|
|
| & etc |
FEEDBACK
(C)1998-2012
All Rights Reserved.
Site last updated
13 January, 2012
|
|
|
|
Dante: "The Central Man of All the World"
Dante And His Time
by Slattery, John T.
|
To know Dante we must know the age which produced Christianity's
greatest poet, he whom Ruskin calls "the central man of all the world,
as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so
dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books.
Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the
thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary
spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism,
"constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this
commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its supremacy.
And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no doubt upon
the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty.
Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use
Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure
imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his
students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to
be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my
own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me
into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school
of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has
served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of
inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's
master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling,
leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own
age by revealing a mighty past.
To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth
century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which
ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here,
perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum
true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth. 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." To
state what history now regards as fact, it must be said that while Dante
by his giant personality and sublime poetic genius could alone ennoble
any epoch he was not "a solitary phenomenon of his time but a worthy
culmination of the literary movement which, beginning shortly before
1200, produced down to 1300 such a mass of undying literature" that
subsequent generations have found in it their model and inspiration
and have never quite equalled its originality and worth.
In verification of this statement I have only to mention to you the
names of the Cid of Spain, the Arthurian Legends of England, the
Nibelungen Lied of Germany and the poems of the Meistersingers, the
Trouveres and the Troubadours. The authors of these works had been
taught to make themselves eternal as Dante says Brunetto Latini taught
him. They are proof against the alleged dumbness of the ages just
preceding Dante's. Of those times speaks Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, renowned
equally for historical study and for architectural ability: "The twelfth
was the century of magnificent endeavors and all that was great in its
successor is here in embryo not only in art but in philosophy, religion
and the conduct of life. The eleventh century is a time of aspiration
and vision, of the enunciation of new principles and of the first shock
of the contest between the old that was doomed and the new that was
destined to unprecedented victories." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 69.)
Let us now make a general survey of Dante's century and then consider
the more particular events and circumstances of his environment.
It may be a surprise to you to know that there is a book entitled The
Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries by Dr. James J. Walsh, in its
fifth edition with a sale of 70,000 copies. He indeed is not the only
man of letters who signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine
the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske
in his Beginnings of New England says of the thirteenth century: "It was
a wonderful time but after all less memorable as the culmination of
medieval empire and medieval church than as the dawning of the new era
in which we live today." Frederic Harrison, in his Survey of the
Thirteenth Century says, "Of all the epochs of effort after a new life
that ... is the most spiritual, the most really constructive and indeed
the most truly philosophic. It had great thinkers, great rulers, great
teachers, great poets, great artists, great moralists, and great
workmen. It could not be called the material age, the devotional age,
the political age or the poetic age in any special degree. It was
equally poetic, political, industrial, artistic, practical, intellectual
and devotional. And these qualities acted on a uniform conception of
life with a real symmetry of purpose."
Ours is an age of thought but of thought finding concrete expression
in practical invention and especially in activities in the line of
manufacture and commerce. Posterity will probably characterize our age
as the Industrial Age, a phrase that will signalize our period both for
the development of industries not thought possible a century ago and
for the evolution of the industrial worker to a position of striking
importance and power. For the first time in the history of humanity the
workman's status is the subject of international agreement. The League
of Nations promises to treat Labor from a humanitarian point of view
and so to place it on the broad, firm pathway leading to industrial
peace and economical solidarity for the common good. That would seem
a necessity in view of the strides of progress in other directions.
Now wireless telegraphy crosses oceans and unites continents. The
wireless telephone between ships and shore is in operation. It has been
found practicable to transport by submarine a cargo from Bremen to
Baltimore. In aircraft the development has been just as wonderful. Less
than ten years ago the world's record for long flight by aeroplane was
made, with no regard for time, with two stops between Albany and New
York. In July, 1919, an aeroplane making no stop covered the distance
between New York and Chicago in some six hours. Furthermore an American
seaplane, in three stages made the trip from New York to England and
then a British Dirigible without making a stop came from England to
Long Island in ninety-six hours. "This is the end and the beginning of
an age" says the author of Mr. Brittling Sees It Through. "This is
something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation
and we live in it."
We indeed consider it the age of "big things." Dynasties fall and
republics spring up. When war breaks out it is a World War involving
twenty-four nations and causing 7,781,806 deaths (Nelson's Encyclopedia,
V. iv, p. 519) and costing $200,000,000,000. In the first year in which
we were at war, our country spent more than had been the cost of
conducting the government for 124 years, including the expenses of
the Civil and the Spanish-American Wars. Yes, it is an age of
things." The Allies in the Champagne offensive of September, 1915,
threw 50,000,000 shells into the German lines in three days. Was it one
out of sympathy with "big things," one intent on the quiet of the higher
life as contrasted with the din of the day, who said that "modern
civilization is noise and the more civilization progresses, the greater
will be the noise?" In any event the muses who inspired Dante, are
almost dumb. Now the captains of industry are the commanding figures of
the day and the student, the poet, the philosopher, the statesman have
gone into innocuous desuetude. Amy Lowell is preferred to Longfellow:
Charlie Chaplin draws bigger crowds than Shakespeare can interest.
Trainmen get wages higher than are the salaries of some of our
governors. Unskilled labor is paid more than the teachers of our youth
receive. The cost of living was never higher in the history of mankind.
