by Will Durant
Albeit my eyes discerned her not, there moved
A hidden virtue from her, at whose touch
The power of ancient love was strong within me.54
He turns to address his poet guide, but Virgil has returned to the limbo from which the summons of Beatrice had drawn him. Dante weeps, but Beatrice bids him mourn rather the sins of lust with which, after her death, he tarnished her image in his soul; indeed, she tells him, that dark wood, from which through Virgil she has rescued him, was the life of incontinence wherein, at the mid-point of his years, he had found himself lost, with the right road dimmed. Dante falls to the ground in shame, and confesses his sins. Celestial virgins come and intercede with the offended Beatrice, and beg her to reveal to him her second and spiritual beauty. Not that she has forgotten the first:
Never didst thou spy,
In art or nature, aught so passing sweet
As were the limbs that in their beauteous frame
Enclosed me, and are scattered now in dust.55
She relents, and shows her new celestial beauty; but the virgins warn Dante not to gaze upon her directly, but only to look at her feet. Beatrice leads him and Statius (who has completed, after twelve centuries, his term in purgatory) to a fountain from which issue two streams—Lethe (Forget-fulness) and Eunoë (Good Understanding). Dante drinks of Eunoë and is cleansed, and, now regenerate, is “made apt for mounting to the stars.”56
It is not true that the Inferno is the only interesting part of The Divine Comedy. There are many arid didactic passages in the Purgatorio, and always a ballast of theology; but in this canticle the poem, freed from the horrors of damnation, mounts step by step in beauty and tenderness, cheers the ascent with nature’s loveliness regained, and faces bravely the task of making the disembodied Beatrice beautiful. Through her again, as in his youth, Dante enters paradise.
4. Heaven
Dante’s theology made his task harder. Had he allowed himself to picture paradise in Persian or Mohammedan style as a garden of physical as well as spiritual delights, his sensuous nature would have found abundant imagery. But how can that “constitutional materialist,” the human intellect, conceive a heaven of purely spiritual bliss? Moreover, Dante’s philosophical development forbade him to represent God, or the angels and saints of heaven, in anthropomorphic terms; rather he visions them as forms and points of light; and the resultant abstractions lose in a luminous void the life and warmth of sinful flesh. But Catholic doctrine professed the resurrection of the body; and Dante, while struggling to be spiritual, endows some denizens of heaven with corporeal features and human speech. It is pleasant to learn that even in heaven Beatrice has beautiful feet.
His plan of paradise is worked out with impressive consistency, brilliant imagination, and bold detail. Following Ptolemaic astronomy, he thinks of the heavens as an expanding series of nine hollow crystal spheres revolving about the earth; these spheres are the “many mansions” of the “Father’s house.” In each sphere a planet and a multitude of stars are set like gems in a diadem. As they move, these celestial bodies, all endowed in gradation with divine intelligence, sing the joy of their blessedness and the praise of their Creator, and bathe the heavens in the music of the spheres. The stars, says Dante, are the saints of heaven, the souls of the saved; and according to the merits that they earned in life, so differently high is their station above the earth, so loftier is their happiness, so nearer are they to that empyrean which is above all the spheres, and holds the throne of God.
As if drawn by the light that radiates from Beatrice, Dante rises from the Earthly Paradise to the first circle of the heavens, which is that of the moon. There are the souls of those who by no fault of their own were forced to violate their religious vows. One such, Piccarda Donati, explains to Dante that though they are in the lowest circle of the heavens, and enjoy a degree of bliss less than that of the spirits above them, they are freed by the Divine Wisdom from all envy, longing, or discontent. For the essence of happiness lies in the joyful acceptance of the Divine Will: la sua volúntate è nostra pace —“His will is our peace.”57 This is the basic line of The Divine Comedy.
