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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

In making light such a central feature of Heaven and symbolically in
identifying light with God and the angels and the blessed, Dante is only
expressing--but expressing beautifully and supremely--the thought which
pagan oracles proclaimed and Holy Writ and the Church made known. From
the earliest ages the sun which vivifies and illuminates the world was
regarded by many nations as the symbol of the Deity--and by still other
nations it was adored. The psalmist, addressing God, says: "Thou art
clothed with light as with a garment." (Ps., CIII, 2.) St. Paul declares
that the Lord of Lords "inhabiteth light inaccessible." (1 Tim., VI,
16.) The Seer of Patmos tells us that the heavenly Jerusalem has no need
of the light of the sun and the moon to shine upon it, "for the glory of
God hath enlightened it and the Lamb is the lamp thereof." (Apoc., XX,
23.) "I am the light of the world," declares Christ, and with that
revelation ringing in his ears the Beloved Disciple does not hesitate to
say: "and this is the declaration which we have heard--that God is
light." (I John, I, 5.) In narrating his vision of Heaven, Ezechial
compares the light emanating from and enveloping the Deity, to fire. "I
saw the likeness as of the appearance of fire, as the appearance of
brightness." (XXIV, 17.) Moses on the mountain saw the Lord in the midst
of fire, and on another mountain Christ, "the brightness of his Father's
glory was transfigured before his apostles and his face did shine as the
Sun and his garments became shining or glittering." (Matt., XVII, 2.)
Small wonder then that the Nicaean creed declares that Christ is "God of
God, Light of light." Not only with God, but with His saints is the idea
of visible light intimately associated. The prophet Daniel tells us
that "They that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament, and they that instruct many unto justice, as stars to all
eternity." (XII, 3.) And it is Christ Himself who says: "Then shall the
just shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father." (Matt., XIII,
43.)

In using such a subtle, dazzling element as light so generally and in
such countless varieties throughout his Paradiso, Dante is exposed to
the danger of palling his readers with brightness and making them lose
interest in things glorious and supernal. But the genius of the man
saves the artist. By a conception of matchless beauty he binds the light
of heaven to the human, making the smile in the eye of his beloved
guide, Beatrice, express his own personal heaven, in the light that
enters his mind and the ardor which quickens his heart. As he mounts
with her the stairway of the heavens leading to the Eternal Palace and
his motion is brought about simply by his gazing into her eyes, she
makes known to him by her increasing brightness both his own mounting
knowledge and his ascent nearer the Empyrean.

As Dante represents the increase of light and love deepening and
expanding in him as he rises empyreanward all by the loved smile of his
beloved Beatrice, it is well that we bear in mind the significance of
the symbolism as expounded by the poet in his Banquet. (III, 15.)
Beatrice being Revelation or Wisdom made known to the world, "in her
face appear things that tell of the pleasures of Paradise and ... the
place wherein this appears is in her eyes and her smile. And here it
should be known that the eyes of Wisdom are the two demonstrations by
which is seen the truth most certainly; and her smile is her persuasion
by which is shown forth the interior light of Wisdom under some veil;
and in these two things is felt the highest pleasure of beatitude, which
is the greatest good of Paradise."

Beatrice--Revealed Truth--remains the poet's guide until he comes to
behold the Beatific Vision. Then, no longer needed, she withdraws in
favor of the contemplative St. Bernard as guide, just as Virgil had
withdrawn when he was powerless and when Beatrice was needed.

The question here presents itself: In what does Dante place the
happiness of Heaven? Does he paint such a Heaven that it shows
principally the rectifications of the inequalities of this life--a
Heaven of such happiness, e.g., that the poor will love poverty or be
resigned to it in the hope of possessing the riches of this Eternity? Is
Dante's Heaven one in which happiness is so alluring that innocence will
gladly submit to calumny and faith will lovingly welcome the sword or
stake, in the certain confidence of gaining unending glory or bliss?
The Paradiso does reward poverty, crown innocence, glorify martyrdom,
but it was never intended to be an account of what takes place in the
real Heaven, or to be a description of the particular acts of goodness
which win Heaven for the soul, or a rapturous picture appealing to the
emotions of the believer and alluring him from earth.

Does Dante place the happiness of Heaven in the bliss and glorification
of family reunion?

