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

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

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Among his disciples--great minds of the time--were Thomas of Celano, one
of the literary geniuses of the day, the author of the sublime Dies
Irae--a religious poem chanted to this day at every funeral high mass
in the Catholic Church, and frequently sung or played in great opera
houses,--Bonaventure, professor of philosophy and theology at the
university of Paris, Roger Bacon, the friar, the renowned teacher at
Paris and Oxford, Duns Scotus, the subtile doctor. In the Third Order
established for those not following the monastic life the membership,
in the course of time, embraced among others St. Louis, King of France,
St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Dante.

He, towards the end of his exile, footsore, weary and discouraged,
buffeted by the adverse winds of fortune knocked, a stranger, at the
gates of the Franciscan monastery at Lunigiana. "As neither I nor any of
the brothers recognized him," writes Brother Hilary, the Prior, "I asked
him what he wished. He made no answer but gazed silently upon the
columns and galleries of the cloister. Again I asked him what he wished
and whom he sought and slowly turning his head and looking around upon
the brothers and me, he answered 'Peace.'"

The monks spoke gently to him, ministered with kindly and delicate
sympathy to his bodily and spiritual needs. His reticence left him and
his reserve melted away. Here the object of loving hospitality, he
remained finding means and opportunity for profound study. Before he
departed he drew from his bosom a part of the precious manuscript of
Divina Commedia and trustingly giving it into the hands of the Prior
said, "Here, Brother, is a portion of my work which you may not have
seen: this remembrance I leave with you: forget me not."

That he himself was not unforgetful of the sympathy of the simple and
warm-hearted followers of St. Francis is evident from the fact that he
gloried in his membership of the Third Order, wearing about his body the
Franciscan cincture for chastity and it is not unlikely that at Ravenna
before he finally closed his eyes upon the turmoil of the world full of
vicissitudes, he modestly requested that he be buried in the simple
habit of the order and be laid to rest in a tomb attached to their
monastery. In any event such was his burial.

For our sympathetic understanding of the supremacy of religion in
Dante's day, may I again quote Ralph Adams Cram, whose words on the
eleventh century are equally applicable to the era of our Florentine and
to his country? Dr. Cram writes: "It is hard for us to think back into
such an alien spirit and time as this and so understand how with
one-tenth of its present population England could support so vast and
varied a religious establishment, used as we are to an age where
religion is only a detail for many and for most a negligible factor. We
are only too familiar with the community that could barely support one
parish church, boasting its one-half dozen religious organizations, all
together claiming the adherence of only a minority of the population,
but in the Middle Ages, religion was not only the most important and
pervasive thing, it was a moral obligation on every man, woman and
child, and rejection or even indifference was unthinkable. If once we
grasp this fact," continues Cram, "we can understand how in the eleventh
century, the whole world should cover itself with 'its white robe of
churches.'"

The second great fact observable in the times of Dante is that it was an
age of inquiry and of efficient craftsmanship. Many of our generation
think that Dante's day being so far removed from the age of printing and
the spirit of positivism, and being given to the upholding of authority
almost as an unexhaustible source of knowledge, was wholly unacquainted
with scientific research. Furthermore they declare that education then
was almost at its minimum stage. A little study will show that the
people of that era were not unacquainted with the scientific spirit and
it will also prove that if education did not prevail, in the sense that
everybody had an opportunity to read and write--a consummation hardly to
be expected--education in the sense of efficiency--education in the
etymological sense, i.e. the training of the faculties so that the
individual might develop creative self-expression and especially that he
might bring out what was best in him, all which meant knowledge highly
useful to himself and others--that kind of education was not uncommon.

To give an idea of the scientific inquiry and sharp observation of mind
in those days, I might cite Dante as a master exponent of nature study,
and adept of science. Passing over his experiment in optics given in
Paradiso, given so naturally as to justify the inference that
investigation in physics was then not an uncommon mode of gaining
knowledge, I call your attention to an observation made by Alexander
Von Humboldt, the distinguished scientist, to prove that nothing escaped
the eyes of Dante, intent equally upon natural phenomena and the things
of the soul. Von Humboldt suggests that the rhetorical figure employed
by Dante in his description of the River of Light with its banks of
wonderful flowers (Par. XXX, 61) is an application of our poet's
knowledge of the phosphorescence of the ocean. If you have ever looked
down the side of a steamship at night as it ploughed its way forward,
and if you have ever observed in the sea the thousand darting lights
just below the water line your enjoyable experience will enable you
to appreciate the beauty of this passage. I now quote:

"I saw a glory like a stream flow by
In brightness rushing and on either side
Were banks that with spring's wondrous hues might vie
And from that river living sparks did soar
And sank on all sides in the flow'rets bloom
Like precious rubies set in golden ore
Then as if drunk with all the rich perfume
Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll
And as one sank another filled its room."

