"[240]
It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident design, constantly
alternates examples drawn from Christian and Pagan tradition or
mythology.[241] He had conceived a unity in the human race, all of whose
branches had worshipped the same God under divers names and aspects, had
arrived at the same truth by different roads. We cannot understand a
passage in the twenty-sixth _Paradiso_, where Dante inquires of Adam
concerning the names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen People had
done in this thing even as the Gentiles did.[242] It is true that he puts
all Pagans in Limbo, "where without hope they live in longing," and that
he makes baptism essential to salvation.[243] But it is noticeable that
his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam,
Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and others as prisoners there with the rest
till the descent of Christ into hell.[244] But were they altogether
without hope? and did baptism mean an immersion of the body or a
purification of the soul? The state of the heathen after death had
evidently been to Dante one of those doubts that spring up at the foot of
every truth. In the _De Monarchia_ he says: "There are some judgments of
God to which, though human reason cannot attain by its own strength, yet
is it lifted to them by the help of faith and of those things which are
said to us in Holy Writ,--as to this, that no one, however perfect in the
moral and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the mind] and in
practice, can be saved without faith, it being granted that he shall
never have heard anything concerning Christ; for the unaided reason of
man cannot look upon this as just; nevertheless, with the help of faith,
it can.
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