Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia. · R. W. Church
[JAN. 1850.]
Dante was not a Ghibelline, though he longed for the interposition of an Imperial power. Historically he did not belong to the Ghibelline party. It is true that he forsook the Guelfs, with whom he had been brought up, and that the White Guelfs, with whom he was expelled from Florence, were at length merged and lost in the Ghibelline party[74]; and he acted with them for a time.[75] But no words can be stronger than those in which he disjoins himself from that "evil and foolish company," and claims his independence-- A te fia bello _Averti fatto parte per te stesso_.[76] And it is not easy to conceive a Ghibelline partisan putting into the mouth of Justinian, the type of law and empire, a general condemnation of his party as heavy as that of their antagonists;--the crime of having betrayed, as the Guelfs had resisted, the great symbol of public right-- Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali Ch'io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mali. L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli Oppone, e _quel s'appropria l'altro a parte_, Sì ch'è forte a veder qual più si falli. _Faccian li Ghibellin, faccian lor arte Sott'altro segno; chè mal segue quello Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte._[77] And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue were free to the end. And in character and feeling, in his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his intolerance of corruption and pride, his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was much less a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed Savonarola.
But he had a very decided and complete political theory, which certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it was not much more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of men would have more vigorously resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have joined more heartily with all immediate opponents--Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or even Boniface VIII.,--to keep out such an emperor as Dante imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates. Dante's political views were a dream; though a dream based on what had been, and an anticipation of what was, in part at least, to come. It was a dream in the middle ages, in divided and republican Italy, the Italy of cities--of a real and national government, based on justice and law. It was the dream of a real _state_. He imagined that the Roman empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that Christendom might be such. He was wrong in both instances; but in this case, as in so many others, he had already caught the spirit and ideas of a far-distant future; and the political organisation of modern times, so familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a form very different from what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those expectations which are in outward form so chimerical--"_i miei non falsi errori_."
Che le terre d'Italia tutte piene Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa Ogni villan, che parteggiando viene.--_Purg._ 6. [Footnote 79: Veggio in Alagna entrar lo fiordaliso, E nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto; Veggiolo un'altra volta esser deriso; Veggio rinnovellar l'aceto e 'l fele, E tra vivi ladroni essere anciso.--_Purg._ 20. G. Villani, viii. 63. Come magnanimo e valente, disse, _Dacchè per tradimento, come Gesù Cristo, voglio esser preso e mi conviene morire, almeno voglio morire come Papa_; e di presente si fece parare dell'ammanto di S. Piero, e colla corona di Constantino in capo, e colle chiavi e croce in mano, e in su la sedia papale si pose a sedere, e giunto a lui Sciarra e gli altri suoi nimici; con villane parole lo scherniro.]
In this scene of violence and disorder, with the Papacy gone astray, the empire debased and impotent, the religious orders corrupted, power meaning lawlessness, the well-disposed become weak and cowardly, religion neither guide nor check to society, but only the consolation of its victims--Dante was bold and hopeful enough to believe in the Divine appointment, and in the possibility, of law and government--of a state. In his philosophy, the institutions which provide for man's peace and liberty in this life are part of God's great order for raising men to perfection;--not indispensable, yet ordinary parts; having their important place, though but for the present time; and though imperfect, real instruments of His moral government. He could not believe it to be the intention of Providence, that on the introduction of higher hopes and the foundation of a higher society, civil society should collapse and be left to ruin, as henceforth useless or prejudicial in man's trial and training; that the significant intimations of nature, that law and its results, justice, peace, and stability, ought to be and might be realised among men, had lost their meaning and faded away before the announcement of a kingdom not of this world. And if the perfection of civil society had not been superseded by the Church, it had become clear, if events were to be read as signs, that she was not intended to supply its political offices and functions. She had taught, elevated, solaced, blessed, not only individual souls, but society; she had for a time even governed it: but though her other powers remained, she could govern it no longer. Failure had made it certain that, in his strong and quaint language, "_Virtus authorizandi regnum nostræ mortalitatis est contra naturam ecclesiæ; ergo non est de numero virtutum suarum_."[81] Another and distinct organisation was required for this, unless the temporal order was no longer worthy the attention of Christians.
