But if the sinful disposition be gone, then the source of our suffering is dried up with it, and the sense of oneness with God, of harmony and trust, gradually overpowers the self-reproach, until from the state of penitence and suffering the soul rises to holiness and peace.
It is in giving us glimpses of this final state that Dante wields his most transforming power over our lives. He shows us what God offers us, what it is that we have hitherto refused, what it is that we may still aspire to, that here or hereafter we may hope to reach. Sin-stained and sorrow-laden as we are, it is only on wings as strong as his that we can be raised even for a moment into that Divine blessedness in which sin has been so purged by suffering, so dried up by the sinner's love of God, so blotted out by God's love of him, that it has vanished as a dream, and the soul can say, 'Here we repent not.'[98] How mighty the spirit that can raise us even for a moment from the desolate weariness of Hell, and the long suffering of Purgatory, to the joy and peace of Heaven!
And here too there is justice. Here too the deserts of the soul are the gauge of its condition. For, as we have seen, in the very blessedness of Heaven there are grades, and the soul which has once been stained with sin or tainted with selfish and worldly passion, can never be as though it had been always pure. Yet the torturing sense of unworthiness is gone, the unrest of a past that thwarts the present is no more; the souls have cast off the burden of their sin, and are at perfect peace with God and with themselves.
Sin, repentance, holiness, confronted with the Eternal Justice—what they are and what they deserve—such is the subject of Dante Alighieri's Comedy.
Have five and a half centuries of progress outgrown the poem, or are Dante's still the mightiest and most living words in which man has ever painted in detail the true deserts of sin, of penitence, of sanctity? The growing mind of man has burst the shell of Dante's mediæval creed. Is his portrayal of the true conditions of blessedness as antiquated as his philosophy, his religion as strange to modern thought as his theology? Or has he still a power, wielded by no other poet, of taking us into the very presence of God and tuning our hearts to the harmonies of Heaven? Those who have been with him on his mystic journey, and have heard and seen, can answer these questions with a declaration as clear and ringing as the poet's own confession of faith in the courts of Heaven. If those who have but caught some feeble echoes of his song can partly guess what the true answer is, then those echoes have not been waked in vain.
FOOTNOTES:
[96] Paradiso, xxiv. 86, 87.
[97] Compare Purgatorio, xvi. 67-84; Paradiso, iv. 73-114, v. 13 sqq., viii. 115-129, xxi. 76-102, xxxii. 49-75.
[98] Paradiso, ix. 103.
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