John T. Slattery - Dante: The Central Man of All the World

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DANTE: "THE CENTRAL MAN OF ALL THE WORLD."

A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Student Body of the
New York State College for Teachers, Albany, 1919, 1920

by

JOHN T. SLATTERY, Ph.D.

With a Preface by John H. Finley, L.H.D.

New York
P. J. Kenedy & Sons
1920
Copyright, 1920, by
P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York
Printed in U.S.A.

DEDICATION

THIS MODEST WORK OWES ITS
PUBLICATION TO THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF

PRESIDENT ABRAM R. BRUBACHER

AND

DEAN HARLAN H. HORNER

OF THE STATE COLLEGE FOR TEACHERS, ALBANY, N.Y.

WHERE MANY PLEASANT HOURS WERE PASSED IN
DELIVERING THESE LECTURES. TO THESE FRIENDS
AND TO THE STUDENT-BODY OF THE COLLEGE THE
AUTHOR HAS THE HONOR OF DEDICATING THIS BOOK

PREFACE

I stand as does the reader at the entrance to this book which I have not
as yet entered myself. I have before me the journey through the Inferno
and Purgatorio, into Paradise, with a new companion. I have made the
journey before many times with others, or with Dante and Virgil alone,
but I know that I shall enjoy especially the companionship and comment
of one with whom I have had such satisfaction of comradeship in our
journey as neighbors for a little way across this earth. I invite
others, and I hope they may be many, to make this brief journey with
us, not because I know specifically what Dr. Slattery will say along
the way, but because whatever he says out of his deep and reverent
acquaintance with the Divine Comedy will help us all who follow him,
whether we are of his particular faith or not, to an appreciation of
the meaning of this immortal poem, and make us desire to go again and
again in our reading through these spaces of the struggles of human souls.

A world-literary-movement will commemorate in 1921 the six hundredth
anniversary of the death of the immortal Dante. That a medievalist
should call forth the homage of the twentieth century to the extent of
being honored in all civilized lands and by cultured peoples who, for
the most part, do not know the language spoken by him, or who do not
profess the religion of him who wrote the most religious book of
Christianity, is a marvel explainable by the fact that the Divine Comedy
is a drama of the soul,--the story of a struggle which every man must
make to possess his own spirit against forces that would enslave it. The
central interest of the poem is in the individual who may be you or I
instead of Dante the subject of the work, and that fact exalts the
personal element and gives the spiritual value which we of modern times
appreciate as well as did the thirteenth century.

The Divine Comedy is attractive for other reasons. It may appeal to us
as it did to Tennyson, because of "its divine intensity," or it may
affect us as it did Charles Eliot Norton by "its powerful exposition of
moral penalties and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable;
or it may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength of
conception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, its
perfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect."
Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his Divine
Comedy will ever be both a discipline "not so much to elevate our
thoughts," says Coleridge, "as to send them down deeper," and a delight
calling forth the deepest emotions of our being.

JOHN H. FINLEY.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Dante and His Time 1

Dante, The Man 49

Dante's Inferno 101

Dante's Purgatorio 151

Dante's Paradiso 219

DANTE AND HIS TIME

DANTE AND HIS TIME

To know Dante we must know the age which produced Christianity's
greatest poet, he whom Ruskin calls "the central man of all the world,
as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so
dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books.
Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the
thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary
spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism,
"constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this
commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its supremacy.
And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no doubt upon
the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty.

Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use
Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure
imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his
students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to
be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my
own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me
into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school
of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has
served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of
inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's
master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling,
leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own
age by revealing a mighty past.

To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth
century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which
ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here,
perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum
true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. We moderns
who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are
dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from
medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries
because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something
else distinctively our own--a vast contribution to the world's progress.
This self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be
in the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory
is not confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was
said of the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were
giants in those days" which we presume to ignore. Homer, Shakespeare,
Dante, indeed stand forth in irrefutable protest against the
questionable assertion of evolution that the present is intellectually
superior to the past.

The evolutionary theory prejudices our age against acknowledging the
high accomplishments of the past. So to know the truth we must overcome
the conspiracy with which so-called history has enveloped the past,
especially those generations immediately prior to Dante's. How that
ignorance of the history and spirit of that period can blind even a
great writer to the wonderful feats inherited from the centuries
immediately preceding the thirteenth, is revealed by the assertion of
Carlyle that "in Dante ten _silent_ centuries found a voice." To
state what history now regards as fact, it must be said that while Dante
by his giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble
any epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy
culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before
1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that
subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration
and have never quite equalled its originality and worth.