How illuminating to turn from this picture to that of Dante's age. Then
in Florence, a bushel of wheat cost about fifteen cents, a carpenter
could buy a broad ax for five cents, a saw for three cents, a plane
for four cents, a chisel for one cent. The average daily wage of a
woolworker was about thirty-six cents. In view of the high purchasing
power of money in Dante's age, the fact that he borrowed at least seven
hundred and fifty seven and a half golden florins, a debt that was not
paid until after his death, leads one to think that he must have been
regarded by his contemporaries as prodigal in the use of money. His
financial difficulties must have given him an uneasy conscience for he
insists repeatedly on the wickedness of prodigality. In fact he makes
the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a
sin against the social order punishable according to the gravity of the
offence in Hell or Purgatory.
To return to the matter of prices in Dante's day. In England a goose
could be bought for two and a half pence. A stall-fed ox commanded
twenty-four shillings while his fellow brought up on grass was sold for
sixteen shillings. A fat hog, two years old,—and this is interesting to
us who pay seventy-five cents a pound for bacon—a fat hog two years old
cost only three shillings four pence and a fat sheep shorn, one shilling
and two pence. A gallon of oysters was purchasable for two pence, a
dozen of the best soles for three pence. A yard of broadcloth cost only
one shilling one pence, a pair of shoes four pence. These figures of
English money are taken from an act of Edward III of England who was
born seven years after Dante's death. Parliamentarian enactment under
the same king fixed a table of wages.
For a day's work at haymaking or weeding of corn, for instance, a woman
got one penny. For mowing an acre of grass or threshing a quarter of
wheat a man was paid four pence. The reaper received also four pence for
his day's labor. Eight hours constituted a working day. The people of
the Middle Ages not only had the Saturday half-holiday but they enjoyed
release from work on nearly forty vigils of feast days during the year.
That they were as well off, e.g. as the unskilled laborer of our day,
who demands from four to eight dollars a day as a wage, is evident from
the fact that while he has to pay forty cents a pound for mutton, the
workman of Edward the Third's day earned enough in four days to buy a
whole sheep and a gallon of ale. So plentiful was meat in England that
it was the ordinary diet of the poor. A preamble of an act of Parliament
of the fourteenth century in specifying beef, pork, mutton and veal
declares that these are "the food of the poorer sort." (The Thirteenth,
the Greatest of Centuries, p. 479.)
Speaking of live-stock leads to the observation that the people of
Dante's time for the most part lived in the country. Cities had not yet
become magnets. London is supposed to have had a population of
twenty-five thousand, York ten thousand four hundred, Canterbury, four
thousand seven hundred, Florence, in the year 1300, according to
Villani, a contemporary of Dante, had "ninety thousand enjoying the
rights of citizenship. Of rich Grandi, there were fifteen hundred.
Strangers passing through the city numbered about two thousand. In
the elementary schools were eight thousand to ten thousand children."
(Staley's Guilds of Florence, p. 555.)
The means of travel and communication, of course, were few and
difficult. The roads were bad and dangerous. In France, Germany and
Italy there were so many forms of government, dukedoms, baronies,
marquisates, signories, city republics, each with its own custom
regulations, not to speak of each having its own coinage and language,
that travelers encountered obstacles almost at every step. For the most
part, journeys had to be made afoot and a degree of safety was attained
only if the traveler joined a large trade caravan, a pilgrimage or a
governmental expedition. Night often found the party far from a hospice
or inn and so they were obliged for shelter to camp on the highway or
in the fields. Necessarily the traveler was subjected to innumerable
privations and sufferings.
I have not been able to get accurate information as to the exact length
of time required to make a trip, say from London to Paris—a distance
covered the other day by an aeroplane in eighty minutes. But, the
"Consuetudines" of the Hereford Cathedral, England, afford us some data
upon which to base the conclusion that six weeks were necessary for
such a trip, allowing another week for religious purposes. The
"Consuetudines" after specifying that no canon of the cathedral was to
make more than one pilgrimage beyond the seas in his lifetime, allows
the clergyman seven weeks' absence to go abroad to the tomb of St. Denis
in the suburbs of Paris, sixteen weeks to Rome and a year to Jerusalem.
A table of time limits between Florence and the principal cities of
Europe and the East made by the Florentine Banking houses in Dante's
day, showed the number of days required for consignments of specie and
goods to reach their destination. Rome was reached in fifteen days,
Venice and Naples in twenty days, Flanders in seventy days, England and
Constantinople in seventy-five days, Cyprus in ninety days. How long it
took Dante to make the trip from Florence to Rome, we do not know but
history tells us that he went to the Eternal City in the year 1300. He
was indeed a great traveler. During his twenty years' exile, we know
that our poet's itinerary led him among other places to Padua, Venice,
Ravenna, Paris and there is good reason to believe, as Gladstone
contends, that he went for study to Oxford. The regret is permissible
that he did not leave us an account of his journeyings. "Had he given us
pictures—as he alone could have painted them—of scenes by the wayside
and of the courts of which he was an honored guest," says Dr. J.A. Zahm
in his Great Inspirers, "we should have had the most interesting
and the most instructive travel book ever written."
We cannot but notice one great effect brought about by traveling in
those days, especially by pilgrimages and by the Crusades formed in
defence of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and that is, that there arose on
all sides a desire for liberty and the growth of a spirit of nationality
that worked to the destruction of absolute government. The power of the
common people began to assert itself. In 1215, England forced from John
Lackland the Magna Charta, the foundation of all the liberty of English
speaking people even in modern times. The very year in which Dante was
born, representatives of the townspeople were admitted as members of the
English Parliament. In France, during the thirteenth century, the
centralization of power in the hands of the kings went forward with the
gradual diminution of the influence of the nobility—a fact operating to
the people's advantage.
In 1222 the nobles forced Andrew II of Hungary to issue the Golden Bull,
the instrument which Blackstone later declared turned "anarchy into
law." In Germany and Sicily Frederick II published laws giving a larger
measure of popular freedom. In Italy, the existence of the city
republics—especially those of Florence, Sienna, Pisa—showed how
successfully the ferment of liberty had penetrated the mass of the
body-politic.
Coming now to regard the characteristics of Dante's age we must say that
the first big thing that looms in sight is the fact that this was the
golden age of Christian faith. Everywhere the Cross, the symbol of
salvation, met the eye. It was the age when men lived in one faith, used
one ritual, professed one creed, accepted a common doctrine and moral
standard and breathed a common religious atmosphere. Heresy was not
wholly absent but it was the exception. Religion regarded then not as an
accident or an incident of life but as a benign influence permeating
the whole social fabric, not only cared for the widow and orphan and
provided for the poor, but it shaped men's thoughts, quickened their
sentiments, inspired their work and directed their wills. These men
believed in a world beyond the grave as an ever present reality. Hell,
Purgatory, Heaven were so near to them that they, so to speak, could
touch the invisible world with their hands. To them, as to Dante, "this
life was but a shadowy appearance through which the eternal realities of
another world were constantly betraying themselves." Of the intensity
and universality of faith in that life beyond death, Dante is not the
exception but the embodiment. His poem has no such false note of
scepticism as we detect in Tennyson's In Memoriam. Note the words of the
modern poet:
"I falter where I firmly trod
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope
And gather dust and chaff and call
To what I feel is Lord of all
And faintly trust the larger hope."
Not thus does Dante speak. As the voice of his age he begins with faith,
continues with faith and leads us to the unveiled vision of God. He
both shows us his unwavering adherence to Christian doctrine in that
scene in Paradiso where he is examined as to his faith by St. Peter and
he teaches us that the seen is only a stepping stone into the unseen. It
has been said of him in reference to his Divina Commedia, "The light of
faith guides the poet's steps through the hopeless chambers of Hell with
a firmness of conviction that knows no wavering. It bears him through
the sufferings of Purgatory, believing strongly fits reality: it raises
him on the wings of love and contemplation into Heaven's Empyrean, where
he really hopes to enjoy bliss far beyond that whereof he says."
(Brother Azarias.)
Leading the religious awakening of the thirteenth century and making
possible Dante's work at the end of the century were two of the world's
greatest exponents of the spiritual life, both signalized in the
Paradiso. St. Dominic characterized by Dante (Par. XII, 56) as "a
jealous lover of the Christian faith with mildness toward his disciples
but formidable to his foes," founded an order to be "the champions of
Faith and the true lights of the world." Even in its early days it gave
to the world eminent scholars such as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas
Aquinas, and it has never ceased to number among its members great
thinkers, ardent apostles, stern ascetics and profound mystics. In
Dante's time it was the only order specially charged with the office of
preaching and from its founder's time down to the present day the one
who acts as the Pope's Theologian has been taken from the ranks of this
order. Besides preaching to all classes of Christian society and
evangelizing the heathen, the Dominicans in Dante's day fought against
heresy and schism, lectured in the universities, toiled among the poor,
activities in which the order is still engaged.
But perhaps the man whose spiritual influence was greatest in
medievalism, if not in all the history of Christianity, was Francis of
Assisi, who "all seraphical in order rose a sun upon the world." (Par.
XI, 37.) Born at Assisi in Umbria in 1182, the son of a wealthy cloth
merchant and of Pica, a member of a noble family of Provence, Francis
grew up a handsome, gay and gallant youth "the prime favorite among the
young nobles of the town, the foremost in every feat of arms, the leader
of civil revels, the very king of frolic." A low fever contracted when
with his fellow citizens he fought against the Perugians turned his
thoughts to the things of eternity. Upon his recovery he determined to
devote himself to the service of his fellow man for the honor of God.
His renunciation of the things of this life was dramatic. To swerve him
from the new life his father had cited him to appear before the Bishop.
Francis, unmoved by the appeal of his father persisted in his
resolution. Stripping himself of the clothes he wore, the Bishop
covering his nakedness, Francis gave his clothes to his father saying,
"Hitherto I have called you Father, henceforth I desire to say only Our
Father who art in heaven." Then and there as Dante sings, were
solemnized Francis' nuptials with his beloved Spouse, the Lady Poverty,
under which name, in the mystical language afterwards so familiar to
Francis, "he comprehended the total surrender of all wordly goods,
honors and privileges." He went forth and attracted disciples. With
these partaking of his zeal and animated by his charity, he labored to
make his generation turn from the sordid to the spiritual, diffusing
over all the people a tender love of nature and God.
Among his disciples—great minds of the time—were Thomas of Celano, one
of the literary geniuses of the day, the author of the sublime Dies
Irae—a religious poem chanted to this day at every funeral high mass
in the Catholic Church, and frequently sung or played in great opera
houses,—Bonaventure, professor of philosophy and theology at the
university of Paris, Roger Bacon, the friar, the renowned teacher at
Paris and Oxford, Duns Scotus, the subtile doctor. In the Third Order
established for those not following the monastic life the membership,
in the course of time, embraced among others St. Louis, King of France,
St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Dante.
He, towards the end of his exile, footsore, weary and discouraged,
buffeted by the adverse winds of fortune knocked, a stranger, at the
gates of the Franciscan monastery at Lunigiana. "As neither I nor any of
the brothers recognized him," writes Brother Hilary, the Prior, "I asked
him what he wished. He made no answer but gazed silently upon the
columns and galleries of the cloister. Again I asked him what he wished
and whom he sought and slowly turning his head and looking around upon
the brothers and me, he answered 'Peace.'"
The monks spoke gently to him, ministered with kindly and delicate
sympathy to his bodily and spiritual needs. His reticence left him and
his reserve melted away. Here the object of loving hospitality, he
remained finding means and opportunity for profound study. Before he
departed he drew from his bosom a part of the precious manuscript of
Divina Commedia and trustingly giving it into the hands of the Prior
said, "Here, Brother, is a portion of my work which you may not have
seen: this remembrance I leave with you: forget me not."
That he himself was not unforgetful of the sympathy of the simple and
warm-hearted followers of St. Francis is evident from the fact that he
gloried in his membership of the Third Order, wearing about his body the
Franciscan cincture for chastity and it is not unlikely that at Ravenna
before he finally closed his eyes upon the turmoil of the world full of
vicissitudes, he modestly requested that he be buried in the simple
habit of the order and be laid to rest in a tomb attached to their
monastery. In any event such was his burial.
For our sympathetic understanding of the supremacy of religion in
Dante's day, may I again quote Ralph Adams Cram, whose words on the
eleventh century are equally applicable to the era of our Florentine and
to his country? Dr. Cram writes: "It is hard for us to think back into
such an alien spirit and time as this and so understand how with
one-tenth of its present population England could support so vast and
varied a religious establishment, used as we are to an age where
religion is only a detail for many and for most a negligible factor. We
are only too familiar with the community that could barely support one
parish church, boasting its one-half dozen religious organizations, all
together claiming the adherence of only a minority of the population,
but in the Middle Ages, religion was not only the most important and
pervasive thing, it was a moral obligation on every man, woman and
child, and rejection or even indifference was unthinkable. If once we
grasp this fact," continues Cram, "we can understand how in the eleventh
century, the whole world should cover itself with 'its white robe of
churches.'"
The second great fact observable in the times of Dante is that it was an
age of inquiry and of efficient craftsmanship. Many of our generation
think that Dante's day being so far removed from the age of printing and
the spirit of positivism, and being given to the upholding of authority
almost as an unexhaustible source of knowledge, was wholly unacquainted
with scientific research. Furthermore they declare that education then
was almost at its minimum stage. A little study will show that the
people of that era were not unacquainted with the scientific spirit and
it will also prove that if education did not prevail, in the sense that
everybody had an opportunity to read and write—a consummation hardly to
be expected—education in the sense of efficiency—education in the
etymological sense, i.e. the training of the faculties so that the
individual might develop creative self-expression and especially that he
might bring out what was best in him, all which meant knowledge highly
useful to himself and others—that kind of education was not uncommon.
To give an idea of the scientific inquiry and sharp observation of mind
in those days, I might cite Dante as a master exponent of nature study,
and adept of science. Passing over his experiment in optics given in
Paradiso, given so naturally as to justify the inference that
investigation in physics was then not an uncommon mode of gaining
knowledge, I call your attention to an observation made by Alexander
Von Humboldt, the distinguished scientist, to prove that nothing escaped
the eyes of Dante, intent equally upon natural phenomena and the things
of the soul. Von Humboldt suggests that the rhetorical figure employed
by Dante in his description of the River of Light with its banks of
wonderful flowers (Par. XXX, 61) is an application of our poet's
knowledge of the phosphorescence of the ocean. If you have ever looked
down the side of a steamship at night as it ploughed its way forward,
and if you have ever observed in the sea the thousand darting lights
just below the water line your enjoyable experience will enable you
to appreciate the beauty of this passage. I now quote:
"I saw a glory like a stream flow by
In brightness rushing and on either side
Were banks that with spring's wondrous hues might vie
And from that river living sparks did soar
And sank on all sides in the flow'rets bloom
Like precious rubies set in golden ore
Then as if drunk with all the rich perfume
Back to the wondrous torrent did they roll
And as one sank another filled its room."
Commenting on this passage, Von Humboldt says "It would seem as if this
picture had its origin in the poet's recollection of that peculiar and
rare phosphorescent condition of the ocean in which luminous points
appear to rise from the breaking waves and, spreading themselves over
the surface of the waters, convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of
stars." This mention of a sea brings to mind the striking fact that Dean
Church has pointed out, viz., when Dante speaks of the Mediterranean, he
speaks not as a historian or an observer of its storms or its smiles but
as a geologist. The Mediterranean is to him: "The greatest valley
in which water stretcheth." (Par. IX, 82.)
So also when he speaks of light he regards it not merely in its
beautiful appearances but in its natural laws (Purg. XV). And when Dante
comes to describe the exact color, say of an apple blossom, his splendid
and unequalled power as a scientific observer of Nature and a poet is
most evident. Ruskin (Mod. Painters III, 226) commenting on the passage:
flowers of a color "less than that of roses but more than that of
violets" (Purg. XXXII, 58) makes this interesting remark: "It certainly
would not be possible in words, to come nearer to the definition
of the exact hue which Dante meant—that of the apple blossom. Had he
employed any simpler color phrase, as 'pale pink' or 'violet pink' or
any other such combined expression, he still could not have completely
got at the delicacy of the hue; he might, perhaps, have indicated its
kind, but not its tenderness; but by taking the rose-leaf as the type
of the delicate red, and then enfeebling this with the violet gray he
gets, as closely as language can carry him to the complete rendering of
the vision although it is evidently felt by him to be in its perfect
beauty ineffable."
These examples of Dante's interest in scientific observation prove his
fitness to be considered a representative of his age in its love for
science. Instead, however, of proposing Dante as a typical example of
the experimental inquiry of his age—you may say that he is sui
generis—I shall call forth other witnesses.
First let Albertus Magnus speak. He was distinguished as a theologian
and philosopher and was also renowned as a scientist. In his tenth book
after describing all the trees, plants and herbs then known, he says:
"All that is here set down is the result of our own observation or has
been borrowed from others whom we have known to have written what their
personal experience has confirmed, for in these matters, experience
alone can give certainty (experimentum solum certificat in talibus)."
We may be sure that such an investigator showing in his method a
prodigious scientific progress was on the line so successfully followed
by modern natural philosophy. This conclusion is confirmed by evidence
from his other books showing that he did a great deal of experimental
work, especially in chemistry. In his treatise De Mineralibus, Albertus
Magnus keen to observe natural phenomena, enumerates different
properties of natural magnets and states some of the properties commonly
attributed to them.
In his book on Botany he treats of the organic structure and physiology
of plants so accurately as to draw from Meyer, a botanist of the
nineteenth century, this appreciative tribute. "No botanist who lived
before Albert can be compared to him unless Theophrastus, with whom he
was not acquainted: and after him none has painted nature with such
living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad
Gesner and Cesalpino"—a high compliment indeed for Albertus for
leadership in science for three centuries. To quote Von Humboldt again,
"I have found in the book of Albertus Magnus, De Natura Locorum,
considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude
and elevation and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the
sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise."
Albertus Magnus gains renown also from his distinguished pupil Roger
Bacon who, some think, should have the honor of being regarded as the
father of inductive science—an honor posterity has conferred upon
another of the same family name who lived 300 years later. We, who wear
eye-glasses would be willing, I think, to vote the honor to the elder
Bacon, because if we do not owe to him the discovery of lenses, we are
his debtors for his clarification of the principles of lenses and for
his successful efforts in establishing them on a mathematical basis. In
any event, he was a pioneer in inductive science.
Before gunpowder is known to have been discovered in the West, the friar
Roger Bacon must have made some interesting experiments along the line
of explosives, else he could not have made the following remarkable
statement as to the property of gunpowder: "One may cause to burst from
bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A
small quantity of prepared matter causes a terrible explosion
accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so
far as to destroy a city or an army." Anticipating the use of even motor
boats and automobiles driven by gasoline, this thirteenth century
scientist wrote: "Art can construct instruments of navigation such that
the largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers and
seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also
make carriages which, without the aid of any animal, will run with
remarkable swiftness." This man whose clarity of vision anticipated
those discoveries of the nineteenth century, left three disciples after
him,—John of Paris, William of Mara and Gerard Hay—who followed their
master's methods, especially of testing by observation and by careful
searching of authorities, every proposition that came up for study.
Perhaps the most striking argument in favor of the experimental attitude
of Dante's century is that afforded by certain facts in the history of
medicine of that epoch. Then surgery began to make vast strides. Pagel,
regarded in our time as the best informed writer on the history of
medicine, has this to say of the surgery in Dante's age. "The stream of
literary works on surgery flows richer during this period. While
surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves from the
ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one department,
that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy the first place
in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation is less hampered
and concerns itself with practical things and not with artificial
theories. Experimental observation was in this not repressed by an
unfortunate and iron-bound appeal to reasoning." (The Popes and Science,
p. 172.)
As to medical practice in the thirteenth century, interesting data are
furnished by the Bulletin of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Journal of
the American Medical Association, January, 1908. The former publication
gives us remarkable instances of surgical operations and of the
treatment of Bright's disease, matters which we might have thought
possible only in the nineteenth century; the latter publishes in full
the law for the regulation of the practice of medicine issued by Emperor
Frederick II in 1240 or 1241. According to that law binding on the two
Sicilies, three years of preparatory university work were required
before the student could begin the study of medicine. Then he had to
devote three years to the study of medicine and finally he had to spend
a year under a physician's direction before a license was issued to him.
In connection with this high standard of a medical education, the law
of Frederick II forbade not only the sale of impure drugs under penalty
of confiscation of goods, but also the preparation of them under penalty
of death—stern legislation, anticipating by nearly seven centuries the
American Pure Drug Law. (The Popes and Science, p. 419.)
Undoubtedly the experimental demonstration and original observation of
Dante's time sprang either from the training or pedagogical methods of
the great universities of that period. There were universities at
Oxford, Paris, Cologne, Montpelier, Orleans, Angers. Spain had four
universities; Italy, ten. The number of students in attendance must
amaze us if we think that higher education did not then prevail.
Professor Thomas Davidson in his History of Education, says: "The number
of students reported as having attended some of the universities in
those early days almost passes belief, e.g. Oxford is said to have had
about 30,000 about the year 1300 and half that number as early as 1224.
The numbers attending the University of Paris were still greater. The
numbers become less surprising when we remember with what poor
accommodations—a bare room and an armful of straw—the students of
those days were content and what numbers of them even a single teacher
like Abelard could, long before, draw into lonely retreats."
That in the twelfth and following centuries there was no lack of
enthusiasm for study, notwithstanding the troubled conditions of the
times, is very clear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
education rose in many European states to a height which it had not
attained since the days of Seneca and Quintilian.
The curriculum followed by a student in Dante's time embraced the seven
liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, namely Grammar,
Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astrology. The
higher education comprised also Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and
Theology. Of the cultural effect of the old education, Professor Huxley
spoke in the highest praise on the occasion of his inaugural address as
rector of Aberdeen University. "I doubt," he said, "if the curriculum
of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension
of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does."
(The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, p. 466.)
Speaking of education in those distant days, one thinks of the supreme
intellect of medieval life, the giant genius St. Thomas Aquinas, whose
philosophy was the food of Dante and became the basis not only of
Dante's great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day,
when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and
universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the
Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such
perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more
generally than that of any other school of philosophy—taught in the
regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia—such a philosopher
could have left the impress of his genius upon seven succeeding
centuries only if his work had been to philosophy what Dante's Divina
Commedia is to literature.
The subject of scholastic philosophy now more or less claims attention
here, since the coming to our country of the most distinguished exponent
of Neo-scholasticism. Cardinal Mercier before becoming a prince of the
Church, held the chair of neo-scholastic philosophy at Louvain where he
made his department so distinguished for deep scholarship that pupils
came from afar to sit under his instruction or to prepare themselves for
a doctorate of philosophy whose requirements at Louvain were perhaps,
more exacting than at any other modern university.
In 1889 Bishop John H. Keane engaged in the task of getting together a
faculty for the Catholic University at Washington went to Louvain to see
Dr. Mercier. "I want you to go to Washington and become head of our
school of philosophy," said the visitor. "I am perfectly willing to go,
the Pope," answered the Belgian scholar. Bishop Keane went to Rome and
presented the matter to Leo XIII. "Better leave him where he is,"
replied the Pope. "He is more needed in Belgium than in the United
States." So it was owing to the wisdom of Pope Leo in keeping the right
man in the right place that Belgium's strongest man was held for his
country against the evil hour to be a terror to wrongdoers and an
inspiration and object of reverence.
The World's War revealed Belgium's Primate not only as a great lucid
thinker who shattered the subtilities with which the philosophy of might
tried to confuse the mind of the world, but also as an undaunted leader
who could not be frightened or defeated by all the forces of militarism.
To my mind the secret of the dominating influence working upon Cardinal
Mercier's character and making him a world-hero came from his training
in scholastic philosophy and from his having assimilated the spirit of
the thirteenth century.
That period indeed not only trained its people to a high spiritual ideal
but gave them golden opportunities to express themselves and to put
forth, under the inspiration of religion, the best that was in them.
The medium was the guild system which, working from a self-protecting
alliance of traders, extended itself to every existing
form of industry
and commerce and gave "the workman a position of self-respect and
independence such as he had never held before and has failed to achieve
since" (Cram).
A remarkable thing about the guild system was that it established and
maintained what we, today, call technical schools for the training of
apprentices. But more remarkable was the spirit which animated the
system. Operare est orare was its principle. As a result of that
teaching that labor is practical prayer, that the worker should labor
not simply for a wage, but for perfection, men with untiring energy
straining for finer and better work came to make the best things their
minds could conceive, their taste could plan, their hands could fashion.
Bell-making in Dante's day attained such perfection that the form and
composition of bells have ever since been imitated. Workers of precious
metals produced such wonderful chalices that succeeding generations have
never equalled the ancient model. The masonry of medievalism has secrets
of construction lost to our age. Mechanical engineering solved without
the use of steel girders problems in the structural work of cathedrals,
palaces, fortresses and bridges that causes open-eyed astonishment in
the twentieth century. Wood carving as seen in many medieval chairs,
tables, and choir equipment is of design so exquisite and of finish of
detail so artistic that
it is the despair of the cabinet makers of our
age.
The beauty of the thirteenth century needlework made into chasubles,
copes, albs, stoles, altar covers,—triumphs of artistic excellence, is
seen in the typical example of the Cope of Ascoli for which Mr. Pierpont
Morgan about ten years ago, paid sixty thousand dollars. So high a price
was paid for this ecclesiastical vestment not because it was an antique
but because marvelous expertness in artcraft had given it such value. Be
it recorded to the honor of the American millionaire, that he returned
the treasure to a church in Italy when he discovered that he had
unknowingly bought stolen property.
Of iron-mongery of Dante's time, the author of the Thirteenth the
Greatest of Centuries writes as follows: "It is difficult to understand
how one of the village blacksmiths of the time made a handsome gate that
has been the constant admiration of posterity ever since, or designed
high hinges for doors that artists delight to copy, or locks and latches
and bolts that are transported to our museums to be looked at with
interest not only because they are antiques but for the wonderful
combination of the beautiful and the useful which they illustrate. The
surprise grows the greater when we realize that these beautiful objects
were made not only in one place or even in a few places, but in nearly
every town of any size in
England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain at
various times during the thirteenth century and that at any time a town
of considerably less than ten thousand inhabitants seemed to be able to
obtain among its own inhabitants, men who could make such works of art
not as copies nor in servile imitation of others, but with original
ideas of their own, and make them in such perfection that in many cases
they have remained the models for many centuries."
That is especially true of the thirteenth century glass windows as seen,
for example, in the Cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Westminster,
Canterbury, Chartres, Rheims, and in Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle,
Paris. Modern art with all its boasting cannot begin to make anything
comparable to that antique glass made and put in place by faith and love
long before Columbus discovered America. There are tiny bits of it in
this country as a result of the relic hunting of our soldiers in the
World's War. Many of them got a fragment of the shattered glass of
Rheims, "petrified color" deep sky blue, ruby, golden green, and sent it
home to a sweetheart, a wife or sister to be mounted on a ring or set in
a pin.
The donors for the most part of the glass of the thirteenth century
Cathedrals, were guilds at that time. For the Cathedral of Chartres
e.g. the drapers and the furriers gave five windows,
the porters one, the tavern-keepers two, the bakers two.
In Dante's time glass-making reached its climax and then the curve began
to decline, until in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the
nineteenth century glass-making reached its lowest point.
Great as was Dante's day in the efficiency and education promoted by the
Guild system—Dante himself was a member of it—the achievement of his
era in architecture was the "most notable perhaps because what happened
there epitomizes all that was done elsewhere and the nature of what was
accomplished is precisely that which informed the whole body of medieval
achievement." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 137.)
In the course of the century that gave birth to Dante, architecture rose
to a glory never equalled before or after. In France alone between the
years of 1180 and 1270 eighty great cathedrals and five hundred abbey
houses were constructed. It was in this century that Notre Dame, Paris,
arose, "the only un-Greek thing" said R.M. Stevenson, "which unites
majesty elegance and awfulness." But it was not alone. Other Notre Dames
sprung up in Germany, Italy and Spain. In England also, in that period
there were more than twenty cathedrals in the course of construction,
some of them in places as small as Wells, whose population never
exceeded four thousand.
To look today upon Wells with its facade of nearly three hundred
statues, one hundred and fifty-three of which are life size or heroic
and then to realize that this magnificent poem in stone was composed by
villagers unknown to us and unhonored and unsung, is to open our eyes
to the wonders accomplished by the foremost age of architecture.
So wonderful are those cathedrals that Ferguson, the standard English
authority on Gothic architecture, does not hesitate to say; "If any one
man were to devote a lifetime to the study of one of our great
cathedrals, assuming it to be complete in all its medieval
arrangements—it is questionable whether he would master all its details
and fathom all the reasonings and experiments which led to the result
before him.
"And when we consider that not only in the great cities alone, but in
every convent and in every parish, thoughtful men were trying to excel
what had been done and was doing by their predecessors and their
fellows, we shall understand what an amount of thought is built into the
walls of our churches, castles, colleges and dwelling houses. My own
impression is that not one-tenth part of it has been reproduced in all
the works written on the subject up to this day and much of it is
probably lost never again to be recovered for the instruction and
delight of future ages."
The irreparable shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the
past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning
perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the
brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which
had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered
kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and
today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its
ruin it shows infinite majesty and if it is left as it is,—and may that
be so—for restoration would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims
will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made
it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and
to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence and
a protest.
The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which
placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In
literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted
conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The
troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk,
meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by
the Emperor Frederick II, patron
of the troubadours, as a combination
of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante
rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the
moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells."
Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him
even lowest in the social scale provided that he is a virtuous man. It
is not an affair solely of gentle blood. It has no pedigree of birth or
richness. "In this sense the true lover need not be a gentleman
but he must be a gentle man, loving not by genteel code of caste
but by gentle code of character." (J.B. Fletcher: Dante p. 27.)
Thus Dante makes Guido Guinicelli say: "Love and the gentle heart are
one and the same thing." And Dante himself in one of his Canzoni writes:
"Let no man predicate
That aught the name of gentleman should have
Even in a king's estate
Except the heart there be a gentle man's."
Love, then, became in literature such a refined emotion that to quote
Dante: "it makes ill thought to perish, it drives into foul hearts a
deadly chill" and on the other hand it fills indeed the lover with such
delicacy of sentiment for his beloved that she is his inspiration to
virtue and the Muse who directs his pen. In harmony with "the sweet new
style" of sincerity with which Dante treats of love, Thomas Bernart de
Ventadorn sings:
"It is no wonder if I sing better than any other singer, for my heart
draws near to Love and I am a better man for Love's command."
Not in literature alone but in actual life did chivalry exalt "the
eternal womanly." In Dante's age, to quote the author of Phases of
Thought and Criticism, "Knights passed from land to land in search of
adventure, vowed to protect and defend the widow and the orphan and the
lonely woman at the hazard of their lives: they went about with a prayer
on their lips and in their hearts the image of the lady-love whom they
had chosen to serve and to whom they had pledged loyalty and fidelity:
they strove to be chaste in body and soul and as a tower of strength for
the protection of this spirit of chastity, they were taught to venerate
the Virgin Mother Mary and cultivate toward her a tender devotion as the
purest and holiest ideal of womanhood. This spirit of chivalry is the
ruling spirit of Dante's life and the inspiration of some of his
sublimest flights."
All these high achievements of Dante's century are all the more notable
in view of the fact that war with its horror and destruction was never
absent from those times. Every European country was involved often in
war and Asia and Africa were not free from its devastation.
In such stirring times, Dante was born at Florence. A city of flowers
and gay festivities, the home of a cultured pleasure-loving people, it
was the frequent scene of feuds and factions handed down from sire to
son. The hatred they engendered and the desolation they caused may be
understood from the reading of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy whose scene
is laid in Verona in the year 1303 and to the families concerned in
which Dante makes allusion in the sixth canto of his Purgatorio. But
Verona and Florence were not the only cities involved by the militarism
of the age. Especially in northern Italy were strife and bloodshed
common. Province, city, town, hamlet and even households were torn by
internal dissensions, which only complicated the main conflict of that
day, viz., the world struggle for supremacy of pope and emperor.
The imperial party called Ghibellines, composed mainly of aristocrats
and their followers, aimed to break down the barriers which kept the
German Emperor out of Italy, their object being to have him subjugate
the whole country, even the states of the Pope. The papal or popular
party, known as Guelfs, had as its purpose the independence of
Italy—the freedom and alliance of the great cities of the north of
Italy and dependence of the center and southern parts on the Roman See.
A few months after Dante's death, the Ghibellines, the imperial party,
suffered a defeat by the overthrow of King Manfred from which they never
recovered. But in Florence for many years they maintained their
struggle.
To add to the confusion of the Florentines whose sympathy was mostly
Guelf—i.e. favorable to the papal or popular cause—the Guelf party of
Florence was divided into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, the
history of whose tumults often leading to blood and mischief may be
known by the frequent allusions of our poet. Embroiled by those feuds,
Dante is found not only as a prior among the ruling Bianchi but as a
soldier under arms at the battle of Campaldino and at the siege of
Caprona. Later when the Neri were restored to power, Dante was banished
and never again beheld his beloved city. In exile Dante transferred his
allegiance to the Ghibellines though he upheld the Guelf view as to the
primacy of the Church. Subsequently he tried, but in vain, to form a
party independent of Guelf, Ghibelline, Bianchi or Neri.
May I conclude this chapter by giving you another view of Dante's
environment? To point out the degeneracy of Florence, Dante becomes a
laudator acti temporis in a picture of the earlier Florence that
has never been equalled.
"Florence was abiding in peace, sober and modest. She had not necklace
or coronal or women with ornamented shoes or girdle which was more to be
looked at than the person. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth give
fear to her father, for the time and dowry did not outrun measure on
this or that side. She had not houses empty of families. I saw
Bellencion Berti go girt with leather and bone and his lady come from
the mirror with unpainted face. I saw him of the Nerlo and him of the
Vecchio satisfied with unlined skin and their ladies with the spindle
and the distaff. O! fortunate women, each was sure of her burial place"
(Paradiso IV, 97).
But time changed all that. With her population vastly increased in
Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her
banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence
had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the
Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take part in the Jubilee of 1300:
"Florence is the greatest of cities. She feeds, clothes, governs us all.
Indeed she appears to rule the world. She and her people are, in truth,
the fifth element of the universe." (The Guilds of Florence, p. 562.)
Such greatness was attained according to Dante only at the loss of
pristine simplicity and virtue. So he apostrophizes his native city:
"Rejoice O Florence, since thou art so mighty that thou canst spread
thy wings over sea and land and thy name is known throughout Hell."
Notorious for crime Florence still kept a big place in her life for
religion. There "religion was abused but its beneficial effects
continued to be manifest—vice was flagrant but it never lost the sense
of shame—men were cruel but their cruelty was followed by sincere
regrets—misfortunes were frequent and signal but they were accepted
with resignation or with the hope of retrieval or men gloried in them
on account of the cause in which they suffered." (Brother Azarias.)
And, meanwhile, side by side with fierce and bloody struggles the
creative forces of art and architecture were making marvelous progress
before the very eyes of Dante. Niccolo Pisano had finished his Sienna
pulpit and with his son was engaged on his immortal works of sculpture.
Orcagna had made a wonderful tabernacle for the Florentine church of San
Michele, Cimabue had painted the Madonna which is now in the Rucellai
chapel. Giotto had completed his work at Assisi and Rome and would soon
give to the world the Florentine Campanile. Fra Sisto and Fra Ristoro
had built the church Santa Maria Novella at Florence and Arnolfo di
Cambio, while Dante was writing sonnets, had begun the duomo or
cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The stout walls and lofty tower of
the Bargello had sprung into beauteous being. Santa Croce destined to
be the burial place of illustrious Italians, had been built and remains
today one of Florence's greatest churches. St. John's Baptistry, il
mio bel Giovanni, had received its external facing of marble, and in
ten years after Dante's death would get its massive bronze doors which
are unparalleled in the world.
The century closed with the opening of the great Jubilee at Rome. March
twenty-fifth of the following year, 1300, Dante places as the time for
his journey through the realms of the unseen—the story of which is told
in the Divina Commedia. If sympathy with Dante and his work is not
aroused already, perhaps these two quotations may quicken your interest.
Charles Elliot Norton writes: "There are few other works of man, perhaps
there is no other, which affords such evidence as the Divine Comedy, of
uninterrupted consistency of purpose, of sustained vigor of imagination,
and of steady force of character controlling alike the vagaries of the
poetic temperament, the wavering of human purpose, the fluctuation of
human powers, the untowardness of circumstances. From the beginning to
the end of his work of many years there is no flagging of energy, no
indication of weakness. The shoulders burdened by a task almost too
great for mortal strength, never tremble under their load."
And Dr. Frank Crane, a foremost writer of the syndicate press, says "I
have put a good deal of hard labor digging into Dante and while I cannot
say that I ever got from him any direct usable material, yet I no more
regret my hours spent with him than I regret the beautiful landscapes I
have seen, the great music I have heard, the wise and noble souls I have
met, the wondrous dreams I have had. These are all a part of one's
education, of one's equipment for life and perhaps the best part."
|
|
| |
