Dante's poem--the true reflection of his mind--is a compact and rounded
_whole_ in which all the parts are mutually interdependent. Its
digressions are never excrescences, its episodes are never detached
from its main purpose, its form is never arbitrary and accidental, but
is always the systematic and deliberate expression of its substance.
Moreover it is profoundly mediaeval and Catholic in conception and
spirit. The scholastic theology and science of the Middle Ages and the
spiritual institutions of the Catholic Church were no trammels to
Dante's thought and aspiration. Under them and amidst them he moved
with a perfect sense of freedom, in them he found the embodiment of his
loftiest conceptions. Against their abuses his impetuous spirit poured
out its lava-stream of burning indignation, but his very passion
against those who laid impure hands upon the sacred things of God is
the measure of his reverence for their sanctity.
If the Catholic poet of the fourteenth century speaks with a voice that
can reach the ears and stir the hearts of the Protestant and heretic
of the nineteenth, it is not so much because he rose above the special
forms and conditions of the faith of his own age as because he went
below them and touched the eternal rock upon which they rested. Not by
neglecting or making light of the dogmas and institutions of his day,
but by piercing to their very heart and revealing their deepest
foundations, did he become a poet for all time.
The distinction, then, which we are about to draw between the permanent
realities of Dante's religion and the passing forms, the temporary
conditions of belief, under which it was manifested, is a distinction
which did not exist for him. His faith was a garment woven without
seam, or, to use his own metaphor, a coin so true in weight and metal,
so bright and round, that there was no 'perhaps' to him in its
impression.[96]
This unwavering certainty alike in principle and in detail, this
unfaltering loyalty to the beliefs of his day alike in form and
substance, is one of the secrets of Dante's strength.
But, again, such compactness and cohesion of belief could not have been
attained except by the strict subordination of every article of
concrete faith to the great central conceptions of religion, rising out
of the very nature and constitution of the devout human soul. And
therefore, paradox as it may seem, the very intensity with which Dante
embraced beliefs that we have definitely and utterly rejected, is the
pledge that we shall find in his teaching the essence of our own
religion; and we may turn to the Comedy with the certainty that we
shall not only discover here and there passages which will wake an echo
in our bosoms, but shall also find at the very heart of it some guiding
thought that will be to us as it was to him absolutely true.
Now Dante himself, as we have seen, tells us what is the subject of his
Comedy. Literally it is 'The state of souls after death,' and
allegorically 'Man, as rendering himself liable to rewarding or
punishing justice, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free
will.' The ideal requirements of Divine Justice, then, form the central
subject of this poem, the one theme to which, amidst infinite diversity
of application, the poet remains ever true; and these requirements he
works out in detail and enforces with all the might, the penetration,
the sweetness of his song, under the conditions of mediaeval belief as
to the future life.
But these conditions of belief are utterly foreign to our own
conceptions. I say nothing of the rejection of the virtuous heathen,
because Dante himself could really find no room for it in his own
system of conceptions. It lay in his mind as a belief accepted from
tradition, but never really assimilated by faith. Apart from this,
however, we find ourselves severed from Dante by his fundamental dogma
that the hour of death ends all possibility of repentance or
amendment. With him there is no repentance in Hell, no progress in
Heaven; and it is therefore only in Purgatory that we find anything at
all fundamentally analogous to the modern conception of a progressive
approximation to ideal perfection and oneness with God throughout the
cycles of a future life. And even here the transition of Purgatory is
but temporal, nor is there any fundamental or progressive change of
heart in its circles, for unless the heart be changed before death it
cannot change at all.
In its literal acceptation, then, dealing with 'the state of souls
after death,' the 'Divine Comedy' has little to teach us, except
indirectly.
But allegorically it deals with 'man,' first as impenitently sinful;
second, as penitent; last, as purified and holy. It shows us the
requirements of Divine Justice with regard to these three states; and
whether we regard them as permanent or transitory, as severed by sharp
lines one from the other or as melting imperceptibly into each other,
as existing on earth or beyond the grave, in any case Dante teaches us
what sentence justice must pronounce on impenitence, on penitence, and
on sanctity. Nay, independently of any belief in future retribution at
all, independently of any belief in what our actions will receive,
Dante burns or flashes into our souls the indelible conviction of what
they deserve.