He is too good a theologian to place the essential happiness of Heaven
merely in the joy of family reunion. He does not ignore that feature of
eternity, but he does not stress it, because temperamentally he is moved
less by sentiment of family and ties of friendship than by his curiosity
for knowledge, by his yearnings to behold Eternal Wisdom. Only once does
he mention Heaven as the state of reunion of families and friends, and
that is when he comments upon the action of the twenty-three spirits in
the Heaven of the Sun, in expressing their agreement with Soloman's
discourse as to the participation which the human body will have, after
the Resurrection in the glories of Paradise:

"So ready and so cordial an Amen
Follow'd from either choir, as plainly spoke
Desire of their dead bodies; yet perchance
Not for themselves, but for their kindred dear,
Mothers and sires and those whom best they loved,
Ere they were made imperishable flames."
(XIV, 65.)

For Dante, Heaven must be the beatitude of the intellect and that
primarily by the intellect's having an intuition full of joy in the
Divine Essence, and secondly by its possessing full light on all those
vexatious problems and mysteries which baffle us in this life.

"Well I perceive that never sated is
Our intellect unless Truth illumines it,
Beyond which nothing true expands itself.
It rests therein, as wild beast in his lair
When it attains it and it can attain it."
(IV, 125.)

In insisting upon the power of the mind to know the truth and to find
perfect happiness in the supernatural act of beholding God face to face,
Dante is not in agreement with Pragmatism, Hegelianism and the "new
Realist" theory--all which make truth elusive to the mind; but he is in
full accord with the teaching of the Catholic Church, which defends the
rights of reason holding, e.g., that "by the natural light of reason
God can be known with certainty, by means of created things" (Vatican
Council), and proclaiming that "all the saints in Heaven have seen and
do see the Divine Essence by direct intuition and face to face in such
wise that nothing created intervenes as an object of vision; ... that
the Divine Essence presents itself to their immediate gaze, unveiled,
clearly and openly; that in this vision they enjoy the Divine Essence,
and in virtue of this vision and this enjoyment they are truly blessed
and possess eternal life and eternal rest." (Benedict XII, Cath.
Encycl., VII, 171.)

It is interesting to see how Dante's Master, St. Thomas Aquinas,
demonstrates the proposition that the beatitude of man consists in the
vision of the Divine Essence. With his usual lucidity of thought he
writes: "The last and perfect happiness of man cannot be otherwise than
in the vision of the Divine Essence. In evidence of this statement two
points are to be considered: first, that man is not perfectly happy so
long as there remains anything for him to desire and seek; secondly,
that the perfection of every power is determined by the nature of its
object. Now the object of the intellect is the essence of a thing; hence
the intellect attains to perfection so far as it knows the Essence of
what is before it. And therefore, when a man knows an effect and knows
that it has a cause, there is in him an outstanding natural desire of
knowing the essence of the cause. If, therefore, a human intellect knows
the essence of a created effect without knowing aught of God beyond the
fact of His existence, the perfection of that intellect does not yet
adequately reach the First Cause, but the intellect has an outstanding
natural desire of searching into the said Cause; hence it is not yet
perfectly happy. For perfect happiness, therefore, it is necesary that
the intellect shall reach as far as the very essence of the First
Cause." (Rickaby, Aquinas Ethicus I, 2 q., 3 a, 8.)

This masterly exposition is after all only the philosophical development
of what every Catholic child learns from one of the first questions of
the little Catechism: "Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to
love Him, and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him
forever in the next." With the satisfaction of the intellect's boundless
yearning for knowledge attained by intuition of the Essence of God, a
consummation that will somewhat deify us--"Who shall be made like to
him, because we shall see him as he is" (I John, III, 2.), the happiness
of man will be primarily intellectual, being as Dante beautifully says:
"Light intellectual full of love, love of the true good, full of joy,
joy that transcendeth all sweetness." (XXX, 40.)

His Heaven, then, is no Nirvana, for each spirit will for eternity have
its individuality, and its activity will be unremitting in seeing God
face to face--a vision that will cause the spirit increasing wonder in
an act that will have no flagging nor satiety. "What, after all, is
Heaven," says Bulwer Lytton, "but a transition from dim guesses to the
fullness of wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, but knowledge of what
order?" To that exclamation of the nineteenth century writer the
medieval seer answers with conviction that the _summum bonum_ is to be
found only in the intellect's attaining Truth.

