Dante

by Edmund G. Gardner

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In the recently discovered codex at Berlin—the earliest of the four extant MSS.—the work is entitled Rectorica Dantis (“The Rhetoric of Dante”), which would associate it with the similarly named treatises of the masters of the ars dictandi, such as Boncompagno da Signa, who wrote a Rhetorica novissima.

[20] This southern idiom (nostrum ydioma, i. 10)—from which Dante apparently regards both classical Latin and the modern romance languages derived—would be what we now call Vulgar Latin; but he restricts the phrase vulgare latinum (or latium) to Italian, which—when discussing the rival claims of the three vernaculars to pre-eminence—he rightly recognises to be closest to classical Latin.

[21] Equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio (ii. 8). The sine responsorio distinguishes the true canzone, canzone distesa, from the ballata, canzone a ballo, in which the ripresa of from two to four lines was repeated after each stanza as well as sung as a prelude to the whole. Dante’s example is his own Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, the poem which began “le nove rime” (Purg. xxiv. 49-51). The tragica coniugatio is most nearly realised in English poetry by the ode, while the closest counterpart to the canzone with stanzas divisible into metrical periods is offered by Spenser’s Epithalamion. The sestina has been employed by English poets from the Elizabethans to Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling.

[22] Cipolla showed that the matter of the first two books more directly controverts the anti-imperialist and anti-Roman arguments of the French political writers of the beginning of the fourteenth century—writers like the Dominican, John of Paris. But these or similar views were now being adduced by Robert of Naples and supported by Clement V.

[23] These two ends are the two cities—the earthly and the heavenly—of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei; but the earthly city, blessedness of this life, is more significant for Dante than it was for Augustine. Felicity in peace and freedom is in some sort man’s right: Che è quello per che esso è nato (Conv. iv. 4).

[24] For the whole history of the Letters, the reader is referred to Dr. Paget Toynbee’s introduction, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, Oxford, 1920.

[25] Torraca would assign it to 1311.

[26] Polyphemus, as Biscaro has shown, is most probably Fulcieri da Calboli, the ferocious podestà of Florence in 1303, who had been elected Captain of the People at Bologna for the first six months of 1321 (his predecessor having died in office). Cf. Ecl. ii. (iv.) 76-83 with Purg. xiv. 58-66. See Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, lxxxi. p. 128. Others have taken the person meant as Robert of Naples, or, with Ricci, a kinsman of Venedico Caccianemico whom Dante had covered with infamy in Inf. xviii.

[27] “This illustrious head, for which the Pruner is already hastening to select unwithering leaves from the noble laurel,” or “to decree an everlasting garland in the divine justice,” according to whether the Virgin is taken as Daphne or Astraea.

CHAPTER IV
THE “DIVINA COMMEDIA”

1. Introductory

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). 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; sinning, doing penance, living virtuously. The Inferno represents the state of ignorance and vice; the Purgatorio is the life of converted sinners, obeying Caesar and reconciled to Peter, doing penance and striving God-wards; after the state of felicity has been regained in the Earthly Paradise, the Paradiso represents the ideal life of action and contemplation, closing in an anticipation, here and now, of the Beatific Vision. The whole poem is the mystical epic of the freedom of man’s will in time and in eternity, the soul after conversion passing through the stages of purification and illumination to the attainment of union and fruition.

It must be admitted that the allegorical interpretation of the Commedia has frequently been carried to excess. This has led to a reaction, represented now by Benedetto Croce, who would separate the allegorical and didactic elements from the poetry, in which alone the true value of the work consists. Such a tendency in its turn, if pressed too far, derogates from Dante’s greatness and mars the unity of the poem. In Dante the poet and the practical man—teacher, prophet, politician, philosopher, reformer—are inseparable; more often purely doctrinal themes become so fused in his imagination, so identified with his personality, that the result is lyrical and great poetry.

Title.—Dante unquestionably called his work simply Commedia, which he wrote Comedia and pronounced Comedìa (Inf. xvi. 128, xxi. 2). The epithet divina first appears in the sixteenth-century editions; but it would be almost as pedantic to discard it now as it would be, except when reading the word where it occurs in the poem, to return to the original pronunciation, comedìa.[28]

Metrical Structure.—Each of the three parts, or cantiche, is divided into cantos: the Inferno into thirty-four, the Purgatorio into thirty-three, the Paradiso into thirty-three—thus making up a hundred cantos, the square of the perfect number. Each canto is composed of from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and sixty lines, forming thirty-eight to fifty-three terzine, a continuous measure of three hendecasyllabic lines, woven together by the rhymes of the middle lines, with an extra line rhyming with the second line of the last terzina to close the canto:

ABA, BCB, CDC, DED ... XYX, YZY, Z.

The normal hendecasyllabic line is the endecasillabo piano, in which the rhyme has the accent upon the penultimate syllable (rima piana, trochaic ending). Occasionally, but rarely, we find the endecasillabo sdrucciolo, with the rhyme accentuated on the antepenultimate syllable (rima sdrucciola, dactylic ending), or the endecasillabo tronco, with the accent on the final syllable (rima tronca). Italian prosody regards both these latter forms (which appear to have twelve and ten syllables respectively) as lines of eleven syllables.[29]

The terza rima seems to be derived from the serventese incatenato (“linked serventese”), one of the rather numerous forms of the Italian serventese or sermontese, a species of poem introduced from Provence in the first half of the thirteenth century. 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.

Sources.—The earlier mediaeval visions of the spirit world, of which the most famous are Irish in origin, bear the same relation, in a much slighter degree, to the spiritual content of the Commedia as the Provençal sirventes does to its metrical form. Even if Dante was acquainted with them (and there are episodes occasionally in the poem which recall the vision of Tundal or Tnuthgal), he was absolutely justified in asserting, in Purgatorio xvi., that God willed that he should see His court “by method wholly out of modern use”:

Per modo tutto fuor del moderno uso.

Such ideas, even in special details, were common property. Dante transformed the mediaeval vision of the world beyond the grave into a supreme work of art, making it the receptacle for all that was noblest in the thought and aspiration of the centuries down to his own day. If a hint or two came from Ibernia fabulosa, as Ariosto calls Ireland, the main suggestion was Roman; and Virgil was his imperial master in very fact, as he was his guide by poetical fiction (Inf. i. 82-87): “O honour and light of the other poets, may the long study avail me, and the great love, that has made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author; thou alone art he from whom I took the fair style that hath gained me honour.”

The influence of Virgil pervades the whole poem, and next to his comes that of Lucan. Ovid was mainly a source of classical mythology (frequently spiritualised in Dante’s hands); the contribution of Horace, Statius, and Juvenal is slighter. And Dante was as familiar with the Bible as with the Aeneid and the Pharsalia; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of the Commedia is the writer’s adaptation of the message of the Hebrew prophets to his own times in the language and with the consummate art of the Latin poets. In its degree, the influence of Boëthius is as penetrating as that of Virgil; Orosius has contributed as much history as has Livy. The philosophy of the poem is naturally coloured by Aristotle, studied in the Latin translations as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. Augustine and Aquinas (more generally the latter) are the poet’s chief theological sources; his mysticism has derived something from Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventura as well as from Dionysius. But he deals with his matter with independence, as a poet, in the light of his own spiritual experience, his own imaginative interpretation of life and history, his own observation of nature. Though versed in a super-eminent degree with most of the knowledge, sacred and profane, possible to a man of his epoch, and well-read to an almost incredible extent when the circumstances of his life are considered, Dante’s main and direct source of inspiration lay, not in books, but in that wonderful world of the closing Middle Ages that lay open to his gaze, as from a celestial watch-tower of contemplation: “The little space of earth that maketh us so fierce, as I turned me with the eternal Twins, all appeared to me from the hills to the sea” (Par. xxii. 151-153).

Virgil and Beatrice.—The end of the poem, as the Epistle to Can Grande shows, is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity. In the individual, this will be accomplished by opening his eyes to the nature of vice; by inducing him to contrition, confession, satisfaction; by leading him to contemplation of eternal Truth. In the universality, it can only be effected by the restoration of the Empire and the purification of the Church. The dual scheme of the Monarchia reappears in the Commedia, but transferred from the sphere of Church and State to the field of the individual soul. In the allegorical sense, Virgil may be taken to represent Human Philosophy based on Reason; Beatrice to symbolize Divine Philosophy, which includes the sacred science of Theology, and is in possession of Revelation. But, primarily, Virgil and Beatrice (like the other souls in the poem) are living personalities, not allegorical types. Allegory may be forgotten in the tender relation between Dante and Virgil, and, when that “sweetest father” leaves his disciple in the Earthly Paradise to return to his own sad place in Limbo, there is little of it left in Beatrice’s rebuke of her lover’s past disloyalty; none when she is last seen enshrined in glory beneath the Blessed Virgin’s throne.

There is then a universal and a personal meaning to be distinguished, as well as the literal and allegorical significations. The Divina Commedia is the tribute of devotion from one poet to another; it is the sequel to a real love, the glorification of the image of a woman loved in youth; the story of one man’s conversion and spiritual experience. Nor can we doubt that the study of the imperial poet of alma Roma helped Dante to his great political conception of the destiny of the Empire, even as Philosophy first lifted him from the moral aberrations that severed him from the ideal life (Purg. xxiii. 118). But, at the same time, Dante represents all mankind; as Witte remarks, “the poet stands as the type of the whole race of fallen man, called to salvation.”

Dates and Epoch.—Although the vision is poetically placed in the spring of 1300, during the Pope’s jubilee and shortly before Dante’s election to the priorate, the actual date of composition of the poem—as far as concerns the first two parts—is still uncertain and disputed. There are at present two principal theories. According to the one (very strongly held by Parodi), the Inferno was composed shortly before the advent of Henry of Luxemburg, the Purgatorio during his Italian enterprise. According to the other, not only the Paradiso, but the whole poem was written after the death of the Emperor, and must therefore be regarded as the work of the closing years of the poet’s life. On the former hypothesis, the allusion to the death of Clement V., in Inf. xix., must be taken as an indefinite prediction or a later insertion. It is possible to adopt a compromise between the two views. The poem may have been begun some time between 1306 and 1308, and portions of the Inferno and Purgatorio composed before the catastrophe of 1313. After the death of the Emperor, Dante may well have revised and completed these two canticles. Boccaccio tells us—and the statement is confirmed (for the Paradiso) by a sonnet of Giovanni Quirino—that the poet was wont to send his work in instalments to Can Grande before any copies were made for others. There is no evidence of any circulation before 1317, when some lines from Inf. iii. appear among the papers of a notary at Bologna.[30] The first Eclogue shows that, by 1319, the Inferno and Purgatorio had been, so to speak, published, and the Paradiso was in preparation; Boccaccio’s story of the finding of the last thirteen cantos confirms the belief that this final canticle, which crowns the poet’s whole life-work, was only completed shortly before Dante’s death. Dante is in the position of a man who is now relating to the world the vision vouchsafed to him many years before. Hence everything that happened after April 1300 is spoken of as future and by way of prophecy, beginning with Ciacco’s account in Inf. vi. of the famous faction fight of May Day in that year. With two exceptions—Frate Alberigo and Branca d’Oria (Inf. xxxiii.), whose souls went down to Hell before their bodies died—every spirit met with in the ecstatic pilgrimage is represented as having died before April 1300. But Dante anticipates the certain damnation of some who, though living in 1300, were dead when he wrote the poem; Corso Donati, Popes Boniface and Clement, and a few less notorious sinners as Carlino de’ Pazzi. In one instance, that of Venedico Caccianemico (Inf. xviii.), he seems to have supposed a man dead in 1300 who in reality lived a few years later.

Time.—Dante’s conferences with the dead open at sunrise on Good Friday, in his thirty-fifth year. He would impress upon us that his visionary world is no mere dreamland, but a terrible reality, and therefore his indications of time are frequent and precise. For poetical purposes, he seems to represent this Good Friday as an ideal Good Friday, March 25th, which was believed to have been the actual date of the Crucifixion on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Annunciation (cf. Inf. xxi. 112, and the “three months” from Christmas Day in Purg. ii. 98). In reality, it fell upon April 8th in 1300; and, when Dante in his pilgrimage through Hell would mark the time by reference to moon and stars, he perhaps has recourse to the ecclesiastical calendar, in which the Paschal full moon was on Thursday, April 7th (see Dr. Moore’s Time-References in the Divine Comedy):

E già iernotte fu la luna tonda,

“And already yesternight the moon was round” (Inf. xx. 127); the night of Maundy Thursday, that he has passed “so piteously” when the poem opens.

2. The “Inferno”

Cantos I. and II.—At break of day on Good Friday, Dante, in his thirty-fifth year, after a night of agonised wanderings, would fain issue from the dark wood into which he has, as it were in slumber, strayed. This tangled forest represents at once his own unworthy life and the corruption of human society; both the “sin of the speaker” (§ 28) and the “state of misery of those living in this life” (§ 15) of the Epistle to Can Grande. He would climb the “mountain of delight” which, for the individual, represents the state of felicity, and, for mankind in general, the goal of civilisation; mystically, it is the mountain of the Lord, to which only the innocent in hands and the clean of heart shall ascend. But he is impeded by a swift and beautiful leopard; terrified by a lion; driven back by a hideous she-wolf. The three beasts are derived from Jeremiah (v. 6), where they stand for the judgments to fall upon the people for their sins; here they symbolise the chief vices that keep man from the felicity for which he is born (Conv. iv. 4): Luxury in its mediaeval sense of Lust, Pride, Avarice or Cupidity in its widest meaning. The comparatively modern interpretation which would see in the beasts the three great Guelf powers that opposed the Empire—the republic of Florence, the royal house of France, the secular power of the Papacy—is now generally discarded.

From this peril Dante is delivered by the spirit of Virgil, who bids him take another way. The power of the wolf will extend until the Veltro or greyhound comes, who will deliver Italy and hunt the wolf back to Hell. The advent of this Deliverer is mysteriously announced (Inf. i. 100-111), and seems to be repeated in other forms at intervals throughout the poem (Purg. xx. 10-15, xxxiii. 37-45; Par. xxvii. 61-63). There can be little doubt that Virgil refers to a future Emperor, who shall re-establish the imperial power and make Roman law obeyed throughout the world, extirpate greed, bring about and preserve universal peace in a restored unity of civilisation. His mission will be the realisation of the ideals of the Monarchia, and will work the salvation of Italy who will be restored to her former leadership among the nations. At the same time, there may possibly be a remoter reference to the second coming of Christ. This double prophecy would have a certain fitness upon the lips of Virgil, who was believed to have sung mystically of the first coming of Christ in the fourth Eclogue (cf. Purg. xxii. 64-73), as well as of the foundation of Rome and her Empire in the Aeneid. It has frequently been supposed that Dante identified the Veltro with some definite person; of the various claimants to this honour Can Grande della Scala is, perhaps, the least improbable. In any case, whatever the nationality of the deliverer, the Empire of Dante’s dream was, in fact as well as name, Roman (cf. Epist. v.).

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. Dante’s sense of unworthiness keeps him back, until he learns that Virgil is but the emissary of Beatrice, to whom in turn Lucia (St. Lucy) has been sent to Dante’s aid by a noble Lady in Heaven—evidently the Blessed Virgin Mary, who may not be named in Hell, and who symbolises Divine Mercy, as Lucia does illuminating Grace. Thus encouraged, Dante follows his guide and master upon “the arduous and rugged way.” Aeneas had been vouchsafed his descent to the shades to learn things that were the cause of the foundation of the Empire and the establishment of the Papacy (Inf. ii. 20-27); Dante shall learn things which may prepare men’s hearts for the restoration of the imperial throne, and the cleansing of the papal mantle from the mire of temporal things. St. Paul was caught up into paradise “to bring confirmation to that faith which is the beginning of the way of salvation” (ibid. 29-30); Dante shall follow him to lead men back to the purity of that faith, from which they have wandered.

Ante-Hell.—It is nightfall on Good Friday when Dante reads the terrible inscription on the infernal portal (Inf. iii. 1-9): “Leave all hope, ye that enter.” The sense of the whole inscription is hard to him, but Virgil gently leads him in. In the dark plain of Ante-Hell, disdained alike by Mercy and by Justice, are those “who lived without blame and without praise,” mingled with the Angels who kept neutral between God and Lucifer. Here the pusillanimous, who, taking no side in the struggle between good and evil, would follow no standard on earth, now rush for all eternity after a banner, “which whirling ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause.” Further on towards the centre, flowing round the mouth of Hell itself, is Acheron; where the souls of the lost assemble, and are conveyed across by Charon in his boat. Unconsciously borne across, Dante with Virgil now stands on the verge of the abyss, hearkening to the gathering thunder of endless wailings.

Structure and Moral Topography of Hell.—Hell is a vast pit or funnel piercing down to the centre of the earth, formed when Lucifer and his Angels were hurled down from Heaven. It lies beneath the inhabited world, whose centre is Jerusalem and Mount Calvary; its base towards the surface, and its apex at the centre. It is divided into nine concentric circles, the lower of which are separated by immense precipices—circles which grow more narrow in circumference, more intense and horrible in suffering, until the last is reached where Lucifer is fixed in the ice at the earth’s centre, at the furthest point from God, buried below Jerusalem, where his power was overthrown on the Cross (cf. Inf. xxxiv. 106-126).

“There are two elements in sin,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas: “the conversion to a perishable good, which is the material element in sin; and the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the formal and completing element of sin.” In Dante’s Purgatory the material element is purged away. In his Hell sin is considered mainly on the side of this formal element, its aversion from the Supreme Good; and its enormity is revealed in the hideousness of its effects. The ethical system of the Inferno, as set forth in Canto xi., combines Aristotle’s threefold division of “dispositions” opposed to mortality into Incontinence, Bestiality, Malice (Ethics vii. 1), with Cicero’s distinction of the two ways by which injury is done as Violence and Fraud (De Officiis i. 13). Dante equates the Aristotelian Bestiality and Malice with the Ciceronian Violence and Fraud respectively. Thus there is the upper Hell of sins proceeding from the irrational part of the soul, divided into five circles. The lower Hell of Bestiality and Malice is the terrible city of Dis, the true kingdom of Lucifer, in which, after the intermediate sixth circle, come three great circles, each divided into a number of sub-divisions, and each separated by a chasm from the one above; the seventh circle of Violence and Bestiality; followed by two circles of Malice—the eighth of simple fraud, and the ninth of treachery. There is some doubt as to how far Dante further equates this division with the seven capital sins recognized by the Church. Although actual deeds are considered in Hell, rather than the sinful propensities which lead to them, it seems plausible to recognise in Incontinence the five lesser capital sins: Luxury, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth (though the treatment of this vice in the Inferno is questionable), and Anger; and to regard the whole of the three circles of the city of Dis as proceeding from and being the visible effects of Envy and Pride, the sins proper to devils according to St. Thomas—seen in their supreme degree in him whose pride made him rebel against his Maker, and whose envy brought death into the world. As an alternative, it may be held that Dante began the Inferno with the intention of basing its ethical system upon the seven capital sins, but abandoned it in favour of a more ample treatment, and that the earlier design has been preserved only in the passage through the upper circles.[31]

Limbo.—In “the first circle that girds the abyss,” Dante sees in Limbo the unbaptised children and the virtuous heathen; without hope, they live in desire; free from physical torment, they suffer the pain of loss. Here Dante differs from Aquinas, who distinguishes the Limbo of the Fathers from the Limbo of the Infants, and who represents unbaptised children as not grieving at all for the loss of the Beatific Vision, but rather rejoicing in natural perfection and a certain participation of the Divine Goodness. The example of Rhipeus in the Paradiso shows that Dante could have saved any of the ancients whom he chose, without any violence to his creed. “Any one,” says Aquinas, “can prepare himself for having faith through what is in natural reason; whence it is said that, if any one who is born in barbarous nations doth what lieth in him, God will reveal to him what is necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by sending a teacher.” The reception of Dante by the five great classical poets as sixth in their company is his own affirmation of poetical succession; for the first time a poet in modern vernacular has attained equality with the masters of antiquity who “wrote poetry with regulated speech and art” (V. E. ii. 4). With them he enters the noble castle of Fame, from which the light of wisdom shone upon the pagan world; within are all the wise and virtuous spirits of antiquity, even Aristotle, “the master of those who know,” whose philosophical authority is for Dante supreme (Inf. iv. 131). Here, too, are certain moderns that “worshipped not God aright”; the Saladin, and Averroës “who made the great comment.”

Upper Hell.—Out of Limbo Dante and Virgil descend into the darkness of the second circle, where the carnal sinners are whirled round and round, “through the nether storm-eddying winds.” At its entrance snarls Minos, a type of the sinner’s disordered and terrified conception of Divine Justice. The Virgilian “Mourning Fields” of the martyrs of love are transformed into a region of active torment, and when, in a lull in the storm, Francesca da Rimini pours forth her piteous story in lines of ineffable pathos, the colouring becomes that of Arthurian romance (Inf. v.). Down again through the third circle of putrid rain and snow, where Cerberus (like the other hellish torturers, merely the effect of the sin, and the sinner’s own creation) tortures the gluttonous (Inf. vi.), and the fourth, where Plutus, demon god of wealth, guards the avaricious and prodigal butting at each other for all eternity, Dante is led to the dark waters of Styx, shortly after midnight, as Friday is passing into the early hours of Saturday (Inf. vii. 97-99). The marsh of Styx represents the fifth circle. Fixed in the slime below are souls, made visible only by the bubbles from their sighs: “Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying heavy fumes within our hearts: now lie we sullen here in the black mire” (Inf. vii. 121-124). These souls are usually identified as the accidiosi, or slothful. The material element in Sloth is lack of charity; the formal element is sadness, the sadness which takes away the spiritual life and withdraws the mind from the Divine Good. Some commentators think that the slothful are placed in the Ante-Hell, and that these sad souls are those guilty of sullen or sulky anger, in contrast to the violent anger of those fiercer spirits who, naked and miry, are rending each other on the surface of the marsh, over which the poets are ferried by Phlegyas, the boatman of Dis, as Charon of Upper Hell. The Florentine, Filippo Argenti, who bandies bitter words with Dante during the passage, connects Anger with Pride (Inf. viii. 46) and with Bestiality (ibid. 62-63). As Anger leads to violence and fraud for the sake of vengeance, so Phlegyas conveys them to the entrance of the city of Dis, glowing red with eternal fire.

The City of Dis.—The gate of the city is defended by fiends, while the Furies appear upon the turrets, girt with greenest hydras and with serpents for hair, calling upon Medusa to come and turn Dante to stone. The Furies are symbols of hopeless remorse, and Medusa of the despair which renders repentance impossible. “A guilty deed is the death of the soul; but to despair is to go down into Hell” (St. Isidore, cf. Virgil’s words to Dante, Inf. ix. 55-57). Virgil can guard Dante from her, but he cannot open the gates; for the city of Dis is the mediaeval counterpart of the Virgilian Tartarus, through which the Sibyl could not lead Aeneas. With the sound of mighty tempest a messenger of Heaven passes the Styx with dry feet, and opens the portal with a little rod; he is a figure drawn from Mercury in the Aeneid (iv.), but here transformed to an Angel, akin to those two terrible beings who summon the dead to rise in Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment.[32] Within the gate, round the circuit of the walls and at the same level as the last circle, the sixth circle confines the Heretics and Epicureans in burning tombs. They seem to hold this intermediate position in accordance with the teaching of St. Thomas that Infidelity, if reduced to one of the capital sins, must be regarded as arising from Pride, but may come also from cupidity or some fleshly illusion; and, in a passage in the Convivio (ii. 9), Dante appears to reduce one form of Heresy to bestialitade. Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline hero of Montaperti, heroic even in Hell, rises to address his fellow countryman; and, from the same blazing sepulchre, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, fondly believing that it is height of genius alone that leads Dante thus scathless through this blind prison, seeks vainly to see his own Guido with him. Emperor and Pope should lead man to blessedness; but Frederick II. and Pope Anastasius are buried here with the rest (Inf. x. 119, xi. 8). The horrible stench that rises from the abyss forces Dante to delay his descent; and, in the pause, Virgil explains the moral structure of Hell, equating the Ciceronian with the Aristotelian division of vice (Inf. xi.), as already indicated, and adding a special explanation of how Usury, the breeding of money from money, is a sin against nature, and violence against the Diety.

