These words, it will be remembered, are addressed by Virgil, at the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, to Cato of Utica. Virgil is speaking of Dante, and of his mystical journey through the eternal world. The object of that quest, he says, is Liberty—that liberty which will make him master of himself morally and spiritually, when Virgil himself, at the summit of the Mountain, ere he takes his leave, shall crown him “King and bishop of his own mind and soul.”[35]
... Te sopra te corono e mitrio.
These moving lines, as D’Ovidio reminds us,[36] have drawn tears from many a patriot of the last century; they may well form for us a starting-point for the consideration of Dante’s attitude towards Political Liberty. True, it is ultimately spiritual liberty, liberty of soul, that the Poet “goes seeking” in his pilgrimage, even as it is slavery of soul from which he announces in Paradise[37] that Beatrice has delivered him. “Thou hast drawn me,” he says, “out of slavery into freedom ... thou has given health to my soul”—
Tu m’ hai di servo tratto a libertate
...
... l’ anima mia ... fatt’ hai sana....
But the conditions of spiritual and of bodily freedom are very close to one another—as many a languishing prisoner of war can testify—interlaced and interwoven if not identical.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.