The Pageant of the Church.—With brilliant light and ineffable melody, the triumph advances: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. xxi. 2). Headed by seven candlesticks of gold as standards, followed by the twenty-four elders, white-robed and crowned with lilies, singing Mary’s praises; between the four living creatures of Ezekiel and St. John, crowned with green, comes a triumphal chariot, more glorious than the sun, upon two wheels; drawn by a Griffin, half lion and half eagle, whose golden wings stretch up far out of sight, through the seven luminous bands that form the processional canopy. By the right wheel dance three maidens, symbolic of the theological virtues; by the left wheel dance four, who represent the cardinal virtues, following the measure of Prudence, as the others take their step from the song of Charity. The seven candlesticks are the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the twenty-four elders, either the patriarchs and prophets, or the books of the Old Testament; the four living creatures, the four Evangelists, or their four Gospels; the Griffin, Christ Himself in His Human and Divine Natures. Lastly, follow seven more elders, white-robed but crowned with flaming red flowers; a physician, and one with shining sword; four of humble appearance; an old man “sleeping with face alert.” According to Benvenuto da Imola, these represent St. Peter (who had intrusted to him the power of healing souls) and St. Paul, the four great Latin doctors, and St. Bernard. More usually they are regarded as personifying the books of the New Testament—the Acts, St. Paul’s Epistles, the Epistles of St. Peter, James, John, and Jude, the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John. Upon the chariot, amidst a hundred Angels singing and scattering flowers, Beatrice appears, clad in the mystical colours, red, white, green, crowned with the olive of wisdom and of peace over her snow-white veil. And, at the advent of the Wisdom divinely revealed to man, Virgil silently vanishes; he has tasted of the delights of the Earthly Paradise, has witnessed the triumph of the Church from which he is for ever cut off, the Faith he never knew, and has gone back to his mournful dwelling-place (Purg. xxx.).
Beatrice and Dante.—The precise significance of the reproaches which Beatrice pours upon Dante for his mode of life after her death, with the poet’s own bitter shame and intense repentance (xxx., xxxi.), depends upon the view taken of his character and the nature of the wanderings represented in the dark wood. That these aberrations were mainly philosophical and intellectual, as sometimes supposed, appears highly improbable. We would regard Dante’s confession here as one of his most personal utterances, and hold that the cherubically inspired singer of righteousness is deliberately casting aside the allegorical veil which, in the Convivio, he had attempted to throw over the things in the past which still severed him from the ideal life when he wrote: “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion.” It is a personal episode, in which Beatrice is the woman loved and to whose memory the poet has been unfaithful, standing out clearly from the allegorical mystery by which it is surrounded and in which it is set. After Matelda has drawn Dante through Lethe, the four cardinal virtues, which “perfect the intellect and appetite of man according to the capacity of human nature,” lead him to the breast of the mystic Griffin; and, in response to the song of the three theological virtues, which perfect man supernaturally, Beatrice at last unveils her countenance to his gaze: “O splendour of living light eternal.”
Concluding Allegories of the “Purgatorio.”—The allegory is resumed. In the light of this revelation, now that he is purified and free from sin, Dante beholds a vision of the Church and Empire (Purg. xxxii.). That glorious procession had first presented an ideal of the Church as Divine Providence intended it to be, before it became the vessel that the serpent of simony broke; the Bride that the Divine Spouse ordained for the guidance of the world. Such being the ideal, Dante beholds in a series of allegorical visions its history, in conjunction with the Empire, from the first coming to Rome down to the transference of the papal chair to Avignon. The great procession moves on through the divine forest, the Griffin still drawing the chariot with Beatrice seated upon it; Matelda with Dante and Statius following after the right wheel. Even as the divine origin of the Church has been seen in the triumphal car, so now the divine origin of the Empire is indicated in the desolate and despoiled tree which they reach. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the prohibition to eat of that tree was the beginning of law and the duty of obedience, represents Natural Law or Natural Justice, what Dante calls ius; which “in things is nought else than the similitude of the divine will” (Mon. ii. 2). The expression of this natural justice and the means for its effectuation in human society is Law, which Dante identifies with the Empire, and thus the tree becomes the symbol of the Empire and of the obedience due to it. The tree is destitute of flowers and foliage till the Griffin comes to it, who plucks nothing from it: “Thus is preserved the seed of all justice” (Purg. xxxii. 48; cf. our Lord’s words to St. John, Matt. iii. 15). Justice can alone be fulfilled when the Church follows this example of her Divine Founder, and usurps none of the temporal rights of the Empire. After the chariot has been bound to the tree, the previously bare plant breaks out into purple leaves and flowers. The Griffin and his train return to Heaven, leaving Beatrice to guard the chariot of the Church, seated beneath the shadow of the Imperial Tree, upon its root, which is Rome. In a new series of visions Dante beholds the sequel; he sees the conflict of the past, contemplates the corruption of the present, hearkens to the hope of the future. The persecution of the Church by the early Roman Emperors is followed by the inroad of the first heresies; and the donation of Constantine by the rising of the dragon of schism or simony. By more assumption of secular power and dignities, the chariot becomes monstrously transformed, and shamelessly usurped by the harlot, who represents the corrupt ecclesiastical authority enthroned in the place of Revelation, a false and degraded theology based upon the Decretals instead of the true divine science of the Scripture and the Fathers. By her side a giant appears who, after alternate caressing and scourging of the usurper, unbinds the transfigured chariot from the tree, and drags it away through the forest—symbolical of the interference of the royal house of France, ending in the transference of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon.
A Deliverer Announced.—But to the mournful psalm that the maidens around her raise, Deus venerunt gentes, Beatrice answers in words of hope; “a little while,” and the spiritual guide shall rise again from the black tomb of Avignon. And, as they move on, she utters to Dante a further prophecy (Purg. xxxiii.). “The vessel that the serpent broke was and is not,” so completely has corruption and simony degraded the chariot of the Bride of Christ. But vengeance shall fall upon the guilty parties, and the eagle shall not for ever be without an heir; for already a favourable disposition of the stars is at hand, under which a messenger of God shall come, who shall slay the harlot and the giant. It is probably the same event as the coming of the Veltro. Dante is to repeat her words “to those that live the life which is a running to death,” and not to conceal what he has seen of the tree. Apparently (Purg. xxxiii. 58-72) he is to make manifest that the Empire is of divine origin, and to recognise that the precept given by God to our first parents corresponds now with the duty and obedience man owes to the Empire. The law under which Adam lived was the prohibition to eat of the tree; the law under which his descendants, the commonwealth of the human race, live is the Empire. As Parodi puts it, it is not a new sense superimposed upon the first; “it is simply the same single meaning, the historical circumstances alone appearing changed.” The sin of Adam is repeated when the Empire is usurped of its rights or its authority attacked, for God created it holy for the purpose of leading man to temporal felicity—the goal, here and now, of the human race.[36]
Lethe and Eunoë.—At noon they come to where the rivers of Lethe and Eunoë issue from one mystical fountain, the fountain of the grace of God. Here Beatrice refers Dante to Matelda, who leads him and Statius to drink of Eunoë, which quickens dead virtue and restores memory of every good deed in those who have first been bathed in Lethe, which takes away the memory of sin. According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa, iii. 89, 5), works done in charity, although in a sense dead through sin, are brought to life through penance. Through repentance they regain their efficacy of leading him who did them into eternal life. Therefore Dante writes: “I returned from the most holy stream, remade even as young trees renewed with new foliage, pure and disposed to ascend to the stars.”
4. The “Paradiso”
Structure.—Dante’s Paradise consists of the nine moving heavens, according to Ptolemaic astronomy, crowned by the tenth motionless and divinest Empyrean heaven, “according to what Holy Church teacheth, who cannot lie” (Conv. ii. 3, 4). The nine moving spheres revolve round our globe, the fixed centre of the Universe, each of the lower eight being enclosed in the sphere above itself. The seven lowest are the heavens of the planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The eighth or stellar heaven, the sphere of the Fixed Stars or Firmament, is the highest visible region of the celestial world, and to some extent corresponds to the Earthly Paradise in the lower realms. Above this visible firmament, the ninth or Crystalline heaven, the Primum Mobile, directs with its movements the daily revolution of all the others. In it nature starts; from it proceed time and motion, with all celestial influence for the government of the world (Par. xxvii. 106-120). It is “the royal mantle of all the volumes of the world, which is most fervent and most living in God’s breath, and in His ways” (Par. xxiii. 112-114); and it communicates in different degrees some participation in this quickening breath of God to the other sphere which it encloses, and to all the Universe. It moves swiftest of all, from the fervent desire of all its parts to be united to the Empyrean, the spaceless and motionless ocean of Divine love, where God beatifies the saints and Angels in the vision of His Essence. This Empyrean is the true intellectual Paradise, for which the lower heavens are merely sensible preparations. “This is the sovereign edifice of the world, in which all the world is included, and outside of which is nothing; and it is not in space, but was formed only in the First Mind” (Conv. ii. 4); “The heaven that is pure light; light intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy, joy that transcendeth every sweetness” (Par. xxx. 39-42).
Gradations.—Each of the nine lower spheres represents a step higher in knowledge, in love, in blessedness, until in the true Paradise the soul attains to perfect knowledge, supreme love, and infinite blessedness in union with the First Cause, in the Beatific Vision of the Divine Essence. The ascent is marked by the increased loveliness of Beatrice, as she guides Dante upwards from heaven to heaven; it is marked, too, by gradations in the brilliancy of the blessed spirits themselves, by their ever increasing ardour of charity towards the poet, and by the growing spirituality of the matters discussed in each sphere—veil after veil being drawn aside from the mysteries of the Divine treasure-house.
The Saints.—“To show forth the glory of beatitude in those souls,” says the letter to Can Grande, “from them, as from those who see all truth, many things will be sought which have great utility and delight” (Epist. x. 33). All the saints without exception have their home and glorious seats with Mary and the Angels in that Empyrean heaven, where they are finally seen as glorified spirit likenesses of what they were on earth. But into each preparatory sphere, excepting the ninth, these citizens of eternal life descend to meet Dante as, with Beatrice, he approaches the gates of the celestial city—like the noble soul returning home to God in the fourth and last part of life:
“And even as its citizens come forth to meet him who returns from a long journey, before he enters the gate of the city, so to the noble soul come forth, as is fitting, those citizens of eternal life. And thus they do because of her good works and contemplations; for, being now rendered to God and abstracted from worldly things and thoughts, she seems to see those whom she believes to be with God” (Conv. iv. 28).
In all these spheres, excepting the first, and to some extent the second, the spirits of the blessed appear clothed in dazzling light, which hides their proper semblances from Dante’s gaze, making them appear as brilliant stars or flaming splendours. In the tenth Heaven of Heavens he is supernaturally illumined, and enabled thereby to behold them in their glorified spirit forms “with countenance unveiled” (Par. xxii. 60, xxx. 96, xxxi. 49).
In the three lower heavens, to which earth’s shadow was supposed to extend (Par. ix. 118, 119), appear the souls whose lives were marred by inconstancy in their vows, who were moved by vain glory, or yielded to sensual love. They descend into these lower spheres to give Dante a sensible sign of the lesser degree of the perfection of their beatitude in the Empyrean. Domus est una, sed diversitas est ibi mansionum; “The house is one, but there is a diversity of mansions there.” There are different mansions of beatitude in God’s house, proceeding from inequality in the soul’s capacity of the Divine Charity; but in that house all are fulfilled with the Vision of the Divine Essence, and each perfectly beatified according to his own capacity of love and knowledge. In the spheres of the four higher planets appear the souls of great teachers and doctors, of Jewish warriors and Christian knights, of just rulers, of ascetic monks and hermits; they appear as types of lives perfected in action or in contemplation, as a sign of the different ways in which perfection may be reached on earth and beatitude attained in Paradise. These successive manifestations in the seven spheres of the planets obviate what might otherwise have proved the monotony of a single heaven, and suggest that, although each soul partakes supremely according to its individual capacity of the Beatific Vision, which is essentially one and the same in all, yet there are not only grades but subtle differences in the possession of it, in which the life on earth was a factor. In the eighth, the Stellar Heaven, still under sensible figures and allegorical veils, Dante sees “the host of the triumph of Christ, and all the fruit gathered by the circling of these spheres” (Par. xxiii. 19-21), representing the Church in which these various modes and degrees of life are brought into unison. In the ninth, the Crystalline, the angelic hierarchies are manifested with imagery symbolical of their office towards God and man, representing the principle of Divine Order, the overruling and disposition of Divine Providence in which the celestial intelligences are the agents and instruments. The Empyrean Heaven depicts the soul in patria, with all the capacities of love and knowledge actualised in the fruition of the Ultimate Reality, the supreme and universal truth which is the object of the understanding, the supreme and universal good which is the object of the will.
The Angels.—Each of the nine moving spheres is assigned to the care of one of the nine angelic orders: Angels, Archangels, Principalities; Powers, Virtues, Dominations; Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. And the character of the blessed spirits that appear to Dante in each heaven, and the subjects discussed, seem in almost every case to correspond more or less closely with the functions assigned by mystical theologians, especially Dionysius, St. Gregory and St. Bernard, to the special angelic order which presides over the sphere in question. There are two fundamental principles in the life of the soul: nature and grace. The one is represented in the Paradiso by the astronomical order of the heavens and their influence upon individual disposition, furnishing man with a natural aptitude for the moral and intellectual virtues; the other by the bounty of Divine Grace, which reveals itself in the perfecting of the natural and the infusion of the supernatural virtues, whereby souls become assimilated to the angelic orders.[37] It is through these Angels (the name is applied generally to all, as well as to the lowest order) that God disposes the visible world; in the hands of the celestial intelligences the heavens are as hammers, to stamp the Divine ideas upon material creation and carry out the Divine plan in the government of the Universe (cf. Par. ii. 127-129). And, by means of the influence of the stars, these Angels have impressed certain men with their own characteristics; perhaps to fill up the vacant places in their ranks left by the fall of Lucifer’s followers, certainly to co-operate on earth in their work. Dante himself was born beneath the constellation of the Gemini, the glorious stars impregnated with the virtue of the Cherubim who rule the eighth sphere (Par. xxii. 112-123). The Cherubim represent the Divine Wisdom; their name signifies plenitude of knowledge. According to St. Bernard, they “draw from the very fountain of wisdom, the mouth of the Most High, and pour out the streams of knowledge upon all His citizens.” Their special prerogatives are fullness of Divine light, and contemplation of the beauty of the Divine order of things; they see most into the profound mysteries of the hidden things of God, and spread the knowledge of Him upon all beneath them. By their inspiration Dante co-operated in this cherubical work by writing the Divina Commedia. The Seraphim especially represent the Divine Love. No soul appears in the ninth heaven which they guide and in which the angelic hierarchies are manifested; Beatrice is the sole interpreter between the poet and the Angels, as she had been the revealer to him on earth of Love’s “possible divinities and celestial prophecies.”