Seventh Circle.—They descend the precipice into the seventh circle, at the entrance to which the Minotaur, emblem of Violence and Bestiality, gnaws himself in bestial rage, on the top of the ruin formed by the earthquake when the Redeemer entered Hell. Since we are now within the Devil’s city, fiends begin to appear as torturers, but in this seventh circle they take bestial forms, or forms which are half-bestial and half-human. There are three rounds in this circle. In the first, Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood, the violent against others are immersed to varying depths, and tormented by the Centaurs (Inf. xii.). Murderers and tyrants are here; and Benvenuto supposes that the Centaurs are types of their own hireling soldiers, the instruments of their cruelty upon earth. In the second round, the violent against themselves (Inf. xiii.) are punished in the pathless wood of the Harpies; the suicides, imprisoned in trees and preyed upon by these monsters, are regarded as bestial sinners, because, properly speaking, a man cannot hate himself; the destroyers of their own substance, similarly considered, are hunted by black hell-dogs. Yet in this round is one of the noblest souls in the Inferno, Piero della Vigna, still defending the memory of the imperial master who caused his death. Enclosed by the wood is a third round, the burning plain (Inf. xiv.), where the violent against God are subjected to a slow rain of dilated flakes of fire. Capaneus, the typical blasphemer, is tortured even more by his own fury than by the flaming shower. It is in this round that Dante learns what Virgil tells him is the most notable thing he has yet seen in his pilgrimage (Inf. xiv. 88): the infernal rivers are produced by the tears and sins of all human generations since the golden age, and flow from rock to rock down the circles of Hell, back to Lucifer at the earth’s core (ibid. 103, etc.). “The tears extorted from the sinners, the blood shed by tyrants and murderers, all the filth of the sinful world, flow down below by secret conduits, and are then transformed into instruments of torment” (Witte). There are few things in literature more poignant than Dante’s cry of recognition: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto (Inf. xv. 30), “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” Nor is there, perhaps, anything that gives us a more terrible conception of Dante’s claim to be the “preacher of justice,” than the fearful doom he has inflicted upon “the dear and kind paternal image” of the sage who had taught him how man makes himself eternal, and upon the great Florentine citizens of the past, whose deeds and honoured names he had ever “rehearsed and heard with affection” (Inf. xvi. 58-60). In the last group of this round are the Usurers, “on the utmost limit of that seventh circle,” where violence passes into fraud (Inf. xvii. 43); and it is worthy of note that the poet finds examples of this sin, not among the persecuted Jews, but in the noble houses of Padua and Florence.

Malebolge.—A yawning abyss, down which the blood-stained Phlegethon dashes with deafening noise, reaches from the seventh to the eighth circle, Malebolge, the realm of Malice. Lured up by the cord which Dante has girt round him and abandons, Geryon, “unclean image of fraud,” a combination of the mythological monster with the apocalyptic Angel of the bottomless pit, bears Dante and Virgil to the place below. Malebolge is divided into ten valleys, with a gulf in the centre. Since they punish Fraud, de l’uom proprio male, “the vice peculiar to man,” the demon tormentors have usually something of the human form (the serpent torturers of the thieves are an exception)—degraded Angels partaking of humanity’s lowest features. Disgusting though many details of this circle may seem to modern taste, they are only terribly realised images of the sins themselves. Panders and seducers (Inf. xviii.), flatterers, simoniacs (xix., Pope Nicholas III.), diviners and sorcerers (xx.), barrators or sellers of justice in public offices (xxi. and xxii.), hypocrites (xxiii.), thieves (xxiv. and xxv.), fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.), sowers of scandal and schism (xxviii.), falsifiers of every kind (xxix. and xxx.)—each class occupies one of the ten valleys of Malebolge, and to each is awarded a special form of punishment representing the crime, observing the contrapasso (Inf. xxviii. 142), the law of retribution. In the meanwhile the sun has risen in the world above, though this makes no difference in Hell where the sun is silent (Inf. xx. 124); it is the morning of Holy Saturday for the Church; the bells have been rung again after the silence of Good Friday, and the Gloria in excelsis sung in anticipation of the morrow’s feast—while Dante is rebuking Pope Nicholas for simony, and hearkening to Guido da Montefeltro’s bitter tale of Pope Boniface’s treachery (Inf. xxvii.). There are few nobler utterances of mediaeval Catholicity than that famous outburst of Dantesque indignation in Canto xix., against the unworthy and simoniacal holders of the papal chair, though restrained by the “reverence for the Great Keys.” In one instance only does Dante seem in personal danger, and, curiously enough, it is in the region of the Barrators (Inf. xxi. and xxii.), with whose sin his ungrateful countrymen had tried to render him infamous; Virgil himself is almost deceived, that is, Dante’s reason is bewildered and his philosophy at fault; but, although hunted as a criminal, not a drop of the boiling pitch lights upon him, nor do the rakes and hooks of the “Evil-claws” as much as graze his skin. Here and there images from external nature relieve the horror: the country shining white with the hoar-frost before the spring (xxiv. 1-15); the fire-flies gleaming below the hill after the long summer day (xxvi. 25-30). The two cantos depicting the fate of the fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.) seem on a different plane from the rest; the sense of increasing degradation in the passage downwards through Malebolge is checked; the story of the last voyage of Ulysses with its spiritual nobility and imaginative splendour, the whole episode of Guido da Montefeltro with its dramatic intensity, are among the greatest creations of poetry. But so repulsive is much of the matter of Malebolge that Dante represents his own moral sense as becoming clouded; in the last valley he listens without disgust, almost with pleasure, to an unsavoury quarrel between the Greek Sinon and the coiner Adam of Brescia (Inf. xxx.), until a sharp rebuke from Virgil restores him to himself: Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia, “for to wish to hear that is a base desire.”

Ninth Circle.—In the centre of Malebolge yawns a huge chasm, like an immense well, where the precipice falls to the ninth and last circle. Like towers round the margin of this pit appear the upper parts of captive Giants, both of Scripture and mythology; Nimrod, Ephialtes, Briareus—the Paladins of the Emperor of Hell defending the last and most secret chamber of his palace. The Giants connect this last circle with Pride (Purg. xii. 28-36), as the mention of Cain does with Envy (Purg. xiv. 133), and Lucifer himself with both Pride and Envy (Inf. vii. 12; Purg. xii. 25; Par. ix. 129, xix. 46, etc.). Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which “is forgotten that love which nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added, giving birth to special trust” (Inf. xi. 61-63); hence the guardians of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape. Antaeus (Inf. xxxi.), less guilty, and therefore less fettered than the others, hands Virgil and Dante down into this last circle, where the traitors are eternally consumed in the river Cocytus, which is frozen to a vast dark lake of ice, sloping down to Lucifer. Nowhere else is Dante so utterly pitiless. Hardly can we recognise the man who had fainted with pity at the story of Francesca (Inf. v. 141) in the ruthless inquisitor, who is ready to add to the torture of Bocca degli Abati (inf. xxxii. 97), but will not stretch out his hand to afford a moment’s alleviation to Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi (Inf. xxxiii. 149).

There are four concentric rings in this ninth circle, increasing in pain as they diminish in circumference. In Caina (Inf. xxxii. 58), the treacherous murderers of their kindred are chattering with their teeth like storks. In Antenora (88), traitors to country or party are still more deeply frozen into the ice. Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelfs to the Ghibellines at Montaperti, is side by side with Buoso da Duera, who, five years later, betrayed the Ghibellines to the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou. Frozen into one hole, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca is gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa; and the terror and pity of Dante’s lines have made the tale of the dying agonies of the old noble and his children perhaps the most famous episode in the Commedia. The terrible imprecation against Pisa adapts Lucan’s curse upon Egypt after the murder of Pompey to the different geographical conditions of the Tuscan city.[33] In Tolomea (Inf. xxxiii. 124), those who slew treacherously, under mask of hospitality, have only their faces showing above the ice, their tears frozen into a crystalline mask; on earth their bodies ofttimes still seem to live, tenanted by a demon until their time is full, while the soul has already gone down into the ice. In Giudecca (xxxiv. 117) are souls of traitors to their lords and benefactors: “Already I was there (and with fear I put it into verse) where the souls were all covered, and shone through like straw in glass. Some are lying; some stand upright, this on its head, and that upon its soles; another, like a bow, bends face to feet” (Inf. xxxiv. 10-15); silent and immovable, in agonised and everlasting adoration in the court of the Emperor of the dolorious kingdom, who, gigantic and hideous, “from mid-breast stood forth out of the ice.” The most radiant of God’s Angels has become the source of evil, the symbol of sin’s hideousness. His three faces, red, yellow-white, black, are an infernal parody of the Power, Wisdom, Love of the Blessed Trinity. Under each face are two huge bat-like wings, whose helpless flappings freeze all the lake of Cocytus. Tormented by his teeth and claws are the three arch-traitors: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed the Divine Founder of the Church; Brutus and Cassius, who murdered the imperial founder of the Empire. The condemnation of the two latter is an instance of how, while accepting the testimony of his sources as to facts, Dante preserves independence of judgment concerning their moral value; in Lucan’s Pharsalia, Brutus and Cassius are the destined avengers of right, the champions of Roman liberty, Brutus bearing the character with which we are familiar in Shakespeare.

Out of the Depths.—It is the night of Easter Eve in our world (Inf. xxxiv. 68) when the poets leave the accursed place. Virgil carries Dante like a child, for man will readily submit himself to the guidance of reason and philosophy when once the nature of sin has been thoroughly comprehended. Down by Lucifer’s shaggy sides, they pass the centre of the universe (lines 76-81, 106-117). Virgil turns with Dante completely round (conversion from sin), so that they find themselves in a chasm left at Lucifer’s fall, below the opposite hemisphere to that which man inhabits. But here it is morning (lines 96, 105, 118), the morning of Easter Eve of the southern hemisphere, which is twelve hours behind the time of its antipodes.[34] Through this space, opposite to “the tomb of Beelzebub,” a rivulet descends, bringing the memory of sin that has been purged in Purgatory back to Lucifer. By a strange and arduous way, typical of the persevering struggle out of vice, Dante with his guide mounts upwards to the clear air; and, on the shores of Purgatory in the southern hemisphere, they “issued forth to rebehold the stars.”

Like the Redeemer of mankind, Dante has been dead and buried part of three days, and it is not yet daybreak on Easter Sunday, “in the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week.”

3. The “Purgatorio”

Structure and Allegorical Meaning.—Purgatory is a steep mountain of surpassing height, on the only land rising out of the sea in the southern hemisphere. Like Hell, it was formed when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of Heaven. To escape him the earth rushed up to form this mountain, and left void the cavern through which Dante ascended (Inf. xxxiv. 125). It is the exact antipodes of Jerusalem and Mount Calvary, rises beyond atmospheric changes, and is crowned by the Earthly Paradise, scene of man’s fall and symbol of blessedness of this life.

In the literal sense the Purgatorio is the essential Purgatory of separated spirits, expiating and exercising, paying the debt of temporal punishment that remains after the guilt has been forgiven; purging away the material element of sin, after the formal element has been remitted. In the allegorical sense it represents the moral purgatory of repentant sinners in this world; and has for subject man, by penance and good works, becoming free from the tyranny of vice, attaining to moral and intellectual freedom. 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. Very wonderful is the transition from the dark night of Hell to the “sweet colour of oriental sapphire,” where the star of Love comforts the pilgrim soul, and the four stars of the Southern Cross, which symbolise the cardinal virtues, make all the sky rejoice in their flame—until Easter Day dawns, and from afar the poet “knew the quivering of the sea” (Purg. i. 117). Throughout this second Cantica the sun is our guide by day, and at night the stars are over our head; we behold the glory of sunrise and of sunset as upon earth, but with added beauty, for it is attended by celestial songs and the softly beating wings of angelic presences. Dante spends part of four days, with three nights, in this portion of his pilgrimage; for Purgatory is the symbol of the life of man, and the life of man has four periods. At the end of each day Dante rests and sleeps; before dawn on each day, except the first, a vision prepares him for the work of the day—the work which cannot begin or proceed save in the light of the sun, for man can advance no step in this spiritual expiation without the light of God’s grace. But the fourth day does not close, like the other three, in night; for it corresponds to that fourth and last stage of man’s life, in which the soul “returns to God, as to that port whence she set out, when she came to enter upon the sea of this life” (Conv. iv. 28).

There are three main divisions of the mountain. From the shore to the gate of St. Peter is Ante-Purgatory, still subject to atmospheric changes. Within the gate is Purgatory proper, with its seven terraces bounded above by a ring of purifying flames. Thence the way leads up to the Earthly Paradise; for by these purgatorial pains the fall of Adam is repaired, and the soul of man regains the state of innocence.

Ante-Purgatory.—In Ante-Purgatory Dante passes Easter Day and the following night. Here the souls of those who died in contumacy of the Church are detained at the foot of the mountain, and may not yet begin the ascent; and the negligent, who deferred their conversion, and who now have to defer their purification, are waiting humbly around the lower slopes. For here purgation has not yet begun; this is the place where time makes amends for time (Purg. xxiii. 84).