In verification of this statement I have only to mention to you the
names of the Cid of Spain, the Arthurian Legends of England, the
Nibelungen Lied of Germany and the poems of the Meistersingers, the
Trouveres and the Troubadours. The authors of these works had been
taught to make themselves eternal as Dante says Brunetto Latini taught
him. They are proof against the alleged dumbness of the ages just
preceding Dante's. Of those times speaks Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, renowned
equally for historical study and for architectural ability: "The twelfth
was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great in its
successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy, religion
and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of aspiration
and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the first shock
of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new that was
destined to unprecedented victories." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 69.)

Let us now make a general survey of Dante's century and then consider
the more particular events and circumstances of his environment.

It may be a surprise to you to know that there is a book entitled The
Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries by Dr. James J. Walsh, in its
fifth edition with a sale of 70,000 copies. He indeed is not the only
man of letters who signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine
the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske
in his Beginnings of New England says of the thirteenth century: "It was
a wonderful time but after all less memorable as the culmination of
medieval empire and medieval church than as the dawning of the new era
in which we live today." Frederic Harrison, in his Survey of the
Thirteenth Century says, "Of all the epochs of effort after a new life
that ... is the most spiritual, the most really constructive and indeed
the most truly philosophic. It had great thinkers, great rulers, great
teachers, great poets, great artists, great moralists, and great
workmen. It could not be called the material age, the devotional age,
the political age or the poetic age in any special degree. It was
equally poetic, political, industrial, artistic, practical, intellectual
and devotional. And these qualities acted on a uniform conception of
life with a real symmetry of purpose."

Ours is an age of thought but of thought finding concrete expression
in practical invention and especially in activities in the line of
manufacture and commerce. Posterity will probably characterize our age
as the Industrial Age, a phrase that will signalize our period both for
the development of industries not thought possible a century ago and
for the evolution of the industrial worker to a position of striking
importance and power. For the first time in the history of humanity the
workman's status is the subject of international agreement. The League
of Nations promises to treat Labor from a humanitarian point of view
and so to place it on the broad, firm pathway leading to industrial
peace and economical solidarity for the common good. That would seem
a necessity in view of the strides of progress in other directions.

Now wireless telegraphy crosses oceans and unites continents. The
wireless telephone between ships and shore is in operation. It has been
found practicable to transport by submarine a cargo from Bremen to
Baltimore. In aircraft the development has been just as wonderful. Less
than ten years ago the world's record for long flight by aeroplane was
made, with no regard for time, with two stops between Albany and New
York. In July, 1919, an aeroplane making no stop covered the distance
between New York and Chicago in some six hours. Furthermore an American
seaplane, in three stages made the trip from New York to England and
then a British Dirigible without making a stop came from England to
Long Island in ninety-six hours. "This is the end and the beginning of
an age" says the author of Mr. Brittling Sees It Through. "This is
something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation
and we live in it."

We indeed consider it the age of "big things." Dynasties fall and
republics spring up. When war breaks out it is a World War involving
twenty-four nations and causing 7,781,806 deaths (Nelson's Encyclopedia,
V. iv, p. 519) and costing $200,000,000,000. In the first year in which
we were at war, our country spent more than had been the cost of
conducting the government for 124 years, including the expenses of
the Civil and the Spanish-American Wars. Yes, it is an age of "big
things." The Allies in the Champagne offensive of September, 1915,
threw 50,000,000 shells into the German lines in three days. Was it one
out of sympathy with "big things," one intent on the quiet of the higher
life as contrasted with the din of the day, who said that "modern
civilization is noise and the more civilization progresses, the greater
will be the noise?" In any event the muses who inspired Dante, are
almost dumb. Now the captains of industry are the commanding figures of
the day and the student, the poet, the philosopher, the statesman have
gone into innocuous desuetude. Amy Lowell is preferred to Longfellow:
Charlie Chaplin draws bigger crowds than Shakespeare can interest.
Trainmen get wages higher than are the salaries of some of our
governors. Unskilled labor is paid more than the teachers of our youth
receive. The cost of living was never higher in the history of mankind.

How illuminating to turn from this picture to that of Dante's age. Then
in Florence, a bushel of wheat cost about fifteen cents, a carpenter
could buy a broad ax for five cents, a saw for three cents, a plane
for four cents, a chisel for one cent. The average daily wage of a
woolworker was about thirty-six cents. In view of the high purchasing
power of money in Dante's age, the fact that he borrowed at least seven
hundred and fifty seven and a half golden florins, a debt that was not
paid until after his death, leads one to think that he must have been
regarded by his contemporaries as prodigal in the use of money. His
financial difficulties must have given him an uneasy conscience for he
insists repeatedly on the wickedness of prodigality. In fact he makes
the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a
sin against the social order punishable according to the gravity of the
offence in Hell or Purgatory.