Subject to a celestial magnetism that draws all things to God, Dante rises with Beatrice to the second heaven, which is the sphere dominated by the planet Mercury. Here are those who on earth were absorbed in practical activity to good ends, but were more intent on worldly honor than on serving God. Justinian appears, and phrases in royal lines the historic functions of the Roman Empire and Roman law; through him Dante strikes another blow for one world under one law and king. Beatrice leads the poet to the third heaven, the circle of Venus, where the Provençal bard Folque foretells the tragedy of Boniface VIII. In the fourth heaven, whose orb is the sun, Dante finds the Christian philosophers—Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Peter Lombard, Gratian, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Siger de Brabant. In a gracious exchange Thomas the Dominican relates to Dante the life of St. Francis, and Bonaventura the Franciscan tells him the story of St. Dominic. Thomas, always a man and mind of some expanse, clogs the narrative with discourses on theological subtleties; and Dante is so anxious to be a philosopher that for several cantos he ceases to be a poet.
Beatrice leads him to the fifth heaven, that of Mars, where are the souls of warriors who died fighting for the true faith—Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, even Robert Guiscard, ravager of Rome. They are arranged as thousands of stars in the form of a dazzling cross and the figure of the Crucified; and every star in the luminous emblem joins in a celestial harmony. Ascending to the sixth heaven, that of Jupiter, Dante finds those who on earth administered justice equitably; here are David, Hezekiah, Constantine, Trajan—another pagan breaking into heaven. These living stars are arranged in the form of an eagle; they speak with one voice, discoursing to Dante on theology, and celebrating the praise of just kings.
Mounting what Beatrice figuratively calls the “stairway of the eternal palace,” the poet and his guide reach the seventh heaven of delight, the planet Saturn and its attendant stars. At every ascent the beauty of Beatrice takes on new brilliance, as if enhanced by the rising splendor of each higher sphere. She dares not smile upon her lover, lest he be consumed to ashes in her radiance. This is the circle of monks who lived in piety and fidelity to their vows. Peter Damian is among them; Dante asks him how to reconcile man’s freedom with God’s foresight and consequent predestination; Peter replies that even the most enlightened souls in heaven, under God, cannot answer his question. St. Benedict appears, and mourns the corruption of his monks.
Now the poet floats upward from the circles of the planets to the eighth heaven, the zone of the fixed stars. From the constellation Gemini he looks down and sees the infinitesimal earth, “so pitiful of semblance that it moved my smiles.” A moment of homesickness, even for that miserable planet, might have moved him then; but a glance from Beatrice tells him that this heaven of light and love, and not that scene of sin and strife, is his proper home.
Canto XXIII opens with one of Dante’s characteristic similes:
Even as the bird, who midst the leafy bower
Has in her nest sat darkly through the night
With her sweet brood, impatient to descry
Their wishéd looks, and to bring home their food,
In the fond quest unconscious of her toil;
She, of the time prevenient, on the spray
That overhangs their couch, with wakeful gaze
Expects the sun, nor ever, till the dawn,
Removeth from the east her eager ken—
So Beatrice fixes her eyes in one direction expectantly. Suddenly the heavens there shine with startling splendor. “Behold,” cries Beatrice, “the triumphant hosts of Christ!”—souls new won for paradise. Dante looks, but sees only a light so full and strong that he is blinded, and cannot tell what passes by. Beatrice bids him open his eyes; now, she says, he can endure her full radiance. She smiles upon him, and it is, he swears, an experi
ence that can never be canceled from his memory. “Why doth my face enamor thee?” she asks, and bids him rather look at Christ and Mary and the apostles. He tries to make them out, but sees merely “legions of splendors, on whom burning rays shed lightnings from above”; while to his ears comes the music of the Regina coeli, sung by heavenly hosts.
Christ and Mary ascend, but the apostles remain behind, and Beatrice asks them to speak to Dante. Peter questions him about his faith, is pleased with his replies, and agrees with him that as long as Boniface is Pope the Apostolic See is vacant or defiled.58 There is no mercy in Dante for Boniface.