Time in Paradise.—The action of the Paradiso begins at noon, immediately after Dante’s return from Eunoë; that is, noon on Wednesday in Easter week in the Earthly Paradise and (the following) midnight at Jerusalem (Par. i. 37-45). The time-references in this third Cantica are rather doubtful (Par. xxii. 151-153, xxvii. 77-87), but it seems probable that Dante takes twenty-four hours to ascend through the nine material heavens to the Empyrean, which is beyond time and space, where “the natural law in nought is relevant” (Par. xxx. 123). When Dante woke from his “mighty trance” to the “sound of the importunate earth,” it was perhaps about dawn on the morning of Friday in Easter week in our world, thus completing the seven days of his ecstatic pilgrimage, which had begun at about the same hour on Good Friday.
Canto I.—In a lyrical prologue of stately music (Par. i. 1-36), the poet sings of the glory of the First Mover, and prays for light and inspiration to complete this third most arduous portion of his divine poem. Then, in the noblest season of the year and noblest hour of the day, as Beatrice gazes upon the sun and Dante upon her, his mind becomes godlike, and he ascends to Heaven swifter than lightning. To explain his ascent, Beatrice discourses upon the form and order of God’s visible image, the Universe; and on His Eternal Law, the sovereign plan of government existing in the Divine Mind, to which all movements and actions of nature are subject (ibid. 103-141). To all created things God has given an instinct, or principle of inclination, by which, in different ways according to their nature, He draws them all back to Himself over the great sea of being. Rational beings alone can resist the order of the Universe and defeat the Eternal Law by sin, which is expiated by temporary or eternal suffering, as Dante has seen in the lower realms; but the purified soul, in accordance with this order and law, inevitably mounts up to find its rest in union with the First Cause. It is the doctrine of spiritual gravitation (derived from St. Augustine), according to which the soul is moved by love as bodies are by their weight, and all things find their rest in order.
The Heaven of the Moon.—They are received into the eternal pearl of the Moon (Par. ii.); where Beatrice first confutes Dante’s former theory concerning the luminous substance of the celestial bodies, and, by explaining how everything in the visible world depends upon the angelic movers of the sphere, gives a mystical interpretation of a natural phenomenon, on this first step of his ascent to the suprasensible. Within this eternal pearl appear faint but divinely beautiful forms of women; the souls of those who had yielded to violence and broken their solemn vow (Par. iii.). Piccarda Donati, sister of Corso and Forese, sets forth the perfection of celestial charity, where all wills are made absolutely one with the will of God, who has awarded different degrees or mansions of beatitude to all His chosen ones:
“And His will is our peace.”[38] Transfigured now with ineffable joy, Piccarda tells the pathetic story of her frustrated life on earth; and points out to Dante the Empress Constance, mother of Frederick II., torn, like her, from the convent’s shelter. Beatrice explains to the poet the place of all the saints in the Empyrean—the “heaven of humility where Mary is,” as Dante had sung long before of Beatrice herself in the Vita Nuova—and the reason of this temporary apparition in the moon (Par. iv.). The other questions solved in this sphere are all connected with Free Will. Rectitude of will is necessary for the gaining of Paradise, and nothing whatever can take away that freedom of the will. “As regards the proper act of the will, no violence can be done to the will”; and, since Piccarda and Constance yielded through fear of greater evil, they fell voluntarily from the state of perfection to which they were called. Freedom of the will is God’s greatest gift to man (Par. v. 19-24); hence the sanctity of an accepted vow, wherein this supreme gift is offered to God as victim, although Holy Church has power to commute, save, apparently, in the case of solemn vows of perpetual chastity. It will be observed that this heaven is moved by the Angels, who are severally assigned to individuals as guardians, and who are the bearers of tidings of God’s bounty to men; and, corresponding to this, the questions solved relate to the salvation and guidance of individual souls, and to the great gift of liberty, whereby God’s bounty is specially shown.
The Heaven of Mercury.—In the second sphere, the heaven of Mercury, appear the souls of those who did great things for humanity or for special nations, but who were actuated by mixed motives; personal ambition, desire of fame and honour, made “the rays of true love mount upwards less vividly” (Par. vi. 117); and they have thus the next lowest mansion of beatitude to the spirits that appeared in the inconstant Moon. The Emperor Justinian recites the proud history of the Roman Eagle, and shows how Divine Providence established the sway of the Roman people over all the earth, made the Eagle the instrument of the Atonement offered by Christ for all mankind, the avenger of His death, the protector of His Church. As the monarch who reformed and codified Roman Law, of which he is for Dante the personification, and who restored Italy to the Empire (the work which the Veltro is to renew under altered conditions of Christendom), Justinian lifts the imperial ideal far above the factious politics of the Middle Ages, condemning Guelfs and Ghibellines alike as traitors and sowers of discord. Here, too, is Romeo of Villanova, who did in a lesser degree for Provence what Justinian did for the Empire, thus appearing with him in the sphere that is moved by the Archangels, whose function is to guide and protect particular nations. The figure of Romeo—unjustly accused of corrupt practices in office, supporting with magnanimous heart the poverty and humiliations of voluntary exile—is perhaps an unconscious portrait of Dante himself. Even as the Archangels announce messages of special import and sacredness, as Gabriel did to Mary, so Beatrice explains to Dante the mystery of man’s redemption by the Incarnation and Crucifixion, the supremest work at once of Divine Justice and Divine Mercy (Par. vii.), and touches somewhat upon the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.
