Dante: The Central Man of All the World | Page 5

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