John T. Slattery

“ In Italy, the existence of the city republics—especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa—showed how successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the body-politic.
Coming now to regard the characteristics of Dante's age we must say that the first big thing that looms in sight is the fact that this was the golden age of Christian faith. Everywhere the Cross, the symbol of salvation, met the eye. It was the age when men lived in one faith, used one ritual, professed one creed, accepted a common doctrine and moral standard and breathed a common religious atmosphere. ”

“ Who is now interested in the tragic jealousies and injustices suffered by the people of Florence which led to the bitter feuds that helped to make Dante the great poet? Who, in this twentieth century so intent upon making the world safe for democracy, has sympathy with Dante's advocated scheme of a world-wide absolute monarchy as the cure for the ills of the society of his day? Is this generation which sees Italy united as a result of the overthrow of the Papal states, so universally concerned with Papal claims which were matters of vital importance to Dante and his generation? ”

“ Does Dante place the happiness of Heaven in the bliss and glorification of family reunion?
He is too good a theologian to place the essential happiness of Heaven merely in the joy of family reunion. He does not ignore that feature of eternity, but he does not stress it, because temperamentally he is moved less by sentiment of family and ties of friendship than by his curiosity for knowledge, by his yearnings to behold Eternal Wisdom. ”

“ The two courts of Heaven, angels and saints, are made manifest in the Rose which spreads out like a vast amphitheatre the lowest circle of which is wider than the circumference of the sun. Above the center of the Rose as the Point of light, is God in all His glory and love, adored in blissful raptures by the saints who form the petals of the heavenly flower. Angels with faces aflame, in white garments and with golden wings fly down to the petals as bees to flowers, bringing God's blessings to the saints and fly back to God as bees to their hive, carrying the adoration of the Elect. ”

“ In the realms of literature no work of man has answered that question with greater vividness of imagery, intensity of concentration, beauty of description—all based in a large measure on the teachings of Christianity—than has Dante in his Divine Comedy. Devised as a love offering to the memory of his beloved Beatrice who in the work is symbolized as Heavenly Light on the things hidden from man, the poem leads the reader through the dark abyss of Hell, the patient abode of Purgatory, the glorious realm of Heaven as if the poet had seen Eternity in reality instead of in imagination. ”

“ In the first of these higher spheres, the Sphere of the Sun, the fourth Heaven, Dante sees the spirits of great theologians and others who loved wisdom—great teachers of men. Around him and Beatrice, as their center, twelve of them appear in one circle and twelve in another, while behind those dazzling splendors of spirits are other vivid lights probably representing authors whom the poet had not read or comprehended or symbolizing the men of science, the lovers of wisdom, who in the future by their discoveries would add to our knowledge of truth. ”

“ And when he (Dante) rises beyond the regions of earthly day, light, simple and unalloyed, unshadowed and eternal, lifts the creations of his thought above all affinity to time and matter; light never fails him, as the expression of the gradations of bliss; never reappears the same, never refuses the new shapes of his invention, never becomes confused or dim, though it is seldom thrown into distinct figure and still more seldom colored. ”

“ At once he beholds a spectacle far more marvelous than the circles of dancing lights he has just seen. It fills him with such wonder and bliss that he falls into an ecstasy and only after that does he look into the eyes of Beatrice, now more lovely than ever. What is the new marvel? A starry cross traversing the sphere—a cross, the arms and body of which, each like a Milky Way, are made up of dazzling lights of the souls of those who laid down their lives for the Faith. ”

“ With her population vastly increased in Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take part in the Jubilee of 1300: "Florence is the greatest of cities. She feeds, clothes, governs us all. Indeed she appears to rule the world. She and her people are, in truth, the fifth element of the universe." ”

“ For Dante there must be, also, the Celestial Paradise where man's supernatural destiny will be realized in joys which the eye has not seen and in music which the ear has not heard. His Paradiso has been called the Ten Heavens, but in reality there is in his plan only one Heaven, the Empyrean, the abode of the angels, of the blessed spirits and of God. It is high above the planets and the stars, beyond time and space. ”

