and the “alps above Tiralli” effectively “bar out” the Teuton![162]
Dante’s inspiration has indeed brooded over the heroic efforts and struggles of Italy’s twentieth century patriots, even as over their forefathers of the Risorgimento. And this living influence of the Divine Poet’s genius has been brought before our readers in the first two Essays of this collection.
Perhaps it may not be amiss to follow up those former articles with a complementary study of the Poet—no longer as the inspirer of nineteenth and twentieth century ideals, but as the supreme representative of the thought and feeling of his own century, the thirteenth. Like Shakespeare, Dante never grows old. There is a quality of universality about his genius, and a broad and deep human appeal in his writing which renders it the proper heritage of every generation. And, haughty and aloof as was his spirit during life, with an aloofness intensified by bitter exile and by the sickness of ever-deferred hope, he was not one of those great ones who are entirely out of touch with their contemporaries, living in an age not yet born. Scarcely had he passed from mortal sight when a chorus of appreciation made itself heard, which, though it has waned in ages of waning taste, has never ceased to sound.
In a very true sense, Dante sums up in himself all that is best in mediaeval thought.
So Mr. Henry Osborne Taylor, in his formidable study of The Mediaeval Mind, significantly heads the forty-third and last chapter “The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante.” “There is unity,” he affirms, “throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof of it.”[163] It is pre-eminently as a religious thinker that Dante holds this place, and supplies this synthesis.
Theology as conceived in the thirteenth century was not only the “Queen of Sciences”; the religious conception of knowledge embraced and included all else. To Dante, the theologian-poet, as to Thomas Aquinas, the theologian-philosopher, all knowledge whatsoever was ultimately one; its end and purpose, its ground and justification, its key and explanation were to be found in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity-in-Unity.
Theology was not one among many departments of knowledge; it was the sum of knowledge, the key to all problems of the universe. Some of us retain, deep down in our nature, a conviction that, in this point at least, the scholastic theologians were right. While thankfully accepting the results of the scientific “division of labour,” the marvellous practical and theoretical fruits of a free and systematic investigation of phenomena which have transformed our very conception of knowledge and the knowable, we are apt to feel sometimes that the thirteenth century thinkers, with their complete mastery and mapping-out of the comparatively narrow field of the “scibile,” were not so liable as ourselves to lose sight of the wood by reason of the multitude of the trees, to lose the idea of an universe in the absorbing interest of its details.
At any rate, it may be accepted as beyond discussion that to the great mediaeval thinkers—to Peter Lombard, to Abelard, to St. Bernard, to St. Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus, to Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus; above all, perhaps, to St. Thomas Aquinas and to Dante, all knowledge is ultimately religious knowledge: just because God is conceived and realised as being the beginning and end and groundwork of all things. This truth underlies the beautiful language of the first canto of Paradiso—
La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’ universo penetra e risplende