understood by their uses or purposes, not by their elements or
antecedents; as the fact that Socrates sits in his prison, when he might
have escaped to Euboea, is to be understood by his allegiance to his
notion of what is best, of his duty to himself and to his country, and
not by the composition of his bones and muscles. Such reasons as we give
for our actions, such grounds as might move the public assembly to
decree this or that, are to be given in explanation of the order of
nature. The world is a work of reason. It must be interpreted, as we
interpret the actions of a man, by its motives. And these motives we
must guess, not by a fanciful dramatic mythology, such as the poets of
old had invented, but by a conscientious study of the better and the
worse in the conduct of our own lives. For instance, the highest
occupation, according to Plato, is the study of philosophy; but this
would not be possible for man if he had to be continually feeding, like
a grazing animal, with its nose to the ground. Now, to obviate the
necessity of eating all the time, long intestines are useful; therefore
the cause of long intestines is the study of philosophy. Again, the
eyes, nose, and mouth are in the front of the head, because (says Plato)
the front is the nobler side,--as if the back would not have been the
nobler side (and the front side) had the eyes, nose, and mouth been
there! This method is what Molière ridicules in _Le Malade Imaginaire_,
when the chorus sings that opium puts people to sleep because it has a
dormitive virtue, the nature of which is to make the senses slumber.
All this is ridiculous physics enough; but Plato knew--though he forgot
sometimes--that his physics were playful. What it is important for us
now to remember is rather that, under this childish or metaphorical
physics, there is a serious morality. After all, the _use_ of opium is
that it is a narcotic; no matter why, physically, it is one. The _use_
of the body _is_ the mind, whatever the origin of the body may be. And
it seems to dignify and vindicate these uses to say that they are the
“causes” of the organs that make them possible. What is true of
particular organs or substances is true of the whole frame of nature.
Its _use_ is to serve the good--to make life, happiness, and virtue
possible. Therefore, speaking in parables, Plato says with his whole
school: Discover the right principle of action, and you will have
discovered the ruling force in the universe. Evoke in your rapt
aspiration the essence of a supreme good, and you will have understood
why the spheres revolve, why the earth is fertile, and why mankind
suffers and exists. Observation must yield to dialectic; political art
must yield to aspiration.
It took many hundred years for the revolution to work itself out; Plato
had a prophetic genius, and looked away from what he was (for he was a
Greek) to what mankind was to become in the next cycle of civilization.
In Dante the revolution is complete, not merely intellectually (for it
had been completed intellectually long before, in the Neoplatonists and
the Fathers of the Church), but complete morally and poetically, in that
all the habits of the mind and all the sanctions of public life had been
assimilated to it. There had been time to reinterpret everything,
obliterating the natural lines of cleavage in the world, and
substituting moral lines of cleavage for them. Nature was a compound of
ideal purposes and inert matter. Life was a conflict between sin and
grace. The environment was a battle-ground between a host of angels and
a legion of demons. The better and the worse had actually become, as
Socrates desired, the sole principles of understanding.
Having become Socratic, the thinking part of mankind devoted all its
energies henceforward to defining good and evil in all their grades, and
in their ultimate essence; a task which Dante brings to a perfect
conclusion. So earnestly and exclusively did they speculate about moral
distinctions that they saw them in almost visible shapes, as Plato had
seen his ideas. They materialized the terms of their moral philosophy
into existing objects and powers. The highest good--in Plato still
chiefly a political ideal, the aim of policy and art--became God, the
creator of the world. The various stages or elements of perfection
became persons in the Godhead, or angelic intelligences, or aerial
demons, or lower types of the animal soul. Evil was identified with
matter. The various stages of imperfection were ascribed to the
grossness of various bodies, which weighted and smothered the spark of
divinity that animated them. This spark, however, might be released;
then it would fly up again to its parent fire and a soul would be saved.
