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 Romance 
 Seminar
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 THE SPIRITUAL SENSE 
 
 OF 
 
 DANTE'S "DIYINA COMMEDIA 1 
 
 BY 
 
 W. T.\ HARRIS 
 
 HG./3.I3S 
 
 NEW YORK 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1889
 
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 COPYBIGHT, 1889. 
 BY W. T. HARRIS. 
 
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 TO 
 MRS. BEVERLY ALLEN, 
 
 OF ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, 
 
 IN MEMORY OF THE HOSPITABLE ENTERTAINMENT AND ENCOURAGEMENT 
 THAT SHE EXTENDED TO THE ST. LOUIS ART SOCIETY 
 
 AND TO KINDRED ENTERPRISES 
 
 IN THE YEARS WHEN THESE STUDIES BEGAN, 
 
 THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR.
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 To this essay on the spiritual significance of the " Divina Corn- 
 media" I prefix a few words, interesting only to the few who 
 study works of literature for spiritual insight. Such insight is of 
 very slow growth, and though I cannbt be permitted to claim any- 
 thing more than a very feeble approach to it in the reflections 
 which I bring forward here, yet I know that the theme dignifies 
 the writer, and that the circumstances of a struggle to attain a 
 high object are worthy of mention, even if the success of the 
 struggle is not great. 
 
 My first reading in Dante began as early as 1858, and continued 
 at intervals for four years, by which time I had completed only 
 the " Inferno," studying it superficially in the original and using 
 Carlyle's translation as a sort of dictionary and general guide to 
 its meaning perhaps better described in college slang as a " pony " 
 or " crib." I read also the translations of Wright and Gary of the 
 " Purgatorio " and " Paradiso " at this time.
 
 6 Preface. 
 
 The poem had attractive poetic passages for me at the time, but 
 as a vision of the future state of any portion of mankind I could 
 not accept it. Its horrors repelled me. After this I began to 
 look for some point of view whence I could see a permanent truth 
 in the poem. The possibility of an inner meaning that would 
 reconcile me to the outer form of a work of art I had already 
 learned in 1861 by studying landscape painting and afterward by 
 a like study of Beethoven's 'masterpieces and, more especially, of 
 Schumann's "Pilgrimage of the Rose" and Mendelssohn's "Song 
 of Praise." 
 
 The " Last Judgment," by Michel Angelo, I had begun to 
 study as early as 1863 in an outline engraving, and by 1865 a per- 
 manent meaning had begun to dawn upon me. I saw that the 
 picture presented symbolically the present condition of the saints 
 and sinners, not as they seem to themselves and others, but as they 
 are in very truth. It placed them under the form of eternity, to 
 use the expressive phrase of Spinoza, "Sub specie ceternitatis" 
 At once Dante's " Inferno " also became clear, as having substan- 
 tially the same meaning. I saw that the great sculptor and painter 
 had derived his ideas from the poet. The ideas of Thomas Car-
 
 Preface. 7 
 
 lyle, in his chapter on " Natural Supernaturalism " in the " Sartor 
 Resartus," seemed to me to offer a parallel thought to the " Last 
 Judgment." Remove the illusion of time, and thus bring together 
 the deed and its consequence, and you see it under the form of 
 eternity. So, too, paint the deed with colors derived from all its 
 consequences, and you will picture its final or ultimate judg- 
 ment. This interpretation I wrote out in 1868 and read to a circle 
 of friends, sometimes called " The St. Louis Art Society," and it 
 was published in the April number of the " Journal of Specula- 
 tive Philosophy" for 1869, under the title "Michel Angelo's Last 
 Judgment." I quote below the passage in which I connected the 
 views of the sculptor and the poet. 
 
 It was about this time (1869) that it occurred to me that there 
 is a threefold view of human deeds. First, there is the deed 
 taken with the total compass of its effects and consequences this 
 is the picture of the " Inferno." 
 
 Secondly, there is the evil deed seen in its secondary effects by 
 way of reaction on the doer a process of gradual revelation to 
 the doer that his deed is not salutary either for himself or for 
 others. The^ evil doer at first does not see that his being is so
 
 8 Preface. 
 
 closely connected with the being of society that if he does injury 
 to his fellows, thinking to derive selfish benefit at the expense of 
 others, he always works evil to himself sooner or later. He thinks 
 that his cunning is sufficient to secure the good to himself, and 
 at the same time to avoid the reaction of evil on himself. But 
 the real process of reaction which comes with time teaches him 
 the lesson of the impossibility of divorcing the individual doer 
 from the consequences of his deeds. This secondary process of 
 reaction is a purifying process in so far as it teaches this lesson to 
 the evil doer. He cannot escape purification to the extent that he 
 becomes enlightened by the wisdom of this experience. 
 
 If he sees that he has to receive the consequences of his deeds, 
 he must needs acquire the habit of considering the ultimate effects 
 of actions ; he will renounce deeds that can end only in pain and 
 repression of normal growth. 
 
 Hence a third aspect of human deeds becomes manifest the 
 purified action which emits only such deeds as build up the social 
 whole affirmatively, and consequently return upon the doer to 
 bless him continually. The purified human will dwells in the 
 " Paradiso," while during the process of purification it is in the
 
 Preface. 9 
 
 " Purgatorio." It is in purgatory so long as it is in the state of 
 being surprised by the discovery that its selfish deeds invariably 
 bring their punishment upon the doer, and so long as the individ- 
 ual still hesitates to renounce utterly and entirely the selfish deed. 
 This renunciation, of course, takes place when the soul has thor- 
 oughly accustomed itself to seeing the selfish deed and its' conse- 
 quences in one unity ; then its loveliness has entirely departed. 
 The taste of a poison may be sweet to the mouth of a child, but 
 it soon produces painful gripes. The child learns to associate the 
 sweet taste and the gripes with the mental picture of the poison, and 
 now the very sight of it becomes loathsome. When temptation 
 is no longer possible, the child is purified as regards this danger. 
 
 From 1870 to 1880 every year brought me seemingly valuable 
 thoughts on some part of Dante's great work. I presented these 
 views in lectures to audiences from time to time. In the summer 
 and fall of 1883 I made new studies on the whole poem, and gave 
 a course of ten lectures to a St. Louis audience in 1884 (January 
 to March). The present paper, which was written in 1886 for the 
 Concord School of Philosophy, is a summary of the St. Louis 
 course, with marginal notes added at this time.
 
 10 Preface. 
 
 In 1886 I came into possession of a copy of Scartazzini's essay, 
 "Ueber die Congruenz der Siinden in Dante's Holle," and discov- 
 ered that many of the conjectures as to the relation between sins 
 and punishments in the " Inferno " which I had set forward in 
 these lectures were already the property of the Dante public 
 through that distinguished scholar's paper in the Annual of the 
 German Dante Society (" Jahrb. d. deutschen Dante Gesellschaft," 
 vol. iv, 1877). In this very valuable article Scartazzini frequent- 
 ly quotes with approval the interpretations of Karl Graul, who 
 seems to have suggested many happy explanations of the sym- 
 bolism. 1 One would wish to see this work of Graul reproduced 
 in English. Meanwhile I expect to publish in the next number 
 of my Journal the essay of Scartazzini, which has been trans- 
 lated by Miss Thekla Bernays, of St. Louis,- for the purpose. 
 
 Had I met with Graul's work twenty-five years ago, when I first 
 
 1 In the " Harvard University Bulletin," " Biographical Contributions, Edited by Jus- 
 tin Windsor, No. 7, the Dante Collections in Harvard College and Boston Public Libra- 
 ries, Part I, by William Coolidge Lane, 1885," I find the work of Graul named under 
 No. 208 : " Gottliche Komoedie in's Deutsche uebertragen, und historisch, aesthetisch, 
 und vornehmlich theologisch erlautert von Karl Graul. Leipzig, 1843." Only the "In- 
 ferno " published.
 
 Preface. 11 
 
 began to see the inner meaning of the poem, I should have adopted 
 it as my guide. Graul's volume bears the imprint of 1843 ; but 
 Scartazzini's essay did not appear until 18T7, or after my views 
 had taken shape. 
 
 In matters of interpreting myths and symbols there is so wide 
 a margin for arbitrary exercise of fancy that it must be regarded 
 as a strong evidence of the probable truthfulness of a theory when 
 two entirely independent readers arrive at the same results in de- 
 tail. At least I have been much strengthened in my own views, 
 and have gained in respect for my own way of studying the poem 
 on reading the thoughts of the greatest of living Dante scholars 
 and finding so many coincidences. 
 
 (From an Essay on Michel Angelo's " Last Judgment " in the " Journal of Speculative 
 Philosophy" for April, 1869.) 
 
 "Michel Angelo passes by all subordinate scenes and seizes at 
 once the supreme moment of all History of the very world itself 
 and all that it contains. This is the vastest attempt that the 
 Artist can make, and is the same that Dante has ventured in the 
 ' Divina Commedia.'
 
 12 Preface. 
 
 " In Religion we seize the absolute truth as a process going on 
 in Time: the deeds of humanity are judged 'after the end of the 
 world.' After death Dives goes to torments, and Lazarus to the 
 realm of the blest. 
 
 " The immense significance of the Christian idea of Hell as com- 
 pared with the Hades of Greek and Roman Mythology we cannot 
 dwell upon. This idea has changed the hearts of mankind. That 
 man by will determines his destiny, and that "between right and 
 wrong doing there is a difference eternally fixed " this dogma has 
 tamed the fierce barbarian blood of Europe and is the producer of 
 what we have of civilization and freedom in the present time. 
 In the so-called heathen civilizations there is a substratum of fate 
 presupposed under all individual character which prevents the 
 complete return of the consequences of individual acts upon their 
 author. Thus the citizen was not made completely universal by 
 the laws of the state as in modern times. The Christian doctrine 
 of Hell is the first appearance in a conceptive form of this deep- 
 est of all comprehensions of Personality ; and out of it have 
 grown our modern humanitarian doctrines, however paradoxical 
 this may seem.
 
 Preface. 13 
 
 "In this supreme moment all worldly distinctions fall away, and 
 the naked soul stands before Eternity with naught save the pure 
 essence of its deeds to rely upon. All souls are equal before God 
 so far as mere worldly eminence is concerned. Their inequality 
 rests solely upon the degree that they have realized the Eternal 
 will by their own choice. 
 
 " But this dogma as it is held in the Christian Religion is not 
 merely a dogma ; it is the deepest of speculative truths. As such 
 it is seized by Dante and Michel Angelo, and in this universal 
 form every one must recognize it if he would free it from all nar- 
 rowness and sectarianism. The point of view is this: The whole 
 world is seized at once under the form of Eternity ; all things are 
 reduced to their lowest terms. Every deed is seen through the 
 perspective of its own consequences. Hence every human being 
 under the influence of any one of the deadly sins Anger, Lust, 
 Avarice, Intemperance, Pride, Envy, and Indolence is being 
 dragged down into the Inferno just as Michel Angelo has depicted. 
 On the other hand, any one who practises the cardinal virtues 
 Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude is elevating him- 
 self toward celestial clearness.
 
 14 Preface. 
 
 " If any one will study Dante carefully he will find that the 
 punishments of the ' Inferno ' are emblematical of the very states 
 of mind one experiences when under the influence of the passions 
 there punished. 
 
 " To find the punishment for any given sin, Dante looks at the 
 state of rnind which it causes in the sinner, and gives it its appro- 
 priate emblem. 
 
 " The angry and sullen are plunged underneath deep putrid 
 mud, thus corresponding to the state of mind produced by anger. 
 If we try to understand a profound truth, or to get into a spirit- 
 ual frame of mind, when terribly enraged, we shall see ourselves 
 in putrid mud, and breathing its thick, suffocating exhalations. 
 So, too, those who yield to the lusts of the flesh are blown about 
 in thick darkness by violent winds. The avaricious carry heavy 
 weights ; the intemperate suffer the eternal rain of foul water, 
 hail, and snow (dropsy, dyspepsia, delirium tremens, gout, apo- 
 plexy, etc.). 
 
 " So Michel Angelo in this picture has seized things in their 
 essential nature : he has pierced through the shadows of time, and 
 exhibited to us at one view the world of humanity as it is in the
 
 Preface. 15 
 
 sight of God, or as it is in its ultimate analysis. Mortals are there, 
 not as they seem to themselves or to their companions, but as they 
 are when measured by the absolute standard the final destiny of 
 spirit. This must recommend the work to all men of all times, 
 whether one holds to this or that theological creed, for it is the 
 Last Judgment in the sense that it is the ultimate or absolute esti- 
 mate to be pronounced upon each deed, and the question of the 
 eternal punishment of any individual is not necessarily brought 
 into account. Everlasting punishment is the true state of all who 
 persist in the commission of those sins. The sins are indissolubly 
 bound up in pain. Through all time anger shall bring with it the 
 'putrid-mud ' condition of the soul; the indulgence of lustful pas- 
 sions, the stormy tempest and spiritual night; intemperance, the 
 pitiless rain of hail and snow and foul water. The wicked sinner 
 so far forth and so long as he is a sinner shall be tormented 
 forever, for we are now and always in Eternity. ' Every one 
 of us,' as Carlyle says, 'is a Ghost. Sweep away the Illusion of 
 Time ; glance from the near moving cause to its far-distant mover ; 
 compress the threescore years into three minutes are we not spir- 
 its that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance, and that fade
 
 16 Preface. 
 
 away again into air and invisibility ? We start out of Nothing- 
 ness, take figure, and are apparitions ; 'round us, as 'round the 
 veriest spectre, is Eternity ; and to Eternity minutes are as years 
 rand aeons.' 
 
 " Thus by the Divine Purpose of the Universe by the Abso- 
 lute every deed is seen in its true light, in the entire compass of 
 its effects. Just as we strive in our human laws to establish jus- 
 tice by turning back upon the criminal the effects of his deeds, so, 
 in fact, when placed ' under the form of Eternity,' all deeds do 
 return to the doer ; and this is the final adjustment, the ' end of 
 all things' it is the Last Judgment. And this judgment is now 
 and is always the only actual Fact in the world." 
 
 (From an article on " The Relation of Religion to Art," " Journal of Speculative 
 Philosophy," April, 1876.) 
 
 " This first great Christian poem (Dante's ' Divina Coin- 
 media ') is regarded by Schelling as the archetype of all Christian 
 poetry. . . . The poem embodies the Catholic view of life, and 
 for this reason is all the more wholesome for study by modern 
 Protestants. The threefold future world Inferno, Purgatorio,
 
 Preface. 17 
 
 Paradise presents us the exhaustive picture of man's relation to 
 his deeds. The Protestant ' hereafter ' omits the purgatory but in- 
 cludes the Inferno and Paradise. What has become of this miss- 
 ing link in modern Protestant Art? we may inquire, and our in- 
 quiry is a pertinent one, for there is no subject connected with 
 the relation of Religion to Art which is so fertile in suggestive 
 insights to the investigator. . . . 
 
 " One must reduce life to its lowest terms, and drop away all 
 consideration of its adventitious surroundings. The deeds of man 
 in their threefold aspect are judged in this ' mystic, unfathomable 
 poem.' The great fact of human responsibility is the key-note. 
 Whatever man does he does to himself. If he does violence, he 
 injures himself. If he works righteousness, he creates a paradise 
 for himself. 
 
 "Now, a deed has two aspects:, First, its immediate relation 
 to the doer. The mental atmosphere in which one does a deed is 
 of first consideration. If a wrong or wicked deed, then is the at- 
 mosphere of the criminal close and stifling to the doer. The 
 angry man is rolling about suffocating in putrid mud. The incon- 
 tinent is driven about by violent winds of passion. Whatever
 
 18 Preface. 
 
 deed a man shall do must be seen in the entire perspective of its 
 effects to exhibit its relation to the doer. The Inferno is filled 
 with those whose acts and habits of life surround them with an at- 
 mosphere of torture. 
 
 "One does not predict that such punishment of each individual 
 is eternal ; but one thing is certain : that with the sins there pun- 
 ished, there is such special torture eternally connected. . . . 
 
 " Wherever the sin shall be, there shall be connected with it the 
 atmosphere of the Inferno, which is its punishment. The doer of 
 the sinful deed plunges into the Inferno on its commission. 
 
 " But Dante wrote the ' Purgatorio,' and in this portrays the 
 secondary effect of sin. The inevitable punishment bound up 
 with sin burns with purifying flames each sinner. The immediate 
 effect of the deed is the Inferno, but the secondary effect is purifi- 
 cation. Struggling up the steep side of purgatory under their 
 painful burdens go sinners punished for incontinence lust, glut- 
 tony, avarice, anger, and other sins that find their place of punish- 
 ment also in the Inferno. 
 
 " Each evil doer shall plunge into the Inferno, and shall scorch
 
 Preface. 19 
 
 over the flames of his own deeds until he repents and struggles up 
 the mountain of purgatory. 
 
 u ln the 'Paradiso' we have doers of those deeds, which, being 
 thoroughly positive in their nature, do not come back as punish- 
 ment upon their authors. 
 
 " The correspondence of sin and punishment is noteworthy. 
 Even our jurisprudence discovers a similar adaptation. If one 
 steals and deprives his neighbor of property, we manage by our 
 laws to make his deed glide off from society and come back on the 
 criminal, and thus he steals his own freedom and gets a cell in 
 jail. If a murderer takes life, his deed is brought back to him, 
 and he takes his own. 
 
 " The depth of Dante's insight discovers to him all human life 
 stripped of its wrappings, and every deed coming straight back 
 upon the doer, inevitably fixing his place in the scale of happiness 
 and misery. It is not so much a 'last judgment' of individual 
 men as it is of deeds in the abstract, for the brave man who sac- 
 rifices his life for another dwells in paradise so far as he contem- 
 plates his participation in that deed, but writhes in the Inferno in
 
 20 Preface. 
 
 so far as he has allowed himself to slip, through some act of in- 
 continence. 
 
 " If we return now to our question, What has become of the 
 purgatory in modern literature ? a glance will show us that the 
 fundamental idea of Dante's purgatory has formed the chief 
 thought of Protestant, ' humanitarian,' works of art. 
 
 " The thought that the sinful and wretched live a life of reac- 
 tion against the effects of their deeds is the basis of most of our 
 novels. Most notable are the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 
 this respect. His whole art is devoted to the portrayal of the 
 purgatorial effects of sin or crime upon its authors. The con- 
 sciousness of the deed and the consciousness of the verdict of one's 
 fellow-men continually burn at the heart, and with slow, eating 
 fires, consume the shreds of selfishness quite away. In the 
 ' Marble Faun ' we have the spectacle of an animal nature be- 
 trayed by sudden impulse into a crime ; and the torture of this 
 consciousness gradually purifies and elevates the semi-spiritual 
 being into a refined humanity. 
 
 " The use of suffering, even if brought on by sin and error, is 
 the burden of our best class of novels. George Eliot's ' Middle-
 
 Preface. 2 1 
 
 march,' 'Adam Bede,' 'Mill on the Floss,' and ' Romola' with 
 what intensity these portray the spiritual growth through error 
 and pain ! 
 
 "Thus, if Protestantism has omitted Purgatory from its Relig- 
 ion, certainly Protestant literature has taken it up and absorbed 
 it entire."
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 1. Introduction 27 
 
 2. Dante turns from Politics to Literature "... 41 
 
 3. In what sense Hell is Eternal 45 
 
 4. Punishment of the Pusillanimous ......... 53 
 
 5. Why Infants and Heathen Sages are in the Limbo ...... 54 
 
 6. The Punishments of the Incontinent 57 
 
 7. The Relation of Sloth to Anger among the Mortal Sins 60 
 
 8. What Form of Heresy is a Daughter of Sloth ? 63 
 
 9. The Punishment of the Violent 65 
 
 10. The Daughters of Envy : Ten Species of Fraud 67 
 
 11. The Circles of Treachery, the Daughter of Pride 73 
 
 12. The Spiritual Sense of Purgatory . . . 75 
 
 13. The Entrance to Purgatory 76 
 
 14. Church and State 82 
 
 15. The Purgatorial Stairs 90 
 
 16. The First Terrace : Purification from Pride . 93 
 
 1 7. Second Terrace : Purification from Envy ........ 95 
 
 18. Third Terrace : Dante's Purification from Anger 96 
 
 19. Fourth Terrace: Sloth and its Relation to the Other Mortal Sins . . .98 
 
 20. Fifth Terrace : Purification from Avarice 1 03 
 
 21. Sixth Terrace : Purgation of the Intemperate 104 
 
 22. Seventh Terrace : Dante's Purification from Lust 104 
 
 23. The Terrestrial Paradise . . 105
 
 24 Table of Contents. 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 24. The Spiritual Sense of " Lethe " . . v 107 
 
 25. The Ascent to Paradise Ill 
 
 26. The Heaven of the Moon. The Ritualists 114 
 
 27. The Heavens of Imperfect Wills 118 
 
 28. The Pusillanimous, the Procrastinators, and the Formalists . . . .118 
 
 29. The Heaven of Mercury. The Ambition for Fame 119 
 
 30. The Heaven. of Venus. Love as Limited to Special Persons . . . .121 
 
 31. The Heaven of the Sun. Theology 124 
 
 32. The Heaven of Mars. True Heroes 128 
 
 33. The Heaven of Jupiter. Just Rulers 129 
 
 34. The Doctrine of Salvation 130 
 
 35. The Heaven of Saturn. Faith, Hope, and Charity 142 
 
 36. The Heaven of the Fixed Stars 143 
 
 37. The Highest Heaven, the Empyrean. The Rose of Paradise and the Vision of 
 
 God 153 
 
 38. The Angelic Knowing 157 
 
 39. The Poetic Mythos. What it Embodies ? ....... 162 
 
 40. The Sun Myth. Its Spiritual Significance as Physical Description of Mind . 165 
 
 41. Homer's Mythos of Hades . 168 
 
 42. Plato's Threefold Future Life Described in the " Phaedo " . . . .170 
 
 43. Plato's Mythos of Er. The Purgatory 174 
 
 44. Virgil's '* JSneid." Descent of ^Eneas to Orals 180 
 
 45. Metempsychosis versus Eternal Punishment in Hell 185 
 
 46. Dante's Mythos of the Formation of the Inferno and the Purgatorial Mountain. 188 
 
 47. Dante's Mythos of the Roman Empire 190 
 
 48. The Minotaur and the Labyrinth in the Light of this Mythos . . . . 1 94 
 
 49. Minos as Judge in the Light of the Same Mythos . . . . . .197 
 
 50. Other My thologic Figures used by Dante . . 197
 
 Table of Contents. 25 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 51. The Mythos of Dante's " Purgatorio " 202 
 
 52. The Mythos of Dante's " Paradiso." Gnosticism and Neoplatonism . . . 203 
 
 53. This Mythos developed in the " Celestial Hierarchies " 208 
 
 54. The Heretical Tendency of this Mythos . . . . . . . . 211 
 
 55. The Doctrine of the Trinity a Symbol of the Highest Truth . . . .214 
 
 2
 
 THE SPIRITUAL SENSE OF 
 DANTE'S "DIYINA COMMEDIA." 
 
 1. Introduction. 
 
 That a poem should possess a spiritual sense does not seem to 
 the common view to be at all necessary to it. It must have a 
 poetic structure ; but does a poetic structure involve a spiritual 
 sense? It is essential that a poem should be built out of tropes 
 and personification. Its real poetic substance, in fact, is an in- 
 sight into the correspondence that exists between external events 
 and situations on the one hand and internal ideas and movements 
 of the soul on the other. Rhyme and rhythm are less essential 
 than this. The true poet is a creator in a high sense, because he 
 turns hitherto opaque facts into transparent metaphors, or because 
 he endows dead things with souls and thus personifies them. The 
 poet uses material forms, so that there glows a sort of morning 
 redness through them.
 
 28 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 There is something symbolic in a poem, but there is quite as 
 much danger from symbolism and allegory in a work of art as 
 from philosophy. If the poet can think philosophic ideas in a 
 philosophic form he will be apt to spoil his poem by attempting 
 to introduce them into its texture. An allegory is repellent to 
 the true poetic taste. The music of a verse is spoiled by the evi- 
 dence of a forced rhyme. So the glad surprise of a newly discov- 
 ered correspondence between the visible and invisible is unpleas- 
 antly suppressed by an intimation that it is a logical consequence 
 of a previously assumed comparison or metaphor. To force a 
 symbol into an allegory necessarily demands the sacrifice of the 
 native individuality of the facts and events which follow in the 
 train of the primary event or situation. They must all wear its 
 livery, whereas fresh poetic insight is fain to turn each one into 
 a new and original revelation of eternal beauty. 
 
 Neither philosophy as such nor allegory can be the best feature 
 of a genuine poem. Nevertheless, there are certain great poems 
 which owe their supreme pre-eminence to the circumstance that 
 they treat themes of such universal significance that they reflect 
 the operation of a supreme principle and its consequences in the
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 29 
 
 affairs of a world, and hence exhibit a philosophy realized, or in- 
 carnated, as it were. Their events and situations, too, being uni- 
 versal types, may be interpreted into many series of events within 
 the world order, and hence stand for so many allegories. Such 
 poems may be said to have a spiritual sense. Homer's " Iliad," 
 and more especially his " Odyssey," contain a philosophy and 
 many allegories. Goethe's " Faust " contains likewise a philoso- 
 phy, and its poetic types are all allegoric, without detriment to 
 their genuine poetic value. 
 
 But of all the great world-poems, unquestionably Dante's " Di- 
 vina Commedia" may be justly claimed to have a spiritual sense, 
 for it possesses a philosophic system and admits of allegorical 
 interpretation. It is par excellence the religious poem of the 
 world. And religion, like philosophy, deals directly with a first 
 principle of the universe, while, like poetry, it clothes its uni- 
 versal ideas in the garb of special events and situations, making 
 them types, and hence symbols, of the kind which may become 
 allegories. 
 
 Homer, too, shows us the religion of the Greeks, but it is an 
 art-religion, having only the same aim as essential poetry to turn
 
 30 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the natural into a symbol of the spiritual. Dante's theme is the 
 Christian religion, which goes beyond the problem of transfigur- 
 ing nature and deals with the far deeper problem of the salvation 
 of man. For man, as the summit of nature, transfigures nature 
 at the same time that he attains the divine. The insight into the 
 divine-human nature of the highest principle of the universe, and 
 the consequent necessity of human immortality and possibility of 
 human growth into divine perfection, includes the Greek principle 
 as a subordinate phase. 
 
 It is proper, therefore, to study the spiritual sense of the great 
 poem of Dante, and to inquire into its philosophy and its allegory. 
 What is Dante's theory of the world and what manner of world- 
 order results from it ? Not that we should expect that the philo- 
 sophic thought of a poet would be of a conscious and systematic 
 order ; that would not promise us so much. It is rather his deep 
 underlying view of the world so deep a conviction that he knows 
 of no other adequate statement for it than the structure of his 
 poem. If an artist does not feel that his work of art utters more 
 completely his thought than some prosaic statement may do it, he 
 is not an artist.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 31 
 
 In tact, a poet may introduce a theory of the world into his 
 poem which is not so deep and comprehensive as that implied in 
 the spiritual sense of his poem. This, we shall see, is often true 
 in the case of Dante that his poetic vision has glimpses of a 
 higher world-view than is contained in his interpretation of the 
 philosophy of the school men ; and his poetic discrimination of the 
 states of the soul under mortal sin is deeper and truer than the 
 ethical scheme which he borrowed from that philosophy. 
 
 Moreover, although allegory is the favorite vehicle for religious 
 revelation, and we have in this, the most religious of poems, a pre- 
 dominating tendency toward it, yet his allegory does not cover (or 
 discover) so deep a spiritual sense as the genuine art-structure of 
 his poem reveals. 
 
 In the beginning, let us call to mind the fundamental distinc- 
 tion between Christianity and Eastern religions. In the latter the 
 Absolute or Supreme Principle is conceived as utterly without form 
 and void. It is conceived as entirely lacking in particularity, ut- 
 terly devoid of attributes, properties, qualities, modes, and distinc- 
 tions of any kind whatever. Such is the Brahm of the Hindoo or 
 the subjective state of Nirvana of the Buddhists. Such is the
 
 32 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 western reflection of this thought at Alexandria and elsewhere in 
 the doctrines of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism. Basilides and 
 Valentinus, Proclns and Jamblichus, all hold to an utterly indeter- 
 minate, formless first principle. As a result, it follows that they 
 are obliged to resort to arbitrary and fanciful constructions in or- 
 der to explain the origin of a world of finite creatures. 
 
 Quite different is the Christian view of the Absolute. It holds 
 that the Absolute is not formless, but the very essence of all form 
 pure form, pure self-distinction, or self-consciousness, or reason. 
 For conscious personality is form in the highest sense, because its 
 energy is creative of form ; it is self-distinction, subject and object, 
 and hence in its very essence an activity ; an unconditioned en- 
 ergy unconditioned from without but self -conditioned from 
 within. 
 
