" A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old
commentators, puts the matter compactly together for us:--
"_Litera_ gesta refert; quid credas _allegoria_;
_Moralis_ quid agas; quid speres _anagogia_."
Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy because it has a fortunate
ending, and gives its title thus: "Here begins the comedy of Dante
Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in morals."[66] The poem
consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is
divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the
Saviour's life; for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto
is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may
find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the
threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings
reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the
architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out of
place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's position as respects
modern literature. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first
Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole
system of thought is colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian
theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption, these are the
subjects of the three parts of the poem: or, otherwise stated,
intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (symbol
also of that imperialism whose origin he sang); moral conversion after
repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with
God, and actual blinding vision of him,--"The pure in heart shall see
God.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52