DANTE ALIGHIERI

(1265-1321)

N ORDER to understand Dante's metaphysics, it must be assumed that the object of every human life is to achieve the fullest possible expression of its spiritual realities, whatever they are. The world, as it becomes visible at any given time, is the sum of the expression of these realities,- of evil, of the struggle away from evil, of good realized through hatred of evil,— or, as Dante expressed it, of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Dante saw that little by little a Socrates can develop, in opposition to the sum of the evil around him, the sum of the good in himself until it reaches its consummation in celestial self-mastery as he raises the hemlock to his lips. He saw too how, little by little, a Ciampolo as he uses public authority to enrich himself from the miserable earnings of starving peasants, lets himself down into the infernal pitch, from which at last bat-winged devils of his own creating drag him by his clotted locks that he may know for a certainty the reality of the hell he has made for himself.

To Dante it appeared that this development of individual realities goes on continually in the world around us. It is, however, the province only of the highest genius to imagine it as Dante did. The eyes of others are "mercifully holden," lest life should become insupportable to them by reason of such knowledge of evil. For even

as Dante himself approached the castle of Dis, which overlooks the deeper hells of flame, he had raised against him the Gorgon's head which petrifies with horror all who come too close to the knowledge of what those hells actually are.

It is self-evident in the poetry of Dante that to him Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are realities of the commonplace every-day world around us. We have his own assurance that the Inferno he wrote of he had seen on earth. This is the fundamental fact of his work as a poet. Take it away and he has no significance except such as Leigh Hunt attributes to him,- that of a passionate and revengeful savage, constructing an Inferno in his own imagination the better to libel and disgrace his enemies. This is commonly said of him, but if it were true, or even fairly imaginable as true, he would be unimaginable as a poet,- as a "Vates," one of the world prophets from whose eyes the scales have fallen; who see in the commonplaces of

our daily lives the infinite realities which belong to us as immortal essences. In the Florence, in the Italy, in the Europe of his day, Dante saw the continual action and reaction of fraud and force. He saw law used for the oppression of the weak, and government made an agency by which political and ecclesiastical authority worked to enthrone individual evil in the place of universal good. He saw the result of this on more than one battlefield, in such nameless horrors of violence as inspired Voltaire to write his "Candide." As his mind slowly put together the details of the expression infernal passion finds for itself on earth, he saw "black, burning gulfs full of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally preying on their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathsome, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is done." He saw, in a word, that evil is infinitely repulsive and infinitely diabolical; and by the coercive power of this knowledge, which came to him in the fullness of his intellect

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita» —

he was compelled to explain to himself the world as he had come to see it. His explanation is only to be understood from the whole of his great poem, but the premises on which all his conclusions depend he saw written on the gates of the Inferno through which he was about to pass.

"Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore,
Fecemi la divina Potestate,

La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore.»

Justice was the thought of power
That moved my architect sublime

In creation's natal hour!

Highest wisdom, primal love

Made me at the birth of time.

As no man can come to such genius as that of Dante except through sympathy with humanity,- genius of this kind being essentially the ability to feel and to express the underlying thought of universal humanity,- he must have been tortured long by the cruel indignation (sæva indignatio) from which death rescued Swift. It had brought Dante not to the grave actually, but to the gates of the mystery of death-to a place where he must either learn the meaning of life or curse God and die. Knowing all that the philosophers and poets of Greece and Rome could teach him, it was not from them