To return to the matter of prices in Dante's day. In England a goose
could be bought for two and a half pence. A stall-fed ox commanded
twenty-four shillings while his fellow brought up on grass was sold for
sixteen shillings. A fat hog, two years old,--and this is interesting to
us who pay seventy-five cents a pound for bacon--a fat hog two years old
cost only three shillings four pence and a fat sheep shorn, one shilling
and two pence. A gallon of oysters was purchasable for two pence, a
dozen of the best soles for three pence. A yard of broadcloth cost only
one shilling one pence, a pair of shoes four pence. These figures of
English money are taken from an act of Edward III of England who was
born seven years after Dante's death. Parliamentarian enactment under
the same king fixed a table of wages.

For a day's work at haymaking or weeding of corn, for instance, a woman
got one penny. For mowing an acre of grass or threshing a quarter of
wheat a man was paid four pence. The reaper received also four pence for
his day's labor. Eight hours constituted a working day. The people of
the Middle Ages not only had the Saturday half-holiday but they enjoyed
release from work on nearly forty vigils of feast days during the year.
That they were as well off, e.g. as the unskilled laborer of our day,
who demands from four to eight dollars a day as a wage, is evident from
the fact that while he has to pay forty cents a pound for mutton, the
workman of Edward the Third's day earned enough in four days to buy a
whole sheep and a gallon of ale. So plentiful was meat in England that
it was the ordinary diet of the poor. A preamble of an act of Parliament
of the fourteenth century in specifying beef, pork, mutton and veal
declares that these are "the food of the poorer sort." (The Thirteenth,
the Greatest of Centuries, p. 479.)

Speaking of live-stock leads to the observation that the people of
Dante's time for the most part lived in the country. Cities had not yet
become magnets. London is supposed to have had a population of
twenty-five thousand, York ten thousand four hundred, Canterbury, four
thousand seven hundred, Florence, in the year 1300, according to
Villani, a contemporary of Dante, had "ninety thousand enjoying the
rights of citizenship. Of rich Grandi, there were fifteen hundred.
Strangers passing through the city numbered about two thousand. In
the elementary schools were eight thousand to ten thousand children."
(Staley's Guilds of Florence, p. 555.)

The means of travel and communication, of course, were few and
difficult. The roads were bad and dangerous. In France, Germany and
Italy there were so many forms of government, dukedoms, baronies,
marquisates, signories, city republics, each with its own custom
regulations, not to speak of each having its own coinage and language,
that travelers encountered obstacles almost at every step. For the most
part, journeys had to be made afoot and a degree of safety was attained
only if the traveler joined a large trade caravan, a pilgrimage or a
governmental expedition. Night often found the party far from a hospice
or inn and so they were obliged for shelter to camp on the highway or
in the fields. Necessarily the traveler was subjected to innumerable
privations and sufferings.

I have not been able to get accurate information as to the exact length
of time required to make a trip, say from London to Paris--a distance
covered the other day by an aeroplane in eighty minutes. But, the
"Consuetudines" of the Hereford Cathedral, England, afford us some data
upon which to base the conclusion that six weeks were necessary for
such a trip, allowing another week for religious purposes. The
"Consuetudines" after specifying that no canon of the cathedral was to
make more than one pilgrimage beyond the seas in his lifetime, allows
the clergyman seven weeks' absence to go abroad to the tomb of St. Denis
in the suburbs of Paris, sixteen weeks to Rome and a year to Jerusalem.

A table of time limits between Florence and the principal cities of
Europe and the East made by the Florentine Banking houses in Dante's
day, showed the number of days required for consignments of specie and
goods to reach their destination. Rome was reached in fifteen days,
Venice and Naples in twenty days, Flanders in seventy days, England and
Constantinople in seventy-five days, Cyprus in ninety days. How long it
took Dante to make the trip from Florence to Rome, we do not know but
history tells us that he went to the Eternal City in the year 1300. He
was indeed a great traveler. During his twenty years' exile, we know
that our poet's itinerary led him among other places to Padua, Venice,
Ravenna, Paris and there is good reason to believe, as Gladstone
contends, that he went for study to Oxford. The regret is permissible
that he did not leave us an account of his journeyings. "Had he given us
pictures--as he alone could have painted them--of scenes by the wayside
and of the courts of which he was an honored guest," says Dr. J.A. Zahm
in his Great Inspirers, "we should have had the most interesting
and the most instructive travel book ever written."