Commenting on this passage, Von Humboldt says "It would seem as if this
picture had its origin in the poet's recollection of that peculiar and
rare phosphorescent condition of the ocean in which luminous points
appear to rise from the breaking waves and, spreading themselves over
the surface of the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of
stars." This mention of a sea brings to mind the striking fact that Dean
Church has pointed out, viz., when Dante speaks of the Mediterranean, he
speaks not as a historian or an observer of its storms or its smiles but
as a geologist. The Mediterranean is to him: "The greatest _valley_
in which water stretcheth." (Par. IX, 82.)

So also when he speaks of light he regards it not merely in its
beautiful appearances but in its natural laws (Purg. XV). And when Dante
comes to describe the exact color, say of an apple blossom, his splendid
and unequalled power as a scientific observer of Nature and a poet is
most evident. Ruskin (Mod. Painters III, 226) commenting on the passage:
flowers of a color "less than that of roses but more than that of
violets" (Purg. XXXII, 58) makes this interesting remark: "It certainly
would not be possible in words, to come nearer to the _definition_
of the exact hue which Dante meant--that of the apple blossom. Had he
employed any simpler color phrase, as 'pale pink' or 'violet pink' or
any other such combined expression, he still could not have completely
got at the delicacy of the hue; he might, perhaps, have indicated its
kind, but not its tenderness; but by taking the rose-leaf as the type
of the delicate red, and then enfeebling this with the violet gray he
gets, as closely as language can carry him to the complete rendering of
the vision although it is evidently felt by him to be in its perfect
beauty ineffable."

These examples of Dante's interest in scientific observation prove his
fitness to be considered a representative of his age in its love for
science. Instead, however, of proposing Dante as a typical example of
the experimental inquiry of his age--you may say that he is _sui
generis_--I shall call forth other witnesses.

First let Albertus Magnus speak. He was distinguished as a theologian
and philosopher and was also renowned as a scientist. In his tenth book
after describing all the trees, plants and herbs then known, he says:
"All that is here set down is the result of our own observation or has
been borrowed from others whom we have known to have written what their
personal experience has confirmed, for in these matters, experience
alone can give certainty (_experimentum solum certificat in talibus_)."

We may be sure that such an investigator showing in his method a
prodigious scientific progress was on the line so successfully followed
by modern natural philosophy. This conclusion is confirmed by evidence
from his other books showing that he did a great deal of experimental
work, especially in chemistry. In his treatise De Mineralibus, Albertus
Magnus keen to observe natural phenomena, enumerates different
properties of natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly
attributed to them.

In his book on Botany he treats of the organic structure and physiology
of plants so accurately as to draw from Meyer, a botanist of the
nineteenth century, this appreciative tribute. "No botanist who lived
before Albert can be compared to him unless Theophrastus, with whom he
was not acquainted: and after him none has painted nature with such
living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad
Gesner and Cesalpino"--a high compliment indeed for Albertus for
leadership in science for three centuries. To quote Von Humboldt again,
"I have found in the book of Albertus Magnus, De Natura Locorum,
considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude
and elevation and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the
sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise."

Albertus Magnus gains renown also from his distinguished pupil Roger
Bacon who, some think, should have the honor of being regarded as the
father of inductive science--an honor posterity has conferred upon
another of the same family name who lived 300 years later. We, who wear
eye-glasses would be willing, I think, to vote the honor to the elder
Bacon, because if we do not owe to him the discovery of lenses, we are
his debtors for his clarification of the principles of lenses and for
his successful efforts in establishing them on a mathematical basis. In
any event, he was a pioneer in inductive science.

Before gunpowder is known to have been discovered in the West, the friar
Roger Bacon must have made some interesting experiments along the line
of explosives, else he could not have made the following remarkable
statement as to the property of gunpowder: "One may cause to burst from
bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A
small quantity of prepared matter causes a terrible explosion
accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so
far as to destroy a city or an army." Anticipating the use of even motor
boats and automobiles driven by gasoline, this thirteenth century
scientist wrote: "Art can construct instruments of navigation such that
the largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers and
seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also
make carriages which, without the aid of any animal, will run with
remarkable swiftness." This man whose clarity of vision anticipated
those discoveries of the nineteenth century, left three disciples after
him,--John of Paris, William of Mara and Gerard Hay--who followed their
master's methods, especially of testing by observation and by careful
searching of authorities, every proposition that came up for study.

Perhaps the most striking argument in favor of the experimental attitude
of Dante's century is that afforded by certain facts in the history of
medicine of that epoch. Then surgery began to make vast strides. Pagel,
regarded in our time as the best informed writer on the history of
medicine, has this to say of the surgery in Dante's age. "The stream of
literary works on surgery flows richer during this period. While
surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves from the
ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one department,
that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy the first place
in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation is less hampered
and concerns itself with practical things and not with artificial
theories. Experimental observation was in this not repressed by an
unfortunate and iron-bound appeal to reasoning." (The Popes and Science,
p. 172.)

