Dante: Six Sermons

by Philip H. Wicksteed

But if we shut our eyes against the light of God's countenance and turn our backs upon His love, if we rebel against the limitations of mutual self-sacrifice to one another and common obedience to God, then an alternative is also offered us in the fierce and weltering chaos of wild passions and disordered desires, recognising no law and evoking no harmony, striking at the root of all common purpose and cut off from all helpful love.

Our inmost hearts recognise the reality of this choice, and the justice and necessity of the award that gives us what we have chosen. That the hard, bitter, self-seeking, impure, mutinous, and treacherous heart should drive away love and peace and joy is the natural, the necessary result of the inmost nature and constitution of things, and our hearts accept it. That self-discipline, gentleness, self-surrender, devotion, generosity, self-denying love, should gather round them light and sweetness, should infuse a fullness of joy into every personal and domestic relation, should give a glory to every material surrounding, and should gain an ever closer access to God, is no artificial arrangement which might with propriety be reversed, it is a part of the eternal and necessary constitution of the universe, and we feel that it ought so to be.

There is no joy or blessedness without harmony, there is no harmony without the concurrence of independent forces, there is no such concurrence without self-discipline and self-surrender.

But these natural consequences of our moral action are here on earth constantly interfered with and qualified, constantly baulked of their full and legitimate effect. Here we do not get our deserts. The actions of others affect us almost as much as our own, and artificially interpose themselves to screen us from the results of what we are and do ourselves. Hence we constantly fail to perceive the true nature of our choice. Its consequences fall on others; we partially at least evade the Divine Justice, and forget or know not what we are doing, and what are the demands of justice with regard to us.

Now Dante, in his three poems, with an incisive keenness of vision and a relentless firmness of touch, that stand alone, strips our life and our principles of action of all these distracting and confusing surroundings, isolates them from all qualifying and artificial palliatives, and shows us what our choice is and where it leads to.

In Hell we see the natural and righteous results of sin, recognise the direct consequences, the fitting surroundings of a sinful life, and understand what the sinful choice in its inmost nature is. As surely as our consciences accuse us of the sins that are here punished, so surely do we feel with a start of self-accusing horror, 'This is what I am trying to make the world. This is where we should be lodged if I received what I have given. This is what justice demands that I should have. This is what I deserve. It is what I have chosen.'

The tortures of Hell are not artificial inflictions, they are simply the reflection and application of the sinner's own ways and principles. He has made his choice, and he is given that which he has chosen. He has found at last a world in which his principles of action are not checked and qualified at every turn by those of others, in which he is not screened from any of the consequences of his deeds, in which his own life and action has consolidated, so to speak, about him, and has made his surroundings correspond with his heart.

In the Hell, Dante shows us the nature and the deserts of impenitent sin; and though we may well shrink from the ghastly conception of an eternal state of impenitence and hatred, yet surely there is nothing from which we ought to shrink in the conception of impenitent sin as long as it lasts, whether in us or in others, concentrating its results upon itself, making its own place and therefore receiving its deserts.

When we turn from Hell to Purgatory, we turn from unrepentant and therefore constantly cherished, renewed, and reiterated sin, to repentant sin, already banished from the heart. What does justice demand with regard to such sin? Will it have it washed out? Will it, in virtue of the sinner's penitence, interpose between him and the wretched results and consequences of his deeds? Who that has ever sinned and repented will accept for a moment such a thought? The repentant sinner does not wish to escape the consequences and results of his sin. His evil deeds or passions must bring and ought to bring a long trail of wretched suffering for himself. This suffering is not corrective, it is expiatory. His heart is already corrected, it is already turned in shame and penitence to God; but if he had no punishment, if his evil deed brought no suffering upon himself, he would feel that the Divine Justice had been outraged. He shrinks from the thought with a hurt sense of moral unfitness. He wishes to suffer, he would not escape into the peace of Heaven if he might.

Never did Dante pierce more deeply into the truth of things, never did he bring home the justice of punishment more closely to the heart, than when he told how the souls in Purgatory do not wish to rise to Heaven till they have worked out the consequences of their sins. The sin long since repented and renounced still haunts us with its shame and its remorse, still holds us from the fullness of the joy of God's love, still smites us with a keener pain the closer we press into the forgiving Father's presence; and we would have it so. The deepest longing of our heart, which is now set right, is for full, untroubled communion with God, yet it is just when nearest to Him that we feel the wretched penalty of our sin most keenly and that we least desire to escape it.