III. DANTE
BY PROFESSOR CHARLES HALL GRANDGENT
DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321) is rightly called the supreme exponent of the Middle Ages. In no other writer, ancient or modern, do we find the spirit of a great period so completely reflected as the mediæval soul is mirrored in him. It was the epoch of mighty builders and mighty theologians, of religious exaltation, of sturdy, militant faith—the age that produced the grand cathedrals and the “Summa Theologiæ,” the age of the Crusades, of St. Bernard and St. Dominic, the age of St. Francis. So essentially is Dante a poet of God that the epithet “Divine” has by universal consent been attached to the work which he called a “Comedy”; and so manifest is his architectural genius that his poem inevitably suggests comparison with a huge Gothic church. The troops of figures that live eternally in his pages, representing all types of contemporary man from burgher to Pope, diversify without obscuring the symmetrical outlines of his plan—a plan sufficiently vast to embrace nearly all that was of much importance in profane and sacred science.