Barnabas’ recurring characterisation of the idols of the heathen as “dei falsi he bugiardi”[308] is surely too remarkable to be without significance, and is enforced and supported by the occurrence of another cadence of the same canto of the Inferno in the phrase “rabbiosa fame,” which in Barnabas, however, applies not to the symbolic lion of the Divina Commedia,[309] but to the torments of the Lost.
There remains one more point to be adduced—an incidental and a somewhat subtle one which makes, not so much for a relation between Dante’s writings and the Gospel of Barnabas as for a relation of contemporaneity between the two writers. The inference which it would suggest is so definite and precise, that it is only fair to remark that there are puzzlingly contradictory arguments to be drawn from the language and style of Barnabas.
Our point, then, is as follows. Barnabas puts into the mouth of our Lord, as we have observed above, numerous predictions of the future advent of Mohammed as “Messiah” and “Messenger of God.” In one of these a “Jubilee” is spoken of as recurring every hundred years: “il iubileo ... che hora uiene ogni cento hanni.”[310] The writer or compiler here, as often, fails to throw himself back into the Palestine of the first century, in which, as his very considerable knowledge of the Old Testament[311] should have reminded him, the Hebrew Jubilee of fifty years would have been in force. Whence, then, comes this Jubilee? He cannot have derived it from the Koran. We are almost forced to the conclusion that the “hora” of the passage quoted is a literal “now” and refers to a contemporary institution—to the Jubilee as conceived of at the moment when the lines were penned; and that, the Jubilee of Western Christendom. This carries us back beyond the twenty-five years’ Jubilee of modern times—beyond the year when Clement VI, for his own ends, instituted a Jubilee of fifty years after the Hebrew model; and would give us as our terminus ad quem the year 1349. For the upper limit—the terminus a quo of the original Barnabas we must turn to the famous Jubilee of 1300, the ideal date of Dante’s pilgrimage. For though the Bull[312] by which that Jubilee was promulgated alleged antecedent tradition, and the contemporary chroniclers naturally followed suit,[313] there seems to be no sufficient historical evidence for a precedent. Thus, between the years 1300 and 1350—and, apparently, only during that period—it would have been possible to speak of the centennial Jubilee as an established institution. If this be so, the writing of this passage in Barnabas is relegated to the years in which the Divina Commedia took its final shape, or those just after the poet’s death in 1321 when the poem so swiftly took its place among the classics of the world’s literature.
The foregoing sketch does not pretend to be exhaustive;[314] it does not even claim to have proved anything of a substantial nature: but it may perhaps suggest to some more competent mind a line of study which has at least the merit of freshness, and it may serve to introduce to those who are not acquainted with it, a document of no ordinary interest and of no little beauty.
It is sometimes stated that Dante places Mohammed not among pagans nor among heretics but with the schismatics: as though he shared the optimistic view of some of his contemporaries, that the Moslems were but an extreme form of Christian “sect.”
But Dante distributes his pagans without prejudice throughout the successive circles, from the “Nobile Castello” in Limbo[315] to the central seat of infamy in the Giudecca; and, as a matter of fact, a pagan, Curio, is partner of Mohammed’s doom in the penultimate “bolgia” of Malebolge. Obviously “scisma” must not be taken too technically from Mohammed’s lips, supplemented as it is by the more general phrase “seminator di scandalo.”[316] The “schism” of which the False Prophet is guilty is rather that introduction of discord and strife into the civilised world which makes “Macometto cieco” in the eighteenth canzone a personification of the factious spirit of Florence.
Yet if it had fallen to Dante’s lot to judge the Founder of Islam by the spirit of this Mohammedan Gospel, he might have shared that milder and more optimistic view of Mohammedanism which, according to a recent writer,[317] inspired Saint Francis when he set out upon his Egyptian mission. For here he would have found, side by side with the inevitable denial of our Lord’s Divinity, an attribution to him not only of the Gospel miracles, but of others beside. He would have found deep teachings on prayer and fasting and almsgiving; on humility, penitence[318] and self-discipline; on meditation and mystic love. He would have found an asceticism in some ways as extravagant as any to be discovered in mediaeval legend, yet tempered with saving humour and common sense; a tolerant and charitable spirit which rivals even that of the “Cristo d’ Italia,” and “a succession of noble and beautiful thoughts concerning love of God, union with God, and God as Himself the final reward of faithful service, which it would be difficult to match in any literature.”[319]
Eleven years after the above lines were written, there appeared in Madrid a study of Dante’s relations with Mohammedan Eschatology,[320] which may possibly prove to hold the key to some of the problems raised by the Gospel of Barnabas. The learned Spanish Professor of Arabic is by no means the first to explore the field of possible Oriental sources for the Divine Comedy. Since Ozanam wrote his La Philosophie Chrétienne avant Dante, a number of writers—D’Ancona, D’Ovidio and others in Italy, and Vossler in Germany—have busied themselves with this subject; and in 1901, M. Blochet[321] brought both the general idea of the Unearthly Pilgrimage and some of its details into what looks like a derivative relationship with the two great Oriental Ascension-myths: the very ancient Mazdean story of Arda-Viraf, of Persian origin, and the secondary legend of Mohammed’s one-night journey through the heavens, founded on a short and obscure passage in the Koran[322] and known as the Miradj. Together with other researchers in the same field, M. Blochet brings in also Sinbad the Sailor, the Voyage of St. Brendan, and all the family of the Quest of the Fortunate Isles; working up the pedigree right back to the Hesperides of the Hellenic myths—themselves descended from an ancestry more ancient still, and of origin further East. He suggests the many possible channels of transmission of oriental lore to Western Europe, and in particular to Ireland[323] by the more easterly “Amber Route” which archaeology shews to have passed from Mesopotamia over the Caucasus and through Russia to the Baltic. He points again to the openings made by the Crusades, and singles out the work of Dante’s Venetian contemporary, Marin Sanudo, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis,[324] as evincing such a mastery of the entire “Eastern Question” as would imply a very exact knowledge of the Moslem religion and its legends. He points also to Paget Toynbee’s demonstration of Dante’s indebtedness in no less than ten passages of the Vita Nuova and Convivio, to the Moslem astronomer Djaafer-îbn-Mohammed-el-Balkhi, known to the mediaeval West by the less cumbrous name of Alfraganus.[325]