I
Introduction
1. The close resemblance that the Divine Comedy has been shown to bear to the legend of the Miraj gives rise to a multiplicity of problems in the history of literature, all relevant to the originality of Dante’s poem. These problems are so important that a more minute examination of the poem in its several parts—limbo, hell, purgatory and the earthly and celestial paradises—is required in order to resolve whether or not many of the descriptive features and even whole scenes and episodes, although successfully standing the test of comparison with the Miraj, are, nevertheless, traceable to other Moslem legends and beliefs.
2. As a preliminary, it may be well briefly to set forth the doctrine of Islam on the future life; for it will be possible to admit or reject a priori the likelihood of any resemblance between the conceptions of Dante and the Arabs according as the Islamic doctrine agrees or disagrees with the teaching of Christianity on the same point.
3. Now, on no question are the two religions in closer agreement than on that of the future life, in which, according to both, the souls exist in four different states. By the eleventh century at the latest definite expression had been given to this doctrine by the orthodox clergy of Islam, and notably by the great moralist and theologian, Algazel.[140]
The state of everlasting damnation, reserved for the souls of those who denying God gave themselves up to worldly pleasures is equivalent to the Christian hell; and, just as in the latter the pain inflicted is both physical and moral, so in the Moslem state the soul, in addition to being subjected to the torture of everlasting fire, is made to suffer anguish through its separation from God.
Everlasting salvation, corresponding to the Christian heaven, is the state of those souls that lived in the true faith and died either innocent or repentant, free from all taint of sin. Their reward is double, for over and above the sensual pleasures promised by Moslem revelation, they experience the infinitely greater bliss of the contemplation of the Divine essence.
The two states intermediate between heaven and hell approximate to our purgatory and limbo. According to Algazel, the punishment in purgatory differs from that in hell only in that it is not eternal, but temporary. True, the Christian purgatory is the place where venial sins are expiated, or deadly sins whose guilt has been washed away; whereas the Moslem purgatory is assigned to those souls who, although guilty of deadly sin, have until the moment of death kept the root of faith alive within their hearts and been deprived by death alone of the possibility of repentance. As, according to Algazel, the faith that saves is not the dead but the living faith expressed in religious feeling and good deeds, this act of living faith in God and in the intercession of the Prophet is then practically the same as the spirit of contrition required to save the Christian.
The fourth state, which represents the Christian limbo, is that of the souls who, having neither served nor offended God, are exempt from punishment, although denied eternal bliss. This is the condition of lunatics, idiots, the children of infidels, and those adults who, never having heard the call of Islam, may be said to have died in ignorance of their infidelity.
The brief outlines sketched above will suffice to show how similar are the moral foundations upon which the Christian and Moslem conceptions of the after-life are based. Nor is this a matter for wonder, seeing that so great an authority as St. John of Damascus held Islam to be but an heretical form of Christianity, heretical inasmuch as it denied both the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ,[141] and that Algazel himself confessed the whole of the teaching of the Christian faith, apart from these two points of doctrine, to be infallible truth.[142]