The Heaven of Venus.—The third heaven, the sphere of Venus, is moved by the celestial Principalities, whose office is to influence earthly rulers to imitate the principality of God, by uniting love with their lordship. They are those, according to St. Bernard, “by whose management and wisdom all principality on earth is set up, ruled, limited, transferred, diminished, and changed.” Into this sphere descend the souls of purified lovers, brilliant lights moving circle-wise and hidden in the rays of their own joy. Carlo Martello, son of Charles II. of Naples, and son-in-law of Rudolph of Hapsburg, who, by reason of his marriage with Clemenza, might have healed the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, pictures the realms over which he should have ruled, denounces the misgovernment of his own house, and explains the influence of the celestial bodies for the constitution of society and the government of states (Par. viii.). Cunizza da Romano, the famous sister of Ezzelino, rebukes the anarchy of the March of Treviso; a “modern child of Venus,” she here appears as the type of a perfect penitent (Par. ix.). Like her, Folco of Marseilles, poet then prelate, but here recorded only as troubadour, remembers the love sins of his youth, not with sorrow, but with gratitude to the Divine Mercy and wonder at the mysteries of Providence. Rahab of Jericho, the highest spirit of this sphere, is a type of the Church, saved by Christ’s blood from the ruin of the world; and, with a fine thrust at the loveless avarice of the Pope and his cardinals, Dante passes with Beatrice beyond the shadow of the earth.
The Heaven of the Sun.—To mark this higher grade of bliss and knowledge, Dante pauses on his entrance into the fourth sphere, the heaven of the Sun, to sing again of the Creation, the work of the Blessed Trinity, and the order of the Universe, the visible expression of the perfection of Divine art (Par. x. 1-21). The Sun is ruled by the celestial Powers, the angelic order that represents the Divine majesty and power, combats the powers of darkness, and stays diseases. Here, in two garlands of celestial lights surrounding Dante and Beatrice, appear the glorious souls of twenty-four teachers and doctors, who illuminated the world by example and doctrine; the twofold work of co-operation with the celestial Powers, which is seen in its supereminent degree in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the champions who led the armies of Christ against the powers of darkness and healed the spiritual diseases of the Christian world. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great light of the Dominicans, after naming the other eleven spirits of his circle (Albertus Magnus, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boëthius, Isidore, Bede, Richard of St. Victor, and Siger), sings the glorious panegyric of St. Francis, the seraphic bridegroom of Poverty, laments the backsliding of the Dominicans (Par. xi.). St. Bonaventura, once minister-general of the Franciscans, extols the marvellous life of St. Dominic, the cherubical lover of Faith, the great paladin in Holy Church’s victorious battle where St. Francis bore the standard of the Crucified (Par. xii.). Lamenting the degenerate state of the Franciscans, he names the eleven spirits that accompany him; two of the followers of St. Francis, Illuminato and Agostino; Hugh of St. Victor; Peter Comestor, Peter of Spain (the logician whose elevation to the papacy as John XXI. may be ignored in Paradise), Nathan, Chrysostom, St. Anselm, Aelius Donatus (the Latin grammarian), Rabanus Maurus, and the Calabrian abbot Joachim. Lovers of poverty, rebukers of corruption, historians, mystics, theologians, writers of humble text-books are here associated in the same glory, as servants of truth in the same warfare against the powers of darkness. They illustrate what St. Bonaventura calls the broadness of the illuminative way. Each group closes with a spirit whose orthodoxy had been at least questioned. Siger of Brabant, the champion of Averroism at the university of Paris, had “syllogised invidious truths,” and met with a violent death at the Papal Court at Orvieto about 1284. Joachim of Flora, “endowed with prophetic spirit,” had foretold the advent of the epoch of the Holy Ghost, in which the Everlasting Gospel, the spiritual interpretation of the Gospel of Christ, would leave no place for disciplinary institutions; his later followers among the Franciscans had been condemned at the Council of Anagni in 1256.
St. Thomas further explains to Dante the grades of perfection in God’s creatures, from the Angels downwards; whereby His Divine light is more or less imperfectly reflected, and the likeness of the Divine ideas more or less imperfectly expressed—perfectly only when the Trinity creates immediately, as in the case of Adam and the humanity of Christ (Par. xiii.). Solomon, whose peerless wisdom St. Thomas had explained as “royal prudence,” instructs Dante concerning the splendour of the body after the resurrection, when human personality will be completed and the perfection of beatitude fulfilled (Par. xiv.). In a mysteriously beautiful apparition of what seems to be another garland of spirits in the Sun, this vision of the fourth heaven closes; and Beatrice and her lover are “translated to more lofty salvation” in the glowing red of Mars.
The Heaven of Mars.—The fifth heaven, the sphere of Mars, is ruled by the angelic Virtues. This is the order which images the Divine strength and fortitude; their name, according to Dionysius, signifies “a certain valiant and unconquerable virility.” According to St. Bernard, they are those “by whose command or work signs and prodigies are wrought among the elements, for the admonition of mortals,” and it is through them that the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven as foretold in the Gospel.[39] Therefore, in Mars, Dante beholds a great image of the Crucified, blood-red, formed by stars which are the souls of the warrior saints, whom the Virtues impressed at their birth with the influence of the planet (Par. xvii. 76-78), to be strongly and manfully valiant, and to do notable things on earth (ibid. 92, 93), even as the Virtues, according to St. Bernard, work signs and prodigies among the elements.
