Dante’s Purgatory possesses, indeed, some of the material attractions a logical Heaven needs: it has all the makings of an Earthly Paradise not inferior to Addison’s in his “Vision of Mirza.” There are even great set pieces of painting, and much that might well tempt the soul to linger on its upward way.
The soul of the present critic is also tempted to seek superiority by preferring the Paradise to the Inferno. Alas! a law of psychology has ordained that pleasures shall be less exciting than tortures, and hence the Purgatory is far duller than the Inferno, while the Paradise is hopelessly swamped in sweetness and light. The splendid vision of the snow-white Rose—wonderful as poetry—retains little spiritual value under analysis, though the majestic passion of the close of the great poem almost carries up the spirit with closed eyes to this dazzling infinitude of Light and Love.
Read as a poem of earth, the “Divine” Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete Mappamondo of the mediæval, a complete vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine background is of the pettiest—including even Dante’s apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John—it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante’s Mappamondo held neither America nor China, neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world—that autocosm—in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as they have in the poetry of Milton—so that the very “Paradiso” could open with an invocation to Apollo! And this world-history is unified by being strung together on a moral plan, precisely as in the Hebrew Bible, Judas and Brutus finding themselves equally in Lucifer’s avenging fangs. The flames of righteous indignation redeem the crude brimstone, and if we bleed for the sinners, the sins under chastisement are mainly those we would wish purged from the universe in the white flame of righteousness. Indeed, this great sensuous, sinful Tuscan, who went unscathed through the dolorous city, is a soul on fire. He is taken up to Heaven, like Elijah, but in the fiery chariot of his own ardour. His passion is the stars, visible symbol of beauty and infinity. Each of his three great sections ends with the very words. “The stars” shine again in that noble letter refusing the Republic’s terms of pardon. “What!” cries the exile, “shall I not everywhere enjoy the sight of the sun and the stars?” “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is, indeed, the great doctrine of the poem—its literal last word. How this love, “this goodness celestial, whose signature is writ large on the universe,” is to be reconciled with the spirit that moves the flame and the other dooms, he does not explain. Though ever and anon his own tears of pity flow, the doctrine of eternal hopeless torture does not appal him; not even though, at the Day of Judgment, worse is in store, for the sufferers shall by then have subtilised their practised nerves for the final damnation. It does not disconcert him—any more than it disconcerts his great admirer, Michelangelo—that unbaptised infants and heathens whose only crime was chronological should sigh in Limbo, and that Adam and Noah, Abraham and Moses themselves, should need for their salvation the special descent of Christ. For all his sublimity, his passionate metaphysic insight into the Godhead, he falls below the homely Rabbis of the Talmud, who taught eight or ten centuries earlier, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come.” Yet there are broken lights of this truth here and there.
“But lo! of those
Who call, ‘Christ, Christ,’ there shall be many found
In judgment, further off from Him by far
Than such to whom His name was never known.”
And the fine temper of the man is shown in his struggle against the pitiful obsessions of a provincial theology; in his gratitude towards the great Teachers of Antiquity, his reverence for whom anticipated the Renaissance, albeit the Greeks among them were probably known to him only in Latin translations. A Dante of the Renaissance—if such were possible—might have placed Aristotle and Plato in Paradise by interposition of a Christ loving his Gospel tongue. Bernardo Pulci did, indeed, place Cicero and sundry Roman heroes in Heaven. But even during the Renaissance Savonarola proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle were in Hell, and the best that Dante in his rigider century could do for them was to put them in a painless Limbo, which they perambulate “with slow majestic port,” acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which it seems not beyond all hoping may ultimately exalt them to bliss. And with Aristotle, the “maestro di color che sanno,” walk not only Homer and Euclid, but his Mohammedan commentator, Averroes, and even mythical figures like Orpheus and Hector. A Christendom that had never altogether lost touch with the classical world—were it only by way of Virgil, mediæval saint and sorcerer—a Christendom whose philosophers found ingenious inspiration in Aristotle, could not easily relegate to the flames either the classical writers or their works. Classic literature and mythology made a second Bible, as the lore of chivalry and general history a third; indeed, these were the three great circles in which swam the world of the mediæval Mappamondo, the Biblical circle outermost and nearest to Heaven. Yet it was a bold stroke of tolerance on Dante’s part to make Virgil his guide, chronology giving him no chance, as it gave with Statius, of a legendary conversion to Christianity. And this penchant for the great Pagans accentuates his intolerance to the great Christian heretics. But if Virgil himself was excluded from Heaven “for no sin save lack of faith”—Virgil who could not possibly have believed—if even the merits of those who lived before the Gospel, could not profit them because they had missed baptism, it is not surprising to find the Christian heretics collected in the ninth canto in burning sepulchres of carefully graduated temperatures. One wishes that they, rather than Farinata degli Uberti, had held their heads high, with a fine disdain foreshadowing Milton’s Satan. How Socrates would have smiled over the perverted morality of the Christian poet, as we smile over the constricted foot of a Chinese lady! Despite the attempt of a recent writer to moralise his scheme of salvation, the best that can be said for Dante is that he probably followed Aquinas in holding that there is no positive pain in that absence of the divine vision which St. Chrysostom made the severest part of the punishment of the damned. But in tolerance as well as humour he falls far below the Ha-Tofet weha-Eden (“Hell and Paradise”) of his Jewish friend and imitator, Immanuel. It is in vain that Émile Gebhart (in “L’Italie Mystique”) points to his revolutionary liberalism in placing Ripheus the Pagan and Trajan, the Roman Emperor, in Paradise. These apparent exceptions only bring out his lack of tolerance and humour more vividly. For, though the Æneid describes the fallen hero, Ripheus, as “justissimus unus” among the Trojans and “the most observant of right,” yet it is not by the simple force of his own goodness but by some complex operation of grace under which he believes in the Christ that has not yet been born, and even turns missionary, that he penetrates among the “luci sante.” As for the Emperor Trajan, complexity is still worse confounded, for he—despite the title he had won of Optimus—must serve his time in hell, and is only popped into Paradise after being resuscitated, converted and baptized by St. Gregory four hundred years after his first decease. Thus both Ripheus and Trajan died Christians, Dante assures us gravely, not Gentiles as the world imagines; one believing in the Crucifixion that was to be, and the other in the Crucifixion that had been.
“Cristiani, in ferma fede
Quel de’ passuri, e quel de’ passi piedi.”