The apostles vanish upward, and Dante mounts at last, with “her who hath imparadised my soul,” into the ninth and highest heaven. Here in the empyrean there are no stars, only pure light, and the spiritual, incorporeal, uncaused, motionless source of all souls, bodies, causes, motions, light, and life-God. The poet struggles now to achieve the Beatific Vision; but all he sees is a point of light about which revolve nine circles of pure Intelligences—seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and angels; through these, His agents and emissaries, the Almighty governs the world. But though Dante cannot perceive the Divine Essence, he beholds all the hosts of heaven forming themselves into a luminous rose, a marvel of shimmering lights and diverse hues expanding leaf by leaf into a gigantic flower.
Beatrice leaves her lover now, and takes her place in the rose. He sees her seated on her individual throne, and prays her still to help him; she smiles down upon him, and thereafter fixes her gaze upon the center of all light, but she sends St. Bernard to aid and comfort him. Bernard directs Dante’s eyes to the Queen of Heaven; the poet looks, but discerns only a flaming luster surrounded by thousands of angels clothed in light. Bernard tells him that if he would obtain power to see the heavenly vision more clearly he must join with him in prayer to the Mother of God. The final canto opens with Bernard’s melodious supplication:
Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio,
Umile ed alta più che creatura—
“Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, more humble and exalted than any creature.” Bernard begs her of her grace to enable Dante’s eyes to behold the Divine Majesty. Beatrice and many saints bend toward Mary with hands clasped in prayer. Mary looks for a moment benignly upon Dante, then turns her eyes upon the “Everlasting Light.” Now, says the poet, “my vision, becoming pure, more and more entered the ray of that high light which in itself is Truth.” What else he saw remains, he says, beyond all human speech and fantasy; but “in that abyss of radiance, clear and lofty, seemed, methought, three orbs of triple hue, combined in one.” The majestic epic ends with Dante’s gaze still fixed upon that radiance, drawn and impelled by “the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.”
The Divine Comedy is the strangest and most difficult of all poems. No other, before yielding its treasures, makes such imperious demands. Its language is the most compact and concise this side of Horace and Tacitus; it gathers into a word or phrase contents and subtleties requiring a rich background and an alert intelligence for full apprehension; even the wearisome theological, psychological, astronomical disquisitions have here a pithy precision that only a Scholastic philosopher could rival or enjoy. Dante lived so intensely in his time that his poem almost breaks under the weight of contemporary allusions unintelligible today without a litter of notes obstructing the movement of the tale.
He loved to teach, and tried to pour into one poem nearly all that he had ever learned, with the result that the living verse lies abed with dead absurdities. He weakens the charm of Beatrice by making her the voice of his political loves and hates. He stops his story to denounce a hundred cities or groups or individuals, and at times his epic founders in a sea of vituperation. He adores Italy; but Bologna is full of panders and pimps,59 Florence is the favorite product of Lucifer,60 Pistoia is a den of beasts,61 Genoa is “full of all corruption,”62 and as for Pisa, “A curse upon Pisa! May the Arno be dammed at its mouth, and drown all Pisa, man and mouse, beneath its raging waters!”63 Dante thinks that “supreme wisdom and primal love” created hell. He promises to remove the ice for a moment from the eyes of Alberigo if the latter will tell his name and story; Alberigo does, and asks fulfillment—“reach hither now thy hand, open my eyes!”—but, says Dante, “I opened them not for him; to be rude to him was courtesy.”64 If a man so bitter could win a conducted tour through paradise we shall all be saved.
His poem is none the less the greatest of medieval Christian books, and one of the greatest of all time. The slow accumulation of its intensity through a hundred cantos is an experience that no thorough reader will ever forget. It is, as Carlyle said, the sincerest of poems; there is no pretense in it, no hypocrisy or false modesty, no sycophancy or cowardice; the most powerful men of the age, even a pope who claimed all power, are attacked with a force and fervor unparalleled in poetry. Above all there is here a flight and sustainment of imagination challenging Shakespeare’s supremacy: vivid pictures of things never seen by gods or men; descriptions of nature that only an observant and sensitive spirit could achieve; and little narratives, like Francesca’s or Ugolino’s, that press great tragedies into narrow space with yet no vital matter missed. There is no humor in this man, but love was there till misfortune turned it into theology.
