We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician, and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards them may be judged by the case of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair and tears it out by the handful!
The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, “cupiditia.” He raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the “fatal gift” from the Emperor Constantine—the temporal possessions which made the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that each of them “has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth.” This is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century!
It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a book entitled “Dante and Other Waning Classics,” in which he argues that the “Divine Comedy” is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly Dante does not shirk this issue—he tells us in plain words: “The kind of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for speculation but for use.”
What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our only advantage over him is that we do not even think we can answer.
The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So the simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of the Middle Ages; and Dante’s whole being, his total art product, was illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without physical expression through the poet’s whole life. No student of the science of sex today would accept Dante’s attitude as sound or sensible; nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul.
In Dante’s pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil. This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have stressed—the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a civilization. In Dante’s time the cultured world was just making the discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or re-birth, we call it.
We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords, and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day, wishing to satirize the “war for democracy” by locating its leaders in hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America.
And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer, for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail; the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soap-box propaganda.
So the cultured Renaissance critics looked upon Dante as a crude and “popular” person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke patronizingly concerning “the rustic homeliness of his language and style, his lack of decorum and grace.” If space permitted I could show you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt with by the academic critics of his own time.