Divine Comedy

“ Even in literature motivated purely by religious factors that is evident. Take for instance the end of the Divine Comedy, where the poet in Paradise stands speechless in his passive contemplation of the secrets of God, and compare it with the poem which has come to be called the Divine Comedy of Puritanism. ”

“ It would be difficult to determine which of the two dramas is the more truthful, or which of the two poets had a firmer grasp upon reality. But the realities of the Divine Comedy are spiritual; those of the Human Comedy are material. ”

“ The Divine Comedy would then have been only human, yet it might have suggested and required the very consummation that the Divine Comedy depicts; and without expressing this consummation, our human comedy might have furnished materials and momentum for it, such that, if ever that consummation came to be expressed, it would be more deeply felt and more adequately understood. ”

“ The moralists and theologians of the Middle Ages, agitated as no other age has been by the problem of death and the life after death, worked out the great scheme of moral retribution on which the "Divine Comedy" is based. ”

“ Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humble and high beyond all other creature,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave, that its Creator
Did not disdain to make himself its creature.
Within thy womb rekindled was the love,
By heat of which in the eternal peace
After such wise this flower has germinated. ”

“ I HAVE a sense of humor that partakes of the divine in life—for there are things even in this chaotic irony that are divine. My genius is not divine. My patheticness is not divine. My philosophy is not divine, nor my originality, nor my audacity of thought. ”

“ A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish.
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. ”

“ Beneath the rind of this mechanism, this play of organs, dwells a vivifying spirit. Beneath these tangible forms of art, the Divine lies hidden, and will be revealed. And the soul that has once known the Divine, feels pain no longer, but is overwhelmed with joy. ”

“ And thou shalt see how safe is Santafiore!
Come and behold thy Rome, that is lamenting,
Widowed, alone, and day and night exclaims,
“My Caesar, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Come and behold how loving are the people;
And if for us no pity moveth thee,
Come and be made ashamed of thy renown! ”

“ And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine.
The air is filled with some unknown perfume;
The congregation of the dead make room
For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine;
Like rooks that haunt Ravenna’s groves of pine,
The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. ”

“ Is there, and can there be, a perpetuity in mortal charms without the recognition or the supposition of a moral beauty connected with them, which alone is pure and imperishable, and which alone creates the sacred ecstasy that revels in the enjoyment of what is divine, or what is supposed to be divine, not in man, but in the conceptions of man,—the ever-blazing glories of goodness or of truth which the excited soul doth see in the eyes and expression of the adored image? It is these archetypes of divinity, real or fancied, which give to love all that is enduring. ”

“ I think that thou wilt hear it, as I judge,
Before thou comest to the Pass of Pardon.
But fix thine eyes athwart the air right steadfast,
And people thou wilt see before us sitting,
And each one close against the cliff is seated. ”

“ May your souls be illumined by the light of the Words of God, and may you become repositories of the mysteries of God, for no comfort is greater and no happiness is sweeter than spiritual comprehension of the divine teachings. If a man understands the real meaning of a poet’s verses such as those of Shakespeare, he is pleased and rejoiced. How much greater his joy and pleasure when he perceives the reality of the Holy Scriptures and becomes informed of the mysteries of the Kingdom! ”

“ See in the orient before the dawn
Rise by a path that long remains not dim,
There came to me in dreams a stammering woman,
Squint in her eyes, and in her feet distorted,
With hands dissevered and of sallow hue. ”

“ If, then, it is the mission of poetry to give pleasure, no matter whether its interpretation of the Divine in the human heart be by tears or by laughter, its ministration necessarily must be to the immortal part of man. ”

“ If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. So I propose—arbitrarily again, if you please—to narrow our definition once more by saying that the word “divine,” as employed therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without restriction might well prove too broad. ”

“ What we adore in our Lord's person is His lowliness and humility, mingled with a certain divine and grand simplicity of character. So are all His words, plain and simple; spoken evidently without passionate gesture, and in no loud or clamorous tone. Simple, because all that is divine is simple; all else is human pride and sensuality. ”

“ An old man, hoary with the hair of eld,
Crying: “Woe unto you, ye souls depraved!
Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens;
I come to lead you to the other shore,
To the eternal shades in heat and frost.
And thou, that yonder standest, living soul,
Withdraw thee from these people, who are dead!” ”

“ We reach the Divine through our aesthetic faculties when our soul is stirred by a grand burst of music, or by the contemplation of a magnificent landscape. We reach the Divine through our purely intellectual faculties, when, by true reasoning, founded on sound observation, we master any great law by which God governs the world. We reach the Divine through our emotional nature when pure grief or pure love, holy longing, unselfish hope, righteous indignation, elevate us above the [272] prosaic level of customary equanimity, and help us to realize the incomparable beauty of holiness. ”

“ Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of the creatures," a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary. "Nature" becomes for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature"—with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces the precept to others, to himself! ”

