After Dante had written his Purgatorio, he retired to the picturesque mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena and Bologna; and in the hospitium of an ancient monastery, "on the woody summit of a rock from which he might gaze on his ungrateful country, he renewed his studies in philosophy and theology."There, too, in that calm retreat, he commenced his Paradiso, the subject of profound meditations on what was held in highest value in the Middle Ages. The themes are theological and metaphysical.
They are such as interested Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, Anselm and Bernard. They are such as do not interest this age,--even the most gifted minds,--for our times are comparatively indifferent to metaphysical subtleties and speculations. Beatrice and Peter and Benedict alike discourse on the recondite subjects of the Bible in the style of Mediaeval doctors. The themes are great,--the incarnation, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, salvation by faith, the triumph of Christ, the glory of Paradise, the mysteries of the divine and human natures; and with these disquisitions are reproofs of bad popes, and even of some of the bad customs of the Church, like indulgences, and the corruptions of the monastic system. The Paradiso is a thesaurus of Mediaeval theology,--obscure, but lofty, mixed up with all the learning of the age, even of the lives of saints and heroes and kings and prophets. Saint Peter examines Dante upon faith, James upon hope, and John upon charity. Virgil here has ceased to be his guide; but Beatrice, robed in celestial loveliness, conducts him from circle to circle, and explains the sublimest doctrines and resolves his mortal doubts,--the object still of his adoration, and inferior only to the mother of our Lord, regina angelorum, mater carissima, whom the Church even then devoutly worshipped, and to whom the greatest sages prayed.
"Thou virgin mother, daughter of thy Son, Humble and high beyond all other creatures, The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,--Thou art the one who such nobility To human nature gave, that its Creator Did not disdain to make himself its creature.
Not only thy benignity gives succor To him who asketh it, but oftentimes Forerunneth of its own accord the asking.
In thee compassion is; in thee is pity In thee magnificence; in thee unites Whate'er of goodness is in any creature."In the glorious meditation of those grand subjects which had such a charm for Benedict and Bernard, and which almost offset the barbarism and misery of the Middle Ages,--to many still regarded as "ages of faith,"--Dante seemingly forgets his wrongs; and in the company of her whom he adores he seems to revel in the solemn ecstasy of a soul transported to the realms of eternal light. He lives now with the angels and the mysteries,--"Like to the fire That in a cloud imprisoned doth break out expansive.
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Thus, in that heavenly banqueting his soul Outgrew himself, and, in the transport lost, Holds no remembrance now of what she was."The Paradise of Dante is not gloomy, although it be obscure and indefinite. It is the unexplored world of thought and knowledge, the explanation of dogmas which his age accepted. It is a revelation of glories such as only a lofty soul could conceive, but could not paint,--a supernal happiness given only to favored mortals, to saints and martyrs who have triumphed over the seductions of sense and the temptations of life,--a beatified state of blended ecstasy and love.
"Had I a tongue in eloquence as rich as is the coloring in fancy's loom, 'Twere all too poor to utter the least part of that enchantment."Such is this great poem; in all its parts and exposition of the ideas of the age,--sometimes fierce and sometimes tender, profound and infantine, lofty and degraded, like the Church itself, which conserved these sentiments. It is an intensely religious poem, and yet more theological than Christian, and full of classical allusions to pagan heroes and sages,--a most remarkable production considering the age, and, when we remember that it is without a prototype in any language, a glorious monument of reviving literature, both original and powerful.
Its appearance was of course an epoch, calling out the admiration of Italians, and of all who could understand it,--of all who appreciated its moral wisdom in every other country of Europe. And its fame has been steadily increasing, although I fear much of the popular enthusiasm is exaggerated and unfelt. One who can read Italian well may see its "fiery emphasis and depth," its condensed thought and language, its supernal scorn and supernal love, its bitterness and its forgiveness; but few modern readers accept its theology or its philosophy, or care at all for the men whose crimes he punishes, and whose virtues he rewards.
But there is great interest in the man, as well as in the poem which he made the mirror of his life, and the register of his sorrows and of those speculations in which he sought to banish the remembrance of his misfortunes. His life, like his poem, is an epic. We sympathize with his resentments, "which exile and poverty made perpetually fresh." "The sincerity of his early passion for Beatrice," says Hallam, "pierces through the veil of allegory which surrounds her, while the memory of his injuries pursues him into the immensity of eternal light; and even in the company of saints and angels his unforgiving spirit darkens at the name of Florence. . . .