Edmund G. Gardner

“ Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore, “To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair,” the first great Italian lyric of this dolce stil nuovo, set forth an ideal creed of love which Dante made his own, and is the most fitting introduction to the Vita Nuova and the Rime. Love has its proper dwelling in the gentle heart, as light in the sun, for Nature created them simultaneously for each other, and they cannot exist apart. “The fire of Love is caught in gentle heart as virtue in the precious stone, to which no power descends from the star before the sun makes it a gentle thing. ”

“ If the Vita Nuova is the most ideal book of love, the Monarchia is one of the most purely idealistic works ever written on politics. Even as Beatrice is the most glorious lady of the poet’s mind, la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, so the temporal monarchy or Empire is to be considered by the poet in its ideal aspect according to the divine intention, typo et secundum intentionem (Mon. i. 2) . Like the Vita Nuova, and unlike any other of Dante’s longer works, the Monarchia contains no mention of the poet’s exile, and no explicit references or allusions to contemporary events or persons. ”

“ Letter and Allegory.—The Divina Commedia is a vision and an allegory. It is a vision of the world beyond the grave; it is an allegory, based upon that vision, of the life and destiny of man, his need of light and guidance, his duties to the temporal and spiritual powers, to the Empire and the Church. In the literal sense, the subject is the state of souls after death. In the allegorical sense, according to the Epistle to Can Grande, the subject is “man as by freedom of will, meriting and demeriting, he is subject to Justice rewarding or punishing” (Epist. x. 11) . ”

“ And there are visions and dreams introduced, in which Love himself appears in visible form, now as a lord of terrible aspect within a cloud of fire with Beatrice in his arms, now by a river-side in the garb of a traveller to bid Dante feign love for another lady, now as a youth clad in very white raiment to console him when Beatrice refuses her salutation. ”

“ 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 [Pg 216] fire to light; their special office is perfecting, as that of the Cherubim is illumination. ”

“ And the ballata is nobler than the sonnet. It is in the canzone alone, in the “tragic” or highest style, that these sublime themes are to be sung; the style in which the stateliness of the lines, the loftiness of the construction, and the excellence of the words agree with the dignity of the subject. In this superexcellent sense, a canzone is a composition in the loftiest style of equal stanzas, without a refrain, referring to one subject. ”

“ There is, therefore, the distinction between the essential Hell, Purgatory, Paradise of separated spirits—the lost and the redeemed—after death; and the moral or spiritual Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, of men still united to their bodies in this life, using their free will for good or for evil ”

“ 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.) ”

“ All these and other reasons show that, for the well-being of the world, it is necessary that there should be the Monarchy. And they are confirmed by the sacred fact that Christ willed to become man in the “fullness of time,” when the world was blessed with universal peace under the perfect monarchy of Augustus, [Pg 114] the seamless garment that has since been rent by the nail of cupidity (i. 16) .
To the modern mind the first book of the Monarchia is the most important. The conception that the goal of civilisation is the realising of all human potentialities is one of abiding significance. ”

“ 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 ninth, the Crystalline, the angelic hierarchies are manifested with imagery [Pg 197] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 heroine in her loveliness and purity becomes an image upon earth of the Divine Beauty and Goodness; the poet’s love for her is the stepping-stone to love of the Supreme Good. Dante has learned his lesson from Guido Guinizelli, and does not fear to take God Himself as a similitude of his love; Heaven itself requires his lady for its perfection of beatitude (V. N. xix.) ”

“ Although the unsearchable Providence of God hath made many men blessed with prudence and virtue, yet before all hath it put Dante Alighieri, a man of noble and profound wisdom, true fosterling of philosophy and lofty poet, the author of this marvellous, singular, and most sapient work. ”

“ The Provençal sirventes was a serviceable composition employed mainly for satirical, political, and ethical purposes, in contrast with the more stately and “tragical” canzone of love. Although the Italians extended its range of subject and developed its metres, no one before Dante had used it for a great poem or had transfigured it into this superb new measure, at once lyrical and epical. In his hand, indeed, “the thing became a trumpet,” sounding from earth to heaven, to call the dead to judgment. ”

“ Human Philosophy can lead man from moral unworthiness and guide him to temporal felicity; there are judgments of God to which human reason can attain. Therefore Virgil will guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, that he may understand the nature of sin and the need of penance to fill up the void in the moral order; after which a worthier soul will lead him to Paradise and the contemplation of celestial things. ”

“ But it may be directly shown that the authority of the Emperor depends immediately upon God. For man, since he alone partakes of corruptibility and incorruptibility, is ordained for two ultimate ends—blessedness of this life, which is figured in the Earthly Paradise, and blessedness of life eternal, which consists in the fruition of the Divine Aspect in the Celestial Paradise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Book I.—At the outset Dante strikes a slightly different note from that of the Convivio, by boldly asserting that vernacular in general (as the natural speech of man) is nobler than “grammar,” literary languages like Latin or Greek, which he regards as artificially formed (V. E. i. 1) . To discover the noblest form of the Italian vernacular, the poet starts from the very origin of language itself. To man alone of creatures has the intercourse of speech been given: speech, the rational and sensible sign needed for the intercommunication of ideas. ”

“ 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 [Pg 221] 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. ”