 In this great idea, so radically differing from the Oriental thought, 
 Christianity has a twofold support the intuition of the Jewish 
 prophets and the philosophy of the Greeks. 
 
 The survey of the entire realm of thought by Plato and Aris- 
 totle has settled the question as to the possibilities of existence. 
 There can be no absolute which is utterly formless. Any absolute
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 33 
 
 whatsoever must be thought of as self-determining; as a pure self- 
 active energy, of the nature of thinking reason, although in degree 
 more comprehensive than human reason and entirely without its 
 intermittencies and eclipses. 
 
 An Absolute which is absolute form and this means self-forma- 
 tive, self-distinguishing, and hence self-particularizing, living, or, 
 what is the same, conscious personal being is essentially a Cre- 
 ator. Moreover, its creation is its own self-revelation, and, accord- 
 ing to this, God is essentially a self-revealing God. Hence Chris- 
 tianity is in a very deep sense a " revealed religion," for it is the 
 religion not of a hidden God who is a formless absolute, but of a 
 God whose essence it is to reveal Himself, and not remain hidden 
 in Himself. 
 
 In the first canto of the " Paradiso" Dante reports Beatrice as 
 laying down this doctrine of form : 
 
 "All things collectively have an order among themselves, and 
 this is form, which makes the universe resemble God." ' 
 
 Christianity has united in its views the Jewish intuition of holy 
 
 1 Le cose tutte quante Hann' ordine tra loro ; e questo d forma Che 1'universo a Dio 
 fa simigliante.
 
 34: The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 personality with the Greek philosophic conception of absolute Rea- 
 son. It has not put these ideas together so to speak but has 
 reached a new idea which includes and transcends them. More- 
 over, the deepest thought of Roman national life is in like manner 
 subsumed and taken up. While the Greek has theoretically 
 reached this highest principle of essential form and the Hebrew 
 has discovered it through his heart, the Roman has experienced it 
 through his will or volition. He has discovered that the highest 
 form in the universe is pure will. And this again is only a new 
 way of naming pure self-determination, pure reason, or pure per- 
 sonality. It sees the absolute form from the standpoint of the 
 will. According to this, all activity of the will returns to the doer. 
 Whatever man as free will does, he does to himself. Here is the 
 root of Dante's Divine Comedy. 
 
 Dante is a Roman, although he has Teutonic blood in his veins. 
 The Roman world-view preponderates in Italy to this day. Ac- 
 cording to the view of the absolute first principle as Will, each 
 being in acting acts upon itself and thereby becomes its own fate. 
 It creates its environment. The responsibility of the free agent 
 is infinite. If it acts so as to make for itself an environment of
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 35 
 
 deeds that are in harmony with its freedom, it lives in the ''Para- 
 diso." If it acts so as to contradict its nature, it makes for itself 
 the " Inferno." All acts of a free will that do not tend to create an 
 external environment of freedom will, of course, result in limiting 
 the original free will and in building up around it walls of hostile 
 fate. Fate is only a " maya " or illusion produced by not recog- 
 nizing the self-contradiction involved in willing in particular what 
 is contrary to the nature of will in general. 
 
 Since the Absolute is free will, it energizes creatively to form a 
 universe of free wills. But it cannot constrain wills to be free. 
 A created being's will is free to contradict its own essence and to 
 defy the absolute Free Will of God. 
 
 Here is the problem which exercised Paul and St. Augustine 
 and Calvin. What is the mediation between the free will of the 
 Creator and the free will of the creature ? There can be no con- 
 straint of the free will except through itself. It makes for itself 
 its own fate. But can it relieve itself from its fate also by its own 
 act \ Here is the all-important question. 
 
 The creature is a part of creation each man is only a member 
 of humanity. His will utters deeds that affect for good or ill his
 
 36 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 fellow-men. He in turn is affected in like manner by the deeds 
 of his fellows. Here is the secret of the method of the return 
 of the deed upon the doer. The individual acts upon his fellow- 
 men, and they react upon him according to the quality of his deeds. 
 
 Hence the individual man by his will creates his environment 
 through and by means of society, so that his fate or his freedom 
 is the reflection of what he does to his fellow-men. Only it is not 
 returned upon him by his own might, but by the freedom of his 
 fellow- members of society. 
 
 Here is the clew to the question of salvation. The circle of a 
 man's freedom includes not only his own deeds, but also the reac- 
 tion of society. Inasmuch as the whole of society stands to the 
 individual in the relation of infinite to finite (for he cannot meas- 
 ure its power), the return of his deed to him is the work of a 
 higher power, and his freedom is the work of grace and not the re- 
 sult of his own strength. This is the conception of GRACE as it 
 occurs in the Christian thought of the world. Man is free through 
 grace, and he perfects himself through grace, or indeed suffers evil 
 through grace ; for this conception of Grace includes Justice as one 
 of its elements.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 37 
 
 Deeds, then, are to be judged by their effect upon society, 
 whether they re-enforce the freedom of others or curtail that 
 freedom. Man as individual combines with his fellows, so as 
 to reap the results of the united effort of the whole. The individ- 
 ual thus avails himself of the entire species, and heals his imper- 
 fections. 
 
 Looking at human life in this way, Dante forms his views of 
 the deeds of men, and slowly constructs the framework of his three 
 worlds and fills them with their people. His classification and 
 gradation of sins in accordance with their effect on society fur- 
 nishes the structure of the first and second parts of the poem. 
 His insight into the subjective effects of these sins both their 
 immediate effect in producing a mental atmosphere in which the 
 individual breathes and lives his spiritual life, and their mediate 
 effect, which comes to the individual after the social whole reacts 
 upon him by reason of his deed his insight into these two effects 
 on the individual gives him the poetic material for painting the 
 sufferings of the wicked and the struggles of the penitent. 
 
 There is in many respects an excess of philosphic structure in 
 the " Divine Comedy." That there should be three parts to the
 
 38 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 poem does not suggest itself as a formalism. But that there 
 should be exactly thirty-three cantos in each part and, adding the 
 introductory canto, exactly one hundred cantos in the whole, seems 
 an excess in this respect. So, too, when we are told that the triple 
 rhyme suggests the Trinity, we find that the suggestion is a vague 
 and trivial one, approaching a vulgar superstition. So, too, the 
 fact that thirty-three years suggests the years of Christ's earthly 
 life. In the second Treatise (Chapter I) of his " Convito " Dante 
 tells us that it is possible to understand a book in four different ways. 
 There is in a poem a literal, an allegorical, a moral, and a mystical 
 sense (litterale, allegorico, morale, anagogico doe sovra sensd). 
 As the leading of Israel out of Egypt should signify, besides its 
 literal meaning, mystically (anagogically) or spiritually the soul's 
 liberation from sin the exodus of the soul, as it were. He says 
 the literal must go first, because you cannot come to the allegori- 
 cal except through the literal; it is impossible to come to that 
 which is within except through the without. " The allegorical 
 is a truth concealed under a beautiful untruth." The moral sense 
 of a book is its practical wisdom what it contains useful for prac- 
 tical guidance (a utilitd di loro). But, in spite of all his in-
 
 Dante's " Divina Commedia" 39 
 
 genuity, we must all, I think, confess that Dante's elaborate syn- 
 tactical analyses of his love poems in the " Yita Nuova," as well 
 as his disquisitions in the" Convito," seem much too artificial, and 
 that they become soon repugnant to us. They seem a sort of 
 trifling in comparison with the grim earnest which the " Divine 
 Comedy " shows. And yet they furnish, after a sort, a key to be 
 kept in hand while we accompany our poet on his journey. 
 
 Two things strike us most forcibly after we have begun to pene- 
 trate the inner meaning of Dante namely, his fertility of genius 
 in inventing external physical symbols for the expression of in- 
 ternal states of the soul, and, secondly, his preternatural psycho- 
 logical ability in discerning the true relation between acts of the 
 will and the traits of character that follow as a result of the subse- 
 quent reaction. But our first impression of the poet must be one 
 of horror at the malignancy of a soul who could allow his imagi- 
 nation to dwell on the sufferings of his fellow-men, and permit his 
 pen to describe them with such painstaking minuteness. We see 
 more of a fiend than a man on our first visit to Dante. But even 
 thus early we are struck, in a few instances, with the apt corre- 
 spondence between the punishments of the " Inferno " and the
 
 40 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 actual state of mind of the sinner on committing the sin. On a 
 second acquaintance these instances increase, and the conviction 
 gradually arises that Dante has done nothing arbitrary, but all 
 things through a deep sense of justice and truth to what he has 
 actually observed in the world about him. After we have come to 
 this view we soon go further and begin to note the tenderness and 
 divine charity of this world-poet, and finally we are persuaded 
 that we see his loving kindness in the very instances in which at 
 first we could see only malignant spite or heartless cruelty.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 41 
 
 I. THE "INFERNO." 
 
 2. Dante turns from Politics to Literature. 
 
 In the year 1300, at the age of thirty-five, Dante found himself 
 in the midst of a gloomy wood of terrestrial trials, his city, 
 Florence, hopelessly divided between factions, and Italy itself in 
 the midst of the terrible struggle between the secular and spiritual 
 powers. The growing power of France, jealous of the Holy 
 Roman Empire, wishes to keep Germany out of Italy. The 
 Pope, likewise, seems obliged to find his interest in siding with 
 France, at least temporarily. The Church seems to have no re- 
 course for the safety of its spiritual interests except in grasping at 
 civil power. The Crusades have brought immense wealth to the 
 cities of Italy, which lie on the way between the East and the 
 West. The upstart wealthy families in those cities contest the su- 
 premacy of the impoverished families of the old nobility. There 
 is no solution of these evils. Each faction, if suppressed within
 
 4:2 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the city, at once appeals to one of the parties into which Italy is 
 divided. It obtains the aid of the Pope and France on the one 
 hand, or of the Emperor on the other, and, thus aided, regains its 
 power in Florence. Bloody retaliations, confiscations, conflagrations 
 ensue. What can Dante as Prior of a city like Florence do ? He 
 banishes the leaders of both factions. But these factions are not 
 isolated, local matters. They are merely symptomatic manifesta- 
 tions of the universal discord the two political parties of Chris- 
 tendom and cannot be cured by local surgery. France ap- 
 proaches to aid one of the banished parties, and the Pope, to whom 
 Dante turns for aid, betrays his intention to take advantage of 
 internal factions and foreign intervention in order to weaken the 
 power of the Empire in Italy. The Church, having small political 
 power in the way of direct control over large territories, is obliged 
 to retain its influence through the next means to wit, money and 
 intrigue. It is evident enough that there is no honorable career 
 left for Dante in his native city. He looks up to the lofty and 
 shining heights of success, a worthy object for the ambition of a 
 young man of ability, and sees in his way before him three ob- 
 stacles. A leopard with spotted hide, white and black spots
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 43 
 
 symbolic of the black and white factions of Florence ' impedes his 
 way, so that he is minded to go back and give up his worthy am- 
 bition to reach the shining heights, but rather to seek safety in 
 the obscurity of private life. But his youth, the hour of the 
 morning, and the sweet season fill him with hope that he shall be 
 able to capture the leopard with his spots and bring peace and 
 good government to his native city, when, lo ! a lion, the sym- 
 bol of France and French interests/ approaches with head erect 
 
 1 Symbolic of much else also, as commentators have shown : " Symbolic of worldly 
 pleasure with its fair outside," and the quiet citizen life checkered with its small joys 
 and alternating cares ; symbolic of sensuality ; also of the business of private life. The 
 chief point is that the " gaietta pelle " distracts him from the ascent and impedes him so 
 that he is often minded to return. The wolf and lion terrify him. But he hopes (" In- 
 ferno," xvi, 106-108), to capture the leopard with his girdle. He thought that he could, 
 with the girdle of his own strength, conquer the factions of Florence, up to the time 
 when he saw that these were backed by the wolf and the lion. Or does the girdle hint 
 at a contemplated entrance of the order of Franciscans in order to overcome his passion 
 for carnal pleasure ? If for la we read alia gaietta pelle, the leopard should be overcome 
 as something hostile and impeding ; if la, then it is one of the causes of good hope but 
 hope of what ? Certainly not of ascent of the hill ! But this will be discussed further 
 in another note. 
 
 2 The lion should be ambition or pride, according to commentators. But it is not am- 
 bition in general that Dante encountered, but the special instance of it in French inter- 
 ference.
 
 44 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 and furious with hunger. The very air quakes. He turns away 
 from before the lion, but only to meet a she wolf (the wolf of the 
 capital at Rome, symbolic of that city, and hence suggesting the 
 papal court), 1 full of all cravings in her leanness, grasping for 
 money and political power. Dante cannot ascend on that road to 
 the glorious summit of a successful and honorable life. He turns 
 from politics to literature. Virgil meets him and informs him 
 that he must take another road if he would attain his object. He 
 must try to make himself useful to his age by holding up to it its 
 true image, as world-poet. He must collect and classify all man- 
 ner of human deeds and all manner of states of the human soul 
 (antecedent and consequent on those deeds) and paint a vast pict- 
 ure-gallery of characters for the education not only of his native 
 city, nor even of all Italy, but of all Europe and of nations yet 
 unborn. 
 
 Accompanied by Virgil, or the genius of literature, he comes to 
 
 1 So the wolf means avarice, but not avarice in general ; it is only the special instance 
 of it that Dante met when he applied to the papal court for aid in suppressing civil war 
 in his native city. Note that the wolf will be chased into hell by the greyhound, so as 
 to no more block the way to the shining heights.
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 45 
 
 the Inferno and the Purgatory. Accompanied thereafter by the 
 divine science " First Philosophy," in the person of Beatrice, 
 he passes the terrestrial and celestial paradises. Although his life 
 seems at first a failure, in that a public career is closed for him, 
 yet it proves in the event a success in a far higher sense, for his 
 service to mankind proves to be more enduring than he had 
 planned. The Celestial Powers have overruled his counsels, led 
 him through Eternal Places, and given him a more important 
 place on the lofty hill whose shoulders were clothed with the rays 
 of the celestial sun. 
 
 3. In what sense Hell is Eternal. 
 
 Over the gate of the Inferno he reads the solemn words : 
 " Through me is the way into the doleful city ; through me the 
 way among the people lost. Justice moved my High Maker ; 
 Divine Power made me, Wisdom Supreme, and Primal Love. 
 Before me were no things created, but eternal; and eternal I en- 
 dure. Leave all hope, ye that enter." (J. C.), 1 iii, 1-9. 
 
 1 John Carlyle's translation is marked (J. C.).
 
 46 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 The Christian doctrine of Hell and everlasting punishment, at 
 first so repugnant to the principle of divine charity and grace 
 which is the evangel of the highest religion, needs philosophic in- 
 terpretation in order that we may endure to accompany Dante 
 further. In the first place, we remark that the doctrine of Hell, 
 as opposed to the heathen notion of Ifades, expresses the insight 
 into the complete freedom of the human will. In the heathen 
 view there is always a substratum of fate which limits man's free- 
 dom and prevents the complete return of his deed upon himself. 
 It is in Christianity that religion, for the first time, conceives 
 man as perfectly responsible, perfectly free a spiritual totality. 
 Hence, too, with Christianity there is possible now a doctrine of 
 immortality that has positive significance. Before Christianity, 
 immortality had not been " brought to light " i. e., no immortality 
 worth having. According to Christianity, man may go forward 
 forever into knowledge and wisdom and mutual brotherly help- 
 fulness in the universe, lifting up others, and himself lifted up by 
 all the influences of an infinite Church, whose spirit is the Holy 
 Spirit and God Himself. 
 
 If man can determine himself or choose freely his thoughts
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 47 
 
 and deeds, he canjoin himself to the social whole, or he can sun- 
 der himself from it. He, on the one hand, can mediate himself 
 through all men, placing his personal interest at the most distant 
 part of the universe and seeking his own good through first 
 serving the interest of all others ; or he can seek his selfish inter- 
 est directly and before that of all others and in preference to 
 theirs. Thus he can make for himself one of two utterly different 
 worlds an Inferno or a Paradiso. 
 
 We are come to one of these places, as Virgil now informs 
 Dante : 
 
 " We are come to the place where I told thee thou shouldst see 
 the wretched people who have lost the good of the intellect."- 
 (J. C.), iii, 16-18. 
 
 The " good of the intellect " refers to Aristotle's ethical doctrine 
 of the highest good, which is that of the contemplation of God 
 the vision of absolute Truth and Goodness. The wicked do not 
 see God revealed in the world of nature and human history. To 
 them God is only another fiend more potent than the fiends of 
 Hell. They are conquered, but not subdued into obedience. To 
 them the good seems an external tyrant, oppressing them and in-
 
 48 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 flicting pain on them. This state is Hell. But even Hell is the 
 evidence of Divine love, rightly understood. For it was made not 
 only by "Justice and Divine Power," but also "by Wisdom Su- 
 preme and Primal Love." Recall the doctrine already stated in 
 regard to Form. A formless Absolute cannot create real creatures. 
 They cannot participate in his substance, because that which is 
 finite and limited can have no substance if God is without form 
 and distinctions. With the Christian idea God has distinctions 
 and self-limitations pure form. With this idea the finite can 
 participate in the divine substance without annihilation. Were 
 this blessed doctrine not true, there could be no existence for finite 
 creatures, even in Hell. For, unless the finite can subsist as real 
 and true substance, there can be no free will and no rebellion of 
 the individual against the species. Rebellion against the divine 
 world-order would at once produce annihilation under the heathen 
 doctrine of a formless God. Even imperfection without rebellion 
 would produce annihilation. 
 
 But in Dante's Hell there is alienation from God as a free act 
 of the sinners. But God's hand is under the sinner holding him 
 back from annihilation. Although you rebel against Me, yet you
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 49 
 
 shall not drop out of My hand into the abyss of Nothingness, and 
 My hand shall sustain you and give you participation in the di- 
 vine substance. My hand shall sustain you, but it will burn you 
 if you sin and so long as you sin, because your freedom is used 
 against itself in the act of sin. 
 
 " Before me," says the inscription, " were no things created, but 
 eternal ; and eternal I endure." That is to say, with the crea- 
 tion of finite things Hell is created, because substance, actual di- 
 vine substance and infinitude, is given to finite things. Hence, 
 even their limitations are made to have essential being, and thus 
 Hell is made by the very act of creating. It will exist, too, as 
 long as the finite is created that is, eternally. 
 
 A doctrine of the ultimate annihilation of the wicked is a sur- 
 vival of heathenism a doctrine compatible only with the doctrine 
 of a formless God. So, too, is the doctrine of the end of proba- 
 tion for the sinners in Hell. Hell signifies the continuance of free 
 will supported by Divine Grace. Let free will cease, and Hell 
 ceases. Let free will cease, and individual immortal being lapses 
 out of spiritual being into mere physical existence, or at least into 
 lower forms of life, and annihilation has taken effect, and the 
 
 3
 
 50 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 Christian idea of God as pure form, pure personality, at once be- 
 comes impossible. 
 
 Free will, therefore, necessarily remains to all people in Hell, 
 and so long as Hell itself endures. Hence, also, probation lasts 
 forever. But probation does not mean enforced salvation. That 
 were equally impossible, and itself also the destruction of the 
 Christian idea of God as pure form. Hell is the shadow of man's 
 freedom ; salvation is the substance of man's freedom. No sinner 
 can be compelled to repent. He must be converted through his 
 freedom and not against it. 
 
 The state of Hell is a state of rebellion against the divine 
 world-order. The individual seeks his selfish good before the good 
 of his fellow-men and instead of their good. Accordingly, he 
 wills that humanity shall be his enemies. He is in a double state 
 of self-contradiction first, within himself he contradicts his own 
 universality or his own reason ; secondly, he contradicts his spe- 
 cies as living in the world. This contradiction exists for him in 
 the shape of pain and unhappiness hellish torment. But this very 
 torment is an evidence of grace. Were he unconscious of his con- 
 tradiction, he were free from torment. But such freedom from
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 51 
 
 torment would be annihilation of his personality, for personality 
 let us define it is individuality which feels its own individu- 
 ality and at the same time its participation with all other indi- 
 viduals. All manner of appetite and desire even is the feeling of 
 one*' s identity with some external or foreign being. Within the 
 depths of one's self he feels that other. So pain is the feeling of 
 the identity of the self with what is not one's particular self. It 
 is the feeling of identity of the little self which we have really 
 become, with that larger self which we are potentially but have 
 not as yet become. Hence pain spiritual pain is evidence ot 
 capacity for growth that is not exercised. 
 
 Here we may see the difference between the state of Hell and 
 the state of Purgatory. The sinner is in Hell when he looks 
 upon his own pain, not as produced by his own freedom, but as 
 thrust upon him undeservedly from without. His case is hope- 
 less, because he must continually get more bitter by the contem- 
 plation of his own pain and its undeservedness. Could he by any 
 means get an insight into the world-order and see it truly, he 
 would see that his pain all comes from his own act of freedom 
 from his opposition to the social whole ; then he would welcome
 
 52 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 his pain as the evidence of his own substantial participation in 
 his race and in the Divine Being. Then at once he would be 
 in Purgatory. All his pain then would become purifying instead 
 of hardening to his soul. He would have arrived at the good of 
 the intellect or the perception of the divine human nature of 
 God. In Hell the individual looks upon himself as the absolute 
 centre and measure of all things. In Purgatory the individual 
 looks upon society as the centre and measure, and strives to rid 
 himself of his selfishness. He strives to ascend from his little 
 self to his greater self. He struggles against the lusts of the flesh 
 and the pride and envy of his soul. Such lusts and passions now 
 seem to him horrible when they arise within him, and this is the 
 torment of Purgatory. 
 
 In Purgatory nothing can happen to the individual that is 
 amiss, for all pain and inconvenience, all the ills of the flesh and 
 of the soul, are made means of purification, means of conquest 
 over selfishness. 
 
 It is obvious that to any sinner in Hell there may come this in- 
 sight into his relation to his own misery, especially if the mission- 
 ary spirit in true St. Francis form comes to him and demonstrates
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 53 
 
 its sincerity by its efforts to relieve him of his, pain by sharing it 
 or bearing it vicariously. 
 
 The eternal occupation of the spirits of the just made perfect is 
 here indicated. They must sustain themselves in their perfection 
 or attain higher degrees of perfection by humbly assisting the 
 souls in Hell to see their true condition and thus get into Purga- 
 tory. 
 
 The characteristic mood of those in Hell is described by Dante 
 in the third canto : 
 
 "Here sighs, plaints, and deep wailings resounded through the 
 starless air ; it made me weep at first. Strange tongues, horrible 
 outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse, and 
 sound of hands among them, made a tumult, which turns itself 
 unceasing in that air forever dyed, as sand when the whirlwind 
 breathes." (J. 0.), iii, 22-30. 
 
 4. The Punishment of the Pusillanimous, 
 
 Within the gate of Hell upon a dark plain he sees a vast crowd 
 of people running furiously behind a whirling flag and sorely 
 goaded by wasps and hornets. These were the souls of those
 
 54 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 who lacked will-power sufficient to decide for themselves. They 
 were the pusillanimous who would not undertake anything for 
 themselves, but were the sport of circumstances, external events 
 stinging them to do things and to pursue some aimless giddy flag 
 of a cause. These were not admitted to Hell proper, because they 
 had not developed their free-will or power of choice, but yielded 
 to fortune or fate. 
 
 5. Why Infants and Heathen Sages are in the Limbo. 
 
 Across the river Acheron we come to 
 
 "... the first circle that girds the abyss. Here there was no 
 plaint that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the 
 eternal air to tremble. And this arose from the sadness, without 
 torment, of the crowds that were many and great, both of children 
 and of women and men." (J. C.), iv, 24-30. 
 
 These had not sinned, but only failed to enter the Christian 
 faith through the portal of Baptism. Many persons, indeed, had 
 been taken out of this circle and carried to heaven by a " Crowned 
 Mighty One," and we see therefore the limitation implied to the
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 55 
 
 words over the gate : "Leave all hope ye who enter." Here are 
 left, however, the noble heathen souls and the souls of unbaptized 
 infants. We ask ourselves, "What is the meaning of all this? 
 Dante weighed carefully the state of mind of the Greeks and 
 Romans as heathen. With all their enlightenment they had yet 
 failed to see the world of humanity as divine-human and with a 
 future like that portrayed in the " Paradiso." For them there was 
 no "Paradiso" yet revealed, and hence no Purgatory or transition 
 to it. 
 
 Dante truly paints for us the actual world-view as it stood in 
 the Greek mind. It was neither sad nor joyful. " We came," he 
 says, 
 
 " to the foot of a Noble Castle, seven times circled with lofty 
 Walls, defended round by a fair Rivulet. This we passed as 
 solid land. Through seven gates I entered with those sages. We 
 reached a meadow of fresh verdure. On it were people with eyes 
 slow and grave, of great authority in their appearance. They 
 spoke seldom, with mild voices. We retired to one of the sides, 
 into a place open, luminous, and high, so that they could all be 
 seen. There direct, upon the green enamel, were shown to me
 
 56 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the great spirits whoni I glory within myself in having seen." 
 (J. C.), iv, 106-120. 
 
 Dante's love of the symbolic thus leads to this allegoric descrip- 
 tion of his university life (at Bologna ?), when he came to the study 
 of literature, and passed over its fair rivulet of speech and entered 
 through the seven gates of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dia- 
 lectic) and quadrimum (astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geome- 
 try) through the lofty walls.of learning. These heathen were not 
 sinful, not to blame for their lack of insight into the Christian view 
 of the world. Indeed, many of them, like Plato and Aristotle, 
 had worked nobly to make the Christian view possible, as Scholas- 
 ticism, even in Dante's writings, plainly manifests. But the fact 
 remains that they had not fully attained its point of vision. Their 
 state of mind only is indicated here, and not their eternal condi- 
 tion, unless Christianity rejects its doctrine of human freedom. 
 This, too, is the state of mind of the " unbaptized " children. All 
 children, whether baptized or unbaptized, are heathens up to the 
 time when they can appreciate the world-view of Christianity in 
 some shape until they can see nature and human history as a 
 revelation of Divine Reason.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 57 
 
 6. The Punishments of the Incontinent. 
 
 Within the real hell of rebellious spirits, beyond the court of Mi- 
 nos, we enter first upon the circles the second to the fifth circles 
 in which sins of incontinence are punished " those who subjugate 
 reason to appetite," as Dante tells us. In the second circle, which 
 is the first of the " Inferno " proper, the lustful are driven through 
 the darkened air, a long streak of them, borne on the blast like a 
 flock of cranes. Their passions darken the intellectual vision and 
 drive them about " hither, thither, up, down " tossed on that 
 strife of windy gusts of passion. The punishment is a realistic 
 symbol of the soul filled with lust. It cannot see truth nor do 
 works of righteousness, for its sky is dark with clouds and tem- 
 pests. The gluttonous are in 
 
 " the third circle that of the eternal, accursed, cold and 
 heavy rain. Its course and quality is never new ; large hail, 
 and turbid water, and snow it pours down through the dark- 
 some air. The ground on which it falls emits a putrid smell. 
 Cerberus, a monster fierce and strange, with three throats, barks 
 dog-like over those that are immersed in it. His eyes are red,
 
 58 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 his beard gory and black, his belly wide, and clawed his hands. 
 He clutches the spirits, flays, and piecemeal rends them. The 
 rain makes them howl like dogs. With one side they screen 
 the other ; they often turn themselves, the impious wretches." 
 (J. C.), vi, 7-21. 
 
 This description of the actual state of the intemperate in this 
 life enables us to recognize the punishments which their sin brings 
 on them. "We see the diseases of the flesh personified in Cerberus 
 dyspepsia, gout, dropsy, delirium tremens, and what not. In- 
 temperance is utterly hostile to the good of the intellect or to any 
 sort of good whatever, and it steeps the soul in its turbid waters 
 and drenches it with its chilly snows or racks it with fevers. In 
 the fourth circle we meet the avaricious : 
 
 " As does the surge, there above Charybdis, that breaks itself 
 against the surge wherewith it meets, so have the people here to 
 counter-dance. Here saw I, too, many more than elsewhere, both 
 on the one side and on the other, with loud bowlings, rolling 
 weights by force of chest. They smote against each other, and 
 then all turned upon the spot, rolling them back, shouting, ' Why 
 boldest thou?' and 'Why throwest thou away?' Thus they
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 59 
 
 returned through the hideous circle, on either hand, to the oppo- 
 site point, shouting always in their reproachful measure. Then 
 every one, when he had reached it, turned through his semicircle 
 toward the other joust." (J. C.), vii, 22-35. 
 