“ In the mind of every well-instructed Christian, a feeling compounded of a compunctious sense of inadequate performance, and a solemn sense of the extent of the divine requirements, repugnates and subdues those self-gratulations, those giddy deliriums, and that vain ambition, which beset a course of active and successful beneficence. ”

“ Many a reverend divine, shaking his head over the romantic follies of his young parishioners whence he draws his text for a Sunday sermon upon the bad tendencies of novel reading, finds himself the unconscious hero of some unwritten tale, trenching somewhat on the sanctity of his profession. When we can banish love from the world, it will be possible to write a story for the faithful delineation of human nature which shall leave out this interlacing of the emotions. ”

“ Its import is exactly what that of a religious drama ought to be: on earth, the struggle between good and evil; and in heaven the wakeful eye of providence beaming, from unapproachable glory, rays of constancy and resolution. ”

“ Thousands of people shrink from the very sound of it, believing that to be religious means the solemn, sour-faced setting of one foot before the other in a hard and narrow way—the shutting out of all beauty, the cutting off of all enjoyment. ”

“ The Poem is intended, in the first instance, to illustrate in a figurative manner the frailty of the human mind—or rather, the natural propensity of the human heart—in the pursuit of pleasure; which, if not mercifully prevented by the interposition of Divine Providence, tends to create an insatiate desire for new and unattainable delights; fosters an intemperate habit; promotes an incessant craving after carnal joys ”

“ The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. ”

“ This done disinterestedly, with a sovereign eye to duty and the Divine Will, is the way for every one to educate himself towards that personal perfection the pursuit of which is his supreme business on earth. He thus learns to assume and absorb the ascending ideals that brighten the pathway to heaven. Herein the dramatic art becomes glorified into identity with religion. ”

“ The contrast between the divine and human natures is needed to throw personality into relief. Take away the human nature, and that contrast disappears, and with it goes the distinction between divine person and divine nature. Then, instead of a transcendent personality in whose portrait divine and human features are distinctly limned, we have a blur. ”

“ He therefore engaged with great ardour in a new poem, called by him, “The Progress of a Divine;” in which he conducts a profligate priest, by all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country to the highest preferments of the Church; and describes, with that humour which was natural to him, and that knowledge which was extended to all the diversities of human life, his behaviour in every station ”

“ We endeavor to enthrone human reason, to ennoble human nature, to restore the human body to its pure dignity, to develop the beauty and glory of the world; and we wind up, not by retorting upon them their fiendish curses, not even by laughing at the idea of an almighty and all-good God, but by laughing at their notions of an almighty and all-good God, who has a Hell ready for the vast majority of us: this horrible laugh lacerates their pious sensibilities, and we hear the venomous whine of “atrocious blasphemy.” ”

“ Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
Divine, to the Divinity. ”

“ Pomp and show, and stage effect, are beneath the dignity of religion; but when under a dispensation which guides the heart and its feelings, as well as the body and its actions, the creature kneels to adore its Creator, the solemnity of every object around can never be too great for such an awful occasion. ”

“ The peculiar characteristic of the poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern, period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to develop into drama. ”

“ And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until The Passionate Friends of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. ”

“ And thus, out of the baseness of habitual adultery, arises incense-like, in the early mediaeval poetry, a new kind of love—subtler, more imaginative, more passionate, a love of the fancy and the heart, a love stimulating to the perfection of the individual as is any religion; nay, a religion, and one appealing more completely to the complete man, flesh and soul, than even the mystical beliefs of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Then they were aware of an impulse of intense adoration, which filled them with rapture mingled with awe. They felt that every being had fallen prostrate in the divine spheres, in the spiritual spheres, and in the worlds of darkness. The angels bent the knee to do honor to his glory, the spirits bent the knee to testify to their eagerness, and in the abyss all knelt, shuddering with awe. ”

“ The homely proverb applies to them: "A miss is as good as a mile." They are those who suppose that elevated moral sentiments, an aesthetic pleasure in noble acts or noble truths, a glow and enthusiasm of the soul at the sight or the recital of examples of Christian virtue and Christian grace, a disgust at the gross and repulsive forms and aspects of sin,—that such merely intellectual and aesthetic experiences as these are piety itself. ”

“ Drama becomes histrionic art indeed, and the stage becomes the mirror in which are reflected the causes and consequences of the deeds of life. Religion soars on wings of aspiration into the empyrean of hope—hope for a purer and better life which bears fruit in purer and better conduct.
The germ of dramatic art is the dance, which in its first stage is religion. Of course religion must be distinguished from theology. Theology is a system of opinions, while religion is a system of worship. ”

“ If the writers of saints' plays, with their attempt to satisfy the yearning for ideal freedom which is natural in all times and places, took, in their fictions of the religious-marvellous, a step towards what may be called romantic comedy,—a step no less important, though nowadays often unnoticed, was taken toward the comedy of ridicule, satire, and burlesque, at a date quite as remote, by the contrivers of religious parodies. ”

“ Once, in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. ”