IN order to understand Dante’s metaphysics, it must be assumed that the object of every human life is to achieve the fullest possible expression of its spiritual realities, whatever they are. The world, as it becomes visible at any given time, is the sum of the expression of these realities,—of evil, of the struggle away from evil, of good realized through hatred of evil,—or, as Dante expressed it, of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

  Dante saw that little by little a Socrates can develop, in opposition to the sum of the evil around him, the sum of the good in himself until it reaches its consummation in celestial self-mastery as he raises the hemlock to his lips. He saw too how, little by little, a Ciampolo as he uses public authority to enrich himself from the miserable earnings of starving peasants, lets himself down into the infernal pitch,—from which at last bat-winged devils of his own creating drag him by his clotted locks that he may know for a certainty the reality of the hell he has made for himself.

  To Dante it appeared that this development of individual realities goes on continually in the world around us. It is, however, the province only of the highest genius to imagine it as Dante did. The eyes of others are “mercifully holden,” lest life should become insupportable to them by reason of such knowledge of evil. For even as Dante himself approached the castle of Dis, which overlooks the deeper hells of flame, he had raised against him the Gorgon’s head which petrifies with horror all who come too close to the knowledge of what those hells actually are.

  It is self-evident in the poetry of Dante that to him Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are realities of the commonplace every-day world around us. We have his own assurance that the Inferno he wrote of he had seen on earth. This is the fundamental fact of his work as a poet. Take it away and he has no significance except such as Leigh Hunt attributes to him,—that of a passionate and revengeful savage, constructing an Inferno in his own imagination the better to libel and disgrace his enemies. This is commonly said of him, but if it were true, or even fairly imaginable as true, he would be unimaginable as a poet,—as a “Vates,” one of the world prophets from whose eyes the scales have fallen; who see in the commonplaces of our daily lives the infinite realities which belong to us as immortal essences. In the Florence, in the Italy, in the Europe of his day, Dante saw the continual action and reaction of fraud and force. He saw law used for the oppression of the weak, and government made an agency by which political and ecclesiastical authority worked to enthrone individual evil in the place of universal good. He saw the result of this on more than one battlefield, in such nameless horrors of violence as inspired Voltaire to write his “Candide.” As his mind slowly put together the details of the expression infernal passion finds for itself on earth, he saw “black, burning gulfs full of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally preying on their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dashing their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mutually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irresistible and loathsome, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is done.” He saw, in a word, that evil is infinitely repulsive and infinitely diabolical; and by the coercive power of this knowledge, which came to him in the fullness of his intellect—

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—

he was compelled to explain to himself the world as he had come to see it. His explanation is only to be understood from the whole of his great poem, but the premises on which all his conclusions depend he saw written on the gates of the Inferno through which he was about to pass.

	“Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore,
	Fecemi la divina Potestate,
	La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore.”
	Justice was the thought of power
	That moved my architect sublime
	In creation’s natal hour!
	Highest wisdom, primal love
	Made me at the birth of time.

    As no man can come to such genius as that of Dante except through sympathy with humanity,—genius of this kind being essentially the ability to feel and to express the underlying thought of universal humanity,—he must have been tortured long by the cruel indignation (sæva indignatio) from which death rescued Swift. It had brought Dante not to the grave actually, but to the gates of the mystery of death—to a place where he must either learn the meaning of life or curse God and die. Knowing all that the philosophers and poets of Greece and Rome could teach him, it was not from them but from his own life that he learned the meaning of the world as he saw it around him. If it were true in the world of his day as he saw it, that as the result of political and ecclesiastical statesmanship the wounded were massacred on the battlefield, women and children were put to the sword, and existence allowed to the weak only at the price of their submission to enduring injustice, then the question God must answer to justify his own existence to such a mind as that of Dante was the meaning of all this! And the answer given at the very gate of hell was “omnipotent power, eternal justice, and primal love” confining evil within itself, so that while those who love evil create for themselves an everlasting Inferno of infinite horrors, those who love good pass through it on their way to the purifying experience which will fit them for heaven. Dante did not postpone hell as a punishment for the infamies of the oppression he saw on earth to some dim future. He saw through the fair outside of the cowls of hypocrisy to the leaden linings, as those who love evil while they pretend to worship good walk wearily between the lake of pitch on one side of them and the serpent-infested wilderness on the other. So long as they love evil and inflict it on others, it shall reward them with eternal tortures. That is the law of love which protects the meek, as Dante discovered it. Wherever evil existed on earth he saw hell—as eternal as the love of evil which created it.

