Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the mediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other directions bore noble fruit.
Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.
There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared with the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification, his hope.
Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of men—a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is a force beyond this theologic belief—the spiritual love of a man and woman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundred years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry, half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a "new life."
Through Dante's early story,—the vestibule by which we are led to the "Divina Commedia,"—through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy which has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol it is the vision of the ideal—the unattainable—the passion of the soul for what lies beyond its full grasp.
In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives by the ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is his self-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after a lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. The anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.
Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen centuries of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms and in wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sin whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows against a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and in his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,—lust, cruelty, treachery. The physical hell he imagines in another world is the counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world. In his Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modern reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.
In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces—often seeming to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.
In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of military force. Out of this grew feudalism,—a kind of order, with its own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment running into fantasy.
Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first by the association of craftsmen,—the guilds, the free cities.