§ 3. PHILOSOPHIC ENTHUSIASM. The slight infidelity, which Dante found in his affection for the young and beautiful consoler, was possible, because a moral and religious change had already begun in the Poet's soul. Some time after the death of Beatrice, and before his eyes beheld the piteous consoler, he turned in search of comfort, not to the promises and consolations of religion, and to the books which Christians venerate as sacred and as inexhaustible sources of true consolation, but to the books of the pagan philosophers, which he began to study with fervor, and with a delight which went on increasing from day to day. Thus he withdrew himself from the guidance of the science of Revelation, and gave himself over to human Philosophy, so that love for her expelled and destroyed every other thought, and he venerated her as the daughter of God and the queen of all, as the divine Word, which in the beginning was God, and with God, and by whom everything was made. And this divine Word he found revealed in the works which he studied, and which formed his delight; that is, in the books of the Greek and Arab philoso

his first dread of it turned into ardent love. The Church, as every one knows, went through exactly the same experience. It first condemned the philosophy of Aristotle as hostile to revelation, and afterwards, on better acquaintance, recommended it, with the interpretation of the Schoolmen, as of the highest value to it. (See Jourdain: Recherches Critiques sur l'Âge et l'Origine des Traductions latines d'Aristote, etc., pp. 202 sqq.; Rosmini: Aristotele Esposto ed Esaminato, pp. 52 sqq.) It is important to observe that in The Feast Beatrice has already become the symbol of Revelation.]

phers, some of whom, like Averroës and Avicenna, were hostile to Christianity. Although Dante never entered the path of unbelieving scepticism, and never was a foe to Christianity, for which he professed reverence during the whole course of his life and in all his works, nevertheless, wishing to investigate, with his human intellect, the causes and foundations of the truths which believing Christians hold to have been directly revealed by God, and finding himself involved in doubts with regard to problems definitely solved by those who believe firmly and sincerely in the absolute truth of revealed doctrines, he found that he had turned his steps into paths which, in the judgment of those who represented revealed Science, were not true, and that he had become an adherent of a school whose path was "as far from the divine path as the heaven that, highest, hastens is from the earth." 1

Dante tells us (Feast, II, 13): "When the first delight of my soul (Beatrice) was lost for me, I was so overcome with grief that no comfort availed me. Nevertheless, after some time, my mind, which was bent upon recovering, made provision (since neither my own consolation nor that of any one else availed) to resort to the method which a certain disconsolate one had adopted in order to console himself. And I set myself to reading that book, not known to many, of Boëthius, in which he, captive and banished, had consoled himself. And hearing, further, that Tully had written another book, in which, treating of friendship, he had referred to words of consolation offered to

[1 Purg., XXXIII, 88 sqq.]

Lælius, a most worthy man, on the death of his friend Scipio, I set to reading that; and, although it was hard for me at first to enter into their meaning, I finally did enter into it, as far as the art of grammar which I had, and a little ability of my own, could do; through which ability I now saw many things as in a dream, as may be seen in The New Life. And, as it often happens that a man goes in search of silver and unawares finds gold,— presented by a hidden cause, not, perhaps, without the divine command, I, who was seeking to console myself, found not only a remedy for my tears, but words of authors and sciences and books; considering which, I judged fairly that Philosophy, which was the lady of these authors, of these sciences, and of these books, was a supreme thing. And I imagined her made as a gentle lady, and I could not imagine her in any attitude save a piteous one; wherefore, so eagerly did my sense of truth admire her, that I could hardly turn it away from her. And, because of this imagining, I began to go where demonstrations were made veraciously, that is, to the schools of the religious and the disputations of the philosophers, so that in a short time — perhaps thirty months—I began to be so much affected by her sweetness that love for her dispelled and destroyed every other thought."

1

Let us observe, first of all, that, in the above passage, Dante begins the allegorical exposition of the ode which heads the second treatise of The Feast, while in the second chapter he means to give us what he calls the literal exposition. Hence, the chronology of the two passages does not harmonize. Ad

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[1 It is to be noted that Dante calls this allegorical exposition the true one ("vera," Feast, II, 13 ad init.; verace," IV, I ad init.). In Beatrice's case, the true meaning was the literal one; in the other case, it was the allegorical one. In other words, Beatrice was an idealized person; Matelda (for that was the name of the second lady, Purg., XXVIII, sqq.) was a personified idea,- sense and intellect.]

mitting, however, that, where he says that the consoling lady of The New Life had first appeared to him at the end of two evolutions of Venus after Beatrice's death, he had in mind, not so much the real lady as the allegorical one, we must observe that he did not begin to imagine Philosophy in the form of a gentle lady, until after he had gone far in understanding the books which he was reading. It follows that he had already begun his philosophical studies before the episode of the faithful consoler of The New Life.

In fact, it would be foolish to suppose that for more than a year Dante did nothing but weep and sigh. The "thirty months" must be reckoned from the moment when he began to read Boëthius' book. By the "schools of the religious," which he says he attended, we may understand the cloister, in which he had taken refuge some time after Beatrice's death.

We have only to read The Feast in order to convince ourselves that, at this period of his life, Dante had to struggle with doubts, even with respect to matters of faith. These doubts show too clearly that he had become estranged from divine Revelation. Indeed, to cite but a single example, he could not for a time have doubted, as he did, whether the first matter of the elements was eternal or created by God (Feast, IV, 1), if he had regarded the biblical teachings as absolute truth. His confessions in The Comedy, moreover, leave no doubt on this point, as we shall show in the proper place.

Philosophy was not the only thing to which Dante devoted himself at this time. Apart from poetry, which he never ceased to love and cultivate, he devoted much attention to the sciences of the State, of history, and of philology. The practical outcome of his historical and political studies was, that he abandoned the political traditions of his family, a fact which is not surprising in a man who had chosen his first friends from among the Ghibelline party. At the same time, although he

embraced Ghibelline principles, he did not undergo any political conversion or reject any ancient convictions. Bred and educated in a Guelph family, he had naturally adopted its principles. But, when he began seriously to study politics and political history, he became convinced that the Guelph notions were false, and the Ghibelline true, and, being "no timid friend of truth" once recognized, he openly passed over from the Guelph party to the Ghibelline, a transition which was only the simple and natural result of his intellectual and scientific development.

Ozanam, A. F.: Dante et la Philosophie Catholique au XIIIième Siècle. Paris, 1839; new edit. 1843.

Azzolino, Pompeo: Introduzione alla Storia della Filosofia Italiana ai Tempi di Dante, per la Intelligenza dei Concetti Filosofici della Divina Commedia. Bastia, 1839.

Conti, Augusto: La Filosofia di Dante, in the volume Dante e il suo Secolo, pp. 271-310.

Asson, Michelangelo: La Filosofia di Dante Alighieri, in the Albo Dantesco Veronese, pp. 351-383.

[Villani, Ferdinando: La Teorica dell' Intuito, ovvero del Principio di Causalità fondamentale di tutta la Filosofia. Aquila, 1878.]

On the extreme enthusiasm expressed by Dante for philosophy, see Feast, II, 13, 16; III, 11-15, 19; IV, 1, etc. That, later on in life, Dante regarded his unreserved devotion to philosophy as an aberration from the true path, is clear from The Divine Comedy, especially from the closing cantos of the Purgatory.

§ 4. THE HOME. - Toward the middle of the last decade of the thirteenth century, Dante married the noble maiden, Gemma, the daughter of Manetto, of the powerful family of the Donati, by whom he had several