Dante: Six Sermons

by Philip H. Wicksteed

If the Catholic poet of the fourteenth century speaks with a voice that can reach the ears and stir the hearts of the Protestant and heretic of the nineteenth, it is not so much because he rose above the special forms and conditions of the faith of his own age as because he went below them and touched the eternal rock upon which they rested. Not by neglecting or making light of the dogmas and institutions of his day, but by piercing to their very heart and revealing their deepest foundations, did he become a poet for all time.

The distinction, then, which we are about to draw between the permanent realities of Dante's religion and the passing forms, the temporary conditions of belief, under which it was manifested, is a distinction which did not exist for him. His faith was a garment woven without seam, or, to use his own metaphor, a coin so true in weight and metal, so bright and round, that there was no 'perhaps' to him in its impression.[96]

This unwavering certainty alike in principle and in detail, this unfaltering loyalty to the beliefs of his day alike in form and substance, is one of the secrets of Dante's strength.

But, again, such compactness and cohesion of belief could not have been attained except by the strict subordination of every article of concrete faith to the great central conceptions of religion, rising out of the very nature and constitution of the devout human soul. And therefore, paradox as it may seem, the very intensity with which Dante embraced beliefs that we have definitely and utterly rejected, is the pledge that we shall find in his teaching the essence of our own religion; and we may turn to the Comedy with the certainty that we shall not only discover here and there passages which will wake an echo in our bosoms, but shall also find at the very heart of it some guiding thought that will be to us as it was to him absolutely true.

Now Dante himself, as we have seen, tells us what is the subject of his Comedy. Literally it is 'The state of souls after death,' and allegorically 'Man, as rendering himself liable to rewarding or punishing justice, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will.' The ideal requirements of Divine Justice, then, form the central subject of this poem, the one theme to which, amidst infinite diversity of application, the poet remains ever true; and these requirements he works out in detail and enforces with all the might, the penetration, the sweetness of his song, under the conditions of mediæval belief as to the future life.

But these conditions of belief are utterly foreign to our own conceptions. I say nothing of the rejection of the virtuous heathen, because Dante himself could really find no room for it in his own system of conceptions. It lay in his mind as a belief accepted from tradition, but never really assimilated by faith. Apart from this, however, we find ourselves severed from Dante by his fundamental dogma that the hour of death ends all possibility of repentance or amendment. With him there is no repentance in Hell, no progress in Heaven; and it is therefore only in Purgatory that we find anything at all fundamentally analogous to the modern conception of a progressive approximation to ideal perfection and oneness with God throughout the cycles of a future life. And even here the transition of Purgatory is but temporal, nor is there any fundamental or progressive change of heart in its circles, for unless the heart be changed before death it cannot change at all.

In its literal acceptation, then, dealing with 'the state of souls after death,' the 'Divine Comedy' has little to teach us, except indirectly.

But allegorically it deals with 'man,' first as impenitently sinful; second, as penitent; last, as purified and holy. It shows us the requirements of Divine Justice with regard to these three states; and whether we regard them as permanent or transitory, as severed by sharp lines one from the other or as melting imperceptibly into each other, as existing on earth or beyond the grave, in any case Dante teaches us what sentence justice must pronounce on impenitence, on penitence, and on sanctity. Nay, independently of any belief in future retribution at all, independently of any belief in what our actions will receive, Dante burns or flashes into our souls the indelible conviction of what they deserve.

Now to Dante's mind, as to most others, the conceptions of justice and desert implied the conception of free will. And accordingly we find the reality of the choice exercised by man, and attended by such eternal issues, maintained with intense conviction throughout the poem. The free will is the supreme gift of God, and that by which the creature most closely partakes of the nature of the Creator. The free gift of God's love must be seized by an act of man's free will, in opposition to the temptations and difficulties that interpose themselves. There is justice as well as love in Heaven; justice as well as mercy in Purgatory. The award of God rests upon the free choice of man, and registers his merit or demerit. It is true, and Dante fully recognises it, that one man has a harder task than another. The original constitution and the special circumstances of one man make the struggle far harder for him than for another; but God never suffers the hostile influence of the stars to be so strong that the human will may not resist it. Diversity of character and constitution is the necessary condition of social life, and we can see why God did not make us all alike; but when we seek to pierce yet deeper into the mystery of His government, and ask why this man is selected for this task, why another is burdened with this toil, why one finds the path of virtue plain for his feet to tread, while one finds it beset with obstacles before which his heart stands still—when we ask these questions we trench close upon one of those doubts which Dante brought back unsolved from Heaven. Not the seraph whose sight pierces deepest into the light of God could have told him this, so utterly is it veiled from all created sight.[97]

But amidst all these perplexities one supreme fact stands out to Dante's mind: that, placed as we are on earth amidst the mysterious possibilities of good and evil, we are endowed with a genuine power of self-directed choice between them. The fullness of God's grace is freely offered to us all, the life eternal of obedience, of self-surrender, of love, tending ever to the fuller and yet fuller harmony of united will and purpose, of mutually blessed and blessing offices of affection, of growing joy in all the supporting and surrounding creation, of growing repose in the might and love of God.