Cacciaguida passes from the right arm of the Cross to greet his descendant, like Anchises to Aeneas in Elysium. In his long discourse with the poet (Par. xv. and xvi.) we dimly discern a splendidly ideal picture of a free Italian commune of the twelfth century, before what Dante regards as the corrupting influence of wealth and illegitimate extension of its boundaries had fallen upon it, and before the hostility of the Church to the Empire, with the resulting confusion of persons in the city, had involved the Florentines in the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines. Then, having bitterly lamented the decay of the old Florentine families and the corruption of their successors, Cacciaguida co-operates with the Virtues by inspiring Dante with endurance and fortitude to suffer unjust exile and perform his life’s work (Par. xvii.). In the famous and most noble lines, to which reference has already been made in touching upon this epoch of Dante’s life, Cacciaguida foretells the poet’s banishment, the calumnies of his enemies, his sufferings in exile, his forming a party to himself, the future greatness of Can Grande, Dante’s own certainty of eternal fame. And let him be no timid friend to truth, but make manifest his whole vision, and especially assail corruption in highest places (cf. Mon. iii. 1). It is Dante’s apologia for his own life, first as citizen, then as poet. The keynote of the closing years of his life is struck at the opening of Canto xviii.: “And that Lady who was leading me to God said: ‘Change thy thought; think that I am near to Him who unburdens every wrong.’” Gazing upon her, his affection “was free from every other desire.” Then, with a charge of celestial chivalry across the sky, this vision of warriors closes; Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne and Orlando, William of Orange still with Renoardo, Godfrey de Bouillon and Robert Guiscard, flash through the Cross, and are rejoined by Cacciaguida in their motion and their song.
The Heaven of Jupiter.—The silvery white sphere of Jupiter, the sixth heaven, is ruled by the Dominations, the angelic order which images the archetypal dominion in God as the source of true dominion. “We must consider in the Dominations,” writes St. Bernard, “how great is the majesty of the Lord, at whose bidding empire is established, and of whose empire universality and eternity are the bounds.” This, then, is the sphere of ideal government, the heaven of the planet that effectuates justice upon earth (Par. xviii. 115-117). The souls of faithful and just rulers appear as golden lights, singing and flying like celestial birds. They first form the text, Diligite iustitiam que iudicatis terram, “Love justice, you that are the judges of the earth” (Wisdom, i. 1, Vulgate), tracing successively the letters until they rest in the final golden M, the initial letter of Monarchy or Empire, under which alone can justice be paramount on earth, and then, with further transformations, become the celestial Eagle (Par. xviii. 100-114). This is the “sign which made the Romans reverend in the world” (xix. 101); no emblem of material conquest, but the image of the sempiternal justice of the Primal Will, the type of dominion on earth ordained by God. It is the allegorical representation of the doctrines of the Monarchia. And, since justice is obscured and good government rendered abortive by the simony of the pastors of the Church, which leads them to oppose the Empire, Dante has a bitter word in season for the reigning pontiff, John XXII (Par. xviii. 130-136).
In the perfect concord of its component spirits the Eagle, speaking with one voice, discourses upon the immutability and absolute justice of the Divine Will, which is inscrutable and incomprehensible to mortals (Par. xix.). Having rebuked the wickedness of all the kings and princes then reigning, from the Emperor-elect (Albert of Austria in 1300) to the King of Cyprus, it sets forth in contrast to them the example of just and righteous monarchs and rulers of olden time, the six noblest of whom now form its eye—David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, the Norman William II. of Sicily, and Rhipeus the Trojan (Par. xx.). Three exquisite lines (73-75)—introduced as a mere image—render the flight and song of the skylark with a beauty and fidelity to nature which even Shelley was not to surpass. The salvation of Trajan, through the prayers of St. Gregory, and Rhipeus, by internal inspiration concerning the Redeemer to come, unveils yet more wondrous mysteries in the treasury of Divine Justice, which suffers itself to be overcome by hope and love. Rhipeus, the justest among the Trojans and the strictest observer of right (Virgil, Aen. ii. 426, 427; cf. Acts x. 35), by his presence solves Dante’s doubt concerning the fate of the just heathen who die without baptism, and indicates that the race which gave the ancestors to the Roman people was not without Divine light.