Upon the face of Cato, the guardian of the shore and mountain, so shines the light of the four mystical stars, that he seems illumined with the very light of the sun of Divine Grace (Purg. i. 37-39). Cato, “the severest champion of true liberty,” “to kindle the love of liberty in the world, gave proof of how dear he held her by preferring to depart from life a free man, rather than remain alive bereft of liberty” (Mon. ii. 5). He was one of those who “saw and believed that this goal of human life is solely rigid virtue” (Conv. iv. 6). 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.). The In exitu Israel of their psalm signifies mystically, in Dante’s allegory, the passing of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory (Epist. x. 7). His own song of love on the lips of Casella has peculiar fitness at the entrance of the realm of hope and purgation; for, in the eyes of that mystical lady, of whom Love discourses, is the anticipation of Paradise, and yet she is the example of humility—the humility in sign of which Dante has girded himself with a rush. As they turn towards the ascent, the excommunicated draw near, led by Manfred; cut off from the body of the Church by the Pontiff’s curse, they were reunited to its soul by tardy repentance. The episode of Manfred is a counterpart to that of Celestine in the corresponding canto of the Inferno. Dante would clearly show the difference of God’s judgment from that of man. The figure of the canonised pope-hermit, whom the world extolled as a perfect type of Christian renunciation, and who died in the odour of sanctity, is contrasted with that of the worldly king who died excommunicate, and whose name was tainted with suspicion of incest and parricide: “Horrible were my sins, but Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it” (Purg. iii. 121-123).

Through a narrow gap they begin the ascent, which is so hard at the outset, but grows ever lighter as man ascends. Among the negligent through indolence, Belacqua seems as lazy as upon earth (Purg. iv.); but his laziness is now its own punishment. At midday Virgil’s swift rebuke (Purg. v. 10-15) cures his pupil of one fatal obstacle to following philosophy in the search of moral and intellectual liberty—human respect. Among those cut off by violent deaths is Buonconte da Montefeltro, the story of whose fate, Canto v., is in designed contrast with the soul’s tragedy that came from his father’s lips out of the torturing flames of Malebolge (Inf. xxvii.). The lacrimetta of the dying knight—the “little tear” that saved his eternal part from the fiend (Purg. v. 107)—has become one of the priceless pearls in the treasury of the world’s poetry. All these souls ask for remembrance in prayer, that their delay may be shortened, and Virgil’s explanation centers upon the power of love to reach for expiation from beyond the grave (vi. 37-39). In these earlier cantos of the Purgatorio, there are constant traces of the deep impression made upon Dante by the story of Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas, in Books v. and vi. of the Aeneid.

The Valley of the Princes.—They come to the solitary and lion-like soul of Sordello, whose loving greeting to his Mantuan countryman gives occasion to Dante’s superb and famous outburst of Italian patriotism: Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello (Purg. vi. 76 et seq.); which shows a striking correspondence with the great passage where Lucan laments the overthrow of Roman liberty at Pharsalia (Phars. vii. 440 et seq.). The part of Sordello is very similar to that of Musaeus in the Aeneid, Book vi.; he leads Virgil and Dante to the Valley of the Princes, which corresponds to Elysium, the verdant vale where Aeneas met Anchises. Dante probably reconstructed the troubadour’s personality from his own famous poem on the death of Blacatz, a Provençal hero of the thirteenth century, in which he upbraids and derides the kings and princes of Christendom, beginning with Frederick II., and ends with a proud assertion that he will speak the whole truth in spite of the powerful barons whom he may offend. So here, in the Valley of the Princes, where those are detained who neglected some peculiarly lofty mission, or postponed their spiritual welfare to worldly and political care, Sordello, beginning with the Emperor-elect, Rudolph of Hapsburg (Purg. vii. 94), points out the descendants or successors of those whom he had rebuked in the other life. Here, singing together to the Queen of Mercy, the deadliest foes sit side by side, consoling each other; Rudolph of Hapsburg with Ottocar of Bohemia, Charles of Anjou with Peter of Aragon; a motive found previously in the vision of Tundal, where, however, the kings are naturally Irish. On Henry of England Sordello had been more severe when he lived. After sunset, in the light of three brighter stars, that symbolise the three theological virtues, Dante has pleasant talk with Nino Visconti and Currado Malaspina (Purg. viii.). And, as evening closes in, two golden-haired Angels, green-clad and green-winged, the Angels of Hope with the flaming but blunted swords of justice tempered with mercy, defend the noble souls from the assault of an evil serpent. In the literal sense, this episode (which seems a relic from earlier mediaeval visions) may imply that souls in Purgatory have not the intrinsic impossibility of sinning that is possessed by the blessed of Paradise, but are kept absolutely free from any sin by the Divine Providence. In the allegorical sense, the meaning clearly is that the way to moral and intellectual freedom is a hard one, and temptations to fall back in despair are many. The tempter would draw man back from regaining the Earthly Paradise, from which he has once caused his expulsion.

The Mystic Eagle and the Gate of Purgatory.—Just before the dawn Dante dreams of a golden eagle snatching him up to the sphere of fire, and, waking when the sun is more than two hours high, finds that Lucia has brought him to the Gate of Purgatory. Mystically, the eagle seems to represent the poet’s own spirit, dreaming that he can soar unaided to the very outskirts of Paradise; but he wakes to realise that Divine grace indicates the preliminary stage of purification. The gate of St. Peter with its three steps, of white marble, exactly mirroring the whole man, of darkest purple cracked in the figure of the Cross, of flaming red porphyry, represents the Sacrament of Penance with its three parts: Contrition, Confession, Satisfaction based upon the love of God. The mournfully robed Angel of Obedience seated on the rock of diamond, with dazzling face and flashing sword, is the confessor. His silver and gold keys, of judgment and absolution, open the gate to Dante; the seven P’s traced by his sword on the poet’s forehead are to be effaced one by one in his ascent (Purg. ix.).

Moral Topography.—Within the gate is Purgatory proper with its seven terraces, each devoted to the purgation of one of the seven capital sins, “out of which other vices spring, especially in the way of final causation” (Aquinas). Whereas in the Inferno sin was considered in its manifold and multiform effects, in the Purgatorio it is regarded in its causes, and all referred to disordered love. The formal element, the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the essence of Hell, has been forgiven; the material element, the conversion to the good that perishes, the disordered love, is now to be purged from the soul. In the allegorical or moral sense, since love, as Aquinas says, is “the ultimate cause of the true activities of every agent,” it is clear that man’s first duty in life is to set love in order; and, indeed, the whole moral basis of Dante’s Purgatory rests upon the definition of St. Augustine that virtue is ordo amoris, “the ordering of love.” In the first three terraces, sins of the spirit are expiated; in the fourth terrace, sloth, which is both spiritual and carnal; in the fifth, sixth, seventh terraces, sins of the flesh. This purgation, which involves both pain of loss for a time and punishment of sense, is effected by turning with fervent love to God and detesting what hinders union with Him. Therefore, at the beginning of each terrace, examples are seen or heard of virtue contrary to the sin, in order to excite the suffering souls to extirpate its very roots; and, at the end, examples of its result or punishment (the “bit and bridle”). These examples are chosen with characteristic Dantesque impartiality alike from Scripture and legend or mythology; but, in each case, an example from the life of the Blessed Virgin is opposed to each capital sin. At the end of each terrace stands an Angel—personification of one of the virtues opposed to the sins or vices. These seven Angels in their successive apparitions are among the divinest things of beauty in the sacred poem. It is only when sin is completely purged away that man can contemplate the exceeding beauty, the “awful loveliness” of the contrary virtue.

First Terrace.—Steep and narrow is the path up to the first terrace, where Pride is purged away (Purg. x). Carved upon the mountain side are fair white marble images of wondrous beauty, setting forth great examples of Humility, alike in “them of low degree” (Mary at the Annunciation) and in “the mighty” (David and Trajan, rulers respectively of the chosen people of the two dispensations, the Jews and the Romans). Wearily and painfully the souls of the proud pass round, pressed down by terrible weights, reciting a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, for themselves and those they have left on earth. And seldom has the Catholic doctrine of prayer for the dead been more winningly set forth than in Dante’s comment (xi. 31-36). A partaker in some degree of their punishment, Dante, all bowed down, goes with these souls; he speaks with Omberto Aldobrandesco, who is expiating pride of birth, and Oderisi of Gubbio, the miniaturist, who is purifying his soul from pride of intellect. The latter points out the great Ghibelline burgher statesman of Siena, Provenzano Salvani, expiating pride of dominion—the sin which turned so many an Italian patriot of the Middle Ages into a tyrant. Figured upon the pavement below their feet are examples of Pride’s punishment, like the designs on the pavement of the Duomo of Siena (Purg. xii.). Noon has passed when the Angel of Humility shows the way up to the next terrace, and with the waving of his wing removes the first P from Dante’s forehead. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” celestial voices sing, as, with almost all weariness gone since Pride is expiated, Dante ascends the steep way.

Second Terrace.—In the second and narrower circle Envy is purged. Examples of charity, “courteous invitations to the table of Love,” are cited by invisible spirits flying past. The envious, clothed in haircloth, lean helplessly shoulder to shoulder against the rock, their eyelids sewn up with iron stitching. Sapia of Siena, the kinswoman of Provenzano Salvani, at whose fall and the defeat of her countrymen she rejoiced, tells her history in lines of singular beauty (Purg. xiii.). Guido del Duca denounces the evil dispositions of the inhabitants of Tuscany, and bewails the degeneracy of the noble houses with the consequent decay of chivalry in his own province of Romagna; envious on earth of prosperity of others, these souls mourn now for its decline (xiv.). Like peals of thunder the cries of spirits follow each other in citing Envy’s punishment. As they go towards the sunset, the dazzling Angel of Fraternal Love removes the mark of Envy. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Rejoice thou that conquerest.” As they mount Virgil expounds the difference between material goods, which are diminished by sharing and beget envy, and the infinite good of Paradise, where love increases with every soul that enters into the joy of the Lord, and its communication is measured only by the charity of each soul that is made its mirror (Purg. xv.).

Third Terrace.—On reaching the third terrace where Anger is purged, Dante sees examples of meekness and forgiveness in vision. From the black, pungent, and tormenting smoke which envelopes the souls of the once wrathful, who now call upon the Lamb of God for peace and mercy, the Lombard Marco reconciles Free Will with stellar influence, and ascribes the evil condition of Italy and the world to the neglect of law, the confusion of the spiritual and temporal power, and the papal usurpation of imperial rights (Purg. xvi.). In this terrace Dante again partakes of the pains of the penitent souls. As the sun is setting, he issues from the dark mist. A most significant passage on the power of the imagination to form images not derived from the senses (xvii. 13-18) introduces the visions of Anger’s punishment, from which the poet is roused by the dazzling splendour of the Angel of Peace or Meekness, who fans away the third P and shows the way up: “Blessed are the peacemakers who are without evil wrath.”

Fourth Terrace.—The stars are appearing as they reach the fourth terrace, where souls are purged from Sloth. We saw that, in the Inferno, the Aristotelian division of things to be morally shunned was discussed, and the ethical structure of the first canticle expounded, in the circle intermediate between Incontinence and Malice (Inf. xi.); so, in the Purgatorio, a compulsory pause in the terrace intermediate between sins of spirit and sins of flesh is selected by Virgil for his great discourse upon Love, on which is based the moral system of the second realm (Purg. xvii. 91-139, xviii. 13-75). It is practically a sermon on the text of Jacopone da Todi, Ordena questo amore, tu che m’ami, “Set this love in order, thou that lovest me”; since in rational beings disordered love produces the seven capital vices. Pride, Envy, Anger are regarded as distorted love; Sloth as defective love; Avarice, Gluttony, Luxury as excessive love. 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. Rational beings alone have Free Will, by which man merits or demerits from the Divine Justice, according as he inclines to good or evil loves. Love’s tendency to good is the precious material upon which Free Will acts like the craftsman’s hand, to fashion a satyr’s mask or a crucifix.

At the end of this discourse, the slothful rush by at full speed in the moonlight, so full of longing to lose no time through too little love, that the Abbot of San Zeno cannot stop while he answers Virgil’s question; those in front cry out examples of alacrity in Mary and Caesar; those behind chant Sloth’s punishment in the chosen people of the Old Testament and the Trojan ancestors of the Romans.

