Vidi ’l maestro di color che sanno Seder tra filosofica famiglia. Tutti lo miran, tutti onor li fanno. —Inf. iv. 131-3. Those who were privileged to listen to Mr. Trevelyan’s lecture on “Italy’s Part in the War,” and to see the wonderful slides presented to him by the Comando Supremo, will remember the thrill contributed by the last picture—the great statue of Dante at Trento, with the fugitive Austrian soldiers at its base, fleeing, as it were, before his face. Dante, we felt, has at last come to his own; the Trentino is at last indefeasibly— Suso in Italia bella, and the “alps above Tiralli” effectively “bar out” the Teuton![162] Dante’s inspiration has indeed brooded over the heroic efforts and struggles of Italy’s twentieth century patriots, even as over their forefathers of the Risorgimento. And this living influence of the Divine Poet’s genius has been brought before our readers in the first two Essays of this collection. Perhaps it may not be amiss to follow up those former articles with a complementary study of the Poet—no longer as the inspirer of nineteenth and twentieth century ideals, but as the supreme representative of the thought and feeling of his own century, In a very true sense, Dante sums up in himself all that is best in mediaeval thought. So Mr. Henry Osborne Taylor, in his formidable study of The Mediaeval Mind, significantly heads the forty-third and last chapter “The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante.” “There is unity,” he affirms, “throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof of it.”[163] It is pre-eminently as a religious thinker that Dante holds this place, and supplies this synthesis. Theology as conceived in the thirteenth century was not only the “Queen of Sciences”; the religious conception of knowledge embraced and included all else. To Dante, the theologian-poet, as to Thomas Aquinas, the theologian-philosopher, all knowledge whatsoever was ultimately one; its end and purpose, its ground and justification, its key and explanation were to be found in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity-in-Unity. Theology was not one among many departments of knowledge; it was the sum of knowledge, the key to all problems of the universe. Some of us retain, deep down in our nature, a conviction that, in this point at least, the scholastic theologians were right. While At any rate, it may be accepted as beyond discussion that to the great mediaeval thinkers—to Peter Lombard, to Abelard, to St. Bernard, to St. Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus, to Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus; above all, perhaps, to St. Thomas Aquinas and to Dante, all knowledge is ultimately religious knowledge: just because God is conceived and realised as being the beginning and end and groundwork of all things. This truth underlies the beautiful language of the first canto of Paradiso— La gloria di colui che tutto move Per l’ universo penetra e risplende In una parte piÙ e meno altrove. and again— ... Le cose tutte quante Hanno ordine tra loro, e questo È forma Che ’l universo a Dio fa simigliante.[164] It also underlies the description of the damned as those who have lost “the Good of the intellect.”[165] Noi siam venuti al luogo ove io t’ ho detto Che tu vedrai le genti dolorose Ch’ hanno perduto il ben de l’ intelletto. This tendency to subsume all knowledge under Holy Scripture, the Patristic writings, ancient classical lore, the Graeco-Arabian philosophy and science of which the groundwork was Aristotle—these are the main antecedents of the mediaeval system of knowledge, and they are blended together in characteristic ways, and dissolved, as it were, in a fluid composed of romantic chivalry and other elements of preponderatingly Teutonic and Celtic origin. (1) The groundwork of all is, of course, Holy Scripture: known and studied exclusively in the Latin Vulgate text, a rather degenerate and corrupt representative of the (in its way) masterly and excellent translation from the Hebrew and Greek made by St. Jerome in the fifth century. The Bible, as we know quite well to-day,—even those of us who are more than ever convinced of its inspiration—is not a manual of natural science or philosophy, nor even an absolutely infallible guide in matters of history and chronology. Its scientific standpoint is that of the age in which each part was composed, however eternal be the significance and application of its fundamental religious principles. To the mediaeval mind, however, Scripture was a universal text-book of science. So that countless questions were regarded as foreclosed because the Bible appeared to have pronounced upon them. The scientific mind of the Middle Ages felt itself committed at a hundred points to the rather crude conceptions of the ancient Hebrews, and to a literal interpretation, very often, of figurative and highly poetical expressions. The disadvantages of this state of things are obvious to us: we must not forget, however, that they were largely modified by the fact that while all knowledge was regarded as ultimately religious knowledge, it is just in its religious principles that the Bible is supreme, and is permanently true. (2) The interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages is largely based on patristic exegesis; on the writings of the really great minds of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, when men like Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine, laid the foundations of systematic Christian thought; men steeped in the Holy Scriptures, and bringing to them an intellect furnished with ideas and categories inherited in part from the classical world—from Graeco-Roman literature and philosophy. The most influential of them all, perhaps, upon mediaeval thought were Jerome (through his translation of the Bible) and Augustine, the deepest and most original thinker (with the exception of Origen) among all the “Fathers.” Holy Scripture then, patristically interpreted, is the first and most important element in mediaeval knowledge; and the place it holds in Dante may be roughly estimated by the calculations of Dr. Moore in his Dante Studies (Vol. I), where he shows that in his extant works the Poet quotes the Vulgate more than five hundred times. Dante is representative of the Middle Ages in his reverence for and his use of Holy Scripture, interpreted for the most part by traditions derived from the Christian Fathers. Scripture itself was mediaevally supplemented by hagiology—the lives and legends of the Saints—nor is this element lacking in Dante.