Now to Dante's mind, as to most others, the conceptions of _justice_
and _desert_ implied the conception of _free will_. And accordingly we
find the reality of the choice exercised by man, and attended by such
eternal issues, maintained with intense conviction throughout the poem.
The free will is the supreme gift of God, and that by which the
creature most closely partakes of the nature of the Creator. The free
gift of God's love must be seized by an act of man's free will, in
opposition to the temptations and difficulties that interpose
themselves. There is justice as well as love in Heaven; justice as well
as mercy in Purgatory. The award of God rests upon the free choice of
man, and registers his merit or demerit. It is true, and Dante fully
recognises it, that one man has a harder task than another. The
original constitution and the special circumstances of one man make the
struggle far harder for him than for another; but God never suffers the
hostile influence of the stars to be so strong that the human will may
not resist it. Diversity of character and constitution is the necessary
condition of social life, and we can see why God did not make us all
alike; but when we seek to pierce yet deeper into the mystery of His
government, and ask why this man is selected for this task, why another
is burdened with this toil, why one finds the path of virtue plain for
his feet to tread, while one finds it beset with obstacles before which
his heart stands still--when we ask these questions we trench close
upon one of those doubts which Dante brought back unsolved from
Heaven. Not the seraph whose sight pierces deepest into the light of
God could have told him this, so utterly is it veiled from all created
sight.[97]
But amidst all these perplexities one supreme fact stands out to
Dante's mind: that, placed as we are on earth amidst the mysterious
possibilities of good and evil, we are endowed with a genuine power of
self-directed choice between them. The fullness of God's grace is
freely offered to us all, the life eternal of obedience, of
self-surrender, of love, tending ever to the fuller and yet fuller
harmony of united will and purpose, of mutually blessed and blessing
offices of affection, of growing joy in all the supporting and
surrounding creation, of growing repose in the might and love of God.
But if we shut our eyes against the light of God's countenance and turn
our backs upon His love, if we rebel against the limitations of mutual
self-sacrifice to one another and common obedience to God, then an
alternative is also offered us in the fierce and weltering chaos of
wild passions and disordered desires, recognising no law and evoking no
harmony, striking at the root of all common purpose and cut off from
all helpful love.
Our inmost hearts recognise the reality of this choice, and the justice
and necessity of the award that gives us what we have chosen. That the
hard, bitter, self-seeking, impure, mutinous, and treacherous heart
should drive away love and peace and joy is the natural, the necessary
result of the inmost nature and constitution of things, and our hearts
accept it. That self-discipline, gentleness, self-surrender, devotion,
generosity, self-denying love, should gather round them light and
sweetness, should infuse a fullness of joy into every personal and
domestic relation, should give a glory to every material surrounding,
and should gain an ever closer access to God, is no artificial
arrangement which might with propriety be reversed, it is a part of the
eternal and necessary constitution of the universe, and we feel that it
ought so to be.
There is no joy or blessedness without harmony, there is no harmony
without the concurrence of independent forces, there is no such
concurrence without self-discipline and self-surrender.
But these natural consequences of our moral action are here on earth
constantly interfered with and qualified, constantly baulked of their
full and legitimate effect. Here we do not get our deserts. The actions
of others affect us almost as much as our own, and artificially
interpose themselves to screen us from the results of what we are and
do ourselves. Hence we constantly fail to perceive the true nature of
our choice. Its consequences fall on others; we partially at least
evade the Divine Justice, and forget or know not what we are doing, and
what are the demands of justice with regard to us.
Now Dante, in his three poems, with an incisive keenness of vision and
a relentless firmness of touch, that stand alone, strips our life and
our principles of action of all these distracting and confusing
surroundings, isolates them from all qualifying and artificial
palliatives, and shows us what our choice is and where it leads to.
In Hell we see the natural and righteous results of sin, recognise the
direct consequences, the fitting surroundings of a sinful life, and
understand what the sinful choice in its inmost nature is. As surely as
our consciences accuse us of the sins that are here punished, so surely
do we feel with a start of self-accusing horror, 'This is what I am
trying to make the world. This is where we should be lodged if I
received what I have given. This is what justice demands that I should
have. This is what I deserve. It is what I have chosen.'
The tortures of Hell are not artificial inflictions, they are simply
the reflection and application of the sinner's own ways and principles.
