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

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