[166] (3) But the place of honour, next to Scripture, in Dante, must be assigned, surely, to classical lore—to the mythology and literature of the ancient Graeco-Roman civilisation for which the mediaeval mind had so profound a reverence. Greek philosophy, as represented by Aristotle— il maestro di color che sanno[167] is a category by itself, to which we shall turn our attention in a moment. But classical lore in general, as represented by such writers as Virgil (quoted 200 times), Ovid (100), Cicero (50), Lucan (50), Horace (15?), Livy (15?), finds very definite recognition in Dante’s works. The old Roman Empire was viewed by Dante with a truly religious veneration, as is clear not only from many a passage in the Divina Commedia (e.g. Par. vi), but from the whole argument of the De Monarchia.[168] This veneration, which shed lustre and dignity upon a “Holy Roman Empire” which even in Dante’s day had become actually, though not technically, German, is characteristic especially of the Italian mind; and Dante was Italian as well as mediaeval. The Italians even of to-day are proud to regard themselves as the direct successors of the old Romans of the Republic and of the Caesars: in Dante’s time they were prepared to trace their ancestry to the divinely guided companions of Aeneas of Troy. Rome looms large in the providential ordering of human history: Dante’s conception of her sovereign place is drawn from the author of the princely Aeneid, whose function in the Divine Comedy is guarantee But it is not only Roman history, but classical mythology that weaves itself into the texture of Dante’s religious thought. If he quotes Virgil some two hundred times, he quotes Ovid about one hundred. The tendency to mingle together examples from Scripture and from pagan mythology is characteristically mediaeval. In Dante it is a well known feature, most typically represented perhaps in the sculptures, visions and voices of the Purgatorio. He who is bold enough in Purg. xxx. to blend together the Scriptural Benedictus qui venis with Virgil’s Manibus o date lilia plenis is not afraid to invoke the Muses and Apollo (mystically interpreted) as he begins a new cantica.[169] He does not hesitate to apostrophise the Saviour of the world in terms which blend the Christian with the antique pagan tradition—[170] ... O Sommo Giove, Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso! This is well explained by Mr. Taylor. “With Dante,” he says,[171] “the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters[172] symbolised, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.” This principle may be regarded as being, in a way, the mediaeval analogue of our broad modern conceptions derived from a comparative study of religions. (4) But supreme among the influences derived by the Middle Ages from classical antiquity is the philosophy of Aristotle, which holds the next place to Scripture alike in the “Summa” of Thomas Aquinas, and in the Divina Commedia of Dante. Mediaeval Christianity drew its knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy from Mohammedan sources. The great Arab scientists and philosophers of mediaeval times, represented in the Commedia by Avicenna and— AverroÌs che il gran comento feo[173] (his commentary on Aristotle was translated into Latin about 1250), gave back, in a modified form, to Western Europe, the works of the Philosopher, of which the original Greek was not acquired by them till several centuries later. This Graeco-Arabian philosophy forms the basis of those constantly recurring, and to many of us rather tiresome, astronomical excursions which form so characteristic a feature of the Divine Comedy. This form of Aristotelianism plays an immense part in the scholastic philosophy; and his deference to it is among Dante’s chief claims to be representative of the religious thought and teaching of his day. In countless other ways the Poet’s writings are representative of what was best and highest in contemporary thought: the wide grasp of innumerable topics and details, the encyclopaedic temper, quaintly obvious in the Convivio but more worthily embodied in the Divina Commedia; the spiritualising of troubadour love, beautifully manifested in the promise of Vita Nuova and Canzoniere, but more sublimely still in the Beatrice of the Paradiso; the blending of religious with political theory so conspicuous in the Monarchia and Commedia; Among the qualities which made Dante what he was—and is—two would seem to be supreme. First his encyclopaedic knowledge, and secondly the unrivalled power of plastic visualisation, by which he was enabled “to use as a poet what he had acquired as a scholar.”[174] Dante has been described by Eliot Norton as an instance of “the incredible diligence of the Middle Ages.” In days when there was no Funk and Wagnalls Company to minister encyclopaedic knowledge by cheap instalments—when everything must be painfully acquired from MSS. and the diligent student ran the risk not only of leanness[175] but of blindness[176] Dante appears, from his extant works, to have known all that was to be known. Dr. Moore’s investigations (in Dante Studies, Vol. I) go some way towards justifying—if anything can absolutely justify so dogmatic a statement—the perhaps over-enthusiastic words of A. G. Butler: “Dante was born a student as he was born a poet, and had he never written a single poem, he would still have been famous as the most profound scholar of his time.”[177] But if Dante had finished the Convivio, and written nothing else, his vast learning would have been as uninteresting to the average modern mind as is that of Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas. Albertus Magnus with his Albert and Thomas were theologians: so was Dante, but he was a poet as well.[178] Dante is saturated with the entire knowledge of the Middle Ages; he has absorbed and assimilated it, and he gives it out again transfigured—alive! It becomes in his hands an original and immortal contribution to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic heritage of mankind. From our present study the Divine Poet emerges once more as the “Apostle of Freedom.” He handles his subject-matter with the master-touch that makes it live, and with the independence of standpoint and sincerity of judgment that draws Catholics to claim him as a Catholic, and Protestants as a Protestant. As a matter of fact he is a loyal Catholic, as was rightly proclaimed by the late lamented Pope Benedict XV in his Encyclical of May, 1921.[179] A Catholic, but above all, a Christian. And, as the Pope also justly remarked, his work and his message are alive to-day—more living than that of many a present-day Poet—just because he is not dependent on mere pagan models and sources, however classical, but is saturated with Christian thought and feeling. For the future lies with Christianity. In our next Essay we shall endeavour to show how the free spirit of the artist and the theologian merges into that of the Educationist: how the characteristic |