He has made his choice, and he is given that which he has chosen. He
has found at last a world in which his principles of action are not
checked and qualified at every turn by those of others, in which he is
not screened from any of the consequences of his deeds, in which his
own life and action has consolidated, so to speak, about him, and has
made his surroundings correspond with his heart.
In the Hell, Dante shows us the nature and the deserts of impenitent
sin; and though we may well shrink from the ghastly conception of an
eternal state of impenitence and hatred, yet surely there is nothing
from which we ought to shrink in the conception of impenitent sin as
long as it lasts, whether in us or in others, concentrating its results
upon itself, making its own place and therefore receiving its deserts.
When we turn from Hell to Purgatory, we turn from unrepentant and
therefore constantly cherished, renewed, and reiterated sin, to
repentant sin, already banished from the heart. What does justice
demand with regard to such sin? Will it have it washed out? Will it, in
virtue of the sinner's penitence, interpose between him and the
wretched results and consequences of his deeds? Who that has ever
sinned and repented will accept for a moment such a thought? The
repentant sinner does not _wish_ to escape the consequences and results
of his sin. His evil deeds or passions must bring and ought to bring a
long trail of wretched suffering for himself. This suffering is not
corrective, it is expiatory. His heart is already corrected, it is
already turned in shame and penitence to God; but if he had no
punishment, if his evil deed brought no suffering upon himself, he
would feel that the Divine Justice had been outraged. He shrinks from
the thought with a hurt sense of moral unfitness. He wishes to suffer,
he would not escape into the peace of Heaven if he might.
Never did Dante pierce more deeply into the truth of things, never did
he bring home the _justice_ of punishment more closely to the heart,
than when he told how the souls in Purgatory do not wish to rise to
Heaven till they have worked out the consequences of their sins. The
sin long since repented and renounced still haunts us with its shame
and its remorse, still holds us from the fullness of the joy of God's
love, still smites us with a keener pain the closer we press into the
forgiving Father's presence; and we would have it so. The deepest
longing of our heart, which is now set right, is for full, untroubled
communion with God, yet it is just when nearest to Him that we feel the
wretched penalty of our sin most keenly and that we least desire to
escape it.
But if the sinful disposition be gone, then the source of our suffering
is dried up with it, and the sense of oneness with God, of harmony and
trust, gradually overpowers the self-reproach, until from the state of
penitence and suffering the soul rises to holiness and peace.
It is in giving us glimpses of this final state that Dante wields his
most transforming power over our lives. He shows us what God offers us,
what it is that we have hitherto refused, what it is that we may still
aspire to, that here or hereafter we may hope to reach. Sin-stained and
sorrow-laden as we are, it is only on wings as strong as his that we
can be raised even for a moment into that Divine blessedness in which
sin has been so purged by suffering, so dried up by the sinner's love
of God, so blotted out by God's love of him, that it has vanished as a
dream, and the soul can say, 'Here we repent not.'[98] How mighty the
spirit that can raise us even for a moment from the desolate weariness
of Hell, and the long suffering of Purgatory, to the joy and peace of
Heaven!
And here too there is justice. Here too the deserts of the soul are the
gauge of its condition. For, as we have seen, in the very blessedness
of Heaven there are grades, and the soul which has once been stained
with sin or tainted with selfish and worldly passion, can never be as
though it had been always pure. Yet the torturing sense of unworthiness
is gone, the unrest of a past that thwarts the present is no more; the
souls have cast off the burden of their sin, and are at perfect peace
with God and with themselves.
Sin, repentance, holiness, confronted with the Eternal Justice--what
they are and what they deserve--such is the subject of Dante
Alighieri's Comedy.
Have five and a half centuries of progress outgrown the poem, or are
Dante's still the mightiest and most living words in which man has ever
painted in detail the true deserts of sin, of penitence, of sanctity?
The growing mind of man has burst the shell of Dante's mediaeval creed.
Is his portrayal of the true conditions of blessedness as antiquated as
his philosophy, his religion as strange to modern thought as his
theology? Or has he still a power, wielded by no other poet, of taking
us into the very presence of God and tuning our hearts to the harmonies
of Heaven? Those who have been with him on his mystic journey, and have
heard and seen, can answer these questions with a declaration as clear
and ringing as the poet's own confession of faith in the courts of
Heaven. If those who have but caught some feeble echoes of his song can
partly guess what the true answer is, then those echoes have not been
waked in vain.
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