This philosophy was not a serious description of nature or evolution;
but it was a serious judgement upon them. The good, the better, the
best, had been discerned; and a mythical bevy of powers, symbolizing
these degrees of excellence, had been first talked of and then believed
in. Myth, when another man has invented it, can pass for history; and
when this man is a Plato, and has lived long ago, it can pass for
revelation. In this way moral values came to be regarded as forces
working in nature. But if they worked in nature, which was a compound of
evil matter and perfect form, they must exist outside: for the ideal of
excellence beckons from afar; it is what we pine for and are not. The
forces that worked in nature were accordingly supernatural virtues,
dominations, and powers; each natural thing had its supernatural
incubus, a guardian angel, or a devil that possessed it. The
supernatural--that is, something moral or ideal regarded as a power and
an existence--was all about us. Everything in the world was an effect of
something beyond the world; everything in life was a step to something
beyond life.
Into this system Christianity fitted easily. It enriched it by adding
miraculous history to symbolic cosmology. The Platonists had conceived a
cosmos in which there were higher and lower beings, marshalled in
concentric circles, around this vile but pivotal lump of earth. The
Christians supplied a dramatic action for which that stage seemed
admirably fitted, a story in which the whole human race, or the single
soul, passed successively through these higher and lower stages. There
had been a fall, and there might be a salvation. In a sense, even this
conception of descent from the good, and ascent towards it again, was
Platonic. According to the Platonists, the good eternally shed its vital
influence, like light, and received (though unawares and without
increase of excellence to itself) reflected rays that, in the form of
love and thought, reverted to it from the ends of the universe. But
according to the Platonist this radiation of life and focusing of
aspiration were both perpetual. The double movement was eternal. The
history of the world was monotonous; or rather the world had no
significant history, but only a movement like that of a fountain playing
for ever, or like the circulation of water that is always falling from
the clouds in rain and always rising again in vapour. This fall, or
emanation of the world from the deity, was the origin of evil for the
Platonists; evil consisted merely infinitude, materiality, or otherness
from God. If anything besides God was to exist, it had to be imperfect;
instability and conflict were essential to finitude and to existence.
Salvation, on the other hand, was the return current of aspiration on
the part of the creature to revert to its source; an aspiration which
was expressed in various types of being, fixed in the eternal,--types
which led up, like the steps of a temple, to the ineffable good at the
top.
In the Christian system this cosmic circulation became only a figure or
symbol expressing the true creation, the true fall, and the true
salvation; all three being really episodes in a historical drama,
occurring only once. The material world was only a scene, a
stage-setting, designed expressly to be appropriate for the play; and
this play was the history of mankind, especially of Israel and of the
Church. The persons and events of this history had a philosophic import;
each played some part in a providential plan. Each illustrated creation,
sin, and salvation in some degree, and on some particular level.
The Jews had never felt uncomfortable at being material; even in the
other world they hoped to remain so, and their immortality was a
resurrection of the flesh. It did not seem plausible to them that this
excellent frame of things should be nothing but a faint, troubled, and
unintended echo of the good. On the contrary, they thought this world so
good, intrinsically, that they were sure God must have made it
expressly, and not by an unconscious effluence of his virtue, as the
Platonists had believed. Their wonder at the power and ingenuity of the
deity reached its maximum when they thought of him as the cunning
contriver of nature, and of themselves. Nevertheless the work seemed to
show some imperfections; indeed, its moral excellence was potential
rather than actual, a suggestion of what might be, rather than an
accomplished fact. And so, to explain the unexpected flaws in a creation
which they thought essentially good, they put back at the beginning of
things an experience they had daily in the present, namely, that trouble
springs from bad conduct.
The Jews were intent watchers of fortune and of its vicissitudes. The
careers of men were their meditation by day and by night; and it takes
little attention to perceive that frivolity, indifference, knavery, and
debauchery do not make for well-being in this world. And like other
hard-pressed peoples, the ancient Jews had a pathetic admiration for
safety and plenty. How little they must have known these things, to
think of them so rapturously and so poetically! Not merely their
personal prudence, but their corporate and religious zeal made them
abhor that bad conduct which defeated prosperity. It was not mere folly,
but wickedness and the abomination of desolation. With the lessons of
conduct continually in mind, they framed the theory that all suffering,
and even death, were the wages of sin. Finally they went so far as to
attribute evil in all creation to the casual sin of a first man, and to
the taint of it transmitted to his descendants; thus passing over the
suffering and death of all creatures that are not human with an
indifference that would have astonished the Hindoos.
The imperfection of things, in the Hebraic view, was due to accidents in
their operation; not, as in the Platonic view, to their essential
separation from their source and their end. It is in harmony with this
that salvation too should come by virtue of some special act, like the
incarnation or death of Christ. Just so, the Jews had conceived
salvation as a revival of their national existence and greatness, to be
brought about by the patience and fidelity of the elect, with tremendous
miracles supervening to reward these virtues.
Thus their conception of the fall and of the redemption was historical.
And this was a great advantage to a man of imagination inheriting their
system; for the personages and the miracles that figured in their
sacred histories afforded a rich subject for fancy to work upon, and for
the arts to depict. The patriarchs from Adam down, the kings and
prophets, the creation, Eden, the deluge, the deliverance out of Egypt,
the thunders and the law of Sinai, the temple, the exile--all this and
much more that fills the Bible was a rich fund, a familiar tradition
living in the Church, on which Dante could draw, as he drew at the same
time from the parallel classic tradition which he also inherited. To
lend all these Biblical persons and incidents a philosophical dignity he
had only to fit them, as the Fathers of the Church had done, into the
Neoplatonic cosmology, or, as the doctors of his own time were doing,
into the Aristotelian ethics.
So interpreted, sacred history acquired for the philosopher a new
importance besides that which it had seemed to have to Israel in exile,
or to the Christian soul conscious of sin. Every episode became the
symbol for some moral state or some moral principle. Every preacher in
Christendom, as he repeated his homily on the gospel of the day, was
invited to rear a structure of spiritual interpretations upon the
literal sense of the narrative, which nevertheless he was always to hold
and preserve as a foundation for the others.[2] In a world made by God
for the illustration of his glory, things and events, though real, must
be also symbolical; for there is intention and propriety behind them.
The creation, the deluge, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection
of Christ, the coming of the Holy Ghost with flames of fire and the gift
of tongues, were all historical facts. The Church was heir to the chosen
people; it was an historic and political institution, with a destiny in
this world, in which all her children should share, and for which they
should fight. At the same time all those facts, were mysteries and
sacraments for the private soul; they were channels for the same moral
graces that were embodied in the order of the heavenly spheres, and in
the types of moral life on earth. Thus the Hebrew tradition brought to
Dante’s mind the consciousness of a providential history, a great
earthly task,--to be transmitted from generation to generation,--and a
great hope. The Greek tradition brought him natural and moral
philosophy. These contributions, joined together, had made Christian
theology.
Although this theology was the guide to Dante’s imagination, and his
general theme, yet it was not his only interest; or rather he put into
the framework of orthodox theology theories and visions of his own,
fusing all into one moral unity and one poetical enthusiasm. The fusion
was perfect between the personal and the traditional elements. He threw
politics and love into the melting-pot, and they, too, lost their
impurities and were refined into a philosophic religion. Theology
became, to his mind, the guardian of patriotism, and, in a strangely
literal sense, the angel of love.
The political theory of Dante is a sublime and largely original one. It
suffers only from its extreme ideality, which makes it inapplicable, and
has caused it to be studied less than it deserves.