Let us now join Dante in his mystic journey to the Heavenly Kingdom. We
left him after three days and three nights in Purgatory, standing with
Beatrice on the summit of the mountain in the Earthly Paradise, where he
remained six hours. At noon he begins his ascent through space, a feat
accomplished by Beatrice's looking up to the Heavens and by Dante's
fixing his eyes upon her. At once his human nature is supposed to take
on agility, the supernatural quality which makes the body independent of
space, and he begins to rise with incomprehensible velocity. Though they
are travelling without conscious movement at the rate of 84,000 miles a
second, there is time for Dante's mind to operate in desire to know how
he can ascend counter to gravitation and for Beatrice to discourse upon
the law--Dante's invention--of universal (material and spiritual)
gravitation.

"The newness of the sound and the great light
Kindled in me a longing for their cause
Never before with such acuteness felt.
And she began: 'Thou makest thyself so dull
With false imagining, that thou sees not
What thou wouldst see if thou hadst shaken it off.
Thou are not upon earth as thou believest;
But lightning, fleeing its appropriate site,
Ne'er ran as thou, who thitherward returnest.'"
(I, 88.)

She explains the order established by Providence by force of which
created beings seek their natural habitat, earthly things being
attracted downward, spiritual entities being drawn upward irresistibly
if they do not oppose this innate inclination to good. "It is as natural
for a man purged of all evil to ascend to God," she declares, "as it is
for a stream from a mountain height to fall into a valley."

Very shortly after this, the first stage of the celestial journey is
reached. "Direct thy mind to God in gratitude," she said, "who hath
united us with the first star." "Me seemed a cloud enveloped us, shining
dense, firm and polished like a diamond smitten by the sun. Within
itself the eternal pearl received us, as water doth receive a ray of
light, though still itself uncleft." This is the Heaven of the Moon, the
planet farthest removed from the Empyrean and therefore the sphere where
not only motion but also beatitude are least in the heavenly bodies. The
sphere of the Moon, indeed with those of Mercury and of Venus, is held
by Dante's cosmography to be within the shadow cast by the earth.
Consequently, the spirits in those three lowest Heavens are represented
as less perfect than those in the higher spheres, because in the moral
sense the shadow of earth fell upon their lives making them imperfect
through inconstancy, vain glory or unlawful love.

In the Heaven of the Moon a long disquisition is carried on by Beatrice
in explanation of Dante's question as to why there are spots on the
moon. It is very likely that this matter of apparent irrelevance in the
heavenly realms is introduced here at the very first stage of the ascent
to give the poet the opportunity of proclaiming that the first thing one
must learn in his passage heavenward--even if this is to be understood
in an allegorical sense--is that the laws of the laboratory are not the
_rationale_ of the heavenly world and that to employ them to explain the
supernal is to violate the very science of these laws, in an
application of scope to which in their very nature they protest. This
point of seeing natural causes for the unexplainable phenomenon of
Heaven and especially of relying upon the testimony of the senses is
soon brought out by Beatrice reproving Dante for thinking that the
spirits whom he now sees are only reflections of the human face:

"Marvel thou not," she said to me, "because
I smile at this thy puerile conceit,
Since on the truth it trusts not yet its foot,
But turns thee, as 'tis wont, on emptiness.
True substances are these which thou beholdest,
Here relegate for breaking of some vow.
Therefore speak with them, listen and believe."
(III, 25.)

So directed, the poet gazes again upon the faint forms appearing like
reflections seen in a plate of glass or in a dark, shallow pool. These,
the first spirits he meets, are apparitions in human form. In the other
spheres all that he will see of the souls will be the light which
envelopes them and which seemingly is identified with them, but here he
sees beautiful women divinely glorious even in their dim outline, who as
nuns had violated their vow of perpetual chastity. In the Inferno the
poet, to lead the reprobate soul to speak to him, promised earthly
fame; in Purgatorio there was the offer of intercessory prayer, here in
the first Heaven there is only an appeal to the charity which inflames
the spirit. All eagerness, Dante now addresses the spirit, who appears
most desirous to converse with him. This is Piccarda, kinswoman of his
wife and sister of his friend Forese (Purg. XXIII, 40), a Poor Clare
nun, who was compelled by her brother, Corse, to leave her convent and
marry Rossellino della Tosa in the expectation that the marriage would
promote a political alliance. So sacrificed, the young virgin sister of
lofty ideals and delicate spiritual sensibility, experienced
unhappiness, the intensity of which is revealed by the ellipsis
contained in the magic line: "And God doth know what my life became."
Dante addresses Piccarda:

"'O well-created spirit, who in the rays
Of life eternal dost the sweetness taste
Which being untasted ne'er is comprehended,
Grateful 'twill be to me, if thou content me
Both with thy name and with your destiny.'
Whereat, she promptly and with laughing eyes:
'Our charity doth never shut the doors
Against a just desire, except as she
Who wills that all her court be like herself.
I was a virgin sister in the world;
And if thy mind doth contemplate me well,
The being more fair will not conceal me from thee,
But thou shalt recognize I am Piccarda,
Who, stationed here among these other blessed,
Myself am blessed in the lowest sphere.
All our affections, that alone inflamed
Are in the pleasure of the Holy Ghost,
Rejoice at being of his order formed;
And this allotment, which appears so low,
Therefore is given us, because our vows
Have been neglected and in some part void.'
Whence I to her: 'In your miraculous aspects
There shines I know not what of the divine,
Which doth transform you from our first conceptions.
Therefore I was not swift in my remembrance;
But what thou tellest me now aids me so,
That the refiguring is easier to me.'"
(III, 37.)

Dante, you recall, had found the souls in Purgatory contented with their
lot, though they were enduring great suffering; in Heaven he is eager to
learn in the very beginning whether the Elect are satisfied with the
decree which awards to them happiness in unequal measure. So he asks
Piccarda whether she and the other spirits in this lowest sphere are not
eager for a higher place. The answer is one of the most touching and
beautiful passages in the poem, summing up in language of radiant
gladness the law of Heaven that in "God's will is our peace," words
which Gladstone says "appear to have an unexpressible majesty of truth
about them, to be almost as if they were spoken from the very mouth of
God."

"'But tell me, ye who in this place are happy,
Are you desirous of a higher place,
To see more or to make yourselves more friends?'
First, with those other shades, she smiled a little;
Thereafter answered me so full of gladness,
She seemed to burn in the first fire of love:
'Brother, our will is quieted by virtue
Of charity, that makes us wish alone
For what we have, nor gives us thirst for more.
If to be more exalted we aspired,
Discordant would our aspirations be
Unto the will of Him who here secludes us;
Which thou-shalt see finds no place in these circles,
If being in charity is needful here,
And if thou lookest well into its nature;
Nay 'tis essential to this blest existence
To keep itself within the will divine,
Whereby our very wishes are made one;
So that, as we are station above station
Throughout this realm, to all the realm 'tis pleasing,
As to the King, who makes His will our will.
And His will is our peace; this is the sea
To which is moving onward whatsoever
It doth create, and all that nature makes.'
Then it was clear to me how everywhere
In Heaven is Paradise, although the grace
Of good supreme there rain not in one measure."
(III, 64.)

Piccarda then tells the moving story of her life, how as a girl she
entered the order of St. Clare, only to be torn from the nunnery and
given into marriage.

"A perfect life and merit high in Heaven
A lady o'er us," said she, "by whose rule
Down in your world they vest and veil themselves,
That until death they may both watch and sleep
Beside that Spouse who every vow accepts
Which charity conformeth to his pleasure.
To follow her, in girlhood from the world
I fled, and in her habit shut myself,
And pledged me to the pathway of her sect.
Then men accustomed unto evil more
Than unto good, from the sweet cloister tore me;
God knows what afterward my life became."
(III, 97.)

Certain questions interesting to a seeker of truth grow out of
Piccarda's statement and these Beatrice proceeds to solve for the
edification of Dante. The first question asks whether in the assignment
to the lowest sphere of souls who violated their vows, there is divine
Justice; the second concerns Plato's teaching that souls really come
from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit
through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda.
The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we
remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven
of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point
out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can
interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining the end for which
God has destined it."

