We moderns
who are not only obsessed with the theory of evolution, but are
dominated by the idea that nothing of permanent value can come from
medievalism, arrogantly proclaim that ours is the greatest of centuries
because we have not only what all other centuries had, but something
else distinctively our own--a vast contribution to the world's progress.
This self-complacency makes us forget that whatever truth there may be
in the great theory of evolution, certainly the validity of the theory
is not confirmed by the intellectual history of the human race. As was
said of the Patriarchal Age so we may say of Dante's times "there were
giants in those days" which we presume to ignore. Homer, Shakespeare,
Dante, indeed stand forth in irrefutable protest against the
questionable assertion of evolution that the present is intellectually
superior to the past.
The evolutionary theory prejudices our age against acknowledging the
high accomplishments of the past. So to know the truth we must overcome
the conspiracy with which so-called history has enveloped the past,
especially those generations immediately prior to Dante's. How that
ignorance of the history and spirit of that period can blind even a
great writer to the wonderful feats inherited from the centuries
immediately preceding the thirteenth, is revealed by the assertion of
Carlyle that "in Dante ten _silent_ centuries found a voice.
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