Heaven of Saturn.—The last of the seven heavens of the planets is the sphere of Saturn, over which the Thrones preside. According to Dionysius, the Thrones are associated with steadfastness, supermundane tendency towards and reception of the Divine. They represent, according to St. Bernard, supreme tranquillity, most calm serenity, peace which surpasses all understanding; and upon them God sits as judge (cf. Par. ix. 61, 62). In Saturn appear the contemplative saints, and the monks who kept firm and steadfast in the cloister. They pass up and down the celestial Ladder of Contemplation (Par. xxi. and xxii.), the stairway by which the soul mystically ascends to the consideration of the impenetrable mysteries of God which transcend all reason. In this high stage of progress towards the suprasensible Beatrice does not smile, for Dante’s human intellect could not yet sustain it, and the sweet symphonies of Paradise are silent. St. Peter Damian discourses upon the impenetrable mysteries of Divine predestination, and rebukes the vicious and luxurious lives of the great prelate and cardinals. St. Benedict describes the foundation of his own great order, and laments the shameless corruption of contemporary Benedictines. Thus in this, and, above all, in the cry like thunder which bursts from the contemplatives at the conclusion of Peter Damian’s words, threatening the Divine vengeance which is to fall upon the corrupt pastors of the Church, the saints of the seventh sphere unite themselves with the celestial Thrones, whose office is purification, and who are the mirrors of the terrible judgments of God.
The Gemini.—At Beatrice’s bidding, Dante follows the contemplatives up the celestial ladder, entering the Firmament at the sign of the Gemini or Twins, beneath which he was born (Par. xxii. 112-123). To his natal stars, and thus to the Cherubim with whose virtue they are animated, he appeals for power to complete the work for which they have inspired him. In a momentary vision, with the capacity of his inward soul enlarged, he looks down upon the whole Universe, and estimates aright the relative value of all things in heaven and earth, now that he is prepared to witness the true glories of Paradise.
The Stellar Heaven.—The Firmament or stellar heaven, the eighth sphere, is ruled by the Cherubim, who represent the Divine Wisdom; it is the celestial counterpart of the Garden of Eden. Here the fruit of man’s redemption is mystically shown in a vision of the triumph of Christ, the new Adam, surrounded by myriads of shining lights which draw their light from Him and represent the souls of the blessed whom He has sanctified (Par. xxiii.). After Christ has ascended from this celestial garden, where Mary is the rose and the Apostles the lilies, the Archangel Gabriel descends with ineffable melody and attends upon the new Eve, “the living garden of delight, wherein the condemnation was annulled and the tree of life planted,”[40] in her Assumption.
The four spheres of the higher planets had set forth a celestial realisation of the four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, with perfect man according to the capacity of human nature; now, in this sphere of the Cherubim whose name indicates plenitude of the knowledge of God, Dante is examined upon the three theological virtues, which have God for their object as He transcends the knowledge of our reason, and which put man on the way to supernatural happiness. “If we would enter Paradise and the fruition of Truth,” writes St. Bonaventura, “the image of our mind must be clothed with the three theological virtues, whereby the mind is purified, illumined, and rendered perfect, and thus the image is reformed and made fit for the Jerusalem which is above.” Dante’s answers to St. Peter upon Faith (Par. xxiv.), to St. James upon Hope (Par. xxv.), to St. John upon Charity (Par. xxvi.), contain the essence of the devout wisdom of the schoolmen upon those three divine gifts, whereby man participates in the Deity, and “we ascend to philosophise in that celestial Athens, where Stoics and Peripatetics and Epicureans, by the art of the eternal Truth, harmoniously concur in one will” (Conv. iii. 14). For the object of Faith and Love alike Dante, even in Paradise, can appeal to the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Par. xxiv. 130-132, xxvi. 37-39); and all the celestial music cannot quite drown the poet’s sigh for that fair Florentine sheepfold, from which he is still barred out, though Hell and Heaven have opened for him their eternal gates (Par. xxv. 1-12). Within a fourth light the soul of Adam appears, to instruct Dante upon the proper cause of his fall and upon his life in the Earthly Paradise, now that the poet has seen the triumph and ascent of the new Adam. Adam, in whom was directly infused all the light lawful to human nature to have (Par. xiii. 43), is the last soul that appears to Dante until the consummation of the vision in the Empyrean. On the close of his discourse, a hymn of glory to the Blessed Trinity resounds through Paradise, a laugh of the Universe in joy of the mystery of Redemption (Par. xxvii. 1-9). Then, while all Heaven blushes and there is a celestial eclipse as at the Crucifixion, St. Peter utters a terrible denunciation of the scandals and corruption in the Papacy and the Church, wherein Dante, as in the Epistle to the Italian Cardinals, takes his stand as the Jeremiah of Roman Catholicity.
The Ninth Heaven.—When the saints have returned to their places in the Empyrean, Dante, after a last look to earth, passes up with his lady into the ninth sphere, the Crystalline heaven. Beatrice discourses upon the order of the heavens and the want of government upon earth, prophesying that, before very long, deliverance and reformation will come, even as St. Peter had announced in the sphere below. Here, where nature begins, Dante has a preparatory manifestation of the nine angelic orders, the ministers of Divine Providence, who ordain and dispose all things by moving the spheres. They appear as nine circles of flame, revolving round an atomic Point of surpassing brilliancy, which symbolises the supreme unity of God, the poet again having recourse to the Metaphysics of Aristotle: “From that Point depends heaven and all nature” (Par. xxviii. 41, 42). Each angelic circle is swifter and more brilliant as it is nearer to the centre, each hierarchy striving after the utmost possible assimilation to God and union with Him. Swiftest and brightest of all are the Seraphim, who move this ninth sphere; the angelic order that, representing the Divine Love, loves most and knows most. “In the Angels,” says Colet on Dionysius, “an intensity of knowledge is love; a less intense love is knowledge.” The relation of the Seraphim to the Cherubim is that of fire to light; their special office is perfecting, as that of the Cherubim is illumination. All the orders contemplate God, and manifest Him to creatures to draw them to Him. Receiving from God the Divine light and love that makes them like to Him, the higher orders reflect this to the lower, like mirrors reflecting the Divine rays; and these lower orders reflect it to men, so rendering all things, as far as possible to each nature, like to God and in union with Him. After distinguishing between the different orders according to Dionysius, Beatrice speaks of their creation as especially illustrating the Divine Love, which the Seraphim represent (Par. xxix.), and their place in the order of the Universe, the fall of the rebellious, the reward of the faithful, and their immeasurable number. Each Angel belongs to a different species, and each differs from every other in its reception of Divine light and love.
