The Paradiso contains the chief store of saving knowledge. It sets forth the ultimate problems of human life and divine salvation, with due emphasis laid upon the limitations of human understanding. Dante, conscious of the strenuousness of his high argument, warns off all but the chosen few.
A first point learned in the heavenly voyage is that no soul in Paradise desires aught save what it has; since such desire would contravene the will of God. Paradise is everywhere in Heaven, though the divine grace rains not upon all in one mode.[732] Beatified souls do not dwell in any particular star, though Plato seems to say so. Scripture condescends to figure the intelligible under the guise of sensible forms, as Plato may have done.[733] Broken vows and their reparation are now considered. Then the history of the Roman Eagle brings out the fact that Christ was crucified under Tiberius and His death avenged by Titus, which leads on to the explanation of the Fall and the Redemption, occupying the seventh canto. The next offers comment upon the divine goodness and the diversity of human lots; and shows how the bitter may rise from the sweet. With deep consistency the poet exclaims against the insensate toilsome reasonings through which mortals beat their wings downward, away from God.[734]
In canto thirteen the reader is enlightened regarding the wisdom of Adam, of Solomon, and of Christ; and then as to the existence of the beatified soul before and after it is clothed with the glorified body of the Resurrection.[735] Incidentally the justice of eternal punishment is adverted to.[736] The depth of the divine righteousness is next presented,[737] and its application to the heathen, with illustrations of God’s saving ways, in the instances of certain princes who loved righteousness, including Trajan and the Trojan Rhipeus.[738] The incomprehensibility of Predestination next receives attention.
Now intervenes the marvellous and illuminative beauty of canto twenty-three, preceding Dante’s declaration of his creed, upon interrogatories from the apostles, Peter, James, and John. In this way he states the dogmatic fundamentals of the Christian Faith, and the substantiating rôles of philosophic argument and authority.[739] After this, the vision of the hierarchies of angels leads on to discourse upon their creation and nature, the immediate fall of those who fell, the exaltation of the steadfast with added grace, and the mode and measure of their knowledge. Thomas is followed in this scholastic argument.
With the vision of the Rose, rational theology gives place to mystic contemplation;[740] and further visions of the divine ordering precede the prayer to the Virgin, with which the last canto opens—that prayer so beautiful and so expressive of mediaeval thought and feeling as to the most kind and blessed Lady of Heaven. This prayer or hymn is made of phrases which the mediaeval mind and heart had been recasting and perfecting for centuries. It is almost a great cento, like the Dies Irae. After the Lady’s answering benediction, there comes to Dante, in grace, the final mystic vision of the Trinity, enfolding all existence—substance, accidents and their modes, bound with love in one volume. Supreme dogmatic truth is set forth, and the furthest strainings of reason are stilled in supersensual and super-rational vision, which satisfies all intellectual desire. This vision, vouchsafed through the Virgin’s grace, assures the pilgrim soul: the goal is reached alike of knowledge and salvation.
One may say that the Commedia begins and ends with the Virgin. It was she who sent Beatrice into the gates of Hell to move Virgil—meaning human reason—to go to Dante’s aid. The prayer which obtains her benediction, and the vision following, close the Paradiso. So the teaching of the poem ends in mediaeval strains. For the Virgin was the mediaeval goddess, beloved and universally adored, helpful in every way, and the chief aid in bringing man to Heaven. But no more with Dante than with other mediaeval men is she the end of worship and devotion. Her eyes are turned on God. So are those of Beatrice, of Rachel, and of all the saints in Paradise. As for man on earth, he is viator, journeying on through discipline, in righteousness and beneficence, but above all in faith and hope and love of God, with his eyes of knowledge and desire set on God. God is the goal, even of the vita activa, which is also training and enlightenment. Loving his brother whom he hath seen, man may learn to love God—practising himself in love. Even Christ’s parable, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these,” rightly interpreted, implies that the end of human charity is God: the human charity is preparation, obedience, means of enlightenment. The brother for whom Christ died—that is he whom thou shalt love, and that is why thou shalt love him. In themselves human relationships are disciplinary, ancillary, as all the sciences are ancillary to Theology. Mediaeval religion is turned utterly toward God; the relationship of the soul to God is its whole matter. It is not humanitarian: not human, but divina scientia, fides, et amor, make mediaeval Christianity. Thus Dante’s doctrine is mediaeval. Toward God moves the desire of the viatores in Purgatory, though they still are incidentally mindful of earth’s memories. In Paradise the eyes of all the blessed are set on Him. Because of the divine love they may for a moment turn the eyes of their knowledge and desire to aid a fellow-creature; the occasion past, they fix them again on God: thus the Virgin, thus Bernard, thus Beatrice.
As a son of the Middle Ages, Dante was possessed with the spirit of symbolism. Allegory, with him, was not merely a way of expressing that which might transcend direct statement: it embodied a principle of truth. The universally accepted allegorical interpretation of Scripture justified the view that a deeper verity lay in allegorical significance than in literal meaning. This principle applied to other writings also. “Now since the literal sense [of the first canzone] is sufficiently explained, it is time to proceed to the allegorical and true interpretation.”[741]
In the Vita Nuova and somewhat more lifelessly in the Convito, Dante explains that it is his way to invest his poetry with a secondary or allegorical sense. He proposes in the latter work to carry out the formal notion of the four kinds of meaning contained in profound writings—literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical.[742] He never holds himself, however, to the lines of any such obsession, but is content in practice with the literal and the broadly allegorical sense.[743] Even then the great Florentine occasionally can be jejune enough. The conception of the ten heavens figuring the Seven Liberal Arts along with metaphysics, ethics, and theology, as a plan of composition for the Convito,[744] was on a level with the structural symbolism of the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Capella. Yet the likening of Ethics to the primum mobile and Theology to the Empyrean has bearing on Dante’s, and the mediaeval, scheme of the sciences, among which Theology is chief.
Allegory moulds the structure and permeates the substance of the Commedia. For this Dante himself vouches in the famous dedicatory letter to Can Grande, where his thoughts may be heard creaking scholastically, as he describes the nature of his poem, and explains why he entitled it Commedia:
“Literally, the subject is the state of souls after death taken simply. If, however, the work be accepted allegorically, the subject is man, according as by merit or demerit through freedom of choice (arbitrii libertatem) he is subject to Justice, rewarding or punitive.”