As medieval Christendom plunged into the abyss, a cry went up, stronger, perhaps, and more moving than any that had yet been heard. This voice gave utterance in immortal language to the sublimity of the Christian ideal and to the age-long Christian message.
He whose cry was to echo down the centuries and bear witness, even in our own day, to medieval culture, stood, as do all creative geniuses, at a turning-point of history. One part of him was deeply rooted in the past, another looked boldly to the future. He fashioned one of the most perfect of those national languages which were at that time in process of development. Through him literature took a decisive step towards its present-day pattern, analysis of the individual soul and knowledge of its hidden psychology. But the material element of his work was drawn from the immediate past which he resurrected and glorified. Everything essential therein proceeds in substance from the ideal laid down, from the experience acquired, by Christian generations of the great epoch. Two poetic streams had risen during the Middle Ages: one initiated by the Franciscans; the other scholarly, flowing from the troubadours and the courts of love. Those two currents were to unite in the dolce stil nuovo which he presented for the admiration of the world in a series of immortal verses. The summae compiled by medieval philosophers and theologians, and the cathedrals, those great compendia of stone and glass, called for a poetic summa in order to perfect the threefold pattern.
Its author was Dante Alighieri, born in the spring of 1265 at Florence, where he spent his childhood. He knew sorrow early; for his mother died when he was very young, his father remarried, and he saw his country drenched in the blood of internecine warfare. The merest trifle was made to excuse a fight in Tuscany, which to this extent reflected the state of Italy as a whole. Guelphs and Ghibellines were reviving ancient feuds; upstart bourgeois and aristocratic cliques were rivals for power and wealth; while an exasperated people were ever prepared to rise against their oppressors. It was from his memory of these things that the poet called up an image of the Arno “flowing less with water than with blood.” …
Dante died at Ravenna on September 14, 1321, and that noble city which had sweetened his exile was determined to retain his body. When his name became celebrated, Florence, his ungrateful fatherland, tried to recover it, but in vain. So there he lies, close to the church of St. Francis, where he had so often prayed, in a tiny garden filled with cool shade and with silence. Far removed from the strife and suffering of earth, as in the sublime vision born of his imagination, beyond the circles of hell and the mount of expiation, he has, no doubt, attained to everlasting peace, to the seven stages of heaven where, at the summit, dwells the Lamb.
His principal work, the Divine Comedy, was written during the last years of his life, after he had reached the age of fifty, when knowledge of men and experience of events had taught him to hope in God alone.
Consisting of three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—this famous work is one of the most tremendous achievements in all the literature of the world. Like many a great monument of human thought, it has its fanatical devotees, its tireless scholiasts; but the general public admires it from farther off and without pretending to penetrate its secrets, confining themselves to a few episodes which are part of the common culture of the West.…
[T]he Divine Comedy is a fascinating work, an intellectual universe so wonderful that it is hard to know how any man could have conceived it. The beauty of language, the rhythmic cadences, the definitive exactness of so many formulae, and above all that interior breath, that vital urge which drives the poem along, even through interminable declamations, until it reaches a land of light and incomparable fullness—all these qualities make the Divine Comedy a unique achievement, one of the three or four priceless jewels in Europe’s crown.
Notwithstanding a host of symbols and obscurities, the general meaning of the poem is clear. It is the description of a journey claimed to have been made by the author in Holy Week, 1300, through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. He describes those whom he met on the road, the facts which he learned, and his own meditations on this marvellous experience. The descriptive passages are so extraordinarily precise that it has been possible to draw maps and plans and to build models of that country beyond the grave. But across the background formed by this strange geography, a perpetual shifting of figures, episodes, and allusions transforms each region into a dreamland forest where the most resplendent images succeed nightmare visions.
The theme was not original. Many ancient writers, e.g., Homer and Virgil, had pictured the living visiting the dead. There were also Muslim poems describing journeys through heaven and hell; and Celtic monks of the barbarian epoch, in the feverish solitude of their convents, had written many another such tale around the persons of St. Brendan or St. Patrick. But upon this common ground Dante erected a monumental structure, combining the profound truth of man’s destiny with all that the Middle Ages had discovered about eternal realities, and resting the whole of his romantic story upon theological foundations.