We cannot but notice one great effect brought about by traveling in
those days, especially by pilgrimages and by the Crusades formed in
defence of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on
all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality
that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the
common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John
Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English
speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was
born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the
English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the
centralization of power in the hands of the kings went forward with the
gradual diminution of the influence of the nobility--a fact operating to
the people's advantage.

In 1222 the nobles forced Andrew II of Hungary to issue the Golden Bull,
the instrument which Blackstone later declared turned "anarchy into
law." In Germany and Sicily Frederick II published laws giving a larger
measure of popular freedom. In Italy, the existence of the city
republics--especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa--showed how
successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the
body-politic.

Coming now to regard the characteristics of Dante's age we must say that
the first big thing that looms in sight is the fact that this was the
golden age of Christian faith. Everywhere the Cross, the symbol of
salvation, met the eye. It was the age when men lived in one faith, used
one ritual, professed one creed, accepted a common doctrine and moral
standard and breathed a common religious atmosphere. Heresy was not
wholly absent but it was the exception. Religion regarded then not as an
accident or an incident of life but as a benign influence permeating
the whole social fabric, not only cared for the widow and orphan and
provided for the poor, but it shaped men's thoughts, quickened their
sentiments, inspired their work and directed their wills. These men
believed in a world beyond the grave as an ever present reality. Hell,
Purgatory, Heaven were so near to them that they, so to speak, could
touch the invisible world with their hands. To them, as to Dante, "this
life was but a shadowy appearance through which the eternal realities of
another world were constantly betraying themselves." Of the intensity
and universality of faith in that life beyond death, Dante is not the
exception but the embodiment. His poem has no such false note of
scepticism as we detect in Tennyson's In Memoriam. Note the words of the
modern poet:

"I falter where I firmly trod
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope
And gather dust and chaff and call
To what I feel is Lord of all
And faintly trust the larger hope."

Not thus does Dante speak. As the voice of his age he begins with faith,
continues with faith and leads us to the unveiled vision of God. He
both shows us his unwavering adherence to Christian doctrine in that
scene in Paradiso where he is examined as to his faith by St. Peter and
he teaches us that the seen is only a stepping stone into the unseen. It
has been said of him in reference to his Divina Commedia, "The light of
faith guides the poet's steps through the hopeless chambers of Hell with
a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering. It bears him through
the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly fits reality: it raises
him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's Empyrean, where
he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond that whereof he says."
(Brother Azarias.)

Leading the religious awakening of the thirteenth century and making
possible Dante's work at the end of the century were two of the world's
greatest exponents of the spiritual life, both signalized in the
Paradiso. St. Dominic characterized by Dante (Par. XII, 56) as "a
jealous lover of the Christian faith with mildness toward his disciples
but formidable to his foes," founded an order to be "the champions of
Faith and the true lights of the world." Even in its early days it gave
to the world eminent scholars such as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas
Aquinas, and it has never ceased to number among its members great
thinkers, ardent apostles, stern ascetics and profound mystics. In
Dante's time it was the only order specially charged with the office of
preaching and from its founder's time down to the present day the one
who acts as the Pope's Theologian has been taken from the ranks of this
order. Besides preaching to all classes of Christian society and
evangelizing the heathen, the Dominicans in Dante's day fought against
heresy and schism, lectured in the universities, toiled among the poor,
activities in which the order is still engaged.

But perhaps the man whose spiritual influence was greatest in
medievalism, if not in all the history of Christianity, was Francis of
Assisi, who "all seraphical in order rose a sun upon the world." (Par.
XI, 37.) Born at Assisi in Umbria in 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth
merchant and of Pica, a member of a noble family of Provence, Francis
grew up a handsome, gay and gallant youth "the prime favorite among the
young nobles of the town, the foremost in every feat of arms, the leader
of civil revels, the very king of frolic." A low fever contracted when
with his fellow citizens he fought against the Perugians turned his
thoughts to the things of eternity. Upon his recovery he determined to
devote himself to the service of his fellow man for the honor of God.

His renunciation of the things of this life was dramatic. To swerve him
from the new life his father had cited him to appear before the Bishop.
Francis, unmoved by the appeal of his father persisted in his
resolution. Stripping himself of the clothes he wore, the Bishop
covering his nakedness, Francis gave his clothes to his father saying,
"Hitherto I have called you Father, henceforth I desire to say only Our
Father who art in heaven." Then and there as Dante sings, were
solemnized Francis' nuptials with his beloved Spouse, the Lady Poverty,
under which name, in the mystical language afterwards so familiar to
Francis, "he comprehended the total surrender of all wordly goods,
honors and privileges." He went forth and attracted disciples. With
these partaking of his zeal and animated by his charity, he labored to
make his generation turn from the sordid to the spiritual, diffusing
over all the people a tender love of nature and God.

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