In spite of his Ghibelline proclivities, Dante was filled with lively faith, and he had so great a veneration for the power of the keys entrusted by Christ to Peter and his successors that even in hell he bowed with respect before one of those who had borne them, and even in his narration of the arrest and ill-treatment of Boniface VIII., whom he hated and placed in hell, he breaks out into the following strains:
"Lo! the flower de luce
Enters Alagna; in his Vicar Christ?
Himself a captive, and his mockery
Acted again. Lo! to his holy lip
The vinegar and gall once more applied;
And he 'twixt living robbers doomed to bleed.
Lo! the new Pilate, of whose cruelty
Such violence cannot fill the measure up,
With no decree to sanction, pushes on
Into the temple his yet eager sails.
O sovereign Master! when shall I rejoice
To see the vengeance, which thy wrath, well pleased,
In secret silence broods?"
(Purg. xx. 85-97. Carey's translation.)
So we have lived to see the day when the author of the above lines is represented as the herald of a party which has treated so shamefully the gentle successor of Boniface VIII., Pius IX., whose only fault was to have opened the prison doors to his enemies, and recalled them from exile with too great indulgence. They have made him drink the chalice of humiliation to the dregs, and, leagued with a French despot, they renew in the Vicar of Christ all the insults heaped of old on the Saviour by the Roman soldiers, when, putting on him the mantle of purple and the crown of thorns, they mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!" Dante was no such Christ-killer.
And what folly is it not to imagine Dante, the haughty aristocrat, whose pride of birth shows itself everywhere in his poem, a partisan of a faction which, like that which governed Florence during the middle ages, is made up of the rabble and of levelers, haters of all nobility.
In another age, when it was not the principle of public life to have no principle at all, such contradictions as those of which we write would have been incomprehensible; but in our own century, in which truth wages an unequal conflict with falsehood, not so much because men do not know how to separate truth from falsehood, as because men find truth less useful for their purposes than falsehood, the conduct of the so-called national party in Italy is easily explained. But if Dante were to rise up from the grave, how strongly he would rebuke those who are making such an unwarrantable use of his name! He would quote for them, perhaps, as he does in many parts of his great work, an apt text of the Holy Scriptures; and none, probably, would come sooner to his mind than the following:
"Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things?
"The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against his Christ.
"Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us.
"He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them; and the Lord shall deride them. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage."