The Italian part of Dante comes between the mediaeval and the personal, as species comes between the genus and the individual. The tremendous feeling which he discloses for the Roman past seems, in him, specifically Italian: child of Italy, he holds himself a Latin and a direct heir of the Republic. Yet often his attitude toward the antique will be that of mediaeval men in general, as in his disposition to accept ancient myth for fact; while his own genius appears in his beautifully apt appropriation of the Virgilian incident or image; wherein he excels his “Mantuan” master, whose borrowings from Homer were not always felicitous. Frequently the specifically Italian in Dante, his yearning hate of Florence, for example, may scarcely be distinguished from his personal temper; but its civic bitterness is different from the feudal animosities or promiscuous rages which were more generically mediaeval. As a lighter example, there are three lines in the fourth canto of the Purgatorio which do not reflect the Middle Ages, nor yet pertain to Dante’s character, but are, we feel, Italian. They are these: “Thither we drew; and there were persons who were staying in the shadow behind the rock, as one through indolence sets himself to stay.”
Again, Dante’s arguments in the De monarchia[672] seem to be those of an Italian Ghibelline. Yet beyond his intense realization of Italy’s direct succession to the Roman past, his reasoning is scholastic and mediaeval, or springs occasionally from his own reflections. The Italian contribution to the book tends to coalesce either with the general or the personal elements. Dante argues that the rewards or fruits of virtue belonged to the Roman people because of the pre-eminent virtue, high lineage, and royal marriage-connections, of their ancestor Aeneas.[673] Here, of course, the statements of Virgil are accepted literally, and one notes that while the argument is mediaeval in its absurdity, it will be made Italian in its application. Likewise his further arguments making for the same conclusion, however Italianized in their pointing, are mediaeval, or patristic, in their provenance: for example, that the Roman Empire was divinely helped by miracles; that the divine arbitrament decided the world-struggle or duellum in its favour; and that Christ was born and suffered legally to redeem mankind under the Empire’s authority and jurisdiction.[674] Moreover, in refuting the very mediaeval papal arguments from “the keys,” from “the two swords,” and from the analogy of the sun and moon, Dante himself reasons scholastically.[675]
The De vulgari eloquentia illustrates the difference between Dante accepting and reproducing mediaeval views, and Dante thinking for himself. In opening he speaks of mixing the stronger potions of others with the water of his own talent, to make a beverage of sweetest hydromel—we have heard such phrases before! Then the first chapters give the current ideas touching the nature and origin of speech, and describe the confusion of language at the building of Babel: each group of workmen engaged in the same sort of work found themselves speaking a new tongue understood only by themselves; while the sacred Hebrew speech endured with that seed of Shem who had taken no part in the impious construction. After this foolishness, the eighth chapter of Book I. becomes startlingly intelligent as Dante discusses the contemporary Romance tongues of Europe and takes up the idioma which uses the particle si. Out of its many dialects he detaches his thought of a volgare, a mother tongue, which shall be the illustrious, noble, and courtly speech in Latium, and shall seem to be of every Latian city and yet of none, and afford a standard by which the speech of each city may be criticized. The mediaeval period offers no such penetrating linguistic observation; and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, as in the Convito, Dante is deeply conscious of the worth of the Romance vernacular.
Written in the volgare, the style of the latter nondescript work bears curious likeness to scientific Latin writing. The Latin scholastic thought shows plainly through this involved and scholastic volgare, while the scholastic substance is rendered in a scarcely altered medium. The Convito is indeed a curious work which one need not lament that Dante did not carry out to its mediaeval interminableness in fourteen books. The four that he wrote suffice to show its futility and apparent confusion in conception and form. Besides incidentally explaining the thought of the idyllic Vita nuova, it professed to be a commentary upon fourteen of Dante’s canzone, the meaning of which had been misunderstood. Indeed they had been suspected of disclosing a passion bearing a morganatic relationship to the love of Beatrice. Truly understood they referred to that love which is the love of knowledge, philosophy to wit; and their commentary should expound that, and might properly set forth the contents of the Seven Liberal Arts and the higher divine reaches of knowledge. The Convito seems also to mark a stage in Dante’s life: the time perhaps when he turned, or imagined himself as turning, to philosophy for consolation in youthful grief, or the time perhaps when his nature looked coldly upon its early faith and sought to stay itself with rational knowledge. The book might thus seem a De consolatione philosophiae, after the temper, if not the manner, of Boëthius’ work, which then was much in Dante’s mind. Yet it was to be a setting forth of knowledge for the ignorant, a sort of Summa contra Gentiles, as is hinted in the last completed chapter. These three purposes fall in with the fact that the work was apparently the expression of Dante’s intellectual nature, and of his spiritual condition between the experience of the Vita nuova and the time or state of the Commedia.[676]
Certainly the Convito gives evidence touching the writer’s mental processes and the interests of his mind. Except for its lofty advocacy of the volgare and its personal apologetic references, it contains little that is not blankly mediaeval. And had it kept on to its completion, so as to have become no torso, but a full Summa or Tesoro of liberal knowledge, its whimsical form as a commentary upon canzone would have made it one of the most bizarre of mediaeval compositions. One should not take this most repellent of Dante’s writings as an adequate expression of the intellectual side of his nature; though a significant phrase may be drawn from it: “Philosophy is a loving use of wisdom (uno amoroso uso di sapienza) which chiefly is in God, since in Him is utmost wisdom, utmost love, and utmost actuality.”[677] A loving use of wisdom—with Dante the pursuit of knowledge was no mere intellectual search, but a pilgrimage of the whole nature, loving heart as well as knowing mind, and the working virtues too. This pilgrimage is set forth in the Commedia, perhaps the supreme creation of the Middle Ages, and a work that by reason of the beautiful affinity of its speech with Latin,[678] exquisitely expressed the matters which in Latin had been coming to formulation through the mediaeval centuries.
The Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is a Summa, a Summa salvationis, a sum of saving knowledge. It is such just as surely as the final work of Aquinas is a Summa theologiae. But Aquinas was the supreme mediaeval theologian-philosopher, while Dante was the supreme theologian-poet; and with both Aquinas and Dante, theology includes the knowledge of all things, but chiefly of man in relation to God. Such was the matter of the divina scientia of Thomas, and such was the subject of the Commedia, which was soon recognized as the Divina Commedia in the very sense in which Theology was the divine science. The Summa of Thomas was scientia not only in substance, but in form; the Commedia was scientia, or sapientia, in substance, while in form it was a poem, the epic of man the pilgrim of salvation. In every sense, Aristotelian and otherwise, it was a work of art; and herein if we cannot compare it with a Summa, we may certainly liken it to a Cathedral, which also was a work of art and a Summa salvationis wrought in stone. For a Cathedral—it is the great French type we have in mind—was a Summa of saving knowledge, as well as a place for saving acts. And presenting the substance of knowledge in the forms of art, very true art, the matter of which had long been pondered on and loved or hated, the Cathedral in its feeling and beauty, as well as in the order of its manifested thought, was a Commedia; for it too was a poem with a happy ending, at least for those who should be saved.
The Cathedral had grown from dumb barrel-vaulted Romanesque to Gothic, speaking in all the terms of sculpture and painted glass. It grew out of its antecedents. The Commedia rested upon the entire evolution of the Middle Ages. Therein had lain its spiritual preparation. To be sure it had its casual forerunners (precursori): narratives, real or feigned, of men faring to the regions of the dead.[679] But these signified little; for everywhere thoughts of the other life pressed upon men’s minds: fear of it blanched their hearts; its heavenly or hellish messengers had been seen, and not a few men dreamed that they had walked within those gates and witnessed clanging horrors or purgatorial pain. Heaven they had more rarely visited.
Dante gave little attention to any so-called “forerunners,” save only two, Paul and Virgil. The former was a warrant for the poet’s reticence as to the manner of his ascent to Heaven;[680] the latter supplied much of his scheme of Hell. Yet there were one or two others possessed of some affinity of soul with the great Florentine, who perhaps knew nothing of them. One of these was Hildegard of Bingen, with her vision of the spirits in the cloud, and her pungent sights of the bitterness of the pains of hell.[681] Another sort of affinity is disclosed in the allegorical Anticlaudianus of Alanus de Insulis, in which Reason can take Prudentia just so far upon her heavenly journey, and then gives place to Theology, even as Virgil, symbol of rational wisdom, gives place to Beatrice at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.[682] Dante might have drawn still more enlightenment from the De sacramentis of Hugo of St. Victor, in which the rational basis of the universal scheme of things is shown to lie in the principle of allegorical intendment. Yet one finds few traces of Hugo in Dante except through Hugo’s pupil, Richard, whose works he had read. That such apt forerunners should scarcely have affected him shows how he was taught and inspired, not by individuals, but by the entire Middle Ages.
One observes mediaeval characteristics in the Commedia raised to a higher power. The mediaeval period was marked by contrasts of quality and of conduct such as cannot be found in the antique or the modern age. And what other poem can vie with the Commedia in contrasts of the beautiful and the loathsome, the heavenly and the hellish, exquisite refinement of expression and lapses into the reverse,[683] love and hate, pity and cruelty, reverence and disdain? These contrasts not only are presented by the story; they evince themselves in the character of the author. Many scenes of the Inferno are loathsome:[684] Dante’s own words and conduct there may be cruel and hateful[685] or show tender pity; and every reader knows the poetic beauty which glorifies the Paradiso, renders lovely the Purgatorio, and ever and anon breaks through the gloom of Hell.
Another mediaeval quality, sublimated in Dante’s poem, is that of elaborate plan, intended symmetry of composition, the balance of one incident or subject against another.[686] And finally one observes the mediaeval inclusiveness which belongs to the scope and purpose of the Commedia as a Summa of salvation. Dante brings in everything that can illuminate and fill out his theme. Even as the Summa of St. Thomas, so the Commedia must present a whole doctrinal scheme of salvation, and leave no loopholes, loose ends, broken links of argument or explanation.