The Siren and the Angel of Zeal.—Before the dawn of the third day in Purgatory, Dante has in his sleep a marvellous dream of the Siren (sensual seduction, concupiscence of the flesh), from which he is delivered by a holy and alert lady who calls upon Virgil (prevenient grace, or the wisdom and prudence of Proverbs vii.). The Siren is the dream-prelude to the purgation of sins of the flesh, as the Eagle had been to that of sins of the spirit. The sun has risen; and the Angel of Zeal (or of Spiritual Joy) cancels the fourth P and shows the way up to the next terrace. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall have their souls wed to consolation.” Sloth is a heaviness and sadness which weighs down the soul, a sadness at spiritual good, to be fought by thinking on spiritual things. Most fitly then do the wings of the Angel of Zeal point upwards, and his words tell of a nobler sorrow, a mourning which shall be followed by Divine consolation (Purg. xix.).

Fifth Terrace.—In the fifth terrace, the avaricious and prodigal, whose souls on earth cleaved to the dust, lie face downwards to earth; unable to move hand or foot until the sin of Covetousness is purged away, the sin which, according to Aquinas, “although not absolutely the greatest of sins, yet has in some sense a greater deformity than the rest, since by it the human heart is subjected even to external things.” Pope Adrian V. tells the story of his tardy conversion, and has tender words for his niece Alagia, the wife of Moroello Malaspina (Purg. xix.). It is a companion episode to that of Nicholas III. in the corresponding canto of the Inferno. In this circle the souls themselves cry out the examples and warnings, by day and night respectively. The soul of Hugh Capet, “the root of the evil plant which overshadows all the Christian earth,” pours forth bitter sarcasm and scathing invective upon all the royal house of France, the great Guelf power that opposed the Empire, oppressed Italy, and wrought scandal in the Church. A monument of poetic infamy is especially raised to Philip the Fair and the three Carlos; and there are few more glorious examples of Christian magnanimity than the burning words in which Dante, distinguishing the man from the office, brands the sacrilege of Anagni, the outrage committed upon him whom the poet held as his own deadliest foe, and yet the unworthy Vicar of Christ. Nowhere else, save in the reference to the Jubilee (Purg. ii. 98, 99), does Dante treat Boniface as lawful pope (cf. Inf. xix. 52-57; Par. ix. 142, xxvii. 22-24). It has been thought that Canto xx. was composed while the Church was ostensibly supporting the policy of Henry VII.; before attacking the Templars, the French king had endeavoured to renew the outrage of Anagni by inducing Pope Clement to condemn the memory of Boniface. With a mighty earthquake, a universal chorus of Gloria in excelsis from the suffering souls, the poet Statius is liberated, and joins Dante and Virgil (Purg. xxi.). He explains how the pains of Purgatory are voluntarily endured, since, against the hypothetic or absolute will with which they desire the bliss of Paradise, the souls suffer these purifying pains with the conditional or actual will, the same inclination or impulse or desire (talento) which they formerly had to sin. Thus it is free will itself that imposes the purgatorial process, and that alone shows the soul when purification is complete. The delicious scene of the recognition of Virgil by Statius is full of that peculiarly tender Dantesque playfulness that informs the two Eclogues; Dante’s affectionate humour in dealing with those he loved is one of the most attractive aspects of his character, and one perhaps too often missed.

Sixth Terrace.—The Angel of Justice has removed the fifth P from Dante’s forehead, opposing in his song the thirst of justice to that of gain. As they mount, Statius explains to Virgil how he was converted from prodigality by a line in the Aeneid, and led to Christianity by the fourth Eclogue (Purg. xxii.). The conversion of a pagan to Christianity through reading Virgil occurs in a story told by Vincent of Beauvais; Dante was probably influenced in applying this to Statius, representing him as a secret convert to the true faith, by his study of the Thebaid; for there, in the last book, Statius describes the Altar of Mercy at Athens in language which harmonises with the words of Christ in the Gospels and the address of his own contemporary, St. Paul, to the Athenians in the Acts. The poets pursue their way with greater confidence now that Statius is with them, and reach the sixth terrace, where unseen spirits cry out examples of temperance from the tree beneath which drunkenness and gluttony are purged. The spirits, terribly wasted, suffer intense torments of hunger and thirst in the presence of most tempting food and drink; but the sanctifying pain is a solace, desired even as Christ willed to die for man. With the soul of Forese Donati, Dante holds loving converse; the memory of their dissolute lives together is still grievous; the poet makes amends for his old slander of Forese’s wife Nella, by the tender lines now placed upon her husband’s lips (Purg. xxiii. 85-93). Forese darkly foretells the death of Corso Donati, which appears to be the latest event in Florentine history mentioned in the poem (xxiv. 82-90). Whatever the friendship of these two had been on earth, it was fair and lovely indeed on the Mount of Purgation.

Amongst many others are Pope Martin IV. and the poet Bonagiunta of Lucca, whose talk with Dante upon the dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style,” is one of the landmarks for the student of poetry (Purg. xxiv. 49-60). Dante’s famous definition of his own position expresses, in another form, the truth that all great poetry is the “transfigured life” of its author:[35] “I am one who, when Love inspires me, note, and give utterance in that fashion which he dictates within.” It is already anticipated in the prose passage prefixed to the Donne che avete in the Vita Nuova (xix.), and completes the conception of poetry set forth in the De Vulgari Eloquentia.

The Seventh Terrace.—Passing another tree, a shoot from the tree of knowledge, beneath which the purging pangs are renewed, and from whose branches spirit voices proclaim examples of gluttony’s punishment, they are summoned upwards by the glowing and dazzling Angel of Abstinence, fragrant with grass and flowers as the air of May. As they ascend the narrow stairs towards the last terrace, Statius explains the generation of the body and the infusion of the rational soul, which exists, after the body’s death, invested with an aerial body as a shade (Purg. xxv. 31 et seq.). Apparently it is because revelation has some voice in these high matters that the Christian Statius gives Dante this exposition, instead of Virgil, and at the latter’s request; until the seventh terrace is reached, where sensual passion is expiated in the bosom of the great burning. Singing to the God of Supreme Clemency, crying aloud examples of chastity or of lust’s punishment, two bands of souls, divided according to the nature of their sin, pass through the fire in opposite ways (Purg. xxvi.). Here is Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, father of the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, whom Dante gazes upon in rapt admiration, and addresses with impassioned love and worship. But Guinizelli—with that humility which is so characteristically Dante’s own—indicates as miglior fabbro del parlar materno, a “better craftsman of his mother-tongue,” Arnaut Daniel, the cunning Provençal song-smith, who invented the sestina, and whose metrical skill and originality won for him a higher place in the estimation of the poet of the rime pietrose than modern students of the troubadours are usually disposed to concede.

The Purging Fire.—At sunset the Angel of Purity, singing “Blessed are the clean of heart,” bids the poets pass through the flames that lie between them and the last stairway—the purging fire that is the wall between Dante and Beatrice. Dante endures the “burning without measure”; and they reach the ascent, greeted by dazzling light and celestial strains of Venite benedicti Patris mei. The Cherubims with the flaming sword, “turning every way to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. iii. 24), are thus welcoming man’s restoration to the Garden of Eden, as the serpent had endeavoured to impede it in the Valley of the Princes. Now it is a delight to mount; but night comes on, and Dante, watched over by Statius and Virgil, falls asleep on the stairs (Purg. xxvii.).

Leah and Liberty.—Just before dawn, prelude to the new day, he dreams of Leah, a young and lovely lady gathering flowers in a meadow. The theologians took Leah as type of the active life, and Rachel, her sister, of the contemplative; a symbolism to which Richard of St. Victor gave a more mystical colour, by interpreting Leah as “affection inflamed by divine inspiration, composing itself to the norm of justice.” Leah may then represent the affection, thus inflamed and ordered, which is the perfection of the active life. At sunrise the topmost stair of Purgatory is reached, and Virgil, who can himself discern no further, resigns his guidance at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Dante’s judgment has been made free, right, and whole; per ch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio, “wherefore I crown and mitre thee over thyself” (xxvii. 142). It has been supposed that Virgil is here resigning to Dante the crown and mitre of the Emperor; mitratus et coronatus was the expression used for the coronation of an Emperor when the Pope placed upon his head a mitre and a crown, which afterwards were united in the mitred crown, as seen in the great fresco at Santa Maria Novella. Others refer the crown to temporal or imperial authority, and the mitre to spiritual or ecclesiastical; for (Mon. iii. 4) “if man had remained in the state of innocence in which he was made by God, he would have had no need of such directive regimens,” which are “remedial against the infirmity of sin.” Dante, purified from sin, has regained this state of innocence, and has attained that liberty through which “we have our felicity here as men and our felicity elsewhere as Gods” (Mon. i. 12). In any case, Virgil is confirming the freedom which Dante has sought and gained by the passage through Purgatory.

The Earthly Paradise and Matelda.—The Earthly Paradise represents “blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s natural powers” (Mon. iii. 16). This blessedness is found in the twofold exercise of the mind: the practical, which “consists in ourselves working virtuously, that is, in integrity, with prudence, with temperance, with fortitude, and with justice”; and the speculative, which consists “in considering the works of God and of nature” (Conv. iv. 22). In this Earthly Paradise, the music of whose birds and trees has surely passed into the wonderful six cantos that close the Purgatorio, Dante meets, amidst the flowers on Lethe’s banks, the glorified realisation of the Leah of his dream (Purg. xxviii.). She has been taken as symbolising the glorified active life in the state of recovered Eden, realising in the Church of Christ what Leah had dimly prefigured in the Old Testament; the active Christian life; innocentia bonorum operum, the virtuous use of earthly things, directly ordered to the love of our neighbour; the temporal felicity of the Earthly Paradise. Since the purgatorial process is the freeing of the soul from disordered love, we may follow Richard’s interpretation of Leah, and take her as representing love rightly ordered and inflamed by divine inspiration. Presently she is called Matelda (xxxiii. 119), and it is probable that she is the idealised presentment of a real person. All the earliest commentators, excepting the Ottimo, identify her with the great Countess of Tuscany, in support of which view might be urged the historical work of the Countess in the revival of the study of Roman Law at Bologna—Roman Law being, for Dante, the secular counterpart of the “perfect law of liberty.” Some modern commentators prefer to seek her prototype in one or other of the ladies of Vita Nuova; for instance, in that lady of very sweet speech who had rebuked Dante at the crisis of his “new life.” Others have attempted to identify her with Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn, two German mystical writers of the latter part of the thirteenth century whose works show occasional analogies with the Commedia. It may be observed that her counterpart, as Rachel to Leah, is not Beatrice, as sometimes supposed, but St. Bernard, in the closing cantos of the Paradiso. Matelda explains her joyous aspect by referring Dante to the Psalm Delectasti (Ps. 92, 91 Vulgate), and her discourse of Eden and its rivers (realising the Golden Age sung by the classical poets) communicates to Virgil and Statius her own celestial joy: “Thou has given me, O Lord, a delight in what Thou hast made: in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice.” She points out to Dante’s gaze the wondrous pageant, which astonishes Virgil as much as his pupil, the mystical procession that represents the triumphal march of the Church (Purg. xxix.).

The Pageant of the Church.—With brilliant light and ineffable melody, the triumph advances: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. xxi. 2). Headed by seven candlesticks of gold as standards, followed by the twenty-four elders, white-robed and crowned with lilies, singing Mary’s praises; between the four living creatures of Ezekiel and St. John, crowned with green, comes a triumphal chariot, more glorious than the sun, upon two wheels; drawn by a Griffin, half lion and half eagle, whose golden wings stretch up far out of sight, through the seven luminous bands that form the processional canopy. By the right wheel dance three maidens, symbolic of the theological virtues; by the left wheel dance four, who represent the cardinal virtues, following the measure of Prudence, as the others take their step from the song of Charity. The seven candlesticks are the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the twenty-four elders, either the patriarchs and prophets, or the books of the Old Testament; the four living creatures, the four Evangelists, or their four Gospels; the Griffin, Christ Himself in His Human and Divine Natures. Lastly, follow seven more elders, white-robed but crowned with flaming red flowers; a physician, and one with shining sword; four of humble appearance; an old man “sleeping with face alert.” According to Benvenuto da Imola, these represent St. Peter (who had intrusted to him the power of healing souls) and St. Paul, the four great Latin doctors, and St. Bernard. More usually they are regarded as personifying the books of the New Testament—the Acts, St. Paul’s Epistles, the Epistles of St. Peter, James, John, and Jude, the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John. Upon the chariot, amidst a hundred Angels singing and scattering flowers, Beatrice appears, clad in the mystical colours, red, white, green, crowned with the olive of wisdom and of peace over her snow-white veil. And, at the advent of the Wisdom divinely revealed to man, Virgil silently vanishes; he has tasted of the delights of the Earthly Paradise, has witnessed the triumph of the Church from which he is for ever cut off, the Faith he never knew, and has gone back to his mournful dwelling-place (Purg. xxx.).

