Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle
Lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale.”
To prove how salt is others’ bread, how hard the passage up and down others’ stairs! How impotent all the laboured strivings to shadow forth the vision celestial compared with this touch of the terrestrial concrete! In truth Dante did not go “out of his senses,” even in his most transcendental moments of inspiration. His five senses were all he had wherewith to obtain the raw material of his imaginings, and out of his sensations of touch and sight, of smell and taste and hearing, he wove both his Hell and his Heaven. The stored repugnances of mankind, the shudders and horrors at beasts and serpents, at bites and wounds and loathsome diseases, the dread of fire—he himself was condemned to be burnt alive—the chill of ice, the nausea of stinks and dizzying motions—these are the factors of his Hell, as the odour of flowers and incense, the shimmer of jewels, the sound of music, and the pains and pleasures of anticipation are the factors of his Purgatory. As for his Paradise, it is merely the sublimation of the philosophic Elysium Aristotle and Cicero had conceived before Christianity; his very ecstasy of Light is anticipated by Seneca.
Restlessness is a recurring image of doom with Dante—and perhaps his own wander-years of exile lent vividness to the onward drifting of the neutral spirits, the unrepose of the learned sinners, the eternal whirl of Paolo and Francesca. Yet there are moments in which Dante rises beyond his gross scale of punishments to a more spiritual plane.
“Thou art more punished in that this thy pride
Lives yet unquenched; no torrent, save thy rage,
Were to thy fiery pain proportioned full.”
In addressing this observation to Capaneus, Virgil, says Dante, spoke in a higher-raised accent than ever before. In a less literal sense, it is indeed a higher accent: it is even the note of modern thinking, from Spinoza onwards. The wages of sin is—sin! It is probably even the note of an earlier and still more misunderstood Master. But this note is only heard once and faintly. The wages of sin is physical torture. But surely such a Hell is unjustly balanced by such a Heaven—all Platonic intellection, Plotinian ecstasy, and ethereal Light. If the wages of sin is physical torture, then the wages of virtue should be physical rapture. Dante’s Hell requires Mohammed’s Heaven, just as Christ’s Heaven requires an immaterial Hell. For if the Kingdom of God is within you, the Kingdom of the Devil cannot be without. This thought broke dimly on Milton when, despite his material Hell, he wrote of Satan:
“But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid-heaven. . . .”