This is the idea of the _De Monarchia_; and though it holds but a place in the great scheme of the _Commedia_, it is prominent there also--an idea seen but in a fantastic shape, encumbered and confused with most grotesque imagery, but the real idea of polity and law, which the experience of modern Europe has attained to. He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy, the theory of merely human society; and raising its end and purpose, "_finem totius humanæ civilitatis_," to a height and dignity which Heathens could not forecast, he adopted it in its more abstract and ideal form. He imagined a single authority, unselfish, inflexible, irresistible, which could make all smaller tyrannies to cease, and enable every man to live in peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is simply what each separate state of Christendom has by this time more or less perfectly achieved. The theoriser of the middle ages could conceive of its accomplishment only in one form, as grand as it was impossible--a universal monarchy.
But he did not start from an abstraction. He believed that history attested the existence of such a monarchy. The prestige of the Roman empire was then strong. Europe still lingers on the idea, and cannot even yet bring itself to give up its part in that great monument of human power. But in the middle ages the Empire was still believed to exist. It was the last greatness which had been seen in the world, and the world would not believe that it was over. Above all, in Italy, a continuity of lineage, of language, of local names, and in part of civilisation and law, forbad the thought that the great Roman people had ceased to be. Florentines and Venetians boasted that they were Romans: the legends which the Florentine ladies told to their maidens at the loom were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman element, little understood, but profoundly reverenced and dearly cherished, was dominant; the conductor of civilisation, and enfolding the inheritance of all the wisdom, experience, feeling, art, of the past, it elevated, even while it overawed, oppressed, and enslaved. A deep belief in Providence added to the intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred character. The flight of the eagle has been often told and often sung; but neither in Livy or Virgil, Gibbon or Bossuet, with intenser sympathy or more kindred power, than in those rushing and unflagging verses in which the middle-age poet hears the imperial legislator relate the fated course of the "sacred sign," from the day when Pallas died for it, till it accomplished the vengeance of heaven in Judæa, and afterwards, under Charlemagne, smote down the enemies of the Church.[82]
The following passage, from the _De Monarchia_, will show the poet's view of the Roman empire, and its office in the world: To the reasons above alleged, a memorable experience brings confirmation: I mean that state of mankind which the Son of God, when He would for man's salvation take man upon Him, either waited for, or ordered when so He willed. For if from the fall of our first parents, which was the starting-point of all our wanderings, we retrace the various dispositions of men and their times, we shall not find at any time, except under the divine monarch Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed, that the world was everywhere quiet. And that then mankind was happy in the tranquillity of universal peace, this all writers of history, this famous poets, this even the Scribe of the meekness of Christ has deigned to attest. And lastly, Paul has called that most blessed condition, the fulness of time. Truly time, and the things of time, were full, for no mystery of our felicity then lacked its minister. But how the world has gone on from the time when that seamless robe was first torn by the claws of covetousness, we may read, and would that we might not also see. O race of men, by how great storms and losses, by how great shipwrecks hast thou of necessity been vexed since, transformed into a beast of many heads, thou hast been struggling different ways, sick in understanding, equally sick in heart. The higher intellect, with its invincible reasons, thou reckest not of; nor of the inferior, with its eye of experience; nor of affection, with the sweetness of divine suasion, when the trumpet of the Holy Ghost sounds to thee--"Behold, how good is it, and how pleasant, brethren, to dwell together in unity."--_De Monarch._ lib. i. p. 54.
Yet this great Roman empire existed still unimpaired in name--not unimposing even in what really remained of it. Dante, to supply a want, turned it into a theory--a theory easy to smile at now, but which contained and was a beginning of unknown or unheeded truth. What he yearns after is the predominance of the principle of justice in civil society. That, if it is still imperfect, is no longer a dream in our day; but experience had never realised it to him, and he takes refuge in tentative and groping theory. The divinations of the greatest men have been vague and strange, and none have been stranger than those of the author of the _De Monarchia_. The second book, in which he establishes the title of the Roman people to Universal Empire, is as startling a piece of mediæval argument as it would be easy to find.
As when we cannot attain to look upon a cause, we commonly wonder at a new effect, so when we know the cause, we look down with a certain derision on those who remain in wonder. And I indeed wondered once how the Roman people had, without any resistance, been set over the world; and looking at it superficially, I thought that they had obtained this by no right, but by mere force of arms. But when I fixed deeply the eyes of my mind on it, and by most effectual signs knew that Divine Providence had wrought this, wonder departed, and a certain scornful contempt came in its stead, when I perceived the nations raging against the pre-eminence of the Roman people:--when I see the people imagining a vain thing, as I once used to do; when, moreover, I grieve over kings and princes agreeing in this only, to be against their Lord and his anointed Roman Emperor. Wherefore in derision, not without a certain grief, I can cry out, for that glorious people and for Cæsar, with him who cried in behalf of the Prince of Heaven, "Why did the nations rage, and the people imagine vain things; the kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were joined in one against the Lord and his anointed." But (because natural love suffers not derision to be of long duration, but, like the summer sun, which, scattering the morning mists, irradiates the east with light, so prefers to pour forth the light of correction) therefore to break the bonds of the ignorance of such kings and rulers, to show that the human race is free from _their_ yoke, I will exhort myself, in company with the most holy Prophet, taking up his following words, "Let us break their bonds, and cast away from us their yoke."--_De Monarch._ lib. ii. p. 58.
