Dante: Six Sermons

by Philip H. Wicksteed

This sweet and gentle type of womanhood, round whose earthly life the genius and devotion of Dante have twined a wreath of the tenderest poetry, the most romantic love, that ever rose from heart of man, had been to him in life and death the vehicle and messenger of God's highest grace. Round her memory clustered all the noblest purposes and purest motives of his life, and in her spirit seemed to be reflected the divinest truth, the loftiest wisdom, that the human soul could comprehend. And so, making her objectively and in the scheme of the universe what she had really been and was to him subjectively, he came to regard her as the symbol of Divine philosophy as Virgil was the symbol of human virtue and wisdom.

Touched by the glow of an ideal love, Dante had reached a deeper knowledge, a fuller grace, than the wisdom of this world could teach or gain. The doctors of the Church, the sweet singers, the mighty heroes, the profound philosophers, who had instructed and supported him, had none of them touched his life so deeply, had none of them led him so far into the secret place of truth, had none of them brought him so near to God, as that sweet child, that lovely maid, that pure woman, who had given him his first and noblest ideal.

Now to Dante and to his age it was far from unnatural to erect concrete human beings into abstract types or personifications. Leah and Rachel are the active and the contemplative life respectively. Virgil, we have seen, is human philosophy. Cato of Utica represents the triumph over the carnal nature and the passions. And it is not only the Old Testament and classical antiquity that furnish these types. The celebrated Countess Matilda, who lived only about two centuries before Dante himself, becomes in his poem, according to the generally received interpretation, one of the attributes of God personified. And so Beatrice became the personification of that heavenly wisdom, that true knowledge of God, of which she had been the vehicle to Dante.

But to the poet and to the age in which he lived, it was impossible to separate this heavenly wisdom in its simple, spiritual essence, from the form which its exposition had received at the hands of the great teachers of the Church. To them true spiritual wisdom, personal experience and knowledge of God, were inseparable from theology. The two united in the conception of Divine philosophy. Thus by a strange but intelligible gradation Dante blended in his conception of Beatrice two elements which seem to us the very extreme of incompatibility. She is in the first place the personification of scholastic theology, with all its subtle intricacy of pedantic method; she is in the second place the maiden to whom Dante sang his songs of love in Florence, and whose early death he wept disconsolate. And in the closing scenes of the Purgatory these two conceptions are more intimately blended, perhaps, than anywhere else in Dante's writings.

After wandering, as it were, in the forest of a bewildered life, the poet is led through Hell and Purgatory until he stands face to face at last with his own purest and loftiest ideal; and the fierceness of his own self-accusation when thus confronted with Beatrice he expresses under the form of reproaches which he lays upon her lips, but which we must retranslate into the reproachful utterances of his own tortured heart, if we are to retain our gentle thoughts of Beatrice.

We need not dwell even for a moment on the gorgeous pageantry with which Dante introduces and surrounds Beatrice. Suffice it to say that she comes in a mystic car, which represents the Church, surrounded by saints and angels.

No sooner does Dante see her, although closely veiled, than the might of the old passion sweeps upon him, and like a child that flees in terror to its mother, so does he turn to Virgil with the cry: 'Not one drop of blood but trembles in my veins! I recognise the tokens of the ancient flame.' But Virgil is gone. Dante has no refuge from his own offended and reproachful ideal. As he bursts into lamentations at the loss of Virgil's companionship, Beatrice sternly calls him back: 'Dante! weep not that Virgil has gone from thee. Thou hast a deeper wound for which to weep.'

As one who speaks, but holds back words more burning than he utters, so she stood. A clear stream flowed between her and Dante, and as she began to renew her reproaches he cast down his eyes in shame upon the water;—but there he saw himself! The angels sang a plaintive psalm, and Dante knew that they were pleading for him more clearly than if they had used directer words. Then the agony of shame and penitence that Beatrice's reproof had frozen in his bosom, as when the icy north wind freezes the snow amid the forests of the Apennine, was melted by the angels' plea for him as snow by the breezes of the south, and burst from him in a convulsion of sobs and tears.

How was it possible that he should have gone so far astray, have been so false to the promise and the purpose of his early life, have abused his own natural gifts and the superadded grace of heaven? How was it possible that he should have let all the richness of his life run wild? That after Beatrice had for a time sustained him and led him in the true path with her sweet eyes, he should have turned away from her in Heaven whom he had so loved on earth? How could he have followed the false semblances of good that never hold their word? His visions and his dreams of the ideal he was deserting had not sufficed, and so deep had he sunk that nothing short of visiting the region of the damned could save him from perdition. Why had he deserted his first purposes? What obstacle had baffled or appalled him? What new charm had those lower things of earth obtained to draw him to them? 'The false enticements of the present things,' he sobbed, 'had led his feet aside, soon as her countenance was hid.' But should not the decay of that fair form have been itself the means of weaning him from things of earth, that he might ne'er again be cheated by their beauty or drawn aside by them from the pursuit of heavenly wisdom and of heavenly love? When the fairest of all earthly things was mouldering in the dust, should he not have freed himself from the entanglements of the less beauteous things remaining?

To all these reproaches, urged by Beatrice, Dante had no reply. With eyes rooted to the ground, filled with unutterable shame, like a child repentant and confessing, longing to throw himself at his mother's feet, but afraid to meet her glance while her lips still utter the reproof, so Dante stood. From time to time a few broken words, which needed the eye more than the ear to interpret them, dropped from his lips like shafts from a bow that breaks with excess of strain as the arrow is delivered.