the totality of things. Herein he has had to
do, if not with the form, at any rate with the very substance of
philosophy.

[Sidenote: Dante.]

Sect. 13. Unquestionably the supreme philosopher-poet is Dante. He is
not only philosophical in the temper of his mind, but his greatest poem
is the incarnation of a definite system of philosophy, the most
definite that the world has seen. That conception of the world which in
the thirteenth century found argumentative and orderly expression in the
"Summa Theologiae" of Thomas of Aquino, and constituted the faith of the
church, is visualized by Dante, and made the basis of an interpretation
of life.

The "Divina Commedia" deals with all the heavens to the Empyrean itself,
and with all spiritual life to the very presence of God. It derives its
imagery from the cosmology of the day, its dramatic motive from the
Christian and Greek conceptions of God and his dealings with the world.
Sin is punished because of the justice of God; knowledge, virtue, and
faith lead, through God's grace and mercy manifested in Christ, to a
perpetual union with Him. Hell, purgatory, and paradise give place and
setting to the events of the drama. But the deeper meaning of the poem
is allegorical. In a letter quoted by Lowell, Dante writes:

"The literal subject of the whole work is the state of the
soul after death, simply considered. But if the work be taken
allegorically the subject is man, as by merit or demerit,
through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the
reward or punishment of justice."[43:4]

In other words, the inner and essential meaning of the poem has to do
not with external retribution, but with character, and the laws which
determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described
in the "Inferno" are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications
of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is
damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth
shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of
Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and
evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this life of
struggle and progress. The earthly paradise, at the close of the
"Purgatorio," represents the highest state to which human character can
attain when choice is determined by ordinary experience, intelligence,
and understanding. Here man stands alone,