And to prove this pre-eminence of right in the Roman people, and their heirs, the Emperors of Christendom, he appeals not merely to the course of Providence, to their high and noble ancestry, to the blessings of their just and considerate laws, to their unselfish guardianship of the world--"_Romanum imperium de fonte nascitur pietatis_;"--not merely to their noble examples of private virtue, self-devotion, and public spirit--"those most sacred victims of the Decian house, who laid down their lives for the public weal, as Livy--not as _they_ deserved, but as _he_ was able--tells to their glory; and that unspeakable sacrifice of freedom's sternest guardians, the Catos;" not merely to the "judgment of God" in that great duel and wager of battle for empire, in which heaven declared against all other champions and "co-athletes"--Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, and by all the formalities of judicial combat awarded the great prize to those who fought, not for love or hatred, but justice--"_Quis igitur nunc adeo obtusæ mentis est, qui non videat, sub jure duelli gloriosum populum coronam totius orbis esse lucratum?_"--not merely to arguments derived "from the principles of the Christian faith"--but to _miracles_. "The Roman empire," he says, "was, in order to its perfections, aided by the help of miracles; therefore it was willed by God; and, by consequence, both was, and is, of right." And these miracles, "proved by the testimony of illustrious authorities," are the prodigies of Livy--the ancile of Numa, the geese of the Capitol, the escape of Clelia, the hail-storm which checked Hannibal.[83]
The intellectual phenomenon is a strange one. It would be less strange if Dante were arguing in the schools, or pleading for a party. But even Henry of Luxemburg cared little for such a throne as the poet wanted him to fill, much less Can Grande and the Visconti. The idea, the theory, and the argument, are of the writer's own solitary meditation. We may wonder. But there are few things more strange than the history of argument. How often has a cause or an idea turned out, in the eyes of posterity, so much better than its arguments. How often have we seen argument getting as it were into a groove, and unable to extricate itself, so as to do itself justice. The everyday cases of private experience, of men defending right conclusions on wrong or conventional grounds, or in a confused form, entangled with conclusions of a like yet different nature;--of arguments, theories, solutions, which once satisfied, satisfying us no longer on a question about which we hold the same belief--of one party unable to comprehend the arguments of another--of one section of the same side smiling at the defence of their common cause by another--are all reproduced on a grander scale in the history of society.
There too, one age cannot comprehend another; there too it takes time to disengage, subordinate, eliminate. Truth of this sort is not the elaboration of one keen or strong mind, but of the secret experience of many; "_nihil sine ætate est, omnia tempus expectant_." But a counterpart to the _De Monarchia_ is not wanting in our own day; theory has not ceased to be mighty. In warmth and earnestness, in sense of historic grandeur, in its support of a great cause and a great idea, not less than in the thought of its motto, [Greek: heis koiranos estô], De Maistre's volume _Du Pape_, recalls the antagonist _De Monarchia_; but it recalls it not less in its bold dealing with facts, and its bold assumption of principles, though the knowledge and debates of five more busy centuries, and the experience of modern courts and revolutions, might have guarded the Piedmontese nobleman from the mistakes of the old Florentine.
But the idea of the _De Monarchia_ is no key to the _Commedia_. The direct and primary purpose of the _Commedia_ is surely its obvious one. It is to stamp a deep impression on the mind, of the issues of good and ill doing here--of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do this forcibly, it is done in detail--of course it can only be done in figure. Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the numberless spirits who have ever lived here--spirits still living and sentient as himself: parallel with our life, they too are suffering or are at rest. Without pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this awful scene is going on--the judgments of God are being fulfilled--could we but see it. It exists, it might be seen, at each instant of time, by a soul whose eyes were opened, which was carried through it. And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is the working out, which is peculiar to him. It is not a barren vision. His subject is, besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates it; by sight, according to his figures--in reality, by faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe, then through the tempered chastisements and resignation of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the course of the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning itself from it--of its purification and preparation for its high lot, by converse with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by efforts of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institution, or thought. Nor will we say but that beyond this earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp and imagine to himself something of that awful process and training, by which, whether in or out of the flesh, the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief Good.
