Even in the narrow confines of the ever-conquered evil, we are to understand that Love is absolute in its supremacy. It enters Hell, and Hell ceases to exist around it.
So we find that Hell has no power over those of pre-Christian times whose own lives were blameless. These are in a place of green lawns and quiet waters:
for there,
Intolerant of itself was Hell made fair
To accord with its containing.
And even the verdict of Hell has no finality, for Virgil tells how he had witnessed the time when—
“Through the shrunk hells there came a Great One, crowned
And garmented with conquest,”
and how Christ had rescued a host of lost souls—
“unnumbered, whom he had led
Triumphant from the dark abodes, to be
Among the blest forever.”
And we are shown that Hell has no power to disturb the serenity of Beatrice. For such as she, she explains to Virgil—
“There is no fear nor any hurt in Hell.”
Yet there is one respect in which Dante’s attitude is too Christ-like to be in sympathy with the vague compromises of modern Christianity. He teaches that sin is sin, and that its consequences are logical, and inevitable. Those who have distorted the Founder of Christianity till “mild” appears to be an appropriate descriptive adjective, will have little sympathy with the attitude of Dante, whose tears for Francesca do not condone her guilt. She is in one of the outer circles of Hell, and she has the companionship of the one she loved, but she is in Hell, no less, without even the hope of Purgatory. Her husband, who killed her, is thrown into the lowest depth of damnation. There are no tears for him. Yet his condemnation is not her acquittal. She made a contract of marriage, and she broke it in an act of adultery with her husband’s brother. Contracts should be kept. There is no more to be said, though there may be tears of pity.
So, when he sees the degradation of some of the finest intellects of the human race, he tells us how he was moved by their grief until—
I, whose eyes with equal tears were wet,
Bowed down upon the cold stone parapet
And wept beyond controlling.
But his pity is powerless to move them from the Hell which their deeds have earned.
There is the same impartiality, the same remorseless justice, in the way in which friends or foes, whether with pity or contempt, are consigned to their appropriate places. He has no preference for those of his own city: none for his own Florentine faction. His dearest friend—his bitterest enemy—his closest relative—are equally likely to be found either in the lowest Hell or in the highest Heaven.
Concerning one only, his wife, Gemma Donati, whose alliance drew him into the slough of Florentine politics, is he always and entirely silent.
More than once his laments over the spiritual ruin of the city he loved reach an emotional intensity which is unrivalled on such a theme in any literature, with the exception of Christ’s lament over Jerusalem, yet his love for Florence does not silence the bitter comment:
Five thieves, and every thief a Florentine!
For the Divine Comedy is the great epic of Christianity. Milton attempted the same path, and brought an almost equal poetic genius, and an almost equal ability to enforce the contributions of alien mythologies to support his purpose. But he lacked the passionate hatred of evil, the passionate sympathy with human weakness, the almost God-like impartiality, the serene and confident faith of the earlier poet. It is of the deepest significance that where Dante prosecutes, Milton’s brief is endorsed for the defence. He is concerned “to justify the ways of God to man.” Dante’s God is unapproachable in the ultimate Heaven, and humanity is on trial, but the God of Milton is in the dock; and though he defends his client with stubborn loyalty, and great forensic skill, and claims that he has secured an acquittal, he leaves us with a sense of bewilderment, and a feeling that the result is due rather to clever advocacy than to the solid merits of the case itself. It would have been possible to put the same facts so very differently!
Dante’s attitude to the organization and doctrines of the Christian church of his own day is of extreme interest, and presents questions of some complexity.
He saw clearly that the greed of the Church for temporal power was a cause of spiritual weakness, and he was uncompromising in condemnation. He did not hesitate to assert that it was beyond the power of the papacy to excommunicate any man from the Divine forgiveness, giving on this point a direct challenge to the Church’s teaching (Purgatorio, Canto V) at that time, as he did when he consigned the Franciscan to Hell for a sin for which he had received absolution in advance (Inferno, Canto XXVII). The very passion of his love for the Church is the measure of his bitterness against a pope who could use his office to betray it. Yet how did he distinguish these freedoms of opinion from the heresies which he condemned? I think a careful consideration of the character and teachings of those whom he variously placed in Hell or Purgatory will solve this apparent inconsistency, and show that there was no confusion in his own mind. He saw the sin of heresy as something which aims to divide rather than to unite, to destroy rather than to build. If he saw the body of the church of Christ to be diseased, he would not call it healthy, but he strove for its cure, not for its destruction. He directed the whole passion of his soul, the whole force of his intellect, to arousing the Church to consciousness of the corruptions which it contained and tolerated; and, had he succeeded, had he been able to inspire it with his own spirit, it is not too much to say that there would have been no Reformation, or, at the least, that the Reformation would have taken a very different form.
The present volume contains the first of the three parts of which the Divine Comedy consists. Should its reception justify further publication, I hope to follow it with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso at short intervals, as they are already at an advanced stage of preparation.
It has been said that the latter parts of the poem are of less general interest than the first, the Purgatorio being encumbered with a dead philosophy, and the Paradiso rendered monotonous by the fact that Dante had nothing but light and colour with which to build the Heavens of his imagination.
I venture to challenge these opinions. To me, the power and the imagination of the poem rise as it proceeds. I hope to justify this assertion, when I follow this volume with the later sections; and, should I fail, I should still hold that the fault is mine, and not that of the greater poet.
Certainly, he would not himself have given the place of honour to the Inferno, and if we consider it separately, we should not forget that the path through Hell is only a means of approach to a clearer atmosphere where his art—
Reviving from that depth where beauty dies
(Purgatorio, Canto I)
can occupy itself with better things, till it culminates in the vision of the ultimate triumph of the Divine Love: (Paradiso, Canto XXIII):
For all the earth
That yearned for Heaven, and all the Heaven that bent
Toward it, separate by the gulf of sin,
Love bridges at last, and ye behold herein
The bridal joys of their so long desire.
Ye see the path God’s suffering paved with fire;
And Christ comes down it.
CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark