Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strengthening of that native
instinct of the soul which leads it to strive backward toward its divine
source, may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the light
of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. In him as in Calderon
the perpetual presence of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy
of life and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols of
material beauty. Though Dante's conception of the highest end of man was
that he should climb through every phase of human experience to that
transcendental and super-sensual region where the true, the good, and the
beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet the prism of his
imagination forever resolved the ray into color again, and he loved to
show it also where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became
beautiful once more to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the
use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And this part
cannot in this life have its perfect use, which is to behold God (who is
the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the intellect
considers and beholds him in his effects.[70] Underlying Dante the
metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the poet,[71]
irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a picturesque phrase, or
touching things unexpectedly with that ideal light which softens and
subdues like distance in the landscape.
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