To the next Heaven, the sphere of Mercury, Beatrice and Dante soar more
swiftly than an arrow attains its mark while the bow is still vibrating.
Increasing in loveliness as she ascends, Beatrice, in the second realm,
radiates such splendor that Mercury itself, apart from its own light,
gains such glory from her that it seems to glitter or smile from very
gladness.

"My lady there so joyful I beheld
As unto the brightness of that heaven she entered
More luminous thereat the planet grew,
And if the star itself was changed and smiled
What became I who by my nature am
Exceeding mutable in every guise?" (V, 97.)

Greeting the travellers, more than a thousand spirits joyfully exclaim:
"Lo, one who shall increase our loves!" The Saints in Mercury thus
testify to their delight that one (Dante) has come to be the fresh
object of their love, just as it is said that "there shall be joy before
the angels of God upon one sinner doing penance." (Luke XV, 10.) These
splendors in Mercury are the souls of those in whose virtue there was
the alloy of ambition and vainglory--a combination, according to Dante,
which makes "the rays of true love less vividly mount upwards." The poet
is addressed by a spirit who bids him ask any question he will and
Beatrice confirms the invitation. "Speak, speak with confidence and
trust them even as gods." All eagerness for knowledge, Dante inquires of
the friendly splendor who he is and why he is in this particular Heaven.

The story told by the spirit of Emperor Justinian is a brief sketch of
his own life, with reference to his conversion from heresy by Pope
Agapetus, to the victories of his general, Belisarius, and to his own
great work of the codification of the Roman law. He then traces the
history of Rome from the time of AEneas to the thirteenth century, bent
upon showing that the Roman Empire, as a world-power over governments
and peoples, is divine in its institution and providentially protected
in its course. Two facts are adduced in crowning proof of this audacious
statement, viz., Christ's choosing to be born and to be registered as a
subject of Caesar and His crucifixion under Tiberius, acting through
Pontius Pilate as the divinely constituted instrument of eternal justice
exercised by the Heavenly Father against His Son, at once the victim of
sin and its atonement.

Dante enlarges on this point in his Monarchia. "If the Roman Empire did
not exist by right, the sin of Adam was not punished in Christ.... If,
therefore, Christ had not suffered by the sentence of a regular judge,
the penalty would not have been properly punished; and none could be a
regular judge who had not jurisdiction over all mankind, for all mankind
was punished in the flesh of Christ, who 'hath borne our infirmities and
carried our sorrows,' as said the prophet Isaias. And if the Roman
Empire had not existed by right, Tiberius Caesar, whose vicar was Pontius
Pilate, would not have had jurisdiction over all mankind." To us both
the argument and its conclusion are wholly indefensible. It seems indeed
a mockery and a blasphemy to attribute to such a monster as Tiberius
Caesar glory because Christ was crucified in his reign. Dante's words,
however, as spoken by Justinian, leave no room for doubt that the poet
was convinced that all the ancient celebrity of Rome was insignificant
as compared to the glory that would come to it because it would carry
out the crucifixion of Christ.

"But what the standard that has made me speak
Achieved before, and after should achieve
Throughout the mortal realm that lies beneath,
Becometh in appearance mean and dim
If in the hand of the third Caesar seen
With an eye unclouded and affection pure
Because the living Justice that inspires me
Granted it, in the hand of him I speak of
The glory of doing vengence for its wrath."
(VI, 82.)

Shining among the splendors of Mercury is a spirit who, though he was
not a lawmaker like Justinian, attained earthly renown by arranging the
marriages of four Kings. Known by the name of Romeo, a word meaning a
pilgrim of Rome, this man came a stranger to the Court of Raymond
Berenger, Court of Provence, multiplied the income without lessening the
grandeur of his master and brought about the marriages to royalty of the
four daughters of the household--Margaret to St. Louis of France,
Eleanor to Henry III of England, Sanzia to Richard, Earl of Cornwall
(brother of Henry III), elected King of the Romans, Beatrice to Charles
of Anjou, later by Papal investiture, King of Naples. Charged by jealous
barons with having wasted his master's goods, Romeo established his
innocence and then departed as he came, on a mule and with a pilgrim's
staff. From affluence he goes a-begging and this is so much like Dante's
own case that the poet's sympathy goes out to the calumniated man, and
he says with touching simplicity:

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14