Beatrice and Dante.—The precise significance of the reproaches which Beatrice pours upon Dante for his mode of life after her death, with the poet’s own bitter shame and intense repentance (xxx., xxxi.), depends upon the view taken of his character and the nature of the wanderings represented in the dark wood. That these aberrations were mainly philosophical and intellectual, as sometimes supposed, appears highly improbable. We would regard Dante’s confession here as one of his most personal utterances, and hold that the cherubically inspired singer of righteousness is deliberately casting aside the allegorical veil which, in the Convivio, he had attempted to throw over the things in the past which still severed him from the ideal life when he wrote: “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion.” 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; and, in response to the song of the three theological virtues, which perfect man supernaturally, Beatrice at last unveils her countenance to his gaze: “O splendour of living light eternal.”

Concluding Allegories of the “Purgatorio.”—The allegory is resumed. In the light of this revelation, now that he is purified and free from sin, Dante beholds a vision of the Church and Empire (Purg. xxxii.). That glorious procession had first presented an ideal of the Church as Divine Providence intended it to be, before it became the vessel that the serpent of simony broke; the Bride that the Divine Spouse ordained for the guidance of the world. 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 tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the prohibition to eat of that tree was the beginning of law and the duty of obedience, represents Natural Law or Natural Justice, what Dante calls ius; which “in things is nought else than the similitude of the divine will” (Mon. ii. 2). The expression of this natural justice and the means for its effectuation in human society is Law, which Dante identifies with the Empire, and thus the tree becomes the symbol of the Empire and of the obedience due to it. The tree is destitute of flowers and foliage till the Griffin comes to it, who plucks nothing from it: “Thus is preserved the seed of all justice” (Purg. xxxii. 48; cf. our Lord’s words to St. John, Matt. iii. 15). Justice can alone be fulfilled when the Church follows this example of her Divine Founder, and usurps none of the temporal rights of the Empire. After the chariot has been bound to the tree, the previously bare plant breaks out into purple leaves and flowers. The Griffin and his train return to Heaven, leaving Beatrice to guard the chariot of the Church, seated beneath the shadow of the Imperial Tree, upon its root, which is Rome. In a new series of visions Dante beholds the sequel; he sees the conflict of the past, contemplates the corruption of the present, hearkens to the hope of the future. The persecution of the Church by the early Roman Emperors is followed by the inroad of the first heresies; and the donation of Constantine by the rising of the dragon of schism or simony. By more assumption of secular power and dignities, the chariot becomes monstrously transformed, and shamelessly usurped by the harlot, who represents the corrupt ecclesiastical authority enthroned in the place of Revelation, a false and degraded theology based upon the Decretals instead of the true divine science of the Scripture and the Fathers. By her side a giant appears who, after alternate caressing and scourging of the usurper, unbinds the transfigured chariot from the tree, and drags it away through the forest—symbolical of the interference of the royal house of France, ending in the transference of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon.

A Deliverer Announced.—But to the mournful psalm that the maidens around her raise, Deus venerunt gentes, Beatrice answers in words of hope; “a little while,” and the spiritual guide shall rise again from the black tomb of Avignon. And, as they move on, she utters to Dante a further prophecy (Purg. xxxiii.). “The vessel that the serpent broke was and is not,” so completely has corruption and simony degraded the chariot of the Bride of Christ. But vengeance shall fall upon the guilty parties, and the eagle shall not for ever be without an heir; for already a favourable disposition of the stars is at hand, under which a messenger of God shall come, who shall slay the harlot and the giant. It is probably the same event as the coming of the Veltro. Dante is to repeat her words “to those that live the life which is a running to death,” and not to conceal what he has seen of the tree. Apparently (Purg. xxxiii. 58-72) he is to make manifest that the Empire is of divine origin, and to recognise that the precept given by God to our first parents corresponds now with the duty and obedience man owes to the Empire. The law under which Adam lived was the prohibition to eat of the tree; the law under which his descendants, the commonwealth of the human race, live is the Empire. As Parodi puts it, it is not a new sense superimposed upon the first; “it is simply the same single meaning, the historical circumstances alone appearing changed.” The sin of Adam is repeated when the Empire is usurped of its rights or its authority attacked, for God created it holy for the purpose of leading man to temporal felicity—the goal, here and now, of the human race.[36]

Lethe and Eunoë.—At noon they come to where the rivers of Lethe and Eunoë issue from one mystical fountain, the fountain of the grace of God. Here Beatrice refers Dante to Matelda, who leads him and Statius to drink of Eunoë, which quickens dead virtue and restores memory of every good deed in those who have first been bathed in Lethe, which takes away the memory of sin. According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa, iii. 89, 5), works done in charity, although in a sense dead through sin, are brought to life through penance. Through repentance they regain their efficacy of leading him who did them into eternal life. Therefore Dante writes: “I returned from the most holy stream, remade even as young trees renewed with new foliage, pure and disposed to ascend to the stars.”

4. The “Paradiso”

Structure.—Dante’s Paradise consists of the nine moving heavens, according to Ptolemaic astronomy, crowned by the tenth motionless and divinest Empyrean heaven, “according to what Holy Church teacheth, who cannot lie” (Conv. ii. 3, 4). The nine moving spheres revolve round our globe, the fixed centre of the Universe, each of the lower eight being enclosed in the sphere above itself. The seven lowest are the heavens of the planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The eighth or stellar heaven, the sphere of the Fixed Stars or Firmament, is the highest visible region of the celestial world, and to some extent corresponds to the Earthly Paradise in the lower realms. Above this visible firmament, the ninth or Crystalline heaven, the Primum Mobile, directs with its movements the daily revolution of all the others. In it nature starts; from it proceed time and motion, with all celestial influence for the government of the world (Par. xxvii. 106-120). It is “the royal mantle of all the volumes of the world, which is most fervent and most living in God’s breath, and in His ways” (Par. xxiii. 112-114); and it communicates in different degrees some participation in this quickening breath of God to the other sphere which it encloses, and to all the Universe. It moves swiftest of all, from the fervent desire of all its parts to be united to the Empyrean, the spaceless and motionless ocean of Divine love, where God beatifies the saints and Angels in the vision of His Essence. This Empyrean is the true intellectual Paradise, for which the lower heavens are merely sensible preparations. “This is the sovereign edifice of the world, in which all the world is included, and outside of which is nothing; and it is not in space, but was formed only in the First Mind” (Conv. ii. 4); “The heaven that is pure light; light intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy, joy that transcendeth every sweetness” (Par. xxx. 39-42).

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. The ascent is marked by the increased loveliness of Beatrice, as she guides Dante upwards from heaven to heaven; it is marked, too, by gradations in the brilliancy of the blessed spirits themselves, by their ever increasing ardour of charity towards the poet, and by the growing spirituality of the matters discussed in each sphere—veil after veil being drawn aside from the mysteries of the Divine treasure-house.

The Saints.—“To show forth the glory of beatitude in those souls,” says the letter to Can Grande, “from them, as from those who see all truth, many things will be sought which have great utility and delight” (Epist. x. 33). All the saints without exception have their home and glorious seats with Mary and the Angels in that Empyrean heaven, where they are finally seen as glorified spirit likenesses of what they were on earth. But into each preparatory sphere, excepting the ninth, these citizens of eternal life descend to meet Dante as, with Beatrice, he approaches the gates of the celestial city—like the noble soul returning home to God in the fourth and last part of life:

“And even as its citizens come forth to meet him who returns from a long journey, before he enters the gate of the city, so to the noble soul come forth, as is fitting, those citizens of eternal life. And thus they do because of her good works and contemplations; for, being now rendered to God and abstracted from worldly things and thoughts, she seems to see those whom she believes to be with God” (Conv. iv. 28).

In all these spheres, excepting the first, and to some extent the second, the spirits of the blessed appear clothed in dazzling light, which hides their proper semblances from Dante’s gaze, making them appear as brilliant stars or flaming splendours. In the tenth Heaven of Heavens he is supernaturally illumined, and enabled thereby to behold them in their glorified spirit forms “with countenance unveiled” (Par. xxii. 60, xxx. 96, xxxi. 49).

In the three lower heavens, to which earth’s shadow was supposed to extend (Par. ix. 118, 119), appear the souls whose lives were marred by inconstancy in their vows, who were moved by vain glory, or yielded to sensual love. They descend into these lower spheres to give Dante a sensible sign of the lesser degree of the perfection of their beatitude in the Empyrean. Domus est una, sed diversitas est ibi mansionum; “The house is one, but there is a diversity of mansions there.” There are different mansions of beatitude in God’s house, proceeding from inequality in the soul’s capacity of the Divine Charity; but in that house all are fulfilled with the Vision of the Divine Essence, and each perfectly beatified according to his own capacity of love and knowledge. In the spheres of the four higher planets appear the souls of great teachers and doctors, of Jewish warriors and Christian knights, of just rulers, of ascetic monks and hermits; they appear as types of lives perfected in action or in contemplation, as a sign of the different ways in which perfection may be reached on earth and beatitude attained in Paradise. 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 eighth, the Stellar Heaven, still under sensible figures and allegorical veils, Dante sees “the host of the triumph of Christ, and all the fruit gathered by the circling of these spheres” (Par. xxiii. 19-21), representing the Church in which these various modes and degrees of life are brought into unison. In the ninth, the Crystalline, the angelic hierarchies are manifested with imagery 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.

The Angels.—Each of the nine moving spheres is assigned to the care of one of the nine angelic orders: Angels, Archangels, Principalities; Powers, Virtues, Dominations; Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. And the character of the blessed spirits that appear to Dante in each heaven, and the subjects discussed, seem in almost every case to correspond more or less closely with the functions assigned by mystical theologians, especially Dionysius, St. Gregory and St. Bernard, to the special angelic order which presides over the sphere in question. There are two fundamental principles in the life of the soul: nature and grace. The one is represented in the Paradiso by the astronomical order of the heavens and their influence upon individual disposition, furnishing man with a natural aptitude for the moral and intellectual virtues; the other by the bounty of Divine Grace, which reveals itself in the perfecting of the natural and the infusion of the supernatural virtues, whereby souls become assimilated to the angelic orders.[37] It is through these Angels (the name is applied generally to all, as well as to the lowest order) that God disposes the visible world; in the hands of the celestial intelligences the heavens are as hammers, to stamp the Divine ideas upon material creation and carry out the Divine plan in the government of the Universe (cf. Par. ii. 127-129). And, by means of the influence of the stars, these Angels have impressed certain men with their own characteristics; perhaps to fill up the vacant places in their ranks left by the fall of Lucifer’s followers, certainly to co-operate on earth in their work. Dante himself was born beneath the constellation of the Gemini, the glorious stars impregnated with the virtue of the Cherubim who rule the eighth sphere (Par. xxii. 112-123). The Cherubim represent the Divine Wisdom; their name signifies plenitude of knowledge. According to St. Bernard, they “draw from the very fountain of wisdom, the mouth of the Most High, and pour out the streams of knowledge upon all His citizens.” Their special prerogatives are fullness of Divine light, and contemplation of the beauty of the Divine order of things; they see most into the profound mysteries of the hidden things of God, and spread the knowledge of Him upon all beneath them. By their inspiration Dante co-operated in this cherubical work by writing the Divina Commedia. The Seraphim especially represent the Divine Love. No soul appears in the ninth heaven which they guide and in which the angelic hierarchies are manifested; Beatrice is the sole interpreter between the poet and the Angels, as she had been the revealer to him on earth of Love’s “possible divinities and celestial prophecies.”

Time in Paradise.—The action of the Paradiso begins at noon, immediately after Dante’s return from Eunoë; that is, noon on Wednesday in Easter week in the Earthly Paradise and (the following) midnight at Jerusalem (Par. i. 37-45). The time-references in this third Cantica are rather doubtful (Par. xxii. 151-153, xxvii. 77-87), but it seems probable that Dante takes twenty-four hours to ascend through the nine material heavens to the Empyrean, which is beyond time and space, where “the natural law in nought is relevant” (Par. xxx. 123). When Dante woke from his “mighty trance” to the “sound of the importunate earth,” it was perhaps about dawn on the morning of Friday in Easter week in our world, thus completing the seven days of his ecstatic pilgrimage, which had begun at about the same hour on Good Friday.

