After Dante had written his Purgatorio, he retired to the
picturesque mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena and
Bologna; and in the hospitium of an ancient monastery, "on the
woody summit of a rock from which he might gaze on his ungrateful
country, he renewed his studies in philosophy and theology."
There, too, in that calm retreat, he commenced his Paradiso, the
subject of profound meditations on what was held in highest value
in the Middle Ages. The themes are theological and metaphysical.
They are such as interested Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, Anselm
and Bernard. They are such as do not interest this age,--even the
most gifted minds,--for our times are comparatively indifferent to
metaphysical subtleties and speculations. Beatrice and Peter and
Benedict alike discourse on the recondite subjects of the Bible in
the style of Mediaeval doctors. The themes are great,--the
incarnation, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the
body, salvation by faith, the triumph of Christ, the glory of
Paradise, the mysteries of the divine and human natures; and with
these disquisitions are reproofs of bad popes, and even of some of
the bad customs of the Church, like indulgences, and the
corruptions of the monastic system. The Paradiso is a thesaurus of
Mediaeval theology,--obscure, but lofty, mixed up with all the
learning of the age, even of the lives of saints and heroes and
kings and prophets. Saint Peter examines Dante upon faith, James
upon hope, and John upon charity. Virgil here has ceased to be his
guide; but Beatrice, robed in celestial loveliness, conducts him
from circle to circle, and explains the sublimest doctrines and
resolves his mortal doubts,--the object still of his adoration, and
inferior only to the mother of our Lord, regina angelorum, mater
carissima, whom the Church even then devoutly worshipped, and to
whom the greatest sages prayed.