New ground has, however, undoubtedly been opened up by Dr. Asín. In his Inaugural Lecture he makes claims which, no doubt, will be fiercely combated, and in the end largely discounted. Dr. Parodi in his important notice of this book[326] points out that Asín’s contention is two-fold, and one half of it, at least, unprovable. The Spanish Orientalist claims to have proved (1) that the Western legends of the World Beyond are derived from Arab (and ultimately from Persian) sources, (2) that Dante was acquainted with specific Moslem sources, and used them freely.
For the first of these contentions, which was, in substance Blochet’s,[327] he has brought—so Parodi admits—fresh and varied evidence; and this part of the claim may now be regarded as largely substantiated. The second claim: that Dante actually knew, and drew from, the Moslem legend “is” says the Italian reviewer, “and will remain, I fear, incapable of demonstration.”[328] Yet he admits that the parallels adduced between the Moslem Hell and Dante’s Inferno, and still more between the Miradj and the Paradiso, are such as to arouse perplexity and astonishment in a mind hostile to, or unconvinced by, the theory of the learned Spaniard. The parallels he interprets[329] as remarkable instances of the similar working of human imagination on similar topics, all over the world. Whether such a hypothesis meets all the facts may still be an open question. But there can be no question whatever that if Dante, who certainly owes the biggest debt to his “true precursor,” Virgil, be indebted also to the Miradj or other Mohammedan legend,[330] he has more than repaid his debt in the splendid originality with which he has bent and transformed such material to his own higher purposes: a use which implies masterly assimilation and adaption, and amounts to creative work.
Yet we would venture to plead for an open mind, even on the subject of Asín’s second contention, and venture to ask whether the Gospel of Barnabas does not contribute some little additional force to the Spanish professor’s argument? When all deductions have been made, has he not gone far towards proving that Dante was more definitely indebted to Moslem thought and legend than has been hitherto believed; and in particular that he may have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Mohammedan sources the architectonic idea of “Hell,” and other parts of his scheme of which the affinity with “Barnabas” has been noted in the preceding pages? If so, we may with some probability attribute to those same sources the occasional striking identity of phraseology which we have observed—regarding them as, in some sense, sources both for Dante and for “Barnabas”; though in some cases it is difficult to believe that the so-called “Barnabas” is not quoting Dante from memory.
The man who placed the Moslem Captain Saladin and the Moslem Philosophers Averroes and Avicenna in the same region of the other world as his own dear master Virgil[331]; who placed the condemned Averroist, Sigieri of Brabant, in the Fourth Heaven as companion of the recognised Doctors of the Church, and put an eulogy of him into the mouth of his opponent Thomas Aquinas,[332] would surely not be willing to borrow from Moslem sources ideas and materials for his mighty building—
al quale ha posta mano e cielo e terra.[333]
That suitable material was in existence (though in the Arabic language) has been abundantly proved. From the various mediaeval forms of the Mohammedan legend of the Prophet’s visit to the other world, Professor Asín draws numerous and striking parallels to the Divina Commedia. The topography of Hell, with its most infamous of sinners in the lowest pit, the scheme of the Heavens, which, like Dante’s, follows the Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres, and many more detailed analogies. He finds the closest affinity in a writer of the same century, Ibn Arabi, a Spanish thinker, who died twenty-five years before Dante was born. By this Arabi the legend—which may have formed the basis of much of the eschatology of “Barnabas”—was presented together with a mystical and allegorical interpretation, such as Dante himself suggests for his own work in the Epistle to Can Grande.[334] Dante’s noble contemporary, Raymond Lull, seems to have known this book of Arabi’s in the original. Dante was not, like Raymond, an Arabic scholar, but he may well have become, by oral means, acquainted with something of its substance.
The court of Alfonso X of Seville, into which Dante’s Brunetto plunged in the abortive embassy of 1260, was a hive of Moslem learning and speculation. And though Brunetto’s visit was but short (and from this point Dr. Parodi does not fail to draw full capital), he was not the only Florentine who found his way to Seville.[335] Commercial relations between Tuscany and Seville were alive in Dante’s day; and the intercourse of trade brings with it a measure of intellectual commerce. The Papal Court to which the Poet paid his fatal visit as Florentine Ambassador must still have held fresh memories of St. Peter Pascual, who was conversant with the Mohammedan legends of Hell and Paradise; and in Ricoldo of Montecroce Dante had an illustrious fellow-townsman who was notably learned in Moslem lore,[336] though missionary travels kept the good Dominican away from Florence during the years of the Poet’s residence, and he only returned as Prior of Sta. Maria Novella in 1301, the year of Dante’s exile, and died the year before his death, in 1320.
Altogether, there seems good reason to believe that Mohammedan materials, if not actual Mohammedan sources, were accessible to Dante, and that with large-hearted tolerance he was content to use them, and so to give them an immortality which they could not otherwise have achieved.
Thus we may conjecture a definite relation between “Barnabas” and the Divine Comedy: not through a debt of either to other (unless it be of “Barnabas” to Dante), but through a measure of common ancestry.