DANTE AND HIS TIME


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