 The avaricious and prodigal are devoted entirely to the unspir- 
 itual occupation of heaping up pelf they roll the weights by force 
 of chest first one way and then another. Think of the human 
 labor given to property as an end merely and not as a means ! 
 The struggle to gain property and save it the absorption of time 
 and attention required suggested to Dante the exertion required 
 to roll heavy weights. The wealthy must needs exert constant 
 pressure to hold together their property ; upon the slightest relaxa- 
 tion, the forces that act continually for the dissipation of wealth 
 will gain the ascendancy and all will go speedily. The avaricious 
 are engaged in resisting those who wish to have their property to 
 spend for the gratification of want. Property can be gained and 
 saved only by continual sacrifice of the appetite for creature com- 
 fort both in one's self and in others. But the longing for property 
 in order to gratify desires has the same limiting effect on the soul 
 as the struggle to save wealth for its own sake. In both cases it
 
 60 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 subordinates spiritual interests to the service of material things. 
 " Cosi convien che qui la gente riddi." It is the struggle of the 
 hoarding propensity with the propensity to outlay for the gratifica- 
 tion of present appetites which produces the vortex in which the 
 avaricious and prodigal are punished. Ill-giving and ill-keeping 
 (mal dare, e mal tener) has deprived them of the fair world the 
 Paradiso. Dante knows well the uses of property, as we shall see 
 by the numerous punishments in the " Inferno " that relate to its 
 abuse. Property or private ownership is one of the two instru- 
 mentalities of free will by which man achieves his freedom. In 
 the circle of the violent, therefore, we see squanderers, robbers, and 
 speculators punished ; in the circles of fraud are punished simony, 
 bribery, theft, and counterfeiters. There are seven punishments 
 in all devoted to sinners against the sacredness of property rights 
 and uses. 
 
 7. The Relation of Sloth to Anger among the Mortal Sins. 
 
 In the fifth circle we come upon the river Styx and encounter 
 the souls of the wrathful and melancholy. 
 
 " We crossed the circle to the other bank, near a spring, that
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 61 
 
 boils and pours down through a cleft which it has formed. The 
 water was darker far than perse. And we, accompanying the 
 dusky waves, entered down by a strange path. This dreary 
 streamlet makes a marsh that is named Styx when it has de- 
 scended to the foot of the gray malignant shores. And I, who 
 stood intent on looking, saw muddy people in that bog, all naked 
 and with a look of anger. They were smiting each other, not 
 with hands only, but with head and with chest and with feet, 
 maiming one another with their teeth, piece by piece. . . . There 
 are people underneath the water, who sob and make it bubble at 
 the surface, as thy eye may tell thee, whichever way it turns. 
 Fixed in the slime, they say : Sullen were we in the sweet air, 
 that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying lazy smoke within our 
 hearts ; now lie we sullen here in the black mire. This hymn they 
 gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak it in full words." 
 (J. 0.), vii, 100-126. 
 
 The seven mortal sins should be lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, 
 anger, envy, and pride. In the " Purgatorio " (where each mortal 
 sin appears as an inner tendency or incitement, but is not allowed 
 to come to external acts or deeds) these seven sins are expressly
 
 62 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 enumerated and assigned each to its separate circle. But sloth is 
 not assigned to a separate round of the " Inferno," nor indeed is 
 envy or pride. These are punished in what the Scholastic theo- 
 logians call the daughters of these mortal sins that is to say, in 
 their results. 
 
 But St. Thomas Aquinas names six daughters to sloth (accidia 
 dtcij&eui) malice, rancor, pusillanimity, despair, torpor, and wan- 
 dering thoughts. Hence slothfulness is punished in its effects in 
 sullenness and rancor, and also in the round of suicides in the 
 circle of the violent, who take their own lives through despair. 
 Moreover, its daughters pusillanimity, torpor, and scatter-brains 
 are not admitted into Hell proper, but are pursuing the aimless, 
 giddy flag around the shores of Acheron. Anger is punished 
 directly in itself, in so far as it is a wrathful state of mind, by the 
 muddy state of the soul which it engenders and by the thick, lazy 
 smoke it causes in the heart. The wrathful is thus far removed 
 from the celestial state of the soul, which discerns truth and wills 
 the good. 
 
 The daughters of anger are punished in the rounds of violence be- 
 low the violent against God, against self, against one's neighbor.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 63 
 
 The spiritual state of the soul under the influence of anger is 
 well symbolized by immersion in the muddy pool, sobbing and 
 bubbling ; the comparison of a sullen disposition to a lazy smoke 
 (accidioso fummo), which obscures the light of day and disin- 
 clines to all acts of duty, is felicitous. Anger is indeed the muddy 
 state of the soul. No insight into truth or into reasonable prac- 
 tical works can exist in the angry soul. 
 
 8. What form of Heresy is a Daughter of Sloth f 
 
 To our surprise we come here, before reaching the circle of vio- 
 lence, upon heretics burned in tombs. 
 
 " As at Aries, where the Rhone stagnates, as at Pola near the 
 Quarnaro Gulf, which shuts up Italy and bathes its confines, the 
 sepulchres make all the place uneven ; so did they here on every 
 side, only the manner here was bitterer. For among the tombs 
 were scattered flames, whereby they were made all over so glow- 
 ing hot that iron more hot no craft requires. Their covers were 
 all raised up, and out of them proceeded moans so grievous that 
 they seemed indeed the moans of spirits sad and wounded. . . .
 
 64 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 These are the Arch-heretics with their followers of every sect ; 
 and, much more than thou thinkest, the tombs are laden. Like 
 with like is buried here ; and the monuments are more and less 
 hot." (J. C.), ix, 112-131. 
 
 u In this part are entombed with Epicurus all his followers, who 
 make the soul die with the body." (J. C.), x, 13-15. 
 
 Is heresy a daughter of sloth ? It is supposed to be a daughter 
 of the opposite of sloth namely, of intellectual violence and in 
 that case it belongs to the progeny of anger. But it is not heresy 
 in general that we have here in the sepulchres, but the heresy of 
 disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Perhaps, however, this 
 seemed in Dante's eyes the effect of intellectual sloth. To them 
 who believe that the soul dies with the body this earth is only 
 one vast tomb in which they are slowly consumed. So long 
 as they live they sit and feel themselves wasting in tombs with 
 the lids raised. At death the lids are to close forever upon them. 
 Dante accurately depicts the spiritual state of the &oul in this life 
 when possessed of the conviction that materialism produces. 
 He supposes this to be the doctrine of Epicurus namely, that 
 we die with the body. The sin itself is its own punishment.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 65 
 
 Moreover, even the view that he takes of the world is to the ma- 
 terialist his hell. 
 
 A point of interest is found in the discourse of Farinata to 
 the effect that spirits who can foretell particulars of Dante's exile 
 yet do not know the present. Spirits, on separation from their 
 bodies, it would seem, lose the instrument by which they read 
 the processes going on upon the earth. They know the total post 
 sibility of all things, but do not know exactly where the presen- 
 has brought the process of unfolding it. This is the doctrine of 
 the Scholastics (and of Homer as well). After time i. e., after 
 all possibility is unfolded the portals of experience are closed 
 (because there is nothing new any more to become event). 
 
 9. The Punishment of the Violent. 
 
 The first round of the circle of violence contained murderers, 
 tyrants, and robbers, quite as we should expect to find them, im- 
 mersed in blood up to their eyebrows. 
 
 Next, the gloomy wood of self-murderers, the fruit of despera- 
 tion chiefly caused by careless use of property. The suicides are 
 pursued by hell-hounds, importunate creditors, no doubt, and the
 
 66 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 cares and worries that attend on poverty. With striking poetic 
 justice those who slay themselves are placed, not in animal bod- 
 ies, but in trees. Their punishment is to need their bodies. This 
 also hints at the vegetative state a sort of paralysis of will and 
 sensibilities, of feeling and locomotion of the soul which has 
 come under the influence of settled melancholy. 
 
 In the third round of violence are punished the violent against 
 God the blasphemers. 
 
 " Over all the great sand, falling slowly, rained dilated flakes oi 
 tire, like those of snow in Alps without a wind. As the flames 
 which Alexander, in the hot regions of India, saw fall upon his 
 host, entire to the ground whereat he with his legions took care 
 to tramp the soil, for the fire was more easily extinguished while 
 alone so fell the eternal heat, by which the sand was kindled, 
 like tinder beneath the flint and steel, redoubling the pain. Ever 
 restless was the dance of miserable hands, now here, now there, 
 shaking off the (flakes) fresh burning." (J. C.), xiv, 28-42. 
 
 Fierce arrogance, like that of Capaneus, attacks the divine me- 
 diation in the world in so far as it appears as benign influences, 
 and this hostility turns such influences into tormenting flames.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 67 
 
 This will be fully evident in considering the sin of Pride later on. 
 In fact, it is not easy to distinguish the sin of Pride from this of 
 violence against God. In fact, Dante makes Yirgil speak of the 
 pride of Capaneus (la tua superbia, xiv, 64) as that which chiefly 
 punishes him. 
 
 The souls punished in the outermost verge of the seventh circle 
 (xvii, 43-78) are the violent against art ; they are usurers and injuri- 
 ous extortioners, or, perhaps, better designated now as speculators 
 in the necessaries of life those who try to make fortunes by cor- 
 nering the food and clothing of the market, and not capitalists 
 who put their money to good uses. These usurers are not to be 
 recognized by their faces, but solely by their money-bags and ar- 
 morial bearings, behind which they are hidden. They sit crouched 
 up on the burning sand quite subordinate to the pelf they are ac- 
 cumulating. They have lost human semblance, or their humanity 
 has shrunk behind their nefarious occupation. 
 
 10. The Daughters of Envy : Ten Species of Fraud. 
 
 The daughters of Envy, according to Dante, are ten species of 
 fraud. These sins are punished in " malebolge," or evil ditches.
 
 68 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 Horned demons scourge the seducers and panders. The natter- 
 erg wallow in filth. They are engaged in destroying the rational 
 self-estimate of those that they natter by calling good evil and evil 
 good, and producing a confusion between clean and unclean. The 
 Simonists buy and sell the gifts of the Church for money, and are 
 plunged, like coin, head first into round holes or purses, while 
 flames scorch the soles of their feet. As others follow them, they 
 sink toward the bottom of the earth, gravitating toward pelf. 
 Their deeds directly destroy the spiritual by making it subservient 
 to money and material gain ; they invert the true order of the 
 spiritual and material, and symbolically place the head where the 
 feet should be. 
 
 In the fourth ditch come the diviners, soothsayers, astrologers, 
 or fortune-tellers, who make a trade of a knowledge of the future. 
 
 "Through the circular valley I saw a people coming, silent and 
 weeping, at the pace which the litanies make in this world. When 
 my sight descended lower on them, each seemed wondrously dis- 
 torted from the chin to the commencement of the chest, so that 
 the face was turned toward the loins ; and they had to come back- 
 ward, for to look before them was denied. Perhaps by force of
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 69 
 
 palsy some have been thus quite distorted ; but I have not seen, 
 nor do I believe it to be so." (J. C.), xx, 7-18. 
 
 Whether the knowledge of the future be real or only pretended, 
 it is all the same, for the effect of foretelling what will happen in 
 the future is to utterly paralyze the human will. What is fated 
 to happen cannot be helped. He who divines his own future 
 learns to depend on luck and chance and external fortune and 
 not on his own reason and will. Moreover, the one who knows 
 the future knows it as already happened, and hence turns all 
 events into something that has already happened that is to 
 say, into a past. For him there is no present or future; all is 
 past time. Hence the meaning of the punishment by twisting 
 the head around so as to look backward. They look at all as past, 
 instead of standing like rational beings between the past and 
 future and, on the basis of the accomplished facts of the past, 
 building new possibilities into facts by the exercise of their wills. 
 
 In the fifth ditch are punished the sinners who sell public offices 
 for money. They sell justice, too, for money, thus confusing all 
 moral order. They are plunged in boiling pitch and tormented 
 by demons with long forks. Dante is actually diverted at the
 
 TO The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 punishment of these mischief-makers, with whom he has become 
 so well acquainted through the politics of his time. 
 
 The nature of bribes and bartery is likened to pitch, because it 
 never leaves the person free. A bargain is never closed, but gives 
 occasion for an indefinite succession of demands for blackmail 
 afterward it is of so sticky a character. 
 
 The hypocrites are in the sixth circle. 
 
 " The're beneath we found a painted people, who were going 
 around with steps exceeding slow, weeping, and in their look tired 
 and overcome. They had cloaks on, with deep hoods before their 
 eyes, made in the shape that they make for the monks at Cologne. 
 Outward they are gilded, so that it dazzles ; but within all lead, 
 and so heavy, that Frederick's compared to them were straw. 
 Oh, weary mantle for eternity ! " (J. C.), xxiii, 58-6T. 
 
 This device of gilded cloaks of lead and deep hoods, all so heavy 
 that they who wear them are tired and overcome, is a symbol 
 ready to suggest itself to a poet. These hypocrites assume forms 
 of disguise wear assumed characters not their own natural, 
 spontaneous characters, but they impersonate characters that they 
 wish to seem. This requires special effort, an eternal make-be-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 71 
 
 lieve, continual artificial effort to do what ought to require no 
 effort. They are punished by their very deeds in this weary 
 manner. 
 
 The seventh ditch is full of thieves turning into serpents. Con- 
 tinual metamorphoses are going on serpents into men and men 
 into serpents, the thief nature taking possession of the man by fits 
 and starts. Thievery destroys property and the thieves have their 
 very persons stolen from them even their bodies and personal 
 features and are obliged to assume others. We have here a 
 symbol of manifold significance, hinting especially at the disguise 
 which the thief assumes in order to perpetrate his crimes. 
 
 Evil counsellors in the eighth ditch are wrapt in tongues of 
 flame, the symbol of their own evil tongues, causing flames of dis- 
 cord in the world. 
 
 In the ninth ditch are the schismatics, those who have divided 
 religious faith ! being cloven asunder ; those who have produced 
 schism in the State are mutilated about the head, to symbolize the 
 place of their injury to society, while the one who foments schism 
 in the family carries his severed head in his hand he has severed 
 the head of the family from its limbs.
 
 72 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 In the tenth ditch or chasm we have the falsifiers in four classes : 
 The alchemists who make base metals resemble gold are punished 
 by cutaneous diseases, symbolic of the superficial effects of their 
 alchemy on the base metals. The simulators of persons are man- 
 gled by each other, so as to symbolize the violence done to person- 
 ality by counterfeiting it. Those who have coriterfeited the coin, 
 swelling it up to due weight by alloy, are themselves swollen 
 with dropsy, their blood alloyed with water. The liars and false 
 witnesses reek with fever that produces delirium or double con- 
 sciousness, for " the liar must have a good memory." He must 
 carry a double consciousness one, a current of thoughts corre- 
 sponding to events as they are, and the other current feigning 
 another order of events consistent with the lies he has told, thus 
 creating within himself a sort of delirium. 
 
 1 Mahomet is regarded by Dante as a perverter of Christian doctrine and not as a re- 
 former of the religion of his countrymen. It is interesting in this connection to read 
 Sprenger's great work (" Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammad," Berlin, 2d ed., 1869 
 see vol. i, 70-90), wherein it is shown how Mahomet derived his first impulse of 
 his career from Ebionitic Christians, who preached in Arabia substantially the doctrine 
 of Islam.
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 73 
 
 11. The Circles of Treachery, the Daughter of Pride. 
 
 Envy is distinguished from Pride by the philosophers in a manner 
 somewhat different from Dante's poetic treatment. Even Dante 
 himself, defining as a philosopher, does not quite agree with him- 
 self as poet. One would say that Dante as poet conceives pride 
 to indicate absolute selfishness, or rather concentration on self. 
 Pride says, in fact, to the universe : "I do not want you or any 
 of your good ; I want no participation with you ! " While envy 
 wants the good of others, but wishes evil to be given to them in its 
 stead. Thus, envy has some sociality about it, though of a nega- 
 tive sort. It is still interested enough in its fellows to wish them 
 evil and to covet their good. As ordinarily defined, it would be 
 easy to classify most of the instances of pride under envy. 
 
 Just as in the case of sloth, anger, and envy, so here pride is 
 represented by its daughters, which are four species of treachery 
 treachery toward one's blood relatives in the family, treachery 
 toward one's native country, treachery toward one's friends, and 
 treachery toward one's masters or benefactors. Caina, named 
 from Cain, holds the first ; the Antenora (from An ten or, who be-
 
 74 . The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 trayed Troy to the Greeks) holds the second class ; the Ptolemaea, 
 named from the captain of Jericho, who betrayed Simon, the 
 high-priest, holds the third class, while the Judecca, named from 
 Judas, holds the fourth class Judas, Cassius, and Brutus being 
 crunched in the three mouths of the monster traitor, Lucifer. 
 
 The entire circle of treachery is covered with ice, to symbolize 
 the isolating and freezing character of the crime of treachery, the 
 daughter of Pride. This sin alone completely isolates each man 
 from every other. All the others attack the social bond, but are 
 inconsistent, because they seek the fruits of society, though aim- 
 ing a blow at its existence. Pride is consistent selfishness, because 
 it makes itself sole end and sole means. It is frozen and it freezes 
 all others. 
 
 The next branch of our subject is the new view of these mortal 
 sins from the inner or subjective standpoint. After repentance 
 begins there is no more sin uttered in deeds, but there yet remains 
 the pain that comes from the repressed proclivity within. Hence 
 a series of torments belong to the Purgatory, but essentially dif- 
 ferent from those of the Inferno.
 
 Dante's "Divina C&mmedia" 75 
 
 II. THE PURGATORY. 
 12. The Spiritual Sense of Purgatory. 
 
 The chief thought that has guided us in our interpretation of 
 the " Inferno " is this : 
 
 Dante describes each punishment in such a manner that we are 
 to see the essential condition produced in the soul by the sin.. The 
 sin itself is beheld as punishment, for each sin cuts off in some 
 peculiar manner the individual from participation in the good that 
 flows from society. In the social whole all help each and each 
 helps all. Each one gives his mite to the treasury of the world^ 
 and in return receives the gift of the whole he gives a finite and 
 receives an infinite. Now, each one of the seven mortal sins ob- 
 structs in some way this participation. 
 
 Let .us only look upon the mortal sin with wise illumined 
 eyes with a spiritual sense, as it were and we see that the 
 sin makes an atmosphere of torment and embarrassment within
 
 76 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the soul, and an environment of hatred between the soul and 
 society. 
 
 Dante, therefore, has only to look into the state of the soul un- 
 der sin and describe by poetic symbols its condition. It is not the 
 remote effects of the seven mortal sins, but their direct immediate 
 presence that furnishes the punishments of the Inferno. The 
 effects of sinful deeds return to the doer, and pain comes from 
 this, too. But Dante has elaborated in symbolic description the 
 internal state which constitutes the sin as being the state of tor- 
 ment. There are two attitudes of the soul, however, in the pres- 
 ence of sinful thoughts, and we have arrived at the second at 
 Purgatory. 
 
 We must read the " Divina Commedia" with this thought in 
 mind : Punishment is not an extraneous affair that may be inflict- 
 ed after sin, and on account of it. Such external infliction is not 
 divine punishment. That is of a different sort; the punishment 
 is the sin itself. 
 
 13. The Entrance to Purgatory. 
 
 On emerging from the dark and gloomy depths of the Inferno? 
 Dante and his guide again behold the stars.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 77 
 
 " Of oriental sapphire that sweet blue 
 
 Which overspread the beautiful serene 
 Of the pure ether, far as eye could view 
 
 To heaven's first circle, brightened up my mien, 
 Soon as I left that atmosphere of death 
 
 Which had my heart so saddened with mine eyes : 
 The beauteous planet which gives love new breath 
 
 With laughing light cheered all the orient skies, 
 Dimming the Fishes that her escort made : 
 
 Then, turning to my right, I stood to scan 
 The southern pole, and four stars there surveyed 
 
 Save the first people, never seen by man. 
 Heaven seemed rejoicing in their blazing rays." 
 
 (T. W. Parsons' Transl.), i, 15-25. 
 
 The two poets have now come to a realm of hope and growth 
 and morning-redness, on the dawn of Easter-day a festival sym- 
 bolic of the rise of the soul out of the Hell of sensuality. They 
 meet Cato, the guardian of the place, his face illuminated by the 
 holy lights of the four bright stars of the southern cross. These 
 symbols of the four cardinal virtues temperance, justice, pru-
 
 78 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 dence, and fortitude flamed thus in the morning sky of the south- 
 ern heavens, while the three great stars symbolizing the three 
 celestial virtues faith, hope, and charity will be seen later, in 
 the evening sky, as mentioned in the eighth canto. Directed by 
 Cato, they proceed toward the shore of the sea, and after Virgil 
 has washed the tear-stained cheeks of Daute with the purgatorial 
 dews, he girds him with a smooth rush, the symbol of humility 
 under chastisement. Dante had thrown his girdle of self-right- 
 eousness 1 into the pit of fraud on his descent. An angel appears, 
 
 1 Carlyle suggests this meaning for the girdle which was thrown to the monster Ge- 
 ryon. He had once thought to catch the leopard with the painted skin by its aid 
 %< E con essa pensai alcuna volta 
 
 Prender la lonza alia pelle dipinta." 
 
 It must be noted that there is a vast abyss separating the upper hell of incontinence 
 from the lower hell of fraud and treachery the hell of natural impulse and desire from 
 the hell of considerate, calculating selfishness, which is conscious of the spiritual bond 
 of society, and deliberately sacrifices it for selfish ends. It is the difference between 
 the special or particular and the universal. Incontinence seeks the particular object of 
 gratification, and simply neglects the social bond that would forbid it. But Envy, with 
 its daughters, the ten species of fraud, does not attack the individual directly, but 
 through and by means of the social bond itself. It uses the social bond as though it 
 were not a means of existence for the social whole, but as though it were a means for 
 the individual to use in seeking his private and exclusive nds. So, too, Pride, with 
 treachery, its daughter, attacks the four forms of the social bond, directly seeking to
 
 Dantds " Dimna Commedia" 79 
 
 piloting swiftly over the waves a bark laden with spirits chanting 
 the psalm of deliverance, " When Israel went out of Egypt, the 
 
 put the individual in place of the social whole, and to set aside the social bond entirely. 
 Now, the principle of this nether hell is not an animal or natural one, a yielding to na- 
 tive impulse, but a peculiarly human hell (xi, 25, " Ma perch frode e dell' uom proprio 
 male "), a hell made by using the social bond against itself (fraud) or by seeking to de- 
 stroy it utterly (treachery). The girdle (of self-righteousness, as Carlyle interprets it, 
 following the hints of older commentators) might then be taken to signify the principle 
 of Dante's actions the aim of life which united or girded up his endeavors while a 
 young man looking to wealth and luxury creature comforts individual happiness, in 
 short. It was the principle of thrift that considers the pleasures which the sins of in- 
 continence seek, to be legitimate ends for the pursuit of the soul. The love of sex, of 
 food and drink, of money, of pure individual will (anger is based on this), is the object 
 for which the girdle of thrift unites one's endeavors it is a selfish aim, and while it 
 may be ever so legitimate in its use of means for gratification, yet it is, after all, akin to 
 envy, and this mortal sin is attracted to it and hopes to prevail upon it. The girdle of 
 legitimate self-seeking, therefore, attracts Geryon, the monster of hypocrisy and kindred 
 vices. Dante has recently seen the nature of these objects of gratification, and is ready 
 to yield up to Virgil this girdle. Scartazzini, in his commentary (Nota A, Inf., xvi, 
 106), holds that the cord is not a mere symbol, but also a real cord the cord of the 
 Franciscan order, with which Dante had once (according to old tradition) girded himself 
 in the habit of a novice, thinking to tame the appetites of the flesh (prender la lonza). 
 " The cord has become superfluous since Dante has left behind the circles wherein lux- 
 ury is punished." This cord is used merely to excite the attention of Geryon ; or does it 
 suggest to Geryon the approach of an apostate from the Franciscan order one who has 
 discarded his girdle of renunciation, a hypocritical Franciscan, secretly unfaithful to the 
 rules of his order (as suggested by Philalethes in his commentary) ? This is certainly
 
 80 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 house of Jacob from a people of strange language," celebrating 
 their escape from the bondage of sin. 
 
 The first terrace of the steep mountain of Purgatory is devoted 
 to the souls who procrastinated their repentance. Manfred tells 
 them that one who dies in contumacy of the holy church must 
 staj" on the plain that surrounds the ascent for a period thirty 
 times as long as the period of his presumption. And Belaqna, 
 who has attained the first terrace, is obliged to wait, as we learn, 
 on the first terrace a duration equivalent to the time he lost in his 
 earthly life by procrastination. But it seems that the time of 
 delay may be shortened by the prayers of pious people still on the 
 earth. 
 
 Here we note a striking contrast between the souls that desire 
 purification and those who peopled the rounds of the Inferno. The 
 
 better than the interpretation of those who take the girdle as a symbol of fraud, or of 
 some virtue opposed to fraud, unless the leopard signifies Florence, and its spots denote 
 the white and black parties, in which case the girdle may mean fraud in the sense of 
 stratagem, or virtue in the sense of justice, or vigilance, or impartiality, as suggested by 
 commentators. But the leopard doubtless suggests Florence and quiet citizen life, and 
 also sensuous pleasure or luxury, and perhaps the factions of Florence also. Gayety 
 and liveliness are emphasized in the beast. It is a complex symbol.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 81 
 
 spirit of those in Hell is that of bitterness against others. They 
 do not look for help from co-operation. Having attacked society 
 by mortal sin, they find their deeds returned or reflected back 
 upon them as pain and limitation. They curse their fellow-men 
 and do -not wish co-operation. But if it has attained the "good 
 of the intellect," which is the recognition of the principle of grace 
 (or beneficence) as the supreme principle of the universe, and its 
 corollary of human freedom and responsibility, the soul is in Pur- 
 gatory. It now sees all pain and inconvenience to be angels in 
 disguise to be, in fact, the necessary means of purification and 
 progress. This mountain of purification is indeed the steepest as- 
 cent in the world, but, as Yirgil assures Dante, " the more one - 
 mounts, the less it pains him," and " when it becomes as pleasant 
 and easy to climb as it is to float down stream in a boat," then 
 one has surely arrived at the end of his journey. He has rooted 
 out not only the habits of sinning, but also all the proclivities and 
 tendencies to it, and there is no longer any danger of temptation 
 because the full light of the intellect enables him to see the true 
 nature of all deeds, and he loves the good and hates the evil quite 
 spontaneously.
 
 82 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 The divine charity that prays for others and seeks their eternal 
 good with missionary zeal avails to help them up the mountain of 
 purification. As the souls who are detained on the first circle on 
 account of their procrastination long for the time when they may 
 enter upon their purgation, they chant the " Miserere," the Fifty- 
 first Psalm, full of longing for purification : " Wash me thorough- 
 ly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I 
 acknowledge my transgressions." 
 
 14. Church and State. 
 
 Dante's poem differs from all other works of art in the fact 
 that he does not limit himself to the development of a single 
 event or a single collision of an individual, but shows us in a 
 threefold series more than half a thousand tragic and epic charac- 
 ters, so foreshortened in the perspective of the divine purpose of 
 his poem as to be seen each at one glance of the eye as we pass on 
 our way. His supreme artistic power in this respect appears in 
 his ability to trace all the essential outlines of a character in the 
 fewest strokes. Examples of this abound throughout the poem. 
 The picture of Bordello, as they met him on the first terrace, on
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 83 
 
 the evening of the first day, is noteworthy, especially because of 
 the fact that it betrays the pride of Dante's character in his loving 
 description of the pride of another : 
 
 " But yonder, look ! one spirit, all alone, 
 
 By itself stationed, bends toward us his gaze : 
 The readiest passage will by him be shown. 
 
 We came up toward it : proud Lombard soul ! 
 How thou didst wait, in thy disdain unstirred, 
 And thy majestic eyes didst slowly roll ! 
 
 Meanwhile to us it never uttered word, 
 
 But let us move, just giving us a glance, 
 Like as a lion looks in his repose." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), vi, 58-66. 
 