  It is a hell in which no lover of good can remain, as no lover of evil can depart from it. It is eternal and it results inevitably from the “primal love” through the omnipotent power of which all shall suffer in themselves the evil they inflict on others. And as the love of evil on earth means hell on earth to endure into eternity, so the love of good means purification on earth for heaven, beginning on earth in love and enduring everlastingly in the beatific vision of creative power, raising every redeemed soul from strength to strength through an eternity of always-increasing efficiency.

  If this can be properly called “theology,” it is a theology of suffering rather than of reason. Dante writes as a man who has lived through sympathy the universal life of the race. It is not intellect he expresses in his poems, but something higher—a divine enthusiasm of sympathetic anguish which moved him as the Hebrew prophets were moved by the sight of the people they loved passing their children “through the fire to Moloch.” He believed in Divine inspiration for all lovers of goodness, and in the fourth treatise of “The Banquet” he declares that Fabricius, Regulus, Cincinnatus,—the great heathen patriots of the classical age were divinely inspired. “Certainly,” he says, “it must be evident remembering the lives of these men and of the other divine citizens that such wonders (as they did) could not have been without some light of Divine goodness added to their own goodness of nature. And it must be evident that these most excellent men were instruments with which Divine Providence worked.” In the same way Dante regarded himself, Aristotle, Virgil, and all others who love goodness, as inspired by heaven. This is his theology—that all goodness is of heaven and all evil of hell. His politics as he defines himself in “The Banquet” are equally simple. Neither power, nor money, nor long descent, nor any other thing which was claimed in his time as a title to superiority can give it. It comes only from the love of virtue and from virtuous actions:—

	“The noble man does noble deeds—
	Who does a churl’s act is a churl.”

  In Dante’s prose his intellect defines thus in explicit terms what in his verse his imagination projects in thronging images of terror or of beauty. His poetry is the least limited by intellect—the most highly spiritual ever written in any European language. There is more of the intellect, of the “wit” which shows itself in axiom and epigram in Pope’s “Essay on Man,” than in all the poetry Dante ever wrote. But Pope was “a wit” and Dante was a prophet. Pope could be satisfied with the world of the commonplace. To him “the proper study of mankind is man.” To Dante knowledge of God is the only end of man’s existence. He lived sick, passionate, and sad, suffering the evil not only of his own nature, but of the whole evil world around him. Yet seeing things “bare to the buff,” having no illusions and waiting in the world as one cured of a long insanity waits his discharge from the hospital, he still saw the darkness around him “shot through with glory and fire,” and in the lives of the commonplace men and women around him, living steadfastly and courageously the life of duty, he recognized the heaven to which he looked for the reward of all suffering—a heaven of limitless power for the weak, of limitless wisdom for the ignorant, of eternal creativeness for all who will consent to build up rather than to pull down.

  That an idea so sublime as this could find adequate expression in any language or from any lips is not to be expected. There is much that is grotesque and repulsive, much that is incoherent, much that is unintelligible in the “Divine Comedy,” but there is always in it an almost superhuman melody of language as a vehicle for the aspiration of a soul which, having attained its heaven, was perpetually disquieted there by the necessity of proclaiming the truth and by the fear of proving “but a timid friend” to it.