Canto I.—In a lyrical prologue of stately music (Par. i. 1-36), the poet sings of the glory of the First Mover, and prays for light and inspiration to complete this third most arduous portion of his divine poem. Then, in the noblest season of the year and noblest hour of the day, as Beatrice gazes upon the sun and Dante upon her, his mind becomes godlike, and he ascends to Heaven swifter than lightning. To explain his ascent, Beatrice discourses upon the form and order of God’s visible image, the Universe; and on His Eternal Law, the sovereign plan of government existing in the Divine Mind, to which all movements and actions of nature are subject (ibid. 103-141). 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. It is the doctrine of spiritual gravitation (derived from St. Augustine), according to which the soul is moved by love as bodies are by their weight, and all things find their rest in order.

The Heaven of the Moon.—They are received into the eternal pearl of the Moon (Par. ii.); where Beatrice first confutes Dante’s former theory concerning the luminous substance of the celestial bodies, and, by explaining how everything in the visible world depends upon the angelic movers of the sphere, gives a mystical interpretation of a natural phenomenon, on this first step of his ascent to the suprasensible. Within this eternal pearl appear faint but divinely beautiful forms of women; the souls of those who had yielded to violence and broken their solemn vow (Par. iii.). Piccarda Donati, sister of Corso and Forese, sets forth the perfection of celestial charity, where all wills are made absolutely one with the will of God, who has awarded different degrees or mansions of beatitude to all His chosen ones:

E la sua volontade è nostra pace,

“And His will is our peace.”[38] Transfigured now with ineffable joy, Piccarda tells the pathetic story of her frustrated life on earth; and points out to Dante the Empress Constance, mother of Frederick II., torn, like her, from the convent’s shelter. Beatrice explains to the poet the place of all the saints in the Empyrean—the “heaven of humility where Mary is,” as Dante had sung long before of Beatrice herself in the Vita Nuova—and the reason of this temporary apparition in the moon (Par. iv.). The other questions solved in this sphere are all connected with Free Will. Rectitude of will is necessary for the gaining of Paradise, and nothing whatever can take away that freedom of the will. “As regards the proper act of the will, no violence can be done to the will”; and, since Piccarda and Constance yielded through fear of greater evil, they fell voluntarily from the state of perfection to which they were called. Freedom of the will is God’s greatest gift to man (Par. v. 19-24); hence the sanctity of an accepted vow, wherein this supreme gift is offered to God as victim, although Holy Church has power to commute, save, apparently, in the case of solemn vows of perpetual chastity. It will be observed that this heaven is moved by the Angels, who are severally assigned to individuals as guardians, and who are the bearers of tidings of God’s bounty to men; and, corresponding to this, the questions solved relate to the salvation and guidance of individual souls, and to the great gift of liberty, whereby God’s bounty is specially shown.

The Heaven of Mercury.—In the second sphere, the heaven of Mercury, appear the souls of those who did great things for humanity or for special nations, but who were actuated by mixed motives; personal ambition, desire of fame and honour, made “the rays of true love mount upwards less vividly” (Par. vi. 117); and they have thus the next lowest mansion of beatitude to the spirits that appeared in the inconstant Moon. The Emperor Justinian recites the proud history of the Roman Eagle, and shows how Divine Providence established the sway of the Roman people over all the earth, made the Eagle the instrument of the Atonement offered by Christ for all mankind, the avenger of His death, the protector of His Church. As the monarch who reformed and codified Roman Law, of which he is for Dante the personification, and who restored Italy to the Empire (the work which the Veltro is to renew under altered conditions of Christendom), Justinian lifts the imperial ideal far above the factious politics of the Middle Ages, condemning Guelfs and Ghibellines alike as traitors and sowers of discord. Here, too, is Romeo of Villanova, who did in a lesser degree for Provence what Justinian did for the Empire, thus appearing with him in the sphere that is moved by the Archangels, whose function is to guide and protect particular nations. The figure of Romeo—unjustly accused of corrupt practices in office, supporting with magnanimous heart the poverty and humiliations of voluntary exile—is perhaps an unconscious portrait of Dante himself. Even as the Archangels announce messages of special import and sacredness, as Gabriel did to Mary, so Beatrice explains to Dante the mystery of man’s redemption by the Incarnation and Crucifixion, the supremest work at once of Divine Justice and Divine Mercy (Par. vii.), and touches somewhat upon the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.

The Heaven of Venus.—The third heaven, the sphere of Venus, is moved by the celestial Principalities, whose office is to influence earthly rulers to imitate the principality of God, by uniting love with their lordship. They are those, according to St. Bernard, “by whose management and wisdom all principality on earth is set up, ruled, limited, transferred, diminished, and changed.” Into this sphere descend the souls of purified lovers, brilliant lights moving circle-wise and hidden in the rays of their own joy. Carlo Martello, son of Charles II. of Naples, and son-in-law of Rudolph of Hapsburg, who, by reason of his marriage with Clemenza, might have healed the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, pictures the realms over which he should have ruled, denounces the misgovernment of his own house, and explains the influence of the celestial bodies for the constitution of society and the government of states (Par. viii.). Cunizza da Romano, the famous sister of Ezzelino, rebukes the anarchy of the March of Treviso; a “modern child of Venus,” she here appears as the type of a perfect penitent (Par. ix.). Like her, Folco of Marseilles, poet then prelate, but here recorded only as troubadour, remembers the love sins of his youth, not with sorrow, but with gratitude to the Divine Mercy and wonder at the mysteries of Providence. Rahab of Jericho, the highest spirit of this sphere, is a type of the Church, saved by Christ’s blood from the ruin of the world; and, with a fine thrust at the loveless avarice of the Pope and his cardinals, Dante passes with Beatrice beyond the shadow of the earth.

The Heaven of the Sun.—To mark this higher grade of bliss and knowledge, Dante pauses on his entrance into the fourth sphere, the heaven of the Sun, to sing again of the Creation, the work of the Blessed Trinity, and the order of the Universe, the visible expression of the perfection of Divine art (Par. x. 1-21). The Sun is ruled by the celestial Powers, the angelic order that represents the Divine majesty and power, combats the powers of darkness, and stays diseases. Here, in two garlands of celestial lights surrounding Dante and Beatrice, appear the glorious souls of twenty-four teachers and doctors, who illuminated the world by example and doctrine; the twofold work of co-operation with the celestial Powers, which is seen in its supereminent degree in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the champions who led the armies of Christ against the powers of darkness and healed the spiritual diseases of the Christian world. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great light of the Dominicans, after naming the other eleven spirits of his circle (Albertus Magnus, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boëthius, Isidore, Bede, Richard of St. Victor, and Siger), sings the glorious panegyric of St. Francis, the seraphic bridegroom of Poverty, laments the backsliding of the Dominicans (Par. xi.). St. Bonaventura, once minister-general of the Franciscans, extols the marvellous life of St. Dominic, the cherubical lover of Faith, the great paladin in Holy Church’s victorious battle where St. Francis bore the standard of the Crucified (Par. xii.). Lamenting the degenerate state of the Franciscans, he names the eleven spirits that accompany him; two of the followers of St. Francis, Illuminato and Agostino; Hugh of St. Victor; Peter Comestor, Peter of Spain (the logician whose elevation to the papacy as John XXI. may be ignored in Paradise), Nathan, Chrysostom, St. Anselm, Aelius Donatus (the Latin grammarian), Rabanus Maurus, and the Calabrian abbot Joachim. Lovers of poverty, rebukers of corruption, historians, mystics, theologians, writers of humble text-books are here associated in the same glory, as servants of truth in the same warfare against the powers of darkness. They illustrate what St. Bonaventura calls the broadness of the illuminative way. Each group closes with a spirit whose orthodoxy had been at least questioned. Siger of Brabant, the champion of Averroism at the university of Paris, had “syllogised invidious truths,” and met with a violent death at the Papal Court at Orvieto about 1284. Joachim of Flora, “endowed with prophetic spirit,” had foretold the advent of the epoch of the Holy Ghost, in which the Everlasting Gospel, the spiritual interpretation of the Gospel of Christ, would leave no place for disciplinary institutions; his later followers among the Franciscans had been condemned at the Council of Anagni in 1256.

St. Thomas further explains to Dante the grades of perfection in God’s creatures, from the Angels downwards; whereby His Divine light is more or less imperfectly reflected, and the likeness of the Divine ideas more or less imperfectly expressed—perfectly only when the Trinity creates immediately, as in the case of Adam and the humanity of Christ (Par. xiii.). Solomon, whose peerless wisdom St. Thomas had explained as “royal prudence,” instructs Dante concerning the splendour of the body after the resurrection, when human personality will be completed and the perfection of beatitude fulfilled (Par. xiv.). In a mysteriously beautiful apparition of what seems to be another garland of spirits in the Sun, this vision of the fourth heaven closes; and Beatrice and her lover are “translated to more lofty salvation” in the glowing red of Mars.

The Heaven of Mars.—The fifth heaven, the sphere of Mars, is ruled by the angelic Virtues. This is the order which images the Divine strength and fortitude; their name, according to Dionysius, signifies “a certain valiant and unconquerable virility.” According to St. Bernard, they are those “by whose command or work signs and prodigies are wrought among the elements, for the admonition of mortals,” and it is through them that the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven as foretold in the Gospel.[39] Therefore, in Mars, Dante beholds a great image of the Crucified, blood-red, formed by stars which are the souls of the warrior saints, whom the Virtues impressed at their birth with the influence of the planet (Par. xvii. 76-78), to be strongly and manfully valiant, and to do notable things on earth (ibid. 92, 93), even as the Virtues, according to St. Bernard, work signs and prodigies among the elements.

Cacciaguida passes from the right arm of the Cross to greet his descendant, like Anchises to Aeneas in Elysium. In his long discourse with the poet (Par. xv. and xvi.) we dimly discern a splendidly ideal picture of a free Italian commune of the twelfth century, before what Dante regards as the corrupting influence of wealth and illegitimate extension of its boundaries had fallen upon it, and before the hostility of the Church to the Empire, with the resulting confusion of persons in the city, had involved the Florentines in the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines. Then, having bitterly lamented the decay of the old Florentine families and the corruption of their successors, Cacciaguida co-operates with the Virtues by inspiring Dante with endurance and fortitude to suffer unjust exile and perform his life’s work (Par. xvii.). In the famous and most noble lines, to which reference has already been made in touching upon this epoch of Dante’s life, Cacciaguida foretells the poet’s banishment, the calumnies of his enemies, his sufferings in exile, his forming a party to himself, the future greatness of Can Grande, Dante’s own certainty of eternal fame. And let him be no timid friend to truth, but make manifest his whole vision, and especially assail corruption in highest places (cf. Mon. iii. 1). It is Dante’s apologia for his own life, first as citizen, then as poet. The keynote of the closing years of his life is struck at the opening of Canto xviii.: “And that Lady who was leading me to God said: ‘Change thy thought; think that I am near to Him who unburdens every wrong.’” Gazing upon her, his affection “was free from every other desire.” Then, with a charge of celestial chivalry across the sky, this vision of warriors closes; Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne and Orlando, William of Orange still with Renoardo, Godfrey de Bouillon and Robert Guiscard, flash through the Cross, and are rejoined by Cacciaguida in their motion and their song.

The Heaven of Jupiter.—The silvery white sphere of Jupiter, the sixth heaven, is ruled by the Dominations, the angelic order which images the archetypal dominion in God as the source of true dominion. “We must consider in the Dominations,” writes St. Bernard, “how great is the majesty of the Lord, at whose bidding empire is established, and of whose empire universality and eternity are the bounds.” This, then, is the sphere of ideal government, the heaven of the planet that effectuates justice upon earth (Par. xviii. 115-117). The souls of faithful and just rulers appear as golden lights, singing and flying like celestial birds. They first form the text, Diligite iustitiam que iudicatis terram, “Love justice, you that are the judges of the earth” (Wisdom, i. 1, Vulgate), tracing successively the letters until they rest in the final golden M, the initial letter of Monarchy or Empire, under which alone can justice be paramount on earth, and then, with further transformations, become the celestial Eagle (Par. xviii. 100-114). This is the “sign which made the Romans reverend in the world” (xix. 101); no emblem of material conquest, but the image of the sempiternal justice of the Primal Will, the type of dominion on earth ordained by God. It is the allegorical representation of the doctrines of the Monarchia. And, since justice is obscured and good government rendered abortive by the simony of the pastors of the Church, which leads them to oppose the Empire, Dante has a bitter word in season for the reigning pontiff, John XXII (Par. xviii. 130-136).

