[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]