 The apostrophe to Italy that follows describes the civil factions 
 and is one of many in which Dante proclaims his doctrine of the 
 necessity of separation of Church and State, or say, rather, the co- 
 ordination and independence of the two institutions. Human de- 
 fect as sin must be adjudged and recompensed differently from 
 human defect as crime. Sin is rebellion against the divine world-
 
 84: The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 order, and cannot be atoned for by a finite measure of punish- 
 ment, but may be escaped only by complete repentance, complete 
 internal change. Sin is essentially internal, while crime consists 
 essentially, in the overt act. Crime must be measured and pun- 
 ished measured by itself, and the deed or its symbolic equivalent 
 returned upon the criminal. For one tribunal to take cognizance 
 of both phases of defect is to confuse the standards of religion and 
 civil justice. To treat sin as crime, and teach that it may be 
 measured and condoned by some external fine or penance, destroys 
 the religious consciousness. To treat crime as sin makes every 
 slightest dereliction incur the last penalty of the law, and estab- 
 lishes the code of Draco. For the sinner is a rebel or traitor 
 against God. He attacks his own essence, and if permitted to 
 carry out his will would actually destroy his individual being. To 
 return his act upon him is to inflict infinite punishment on him. 
 Hence justice i. e., a formal return of the deed cannot save the 
 winner. But there is grace, which forgives the sin upon genuine 
 repentance. The Church must look to the state of the heart that 
 is to say, to the disposition of the man. The civil power must 
 look to the deed. If the Church administers the State, it looks
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 85 
 
 too much toward the disposition, and makes too small account of 
 the overt act. In correcting its procedure and in adapting itself 
 to the needs of civil justice, it soon comes to neglect its divine 
 functions, and reduce religion to an external ceremonial by de- 
 grading the idea of sin to the idea of crime, or external act. These 
 thoughts weighed much upon the mind of Dante, and he often 
 recurs to this theme. 
 
 The vale of the princes to which the three poets come on the 
 close of the first day is in many respects the most charming scene 
 in the "Divina Commedia," although its intent appears to be the 
 reproof of secular potentates for their hesitation, their procrastina- 
 tion, in asserting their divine co-ordination with the spiritual po- 
 tentate, and thus bringing to an end the distraction of Italy. This 
 suggestion also occurs in the psalm, " Salve Kegina," which the 
 princes intone as they sit on the green turf amid flowers. It calls 
 upon the Mother of Pity to save us poor exiles dwelling in this 
 vale of tears exiles also from our rightful thrones. 
 
 Moreover, the poem hints at the pathos, for Dante, himself an 
 exile, on account of this procrastination of the princes to assume 
 rightful authority and bring peace to the Italian cities.
 
 86 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 " 'Twixt steep and 3evel went a winding path 
 
 Which led us where the vale-side dies away 
 Till less than half its height the margin hath. 
 
 Gold and fine silver, ceruse, cochineal, 
 
 India's rich wood, heaven's lucid blue serene, 
 Or glow that emeralds freshly broke reveal, 
 
 Had all been vanquished by the varied sheen 
 Of this bright valley set with shrubs and flowers, 
 
 As less by greater. Nor had Nature there 
 Only in painting spent herself, but showers 
 
 Of odors manifold made sweet the air 
 With one strange mingling of confused perfume, 
 
 And there new spirits chanting, I descried, 
 ' Salve Regina ! ' seated on the bloom 
 
 And verdure sheltered by the dingle side." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), vii, 70-84. 
 
 The sun goes down, and here no step can be taken with safety 
 after the darkness comes on. The sun of righteousness shines 
 intermittently on this round of ante-Purgatory, and strictest care
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 87 
 
 must be taken to guard against the temptations that come up from 
 the memories of the old life during the night intervals of the soul. 
 
 " 'Twas now the hour that brings to men at sea, 
 
 Who in the morn have hid sweet friends farewell, 
 Fond thoughts and longing back with them to be ; 
 
 And thrills the pilgrim with a tender spell 
 Of love, if haply, new upon his way, 
 
 He faintly hear a chime from some far bell, 
 That seems to mourn the dying of the day ; 
 
 When I forbore my listening faculty 
 To mark one spirit uprisen amid the band 
 
 Who joined both palms and lifted them on high 
 (First having claimed attention with his hand) 
 
 And toward the Orient bent so fixed an eye 
 As 'twere he said, ' My God ! on thee alone 
 
 My longing rests.' Then from his lips there came 
 ' Te lucis ante,' so devout of tone, 
 
 So sweet, my mind was ravished by the same ; 
 The others next, full sweetly and devout, 
 
 Fixing their gaze on the supernal wheels, 
 Followed him chanting the whole Psalm throughout.
 
 88 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 Now, reader, to the truth iny verse conceals 
 Make sharp thy vision ; subtle is the veil, 
 
 So fine 'twere easily passed through unseen." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), viii, 1-21. 
 
 This hymn for the close of day prays for guardianship during 
 the night of the soul from dreams, phantasms, and from the ene- 
 my. Temptation has for it the world-renowned symbol of the 
 Serpent in the Garden of Eden. 
 
 " I saw that gentle army, meek and pale, 
 
 Silently gazing upward with a mien 
 As of expectancy, and from on high 
 
 Beheld two angels with two swords descend 
 Which flamed with fire, hut, as I could descry, 
 
 They bare no points, being broken at the end. 1 
 Green robes, in hue more delicate than spring's 
 
 Tender new leaves, they trailed behind and fanned 
 With gentle beating of their verdant wings. 
 
 One, coming near, just over us took stand ; 
 
 1 The guardian angels, whose swords of divine justice are blunted with mercy through 
 the death of the Redeemer. Lombardo, quoted by Scartazzini.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 89 
 
 Down to th' opponent bank the other sped, 
 
 So that the spirits were between them grouped. 
 Full well could I discern each flaxen head ; 
 
 But in their faces mine eyes' virtue drooped, 
 As 'twere confounded by excess and dead. 
 
 4 From Mary's bosom they have both come here,' 
 Sordello said ' this valley to protect 
 
 Against the serpent that will soon appear.' " 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), viii, 22-39. 
 
 The compline hymn prayed for protection, and it has been an- 
 swered. Now the " enemy " appears. 
 
 " Sordello to his side 
 Drew Virgil, and exclaimed : ' Behold our Foe ! ' 
 
 And pointed to the thing which he descried ; 
 And where that small vale's barrier sinks most low 
 
 A serpent suddenly was seen to glide, 
 Such as gave Eve, perchance, the fruit of woe. 
 
 Through flowers and herbage came that evil streak, 
 To lick its back oft turning round its head, 
 
 As with his tongue a beast his fur doth sleek.
 
 90 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 I was not looking, so must leave unsaid 
 
 When first they fluttered, but full well I saw 
 
 Both heavenly falcons had their plumage spread. 
 Soon as the serpent felt the withering flaw 
 
 Of those green wings, it vanished, and they sped 
 Up to their posts again with even flight." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), viii, 95-108. 
 
 Within Purgatory proper we are told that there is no longer 
 any temptation. The serpent appears no more after passing be- 
 yond the terrace of ante-Purgatory. 
 
 15. The Purgatorial Stairs. 
 
 Dante is carried in sleep by Lucia (Divine Grace) to the gate of 
 Purgatory, and on the morning of the second day he sees 
 
 "... a gate, and leading to it went 
 Three steps, and each was of a different hue ; 
 A guardian sat there keeping the ascent. 
 
 As yet he spake not, and as more and more 
 Mine eyes I opened, on the topmost stair 
 
 I saw him sitting, and the look he wore 
 Was of such brightness that I could not bear.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 91 
 
 The rays were so reflected from his face 
 By a drawn sword that glistened in his hand 
 That oft I turned to look in empty space." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), ix, 76-84. 
 
 " We therefore came and stood 
 At the first stair, which was of marble white, 
 
 So clear and burnished that therein I could 
 Behold myself, how I appear to sight. 
 
 The second was a rough stone, burnt and black 
 Beyond the darkest purple ; through its length 
 
 And crosswise it was traversed by a crack. 
 The third, whose mass is rested on their strength, 
 
 Appeared to me of porphyry, flaming red, 
 Or like blood spouting from a vein." 
 
 (T. W. P., Tr.), ix, 94-102. 
 
 In the " Summa Theologica " of St. Thomas Aquinas (iii, 90) 
 Penitence, which is the theme of Purgatory, is defined as having 
 three parts, contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Dante places 
 the stair of confession first. It mirrors the individual as he appears. 
 Contrition calcines the soul with humility and renunciation, and
 
 92 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 makes cross-shaped fissures in it where the human passions and 
 appetites are burnt out. Satisfaction or penance is the third part 
 of penitence, and is defined as, first, alms ; second, fasting ; and 
 third, prayer. Satisfaction consists, therefore, in the repression 
 of selfishness, and especially in the practical seeking for the good 
 of others. Hence the third step flames red with the color ot 
 love. 
 
 Two keys, golden and silver, the latter of discernment of the 
 heart and the former of authority to give absolution, are in the 
 hands of Peter, the symbol of the power of the Church. Seven 
 p's are inscribed on the forehead on entering Purgatory ; one of 
 these seven mortal sins (peccata) is to be purged away on each ter- 
 race of the mountain. 
 
 In the " Inferno" the seven mortal sins were not all punished di- 
 rectly in their abstract form as passions or appetites, but rather in 
 their fruits ; for example, " the daughters of anger, of envy, of 
 pride." Here, however, sin is not permitted to triumph and come 
 to its fruitage ; nay, it is not permitted even to fill the desires. 
 It can only appear in the soul as an element of struggle in which 
 the will for holiness is victorious.
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 93 
 
 In purgation from sin, therefore, the sin appears directly in its 
 proper form, and the soul discerns it in its true character as em- 
 barrassment and hindrance to its higher life. 
 
 16. The First Terrace : Purification from Pride. 
 
 On the lowest terrace souls are purified from pride. To the 
 soul enlightened by the good of the intellect, selfish pride seems to 
 convert human beings into caryatids or corbels bent to the earth 
 by their loads. The soul that makes itself the centre of the uni- 
 verse and strives to live on that principle finds on his shoulders 
 the entire weight of the world. 
 
 " As, to support a floor or roof by way of corbel, one sometimes 
 sees a figure join the knees to the breast, the which, out of its un- 
 truth, causes a true discomfort in who sees it, thus saw I these 
 shaped, when I well gave heed. True is it that they were more 
 and less drawn together, according as they had more or less on 
 their backs ; and he who had most endurance in his mien, weep- 
 ing, seemed to say, ' I can no more.' "(A. J. Butler, Tr.), x, 130- 
 139.
 
 94 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 These proud souls, thus bowed down beneath the weight of the 
 universe, chant the Lord's prayer the prayer taught as the model 
 of true humility in contrast to the prayer of the proud Pharisee. 
 Dante's version of this prayer is not only a wonderful paraphrase, 
 but, at the same time, a high order of commentary on its meaning. 
 
 Images of humility are sculptured on the cornice of the wall 
 where those who are bent with pride have the greatest difficulty 
 in seeing them. Ideals of humility are not easily formed in the 
 soul when it is first resisting its inclinations to pride. It can then 
 see only the effects of pride. Hence on the floor beneath their 
 feet are sculptured the examples of pride brought low. These 
 they can see readily when bowed to the earth. When they have 
 recovered a more erect position they may see the examples of hu- 
 mility. The souls of this terrace feel the true relation of pride to 
 the good of the intellect. They chant the hymn Te Deum Lauda- 
 mus, recognizing God as infinitely exalted above them, while 
 the proud in the Inferno would not recognize God except by 
 blasphemy and violence. At the holy stairs the poets hear the 
 beatitude sung " Blessed are the poor in spirit," symbolizing the 
 victory over pride.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia"^ 95 
 
 17. Second lerrace : Purification from Envy. 
 
 On the next terrace the rock has the livid hue of envy. The 
 souls lean one upon another like blind men. " For in all of them 
 a thread of iron bores the eyelid and sews it in such wise as is 
 done to a wild falcon because he remains not quiet." (A. J. B., 
 Tr.), xiii, 70-72. 
 
 These souls perceive the spiritual effects of envy to be the blind- 
 ing of the soul to all true and just estimate of their fellow-men. 
 Whereas in the Inferno each envious soul rejoiced in his superior 
 craft and tried to break the social bond by fraud, here they mu- 
 tually support and are supported, and are conscious of their blind- 
 ness. 
 
 As their sight is taken away, they do not behold sculptures, but 
 hear voices in the air, first reciting examples of generosity and 
 next examples of the dreadful fruits of envy. 
 
 On entering the stairway to the next terrace they hear the beati- 
 tude directed against envy : " Blessed are the merciful." Blessed 
 are they who are considerate of the welfare of others. In spiritual 
 things the more participation, the more each gives to all, the more
 
 96 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 all give to each, and the greater is the share of each, because the 
 good that is enjoyed by one's fellows is reflected back from them 
 (E come specchio Vuno all* altro rende), so that the individual is 
 blessed by all the spiritual good possessed by the whole of society. 
 Herein is contained the doctrine of " the Good of the Intellect " as 
 regards the sin of envy. 
 
 18. Third Terrace : Dante's Purification from Anger. 
 
 On the third terrace, within Purgatory proper, takes place the 
 purification from anger. Dante himself has given us examples of 
 anger, as we saw in the Inferno, for instance, in his treatment, of 
 Bocca degli Abati, whose hair he pulled so cruelly. In the round 
 of anger, and still more in the round of treachery, he seemed to 
 give way to anger. He made some effort to justify himself symboli- 
 cally on the ground that it was his hatred of the sins that made 
 him mistreat the sinners. Even Yirgil approves (Inf., viii, 44, 
 45) of his rage against Filippo Argenti, formerly an arrogant per- 
 sonage {persona orgogliosa] but now weeping (oedi che son un che 
 piango). "Why should he be spiteful toward some of the sinners 
 in the Inferno and pitiful toward others? His own weaknesses
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 97 
 
 and proclivities are painted by his sympathies and aversions. On 
 this third terrace, however, he seems to confess his own sin and 
 suffers the pain of purification like the other penitents. 
 
 " We were going through the evening, gazing onward, as far as 
 the eyes could reach, against the late and shining rays, and beheld 
 little by little a smoke draw toward us, as the night obscure ; nor 
 from that was there place to withdraw one's self ; this took from us 
 our eyes and the pure air." (A. J. B., Tr.), xv, 139-145. 
 
 " Gloom of hell, and of a night bereft of every planet under a 
 poor sky, darkened all that it can be by cloud made not to my 
 sight so thick a veil as that smoke which there covered us, nor of 
 so harsh a texture to feel ; for it suifered not the eye to stay open ; 
 wherefore my learned and faithful escort moved to my side and 
 offered me his shoulder. Just as a blind man goes behind his 
 guide in order not to stray, and not to stumble against aught that 
 can harm him or maybe slay him, I was going through the bitter 
 and foul air listening to my leader, who said only : ' See that thou 
 be not cut off from me.' I began to hear voices, and each ap- 
 peared to be praying for peace and mercy to the Lamb of God who 
 takes away sins. Only Agnus Dei were their preludes ; one word 
 
 5
 
 98 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 in all there was, and one measure, so that there appeared among 
 them all concord." (A. J. B., Tr.), xvi, 1-15. 
 
 In this terrace examples of meekness, and of anger, its opposite, 
 flash before the mind in visions as they walk onward through the 
 stifling smoke. Dante listens eagerly to another discussion of the 
 separate functions of Church and State and of the bad government 
 in that State where " the shepherd who goes before may chew the 
 cud, but has not the hooves divided." The leader ruminates (*'. e. y 
 chews the cud), or theorizes and comes to know divine wisdom as 
 a teacher, but does not discriminate in temporal affairs and divide 
 good from evil conduct (discretionem boni et mali, as St. Augus- 
 tine suggests). 
 
 At the close of the second day they reach the stairway and 
 hear the beatitude directed against anger : " Blessed are the 
 Peace-makers ! " 
 
 19. Fourth Terrace : Sloth and its Relation to the other Mortal 
 
 Sins. 
 
 On the fourth terrace Virgil explains to Dante the relation of 
 the seven mortal sins to each other, newly defining them all.
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 99 
 
 Love is the common ground. Love remiss is sloth, the mortal sin 
 purged away on this terrace. Love perverted by selfishness, be- 
 comes love of evil to one's neighbor, and forms the essence of the 
 three sins pride, envy, and anger. Love excessive is the basis of 
 the three sins of incontinence lust, gluttony, and avarice. 
 
 These sins are called mortal or deadly because they attack the 
 conditions of spiritual life, or, what is the same thing, the founda- 
 tions of the institutions of civilization. Pride, the most deadly 
 of the seven, strikes not only against the fruits of social union, 
 but also against the essence of social union in itself. It refuses to 
 associate. Its aim is to isolate itself from the universe. Hence 
 its fruits are treachery in the family, the State, and the Church. 
 It aims blows directly against the existence of the social bond. 
 Its effect on the soul is symbolized by the frozen lake Cocytus. 
 
 Envy is not so deadly as pride, but far more fatal than anger. 
 Envy, by means of fraud, strikes against the social tie that binds 
 society together, while anger induces violence, which strikes only 
 particular individuals and not the social bond. Envy strikes 
 against the institution of property, rendering it insecure, and de- 
 stroying the trust of men in the means of achieving their freedom
 
 100 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 from wants of food, clothing, and shelter. It attacks personality 
 itself by hypocrisy, flattery, fraudulent impersonation, evil coun- 
 sel, and schism, rendering every man distrustful of his fellows. 
 But it does not isolate man so deeply and in so deadly a manner 
 as Pride. Pride severs all social intercourse, while Envy desires 
 to reap the fruits of social life, but at the expense of society itself, 
 thus setting up a contradiction in the form of its effort. Envy 
 wishes to appropriate the good of men, but through their loss ; 
 Pride wishes no share either in society or in its fruits. 
 
 Anger produces these evils in a less degree, because it is special 
 in the character of its effects. 
 
 . Avarice and Waste injure society by diverting property from 
 its place as a means of realizing human freedom. The social in- 
 terchange by which the individual is enabled to contribute some- 
 thing of his own deeds for the benefit of his fellow-men, and to 
 draw out in his turn from the market of the world his share in its 
 aggregate of productions, is rendered possible by means of the in- 
 stitution of private property. There could be no transfer of the 
 individual will to the social whole unless the individual could im- 
 press his will on things and make them his property. Conse-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 101 
 
 quently, without the institution of private property, he could not 
 help society, and this would render impossible, on the other hand, 
 his participation in the labor of the race he could receive nothing 
 from his fellow-men, because nothing could be collected or trans- 
 mitted. Hence the significance of property, and hence the dead- 
 liness of the sin which perverts property from its usefulness by 
 avarice or wastefulness. 
 
 Gluttony is more of a private nature than avarice. Avarice 
 touches at once the material bond of the practical will-power of 
 society, while gluttony or intemperance unfits the individual to 
 fulfil his functions as a member of institutions, the family, civil 
 society, the State, the Church. Consequently the good that would 
 flow from him is greatly diminished or entirely cut off. He sinks 
 down below the condition of a brute and follows appetite alone, 
 thus paralyzing his will and cutting himself off from the dominion 
 over nature in time and space. 
 
 Lust attacks the institution of the family. It is a deadly sin, 
 because the family is the element of all other institutions, their 
 material presupposition. It is placed above intemperance, because 
 the latter is nearly as destructive to the family and directly more
 
 102 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 destructive to the industrial well-being of society, and because in- 
 temperance leads more directly to the sins of sloth and anger. 
 Each nation has its besetting sins. Our Norman Anglo-Saxon 
 race, most given to independent individuality of all races, is, per- 
 haps, liable to pride and avarice more than other nations, showing 
 its individuality against the State and using its free-will in creat- 
 ing an independence in the shape of a private fortune ; and, on 
 the other hand, it is perhaps more inclined than other peoples to 
 respect the sacredness of the family. Hence, lust would change 
 places with avarice or pride in the hierarchy of sins, as formulated 
 by a theologian of Old or New England. 
 
 After the new definition of the mortal sins and their reduction 
 to a system by Yirgil, he proceeds in the eighteenth canto to dis- 
 course on ethics. The hour of midnight has approached and the 
 poets, seated at the top of the stairway, are looking at the gibbous 
 moon in the west, when suddenly they are startled by a mighty 
 rout of souls, who are purging away the sin of sloth by run- 
 ning furiously and shouting instances of zeal and energy. This 
 example of zeal is all the more surprising after the words of Sor- 
 dello relative to the effect of darkness on the soul in ante-Purga-
 
 Dante's "Divina (Jommedia." 103 
 
 tory : " To go upward in the night is not possible ; even this line 
 thou couldst not pass after the set of sun." We note here that 
 the moon, or the reflected light of mere forms and ceremonies, 
 serves to guide the reformed slothful people. 
 
 Later in the night Dante dreams the dream of the Siren who 
 (symbol of the sin here purged away) charms one aside from the 
 labors of duty and plunges him in a dream of slothful ease and 
 luxury. It is remarked that sloth assails the whole range of moral 
 virtues, theoretical and practical. 
 
 20. ftifth Terrace : Purification from Avarice. 
 
 On the fifth terrace Dante sees the purification from avarice, 
 people realizing its grovelling nature as taking the mind off from 
 spiritual things and placing them on things of earth earthy. In 
 Canto XX we hear a brief resume of French history hinting of 
 the relation of the French nation to avarice (its bribery by the papal 
 court). The mountain trembles and the hymn " Gloria in Excel- 
 sis " peals out, and the shade of the poet Statius emerges from the 
 terrace below into the fifth. All souls in a state of penitence re- 
 joice and praise God when one of their number makes progress.
 
 104 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 21. Sixth Terrace: Purgation of the Intemperate. 
 
 On the sixth terrace the intemperate resist their inordinate appe- 
 tites in the presence of food and drink that invite the senses. To 
 them gluttony is a fetter fastening the spirit to food and drink so 
 that it is not able to attend to spiritual matters. Instead of eating 
 and drinking with their mouths, they recall the words of the 
 Psalmist : " Open thou my lips and my mouth shall show forth 
 thy praise." They hunger and thirst after righteousness and not 
 after other food. 
 
 22. Seventh Terrace : Dante's Purification from Lust. 
 
 On the seventh terrace the sin of lust is purged by tire. The souls 
 realize that their lustful passions are consuming flames. Dante 
 himself receives purification on this terrace again. He passes 
 through a tire of which he says : " I would have flung myself into 
 boiling glass to cool me, so immeasurable was the degree of heat " 
 in the purifying flame. And yet the souls are careful not to step 
 out of the flame but to keep within its chaste pains and receive its 
 purification. " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
 
 Dante's "J)ivina Commedia." 105 
 
 God " is the beatitude directed against lust. To see the eyes of 
 Beatrice, or the Revelation of Divine Theology, Dante must pass 
 through the flame of purification and become pure in heart. So 
 Virgil, in the midst of the flames, discourses of Beatrice to encour- 
 age Dante. 
 
 23. The Terrestrial Paradise. 
 
 In the Terrestrial Paradise, which is the place of transfigured 
 and perfected human society on earth, Dante finds the Church. 
 It is a complex symbol bodying forth the visible Church ' and its 
 history (as commentary has sufficiently shown). 
 
 ' The seven candlesticks denoting the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit ; the seven bands 
 of color streaming out from them, the sacraments, or else the influences of the gifts ; the 
 ten paces, the ten commandments ; the twenty-four elders, the twenty-four books of the 
 Old Testament crowned with the lilies of faith ; the four beasts (quattro animali) crowned 
 with green leaves, the four gospels clad in the color of hope (or salvation) ; the six wings 
 of protection extending in the six possible directions in space, and full of eyes for provi- 
 dential guardianship (?), or perhaps the wings denote inspiration and the eyes the full- 
 ness of divine vision ; the car of the visible Church in their midst, on two wheels, the 
 old and the new dispensations, or rather, as the wheels serve as the means by which the 
 Church moves forward, they signify revelation and tradition (Philalethes) or the priest- 
 hood and the monks (Witte) ; the griffon with his two bodies signifies the divine-human 
 founder of the Church ; the lion's body, colored white (faith) and vermilion (charity or 
 grace), symbolizes the human part and the eagle's head and wings of gold the divine
 
 106 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 After Dante beholds the history of the Church symbolized and 
 its future prophesied, great emphasis being placed on its relations 
 
 part, the wings rising so high that their ends can not be seen extending into the mystic 
 and incomprehensible Godhead ; the wings, one of justice and the other of mercy, rise 
 through the bands of influence that stream from the candlesticks, including one sacra- 
 ment that of repentance between the wings as the most essential one of Purgatory, and 
 three sacraments on each side of both wings ; the griffon draws the car by its shaft, the 
 cross, and attaches it to a tree a tree that suggests the tree of knowledge of good and 
 evil in Paradise, and yet it would seem that Dante refers to the fixing of the papal seat 
 at Rome. Three dames white, green, and red, to signify the three celestial virtues, faith, 
 hope, and charity dance by the side of the right wheel, while four dames, clad in pur- 
 ple, signify the four cardinal or secular virtues, one of whom (Prudence) has three eyes 
 (counsel, agreement, and habit) dance by the left wheel. Then follow the symbols of 
 the remaining books of the New Testament St. Luke (of Acts), St. Paul, Saints Peter, 
 John, James, and Jude for their epistles ; a solitary old man sleeping, but with subtle 
 countenance, for Revelation. Beatrice now descends crowned with olive (peace) over a 
 white veil (faith), in a green mantle (hope), and clad in the color of a living flame 
 (love). She signifies divine theology or revelation (Scartazzini) or grace that perseveres 
 (Philalethes), and much else no doubt infinite aspiration of the soul. Dante is up- 
 braided for unfaithfulness to this highest aspiration ; he has pursued other aims, sought 
 to capture the leopard ; sought also to explain the world by an inferior philosophy (the 
 quetta scuola ch 1 hai seguitata e sua dottrina spoken of in XXXIII, 89, 90, and contrasted 
 with the divine way). The reference to unfaithfulness in Canto XXX is perhaps the 
 symbolic statement of what is literally named in Canto XXXIII as a philosophic doc- 
 trine, and this seems to be acknowledged by Dante (XXXIII, 92). It was perhaps some 
 doctrine derived from the Arabian commentators like Averrhoes, who inclined toward 
 Pantheism and denied individual immortality to men. In his commentary on Aristotle's
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 107 
 
 to the Empire, he passes through the waters of Lethe and be- 
 comes oblivious of his mortal defects. 
 
 24. The Spiritual Sense of "Lethe." 
 
 That Lethe is an essential product of the process of purification 
 must be obvious to every one who reflects upon the nature of it. 
 The river of forgetfulness does not destroy or impair in any way 
 the recollection of deeds done in the body, but it changes essen- 
 tially the quality of that memory. In the Inferno state of the 
 soul sins had been committed as though they were the special pri- 
 vate or personal interest of the individual doer, and their punish- 
 ment was looked upon as though coming from an alien interest 
 outside of the doer. The memory of the Inferno state of the soul, 
 therefore, would preserve the dualism of the selfish me versus the 
 avenging social whole. But Purgatory so eradicates this sense of 
 
 psychology Averrhoes understands " the Philosopher " to prove that man has only a 
 " passive " intellect which perishes at death, while the " active intellect," which is the 
 soul of the world, alone possesses persistent being. This was also the interpretation 
 of Alexander of Aphrodisias. St. Thomas Aquinas's greatest service to Christian 
 Theology is his refutation of this error which places the principle of individuality in the 
 passive rather than in the active part of the human soul.
 
 108 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 dualism that it leads the individual to feel that his real essential self 
 his divine self, in fact is the self embodied in the institutions 
 of civilization. With this insight he comes to see all human his- 
 tory as his own history, and to sympathize with the action of the 
 social whole in relation to the individual. Hence he adopts the 
 action of the social whole as his own essential act and ignores his 
 particular rights and wrongs as opposed to the universal right of 
 society. He therefore loses the interest of personal memory in 
 himself and looks upon himself as an alien personality quite out- 
 side of his new self that has grown as a second nature, a regener- 
 ated self, through the struggle of Purgatory. He loves his new 
 life, which is in conformity with the life of civilization and the 
 Divine world-order, and he loves whatever deeds of his old life 
 contributed to forming this new life. This is the bath in the 
 stream Eunoe, which brings to memory the good deeds of the past 
 life. The bath in Lethe is the death of the old life. 
 
 Moreover, there is a certain progress in the theoretical mind 
 itself which Dante and his like well know that has an effect in 
 raising the soul above sense and memory into the realm of the in- 
 tuition of ideas. After any one has thoroughly mastered the sci-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 109 
 
 entific knowledge of a given province he abides by the general 
 symbols that sum up his knowledge in the form of abstract ideas. 
 These indicate to him not mere dead classifications and mere sum- 
 maries of observation in the form of statistics, but concrete prin- 
 ciples involving both energies and laws, so that they explain not 
 only all the facts and phenomena that are collected in the science, 
 but also furnish a permanent image of the eternal process mani- 
 fested in the facts and phenomena treated of in the science of 
 which he has become the master. 
 