Thus it seems that even in its main design, the poem has more than one aspect; it is a picture, a figure, partially a history, perhaps an anticipation. And this is confirmed, by what the poet has himself distinctly stated, of his ideas of poetic composition. His view is expressed generally in his philosophical treatise, the _Convito_; but it is applied directly to the _Commedia_, in a letter, which, if in its present form, of doubtful authenticity, without any question represents his sentiments, and the substance of which is incorporated in one of the earliest writings on the poem, Boccaccio's commentary. The following is his account of the subject of the poem: For the evidence of what is to be said, it is to be noted, that this work is not of one single meaning only, but may be said to have many meanings ("_polysensuum_"). For the first meaning is that of the letter--another is that of things signified by the letter; the first of these is called the literal sense, the second, the allegorical or moral. This mode of treating a subject may for clearness' sake be considered in those verses of the Psalm, "_In exitu Israel_." "When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from the strange people, Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion." For if we look at the _letter_ only, there is here signified, the going out of the children of Israel in the time of Moses--if at the _allegory_ there is signified our redemption through Christ--if at the _moral_ sense there is signified to us the conversion of the soul from the mourning and misery of sin to the state of grace--if at the _anagogic_ sense,[84] there is signified the passing out of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of everlasting glory. And these mystical meanings, though called by different names, may all be called _allegorical_ as distinguished from the literal or historical sense.... This being considered, it is plain that there ought to be a twofold subject, concerning which the two corresponding meanings may proceed. Therefore we must consider first concerning the subject of this work as it is to be understood literally, then as it is to be considered allegorically. The subject then of the whole work, taken literally only, is the state of souls after death considered in itself. For about this, and on this, the whole work turns. But if the work be taken allegorically, its subject is man, as, by his freedom of choice deserving well or ill, he is subject to the justice which rewards and punishes.[85]
When we had run O'er all the ladder to its topmost round, As there we stood, on me the Mantuan fix'd His eyes, and thus he spake: "Both fires, my son, The temporal and the eternal, thou hast seen: And art arrived, where of itself my ken No further reaches. I with skill and art, Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take For guide. Thou hast o'ercome the steeper way, O'ercome the straiter. Lo! the sun, that darts His beam upon thy forehead: lo! the herb, The arborets and flowers, which of itself This land pours forth profuse. Till those bright eyes With gladness come, which, weeping, made me haste To succour thee, thou mayest or seat thee down, Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more Sanction of warning voice or sign from me, Free of thine own arbitrement to choose, Discreet, judicious. To distrust thy sense Were henceforth error. I invest thee then With crown and mitre, sovereign o'er thyself." _Purg._ c. 27--CARY.]
Aguzza, qui, lettor, ben l'occhi al vero: Chè il velo è ora ben tanto sottile, Certo, che il trapassar dentro è leggiero.--_Purg._ c. 8. But eyes are still strained in conjecture and doubt. [Footnote 88: Sempre a quel ver, ch'ha faccia di menzogna, De' l'uom chiuder le labbra, quanto puote, Però che senza colpa fa vergogna. Ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note Di questa _Commedia_, lettor, ti giuro S'elle non sien di lunga grazia vote, &c.--_Inf._ 16.] Yet the most certain and detailed commentary, one which assigned the exact reason for every image or allegory, and its place and connexion in a general scheme, would add but little to the charm or to the use of the poem. It is not so obscure but that every man's experience who has thought over and felt the mystery of our present life, may supply the commentary--the more ample, the wider and more various has been his experience, the deeper and keener his feeling. Details and links of connexion may be matter of controversy. Whether the three beasts of the forest mean definitely the vices of the time, or of Florence specially, or of the poet himself--"the wickedness of his heels, compassing him round about"--may still exercise critics and antiquaries; but that they carry with them distinct and special impressions of evil, and that they are the hindrances of man's salvation, is not doubtful. And our knowledge of the key of the allegory, where we possess it, contributes but little to the effect. We may infer from the _Convito_[90] that the eyes of Beatrice stand definitely for the _demonstrations_, and her smiles for the _persuasions_ of wisdom; but the poetry of the Paradiso is not about demonstrations and persuasions, but about looks and smiles; and the ineffable and holy calm--"_serenitatis et æternitatis afflatus_"--which pervades it, comes from the sacred truths, and holy persons, and that deep spirit of high-raised yet composed devotion, which it requires no interpreter to show us.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.