, the key to all problems of the universe. Some of us
retain, deep down in our nature, a conviction that, in this point at
least, the scholastic theologians were right. While thankfully accepting
the results of the scientific “division of labour,” the marvellous
practical and theoretical fruits of a free and systematic investigation
of phenomena which have transformed our very conception of knowledge
and the knowable, we are apt to feel sometimes that the thirteenth
century thinkers, with their complete mastery and mapping-out of the
comparatively narrow field of the “scibile,” were not so liable as
ourselves to lose sight of the wood by reason of the multitude of the
trees, to lose the idea of an universe in the absorbing interest of its
details.
At any rate, it may be accepted as beyond discussion that to the great
mediaeval thinkers—to Peter Lombard, to Abelard, to St. Bernard, to
St. Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus, to Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus;
above all, perhaps, to St. Thomas Aquinas and to Dante, all knowledge
is ultimately religious knowledge: just because God is conceived and
realised as being the beginning and end and groundwork of all things.
This truth underlies the beautiful language of the first canto of
_Paradiso_—
La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’ universo penetra e risplende
In una parte più e meno altrove.
and again—
... Le cose tutte quante
Hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma
Che ’l universo a Dio fa simigliante.[164]
It also underlies the description of the damned as those who have lost
“the Good of the intellect.”[165]
Noi siam venuti al luogo ove io t’ ho detto
Che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
Ch’ hanno perduto il ben de l’ intelletto.
This tendency to subsume all knowledge under religious knowledge is
indeed one of the most important ways in which Dante is representative of
his time. To that we shall revert later on. Now let us turn to consider
for a moment some of the elements and sources of mediaeval knowledge as
Dante knew and mastered it.
Holy Scripture, the Patristic writings, ancient classical lore, the
Graeco-Arabian philosophy and science of which the groundwork was
Aristotle—these are the main antecedents of the mediaeval system of
knowledge, and they are blended together in characteristic ways, and
dissolved, as it were, in a fluid composed of romantic chivalry and other
elements of preponderatingly Teutonic and Celtic origin.
(1) The groundwork of all is, of course, Holy Scripture: known and
studied exclusively in the Latin Vulgate text, a rather degenerate
and corrupt representative of the (in its way) masterly and excellent
translation from the Hebrew and Greek made by St. Jerome in the fifth
century.
The Bible, as we know quite well to-day,—even those of us who are more
than ever convinced of its inspiration—is not a manual of natural science
or philosophy, nor even an absolutely infallible guide in matters of
history and chronology. Its scientific standpoint is that of the age in
which each part was composed, however eternal be the significance and
application of its fundamental religious principles.
To the mediaeval mind, however, Scripture was a universal text-book
of science. So that countless questions were regarded as foreclosed
because the Bible appeared to have pronounced upon them. The scientific
mind of the Middle Ages felt itself committed at a hundred points
to the rather crude conceptions of the ancient Hebrews, and to a
literal interpretation, very often, of figurative and highly poetical
expressions.
The disadvantages of this state of things are obvious to us: we must not
forget, however, that they were largely modified by the fact that while
all knowledge was regarded as ultimately religious knowledge, it is just
in its religious principles that the Bible is supreme, and is permanently
true.
(2) The interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages is largely based
on patristic exegesis; on the writings of the really great minds of the
third, fourth and fifth centuries, when men like Athanasius, Cyril of
Alexandria, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine,
laid the foundations of systematic Christian thought; men steeped in
the Holy Scriptures, and bringing to them an intellect furnished with
ideas and categories inherited in part from the classical world—from
Graeco-Roman literature and philosophy. The most influential of them all,
perhaps, upon mediaeval thought were Jerome (through his translation of
the Bible) and Augustine, the deepest and most original thinker (with the
exception of Origen) among all the “Fathers.”
Holy Scripture then, patristically interpreted, is the first and most
important element in mediaeval knowledge; and the place it holds in Dante
may be roughly estimated by the calculations of Dr. Moore in his _Dante
Studies_ (Vol. I), where he shows that in his extant works the Poet
quotes the Vulgate more than five hundred times.
Dante is representative of the Middle Ages in his reverence for and
his use of Holy Scripture, interpreted for the most part by traditions
derived from the Christian Fathers.
Scripture itself was mediaevally supplemented by hagiology—the lives and
legends of the Saints—nor is this element lacking in Dante.[166]
(3) But the place of honour, next to Scripture, in Dante, must be
assigned, surely, to classical lore—to the mythology and literature of
the ancient Graeco-Roman civilisation for which the mediaeval mind had so
profound a reverence. Greek philosophy, as represented by Aristotle—
il maestro di color che sanno[167]
is a category by itself, to which we shall turn our attention in a
moment. But classical lore in general, as represented by such writers as
Virgil (quoted 200 times), Ovid (100), Cicero (50), Lucan (50), Horace
(15?), Livy (15?), finds very definite recognition in Dante’s works.