 At this point of insight into principles and their energies and 
 laws which produce the processes of nature and life, the mind 
 contemplates what is essential and therefore necessary, and is 
 thereupon released from the obligation to retain all the data of 
 observation which had to be used at first in order to discover the 
 principle. The facts and data are only a scaffolding useful while 
 the temple was building. The principles, for example, of botany 
 do not depend on the facts and phenomena which have furnished 
 the botanists the data on which they have climbed up to laws and 
 principles. Those data were only illustrations flowing from those 
 principles, and not the causes of the principles themselves. The
 
 110 TJie Spiritual Sense of 
 
 principles once established and in the mind, those data may drop 
 away as so much scaffolding, for the temple is not built on the 
 scaffolding but on its own foundation ; and, although the scaffold 
 is useful in the process of building, it is now no longer needed. 
 So the facts and phenomena are the accidental illustrations of the 
 principles which pointed the way to their discovery and now may 
 be forgotten. The scientific mind bathes in the waters of Lethe 
 and washes away the memory of facts that once imprisoned it in 
 mechanical theories, or systems of classification, or statistical results.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." Ill 
 
 III. THE "PABADISO." 
 25. The Ascent to Paradise. 
 
 Dante gazes into the eyes of Beatrice 1 (symbolizing Divine 
 Knowledge, Christian Theology, or Revelation), and now ascends 
 
 1 Beatrice may signify perfecting grace, as Philalethes thinks, or Revelation, as Scar- 
 tazzini prefers. But Dante himself (in the "Convito," ii, 13) tells us that he imaged 
 Philosophy under the form of a gentle lady and compassionate, and, after thirty months 
 of study of Boethius, he began to feel the sweetness of this lady so much that his love 
 for her chased away all other thoughts. In Chapter II of the second Treatise he alludes 
 to Beatrice as the gentle lady of the " Vita Nuova," and in Chapter XVI he discourses at 
 length on the fair lady Philosophy : " The spirit made me look on a fair lady, in which 
 passage it should be understood that this lady is Philosophy ; a lady full of sweetness, 
 indeed, adorned with modesty, wonderful in her wisdom, the glory of freedom. . . 
 Whoever desires to see his salvation must look steadfastly into this Lady's eyes : 
 
 ' Chi veder vuol la salute, 
 Faccia che gli occhi d'esta donna miri.' 
 
 The eyes of the Lady are her demonstrations which look straight into the eyes of the 
 intellect, enamor the soul, and emancipate it from all fettering conditions." 
 
 If one understands by Philosophy what Dante expounds in his " Convito," it signifies 
 the insight into a Divine Reason as First Cause without envy and full of goodness or 
 grace. This doctrine is therefore the same as perfecting grace and the same as the
 
 112 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 to the celestial spheres. There are ten heavens in all, of which 
 the lowest and nearest to the earth is the heaven of the moon, 
 while the highest heaven is the Empyrean. 
 
 The doctrine already alluded to as the fundamental principle 
 of Christianity to wit, that God is pure form, pure self-dis- 
 tinction, pure consciousness, pure personality is stated in the 
 following discourse of Beatrice placed in the first canto of the 
 " Paradiso " : 
 
 " All things, whate'er they be, 
 
 Have order ' among themselves, and this is form, 
 
 That makes the universe resemble Grod. 
 
 substance of Revelation. For Reason is divine-human. In the "Paradiso," Canto xxxi, 
 Beatrice leaves Dante, and St. Bernard takes her place. This, perhaps, means that Phi- 
 losophy, daughter of God though she be (" Convito," ii. 13), does not suffice to reveal the 
 mystery of the Trinity. St. Bernard as religious mystic expounds the White Rose of 
 Paradise, symbol of the Invisible Church, corresponding to the Visible Church on the sum- 
 mit of the purgatorial mount. He also conducts him to the vision of the Triune God. 
 It makes no difference whether Beatrice is interpreted as Philosophy if understood in 
 the sense that Dante explains in the " Convito," or as Divine Theology as unfolded by 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, or as perfecting grace if understood as the illuminating effects of 
 this insight which is the vision of God, or as Revelation if understood as producing 
 this same vision of God. 
 
 1 Order is the technical expression for dependence of the lower beings on the Highest 
 and for the revelation of the Power of the Highest in the lower. In the " Convito "
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia." 113 
 
 Here do the higher creatures see the footprints 
 Of the Eternal Power, which is the end 
 Whereto is made the law already mentioned. 
 In the order that I speak of are inclined 
 All natures, by their destinies diverse, 
 More or less near unto their origin ; 
 Hence they move onward unto ports diverse 
 O'er the great sea of heing ; and each one 
 With instinct given it which bears it on. 
 This bears away the fire toward the moon ; 
 This is in mortal hearts the motive power ; 
 This binds together and unites the earth. 
 Nor only the created things that are 
 Without intelligence this bow shoots forth, 
 But those that have both intellect and love. 
 
 (iii, 7) Dante quotes from the " Book of Causes " : " The First Goodness sends His good 
 gifts forth upon things in one stream." Each thing, adds he, receives from this stream 
 according to the mode of its powers (virtu) and its nature. And, again (iv, 8), he 
 quotes St. Thomas as saying " To know the order of one thing to another is the proper 
 act of Reason." To perceive dependencies in nature is to perceive unity, and therefore 
 to perceive the " Form that makes the universe resemble God."
 
 114 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 The Providence that regulates all this 
 Makes with its light the heaven forever quiet, 
 Wherein that turns which has the greatest haste." 
 
 (Longfellow, Tr.), "Paradiso," Canto i, 103-123. 
 
 The lowest rests on the highest, and not the highest on the 
 lowest. Things are substantial just in proportion to their 
 degree of participation in the divine self-activity. The lack 
 of self-activity appears as external impulsion and fate, to finite 
 things. 
 
 The doctrine of ten heavens draws its artificial form from the 
 doctrine of the pseudo-Dionysius concerning the Celestial Hierarchy, 
 and will be considered under the subject of Dante's Mythology. 
 For the present we will limit our attention to the ethical contents 
 of the several heavens in their order. 
 
 26. The Heaven of the Moon, or the Ritualists. 
 
 Beatrice fixes her eyes on the Sun i. e., draws light from The- 
 ology ("luce virtuosissima Filosofia," " Conv.," iv, 1), and by this 
 means elevates herself to the heaven of the moon, Dante follow- 
 ing by the light reflected from her eyes :
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 115 
 
 " It seemed to me a cloud encompassed us, 
 Luminous, dense, consolidate, and bright 
 As adamant on which the sun is striking. 
 Into itself did the eternal pearl 
 Receive us, as water doth receive 
 A ray of light, remaining still unbroken. 
 If I was body (and we here conceive not 
 How one dimension tolerates another, 
 Which needs must be if body enter body), 
 More the desire should be enkindled in us 
 That essence to behold, wherein is seen 
 How God and our own nature were united." 
 
 (L. Tr.), ii, 31-42. 
 
 They enter the substance of the moon realizing the fact that 
 one dimension tolerates another. For in spiritual things all may 
 participate without diminution of shares, while in material things 
 there is exclusion and division. Dante beholds the outlines of 
 faces prompt to speak, but they seem so much like reflections that 
 he supposes them to be " mirrored semblances," and looks around 
 to see the persons that are thus reflected. Beatrice corrects his
 
 116 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 error and assures him that these are real souls assigned to the 
 sphere of the moon for the breaking of some vow. 
 
 They were forced by external influences to break their vows, 
 but had their wills been firm unto death they would not have been 
 compelled. This heaven of the moon, therefore, holds souls who 
 have attained heaven, but with some defect of will. In a dis- 
 course on the nature of heaven, it is explained to Dante that 
 everywhere in heaven is Paradise, and that each soul belongs to all 
 the heavens, although he will behold the special heavens tilled 
 each with souls of a certain rank or degree, in order to teach him 
 that there are different degrees of celestial growth, notwithstand- 
 ing each one has access to all the heavens. 
 
 The moon was known to Dante to shine with reflected light and 
 to be nearest to the earth. The moon also presents phases, wax- 
 ing and waning because of relation to another light. Moreover, 
 it has dark and light spots on itc surface. It, therefore, is a proper 
 symbol for the heaven that contains those souls who have willed in 
 conformity to the divine will, but intermittently and in a formal 
 manner, or who have not willed supremely the divine. Hence 
 they are fittingly placed here in the moon and appear as though
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 117 
 
 reflections and not substances. Inasmuch as their obedience to 
 prescribed forms and ceremonies of the Church is very nearly me- 
 chanical, and not from genuine insight, you can scarcely distin- 
 guish their actuality from the reflection of somebody else's will in 
 which they appear. He who made the forms and ceremonies, and 
 who taught them how to perform them, lives in them still as their 
 reality they manifest his will rather than their own freedom. 
 If they happen to be derelict from lack of firmness of will, yielding 
 to others who assume authority over them, their course resembles 
 still more the inconstancy of the moon, as appears in its changes. 
 The spirits of the formal order show inconstancy and instability, 
 therefore, because they appear and disappear in the will of an- 
 other, according as it interrupts or changes its relation to them by 
 some external circumstance. And we must supply this natural 
 inference to Dante's picture and see in these lunar souls not only 
 the interposition of violent family authority, as in the case of 
 Piccarda, dragged away from monastic vows by her brother, Corso 
 Donati, but also the lunar variations of temperament, moods, and 
 external conditions.
 
 118 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 27. The Heavens of Imperfect Wills. 
 
 The heavens of imperfect wills include also those of Mercury 
 and Venus. We must keep in mind this distinction between true 
 and spurious individuality. The true individuality energizes to 
 produce for itself and within itself, and also on the world, the 
 divine form of God's will. The more completely it does this, the 
 more completely it fills itself with divine freedom, and thus be- 
 comes independent, or symbolically able to shine by its own light, 
 for its own light arises from energizing according to the divine 
 form. The spurious individuality arises from intermingling any 
 kind or variety of selfishness between itself and the divine or, in 
 other words, from acting with partial or entire reference to itself 
 instead of the divine. 
 
 In the moon the will does not cast life into the scale, but lets love 
 of life determine its actions in a last resort. Besides, it acts wholly 
 from another's insight even when it obeys the divine commands. 
 
 28. The Pusillanimous, the Procrastinators, and the 
 Formalists. 
 
 The correspondence between these spirits of the moon and the 
 pusillanimous ones on the shore of Acheron will not fail to strike
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 119 
 
 us. They had no choice of their own, but went where the wasps 
 and hornets of chance and circumstance impelled them. The 
 souls who have procrastinated repentance until the last moment 
 likewise are placed on the outer terrace of Purgatory, and not al- 
 lowed to enter St. Peter's gate. The pusillanimous, the procras- 
 tinators, and the mechanical formalists are found on the outer 
 verges of the three worlds. But, although formalists, these souls 
 sacrifice their inclinations for the service of the Church and are in 
 Paradise, though immature in spiritual insight. 
 
 29. The Heaven of Mercury. The Love of Fame. 
 
 In the Heaven of Mercury the love of fame prevents the perfect 
 devotion of the hero to a divine cause. Perfect devotion would 
 elevate him to Mars or Jupiter. The Mercurial saint does not 
 abandon himself to the cause for itself alone, but only as moved 
 by a love of fame. 
 
 Fame is the reflection, not of the deed itself, shining in us as 
 inspired by the deepest conviction, but the reflection of the deed 
 shining in the recognition of our fellow-men. This destroys or 
 affects our freedom. We have not the true celestial revolution
 
 120 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 derived From the Primum Mobile, but a defective sort of orbit 
 an epicycle, in fact. 
 
 The planets Mercury and Yenus move in epicycles. They 
 drive out of their course in order to move round the sun as they 
 pass through the zodiac. They never get far away from the sun, 
 but pass through the zodiac only because the sun in his course 
 carries them around it. They act, not from an independent pur- 
 pose of their own, to complete the course of the celestial revolu- 
 tion of themselves. The sun is the great luminary of day, sym- 
 bolizing the spiritual light as well. Hence it not improperly 
 means fame for Mercury. 
 
 Mercury is usually eclipsed by the sun's rays, and is rarely ever 
 seen because of its closeness to the sun. So, too, in case of the 
 Mercurial saint, we cannot tell how much he is moved by his own 
 insight into what is holy, and how much he is impelled by the 
 fame attached to the cause that he engages in. It is his cause 
 that ennobles him, and we do riot know how much to subtract 
 from him on account of his selfish ambition. The sun of his cause 
 is to be accredited with much of his action. 
 
 The true hero who devotes himself with utter self-abnegation
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 121 
 
 to his cause shines independently. We shall see this species of hero 
 in the heaven of Mars. The cause shines in him and not he in the 
 cause. He does not use it as a serai-external means of fame, but 
 he becomes the cause itself, and his individuality widens to the 
 greatness of independent subsistence. Ambition conflicts with 
 Divine Charity in the heaven of Mercury. 1 
 
 30. The Heaven of Venus. Love as Limited to /Special 
 
 Spheres. 
 
 The Heaven of Yenus is also a heaven of imperfect will. It is 
 that of lovers and includes the conjugal, the parental, the filial, 
 and the fraternal, as well as the love of friends. Terrestrial love 
 is connected with a limitation devoted to a special object, parent, 
 child, husband, wife, brother, sister, or friend. Such love is of 
 the same nature fundamentally as celestial love or Divine Charity. 
 But there is a particular limitation in the former which prevents 
 its complete identity. 
 
 1 Dante introduces Justinian in Mercury (Canto VI) in order to give the history of 
 Rome and show its providential place in the world. It is full of conflicts between am- 
 6
 
 122 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 The planet Yenus is not obscured by the sun's rajs to the same 
 extent as Mercury. It gives notice of the rising sun as Lucifer, 
 and it follows the setting sun as Hesperus. It is " brightest of all 
 the starry host," but is not independent of the sun. It reveals 
 and celebrates the sun rising or setting rthe friendly herald and 
 disciple. It is dependent on the sun, moving in an epicycle round 
 it. As represented in the charming Auroras of Guido and Guer- 
 cirio, it looks back lovingly to the King of Day. 
 
 But it is not the love of St. Francis of Assisi, not the divine 
 charity displayed by the Poor in Spirit, devoted to the resurrec- 
 tion of the divine spirit in those who most need it the dregs and 
 
 bition and pure patriotism, and suits well to this heaven of Mercury. Tinder the 
 Empire, vengeance was done on Calvary for the ancient sin in the Garden of Eden, and 
 later, under Titus, another vengeance was done upon that vengeance by the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem. Providence having selected Rome as the residence of the head of 
 the Church "will not change his scutcheon for the lilies." France must bethink herself 
 of this. The allusion of Justinian to a just vengeance that could be justly avenged gives 
 occasion (Canto VII) for a discourse from Beatrice on Incarnation and Immortality, in 
 which Aristotle's doctrine of the goodness of God (" without envy ") is used after the 
 manner of the Schoolmen St. Thomas and Hugo of St. Victor. Divine condescension 
 and human freedom are dwelt upon. Supreme beneficence lifts man into the rank of 
 immortals. Here is the ground of the human desire for fame, infinite aspiration founded 
 on the divine gift of immortality, and the divine election of man to a union with God.
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 123 
 
 scum of humanity. It is not willing to be crucified in order that 
 it may save them. 
 
 The theory of Copernicus, to which we are accustomed, is, of 
 course, very different from the astronomy of Dante, and, we may 
 add, not so well adapted for the poetic use he makes of the solar 
 and stellar systems. Dante deals with the starry. heavens as they 
 appear to actual observation. The theory of Copernicus exists 
 only for onr reason and is not a poetic matter. According 'to 
 Ptolemy, the moon shines by reflected light, but not so the planets. 
 Their phases could not be perceived without the aid of a telescope. 
 The inferior planets seemed to Dante to revolve primarily around 
 the sun and to accompany him around the zodiac, while the su- 
 perior planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn seemed to revolve 
 around the zodiac independently like the sun itself. 
 
 Terrestrial love moves in the direction of the divine love but 
 in channels with high banks, so that it acts with regard to a few 
 and intermits in regard to many. It is allied to selfishness in the 
 fact that it is thus limited to those near it, or connected by natu- 
 ral ties. It is therefore imperfect in the manner symbolized by 
 Dante. It possesses, like the planet Venus, an individuality, but
 
 124 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 an individuality that is ancillary subordinated to another. Ter- 
 restrial love has so much of the true celestial individuality that it 
 can appear independently (i. e., shine by its own light), but its 
 course is back and forth along the heavenly pathway and not al- 
 ways progressive. 
 
 31. The Heaven of the Sun. Theologians. 
 
 The fourth heaven, or that of the sun, forms the transition from 
 the lower to the higher order of heavens. 
 
 It is the heaven of theologians. The doctrine of the Trinity 
 as taught by the Church is the dogmatic version of the doctrine of 
 divine form laid down by Beatrice in the first canto. It is the 
 doctrine that explains how an infinitely perfect being creates a 
 finite, imperfect being. 
 
 The tenth canto begins with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit : 
 
 " Looking into his Son with all the Love 
 Which each of them eternally breathes forth, 
 The primal and unutterable Power 
 Whate'er before the mind or eye revolves
 
 Dante's "Divina Corn-media" 125 
 
 With so much order made, there can he none 
 Who this beholds without enjoying it." 
 
 (L. Tr.), x, 1-6. 
 
 Dante's love of theology has led him to this heaven, and he is 
 filled with gratitude to God for his goodness in raising him to 
 this place. 
 
 In this great family of theologians he tinds not only Thomas 
 Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, but also Dionysius the Areopa- 
 gite and the mystics, Richard of St. Victor, and St. JBonaventura. 
 In this heaven St. Thomas narrates the life of St. Francis, who 
 wedded poverty or humility. Poverty in Spirit had been a widow 
 since the crucifixion. Afterward St. Bonaventura recounts the 
 deeds of St. Dominic. St. Francis and St. Dominic are the two 
 great reformers of Monasticism in the thirteenth century. They 
 moved out to conquer the world, the Franciscans preaching to the 
 poor and lowly, the Dominicans teaching the governing classes of 
 society, and cultivating literature and theology. Each is cele- 
 brated here by the mouth of the other's most eminent disciple. 
 
 In the heaven of the sun we hear from St. Thomas the wisdom 
 of Solomon the doctrine of the Word and the Spirit and the nine
 
 126 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 subsistences. All things are but the thought of God and created 
 by him in love. 
 
 " That which can die, and that which dieth not, 
 Are nothing but the splendor of the idea 
 Which by his love our Lord brings into being ; 
 Because that living Light, which from its fount 
 Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not 
 From Him nor from the Love in them intrined, 
 Through its own goodness reunites its rays 
 In nine subsistences, as in a mirror, 
 Itself eternally remaining One. 
 Thence it descends to the last potencies, 
 Downward from act to act becoming such 
 That only brief contingencies it makes ; 
 And these contingencies I hold to be 
 Things generated, which the heaven produces 
 By its own motion, with seed and without. 
 Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it, 
 Remains immutable, and hence beneath 
 The ideal signet more and less shines through;
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 127 
 
 Therefore it happens that the self-same tree 
 After its kind bears worse and better fruit, 
 And ye are born with characters diverse. 
 If in perfection tempered were the wax, 
 And were the heaven in its supremest virtue, 
 The brilliance of the seal would all appear ; 
 But nature gives it evermore deficient, 
 In the like manner working as the artist, 
 Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles. 
 If then the fervent Love, the Vision clear, 
 Of primal Virtue do dispose and seal, 
 Perfection absolute is there acquired." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xiii, 52-81. 
 
 Herein we have a new statement of the Form which makes the 
 universe resemble God. It is an account of the rise of finite, im- 
 perfect beings. In God, says St. Thomas, knowing and willing 
 are one, so that his consciousness of himself his knowing of 
 himself on the part of " Primal Virtue " creates another, the 
 " Vision Clear." From these two proceed the Third Person, the 
 " Fervent Love." The Trinity was denied by Sabellius, and on
 
 128 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 leaving this heaven of divine theology it is fitting that we have 
 the great heresiarchs condemned bj the mouth of St. Thomas. 
 But a caution is added : 
 
 " Nor yet shall people be too confident 
 
 In judging, even as he is who doth count 
 
 The corn in field or ever it be ripe. 
 
 For I have seen all winter long the thorn 
 
 First show itself intractable and fierce, 
 
 And after bear the rose upon its top ; 
 
 And I have seen a ship direct and swift 
 
 Run o'er the sea throughout its course entire 
 
 To perish at the harbor's mouth at last. 
 
 Let not Dame Bertha nor Ser Martin think, 
 Seeing one steal, another offering make, 
 To see them in .the arbitrament divine ; 
 For one may rise, and fall the other may." 
 
 32. The Heaven of Mars. True Heroes. 
 In the fifth heaven are found the great Christian heroes and 
 martyrs who have risked their lives from zeal for the true faith.
 
 Dante's " Divina Commedia" 129 
 
 These are arranged in the form of a cross stretched athwart the 
 sky, on which Christ is flashing, symbolic of the spirit of self-sacri- 
 fice which is dominant in the character of these martial saints. 
 These are not those heroes who were obscured by love of fame 
 like the Mercurial saints, but the firm in will and deep in faith. 
 Here Dante listens to the long discourse from Cacciaguida con- 
 cerning the good old times in Florence (Canto xv-xviii). In this 
 heaven of the true spirit of patriotism and heroic self-sacrifice for 
 principle the poet naturally recurs to the subject nearest his heart, 
 and through the mouth of his ancestor he describes the old order 
 and the genesis of the new. The remedy for the evils of Italy in 
 a firmly seated imperial power is prophetically indicated. Thus 
 Dante comes again to the burning question (" Convito," fourth 
 Treatise) at every possible opportunity. The subject is continued 
 in the next heaven, to which we now arrive. 
 
 33. The Heaven of Jupiter. Righteous Kings. 
 
 In the sixth heaven, that of Jupiter, we find the righteous 
 kings arranged in the form of an enormous Eagle symbol of the 
 Holy Roman Empire.
 
 130 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 As we rise from heaven to heaven in the Paradise we reach 
 a more adequate state of devotion of the individual to the welfare 
 of the social whole. Each one unites with his fellows to produce 
 an aggregate social result. This is symbolized by the formation 
 of great figures out of saints arranged as in Mars, so as to present 
 a colossal cross, or in Jupiter, so as to spell out the words that ex- 
 press ethical principles, or to present a great Eagle, or, in the 
 tenth heaven, the Rose of Paradise. This paradise is the state 
 of those whose deeds re-enforce society. 
 
 34. The Doctrine of Salvation. 
 
 The Eagle discourses of salvation by faith and touches on the 
 important question of the salvation of the heathen : 
 
 " For saidst thou : ' Born a man is on the shore 
 Of Indus, and is none who there can speak 
 Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write ; 
 And all his inclinations and his actions 
 Are good, so far as human reason sees, 
 Without a sin in life or in discourse :
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 131 
 
 He dieth unbaptized and without faith ? 
 Where is this justice that conderaneth him? 
 Where is his fault, if he do not believe ? ' 
 Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit 
 In judgment at a thousand miles away, 
 With the short vision of a single span ? " 
 
 (L. Tr.), xix, 70-81. 
 
 This, of course, shuts out the exercise of human reason. While 
 it is true that our failure to comprehend the total system renders 
 it impossible for us to condemn divine justice, in a single instance, 
 yet, on the other hand, we are called upon to understand as far as 
 possible the purposes of Providence and to see their supreme 
 reasonableness. This we may do in given instances, and probably 
 in all, if we ponder the subject sufficiently. Only our negative 
 judgments are insufficient; where the divine decree seems irra- 
 tional there we may be sure that we do not comprehend the case. 
 If we are sure of the existence of the decree as a fact we are sure 
 of its rationality on the same ground that Dante's philosophy 
 assures him of the existence of God. Form and order the de- 
 pendence of all things in space and time unite every thing to
 
 132 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 every other ; it is the universal relativity of which we hear so 
 much in natural philosophy. This interdependence proves the 
 unity of the whole ; and accordingly the whole in all its changes, 
 in all its beginnings and its ceasings, manifests one sole energy 
 an energy of self-determination whose form is Reason No^o-t? 
 1/0770-66)5, as Aristotle calls it. Since the Absolute is self-related 
 and can only be self-related, from its very nature its self-know- 
 ing will result in other creatures. Because that divine knowing 
 in making itself an object, generates another like itself the eter- 
 nal Word as the eternal thought of the eternal Reason. This 
 is the doctrine of the Logos, and was understood by Plato and 
 Aristotle, though not stated by the latter in the same terms as by 
 Plato. It was seen clearly by these two philosophers that the ne- 
 cessary dependence (ordo) of things in space implies or presup- 
 poses an Absolute, that the relative presupposes an independent, 
 self-related Absolute. It was seen, in the second place, that the 
 Absolute has necessarily the form of self-activity or self-determi- 
 nation, and that self-activity in its perfect form is Reason, subject 
 and object in one. Following this a third step, they saw that such 
 an absolute Reason is perfect goodness or without envy (see Canto
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 133 
 
 vii, " La divina bonta, che da se sperne ogni livore"), 1 and this is 
 explicitly stated by both philosophers (" Timaeus," 29, and 
 
 1 Livore, used in this passage (vii, 65), also used in " Purg.," xiv, 84, names envy by 
 its livid hue. Without doubt this word is suggested to Dante by Boethius, who indeed 
 suggests also this whole passage in regard to the divine goodness. In " The Consola- 
 tion of Philosophy," Metrum ix of the third book, he speaks of " the form of the su- 
 preme goodness, devoid of envy, not impelled to create by external causes " (uerum 
 insita summi forma boni livore carens). To Boethius is due also the form of the " Vita 
 Nuova," and especially that of the " Convito." For Boethius puts in verse the sub- 
 stance of a prose discourse in each chapter. Dante makes his prose discourse a com- 
 mentary on the verse, while Boethius makes the latter a summary. In the old trans- 
 lation of Boethius " by the Right Honorable Richard Lord Viscount Preston " (London, 
 1695) is the following rendering of the first portion of Metrum ix: 
 " thou who with perpetual Reason rul'st 
 
 The World, great Maker of the Heaven and Earth ! 
 
 Who dost from ages make swift Time proceed, 
 
 And fix'd thyself, mak'st all things else to move ! 
 
 Whom exterior Causes did not force to frame 
 
 This Work of floating Matter, but the Form 
 
 Of Sovereign Good, above black Envy plac'd, 
 
 Within thy Breast ; thou everything dost draw 
 
 From the supreme Example ; fairest thyself, 
 
 Bearing the World's Figure in thy Mind, 
 
 Thou formedst this after that Prototype," etc. 
 
 When we go back to Dante and to the Christian writers of earlier ages we find their 
 statements taking on the technical terms in which this great doctrine of divine Good- 
 ness was stated by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The creed had not at that
 
 134: The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 " Metaph.," Book i, ch. ii). In other words, this is the doctrine 
 that Creation proceeds from God's grace. He desires to share his 
 life with other beings without number (" Convito," second Treat- 
 ise, ch. v, " He has made spiritual creatures innumerable"). 
 
 The doctrine of the Logos includes a further thought, and from 
 this is derived the idea of creation and the procession of the Holy 
 Spirit. If Divine Reason, in thinking itself as object causes that 
 object to exist as its perfect other an eternally and only begot- 
 ten it follows that the only begotten Logos is a perfect reason 
 (vorja-is voqa-ecos} who also causes his own object to exist independ- 
 ently. The Logos in knowing himself has to know himself as in- 
 dependent and perfect, and also to know himself as begotten, as 
 derived from the First Reason (not as being derived, but as one 
 who has completed his derivation and become perfect). His 
 knowledge of his perfection makes for its object the Holy Spirit, 
 and his knowledge of his derivation creates a world of derivation or 
 
 time become a mere formula of words confessed to have no meaning that can be com- 
 prehended, but it was a " symbolum " or statement of the highest insight attained by 
 the contemplative souls within the Church (" Symbolum est professio fidei," T. Aq. 
 "Summa Theolog.," 2, 2, Article ix).
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 135 
 
 evolution containing all stages in it of growth and development, 
 from chaos or unformed matter below up to the highest saint or 
 angel above. Space and time are the forms of all finite existence ; 
 they condition matter. The universe in time and space is the Pro- 
 cessio of the Holy Ghost. Nature is the process of creating con- 
 scious, rational souls who being arrived at the doctrine of Chris- 
 tianity, " the good of the Intellect " (Aristotle), the doctrine of 
 God as pure grace set up charity as the highest principle and 
 form an Invisible Church which is the " Rose of Paradise " in- 
 numerable souls united through brotherly helpfulness, so that 
 each prefers the welfare of all others to his own, and by such al- 
 truism becomes the recipient of the providential care of all. Such 
 an Invisible Church, including all rational beings in all the worlds 
 in space, and especially the infinitely numerous spirits that have 
 passed through death to immortality, is celebrated in the Apoca- 
 lypse as the " Bride." This Invisible Church has one spirit, be- 
 cause mutual interdependence makes unity it is an institutional 
 Spirit The Holy Spirit. 
 
 The form of this statement is different from that of Dante and 
 St. Thomas and from that of the mystics, but is substantially their
 
 136 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 view. If one will take this view in its history, beginning with 
 Plato and Aristotle and following it down to Philo and Alexan- 
 drian mysticism ; beginning again with the New Testament state- 
 ments of it by St. John in his Gospel and by St. Paul in Colossians 
 (i, 13-20), trace its growth in the creeds through the conflict with 
 Arianism, and finally through the conflict of the Greek and Roman 
 churches he will find this statement a clew to the entire move- 
 ment and the mysterious principle that guided the church fathers 
 in defining their symbola as well as in building up their systems 
 of theology. Interpreted by this, one may see the general ethical 
 significance of the expression " faith in Christ," as a faith in the 
 doctrine of grace and the recognition of Divine charity as the high- 
 est principle. 
 
 " It recommenced : ' Unto this kingdom never 
 Ascended one who had not faith in Christ, 
 Before or since he to the tree was nailed. 
 But look thou, many crying are, " Christ, Christ ! " 
 Who at the judgment shall be far less near 
 To him than some shall be who knew not Christ.' " 
 
 (L. Tr.), xix, 103-108.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 137 
 
 Interpreting this by the doctrine of the Logos as above stated, 
 all beings in the world, conscious and unconscious, are created by 
 the act of the Logos. He recognizes his derivation ; whatever he 
 knows as object He causes to exist as object. Man may think 
 a thought without causing it to exist; his will is different from 
 his knowing; this constitutes man's finitude; but in God will 
 and intellect are one (" In Deo sit idem voluntas et intellectus," 
 St. T. Aquinas, " Summa Theol.," I, q. xxvii, art. 3 ; see also " Con- 
 tra Gentiles," lib. iv, cap. 19). Hence, whatever God knows de- 
 rives existence, and whatever finitude exists, exists in the knowl- 
 edge of the Logos. Individual existence is, therefore, derived from 
 grace which gives separate subsistence to that which is finite and 
 imperfect. But such imperfect or finite exists only in a state of 
 change and genesis, for it is the thought of His own genesis that 
 causes the finite to exist it exists only in a state of becoming 
 or evolution. Hence, it is said in theology that all improve- 
 ment and growth in intellect and morality is a work of grace. 
 Hence, too, it is said that Christ bears the sins of man ; he thinks 
 all their imperfections and does not annihilate them because of 
 imperfection. He is the Mediator with the First Person because
 
 138 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the First thinks perfection and generates a Perfect Logos. To 
 think imperfection, God must find it in some way involved with 
 His Being. The Logos, inasmuch as there is derivation or gen- 
 eration logically implied in His being, necessarily thinks imper- 
 fection, but only as a preface and procession toward perfection. 
 He is perfection, and no imperfection remains in the Logos ; but 
 there is a logical implication that there was such imperfection in 
 the fact that he was begotten or derived from the First. This log- 
 ical derivation necessary to the thought of His relation to the 
 First becomes a real derivation in time and space. But the 
 thought of finitude and imperfection must be looked upon as re- 
 pugnant to the mind of the Logos, and to be endured only in view 
 of what proceeds from it. In religious symbolism He is spoken 
 of as redeeming finite beings through his incarnation and death 
 on the Cross. This expresses symbolically the act of the Logos in 
 Creation. For the sake of reconciliation or atonement, and the 
 existence of the invisible Church of believers in divine charity, 
 God creates matter and lower forms of being, and educes, from 
 these, higher and higher forms of self-activity and freedom, culmi- 
 nating in immortal souls who may freely unite in institutions.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 139 
 
 Institutions enable each member to reap the united result of the 
 whole. Philosophy must certainly agree with religion in this: 
 that the existence of matter and lower forms of life not only 
 these, but the higher and highest forms of life and finite spirit are 
 evidences of benevolent goodness (grace) in the First Principle. 
 Nature seems even to the scientist (illuminated by the thought of 
 Darwin) to be a vast process of developing individuality. For 
 the fittest survives, and the fittest is the most able to conquer by 
 ideas. All matter struggles to assume the form of man, or, 
 
 " Striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts through all the spires of form." 
 
 Souls may exist without this doctrine, but they are not in the 
 Paradise and the Holy Spirit does not dwell in them. But they 
 are subject to conversion by the spirits who have found the truth. 
 
 The voice of the spirit choir, seeming to proceed from the beak 
 of the Eagle, continues its discourse, and Dante is informed that 
 the supreme saints forming the eye are the supreme saints of this 
 heaven, David the psalmist being its very pupil. 
 
 " Of the five who make me a circle for eyelid, he who is closest
 
 140 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 beside my beak consoled the poor widow for her son. Now 
 knows he how dear it costs not to follow Christ by the experi- 
 ence of this sweet life and of the opposite." (A. J. B., Tr.), xx, 
 43-48. 
 
 This was the Emperor Trajan, the story of whose justice so in- 
 terested St. Gregory that he interceded with prayers for his soul, 
 and having his bones disinterred, baptized him and thus brought 
 him into Paradise. This shows the power of the Church over the 
 souls in the Limbo. But Dante carries it a step further by saving 
 on his own authority the soul of Rhipeus, whom Yirgil (^Eneid 
 ii, 426) has called the justest of all that were in Troy. Dante 
 makes him one of the five supreme spirits in the eye of the 
 Eagle. 
 
 " Who would believe down in the erring world that Rhipeus of 
 Troy should be in this round the fifth of the holy lights ? Now 
 knows he enough of that which the world cannot see of the divine 
 grace, albeit his view discerns not the depth. Like a lark which 
 goes abroad in air, singing first, and then holds her peace, con- 
 tent with the last sweetness which sates her, such seemed to me 
 the image of the imprint of the eternal pleasure, according to its
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 141 
 
 desire for which each thing becomes of what sort it is. And 
 albeit in that place I was in regard to ray doubting as glass to 
 the color which covers it, it did not suffer me to wait a while in 
 silence, but with the force of its weight it urged from my mouth, 
 * What things are these ? ' Wherefore of sparkling I beheld a great 
 festival. Thereafter, with its eye more kindled, the blessed en- 
 sign responded to me, not to keep me in suspense wondering : ' I 
 see that thou believest these things because I say them, but seest 
 not how ; so that if they are believed, they are concealed. Thou 
 dost as he who well apprehends the thing by name, but its quid- 
 dity he cannot see, if another sets it not forth. Regnum ccelorum 
 suffereth violence of warm love and of lively hope, which over- 
 comes the divine will, not in such wise as man has the mastery 
 over man, but overcomes it, because it wills to be overcome, and 
 being overcome, overcomes with its own goodness. The first life 
 in the eyelid and the fifth make thee marvel because with them 
 thou seest the angels' domain adorned.' ' (A. J. B., Tr.), xx, 
 6T-102. 
 
 The principle of grace in the Christian religion contains infinite 
 depths yet to be revealed in creeds and practice. The adjustment
 
 142 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 of the principle of grace to the principle of justice has furnished 
 the most difficult of theological problems. It is the old question 
 of Orientalism as against Occidentalism Asia versus Europe. 
 The Eagle says that " Rhipeus placed all his love below upon 
 righteousness, being led by grace that distills from a Fountain so 
 deep that never creature has been able to see its first wave ; from 
 grace to grace God opened his eye to our future redemption." 
 Then, with this example of salvation, he concludes with a warn- 
 ing against the sin of limiting in thought God's grace : 
 
 " thou predestination, how remote 
 Thy root is from the aspect of all those 
 Who the First Cause do not behold entire ! 
 And you, O mortals ! hold yourselves restrained 
 In judging ; for ourselves, who look on God, 
 We do not know as yet all the elect." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xx, 130-135. 
 
 35. The Heaven of Saturn. 
 
 The seventh heaven, that of Saturn, is the special place for the 
 contemplative spirits the highest mystics. But while we find St.
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia" 143 
 
 Bonaventura and Dionysius in the heaven of the sun with Albert 
 and St. Thomas, here are found only St. Peter Damiano and St. 
 Benedict and the former does not speak of highest and subtlest 
 doctrines, but only inveighs against the luxury of modern prelates, 
 while the latter complains of the corruption of the monks. 
 
 36. The Heaven of the Fixed Stars. 
 
 The eighth heaven is that of the fixed stars to which Dante 
 follows Beatrice, beholding the solar system at such a distance 
 that the planets seemed to form a small cluster of stars. Here he 
 beholds the Triumph of Christ. 
 
 Dante is now examined by St. Peter on the subject of Faith 
 (xxiv), by St. James on that of Hope (xxv), and by St. John on 
 that of Charity (xxvi). 
 
 One looks for a mystical interpretation for these three celestial 
 virtues from Dante in this place, or at least for hints of such an 
 interpretation. "What he finds at first is the ordinary definitions 
 taken in the ordinary sense. " Faith is the substance of things 
 hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." In what sense
 
 144 The Spiritual Sense -of 
 
 can there be a substance (trrocrrcwn?, or hypostasis) of things hoped 
 for? 
 
 Faith is not contrasted with knowledge of the higher order, but 
 only with knowledge attained by experience. Faith is a higher 
 order of knowledge a knowledge founded on insight into what is 
 necessarily and eternally true. We know phenomena by sense- 
 perception, but we know noumena through insight into the pre- 
 suppositions of things that appear to our senses. "We perceive 
 things and events by our senses, but we perceive time and space 
 by reflection. Things and events may or may not be, but time and 
 space must be, and cannot be thought away. We may be said to 
 know time and space by faith in this technical sense. Faith is 
 not mere belief founded on probabilities, or on hearsay, though 
 it is often taken in that sense. Probable knowledge does not go 
 for BO much as this true faith. Faith in mere hearsay relates to 
 things of sense whose existence is not necessary but contingent. 
 They exist at one time and cease to exist at another to-day the 
 lily of the field is, but to-morrow it is withered and gone. But 
 the logical conditions of existence do not pass away, nor are they 
 to be perceived or known by sense-perception.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 145 
 
 But Christian faith is something else than mere insight into 
 what is logically permanent. It is insight into the principle of 
 grace as the source of all things, of time and space, as well as 
 things and events. The Trinity is the supreme object of faith, and 
 it is the object of highest knowledge and subtlest insight. Faith 
 is the substance of things hoped for, inasmuch as it explains how 
 human life is a part of an eternal life, a part of the Procession of 
 the Holy Ghost, a career which begins here and ends no more 
 through all the future. All things hoped for or worthy of being 
 hoped for have, therefore, their substance and ground in this doc- 
 trine, as the deepest insight attained by the human mind. Faith 
 is " evidence of things not seen " (eXey^o?, or " evidence," is 
 proof or conviction) in the general sense of all a priori knowledge. 
 All non-sensuous knowledge is of this order. It is not less probable 
 but more probable than sense-knowledge. Sense-knowledge tells 
 us that this or that object undergoes a change ; insight tells us that 
 if it undergoes a change there is a cause for it : and this is not a 
 probability but a certainty. The observation of the change may 
 have been a mistake, but the insight cannot be. Sense-perception 
 
 looks for the cause of the change, say of the movement of a piece 
 
 7
 
 146 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 of matter, and finds it perhaps in an animal, perhaps in another 
 body. But insight knows that a real efficient cause must be found 
 in a self-activity, in a living being, plant, animal, or man, or in 
 God. Sense-perception may be mistaken in identifying any being 
 as cause ; but insight, or faith in this high sense of " the evidence 
 of things not seen " cannot be mistaken as to the fact of the exist- 
 ence of a cause of this change and of any change. Moreover, 
 although we may speak truly of plant, animal, or man as a cause, 
 yet the causal energy is invisible and cannot be a matter of sense- 
 perception, which is limited to effects. It sees limbs move, but not 
 the force that moves them. Faith in this sense is, as St. Peter 
 observes, correctly placed among the substances, and also among 
 the proofs (tra gli argomenti). " Faith is that capacity of mind " 
 St. Thomas quotes this definition (ii, 2, qu. 4, art. 1) " wherein 
 eternal life begins in us, making our intellect assured of invisi- 
 ble beings." 
 
 The greatest of all miracles in the world is its adoption of Chris- 
 tianity, says Dante ; for that poverty and the doctrine of other- 
 worldliness should turn aside people enjoying this world seems 
 impossible. But Christianity is not so ascetic as Buddhism or
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 147 
 
 Brahminism, which hold more devotees to-daj than Christianity. 
 But miracle in religion has this deep sense as foundation of faith : 
 All manifestation of force is ultimately the manifestation of self- 
 activity. Self-activity is the opposite of mechanism and mechani- 
 cal links in a chain of causation. The religious mind does not 
 pause for a moment on the mechanical nexus, but flies at once to 
 the efficient cause a self-activity. 
 
 Dante repeats his " credo" but carries it only through the por- 
 .tion that relates to one eternal God in three eternal Persons, dis- 
 tinct as persons but one in essence, so that of them is and are may 
 both be predicated. 
 
 " Hope is a sure expectation of the future glory which is the 
 effect produced by divine grace, and preceding merit" is Dante's 
 reply ' to the holy catechist. It is not hope in the ordinary sense, 
 but hope based on the faith or insight into the constitution of the 
 universe a faith based on the knowledge of God and the Final 
 Cause of His Creation. It is thus, as St. Thomas explains it, " a 
 sure expectation of future glory." It is to the will what faith is 
 
 1 Quoted from Peter the Lombard, as Philalethes shows.
 
 14:8 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 to the intellect (St. T. Aq., " Sumraa Theol.," ii, 2, qu. 18). With 
 the inequalities of insight and the vicissitudes of life, Hope sup- 
 ports the soul during its nights and eclipses, giving steadfastness to 
 the will. 
 
 The approach of St. John temporarily eclipses Beatrice by ex- 
 cess of light. To his catechist Dante defines the object of love 
 as God, and affirms that lie has learned this through Philosophy 
 (Plato and Aristotle teaching him that the divine is without envy), 
 and also from revelation. Love is the foundation of all Being. 
 One may have faith (insight) or hope, and yet not admit the divine 
 principle into his heart. But with divine charity he becomes 
 filled with it and is it. 
 
 Dante now is permitted to see Adam the archetypal man, for 
 he has fulfilled the course of human education, having passed his 
 examination in this heaven of Saturn, highest of the planets or 
 varying stars. - f '- ' 
 
 St. Peter, however (as a sort of favor to Dante ?), takes occasion 
 to administer a violent rebuke to certain of his successors in the 
 papal chair.
 
 Dantds "Divina Commedia." 149 
 
 36. The Heaven of the Fixed Stars. 
 
 Dante and Beatrice now leave the solar system and ascend to 
 the heaven of the fixed stars the primum mobile, or first moved ; 
 for motion is communicated to all the lower heavens by this 
 heaven which is the crystalline sphere. The unmoved heaven, 
 the tenth, is the Empyrean. Spiritual perfection (eWeXe^eia) is 
 all in all, and everywhere perfect. But that which is in space 
 and time is sundered, so that it is not everywhere self-identical. 
 But the imperfect desires to be perfect. It is part real and part 
 potential ; hence it moves in order to realize its potentialities. 
 Hence change in the world is caused by desire on the part of that 
 which is imperfect to realize all its potentialities and become per- 
 fect. This is Aristotle's theory of the movements and changes in 
 the world, and especially of the stars. If each point in space 
 could be all points at once, it would reach perfection. This it 
 attempts to do through movement. (This thought of Aristotle and 
 also of Plato at first seemingly whimsical will bear the closest 
 examination. It is an interesting fact that Hegel adopts it in his 
 " Naturphilosophie "). The primum mobile, or crystalline sphere,
 
 150 Tlie Spiritual Sense of 
 
 " desires " to touch the Empyrean in each and every part at once 
 with all its own parts, and thus have perfect contact. Hence it 
 moves with inconceivable swiftness, so that this contact shall occur 
 with the least possible intervals of delay. 
 
 The Empyrean is all-living flame (symbol of pure self-activ- 
 ity). It is everywhere total and complete just as the soul is 
 everywhere present in the body in the act of feeling. " And 
 this is why," says Dante in the " Convito " (second Treatise, chap. 
 iv, E. P. Sayer's translation) " that first moved the Primum Mo- 
 bile has such extremely rapid motion ; for, because of the most 
 fervent appetite which each part of it has to be united with each 
 part of that most divine heaven of peace, in which it revolves 
 with so much desire, its velocity is almost incomprehensible." 
 
 Dante learns here of the nine hierarchies. Beatrice discourses 
 also of the creation of the angels and of the fall of Lucifer : 
 
 "Jerome has written unto you of angels 
 Created a long lapse of centuries 
 Or ever yet the other world was made ; 
 But written is this truth in many places
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 151 
 
 By writers of the Holy Ghost, and thou 
 Shalt see it, if thou lookest well thereat 
 And even reason seeth it somewhat, 
 For it would not concede that for so long 
 Could be the motors without their perfection." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xxix, 37-45. 
 
 The higher has its perfection in giving help and guidance to 
 the lower, and hence is not without the lower. 
 
 " Nor could one reach, in counting, unto twenty 
 So swiftly, as a portion of these angels 
 Disturbed the subject of your elements. 
 The rest remained, and they began this art 
 Which thou discernest, with so great delight 
 That never from their circling do they cease. 
 The occasion of the fall was the accursed 
 Presumption of that One whom thou hast seen 
 By all the burden of the world constrained." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xxix, 49-57. 
 
 In describing the angels the subject of angelic knowing (treated 
 of elsewhere in this essay) is touched upon (xxix, 79). " They
 
 152 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 behold rod's face direct, and therefore naught is hidden from 
 them." For they look into universals and behold in the efficient 
 and final causes the entire compass of effects. " Their vision is 
 not interrupted by new objects, and hence they have no need to 
 remember through partial concepts." They do not know by 
 objects which, though real, yet are defective in that they do not 
 exhibit all the possibilities of their species ; for example, by the 
 senses I see this oak, which is only one specimen out of a multi- 
 tude. Scientific knowing so re-enforces my sense-perception by the 
 sense-perception of all men that I ma} 7 come to see in this oak all 
 oaks, or, rather, I may compare it with the species and note its 
 defects. 
 
 Beatrice improves the occasion to reprehend vehemently that 
 sort of theologians and preachers who have, through ignorance or 
 avarice, substituted inventions of their own for the truth. 
 
 They now ascend to the highest heaven the tenth and Dante 
 sees the river of light of the Empyrean and the White Rose of 
 Paradise, in which all the souls of all the heavens find their 
 place, the Paradise being symbolized by this perfect participation 
 of each in the whole.
 
 Dante's "Divina (Jommedia" 153 
 
 Beatrice takes up the question of the ignorance and avarice of 
 the clergy, and also hints of the sale of indulgences, supplement- 
 ing St. Peter's condemnation of higher dignitaries. 
 
 3T. The Empyrean. The White Rose of Paradise. The Vision 
 
 of God. 
 
 In the tenth heaven Dante beholds the river of light : 
 
 " And light I saw in fashion of a river 
 Fulvid with its effulgence, 'twixt two banks 
 Depicted with an admirable Spring. 
 Out of this river issued living sparks, 
 And on all sides sank down into the flowers, 
 Like unto rubies that are set in gold ; 
 And then, as if inebriate with the odors, 
 They plunged again into the wondrous torrent, 
 And as one entered, issued forth another." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xxx, 61-69. 
 
 This river takes the form of the White Rose of Paradise :
 
 154 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 " Thus into greater pomp were changed for me 
 The flowerets and the sparks, so that I saw 
 Both of the Courts of Heaven made manifest. . . . 
 There is a light above, which visible 
 Makes the Creator unto every creature, 
 Who only in beholding Him has peace, 
 And it expands itself in circular form 
 To such extent that its circumference 
 Would be too large a girdle for the sun. . . . 
 And as a hill in water at its base 
 Mirrors itself, as if to see its beauty 
 When affluent most in verdure and in flowers, 
 So, ranged aloft all around about the light, 
 Mirrored I saw in more ranks than a thousand 
 All who above there have from us returned." 
 
 (L. Tr.), xxx, 94-114. 
 
 " Into the Yellow of the Rose Eternal 
 That spreads, and multiplies, and breathes an odor 
 Of praise unto the ever-vernal Sun," 
 
 Beatrice drew him as if she fain would speak, and said :
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 155 
 
 "Behold how vast the circuit of our city ! 
 Behold our seats so filled to overflowing, 
 That here henceforward are few people wanting ! " 
 
 (L. Tr.), xxx, 130-132. 
 
 Dante compares his vision of the rose to the vision of a barba- 
 rian who has come from some remote region, and now " beholds 
 Rome and all her noble works " : 
 
 " I, who to the divine had from the human, 
 From time unto eternity, had come 
 From Florence to a people just and sane, 
 With what amazement must I have heen filled ! " 
 
 He turns round to question Beatrice concerning this wonderful 
 sight, but she has vanished and taken her place as a petal in the 
 great white rose, and Dante finds an old man robed in glory by 
 his side, who has been summoned by Beatrice to aid him. It is 
 St. Bernard. After explaining the blessed souls on their thrones 
 in the Mystic Rose of Paradise, St. Bernard addresses a prayer 
 to the Virgin as symbol of Divine Grace to aid Dante, and he is
 
 156 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 permitted to have a glimpse of the great mystery of the Holy 
 Trinity. He sees something that suggests the human image in the 
 eternal light of the Godhead. If man is in God's image, there 
 is something human to be discerned in the form divine.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 157 
 
 IY. DANTE'S MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 38. The Angelic Knowing. 
 
 According to scholastic philosophy, the human mode of know- 
 ing differs from the angelic through this: The angels know by 
 means of pure illumination, while men know by means of the 
 symbolism involved in objects perceptible by the senses (" Para- 
 diso," xxix, 79-81). At first this seems a mere idle distinction 
 based on no ascertained facts and with a purely imaginary psy- 
 chological distinction at its basis. But a careful consideration 
 will discover an important thought in the definition. 
 
 It is readily granted that the growth of the human intellect is 
 from particular facts to general truths. The immediate fact sug- 
 gests to us presuppositions, and we learn to observe relations and 
 to think an object in its relations. Moreover, we discover corre- 
 spondences between one series of phenomena and another, and 
 thereby enrich our language by means of trope and metaphor. 
 The poetic faculty of man thus arises. We especially learn to
 
 158 The Spiritual Se<nse of 
 
 express our internal states and conditions the feelings, desires, 
 volitions, and ideas of the soul by means of words that had origi- 
 nally only a material signification and applied only to things per- 
 ceptible by the senses. 
 
 So, too, our scientific activity has a movement from particular 
 facts to general principles. At first there is a feeble effort at 
 mere classification, or a statistical inventory. By and by laws are 
 reached, and then energies are inferred as operating through these 
 laws. Finally, knowledge becomes so complete that it sees prin- 
 ciples, and in them recognizes energies acting in the form of laws. 
 A natural principle is an energy or force or cause that acts accord- 
 ing to its own laws, or, in other words, according to its definite 
 nature. 
 
 When the scientific mind has reached a principle it can deduce 
 from it et priori the facts that will follow as results. 
 
 The application of science is called art. It is evident that the 
 existence of art, properly so called, depends upon the possibility 
 of guiding practice by a knowledge of principles. 
 
 In his philosophic activity man traces back all principles to one 
 principle as fundamental presupposition. From this one princi-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 159 
 
 pie thus found he descends by deduction along the line of prin- 
 ciples, seeing the necessary causes and conditions that operate in 
 the world, and comprehending the necessity of the general order 
 and form of things and events. 
 
 Although man possesses and uses his capacity for philosophic 
 knowledge, yet for the most part the activity of his mind is de- 
 voted to the inventory of particular facts and events, and to an 
 equally special practical activity of arranging, ordering, and pro- 
 ducing particular things and events, useful or hurtful to human 
 interests. 
 
 If man should ever become so well acquainted with principles 
 that he habitually put his knowledge into the form of deduction 
 from the first principle, he would know by " pure illumination " 
 just as the angels are said to know. To see at a glance the con- 
 sequences of the energy of the first principle creatively descend- 
 ing from the universal toward the particular is to have pure illu- 
 mination. But so long as one's knowledge of principles is so im- 
 perfect that he cannot comprehend them in the double sense of 
 energy and law, he cannot use them deductively. In this respect 
 human science is constantly on the road of progress. Some spe-
 
 160 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 cies of knowledge, like mathematics, have been deductive since 
 the dawn of civilization. 
 
 Mathematical applications, like astronomy and other branches 
 of physics, have long been deductive and in a condition to predict 
 results of combinations and processes. So, too, in the highest sci- 
 entific minds in many departments of biology there are instances 
 of men becoming so familiar with the principle of life in special 
 provinces as to possess a ready intuitive knowledge which led 
 them to numerous discoveries. They knew the whole from in- 
 spection of the part because they had become so familiar with the 
 analogies of nature that a luminous principle had come to be seen, 
 arid they could " anticipate experience," to use an expression of 
 the philosopher Kant. Their intuition was a sort of " pure illu- 
 mination," and if they had been able to trace their principle back 
 to the first principle so as to see vastly wider analogies, they 
 would have attained to the veritable pure illumination which the 
 schoolmen defined as the characteristic of angelic knowledge. 
 
 Human experience, therefore, is in the nature of a ladder which 
 helps us to attain an elevation upon which we may walk securely 
 without afterward needing the ladder. Of course I am aware
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 161 
 
 that the empirical psychology of the present day does not take 
 this view of the matter. It supposes that knowledge is firmly 
 based on facts, and that it remains conditioned by them and can 
 never soar on its own wings without losing the certainty of scien- 
 tific knowledge. But in this I conceive it has not followed its 
 own advice and examined carefully the state of scientific knowl- 
 edge, nor accurately analyzed the practical action of the scientific 
 mind as it is actually employed in scientific questions. Rather 
 than this, it furnishes us an example of what it condemns. It 
 sweepingly concludes regarding the possibilities of knowledge and 
 its necessary conditions, from supposed principles from supposed 
 knowledge concerning the energy called mind and its laws of 
 action. 
 
 But the poetic faculty of the soul which we have already men- 
 tioned is perhaps a more wonderful illustration of the distinction 
 between the angelic and human modes of cognition, and of the 
 ascent of the latter into the former. A great poet converts all 
 things and events lying familiar about him in the world into 
 tropes and similitudes, so that they lose their imposing airs of act- 
 uality and become transparent images of ideas and spiritual truth.
 
 162 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 If he accomplishes so much as this by means of his tropes and 
 personifications, he accomplishes far more than this by means of 
 his entire poetic structures, for the individual tropes are only the 
 brick and mortar of the poetic edifice. What the scientific prin- 
 ciple is to the isolated facts and events, the poetic structure is to 
 the separate tropes and personifications. It organizes them into 
 a whole. It connects them with a central unity which stands to 
 them in the twofold relation of efficient and final cause. It is at 
 once their origin and the final purpose for which they exist. 
 
 39. The Poetic Myihos What it Embodies. 
 
 It may be said that the supreme object of a great poetic work 
 of art is the production of a myth. A myth furnishes a poetic 
 explanation for a class of phenomena observed in the world. The 
 mind that can see tropes in natural objects sees his way lighted by 
 their converging rays to an underlying unity. Under tropes of 
 small compass lie more extensive tropes, which unite the former 
 into a consistent whole. And, as the poet's fundamental insight 
 into the world is this, that the things and events of the world are
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 163 
 
 means of spiritual expression, themselves moved and shaped by 
 spiritual being, which they both hide and reveal, it follows that his 
 combination of these poetic elements produces a whole structure 
 that is spiritual throughout and a revelation of human nature 
 such as the poet has conceived and fitted to the world he has 
 created. 
 
 Most beloved among mortal men is the poet. He is eyes to the 
 blind and ears to the deaf. He is intuition and reflection for all. 
 He furnishes his people a view of the world in which they can all 
 unite. Hence he is the inspired Orpheus who builds cities and 
 civilizations. His inspired mythos is recognized as the highest 
 possession of the race, and implicit faith in it is demanded of all 
 men. While it is permitted to deny the reality of existing facts 
 and events, it is never permitted to deny the truth of the poetic 
 mythos which unites .a people in one civilization. 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, to study with all care the workings 
 of a great poet's mind, and to note also what phases of nature he 
 finds most available as vehicles for his myths. It has already been 
 observed that the poet sees in the inanimate things and events of 
 nature a revelation of rational will that is to say, of spiritual
 
 164 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 being like himself and humanity. Conscious being is the key to 
 the universe in the poet's hands. 
 
