An Irish precursor of Dante

by Charles Stuart Boswell

The description of the whirlpool in the fiery river (ch. 18) is thoroughly Dantesque in style, though none of Dante’s infernal rivers or whirlpools exactly corresponds to it in details; equally Dantesque is the realistic touch of the angel lifting out the souls on the end of his rod, ‘hard as it were of stone.’

Hitherto all the souls, good and bad alike, have been conducted by their guardian spirits. At the door of the sixth Heaven Michael assumes his accustomed function of psychopompos for the remainder of the way. This Heaven is free from pain of any kind; apparently the author’s intention is to convey the impression of a solemn pause, before the soul is ushered into the awful presence of the Creator. The manner of his reception there recalls the corresponding scene in the Avestan account. This reception, and the Divine Judgment, are described in the briefest possible terms, but not the less impressively for that.[173] The fate of the reprobate is depicted in a manner at once terse and complete, presenting a remarkable contrast to the rambling enumeration of horrors in which most of the vision writers indulge. One circumstance, indeed, is marked by the grotesque horror characteristic of mediæval and Oriental imagery; namely, the twelve fiery dragons which swallow the guilty soul in succession, until the lowest finally lands him in the Devil’s maw, the destination reserved by Dante for the worst of sinners.[174]

Upon the whole, however, our author seems to dwell, by preference, upon the spiritual aspects of his subject. In his eyes, the essence of the punishment consists in the forfeiture of the Beatific Vision by those chi hanno perduto il ben del intelletto, a loss enhanced by the previous glimpse of it which has been vouchsafed to them. This, indeed, is a common feature of ecclesiastical pictures of the Inferno, where the idea, sufficiently obvious in itself, is sanctified by the parable of Dives and Lazarus, though there it is introduced with a special and different purpose. Commonly, however, it is used merely to intensify the sufferings of the lost by a Tantalus vision of the contrast between their own pains and the pleasures of the blest. Our author would seem to introduce it as essential for their full comprehension of the good, otherwise inconceivable, which they have forfeited by their own wilful default. Evidently he understood that in this life and the next—Dante notwithstanding—there is a maggior dolore than the remembrance, in time of sorrow, of past happiness, and that is the comprehension of the things that once might easily have been, but never have been, and never can be.

Finally, the lot of the sinner—‘the perfection of all evil, in the Devil’s own presence, throughout all ages,’—forms the exact correlative of the Beatific Vision enjoyed by the elect.

This climax leaves nothing to be desired for completeness, and it seems impossible to believe that the next ten chapters were the work of the same hand. Nevertheless, the author of this second part, whether he be the original author or a compiler, has treated his materials, trite as these are, with more than common skill.

The approach to the land of eternal pain, to which the Seer is now conveyed, leads across a desolate, fire-scathed region, on the farther side of which lies a glen, filled with ‘flame, that extends beyond the margin on either hand.’ Even this slight descriptive touch is an instance of the imaginative, or visualising, faculty which is often apparent throughout the work. This glen is spanned by the bridge which serves to separate the bad from the good, in a manner quite consistent with precedent, but entirely inconsistent with the earlier part of the present work.

The description of that incident, as here given, differs from other variants in several points of detail, and especially in the greater literary skill with which it is related; but as much has been said upon this subject as our present purpose demands. We have seen that the idea of such a bridge existed previously in Irish tradition, but the guise in which it appears in the present place leads us to suppose that the author’s immediate source of inspiration was one of the ecclesiastical legends, though we find the usual difficulty of assigning any given item to some one specific source. It is possible that the author found his immediate prototype in the writings of St. Gregory, with which he was likely to be acquainted; equally possible that the idea was derived from the traditions of the Eastern Church, with which it is probable, both on à priori grounds and from several internal indications, that he had come in contact; or, again, from some floating popular tradition, originally emanating from either of the above sources. However this may be, the present is probably the best-told version of the incident that we possess in any language; nevertheless, it fits in as badly with what follows as with what goes before. The good—both the more and the less good—pass over in safety, and the bad, of course, fall off, but there is nothing to show how either sort reach their ultimate habitations. The justified, in fact, are left to their own devices, and we hear no more of them; the reprobate, indeed, as they fall from the bridge, are received in the jaws of eight fiery dragons, which await them in the fiery gulf, but there is nothing to show by what means they are subjected to the specific torments mentioned further on, nor yet how the redeemable sinners are brought to their state of temporary punishment.

The classification of the three companies who attempt to cross the bridge is not without interest. The virtues of the righteous who pass with ease are the specially ecclesiastical virtues of martyrdom and asceticism. Immediate access to Heaven had been regarded as the peculiar reward of martyrdom so early, at least, as Tertullian, whose authority was Revelation vii. 14, 15; although in the fourfold classification in the Book of Enoch the like precedence is awarded to the martyrs.[175] The association of the mortification of the flesh with the pains of martyrdom is easily explicable.

Sinners that have been induced to see the errors of their ways and to amend, find the bridge narrow and difficult at first, but easy afterwards, while those fall off who have persevered in evil. We thus have only three of the usual four categories which frequently occur in Irish eschatology, as in the Book of Enoch: the boni valde, the boni sed non valde, and the mali valde. However, the mali sed non valde are represented, approximately, by those spirits of mingled qualities, and those sinners that are redeemed by their good works, who are dealt with specially in the sequel.

The torments meted out to evildoers are of the usual description, though represented with that increasing fulness and terror which had been perceptible for some time previously in the Irish visions, or Imrama, the result, apparently, of increased familiarity with the Continental writers of this kind, who, so early as the Apocalypses of St. Peter and St. Paul, had devoted much ingenuity to this horrible branch of their subject. We may also perceive an attempt at a more accurate classification of crimes and punishments; in this respect, too, those Apocalypses display more method than the visions of subsequent writers. The classification adopted by our author, which would seem to be his own, contains indications both of his nationality, and of his acquaintance with foreign literature. Four categories of evildoers are enumerated, in which, although they exhibit nothing of Dante’s scientific precision, a certain system is apparent, in spite of the several classes overlapping to a certain extent. In chapter 25 fratricides and sacrilegious persons are dealt with, including fraudulent Erenachs—the guardians of the Church’s temporalities—who had abused the considerable powers which the tribal constitution of the Irish Church had given them. The class described in chapter 27 comprises, for the most part, those guilty of various kinds of dishonesty or violence, though some of them, such as false judges, sorcerers, and teachers of heresy, would seem to belong rather to the two following classes, the one of which comprises renegade ecclesiastics and heresiarchs (chapter 28), while the other, and last deals with an apparently heterogeneous collection of crimes, all of which, however, will be found to involve, somehow, a breach of faith on the part of the offender.