The old Roman Empire was viewed by Dante with a truly religious
veneration, as is clear not only from many a passage in the _Divina
Commedia_ (e.g. _Par._ vi), but from the whole argument of the _De
Monarchia_.[168] This veneration, which shed lustre and dignity upon a
“Holy Roman Empire” which even in Dante’s day had become actually, though
not technically, German, is characteristic especially of the Italian
mind; and Dante was Italian as well as mediaeval. The Italians even of
to-day are proud to regard themselves as the direct successors of the
old Romans of the Republic and of the Caesars: in Dante’s time they were
prepared to trace their ancestry to the divinely guided companions of
Aeneas of Troy.
Rome looms large in the providential ordering of human history: Dante’s
conception of her sovereign place is drawn from the author of the
princely _Aeneid_, whose function in the _Divine Comedy_ is guarantee of
the affectionate reverence which Dante bore to him.
But it is not only Roman history, but classical mythology that weaves
itself into the texture of Dante’s religious thought. If he quotes Virgil
some two hundred times, he quotes Ovid about one hundred.
The tendency to mingle together examples from Scripture and from pagan
mythology is characteristically mediaeval. In Dante it is a well known
feature, most typically represented perhaps in the sculptures, visions
and voices of the Purgatorio.
He who is bold enough in _Purg._ xxx. to blend together the Scriptural
_Benedictus qui venis_ with Virgil’s _Manibus o date lilia plenis_ is
not afraid to invoke the Muses and Apollo (mystically interpreted) as he
begins a new _cantica_.[169] He does not hesitate to apostrophise the
Saviour of the world in terms which blend the Christian with the antique
pagan tradition—[170]
... O Sommo Giove,
Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso!
This is well explained by Mr. Taylor. “With Dante,” he says,[171] “the
pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not
veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for
the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan
monsters[172] symbolised, if indeed it did not continue to make part of,
the Christian struggle against the power of sin.”
This principle may be regarded as being, in a way, the mediaeval analogue
of our broad modern conceptions derived from a comparative study of
religions.
(4) But supreme among the influences derived by the Middle Ages from
classical antiquity is the philosophy of Aristotle, which holds the next
place to Scripture alike in the “Summa” of Thomas Aquinas, and in the
_Divina Commedia_ of Dante.
Mediaeval Christianity drew its knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy
from Mohammedan sources. The great Arab scientists and philosophers of
mediaeval times, represented in the _Commedia_ by Avicenna and—
Averroìs che il gran comento feo[173]
(his commentary on Aristotle was translated into Latin about 1250),
gave back, in a modified form, to Western Europe, the works of the
Philosopher, of which the original Greek was not acquired by them till
several centuries later.
This Graeco-Arabian philosophy forms the basis of those constantly
recurring, and to many of us rather tiresome, astronomical excursions
which form so characteristic a feature of the _Divine Comedy_.
This form of Aristotelianism plays an immense part in the scholastic
philosophy; and his deference to it is among Dante’s chief claims to be
representative of the religious thought and teaching of his day.
In countless other ways the Poet’s writings are representative of
what was best and highest in contemporary thought: the wide grasp of
innumerable topics and details, the encyclopaedic temper, quaintly
obvious in the _Convivio_ but more worthily embodied in the _Divina
Commedia_; the spiritualising of troubadour love, beautifully manifested
in the promise of _Vita Nuova_ and _Canzoniere_, but more sublimely
still in the Beatrice of the _Paradiso_; the blending of religious with
political theory so conspicuous in the _Monarchia_ and _Commedia_; the
realistic vividness of conception; the eye for contrast, which makes
Dante’s great poem a mirror of the kaleidoscopic life of the Middle Ages.
Among the qualities which made Dante what he was—and is—two would seem
to be supreme. First his encyclopaedic knowledge, and secondly the
unrivalled power of plastic visualisation, by which he was enabled “to
use as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar.”[174]
Dante has been described by Eliot Norton as an instance of “the
incredible diligence of the Middle Ages.” In days when there was no
Funk and Wagnalls Company to minister encyclopaedic knowledge by cheap
instalments—when everything must be painfully acquired from MSS. and
the diligent student ran the risk not only of leanness[175] but of
blindness[176] Dante appears, from his extant works, to have known all
that was to be known. Dr. Moore’s investigations (in _Dante Studies_,
Vol. I) go some way towards justifying—if anything can absolutely justify
so dogmatic a statement—the perhaps over-enthusiastic words of A. G.
