: Dante: Six Sermons by Wicksteed Philip H Philip Henry - Dante Alighieri 1265-1321

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DANTE'S LIFE AND PRINCIPLES

There are probably few competent judges who would hesitate to give Dante a place of honour in the triad of the world's greatest poets; and amongst these three Dante occupies a position wholly his own, peerless and unapproached in history.

For Homer and Shakespeare reflect the ages in which they lived, in all their fullness and variety of life and motive, largely sinking their own individuality in the intensity and breadth of their sympathies. They are great teachers doubtless, and fail not to lash what they regard as the growing vices or follies of the day, and to impress upon their hearers the solemn lessons of those inevitable facts of life which they epitomise and vivify. But their teaching is chiefly incidental or indirect, it is largely unconscious, and is often almost as difficult to unravel from their works as it is from the life and nature they so faithfully reflect.

With Dante it is far otherwise. Aglow with a prophet's passionate conviction, an apostle's undying zeal, he is guided by a philosopher's breadth and clearness of principle, a poet's unfailing sense of beauty and command of emotions, to a social reformer's definite and practical aims and a mystic's peace of religious communion. And though his works abound in dramatic touches of startling power and variety, and delineations of character unsurpassed in delicacy, yet with all the depth and scope of his sympathies he never for a moment loses himself or forgets his purpose.

As a philosopher and statesman, he had analysed with keen precision the social institutions, the political forces, and the historical antecedents by which he found his time and country dominated; as a moralist, a theologian, and a man, he had grasped with a firmness that nothing could relax the essential conditions of human blessedness here and hereafter, and with an intensity and fixity of definite self-conscious purpose almost without parallel he threw the passionate energy of his nature into the task of preaching the eternal truth to his countrymen, and through them to the world, and thwarting and crushing the powers and institutions which he regarded as hostile to the well-being of mankind. He strove to teach his brothers that their true bliss lay in the exercise of virtue here, and the blessed vision of God hereafter. And as a step towards this, and an essential part of its realisation, he strove to make Italy one in heart and tongue, to raise her out of the sea of petty jealousies and intrigues in which she was plunged; in a word, to erect her into a free, united country, with a noble mother tongue. These two purposes were one; and, supported and supplemented by a never-dying zeal for truth, a never-failing sense of beauty, they inspired the life and works of Dante Alighieri.

It is often held and taught, that a strong and definite didactic purpose must inevitably be fatal to the highest forms of art, must clip the wings of poetic imagination, distort the symmetry of poetic sympathy, and substitute hard and angular contrasts for the melting grace of those curved lines of beauty which pass one into the other. Had Dante never lived, I know not where we should turn for the decisive refutation of this thought; but in Dante it is the very combination said to be impossible that inspires and enthrals us. A perfect artist, guided in the exercise of his art by an unflagging intensity of moral purpose; a prophet, submitting his inspirations to the keenest philosophical analysis, pouring them into the most finished artistic moulds, yet bringing them into ever fresher and fuller contact with their living source; a moralist and philosopher whose thoughts are fed by a prophet's directness of vision and a poet's tender grace of love, a poet's might and subtlety of imagination--Philosopher, Prophet, Poet, supreme as each, unique as a combination of them all--such was Dante Alighieri! And his voice will never be drowned or forgotten as long as man is dragged downward by passion and struggles upward towards God, as long as he that sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, and he that sows to the spirit reaps of the spirit life everlasting, as long as the heart of man can glow responsive to a holy indignation with wrong, or can feel the sweetness of the harmonies of peace.

It is little that I can hope to do, and yet I would fain do something, towards opening to one here and there some glimpse into that mighty temple, instinct with the very presence of the Eternal, raised by the master hand, nay rather wrought out of the mighty heart of Dante; but before we can even attempt to gather up a few fragments of the 'Divine Comedy,' as landmarks to guide us, in our turn, through Hell and Purgatory up to Heaven, it is needful for us to have some conception who Dante Alighieri was, and what were his fortunes in this mortal life.

And here I must once for all utter a warning, and thereby discharge myself of a special duty. The Old Testament itself has not been more ruthlessly allegorised than have Dante's works and even his very life. The lack of trustworthy materials, in any great abundance, for an account of the poet's outward lot, the difficulty of fixing with certainty when he is himself relating actual events and when his apparent narratives are merely allegorical, the obscurity, incompleteness, and even apparent inconsistency of some of the data he supplies, the uncertainty as to the exact time at which his different works were composed and the precise relation in which they stand to each other, and the doubts which have been thrown upon the authenticity of some of the minor documents upon which the poet's biographers generally rely, have all combined to involve almost every step of his life in deep obscurity. Here, then, is a field upon which laborious research, ingenious conjecture, and wild speculation can find unending employment, and consequently every branch of the study has quite a literature of its own.

Now into this mass of controversial and speculative writings on Dante, I do not make the smallest pretensions to have penetrated a single step. I am far from wishing to disparage such studies, or to put forward in my own defence that stale and foolish plea, the refuge of pretentious ignorance in every region of inquiry, that a mind coming fresh to the study has the advantage over those that are already well versed in it; but surely the students who are making the elucidation of Dante their life work would not ask or wish, that until their endless task is completed all those whose souls have been touched by the direct utterance of the great poet should hold their peace until qualified to speak by half a life of study.

With no further apology, then, for seeming to venture too rashly on the task, we may go on to a brief sketch of Dante's life and principles. The main lines which I shall follow are in most cases traced distinctly enough by Dante's own hand, and to the best of my belief they represent a fair average of the present or recent conclusions of scholars; but, on the other hand, there have always been some who would unhesitatingly treat as allegory much of what I shall present to you as fact, who for instance would treat all Dante's love for Beatrice, and indeed Beatrice's very existence, as purely allegorical; and, again, where the allegory is admitted on all hands, there is a ceaseless shifting and endless variety in the special interpretations adopted and rejected by the experts.

Dante, or properly Durante, Alighieri was born in Florence of an ancient and noble family, in the year 1265. We may note that his life falls in a period which we used to be taught to regard as an age of intellectual stagnation and social barbarism, in which Christianity had degenerated into a jumbled chaos of puerile and immoral superstitions! We may note also that in the early years of his life the poet was a contemporary of some of the noblest representatives of the feudo-Catholic civilisation, that is to say of mediaeval philosophy, theology, and chivalry, while his manhood was joined in loving friendship with the first supremely great mediaeval artist, and before he died one of the great precursors and heralds of the revival of learning was growing up to manhood and another had already left his cradle. To speak of Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Louis, as living when Dante was born, of Giotto as his companion and friend, of Petrarch and Boccaccio as already living when he died, is to indicate more clearly than could be done by any more elaborate statement, the position he occupies at the very turning point of the Middle Ages when the forces of modern life had begun to rise, but the supremacy of mediaeval faith and discipline was as yet unbroken. Accordingly Dante, in whom the truest spirit of his age is, as it were, 'made flesh,' may be variously regarded as the great morning star of modern enlightenment, freedom, and culture, or as the very type of mediaeval discipline, faith, and chivalry. To me, I confess, this latter aspect of Dante's life is altogether predominant. To me he is the very incarnation of Catholicism, not in its shame, but in its glory. Yet the future is always contained in the present when rightly understood, and just because Dante was the perfect representative of his own age, he became the herald and the prophecy of the ages to come, not, as we often vainly imagine them, rebelling against and escaping from the overshadowing solemnity of the ages past, but growing out of them as their natural and necessary result.

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