The stern outline of his system
wavers and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of
imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs in
serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from worlds not
realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the
horizon of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of the
empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a Roman,[72]
the citadel of refuge, even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow
and self denial, transhumanized[73] to the divine abstraction of pure
contemplation. "And it is called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can
Grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not
because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one,
which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, if
sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often in types of winning
grace.
Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A Platonist by
nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep closely to the narrow
path of dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while his eyes are
fixed on the stars and his brain is busy with things not demonstrable,
save by that grace of God which passeth all understanding, nor capable of
being told unless by far off hints and adumbrations.
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