 Not only in poetic art, but in all art sculpture, poetry, music, 
 and architecture there is a seeking after rhythm or after regu- 
 larity, symmetry, and harmony, and a delight in them simply as 
 such as though they constituted indubitable evidence of a rational 
 cause identical in nature with the human mind that beholds it. 
 What is consciousness but the rhythm of subject and object con- 
 tinually distinguishing and continually recognizing and identify- 
 ing? In this is regularity and symmetry and also harmony. 
 There is the repetition involved in self-knowing the self being 
 subject and likewise object hence regularity. The shallowest 
 mind, the child or the savage, delights in monotonous repetition, 
 not possessing, however, the slightest insight into the cause of his 
 delight. To us the phenomenon is intelligible. We see that his 
 perception is like a spark under a heap of smoking flax. There 
 is little fire of conscious insight, but much smoke of pleasurable 
 feeling. He feels rather than perceives the fact of the identity 
 which exists in form between the rhythm of his internal soul- 
 activity and the sense-perception by which he perceives regularity.
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 165 
 
 40. The Sun Myth its Significance as Physical Description 
 
 of Mind. 
 
 The sun myth arises through the same feeling, illuminated by 
 the poetic insight. Wherever there is repetition, especially in the 
 form of revolution or return-to-itself, there comes this conscious 
 or unconscious satisfaction at beholding it. Hence especially cir- 
 cular movement, or movement in cycles, is the most wonderful of 
 all the phenomena beheld by primitive man. Nature presents to 
 his observation infinite differences. Out of the confused mass he 
 traces some forms of recurrence : day and night, the phases of the 
 moon, the seasons of the year, genus and species in animals and 
 plants, the apparent revolutions of the fixed stars, and the orbits 
 of planets. These phenomena furnish him symbols or types in 
 which to express his ideas concerning the divine principle that he 
 feels to be First Cause. To the materialistic student of sociology 
 all religions are mere transfigured sun myths. But to the deeper 
 student of psychology it becomes clear that the sun myth itself 
 rests on the perception of identity between regular cycles and the 
 rhythm which characterizes the activity of self-consciousness.
 
 166 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 And self -consciousness is felt and seen to be a form of being not 
 on a level with mere transient, individual existence, but the essen- 
 tial attribute of the Divine Being, Author of all. 
 
 Here we see how deep-seated and significant is this blind in- 
 stinct or feeling which is gratified by the seeing and hearing of 
 mere regularity. The words which express the divine in all lan- 
 guages root in this sense-perception and in the aesthetic pleasure 
 attendant on it. Philology, discovering the sun-myth origin of 
 religious expression, places the expression before the thing ex- 
 pressed, the symbol before the thing signified. It tells us that 
 religions arise from a sort of disease in language which turns 
 poetry into prose. But underneath the aesthetic feeling lies the 
 perception of identity which makes possible the trope or meta- 
 phor. 
 
 In the poetic mythos there is a collection of those phenomena 
 which have astonished the primitive consciousness of the race and 
 impressed on the soul a deep feeling of awe. Unutterable ques- 
 tions have made themselves dimly felt at the constant spectacle 
 of nature's returning cycles. The activity of the mind with its 
 regular and symmetrical recurrence or rhythm the vibration be-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 167 
 
 tween subject and object, its alternation of seizing an object at 
 first new and unknown and then recognizing in it what is already 
 become familiar, the alternation of subject and predicate have 
 not been recognized as the characteristics of mind, but these phe- 
 nomena of return-into-self have excited its attention and suggested 
 first the far-off questions of the cycle of the soul reaching beyond 
 this life into the hereafter. 
 
 Of all nations, the Egyptians were the most inclined to study 
 these analogies of nature. Because of the fact that the supreme 
 natural circumstance in Egyptian life is the Nile, and its cycles of 
 rise and fall alternating with seed-time and harvest, this attention 
 to cycles finds its natural occasion and explanation. The calendar 
 and the signs of the seasons of the year became objects of the 
 utmost solicitude. By and by the poetic faculty seized on the 
 phenomena and the doctrine of immortality was embodied in a 
 mythos for mankind. There is the still world of Amenti where 
 the good Egyptian goes to dwell with Osiris. 
 
 But the most highly gifted of all peoples in poetic insight were 
 the Greeks. They possessed supreme ability in the interpretation 
 of nature as expression of spirit.
 
 168 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 They have countless mythoses to express the immortality of 
 man and his after-life. Some of the more notable of these we 
 must briefly consider. 
 
 41. Homers Mythos of Hades. 
 
 In the eleventh book of Homer's " Odyssey " we have the Greek 
 mythosofthe state after death. The great poet Homer under- 
 stands human freedom and retribution, making this circle of the 
 deed and its return, however, include the gods on Olympus ' and 
 the life of men on earth in one process. He does not yet con- 
 ceive the return of the deed as directly the affair of human society 
 and the individual, and hence does not punish in his Hades the 
 wickedness of men, although he symbolizes from a distance this 
 species of retribution by the examples of Orion, Tityus, and espe- 
 cially of Tantalus and Sisyphus. 
 
 Orion is hunting beasts in the meadow of Asphodel. Tityus, 
 
 1 Mr. D. J. Snider, in his essays on the " Iliad " (" Journal of Speculative Philosophy " 
 for April and October, 1883 ; for January, July, and October, 1884 ; and for July 1887) 
 has shown clearly how this ethical process goes on one part of it on Olympus and the 
 other part around Troy.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 169 
 
 the son of the very renowned Earth, lies on the ground stretched 
 over nine acres ; two vultures gnaw his liver, and thus he expi- 
 ates his violence done to Latona. Even Hercules, although de- 
 lighted with banquets, is surrounded with a perpetual clang of 
 the dead and is continually startled and on the alert. He holds 
 his naked bow and an arrow on the string, looking about terribly, 
 always ready to let fly an arrow at some approaching monster. 
 The atmosphere of earthly labors still envelops him. 
 
 " And I beheld Tantalus, suffering severe griefs, standing in a 
 lake; and it approached his chin. But he stood thirsting, and 
 he could not get anything to drink ; for as often as the old man 
 stooped, desiring to drink, so often the water, being sucked up, 
 was lost to him ; and the black earth appeared around his feet, 
 and the Deity dried it up. And lofty trees shed down fruit from 
 the top, pear-trees, and apples, and pomegranates producing glori- 
 ous fruit, and sweet figs, and flourishing olives ; of which, when 
 the old man raised himself up to pluck some with his hands, the 
 wind kept casting them away to the dark clouds. 
 
 " And I beheld Sisyphus, having violent griefs, bearing an enor- 
 mous stone with both his hands ; he indeed, leaning with his hands
 
 170 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 and feet, kept thrusting the stone up to the top ; but when it was 
 about to pass over the summit, then strong force began to drive it 
 back again ; then the impudent stone rolled to the plain ; but he, 
 striving, kept thrusting it back, and the sweat flowed down from 
 his limbs, and dust begrimed his head." (Buckley's Tr.) 
 
 It is interesting to note that Homer in his " Odyssey " first sug- 
 gested the selection of Minos as judge in the lower world. 
 
 "There I beheld Minos, the illustrious son of Jove, having a 
 golden sceptre, giving laws to the dead, sitting down, but the 
 others around him, the king, pleaded their causes, sitting and 
 standing through the wide-gated house of Pluto." 
 
 42. Plato's Threefold Future Life in the " Pha&do." 
 
 In Plato's " Phaedo " we have a much more definite picture of 
 the future state, involving not only the punishment of the wicked, 
 but their purification also. To Plato, therefore, is to be accred- 
 ited the invention of Purgatory and the discrimination of three 
 states in the future life. 
 
 " For after death, as they say, the genius of each individual to 
 whom he belonged in life leads him to a certain place in which
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 171 
 
 the dead are gathered together for judgment, whence they go 
 into the world below, following the guide who is appointed to 
 conduct them from this world to the other ; and when they have 
 there received their due and remained their time, another guide 
 brings them back again after many revolutions of ages. Now, 
 this journey to the other world is not, as ^Eschylus says in the 
 " Telephus," a single and straight path no guide would be wanted 
 for that and no one could miss a single path but there are many 
 partings of the road, and windings, as I must infer from the rites 
 and sacrifices which are offered to the Gods below, in places where 
 three ways meet on earth. The wise and orderly soul is conscious 
 of her situation and follows in the path ; but the soul which de- 
 sires the body and which, as I was relating before, has long been 
 fluttering about the lifeless frame and the world of sight, is, after 
 many struggles and many sufferings, hardly and with violence 
 carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at 
 the place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and 
 have done impure deeds, or been concerned in foul murders or other 
 crimes which are brothers of these, and the works of brothers 
 in crime from that soul every one flees and turns away ; no one
 
 172 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she wanders 
 in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled, and when 
 they are fulfilled she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting habi- 
 tation, as every pure and just soul which has passed through life 
 in the company and under the guidance of the gods has also her 
 own proper home. (Plato's "Phaedo," Jowett's Tr., p. 438.) 
 
 Plato, too, gives a minute description of the Infernal rivers 
 which Dante makes so impressive. He mentions Tartarus, Ache- 
 ron, Pyriphlegethon, Styx, Cocytus, borrowing from Horner, who 
 uses all of these (in the " Odyssey," except Tartarus, which occurs 
 in the " Iliad," Book viii), as well as Erebus. 
 
 He then continues his account of the processes of punishment 
 and purification : 
 
 " Such is the nature of the other world ; and when the dead 
 arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys 
 them, first of all, they have sentence passed upon them, as they 
 have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to 
 have lived neither well nor ill [or rather ' those who have lived 
 average lives ' (01 pea-as /Se/Swa/eei/at) ; Professor Jowett's ' neither 
 well nor ill ' contradicts the ' evil deeds,' ' wrongs they have done to
 
 Dant^s "Divina Commedia" 173 
 
 others,' and 'good deeds 'spoken of below] go to the river Acheron 
 and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them 
 to the Acherusian lake ; and there they dwell and are purified of 
 their evil deeds [here is Purgatory] and suffer the penalty of 
 the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and 
 receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts. 
 But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness 
 of their crimes who have committed many and terrible deeds of 
 sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like such are hurled 
 into Tartarus, which is their suitable destiny, and they never come 
 out [this is the Inferno]. Those, again, who have committed 
 crimes which, although great, are not unpardonable who in a 
 moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or 
 a mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or 
 who have taken the life of another under the like extenuating 
 circumstances these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which 
 they are compelled to undergo for a year ; but at the end of a year 
 the wave casts them forth mere homicides by way of Cocytus, 
 parricides and matricides by Pyriphlegethon and they are borne 
 to the Acherusian lake, and there they lift up their voices and
 
 174 . The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged to have 
 pity on them and to receive them, and to let them come out of 
 the river into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth 
 and cease from their troubles ; but if not, they are carried back 
 again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, 
 until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged : 
 for that is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. [Here 
 we have Purgatory again, with the method of purification speci- 
 fied.] Those also who are remarkable for having led holy lives 
 are released from this earthly prison and go to their pure home 
 which is above, and dwell in the purer earth ; and those who have 
 duly purified themselves with philosophy live henceforth alto- 
 gether without the body in mansions fairer far than these, which 
 may not be described [Plato's ' Paradiso '], and of which the time 
 would fail me to tell." (Jowett, " Phsedo," 443, 444.) 
 
 43. Plato's Mythos of Er. The Purgatory. 
 
 In the tenth book of his " Republic " Plato tells the story of 
 Er, the son of Armenius, a Parnphylian, who was apparently 
 slain on the field of battle but had really fallen into a trance and
 
 Dante's "Dimna Commedia." 175 
 
 remained thus until the twelfth day. On reviving, he told the 
 story of his visit to the other world, where he beheld the last judg- 
 ment. The just were sent upward on a heavenly way with a 
 seal of judgment on their foreheads (suggesting Dante's seven 
 p'sf\ while the unjust were commanded by the judges to "de- 
 scend by the lower way on the left hand with the symbols of their 
 deeds fastened on their backs." What is most wonderful in this 
 story follows: For it seems that after judgment the souls go 
 on journeys lasting a thousand years for each hundred years of 
 their former lives (suggesting the period of the Procrastinators 
 wandering on the lowest terrace). They come together, however, 
 after the lapse of this period, both the good and the bad, and de- 
 scribe to each other their experiences, those who had gone below 
 weeping and sorrowing at the recollection of their hard lot on 
 their journey, and those who had gone above relating the delights 
 and visions of beauty in heaven. After seven days of this reunion 
 they set out anew on a journey to the place where they behold 
 the spectacle of the universe with its eight heavens arranged 
 like hollow shells around about the gigantic spindle of necessity 
 that pierces through the universe as its axis of revolution. There
 
 176 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 is the outermost heaven (1) of the fixed stars, and then, arranged 
 concentrically, the heavens of the planets, being as follows : (2) 
 Saturn, next to the fixed stars ; (3) Jupiter, second in whiteness ; 
 (4) Mars, reddish in hue; (5) Sun, brightest light; (6) Venus, 
 whitest ; (T) Mercury, like Saturn, both being yellowish ; (8) Moon, 
 colored by light reflected from the sun. Here is the suggestion of 
 eight of Dante's heavens. 
 
 Each heaven moves at the song of a siren (Dante's Angels of 
 the Hierarchy), and the music of all forms a harmony. Around 
 about these heavens on the tripod of the universe sit the three 
 fates, Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, and 
 Atropos of the future. Clotho keeps in motion the heaven of the 
 fixed stars, while Atropos guides the inner ones, giving them their 
 various retrograde motions, and Lachesis assists at both. The 
 journeying spirits, having arrived before Lachesis, now choose 
 new lots of life, so that they may reascend to the earth. A prophet 
 standing before Lachesis bids each choose his life freely and in 
 view of his experiences on the long journey he has undergone : 
 ; ' Your genius will not choose for you, but you will choose your 
 genius. . . . Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 177 
 
 he will have more or less of her ; the chooser is answerable God 
 is justified." 
 
 Plato informs us that those who had experienced one human 
 life before chose wiser than the new souls who had never before 
 descended into bodies. The patterns of lives were spread out on 
 the ground before the souls to choose from. Those who had re. 
 fleeted much and improved by experience and " had acquired an 
 adamantine faith in truth and right " were not dazzled by wealth 
 and other allurements, but chose virtuous lives, and consequently 
 happy ones. Others chose bad lives. The great idea of responsi- 
 bility is emphasized in the strongest manner in this myth of 
 Plato. It had not yet been born in the rninds of the Greek peo- 
 ple (witness the Nemesis that repressed high aspiration too much 
 choice), arid consequently we do not find it in the Greek religion. 
 What we find in the Greek philosophy, however, gets realized in 
 the mythos of succeeding ages. Note particularly in the myth of 
 Er that it is the purgatorial idea that is uppermost. The present 
 life is a probation, and the next life is determined at first by the 
 present life. After a journey ten times the length of the present 
 life and determined by the present life has passed away, a new
 
 178 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 life is to be chosen by the individual with opportunity to avail 
 himself of all his earthly experience as well as his experience in 
 Hades. But Plato introduces the genuine Inferno for the worst 
 speeies of tyrants and murderers punishing treachery and vio- 
 lence by depriving the sinner of the privilege of journeying and 
 of profitable experience in Hades. There are frames of mind, saw 
 Plato, in which the individual does not profit by his experience, 
 and such dispositions are hopeless ; they are in the Inferno and 
 not in the Purgatory. 
 
 Er relates that Ardiaeus the Great (tyrant and parricide of Pam- 
 phy lia) and other like sinners, attempting to come out of the " lower 
 way " to the place of new choice, were seized and carried oif by 
 wild men of fiery aspect (Dante's demons of the "Inferno"), who 
 " bound them head, foot, and hand, and threw them down and 
 flayed them with scourges, and dragged them along the road at 
 the side, carding them on thorns like wool, and declaring to the 
 pilgrims as they passed what were their crimes, and that they 
 were being taken away to be cast into Tartarus." (Jowett's Tr.) 
 
 The state of mind of those who choose the worst lots is well 
 depicted by Plato. One chooses a life of the greatest tyranny.
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 179 
 
 " His mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he did 
 not well consider, and therefore did not see at first, that he was 
 fated, among other evils, to devour his own children. But when 
 he came to himself and saw what was in his lot he began to beat 
 his breast and lament over his choice, forgetting the warning of 
 the prophet. For, instead of blaming himself as the author of his 
 calamity, he accused chance and the gods, and everything rather 
 than himself." This thought is adopted by Dante, we have seen, 
 as a definition of the pervading frame of mind of the sinners in 
 the " Inferno." " They blasphemed God and their parents ; the 
 human kind ; the place, the time, and the origin of their seed and 
 of their birth. (Inf., iii, 103.) 
 
 Finally, when the souls had all chosen their lots in life they 
 came to the Fates, who spun their threads and made them irre- 
 versible ; external circumstance has no power to change the reso- 
 lution of the free will. " They then marched on in a scorching 
 heat to the plain of forgetfulness \^6rj (Dante's Lethe) which 
 was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure, and toward 
 evening they encamped by the river of Negligence (a/u.X.??Ta, lack 
 of care or concern, general apathy and loss of interest), the water
 
 180 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 of which river no vessel can hold." [Plato makes Lethe a plain, 
 while Dante makes it a river, following Yirgil. Lack of interest 
 is so near non-existence of character that no vessel can hold it. 
 Not only the memory of the past is gone, but even all instincts 
 and impulses, " organic memory " all " karma," so to speak.] 
 All were obliged to drink of this water, and those who were not 
 saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and those who 
 drank forgot all things. Now, after they had gone to rest, about 
 the middle of the night, there was a thunder-storm and an earth- 
 quake, and suddenly they were all exploded, so to speak, like 
 shooting stars, into the earthly life, and were born again as infants." 
 
 44. VirgiVs " ^Eneid" Descent of ^Eneas to Orcus. 
 
 In the sixth book of Virgil's " ^Eneid " there is another state- 
 ment of the idea of the future life. It is full of hints which 
 Dante has followed, but it is hardly an advance on the Platonic 
 statement. 
 
 We might expect the Roman mind, especially given to the in- 
 vention of legal forms and to the definition of the just compass of 
 the human will with reference both to political and civil freedom
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 181 
 
 i. e., freedom of life, limb, and property, and freedom by means 
 of the latter from thraldom to nature we might expect that Vir- 
 gil, a Roman, would give us a much more concrete and developed 
 view of the idea of retribution in the future life. We are not 
 altogether disappointed in this expectation, although we are com- 
 pelled to notice that even Virgil is far from realizing in his poetic 
 mind the mythos of the completely independent personal will 
 the doctrine of perfect responsibility he retains the doctrine of 
 metempsychosis. 
 
 ^Eneas finds Charon the ferryman and the infernal rivers ; he 
 sees vast " prisons enclosed with a triple wall which Tartarean 
 Phlegethon's rapid flood environs with torrents of flame, and 
 whirls roaring rocks along. Fronting is a huge gate with columns 
 of solid adamant, that no strength of men nor the gods themselves 
 can with steel demolish. An iron tower rises aloft, and there 
 wakeful Tisiphone sits watching." Here is evidently the sugges- 
 tion of Dante's towers of the city of Dis, with its walls of iron 
 heated to redness and guarded by the three furies. Cretan 
 Rhadamanthus presides over this special realm of punishment of 
 fraud, the furies being the ministers of justice. Below this ex-
 
 182 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 tends Tartarus, wherein the Titan brood are punished. Again 
 Dante has taken a hint for his lowest hell, making the giants en- 
 compass the pit of treachery. Treachery seeks the complete dis- 
 solution of all institutions. The giants even in Homer's u Odys- 
 sey " have this typical meaning. They do not live in villages, but 
 isolatedly. Ulysses relates: "There are no assemblies for con- 
 sultation among this people, and they have no established laws. 
 They live on mountain summits in hollow caves, each gives the 
 law to his own family, and no one cares for his neighbors." They 
 have no arts and trades, no commerce, no civilization. 
 
 ^Eneas next comes to the walls of Pluto's realm and finds the 
 Paradise of Trojan heroes " regions of joy, delightful green re- 
 treats and blessed abodes in groves, where happiness abounds." 
 Here are found those who died fighting for their country, also 
 " priests who preserved themselves pure and hoi} 7 while life 
 remained; pious poets who sang in strains worthy of Apollo; 
 those who improved life by the invention of arts, and, in general, 
 those who by worthy deeds have caused posterity to remember 
 them." 
 
 On inquiring for Anchises, Musaeus replies : " None of us have
 
 Dante's "Divina Oommedia." 183 
 
 a fixed abode; in shady groves we dwell, or lie on couches all 
 along the banks on meadows fresh with rivulets," etc. This sug- 
 gests Dante's thought, that each of the souls in the " Paradise " 
 belongs to all the heavens, although they appear in special heavens 
 to him. The interview with Anchises suggests that with Caccia- 
 guida (Par. xv, xvi, xvii). 
 
 Here, also, ./Eneas learns the doctrine of purgatory : 
 
 " Meanwhile vEneas sees in the retired vale a grove situate by 
 itself, shrubs rustling in the woods, and the river Lethe, which 
 glides by those peaceful dwellings. Around this, unnumbered 
 tribes and nations of ghosts were fluttering ; as in meadows on a 
 serene summer's day when the bees sit on the various blossoms 
 and swarm around the snow-white lilies, all the plain buzzes with 
 their humming noise." 
 
 " These souls for whom other bodies are destined by Fate, at 
 the stream of Lethe's flood quaff care-expelling draughts and last- 
 ing oblivion." 
 
 " The spirit within (spiritus intus alit) nourishes the heavens, 
 the earth, and watery plains, the moon, the sun, and the stars. 
 The mind diffused through the limbs makes active the entire
 
 184 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 mass (mens agitat molem), and permeates the vast body of na- 
 ture." This is the reason why the animals and man arise. 
 
 "This fiery spiritual principle is of celestial origin, but souls are 
 clogged by the influence of the body which is hurtful to spirit ; 
 material limbs and mortal bodies dull The powers of the soul. 
 
 " Hence they tear and desire, grieve and rejoice ; and, shut up 
 in darkness and a gloomy prison [the body], lose sight of their 
 native skies. Even when with the last beams of light their life 
 is gone, yet not every ill, nor all corporeal stains, are quite removed 
 from the unhappy beings ; and it is absolutely necessary [i. <?., it 
 cannot be but] that many imperfections which have long been 
 joined to the soul should be in marvellous ways increased and 
 riveted therein [*'. 0., should have become firmly fixed or ingrafted in 
 the soul inolescere~\. Therefore [because these stains should be 
 removed] are they afflicted with punishments and pay the penal- 
 ties of their former ills. Some, hung on high, are spread out to 
 the empty winds [the purification by air, the second element above 
 the earthy]; in others the guilt not done away is washed out in 
 a vast watery abyss [the first element above the earthy] or burned 
 away in fire [purification by the third element above the earthy].
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 185 
 
 We each endure his own manes [i. e., suffer for our sins or 
 ' Karma,' as the Hindoos call it ; or, if manes refers to Plato's 
 "genius" Sal/jLwv then it means here the punishers or avengers]. 
 Thence are we conveyed along [i. e., into] the spacious Elysium, 
 and we, the happy few, possess the fields of bliss, till length of 
 time, after the fixed period is elapsed, hath done away the inhe- 
 rent stain and hath left the pure celestial reason and the fiery en- 
 ergy of the simple spirit [i. e., left it free from its stains]. All 
 these [souls], after a thousand years have rolled away, are. sum- 
 moned forth by the God in a great body to the river Lethe ; to 
 the intent that losing memory of the past they may revisit the 
 vaulted realms above [i. e., revisit the surface of the earth], and 
 willingly return into bodies." (Bonn's Tr., with emendations.) 
 
 45. Metempsychosis versus Eternal Punishment in Hell. 
 
 Metempsychosis the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, or 
 the return to earth of the soul after death and its reincarnation 
 we see is held by Plato and Virgil. This, too, although Plato 
 makes the soul responsible for its choice of the lot in life that it 
 shall lead.
 
 186 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 It was necessary that Christianity should recognize the perfect 
 responsibility of the human soul as well as its immortal destina- 
 tion. The mythos which should contain the idea of complete 
 freedom of the will, or, what is the same thing, perfected individ- 
 uality, would be forced to express this insight by laying infinite 
 stress on the determining power of the individual in this life. 
 Nothing else could bring men to realize the true dignity of the 
 human soul and its exalted destiny. The individual soul is strict- 
 ly responsible to God and to the visible body of the Divine Spirit 
 here on earth the Church for his choice of his career and for 
 his deeds. 
 
 The only form in which the due emphasis could be given to 
 this doctrine of responsibility was that chosen by the mythos 
 of Hell " bitter, remorseless, endless Hell " as the future 
 lot of all who reject the proffered eternal life and refuse to 
 enter the body of the Holy Spirit through union with the visible 
 Church. 
 
 In translating the philosophical idea of essential or substantial 
 into the poetic form of a mythos, it is always necessary to repre- 
 sent it by infinite time. The will, in determining itself, affects
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia.'" 187 
 
 itself for all time. It determines itself completely in this life, 
 and there is no probation in the next. This dogma alone could 
 bring man to a consciousness of his independent personality his 
 " substantia separata." In this way the rnythos expressed the 
 true and profound doctrine of the determinability of human des- 
 tiny by the actual exertion of volition on the part of the soul itself, 
 and of the utter non-effectiveness of vague postponement and reli- 
 ance on external influences. External influences cannot initiate 
 one's salvation either here or hereafter, is the doctrine of respon- 
 sibility. The initiation lies always in free choice. 
 
 There is found no hope on the line of mortal sin only aliena- 
 tion more and more profound. It is not a progress ; sin is not a 
 necessary stage on the way to growth, but a retrogradation. 
 Nevertheless, it is not extinction one can never reach that. Once 
 immortality is reached, the individual remains a responsible being 
 to all eternity. The negative will of the sinner builds up a wall 
 of fate about him, it is true, but within this wall he ever holds his 
 free volition, his absolute individuality. 
 
 Dante's poetic treatment of this rnythos forms one of the few 
 great works of all time.
 
 188 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 46. Dante's Mythos of the Formation of the Inferno and 
 the Purgatorial Mount. 
 
 Dante conceives that certain of the angels fell immediately 
 after creation (" Paradiso," xxix, 49). Before one could so much as 
 count twenty, Lucifer fell. He struck the earth under Jerusalem 
 and hollowed it out to the very centre, thus making the tunnel- 
 shaped Inferno and raising on the opposite side in the southern 
 Atlantic Ocean the mountain of Purgatory. 
 
 " On this side fell he down from heaven ; and here the land, 
 which erst stood out, through fear of him veiled itself with sea 
 and came to our hemisphere ; and perhaps, in order to escape 
 from him, that which on this side appears, left here the empty 
 space, and upward rushed." (J. C., Tr.), Inf., xxx, 121. 
 
 The Mountain of Purgatory arises in the southern Atlantic 
 Ocean ; for the earth, according to his view, is not 8,000 miles in 
 diameter, but only 6,500. (See for some of the passages in which 
 Dante gives this item, " Convito," ii, 7; iii, 5.) In the Southern 
 Hemisphere Dante knows the most remarkable constellation of 
 stars there. He probably had travelled far enough south to see 
 them with his own eyes. He knows, too, the Precession of Equi-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 189 
 
 noxes by which the pole of the heavens changes so as to bring 
 up the Southern Cross to the view of Europeans : " Seen only by 
 the primitive peoples," says he. 
 
 The streams of sorrow, wrath, malice, fraud, and treachery that 
 flow down into this region Dante explains as flowing from the 
 tears of the human race, which he figures as a gigantic Man 
 standing within the Idsean mountain of Crete and looking toward 
 Rome. He borrows the external form of the figure from the 
 vision of the Great Image in Daniel, which there prefigured the 
 fate of the Babylonian Empire and the world-movement of nations 
 that followed it the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus, and 
 possibly the final supremacy of Rome. 
 
 Daniel describes the King's Dream: "This image's head was 
 of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his 
 thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of 
 clay. . . This head of gold is Nebuchadnezzar. 
 
 " And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, 
 and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over 
 all the earth. 
 
 " And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron ; forasmuch
 
 190 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things, and as iron 
 that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. 
 
 " And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potter's 
 clay and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there 
 shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou 
 sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. . . . 
 
 " And in the days of these kings shall the God of Heaven set 
 up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed ; and the kingdom 
 shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and 
 consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. . . ." 
 
 Dante would think of the Roman Empire and the Christian 
 Church as signified by this kingdom, which shall break in pieces 
 all other kingdoms, but which shall itself stand forever. The 
 Holy Roman Empire is, as we know, to Dante this kingdom. It 
 was a stone carved out of a mountain, and it came to till the 
 whole earth, which clearly enough the Persian Empire never did, 
 for it failed to conquer Europe. 
 