Butler:
“Dante was born a student as he was born a poet, and had he never written
a single poem, he would still have been famous as the most profound
scholar of his time.”[177]
But if Dante had finished the _Convivio_, and written nothing else, his
vast learning would have been as uninteresting to the average modern
mind as is that of Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas. Albertus Magnus
with his incredible learning and his more than incredible fecundity
and voluminousness is unknown to most of us. Thomas Aquinas, though
the soundness of his judgment and the depth of his insight have given
his writings a permanent place of honour, more especially in the Roman
Communion, is little more than a name to the average student even of
literature and philosophy.
Albert and Thomas were theologians: so was Dante, but he was a poet as
well.[178] Dante is saturated with the entire knowledge of the Middle
Ages; he has absorbed and assimilated it, and he gives it out again
transfigured—alive! It becomes in his hands an original and immortal
contribution to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic heritage of mankind.
From our present study the Divine Poet emerges once more as the “Apostle
of Freedom.” He handles his subject-matter with the master-touch that
makes it _live_, and with the independence of standpoint and sincerity
of judgment that draws Catholics to claim him as a Catholic, and
Protestants as a Protestant. As a matter of fact he is a loyal Catholic,
as was rightly proclaimed by the late lamented Pope Benedict XV in his
Encyclical of May, 1921.[179] A Catholic, but above all, a Christian.
And, as the Pope also justly remarked, his work and his message are alive
to-day—more living than that of many a present-day Poet—just because he
is not dependent on mere pagan models and sources, however classical, but
is saturated with Christian thought and feeling. For the future lies with
Christianity.
In our next Essay we shall endeavour to show how the free spirit of the
artist and the theologian merges into that of the Educationist: how the
characteristic modern principles of freedom in the educational sphere
underlie Dante’s thought and writing, and how, in particular, they
dominate his scheme of the _Purgatorio_.
V
DANTE AND MODERN EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES
... Io sarò tua guida
E trarrotti di qui per loco eterno.
—_Inf._ i. 177 _sq._
In face of Benedetto Croce’s new Book,[180] wherein all the meticulous
industry exerted by the typical Dantist upon side-issues of the _Divine
Comedy_ is held up to scorn, and denounced, like Cromwell’s House
of Lords, as “useless and dangerous,” one hardly dares to labour a
point—even if it be so exalted a point as the principles and method of
education. But it is the criticism of Dante’s Poesy that is Croce’s
concern: his jealous anxiety is directed against any admixture in that
criticism of any irrelevant considerations—allegorical, theological,
philosophical, poetical. As we are not attempting a criticism of Dante’s
Poesy (though none can approach the _Commedia_ without falling under the
spell of its beauty and passion), we may perhaps hope to evade the fiery
darts of the Poet’s latest critic.
Croce himself would be the last to deny Dante’s extraordinary
versatility: only he pleads that if the author of the _Divine Comedy_ had
not been, “as he is, _grandissimo poeta_,” the world would not have noted
his other accomplishments.[181] We may therefore perhaps be pardoned if
we indulge in something of that “sonorous but empty phraseology”[182]
which he attributes to those who look for much more than Poetry in the
great Poem; and come to the _Commedia_ as to a mine of varied treasures
reflecting the versatile spirit of one who was not only a sublime poet,
but also a man of many-sided knowledge and experience—theological,
philosophical, political, practical—and who poured all the wealth of his
knowledge and experience into the supreme effort of his genius:
Il poema sacro
Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.
Before Dante as a boy learnt his lessons of the good friars of Sta.
Croce, and in the school of the great lord, Love blossomed out into
verse under the sunshine of his “first friend’s” encouragement, pored
over crabbed manuscripts under the inspiration of the learned Ser
Brunetto, and grew up to be an unique exponent of mediaeval lore; that
lore, which formed the material out of which he wrought the scheme of
his immortal poem had very slowly and gradually come into being. The
course of Christian Education had passed through rhythmic vicissitudes
of advance and retrogression, of decadence and revival. Sown broadcast
over the fields of the Graeco-Roman world by Apostolic hands[183] the
seed fructified and gave forth foliage to delight and refresh mankind.
In the golden age of the Greek Fathers, when Clement and Origen wrote
and taught, when Basil and Gregory at the University of Athens drank in
all that the old world had to teach, and transmuted it into something
fresh and new by the fertilising power of the New Life that was in them,
the Christian Church became, in Harnack’s phrase, “the great elementary
schoolmistress of the Roman Empire.”
Then followed a decline. The barbarian invasions kept men fighting, and
left no time to muse or think, or write. Dante’s hero, Boethius, stands
out an almost solitary luminous figure in a world of growing intellectual
darkness, of which Gregory of Tours despairingly exclaimed: “Periit
studium litterarum.” By the middle of the eighth century the lamp was
nearly extinguished. To our own Alcuin of York belongs the glory of
having preserved the continuum of literary studies which made a Dante
possible. His patient and persevering labours at the court of Charles the
Great laid the foundations on which was ultimately built—of multifarious
material, partly recovered through Arabic sources—the splendid structure
of mediaeval scholasticism which forms much of Dante’s mental background.