A man’s country, in the modern sense, is something that arose yesterday,
that is constantly changing its limits and its ideals; it is something
that cannot last for ever. It is the product of geographical and
historical accidents. The diversities between our different nations are
irrational; each of them has the same right, or want of right, to its
peculiarities. A man who is just and reasonable must nowadays, so far as
his imagination permits, share the patriotism of the rivals and enemies
of his country,--a patriotism as inevitable and pathetic as his own.
Nationality being an irrational accident, like sex or complexion, a
man’s allegiance to his country must be conditional, at least if he is a
philosopher. His patriotism has to be subordinated to rational
allegiance to such things as justice and humanity.
Very different was the situation in Dante’s case. For him the love of
country could be something absolute, and at the same time something
reasonable, deliberate, and moral. What he found claiming his allegiance
was a political body quite ideal, providential, and universal. This
political body had two heads, like the heraldic eagle,--the pope and the
emperor. Both were, by right, universal potentates; both should have
their seat in Rome; and both should direct their government to the same
end, although by different means and in different spheres. The pope
should watch over the faith and discipline of the Church. He should bear
witness, in all lands and ages, to the fact that life on earth was
merely a preliminary to existence in the other world, and should be a
preparation for that. The emperor, on the other hand, should guard peace
and justice everywhere, leaving to free cities or princes the regulation
of local affairs. These two powers had been established by God through
special miracles and commissions. An evident providential design,
culminating in them, ran through all history.
To betray or resist these divine rights, or to confound them, was
accordingly a sin of the first magnitude. The evils from which society
suffered were the consequence of such transgressions. The pope had
acquired temporal power, which was alien to his purely spiritual office;
besides, he had become a tool of the French king, who was (what no king
should be) at war with the emperor, and rebellious against the supreme
imperial authority; indeed, the pope had actually been seen to abandon
Rome for Avignon,--an act which was a sort of satanic sacrament, the
outward sign of an inward disgrace. The emperor, in his turn, had
forgotten that he was King of the Romans and Caesar, and was fond of
loitering in his native Germany, among its forests and princelings, as
if the whole world were not by right his country, and the object of his
solicitude.
And here the larger, theoretical patriotism of Dante, as a Catholic and
a Roman, passed into his narrower and actual patriotism as a Florentine.
Had Florence been true to its duties and worthy of its privileges, under
the double authority of the Church and the Empire? Florence was a Roman
colony. Had it maintained the purity of its Roman stock, and a Roman
simplicity and austerity in its laws? Alas, Etruscan immigrants had
contaminated its blood, and this taint was responsible, Dante thought,
for the prevalent corruption of manners. All that has made Florence
great in the history of the world was then only just beginning,--its
industry, refinements, arts, and literature. But to Dante that budding
age seemed one of decadence and moral ruin. He makes his ancestor, the
crusader Cacciaguida, praise the time when the narrow circuit of the
walls held only one-fifth of its later inhabitants. “Then the city
abided in peace, sober and chaste.”[3] The women plied the distaff, or
rocked the cradle, and prattled to their children of the heroic legends
of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. A woman could turn from her glass with her
face unpainted; she wore no girdle far more deserving of admiration than
her own person. The birth of a daughter did not frighten a good burgher;
her dowry would not have to be excessive, nor her marriage premature. No
houses were empty, their masters being in exile; none were disgraced by
unmentionable orgies.[4] This was not all; for if luxury was a great
curse to Florence, faction was a greater. Florence, an imperial city,
far from assisting in the restitution of the emperors to their universal
rights, had fought against them traitorously, in alliance with the
French invader and the usurping pontiff. It had thus undermined the only
possible foundation of its own peace and dignity.
These were the theoretical sorrows that loomed behind the personal
sorrows of Dante in his poverty and exile. They helped him to pour forth
the intense bitterness of his heart with the breath of prophetic
invective. They made his hatred of the actual popes and of the actual
Florence so much fervid zeal for what the popes and Florence ought to
have been. His political passions and political hopes were fused with a
sublime political ideal; that fusion sublimated them, and made it
possible for the expression of them to rise into poetry.
