Piccarda then tells the moving story of her life, how as a girl she entered the order of St. Clare, only to be torn from the nunnery and given into marriage.
"A perfect life and merit high in Heaven
A lady o'er us," said she, "by whose rule
Down in your world they vest and veil themselves,
That until death they may both watch and sleep
Beside that Spouse who every vow accepts
Which charity conformeth to his pleasure.
To follow her, in girlhood from the world
I fled, and in her habit shut myself,
And pledged me to the pathway of her sect.
Then men accustomed unto evil more
Than unto good, from the sweet cloister tore me;
God knows what afterward my life became."
(III, 97.)
Certain questions interesting to a seeker of truth grow out of Piccarda's statement and these Beatrice proceeds to solve for the edification of Dante. The first question asks whether in the assignment to the lowest sphere of souls who violated their vows, there is divine Justice; the second concerns Plato's teaching that souls really come from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda. The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining the end for which God has destined it."
To the next Heaven, the sphere of Mercury, Beatrice and Dante soar more swiftly than an arrow attains its mark while the bow is still vibrating. Increasing in loveliness as she ascends, Beatrice, in the second realm, radiates such splendor that Mercury itself, apart from its own light, gains such glory from her that it seems to glitter or smile from very gladness.
"My lady there so joyful I beheld
As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered
More luminous thereat the planet grew,
And if the star itself was changed and smiled
What became I who by my nature am
Exceeding mutable in every guise?"
(V, 97.)
Greeting the travellers, more than a thousand spirits joyfully exclaim: "Lo, one who shall increase our loves!" The Saints in Mercury thus testify to their delight that one (Dante) has come to be the fresh object of their love, just as it is said that "there shall be joy before the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance." (Luke XV, 10.) These splendors in Mercury are the souls of those in whose virtue there was the alloy of ambition and vainglory—a combination, according to Dante, which makes "the rays of true love less vividly mount upwards." The poet is addressed by a spirit who bids him ask any question he will and Beatrice confirms the invitation. "Speak, speak with confidence and trust them even as gods." All eagerness for knowledge, Dante inquires of the friendly splendor who he is and why he is in this particular Heaven.
The story told by the spirit of Emperor Justinian is a brief sketch of his own life, with reference to his conversion from heresy by Pope Agapetus, to the victories of his general, Belisarius, and to his own great work of the codification of the Roman law. He then traces the history of Rome from the time of Æneas to the thirteenth century, bent upon showing that the Roman Empire, as a world-power over governments and peoples, is divine in its institution and providentially protected in its course. Two facts are adduced in crowning proof of this audacious statement, viz., Christ's choosing to be born and to be registered as a subject of Cæsar and His crucifixion under Tiberius, acting through Pontius Pilate as the divinely constituted instrument of eternal justice exercised by the Heavenly Father against His Son, at once the victim of sin and its atonement.
Dante enlarges on this point in his Monarchia. "If the Roman Empire did not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ.... If, therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge, the penalty would not have been properly punished; and none could be a regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind, for all mankind was punished in the flesh of Christ, who 'hath borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows,' as said the prophet Isaias. And if the Roman Empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Cæsar, whose vicar was Pontius Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind." To us both the argument and its conclusion are wholly indefensible. It seems indeed a mockery and a blasphemy to attribute to such a monster as Tiberius Cæsar glory because Christ was crucified in his reign. Dante's words, however, as spoken by Justinian, leave no room for doubt that the poet was convinced that all the ancient celebrity of Rome was insignificant as compared to the glory that would come to it because it would carry out the crucifixion of Christ.
"But what the standard that has made me speak
Achieved before, and after should achieve
Throughout the mortal realm that lies beneath,
Becometh in appearance mean and dim
If in the hand of the third Cæsar seen
With an eye unclouded and affection pure
Because the living Justice that inspires me
Granted it, in the hand of him I speak of
The glory of doing vengence for its wrath."
(VI, 82.)