Dante himself is the hero of the Divine Comedy; the background is his own experience, the story of his conversion. Wandering in “the dark forest” of vice, he almost stumbles into hell where so many unfortunates pay the price of sin. Saved from damnation through the intervention of our Lady, he gradually discovers the way of light by climbing the painful mount of Purgatory. Two providential beings come to assist him on this journey: Virgil, representing human reason freed from the yoke of passion, and Beatrice, who stands both for ineffable love and for revealed truth. Thanks to them, he is able to reach the place of all peace and of all justice, Paradise. The poem is essentially autobiographical. He whom we follow on this curious road is a man like unto ourselves. Like him, we are shaken by the gusts of hell, we feel the breath of fire in which the damned are burning. With him we share the proud sorrows of sinful love. With him also we rise to light and certainty. He is a man speaking to men with human voice…
The historical framework within which this mighty adventure unfolds is none other than that society of which the poet had direct experience: Christendom. The events to which he refers are those of Christian history; the protagonists of his fantastic work are men who had played a part therein. The problems he is so anxious to solve are those which troubled the whole Christian world. His ideal is the same as that which inspired reforming popes, saints, crusaders, and great thinkers; it is the ideal of a hierarchic order upon earth corresponding to the perfect harmony of heaven.…
Dante’s anxiety for Christendom led him to concentrate his attention on the Church as supernatural guide of that society and keystone of its existence. No literary work has ever been so completely concerned with the Church as is the Divine Comedy. None has spoken with more fervour and tenderness of the Spouse of Christ than he who is so often quoted for his invective against some of her prelates and some of her institutions. He was her devoted and unwavering son; he wished to see her absolutely pure, absolutely beautiful, strictly faithful to her Master’s precepts, freed from the filth wherewith human weakness defiles the Vessel of Election.
His genius and prophetic insight saw the perils to which the Church was then exposed. Amid the bloody conflicts of his age, he realized that Christendom was passing through a crisis, that her very existence was in danger. The Church seemed to him no longer to obey the law of Christ.… The tragedy, in his eyes, was that the Church, instead of proving herself the unassailable witness of things spiritual, the mouthpiece of God, had become bogged down in things of Earth. In the twenty-seventh Canto of the Paradiso, St. Peter tells Dante: “The Spouse of Christ was not reared upon my blood, and that of Linus and of Cletus, that she might then be used for gain of gold.” It was against this fundamental treason that he took his stand, even to the point of unfairness.
His work is thus a tremendous clamour against those who betray the ideal of Christianity, against those “ravening wolves in the guise of shepherds,” against those who “make a god of gold and silver,” against prelates with richly caparisoned horses, and against all those who, by their silence, make themselves accomplices of evil, decking their sermons with witticism and buffoonery instead of recalling the faithful to their sacred duties. The Popes and members of the Curia, whom he expressly names, appeared to him responsible for this state of affairs…
What he desired was a papacy freed from earthly shackles in order to lead and care for the baptized. He believed that the Church had committed a fundamental error by accepting the “Donation of Constantine,” the existence of which he no more doubted than did most of his contemporaries.…
What was the solution to this grave problem? At one time Dante thought the world would recover if the two swords could be separated, if the Church could be confined within her proper domain and the temporal sphere entrusted to the Emperor, who was the traditional embodiment of unity. That is why Dante, the Guelph, called for the intervention of the Germans in Italy, not (as has been suggested) because he had become a partisan of Henry VII, but because the end for which he hoped seemed to justify this means. Events proved him wrong. Instead of appreciating his high responsibility, the emperor showed a lust for power, greed of gain, weakness, and incapacity to oppose Clement V. What, then, of the splendid image of which Dante dreamed—that image which had haunted so many minds since the Carolingian era, that dream of a universal monarchy, of a world governed spiritually by the Pope and temporally by a Caesar in obedience to the precepts of Christ? Was it a mere decoy? Now that this hope had been disappointed, what remained?
Men could still remind themselves that in face of eternity all earthly associations are vain, that Christian policy has ultimately to deal with a kingdom not of this world. The true mediators, therefore, the true guides to whom the poet finally entrusted himself, were not worldly powers, but privileged souls on whom the Spirit of God had descended: Virgil, reason purified; Beatrice, mystical knowledge; and all those who have escaped from the bondage of sinful nature to attain the full stature of humanity—the saints who are the real heads of the Church.
Only they can lead the Spouse of Christ into the light, and it is because there are so many of them that we can still have hope. The human side of the Church may be defiled; but no matter, if she continue to preach her message. A liberator will one day arise, whose coming Dante prophesied in the shape of a mysterious personage, the Veltro, the “Greyhound,” whose identity has been much discussed but who may possibly be none other than Christ intervening directly in history.
Thus the essential lesson of the Divine Comedy is simply an appeal to the Christian conscience.… It is a pure and simple lesson, which the Church had taught her children throughout the period of Cathedral and Crusade, just as she had done during the barbarian night and in the heroic days of the Apostles and Martyrs. Echoing that lesson, Dante expressed in noble language the same thoughts uttered by the mystics in their prayers, by craftsmen in their churches, by the theologians in their writings, and by crusaders in the shedding of their blood.…
“Metanoeite! Be ye transformed in mind!” Such is the keynote of Christian faith, whereby man rises above himself and makes himself eternal; such is the word that passeth not away, that sums up the whole history of the Church.…
From The Church of Cathedral and Crusade, Volume 2
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
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