Here is one iron string on which Dante played, and which gave a tragic
strength to his music. He recorded the villainies of priests, princes,
and peoples. He upbraided them for their infidelity to the tasks
assigned to them by God,--tasks which Dante conceived with a Biblical
definiteness and simplicity. He lamented the consequences of this
iniquity, wasted provinces, corrupted cities, and the bodies of heroes
rolling unburied down polluted streams. These vigorous details were
exalted by the immense significance that Dante infused into them. His
ever-present definite ideal quickened his eye for the ebb and flow of
things, rendered the experience of them singly more poignant, and the
vision of them together more sustained and cumulative. Dante read
contemporary Italy as the Hebrew prophets read the signs of their times;
and whatever allowance our critical judgement may make for generous
illusions on the part of either, there can be no doubt that their
wholeness of soul, and the prophetic absoluteness of their judgements,
made their hold on particular facts very strong, and their sense for
impending weal or woe quite over-powering.
Nor does it seem that at bottom Dante’s political philosophy, any more
than that of the Hebrew prophets, missed the great causes and the great
aims of human progress. Behind mythical and narrow conceptions of
history, he had a true sense for the moral principles that really
condition our well-being. A better science need subtract nothing from
the insight he had into the difference between political good and evil.
What in his day seemed a dream--that mankind should be one great
commonwealth--is now obvious to the idealist, the socialist, the
merchant. Science and trade are giving, in a very different form, to be
sure, a practical realization to that idea. And the other half of his
theory, that of the Catholic Church, is maintained literally by that
church itself to this day; and the outsider might see in that ideal of a
universal spiritual society a symbol or premonition of the right of the
mind to freedom from legal compulsions, or of the common allegiance of
honest minds to science, and to their common spiritual heritage and
destiny.
On the other hand, the sting of Dante’s private wrongs, like the
enthusiasm of his private loves, lent a wonderful warmth and clearness
to the great objects of his imagination. We are too often kept from
feeling great things greatly for want of power to assimilate them to the
little things which we feel keenly and sincerely. Dante had, in this
respect, the art of a Platonic lover: he could enlarge the object of his
passion, and keep the warmth and ardour of it undiminished. He had been
banished unjustly--_Florentinus exul immeritus_, he liked to call
himself. That injustice rankled, but it did not fester, in his heart;
for his indignation spread to all wrong, and thundered against Florence,
Europe, and mankind, in that they were corrupt and perfidious. Dante had
loved. The memory of that passion remained also, but it did not
degenerate into sentimentality; for his adoration passed to a larger
object and one less accidental. His love had been a spark of that “love
which moves the sun and the other stars.”[5] He had known, in that
revelation, the secret of the universe. The spheres, the angels, the
sciences, were henceforth full of sweetness, comfort, and light.
Of this Platonic expansion of emotion, till it suffuses all that
deserves to kindle it, we have a wonderful version in Dante’s _Vita
Nuova_. This book, on the surface, is an account of Dante’s meeting, at
the age of nine, with Beatrice, a child even a little younger; of
another meeting with her at the age of eighteen; of an overwhelming
mystic passion which the lover wished to keep secret, so much so that he
feigned another attachment as a blind; of a consequent estrangement; and
of the death of Beatrice, whereupon the poet resolved not to speak
publicly of her again, until he could praise her in such wise as no
woman had ever been praised before.
This story is interspersed with poems of the most exquisite delicacy,
both in sentiment and in versification. They are dreamlike, allegorical,
musical meditations, ambiguous in their veiled meanings, but absolutely
clear and perfect in their artful structure, like a work of tracery and
stained glass, geometrical, mystical, and tender. A singular limpidity
of accent and image, a singular naïveté, is strangely combined in these
pieces with scholastic distinctions and a delight in hiding and hinting,
as in a charade.