GANTO L. tal sects are said to have waged bitter war from a difference about washing their hands, les uns disant qu'il faut verser l'eau dans le creux de la main en la faisant couler le long du bras jusqu'au coude, et les autres qu'il faut au contraire jeter l'eau dans la jointure du bras et la faire couler en bas jusqu'à l'extrémité des doigts (1). Not only all Christians, but the principal framers of every system of ethics and religion, agree in this, that there is an Almighty Creator, with whom the virtuous are to enjoy eternal happiness, and from whom the wicked are to be banished for ever and consequently to be, in some way or other, for ever miserable. This sentence the substance of which remains untouched, whatever phraseology be employed, God, virtue or principle of good, or Satan, vice, or evil principle comprises the entire subject of the poem on which we are entering: and the last words of it that of the present Canticle, or rather of the largest portion of it, as shall be shown and whether we call it 'Hell-of-thedamned' or Tartarus or Gehenna, it is still the selfsame thing, a place of everlasting woe believed in, with amazing unity, by the greatest law-givers, theologians and poets, from Moses and Homer down to Milton, and by the mightiest philosophers from Zeno and Socrates down to Newton; with the almost single exception of a few Epicureans, (1) Hist. Mod. de Maury. V. 4. p. 338. CANTO I of whom Tully said, it was hard to determine which were more remarkable, their unworthy morals or their ignorance and imbecility (1). Amongst the Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians and others, fire is principally, but not exclusively, represented as the instrument of future punishment: while the Magians reject it altogether, apparently from respect to that element, and the Mahommedans, for the most part, substitute cold in its stead, (2) a theory much followed by Dante and probably taken from the Koran with which book he appears to have been familiar, as I shall explain hereafter. But whatever be the station assigned, whether in the bowells of the earth, or in the viewless void, or beyond both space and time, or whatever be the tortures depicted, they, by all the religions I have noticed, are used as allegorical, and as finite representations of that which is infinite: whether flames, frost, vultures, hippocentaurs, chimæras, Styx, hunger, thirst, stench, serpents, dragons, or brimstone be employed; or it more than realise all these, to describe the bad spirit as cursed with the conscious horrors of her own identity; the same things are evidently signified, things of which we can have no conception, although our reason acknowledgeth their necessary existence; material substances that figure immaterial ones, and that would therefore be erroneous pictures, if, during Divin. 1. 1. p. 3. (1) Nat. Deor. 1. 1. p. 44. (2) Sale. p. 124. CANTO I. our connection with the body, it were not so requisite to strike our senses in order to make an impression on our souls. They are then very puny reasoners, who, under pretence of wisdom, ridicule such imagery: while, on the other hand, those are wrong who prize too highly their own or condemn that adopted elsewhere. This is a theme on which we may be allowed to expatiate freely. Our fables cannot approach the truth; but they may indicate it imperfectly, as a word may do an entity. Nations quarrel not about their languages; I may call a ship what you name vaisseau, vascello or navis: nor poets about their metaphors; one terming a ship a sea horse, and another a bird of the ocean: neither should people object with greater severity to each other's ideal pictures of the site or the form of a region or state, which, as they all agree, is beyond the utmost stretch of mortal comprehension. Those representations pass away with time and vary with fashion; but the truth they shadow forth remains unchanged because eternal, unconceived because infinite- opinionum enim commenta delet dies, naturæ judicia confirmat (1). do Boetius, who was a wonderful favourite with Dante, having used this expression second death to denote oblivion, such, it is likely, is its meaning (1) Nat. Deor. 1. 2. par. 2. CANTO 1. in this passage also; where the damned are therefore represented as fruitlessly desiring some oblivious antidote for their pangs an antidote that might arise from the forgetfulness of their eternal judge, if it were possible for him to forget. Quod si putatis longius vitam trahi . Cum sera vobis rapiet hoc etiam dies. Petrarch (whether imitating Boetius or Dante) uses the same form of speech in the sense of oblivion chiamasi fama et è morir secondo. It is possible however that a verse in the Koran « Death twice! O Malec intercede for us that thy Lord would end us by annihilation! » (2). might have been in Dante's mind, and, in that case, he meant by second death the death of the soul or utter annihilation: but this is indubitable, that his second death means either oblivion, or annihilation of the soul; and not hell, which is the signification of that expression in the Apocalypse -«the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death » (3); and much less can it mean the Last Judgment, as is advanced by some expounders. In the one case, the damned cannot be said to be howling for it, since they are already in full and fearful possession of it; and in the (1) De Con. I. 2. c. 7. (2) Chap. 40-3. (3) Rev. xxi. 8. CANTO I. other, it were doubly improper to say they howl for it in vain, for they cannot have any reason to desire it, and, if they had such a desire, it would not be in vain; since come that Last Judgment will, and since their pangs shall be then increased, from their own increased capacities of suffering; as we shall have laid down expressly, by and by, in Canto VI. Nor is Buonanni's supposition tenable, that they deceive themselves and hope for that change, although it shall be worse for them; (1) that were to hold that hope is among the damned, whereas the very lines of Dante's own definition of their state declare that it admits of no hope Lasciate ogni speranza voi che'ntrate ! But that the God of vengeance should forget them, or that their souls should die as well as their bo dies, are, each, desires both natural and vain. Hope is that which distinguisheth a state of expiation, from one of utter ruin. This latter im-plies such ineffable misery that, if we did not know the contrary to be the fact, we might surmise that a doctrine so repugnant to human nature could never be long preserved except by that faith which is all-divine, and which might therefore (had it been the pleasure of the Divinity) ordain precepts (1) I dannati bramano la gran sentenza perchè sperano in questa mutazione di trovarsi meno male. Dis. sopra l'Inferno p. 64. |