The Empyrean.—Dante and Beatrice now issue forth of the last material sphere into the Empyrean, the true Paradise of vision, comprehension, and fruition, where man’s will is set at rest in union with universal Good, and his intellect in the possession of universal Truth. In preparation for this Divine union, Dante is momentarily blinded by the Divine light which overpowers him with its radiance—a blindness followed by a new celestial sight and new faculties for comprehending the essence of spiritual things. The first empyreal vision is still a foreshadowing preface: a river of light, the stream which makes the city of God joyful, the wondrous flowers of celestial spring, the living sparks of angelic fire. This river of Divine grace is the fountain of wisdom from which, according to Bernard, the Cherubim drink, to pour out the streams of knowledge upon all God’s citizens; and of this fountain Dante, too, drinks with his eyes, that he may more fully see the vision of God which he has to relate, to diffuse His knowledge upon earth as the Cherubim do from Heaven. By the light of glory his mind is rendered capable of seeing those spiritual things which the blessed behold with immediate intuition, and of ultimate union with the Divine Essence (Par. xxx. 100-102). The river seems to change to a circular ocean of light; the saints and Angels appear in their true forms, all united in the sempiternal Rose of Paradise. Even at this height of ecstatic alienation from terrestrial things, Dante can turn in thought to Pope and Emperor who should be leading men to beatitude; a throne is prepared for Henry in this convent of white stoles, while the hell of the simoniacs is gaping for Boniface and Clement.
Eternity, as defined by Boëthius, is “the complete and perfect simultaneous possession of unlimited life”; and Dante is one who has come from time to the eternal: a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto (Par. xxxi. 38).[41] Beatrice has returned to her throne, her allegorical mission ended; and for this supreme revelation of the Divine beauty in the mystical Rose, where there is no medium to impede the poet’s sight of the Divine light (for his is now that of a separated spirit), but blessed souls and flying Angels are absorbed in love and vision, St. Bernard completes her work, even as that of Virgil had been completed by Matelda in the Earthly Paradise. St. Bernard may represent the glorified contemplative life in our heavenly country, as Matelda may symbolise the glorified active life in the state of restored Eden; or, perhaps better, if Matelda is taken as the love rightly ordered to which the Purgatorio leads, Bernard represents the loving contemplation or contemplative love, attained by the mystic in brief moments here and now, in which the eternal and unchanging life of the soul in the hereafter consists. In an exquisite lyrical inter-breathing Dante addresses Beatrice for the last time, thanking her for having led him from servitude to liberty, praying to her for final perseverance (Par. xxxi. 79-90). Under the guidance of Bernard, he prepares himself for the vision of the Divine Essence, by disciplining his spiritual sight in contemplation of the glory of the saints and of the ineffable beauty of Mary, surrounded by her Angels, and clothed, as Bernard himself puts it elsewhere, in the Sun by whose fire the prophet’s lips were cleansed and the Cherubim kindled with love.
Throughout the Rose two descending lines divide the redeemed of the old law from the redeemed under the new. The one line passes down from Mary’s throne, composed of holy women, ancestresses of Christ or types of His Church: Eve, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth (Par. xxxii.). With Rachel, in the third row, Beatrice is seated. The opposite line passes down from the seat of the Baptist, Christ’s precursor; and begins with St. Francis, His closest and most perfect imitator, St. Benedict (in the third row opposite to Rachel and Beatrice), St. Augustine. The lower sections of each half of the Rose are occupied by the little children who died before attaining use of reason; and who yet have different degrees of bliss, according to the inscrutable mysteries of predestination and Divine Justice, which willed to give grace differently to each. Another vision of Mary, the supreme of created things, “the face that is most like to Christ, whose beauty alone can dispose thee to see Christ” (Par. xxxii. 85-87), is the prelude to the vision of the Deity. Before her hovers her chosen knight, Gabriel, the “strength of God,” the pattern of celestial chivalry, leggiadria. Round her are Adam and St. Peter, Moses and St. John the Divine; opposite the two latter are St. Anne and St. Lucy. Thus the three Ladies who took pity upon Dante in the dark wood, when the mystical journey opened, have been seen in their glory at its close.
Mary and the Divine Essence.—And the poet turns finally to the Primal Love, by Mary’s grace and Bernard’s intercession, in the lyrical prayer that opens the wonderful closing canto of the Commedia: