This
need not, however, imply publication; and Witte, whose opinion is
entitled to great consideration, supposes even the _Inferno_ not to have
been finished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where certainty would be
impossible, it is of little consequence to reproduce conjectural dates.
In the letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante himself has stated
the theme of his song. He says that "the literal subject of the whole
work is the state of the soul after death simply considered. But if the
work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by merit or demerit,
through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the reward or
punishment of justice." He tells us that the work is to be interpreted in
a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense, a mode then commonly
employed with the Scriptures,[64] and of which he gives the following
example: "To make which mode of treatment more clear, it may be applied
in the following verses: _In exitu Israel de Aegypto, domus Jacob de
populo barbaro, facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel potestas
ejus_.[65] For if we look only at the literal sense, it signifies the
going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if
at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption through Christ; if at the
moral, it signifies the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery
of sin to a state of grace; and if at the anagogical, it signifies the
passage of the blessed soul from the bondage of this corruption to the
freedom of eternal glory.
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