 47. Dante's Mythos of the Roman Empire. 
 Under the guidance of Virgil's mythos of the Roman Empire, 
 Dante had been in the habit of looking upon Troy and the Tro-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 191 
 
 jans as the ancestors of the Romans. Crete, too, was a still more 
 remote ancestor the nursery of Zeus, the god of civil order and 
 the father of Minos, the first king who made just laws and secured 
 peace and harmony by their rigid execution. 
 
 Hence, too, Dante, in the " Inferno," shows so much bitterness 
 toward the Greek heroes and statesmen, punishing, for example, 
 Alexander and Pyrrhus in the seething purple flood of Phlegethon ; 
 Diomede and the great Ulysses in the bolge of evil counsellors in 
 the circle of fraud. 
 
 In the fourteenth canto of the " Inferno " Dante explains the 
 origin of the rivers by this mythos of Crete and the Image of the 
 Human Race, or perhaps, more accurately, the Image of Human 
 Civil Government (as the reference to Daniel's vision seems to 
 indicate) : 
 
 "* In the middle of the sea lies a waste country,' he then said, 
 ' which is named Crete,' ' under whose King the world once was 
 
 1 Virgil, " ^Eneid," iii, 104 : 
 
 " Greta Jovis magni medio jacet insula ponto 
 Mons Idaeus ubi, et gentis cunabula nostrae ; 
 Centum urbes habitant magnas, uberrima regna 
 Maxirnus unde pater, si rite audita recorder 
 Teucrus Rhceteus primum eat advectus in oras."
 
 192 . The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 chaste. A mountain is there, called Ida, which once was glad 
 with waters and foliage; now it is deserted like an antiquated 
 thing. Rhea of old chose it for the faithful cradle of her son ; 
 and the better to conceal him, when he wept, caused cries to be 
 made on it. 
 
 " Within the mountain stands erect a great Old Man, who keeps 
 his shoulders turned toward Damietta, and looks at Rome as if it 
 were his mirror. His head is shapen of fine gold, his arms and 
 his breast are pure silver ; then he is of brass to the cleft ; from 
 thence downward he is all of chosen iron, save that the right foot 
 is of baked clay ; and he rests more on this than on the other. 
 Every part, except the gold, is broken with a fissure that drops 
 tears, which collected perforate that grotto. Their course descends 
 from rock to rock into this valley. They form Acheron, Styx, 
 and Phlegethon ; then, by this narrow conduit, go down to where 
 there is no more descent. They form Cocytus ; and thou shalt 
 see what kind of lake that is ; here, therefore, I describe it not." 
 (J. C. Tr.), Inf., xiv, 94-120. 
 
 In Yirgil (" JEueid," iii, 104) we find the suggestion which re- 
 veals to us the idea in Dante's mind in its entirety : " Crete, the
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 193 
 
 island of great Jove, lies in the middle of the sea, where is Mount 
 Ida and the nursery of our race ; they inhabit a hundred great 
 cities, most fertile realms, whence Teucer, our first ancestor, if 
 rightly I remember the things I have heard, was first carried to 
 the Rhcetian coasts [promontory of Troas], and there selected the 
 place for his kingdom. Ilium stood not yet," etc. 
 
 According to Apollodorus (iii, 1, 1), Teutamus, the son of 
 Dorus and a descendant of Deucalion, mythic founder of the 
 Dorian race, came to Crate with a Greek colony. In the time of 
 his son Asterion, Zeus came to Crete with Europa and became 
 father of Minos, Sarpedon, and Rhadamanthus, who were adopted 
 by Asterion upon his marriage with Europa. 
 
 Zeus, according to the Greek mythos, is the divine founder of 
 civil order, and to be son of Zeus is to be a hero of civilization. 
 Minos became the greatest king of the mythic heroic period, being 
 the inventor of wonderful laws for the securing of justice. He 
 freed the seas of pirates. 
 
 The circumstances of his obtaining his kingdom gave rise to 
 feuds symbolized by the story of the wild bull of Crete probably 
 an independent freebooter who sought alliance with Minos. The
 
 194 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 Minotaur is the symbol of blood violence which Minos repressed 
 by shutting up the monster in a labyrinth wonderfully con- 
 structed. 
 
 48. The Minotaur and the Labyrinth in the Light of this 
 
 Mythos. 
 
 In the myth of the labyrinth we have a symbolic description of 
 the nature offends and blood violence and of the manner in which 
 they are suppressed by a Jove-nurtured king. Within a labyrinth 
 the avenues continually lead from one into the other without mak- 
 ing any progress toward a final goal. One goes forward and for- 
 ward, but after weary labors finds himself at length where he 
 started, or even farther off from his goal. 
 
 So long as there was no kingly authority and no just laws, feuds 
 arose ; violence on the part of one led to retaliation on the part of 
 another, and this to counter-retaliation. Each avenging of a deed 
 was taken as a new case of violence to be avenged again. 
 
 Thus the island of Crete and the surrounding nations were in a 
 labyrinth of blood revenge. The Minotaur is used by Dante as 
 symbol of blood revenge, and the labyrinth, which is not named
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 195 
 
 in the " Divina Commedia," signifies the endless nature of feuds 
 thus avenged. 
 
 But the labyrinth has also the meaning of a code of justice 
 which imprisons the Minotaur; for when this system of blood 
 revenge is throttled by just laws, the State steps in and, appre- 
 hending the first aggressor, makes a labyrinth of him by making 
 his deed return upon him at once, and thus rendering unnecessary 
 the blood revenge on the part of the injured one ; hence the laby- 
 rinth in this sense is a device by which the endless progress of 
 private revenge is stopped in its first steps it is shut up and the 
 labyrinth is reduced to a jail or prison conducted according to 
 just criminal laws. Formerly all Crete was a labyrinth and all 
 the neighboring islands of the vEgean seas and the main-land were 
 infested by pirates and robber States continually at feud with each 
 other. Minos, it is said, not only checked piracy about Crete, but 
 made himself master of the Greek islands, and was able, it seems, 
 to punish the blood violence and treachery even of a colony like 
 Athens. His son Androgeus was assassinated at Athens on account 
 of some jealousy or teud. Minos subdued Megara and compelled 
 the Athenians to send every nine years or oftener a tribute of
 
 196 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 fourteen youths and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur 
 that is to say, confined in the labyrinth as hostages, or perhaps exe- 
 cuted for new deeds of violence done against Cretans. 
 
 It was the national hero of Athens, Theseus, also a law-giver, 
 who slew this Minotaur, at least so far as the Athenian tribute 
 was concerned probably entering into a treaty by which he sup- 
 pressed the blood violence of his own subjects and assisted Minos 
 in his endeavors to suppress such violence everywhere, and thus 
 put an end to the Minotaur altogether. 
 
 Wonderful insight, therefore, Dante displays in making the 
 Minotaur or blood violence stand as guardian at the entrance of 
 the circles of violence. 
 
 From this good law-maker, Minos, descends the Trojan JEneas, 
 as Virgil asserts and Dante believes, and hence by direct descent 
 the Roman Empire appointed by divine right to give laws to the 
 whole world and suppress the complex of private revenge and 
 feuds a complex in the fact that each avenging deed is a new 
 crime and thus forms a labyrinth out of which it is impossi- 
 ble to extricate the state. Dante knew bitterly knew how 
 this labyrinth of blood revenge extended over his native Italy ;
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 197 
 
 cities divided by factions and continually at war with each 
 other. 
 
 49. Minos as Judge in the Light of this Mythos. 
 
 The island of Crete has great significance to Dante for these 
 reasons : He accordingly selects Minos, as the typical dispenser 
 of justice, to preside over the court of the Inferno, following 
 Homer and Yirgil in this choice. Minos invented a code which 
 secured the return of his own deed, or at least its symbol, upon the 
 criminal. The sinners, on entering the presence of Minos, lay open 
 their secret lives to him. His judgment is indicated by coiling 
 about him his tail, " making as many circles round himself as the 
 number of grades or circles that the sinner will have to descend." 
 Minos symbolically indicates that the sinner's own beastiality has 
 made its coil about him and that the sinner's own deed makes his 
 circle of hell. 
 
 50. Other Mythology Figures used by Dante. 
 
 It is noteworthy that Virgil places in the gates of his Inferno 
 Centaurs, Briareus, the Chimaera, the Lernsean Hydra, Harpies,
 
 198 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 and the three-bodied Geryon all indicating the instrumentalities 
 that send men to their death. Dante uses most of these figures 
 in his own way, always showing a profound insight into the capa- 
 city of the symbol for spiritual expression. 
 
 THE CENTAUKS were nomadic peoples, without organized laws 
 of justice, who marauded on the Greek civil communities and 
 escaped punishment on their swift horses; hence also they are 
 symbols of violence of a special kind. Dante employs them to 
 guard the banks of Phlegethon and punish the violent. It is the 
 fitting punishment of the violent that they make for themselves an 
 environment of violence. The Centaurs were also teachers of the 
 Greek heroes in the arts of single combat, medicine, and music 
 means useful to a life of roving adventure but they were not 
 teachers of laws ; of the art of commanding armies or organized 
 bodies; of anything specially useful to cities. Like the Cyclops, 
 they symbolize man as individual apart from man as social whole 
 the little self over against the greater self. 
 
 THE HAEPIES are placed by Dante in the doleful woods of the 
 suicides as symbolic of their hypochondria. The gloomy presage 
 of coming evil causes suicide. These are birds, airy creatures,
 
 Dante's " Divina Commedia." 199 
 
 symbolic therefore of fancy and the future. They defile the feast 
 of the present with forebodings of evil. 
 
 THE FURIES and THE GORGONS guard the sixth circle, from of 
 old the symbols of all that is destructive in violence against civil 
 order discord, slander, mistrust, suspicion, and deadly revenge. 
 MEDUSA the Gorgon paralyzes the beholder is it hardened rebellion 
 against God (as Carlyle thinks), is it atheism or petrifying scep- 
 ticism regarding immortality (as Philalethes thinks), or is it simply 
 panic terror which deprives one of all control of his limbs? 
 a significance which the Greeks may have given to the Medusa 
 face. One may see the reflection of such panic fear i. e., hear of 
 it at a distance, but he must not look upon it directly if he would 
 escape its paralyzing effects. 
 
 GERYON is the well-described image of fraud in Dante's por- 
 traiture. The ancients did not thus specially characterize him. 
 He was simply the three-bodied king of Hesperia, who owned the 
 famous herd of oxen that Hercules obtained. Perhaps Dante 
 confounded him with Cacus, the wily thief of those oxen in Vir- 
 gil's story. lie is represented with the face of the just man, mild, 
 of aspect. The fraudulent purpose is covered with a special ap-
 
 200 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 pearance of conformity to law and justice submission cf the indi- 
 vidual will to the general will of the community. But he has a 
 reptile's body covered with knots and circlets like a lizard or a 
 toad, the paws of a beast, and an envenomed scorpion tail. He 
 seeks not, like the violent, to rob his fellow-men directly and attack 
 the civil order with his individual might. But he seeks to use 
 the civil order against itself, under a semblance of obedience to it 
 to gain the faith of men and then abuse their confidence. This, 
 of course, will weaken their confidence in civil order. While 
 direct violence forces every one to trust civil order all the more 
 and draw close to the protecting shelter of the state, Fraud, on 
 the other hand, weakens the faith of the citizen in the power of 
 the State to protect him. For, see, have not I been wronged under 
 the semblance of mild-faced justice ? 
 
 THE GIANTS in the lowest round have already been mentioned 
 as typical of the entirely savage state of society, utterly isolated 
 human life. The individual by himself must do all for himself. 
 He cannot share with others the conquest of nature. It is his 
 own individual might against the world. The subduing of wild 
 beasts, the cultivation of the soil, the arts of manufacture in all
 
 Daniels "Divina Coinmedia" 201 
 
 these he is unaided. Worse than all, he is deprived of human in- 
 tercourse and does not inherit the accumulated wisdom and expe- 
 rience of the human race. Homer, as we saw, has painted this 
 state of savagery in the Cyclops. 
 
 CERBERUS furnishes a familiar type of greed in general. Dante, 
 after Virgil, makes him the type of intemperance and gluttony. 
 
 PLUTUS, the ancient god of wealth, presides over the fourth cir- 
 cle of the " Inferno." The avaricious make property their god ; 
 it should be their means for achieving earthly freedom and leisure 
 for divine works such as tend to the spiritual good of one's fellow- 
 men and one's own growth in wisdom. The prodigal misuse their 
 property and are always in want, or "hard up," as the slang 
 phrase has it. Hence they are always trying to come at a little 
 money to help them over a " tight place." Hence, too, they are 
 always giving their minds to getting property, and are in the same 
 hell with the avaricious. Both long for property in the same 
 degree. 
 
 CHARON, the infernal ferrymari, is likewise borrowed from Vir- 
 gil, and is not found in the early Greek poets. His fiery eyes and 
 wheels of flame typical of the red- weeping eyes of mourners for
 
 202 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 the dead, or possibly a symbol of his keen watchfulness required 
 to separate (in Virgil's "Inferno") the souls whose bodies are 
 buried with due ceremony from those unsepultured ; or in Dante's 
 " Inferno," to exclude the souls of the pusillanimous from his boat 
 this circumstance of the flaming eyes is also borrowed from 
 Virgil. 
 
 51. The Mythos of Dante's " Purgatorio" 
 The finest portion of the " Divina Com media" is unquestionably 
 the Purgatory, but it needs the " Inferno " to precede it for the 
 sake of effect. It is filled with the light of the stars, the verdure 
 of spring, growth of character, and the aspiration for perfection. 
 In it the human will shows its true power to make the years re- 
 enforce the days, while in the " Inferno " there is constant self-con- 
 tradiction of the will and constant building up of Fate between 
 man and society. 
 
 The mythos of Purgatory is more entirely Dante's work than 
 that of the " Inferno." He found it a shadowy middle state ot 
 the soul, and built it up into a systematic structure, definitely out- 
 lined in all its phases. It is the true state of man as a condition 
 of perpetual education in holiness here and hereafter. All men
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 203 
 
 who are struggling here in the world with an earnest aspiration 
 for spiritual growth can find no book to compare with the second 
 part of Dante's Poem. In climbing the steep sides of this mount- 
 ain the air continually grows purer and the view wider and less 
 obstructed. On the summit is the terrestrial paradise of the 
 Church symbolizing the invisible Church, of all sincere laborers 
 for good on earth. The Church on earth holds humanity in so 
 far as it lives in the contemplation of the divine and in the process 
 of realizing the divine nature in the will and in the heart. Dante 
 collects in a complex symbol the various ceremonial devices of 
 the Church almost mechanically, in fact. It is an allegory 
 rather than a poetic symbol. But he adds dramatic action to it 
 first by introducing the scene between Dante and Beatrice, sec- 
 ondly by the dumb show of the history of the Church the trag- 
 edy of its corruption, its seizure by France, and its transfer from 
 Rome to Avignon. 
 
 52. The Mythos of Dante's " Paradiso" Gnosticism. 
 
 The mythos of the " Paradiso " is constructed on a wholly new 
 plan. There is no hint of it elsewhere except in the Platonic
 
 204 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 myth in the " Phsedo " (the allusion to the complete disembodi- 
 ment of the soul). The Mysticism of sixteen hundred years enters 
 it as material. 
 
 Gnosticism represented the first attempt to reconcile Christian- 
 ity with philosophy, as Neoplatonism represented a later attempt 
 on the part of Greek Philosophy to reach the Oriental unity by 
 transcending the first principle of Plato and Aristotle. 
 
 Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, accordingly, have substantially 
 the same problem before them. Both systems agree in adopting 
 the doctrine of Philo that God is exhalted above virtue and knowl- 
 edge, and even above good and evil altogether. Plato had iden- 
 tified God with the Absolute Good, while Aristotle had made him 
 absolute reason. 
 
 From God, according to Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, there 
 emanates Nous as His image, and then directly or after some in- 
 terval the Psyche or Soul, from which emanates finally matter or 
 body from the soul as the soul's object, created result, or achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 These four cardinal points are common to all Gnostic and Neo- 
 platonist systems ; but great diversity exists in regard to intermedi-
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia." 205 
 
 ate steps and in regard to names and definitions. Gnosticism likes 
 to use the word " aeon " (aldav) where Platonism likes the word 
 u idea." By aeon it means individual or complete cycle of activ- 
 ity a self-determined being (substantia separata), in short. There 
 may be many ideas or seons, or complete cycles of process, between 
 the Nous or Reason and the Soul. There are, in fact, twenty-eight 
 of these in the system of Yalentinus (who came to Rome from Al- 
 exandria about the year 140 A. D.). He made thirty aeons in all 
 wishing to symbolize the thirty years of Christ's life, as is said, 
 somewhat as Dante wished to do this by the number thirty-three 
 (the number of the cantos in each part of the " Divina Commedia "). 
 These seons were yoked together in pairs, each pair being called 
 a syzigy, such a syzigy being, for example : 1. Truth (a\r)6eui). 
 + 2. Reason (Now). These beget the second syzigy. 3. The crea- 
 tive word (\0709). -f 4. Life (o>rj} The Word and Life beget 
 the third syzigy. 5. Man (avOptoTros). +6. Church (eKK\r)(ria), and 
 so on until one comes to Sophia (2,o<f>ta) or wisdom, which is the 
 youngest of the third division of eeons and (we are curious to 
 learn) is conscious of her remoteness from God, and hence flies 
 toward God, the source of emanation. Wisdom proceeds to imi-
 
 2<>6 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 tate the other aeons by creating, but begets only chaos and con- 
 fusion. In her grief at this dreadful result the other aeons take 
 pity and conspire with God to produce two new aeons Christ and 
 the Holy Spirit, who redeem the world of chaos and confusion, 
 acting as the Demiurgos or world-builder. Here we have a my- 
 thos of the fall into h'nitude the lapse from the One to the Many, 
 from the Perfect to the Imperfect, and the redemption from the 
 latter. 
 
 In Proclus's system there are many unities issuing from the 
 primal essence all above life and reason and the power of compre- 
 hension. Then there are many triads corresponding to aeons be- 
 tween reason and matter. Marcion of Pontus had no aeons in his 
 system of Gnosticism, but retained the Demiurgos or world-maker 
 (as Jehovah of the Old Testament who is opposed to Christ as 
 Savior). 
 
 The emanation theories of both Gnosticism and Neoplatonism 
 have the principle of Lapse as the principle of their philosophic 
 method, and not the principle of self-determination, which is the 
 true principle of philosophic method. The principle of Lapse 
 finds only a descending scale and is obliged to introduce an arbi-
 
 Dante's " Divina Commedia" 207 
 
 trary and miraculous interference into its world-order, in order to 
 explain progressive development and redemption. The principle 
 of self-determination shows us an ascending scale, all of whose 
 steps are miraculous and yet none of them arbitrary. 
 
 In the later forms of Neoplatonism there is a slight trace of re- 
 turn toward the pure doctrines of Aristotle and Plato. The pupils 
 of Plutarch of Athens seem to have learned from him that Plato 
 and Aristotle substantially agree in their world-view. Syrianus 
 and Hierocles, of Alexandria, the former the teacher of Proclus, 
 both recognize this fact, and Hierocles insists that Ammonius 
 Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism, proved once for all the sub- 
 stantial agreement of the two great Greek philosophers. Proclus 
 in his great work on the theology of Plato, treating chiefly of the 
 dialogue of " Parmenides," has undertaken, however, to show that 
 Plato himself holds the doctrine of a primal essence above reason 
 in several of his works; such an essence would, of course, be un- 
 revealed and unrevealable, and thus could not be the God of 
 Christianity. Proclus lived a century and a half after Christian- 
 ity had become the state religion, and the Neoplatonic school at 
 Athens was closed in 529 by Justinian, forty-four years after the
 
 208 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 death of Proclus. The influence of the school continued into 
 Christian philosophy and mysticism for many centuries, the chief 
 channel through which this influence flowed being the writings of 
 the Pseudo-Dion ysius, about whom Dante readers hear so much. 
 
 53. The Mythos of the " Paradiso " developed in the Doctrine 
 of the Celestial Hierarchies. 
 
 The chief work of Dionysius, according to historians, must have 
 been written after the year 450, because it contains expressions 
 used in the Council of Chalcedon in 451. ' Purporting to be 
 written by the first bishop of Athens, a convert of St. Paul, the 
 work exercised great authority. Its chief doctrine is that of 
 the fourfold division of natures into (1) that which is created and 
 
 1 The following is condensed from Ueberweg's account : " The writings that purport 
 to be the works of Dionysius the Areopagite of Athens (Acts, xvii, 34), first Bishop of 
 Athens, are mentioned first in the year A. D. 532. They were accepted as genuine and 
 of high authority on account of the connection of their supposed author with Paul. 
 They gained credit in the Church in the eighth and ninth centuries and after a commen- 
 tary had been written on them by Maximus Confessor early in the seventh century. 
 Laurentius Valla, about the middle of the fifteenth century, asserted their spuriousness, 
 which was demonstrated afterward by Morinus, Dallaeus, and others."
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 209 
 
 does not create matter ; (2) that which is created but creates 
 again, as, for example, souls ; (3) that which creates but is not cre- 
 ated, as Christ, the Logos ; and (4) that which neither creates nor 
 is created, as the Absolute One or the Father. Here is Neopla- 
 tonism in its most heretical form. 
 
 The highest cannot be called by a name, according to Diony- 
 sins. It may be spoken of symbolically only. It is above truth 
 and above goodness ; nor does it create. 
 
 Through the thinking of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, using 
 the results of Plato and Aristotle and endeavoring to solve the 
 problems of Christianity by them, arose a new mythos a mythos 
 of symbolic thinking which came over into Christian Theology 
 as the doctrine of the Celestial Hierarchy. On this mythos Dante 
 has constructed his " Paradise." It is modified to meet the wants 
 of Christian doctrine in such a manner that what were emanating 
 ./Eons or Ideas become one hierarchy of Angels, consisting of nine 
 separate orders, divided, according to office and participation in 
 divine gifts, into three triads. 
 
 The highest triad behold God's judgments directly and are 
 called THRONES ; but there are two grades of excellence above the
 
 210 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 common rank of these to wit, CHERUBIM, who are filled perfectly 
 with divine light, and hence comprehend most. The SERAPHS are 
 filled more especially with divine charity and excel in will power. 
 The common angels of this class are called THRONES. 
 
 The second triad are distinguished for announcing things divine, 
 and are called POWERS, the common principle of all being this. 
 But elevated to an extraordinary degree are DOMINIONS, who are 
 supreme in ability to distinguish the proper order and fitness of 
 what is to be done. Then, secondly, the VIRTUES, who are emi- 
 nent in providing the faculty of fulfilling or in planning the 
 means. 
 
 The lowest triad has the common function of arranging and 
 executing the duties of the angelic ministry so far as it deals 
 directly with men. ANGELS are the common principle, ARCH- 
 ANGELS the superior, and PRINCIPALITIES the highest directors of 
 this function of angelic ministry. 
 
 These bizarre expressions used to name the different degrees of 
 celestial perfection arose in the interpretation of obscure passages 
 in St. Paul's writings. 
 
 In " Romans " we have a passage speaking of " death, life, angels,
 
 Dante's "Divina Commedia" 211 
 
 principalities, powers, things present and things to come," and a 
 still more remarkable passage in Colossians (i, 16, 17) : " By him 
 were all things created that are in heaven or that are in earth, 
 visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions 
 or principalities or powers. All things were created by him 
 and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things 
 consist." 
 
 This passage is otherwise famous as the most important place in 
 which St. Paul gives his version of St. John's doctrine of the 
 Word or Logos, which was in the beginning and which made all 
 created things. 
 
 54. The Heretical Tendency in this Mythos. 
 
 It is essential to note that the hierarchy may be interpreted to 
 mean that the highest, or the THRONES (Seraphim, Cherubim, 
 Thrones), are of an angelic ministry more removed from mediation 
 with what is below more immediate in their contemplation of 
 the divine. This is heretical when the mediation is denied i. e., 
 when it is thought to be more divine to be above and apart from 
 the world of humanity but not heresy when it is held that
 
 212 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 " Thrones " complete their mediation perfectly, and corae to use 
 their power to elevate fallen humanity, and are not held aloof as 
 through fear of contamination by contact with sinners. The 
 Highest Logos goes down into the manger of Space and Time, 
 and raises all up as contemplative Cherub, the Logos pierces 
 clear through the mediation of time and space intellectually and 
 philosophically and sees the face of God. As Seraph it loves God 
 through loving all creation, down to the lowest insect or plant or 
 clod. 
 
 Seraph and Cherub are of the highest triad, because they make 
 the deepest and completest mediation and see clearest the divine 
 shining through creation. They can see the praise of God even 
 in sin and evil. But the danger of heresy lurks in this doctrine. 
 If it is held that the Cherubim see God directly face to face with- 
 out the mediation of creation, then mere quietism is reached. 
 Buddhism holds that the highest states of perfection for its saints 
 are most aloof from the world of man and nature. 
 
 " From the lowest to the highest stations of human activity, to 
 serve as a servant who does menial work is everywhere necessary. 
 For the lowest class of laborers, whatever they do is only a trade ;
 
 Dante's "Divina, Commedia" 213 
 
 for the next higher it is an art ; and for the highest, whatever they 
 do is to them the image of the totality." (Paraphrase of one of 
 Goethe's sayings.) 
 
 Hence it is not the angels, archangels, and principalities that 
 make the human mediation most perfectly. It is to them a 
 " trade." But the powers, virtues, and dominions are higher 
 toward a perfect mediation and can go down lower into the depths 
 safely to bring up the lowest. But the thrones can make the 
 complete mediation from lowest to highest. 
 
 Dante has connected this artificial system (which refuses, even 
 in the expositions of its greatest disciples, to take on a perfectly 
 rational and logical form) to the heavens of the Ptolemaic system, 
 and thereby fastened his degrees of spiritual perfection to astro- 
 nomical distinctions observable by all men. In the "Convito" 
 second treatise, Chapter xiv, he has stated in detail his astronomi- 
 cal theory. 
 
 That there remained a sediment of Neoplatonism, and hence of 
 Oriental thinking, in Dante's mind, even after the chidings of 
 Beatrice in the Terrestrial Paradise, and perhaps, too, even in the 
 teachings of Beatrice herself in the twenty-eighth canto of the
 
 214 The Spiritual Sense of 
 
 "Paradise," may well be believed. But the main great points of 
 his theology, founded on Aristotle as interpreted by the School- 
 men, will stand the scrutiny of all time. 
 
 The doctrine of the Divine form or the self-activity of the ab- 
 solute involves the common nature of man and God or God as 
 divine-human. This is the great central truth (of which the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity is the symbol) on which all modern civiliza- 
 tion is built as its open secret. 
 
 55. The Symbol of the Trinity embodies the Highest Philo- 
 sophic Truth. 
 
 God the absolute reason is perfect knowing and willing in one 
 what he knows he creates ; for his knowing causes to be, that 
 which he intellectually perceives. His intuition of himself then 
 contemplates the eternal Word the Second Person equal in all 
 respects to himself. The Second Person, the Logos, knows and 
 wills likewise himself, and thus arises a Third Person. But a dif- 
 ference makes its appearance here ; the Second Person knows him- 
 self as having been begotten, in the timeless past of " The Be- 
 ginning," as having arisen through all stages of imperfection up
 
 Daniels "Divina Commedia" 215 
 
 to the highest. This knowledge is also creation, and the Word 
 creates a world of imperfect beings in the form of evolution from 
 pure space and time up to the highest and holiest on earth the 
 " New Jerusalem "the " City of God," the " Invisible Church " 
 whose spirit is the Holy Spirit or the Third Person. The world 
 of man and nature thus belongs to the processio to the hyposta- 
 sis of derivation or the genesis of the Eternal Word. The Logos, 
 contemplating its own derivation, logically implied, causes it to be, 
 as an actual creation in Time and Space. As the Holy Spirit 
 proceeds from all eternity, it is not a generation, but a procession 
 always complete, but always continuing. Here is the highest 
 view possible of human nature; it is part of the procession of the 
 Holy Spirit. 
 
 Man reaches perfection in the infinite, eternal, immortal, and 
 invisible Church. 
 
 This is the river and the Great White Rose of Paradise. 
 
 The symbol of philosophy as the knowledge of the highest 
 truth is Beatrice, and Dante has recorded his conviction that 
 this highest truth is revealed and can be known in the following 
 words :
 
 216 The Spiritual Sense of Dante's "Divina Commedia." 
 
 " I see well that our intellect is never sated if the truth does 
 not illuminate it, beyond whose circuit no truth exists. In that 
 truth it reposes as a wild animal in its lair, as soon as it has 
 reached it. And it can reach it, for were this not so all desire 
 would be created in vain " (" Paradise," iv, 124^129). 
 
 FINIS.