What Dante achieves at last is sublimity. We cannot find in his epic the Mississippi of life and action that is the Iliad, nor the gentle drowsy stream of Virgil’s verse, nor the universal understanding and forgiveness of Shakespeare; but here is grandeur, and a tortured, half-barbaric force that foreshadows Michelangelo. And because Dante loved order as well as liberty, and bound his passion and vision into form, he achieved a poem of such sculptured power that no man since has equaled it. Through the centuries that followed him Italy revered him as the liberator of her golden speech; Petrarch and Boccaccio and a hundred others were inspired by his battle and his art; and all Europe rang with the story of the proud exile who had gone to hell, and had returned, and had never smiled again.
Epilogue
THE MEDIEVAL LEGACY
IT is fitting that we should end our long and devious narrative with Dante; for in the century of his death those men appeared who would begin to destroy the majestic edifice of faith and hope in which he had lived: Wyclif and Huss would preface the Reformation; Giotto and Chrysoloras, Petrarch and Boccaccio would proclaim the Renaissance. In the history of man—so multiple is he and diverse—one mood may survive in some souls and places long after its successor or opposite has risen in other minds or states. In Europe the Age of Faith reached its last full flower in Dante; it suffered a vital wound from Occam’s “razor” in the fourteenth century; but it lingered, ailing, till the advent of Bruno and Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza, Bacon and Hobbes; it may return if the Age of Reason achieves catastrophe. Great areas of the world remained under the sign and rule of faith while Western Europe sailed Reason’s uncharted seas. The Middle Ages are a condition as well as a period: in Western Europe we should close them with Columbus; in Russia they continued till Peter the Great (d. 1725); in India till our time.
We are tempted to think of the Middle Ages as a fallow interval between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (476) and the discovery of America; we must remind ourselves that the followers of Abélard called themselves moderni, and that the bishop of Exeter, in 1287, spoke of his century as moderni tempores, “modern times.”1 The boundary between “medieval” and “modern” is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life. The Middle Ages were no mere interlude between one civilization and another; if we date them from Rome’s acceptance of Christianity and the Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325, they included the final centuries of the classic culture, the ripening of Catholic Christianity into a full and rich civilization in the thirteenth century, and the breakup of that civilization into the opposed cultures of the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The men of the Middle Ages were the victims of barbarism, then the conquerors of barbarism, then the creators of a new civilization. It would be unwise to look down with hybritic pride upon a period that produced so many great men and women, and raised from the ruins of barbarism the papacy, the European states, and the hard-won wealth of our medieval heritage.*
That legacy included evil as well as good. We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages: the insecurity that excites greed, the fear that fosters cruelty, the poverty that breeds filth and ignorance, the filth that generates disease, the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition, occultism—these still survive amongst us; and the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions only awaits opportunity or permission to oppress, kill, ravage, and destroy. In this sense modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority. The Inquisition left its evil mark on European society: it made torture a recognized part of legal procedure, and it drove men back from the adventure of reason into a fearful and stagnant conformity.
The preponderant bequest of the Age of Faith was religion: a Judaism absorbed till the eighteenth century in the Talmud; a Mohammedanism becalmed after the victory of the Koran over philosophy in the twelfth century; a Christianity divided between East and West, between North and South, and yet the most powerful and influential religion in the white man’s history. The creed of the medieval Church is today (1950) cherished by 330,000,000 Roman, 128,000,000 Orthodox, Catholics; her liturgy still moves the soul after every argument has failed; and the work of the Church in education, charity, and the moral taming of barbaric man left to modernity a precious fund of social order and moral discipline. The papal dream of a united Europe faded in the strife of Empire and papacy; but every generation is stirred by a kindred vision of an international moral order superior to the jungle ethics of sovereign states.
