"Truly" he
says, "we ought to help them to wash away their stains which they have
borne hence, so that, pure and light, they may go forth to the starry
spheres," (Purg. VI, 34.)
To sum up Dante's attachment to his religion we can truly say not only
his life but his great poem radiates the spirit and doctrine of the
Church. Hettinger says of Dante: "In truth he anticipated the most
pregnant developments of Catholic doctrine, mastered its subtlest
distinctions and treated its hardest problems with almost faultless
accuracy. Were all the libraries in the world destroyed and the Sacred
Scripture with them, the whole Catholic system of doctrine and morals
might be almost reconstructed out of the Divina Commedia."
Intensity, indeed, is the characteristic of Dante's spiritual life. In
bringing that quality to his faith and religious practice he was only
manifesting the operation of the dominating quality which regulated his
whole life and shaped all his mental and emotional habits. The realm of
his thought and feeling was truly the land of the strenuous life. Having
once set out to say of Beatrice what had never been said of any woman,
Dante applied himself to his prodigious task with a consistency of
purpose that was unmoved by persecution and unshaken by time.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73