In the perfect concord of its component spirits the Eagle, speaking with one voice, discourses upon the immutability and absolute justice of the Divine Will, which is inscrutable and incomprehensible to mortals (Par. xix.). Having rebuked the wickedness of all the kings and princes then reigning, from the Emperor-elect (Albert of Austria in 1300) to the King of Cyprus, it sets forth in contrast to them the example of just and righteous monarchs and rulers of olden time, the six noblest of whom now form its eye—David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, the Norman William II. of Sicily, and Rhipeus the Trojan (Par. xx.). Three exquisite lines (73-75)—introduced as a mere image—render the flight and song of the skylark with a beauty and fidelity to nature which even Shelley was not to surpass. The salvation of Trajan, through the prayers of St. Gregory, and Rhipeus, by internal inspiration concerning the Redeemer to come, unveils yet more wondrous mysteries in the treasury of Divine Justice, which suffers itself to be overcome by hope and love. Rhipeus, the justest among the Trojans and the strictest observer of right (Virgil, Aen. ii. 426, 427; cf. Acts x. 35), by his presence solves Dante’s doubt concerning the fate of the just heathen who die without baptism, and indicates that the race which gave the ancestors to the Roman people was not without Divine light.

Heaven of Saturn.—The last of the seven heavens of the planets is the sphere of Saturn, over which the Thrones preside. According to Dionysius, the Thrones are associated with steadfastness, supermundane tendency towards and reception of the Divine. They represent, according to St. Bernard, supreme tranquillity, most calm serenity, peace which surpasses all understanding; and upon them God sits as judge (cf. Par. ix. 61, 62). In Saturn appear the contemplative saints, and the monks who kept firm and steadfast in the cloister. They pass up and down the celestial Ladder of Contemplation (Par. xxi. and xxii.), the stairway by which the soul mystically ascends to the consideration of the impenetrable mysteries of God which transcend all reason. In this high stage of progress towards the suprasensible Beatrice does not smile, for Dante’s human intellect could not yet sustain it, and the sweet symphonies of Paradise are silent. St. Peter Damian discourses upon the impenetrable mysteries of Divine predestination, and rebukes the vicious and luxurious lives of the great prelate and cardinals. St. Benedict describes the foundation of his own great order, and laments the shameless corruption of contemporary Benedictines. Thus in this, and, above all, in the cry like thunder which bursts from the contemplatives at the conclusion of Peter Damian’s words, threatening the Divine vengeance which is to fall upon the corrupt pastors of the Church, the saints of the seventh sphere unite themselves with the celestial Thrones, whose office is purification, and who are the mirrors of the terrible judgments of God.

The Gemini.—At Beatrice’s bidding, Dante follows the contemplatives up the celestial ladder, entering the Firmament at the sign of the Gemini or Twins, beneath which he was born (Par. xxii. 112-123). To his natal stars, and thus to the Cherubim with whose virtue they are animated, he appeals for power to complete the work for which they have inspired him. In a momentary vision, with the capacity of his inward soul enlarged, he looks down upon the whole Universe, and estimates aright the relative value of all things in heaven and earth, now that he is prepared to witness the true glories of Paradise.

The Stellar Heaven.—The Firmament or stellar heaven, the eighth sphere, is ruled by the Cherubim, who represent the Divine Wisdom; it is the celestial counterpart of the Garden of Eden. Here the fruit of man’s redemption is mystically shown in a vision of the triumph of Christ, the new Adam, surrounded by myriads of shining lights which draw their light from Him and represent the souls of the blessed whom He has sanctified (Par. xxiii.). After Christ has ascended from this celestial garden, where Mary is the rose and the Apostles the lilies, the Archangel Gabriel descends with ineffable melody and attends upon the new Eve, “the living garden of delight, wherein the condemnation was annulled and the tree of life planted,”[40] in her Assumption.

The four spheres of the higher planets had set forth a celestial realisation of the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, with perfect man according to the capacity of human nature; now, in this sphere of the Cherubim whose name indicates plenitude of the knowledge of God, Dante is examined upon the three theological virtues, which have God for their object as He transcends the knowledge of our reason, and which put man on the way to supernatural happiness. “If we would enter Paradise and the fruition of Truth,” writes St. Bonaventura, “the image of our mind must be clothed with the three theological virtues, whereby the mind is purified, illumined, and rendered perfect, and thus the image is reformed and made fit for the Jerusalem which is above.” Dante’s answers to St. Peter upon Faith (Par. xxiv.), to St. James upon Hope (Par. xxv.), to St. John upon Charity (Par. xxvi.), contain the essence of the devout wisdom of the schoolmen upon those three divine gifts, whereby man participates in the Deity, and “we ascend to philosophise in that celestial Athens, where Stoics and Peripatetics and Epicureans, by the art of the eternal Truth, harmoniously concur in one will” (Conv. iii. 14). For the object of Faith and Love alike Dante, even in Paradise, can appeal to the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Par. xxiv. 130-132, xxvi. 37-39); and all the celestial music cannot quite drown the poet’s sigh for that fair Florentine sheepfold, from which he is still barred out, though Hell and Heaven have opened for him their eternal gates (Par. xxv. 1-12). Within a fourth light the soul of Adam appears, to instruct Dante upon the proper cause of his fall and upon his life in the Earthly Paradise, now that the poet has seen the triumph and ascent of the new Adam. Adam, in whom was directly infused all the light lawful to human nature to have (Par. xiii. 43), is the last soul that appears to Dante until the consummation of the vision in the Empyrean. On the close of his discourse, a hymn of glory to the Blessed Trinity resounds through Paradise, a laugh of the Universe in joy of the mystery of Redemption (Par. xxvii. 1-9). Then, while all Heaven blushes and there is a celestial eclipse as at the Crucifixion, St. Peter utters a terrible denunciation of the scandals and corruption in the Papacy and the Church, wherein Dante, as in the Epistle to the Italian Cardinals, takes his stand as the Jeremiah of Roman Catholicity.

The Ninth Heaven.—When the saints have returned to their places in the Empyrean, Dante, after a last look to earth, passes up with his lady into the ninth sphere, the Crystalline heaven. Beatrice discourses upon the order of the heavens and the want of government upon earth, prophesying that, before very long, deliverance and reformation will come, even as St. Peter had announced in the sphere below. Here, where nature begins, Dante has a preparatory manifestation of the nine angelic orders, the ministers of Divine Providence, who ordain and dispose all things by moving the spheres. They appear as nine circles of flame, revolving round an atomic Point of surpassing brilliancy, which symbolises the supreme unity of God, the poet again having recourse to the Metaphysics of Aristotle: “From that Point depends heaven and all nature” (Par. xxviii. 41, 42). 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 fire to light; their special office is perfecting, as that of the Cherubim is illumination. All the orders contemplate God, and manifest Him to creatures to draw them to Him. Receiving from God the Divine light and love that makes them like to Him, the higher orders reflect this to the lower, like mirrors reflecting the Divine rays; and these lower orders reflect it to men, so rendering all things, as far as possible to each nature, like to God and in union with Him. After distinguishing between the different orders according to Dionysius, Beatrice speaks of their creation as especially illustrating the Divine Love, which the Seraphim represent (Par. xxix.), and their place in the order of the Universe, the fall of the rebellious, the reward of the faithful, and their immeasurable number. Each Angel belongs to a different species, and each differs from every other in its reception of Divine light and love.

The Empyrean.—Dante and Beatrice now issue forth of the last material sphere into the Empyrean, the true Paradise of vision, comprehension, and fruition, where man’s will is set at rest in union with universal Good, and his intellect in the possession of universal Truth. In preparation for this Divine union, Dante is momentarily blinded by the Divine light which overpowers him with its radiance—a blindness followed by a new celestial sight and new faculties for comprehending the essence of spiritual things. The first empyreal vision is still a foreshadowing preface: a river of light, the stream which makes the city of God joyful, the wondrous flowers of celestial spring, the living sparks of angelic fire. This river of Divine grace is the fountain of wisdom from which, according to Bernard, the Cherubim drink, to pour out the streams of knowledge upon all God’s citizens; and of this fountain Dante, too, drinks with his eyes, that he may more fully see the vision of God which he has to relate, to diffuse His knowledge upon earth as the Cherubim do from Heaven. By the light of glory his mind is rendered capable of seeing those spiritual things which the blessed behold with immediate intuition, and of ultimate union with the Divine Essence (Par. xxx. 100-102). The river seems to change to a circular ocean of light; the saints and Angels appear in their true forms, all united in the sempiternal Rose of Paradise. Even at this height of ecstatic alienation from terrestrial things, Dante can turn in thought to Pope and Emperor who should be leading men to beatitude; a throne is prepared for Henry in this convent of white stoles, while the hell of the simoniacs is gaping for Boniface and Clement.

Eternity, as defined by Boëthius, is “the complete and perfect simultaneous possession of unlimited life”; and Dante is one who has come from time to the eternal: a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto (Par. xxxi. 38).[41] Beatrice has returned to her throne, her allegorical mission ended; and for this supreme revelation of the Divine beauty in the mystical Rose, where there is no medium to impede the poet’s sight of the Divine light (for his is now that of a separated spirit), but blessed souls and flying Angels are absorbed in love and vision, St. Bernard completes her work, even as that of Virgil had been completed by Matelda in the Earthly Paradise. St. Bernard may represent the glorified contemplative life in our heavenly country, as Matelda may symbolise the glorified active life in the state of restored Eden; or, perhaps better, if Matelda is taken as the love rightly ordered to which the Purgatorio leads, Bernard represents the loving contemplation or contemplative love, attained by the mystic in brief moments here and now, in which the eternal and unchanging life of the soul in the hereafter consists. In an exquisite lyrical inter-breathing Dante addresses Beatrice for the last time, thanking her for having led him from servitude to liberty, praying to her for final perseverance (Par. xxxi. 79-90). Under the guidance of Bernard, he prepares himself for the vision of the Divine Essence, by disciplining his spiritual sight in contemplation of the glory of the saints and of the ineffable beauty of Mary, surrounded by her Angels, and clothed, as Bernard himself puts it elsewhere, in the Sun by whose fire the prophet’s lips were cleansed and the Cherubim kindled with love.

Throughout the Rose two descending lines divide the redeemed of the old law from the redeemed under the new. The one line passes down from Mary’s throne, composed of holy women, ancestresses of Christ or types of His Church: Eve, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth (Par. xxxii.). With Rachel, in the third row, Beatrice is seated. The opposite line passes down from the seat of the Baptist, Christ’s precursor; and begins with St. Francis, His closest and most perfect imitator, St. Benedict (in the third row opposite to Rachel and Beatrice), St. Augustine. The lower sections of each half of the Rose are occupied by the little children who died before attaining use of reason; and who yet have different degrees of bliss, according to the inscrutable mysteries of predestination and Divine Justice, which willed to give grace differently to each. Another vision of Mary, the supreme of created things, “the face that is most like to Christ, whose beauty alone can dispose thee to see Christ” (Par. xxxii. 85-87), is the prelude to the vision of the Deity. Before her hovers her chosen knight, Gabriel, the “strength of God,” the pattern of celestial chivalry, leggiadria. Round her are Adam and St. Peter, Moses and St. John the Divine; opposite the two latter are St. Anne and St. Lucy. Thus the three Ladies who took pity upon Dante in the dark wood, when the mystical journey opened, have been seen in their glory at its close.

Mary and the Divine Essence.—And the poet turns finally to the Primal Love, by Mary’s grace and Bernard’s intercession, in the lyrical prayer that opens the wonderful closing canto of the Commedia:

Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio,

“Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son.” Setting forth her predestination from eternity to bring the Redeemer into the world, her office of love and hope to Heaven and earth, her infinite excellence and dignity, her power and never-failing love, St. 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 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. In the Divine light, he beholds all nature, all Being scattered in leaves throughout the Universe here united by love into one volume; the vision of the First Cause which satisfies the understanding becomes that of the Supreme Goodness which fulfils the will; and this First Cause, this Supreme Goodness, itself remaining unchanged, becomes revealed to the poet’s ever strengthening intuition as the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, in which the Person of the Word took Human Nature.

A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;

“Here power failed the lofty phantasy”—the inspired imagination of the prophet; but it left the desire and will assimilated in perfect harmony with the will of God—the Divine will revealed as universal, all-pervading, and all-moving love, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”:

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.