As to medical practice in the thirteenth century, interesting data are
furnished by the Bulletin of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Journal of
the American Medical Association, January, 1908. The former publication
gives us remarkable instances of surgical operations and of the
treatment of Bright's disease, matters which we might have thought
possible only in the nineteenth century; the latter publishes in full
the law for the regulation of the practice of medicine issued by Emperor
Frederick II in 1240 or 1241. According to that law binding on the two
Sicilies, three years of preparatory university work were required
before the student could begin the study of medicine. Then he had to
devote three years to the study of medicine and finally he had to spend
a year under a physician's direction before a license was issued to him.
In connection with this high standard of a medical education, the law
of Frederick II forbade not only the sale of impure drugs under penalty
of confiscation of goods, but also the preparation of them under penalty
of death--stern legislation, anticipating by nearly seven centuries the
American Pure Drug Law. (The Popes and Science, p. 419.)

Undoubtedly the experimental demonstration and original observation of
Dante's time sprang either from the training or pedagogical methods of
the great universities of that period. There were universities at
Oxford, Paris, Cologne, Montpelier, Orleans, Angers. Spain had four
universities; Italy, ten. The number of students in attendance must
amaze us if we think that higher education did not then prevail.
Professor Thomas Davidson in his History of Education, says: "The number
of students reported as having attended some of the universities in
those early days almost passes belief, e.g. Oxford is said to have had
about 30,000 about the year 1300 and half that number as early as 1224.
The numbers attending the University of Paris were still greater. The
numbers become less surprising when we remember with what poor
accommodations--a bare room and an armful of straw--the students of
those days were content and what numbers of them even a single teacher
like Abelard could, long before, draw into lonely retreats."

That in the twelfth and following centuries there was no lack of
enthusiasm for study, notwithstanding the troubled conditions of the
times, is very clear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
education rose in many European states to a height which it had not
attained since the days of Seneca and Quintilian.

The curriculum followed by a student in Dante's time embraced the seven
liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar,
Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology. The
higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and
Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley
spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural address as
rector of Aberdeen University. "I doubt," he said, "if the curriculum
of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension
of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does."
(The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, p. 466.)

Speaking of education in those distant days, one thinks of the supreme
intellect of medieval life, the giant genius St. Thomas Aquinas, whose
philosophy was the food of Dante and became the basis not only of
Dante's great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day,
when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and
universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the
Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such
perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more
generally than that of any other school of philosophy--taught in the
regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia--such a philosopher
could have left the impress of his genius upon seven succeeding
centuries only if his work had been to philosophy what Dante's Divina
Commedia is to literature.

The subject of scholastic philosophy now more or less claims attention
here, since the coming to our country of the most distinguished exponent
of Neo-scholasticism. Cardinal Mercier before becoming a prince of the
Church, held the chair of neo-scholastic philosophy at Louvain where he
made his department so distinguished for deep scholarship that pupils
came from afar to sit under his instruction or to prepare themselves for
a doctorate of philosophy whose requirements at Louvain were perhaps,
more exacting than at any other modern university.

In 1889 Bishop John H. Keane engaged in the task of getting together a
faculty for the Catholic University at Washington went to Louvain to see
Dr. Mercier. "I want you to go to Washington and become head of our
school of philosophy," said the visitor. "I am perfectly willing to go,
nothing could please me more. But we must first get the permission of
the Pope," answered the Belgian scholar. Bishop Keane went to Rome and
presented the matter to Leo XIII. "Better leave him where he is,"
replied the Pope. "He is more needed in Belgium than in the United
States." So it was owing to the wisdom of Pope Leo in keeping the right
man in the right place that Belgium's strongest man was held for his
country against the evil hour to be a terror to wrongdoers and an
inspiration and object of reverence.

The World's War revealed Belgium's Primate not only as a great lucid
thinker who shattered the subtilities with which the philosophy of might
tried to confuse the mind of the world, but also as an undaunted leader
who could not be frightened or defeated by all the forces of militarism.
To my mind the secret of the dominating influence working upon Cardinal
Mercier's character and making him a world-hero came from his training
in scholastic philosophy and from his having assimilated the spirit of
the thirteenth century.

That period indeed not only trained its people to a high spiritual ideal
but gave them golden opportunities to express themselves and to put
forth, under the inspiration of religion, the best that was in them.
The medium was the guild system which, working from a self-protecting
alliance of traders, extended itself to every existing form of industry
and commerce and gave "the workman a position of self-respect and
independence such as he had never held before and has failed to achieve
since" (Cram).

