In the three divisions of the poem we may
trace something more than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica.
There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purgatorial middle-space,
and last the holy of holies dedicated to the eternal presence of the
mediatorial God.
But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to the title of the first
Christian poem is not merely its doctrinal truth or its Christian
mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world,
but in the soul of man; that it is the allegory of a human life, and
therefore universal in its significance and its application. The genius
of Dante has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that one almost
gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary Italian history had
been to furnish it with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it
was written assumes towards it the place of a satellite. For Italy, Dante
is the thirteenth century.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which
they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had
made up his mind as to the true purpose and meaning of our existence in
this world, shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had
already conceived the system about which as a connecting thread the whole
experience of his life, the whole result of his studies, was to cluster
in imperishable crystals.
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