After Dante’s death the same rhythmic alternation of advance and
retrogression, of greater and less vitality, may, on the whole, be
discerned in the course of educational history; and as our object is to
unearth in the _Divine Comedy_ some educational principles vaunted as
“peculiarly modern,” it may be best to dwell for a moment—if still all
too superficially—on this second half of the story.
When the impulse of Scholasticism had well-nigh spent itself—and with
it the splendid revival at once of practical and of intellectual
Christianity which came in with “The Coming of the Friars”—the dawn
of the Renaissance was already gleaming in the Eastern sky, and the
fall of Constantinople flooded Western Europe with a new interest in,
and passion for, Hellenic culture. The birth-throes of the Reformation
ushered into the world a “New Learning.” In a couple of centuries the
fire of this impulse in turn died down, and (in England, at any rate)
Education largely fell back, speaking generally—with smaller actions and
reactions—into something like a mere mechanical routine. The Classics
became an end, and not a means, and the study of them was divorced from
citizenship and from life. The aim and method of the average schoolmaster
would almost appear to have degenerated into a grinding of his pupils all
alike in the same mill, or a feeding of their diverse digestions all on
the same “iron rations”: the pedagogue himself innocent alike of an as
yet undiscovered psychological method in teaching, and in many cases also
failing to realise the paramount importance of the formation of character
as the only result worth striving for.
Then came, with Rousseau, the first streaks of the dawn of the “New
Teaching,” and there followed, in a brightening sky, Pestalozzi and
Froebel abroad, and here in England Arnold and Thring and the rest. And
this New Teaching, using the present-day opportunities of co-operation
and tabulation of experimental results on a large scale, has, by dint of
Conferences and Congresses, grown into something of a world-wide unity.
Modern Science has thus leavened educational method both in general and
in particular. In general, its spirit and principles have been employed
to make available for all the investigations of each; in particular,
the recent developments of psychology and psycho-physics have given a
new impulse and a new direction to child-study, and made possible an
elaboration of scientific method and of didactic apparatus such as was
not available in any previous age. Here the instinctive methods employed
unconsciously by the “born teachers” of all generations have been brought
up to the level of consciousness, and systematised and made available, to
a large extent, for those in whom the instinctive gift is not so great.
One of the prominent tendencies of the New Teaching is to revert to, and
elaborate, that Direct Method in the teaching of Languages which was
characteristic of the “New Learning” in the days of Erasmus and his
fellow pioneers. This we shall see foreshadowed in Dante. It is a part
of a tendency to make education “paido-centric”; to lay its emphasis on,
and find its focus in, the child rather than in the instructor; to make
it less of an imposition of the dominant teacher upon a submissive and
receptive pupil. The New Teaching requires that “the relative activities
of teacher and pupil” should be “reversed.” It recognises that pupils
need to be “trained in initiative,” and “made increasingly responsible
for their own education”; that the inertia of many pupils has to be met
not by force or browbeating, but “by taking steps to reach indirectly the
goal of stimulating their individual activity.”[184]
The watchword therefore of the modern teaching is _Liberty_. And this
principle of Liberty—the recognition that all education is, at bottom,
self-education; and that the teacher’s business is to liberate (or make
possible the liberation of) the inherent evolutionary forces latent in
the pupil—finds its climax in the doctrine of Dante’s compatriot and
sincere admirer, Madame Montessori. She is also, in a sense, the most
modern of the Modernists; for in her method is carried, probably to its
highest point, the application of psycho-physical science to education.
She represents in some ways—and especially on the individualistic
side—the extreme advance of the modern movement; and it is with her
system that we shall institute later on a somewhat detailed comparison of
the educational principles underlying Dante’s _Purgatorio_.
Dante’s name is not popularly associated with those of the World’s
Greatest Educators—with Aristotle and Quintilian, with Alcuin and Alfred,
with Colet and Erasmus, with Pestalozzi and Froebel and Montessori. He is
not claimed as the conscious originator of new didactic method. He has
not left us any systematic treatise on Education. Yet many have found in
him a mighty Teacher, “who being dead yet speaketh”; and to such it will
bring no surprise to find great educational principles embodied in his
work.
We may compare and contrast his opportunities with those of his great
contemporary, Robert Grosseteste, who as “First Chancellor,” if we may
call him so, of the University of Oxford, may rank in a sense as a
professional Teacher. Such a comparison would surely demonstrate that the
permanent influence of the illustrious Bishop of Lincoln upon subsequent
generations bears no comparison with that of the Florentine Poet.