“ They are mingled with the mean choir of those angels who were not rebels and were not faithful to God, but were for themselves. Heaven cast them out lest its beauty should be spoiled; and deep Hell will not receive them, because the damned might derive some satisfaction from them.'
"'Master,' I said, 'what is so grievous to them which makes them complain so loud?' 'I shall tell thee right briefly' he answered. 'These people have no hope of death and their blind life's so vile that they are envious of any other lot. The world allows no report of them to last: mercy and justice disdain them. ”

“ The fair lady (Matilda) dipped me where I must needs swallow of the water, then drew me forth and led me, bathed, within the dance of the four fair ones, and each did cover me with her arm. 'Here we are nymphs and in heaven are stars. Ere Beatrice descended to the world, we were ordained for her handmaids: we will lead thee to her eyes: but the three on the other side who deeper gaze will sharpen thine eyes to the joyous light that is within. ”

“ It is Beatrice, Dante's beloved, now apotheosized in the personification of Revelation. What other poet ever dreamed of so glorifying his beloved that for her coming the natural virtues prepare the way, the supernatural virtues, as handmaids accompany her to assist us to the understanding of her doctrine, the angels sing her laudation and she herself in the role both of unveiler of the Scriptures of the Prophets and the Apostles and the mystical Bride of the Canticles is worthy to be called "O Light, O Glory of the human race?" ”

“ The twelfth was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great in its successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy, religion and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of aspiration and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the first shock of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new that was destined to unprecedented victories. ”

“ Because the world ever loves a lover, and because Dante is The Lover par excellence whose love-story is one "to which heaven and earth have put their hand," he stands forth with a hold on humanity that is both enduring and supreme.
Love as a passion and a principle of action never left him to his dying day, from the time when he, a boy of nine years of age, became attracted by the sweet little girl Beatrice. ”

“ So directed, the poet gazes again upon the faint forms appearing like reflections seen in a plate of glass or in a dark, shallow pool. These, the first spirits he meets, are apparitions in human form. In the other spheres all that he will see of the souls will be the light which envelopes them and which seemingly is identified with them, but here he sees beautiful women divinely glorious even in their dim outline, who as nuns had violated their vow of perpetual chastity. ”

“ In the seventh circle Virgil leads Dante to the river of blood, "in which boils every one who by violence injures others." Centaurs, half horses and half men, are there. "Around the fosse they go by thousands, piercing with their arrows whatever spirit wrenches itself out of the blood farther than its guilt has allotted for it." ”

“ And now we come with the poets to the lowest depths of Hell, where we see imprisoned in ice Lucifer, huge and hideous. As we gaze on mankind's enemy, an archangel fallen and punished for sin, the words of Isaias come to mind: "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who did'st rise in the morning! How art thou fallen to the earth, that did'st wound the nations. ”

“ To the next Heaven, the sphere of Mercury, Beatrice and Dante soar more swiftly than an arrow attains its mark while the bow is still vibrating. Increasing in loveliness as she ascends, Beatrice, in the second realm, radiates such splendor that Mercury itself, apart from its own light, gains such glory from her that it seems to glitter or smile from very gladness. ”

“ A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more generally than that of any other school of philosophy—taught in the regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia—such a philosopher could have left the impress of his genius upon seven succeeding centuries only if his work had been to philosophy what Dante's Divina Commedia is to literature. ”

“ These men believed in a world beyond the grave as an ever present reality. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven were so near to them that they, so to speak, could touch the invisible world with their hands. To them, as to Dante, "this life was but a shadowy appearance through which the eternal realities of another world were constantly betraying themselves." Of the intensity and universality of faith in that life beyond death, Dante is not the exception but the embodiment. His poem has no such false note of scepticism as we detect in Tennyson's In Memoriam. ”

“ It surely must be of inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling, leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own age by revealing a mighty past.
To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here, perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. ”