A remarkable thing about the guild system was that it established and
maintained what we, today, call technical schools for the training of
apprentices. But more remarkable was the spirit which animated the
system. _Operare est orare_ was its principle. As a result of that
teaching that labor is practical prayer, that the worker should labor
not simply for a wage, but for perfection, men with untiring energy
straining for finer and better work came to make the best things their
minds could conceive, their taste could plan, their hands could fashion.
Bell-making in Dante's day attained such perfection that the form and
composition of bells have ever since been imitated. Workers of precious
metals produced such wonderful chalices that succeeding generations have
never equalled the ancient model. The masonry of medievalism has secrets
of construction lost to our age. Mechanical engineering solved without
the use of steel girders problems in the structural work of cathedrals,
palaces, fortresses and bridges that causes open-eyed astonishment in
the twentieth century. Wood carving as seen in many medieval chairs,
tables, and choir equipment is of design so exquisite and of finish of
detail so artistic that it is the despair of the cabinet makers of our
age.

The beauty of the thirteenth century needlework made into chasubles,
copes, albs, stoles, altar covers,--triumphs of artistic excellence, is
seen in the typical example of the Cope of Ascoli for which Mr. Pierpont
Morgan about ten years ago, paid sixty thousand dollars. So high a price
was paid for this ecclesiastical vestment not because it was an antique
but because marvelous expertness in artcraft had given it such value. Be
it recorded to the honor of the American millionaire, that he returned
the treasure to a church in Italy when he discovered that he had
unknowingly bought stolen property.

Of iron-mongery of Dante's time, the author of the Thirteenth the
Greatest of Centuries writes as follows: "It is difficult to understand
how one of the village blacksmiths of the time made a handsome gate that
has been the constant admiration of posterity ever since, or designed
high hinges for doors that artists delight to copy, or locks and latches
and bolts that are transported to our museums to be looked at with
interest not only because they are antiques but for the wonderful
combination of the beautiful and the useful which they illustrate. The
surprise grows the greater when we realize that these beautiful objects
were made not only in one place or even in a few places, but in nearly
every town of any size in England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain at
various times during the thirteenth century and that at any time a town
of considerably less than ten thousand inhabitants seemed to be able to
obtain among its own inhabitants, men who could make such works of art
not as copies nor in servile imitation of others, but with original
ideas of their own, and make them in such perfection that in many cases
they have remained the models for many centuries."

That is especially true of the thirteenth century glass windows as seen,
for example, in the Cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Westminster,
Canterbury, Chartres, Rheims, and in Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle,
Paris. Modern art with all its boasting cannot begin to make anything
comparable to that antique glass made and put in place by faith and love
long before Columbus discovered America. There are tiny bits of it in
this country as a result of the relic hunting of our soldiers in the
World's War. Many of them got a fragment of the shattered glass of
Rheims, "petrified color" deep sky blue, ruby, golden green, and sent it
home to a sweetheart, a wife or sister to be mounted on a ring or set in
a pin.

The donors for the most part of the glass of the thirteenth century
Cathedrals, were guilds at that time. For the Cathedral of Chartres
e.g. the drapers and the furriers gave five windows, the porters one,
the tavern-keepers two, the bakers two.

In Dante's time glass-making reached its climax and then the curve began
to decline, until in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the
nineteenth century glass-making reached its lowest point.

Great as was Dante's day in the efficiency and education promoted by the
Guild system--Dante himself was a member of it--the achievement of his
era in architecture was the "most notable perhaps because what happened
there epitomizes all that was done elsewhere and the nature of what was
accomplished is precisely that which informed the whole body of medieval
achievement." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 137.)

In the course of the century that gave birth to Dante, architecture rose
to a glory never equalled before or after. In France alone between the
years of 1180 and 1270 eighty great cathedrals and five hundred abbey
houses were constructed. It was in this century that Notre Dame, Paris,
arose, "the only un-Greek thing" said R.M. Stevenson, "which unites
majesty elegance and awfulness." But it was not alone. Other Notre Dames
sprung up in Germany, Italy and Spain. In England also, in that period
there were more than twenty cathedrals in the course of construction,
some of them in places as small as Wells, whose population never
exceeded four thousand.

To look today upon Wells with its facade of nearly three hundred
statues, one hundred and fifty-three of which are life size or heroic
and then to realize that this magnificent poem in stone was composed by
villagers unknown to us and unhonored and unsung, is to open our eyes
to the wonders accomplished by the foremost age of architecture.

So wonderful are those cathedrals that Ferguson, the standard English
authority on Gothic architecture, does not hesitate to say; "If any one
man were to devote a lifetime to the study of one of our great
cathedrals, assuming it to be complete in all its medieval
arrangements--it is questionable whether he would master all its details
and fathom all the reasonings and experiments which led to the result
before him.

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