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About Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) (4) :
When a century had passed after Dante's death, Florence began to be ashamed of the injustice it had done him. In 1429 the Florentines applied to Ravenna for his remains, and again in the sixteenth century, but without success. The city which exiled him when living has never held his bones.
Florence was obliged to satisfy itself with the empty honor of raising a monument to Dante in the church of Santa Croce, which was opened to the public in 1830.
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The Divina Commedia exemplifies Dante's-- and, indeed, the Christian-- idea of the genesis and development of good and evil.
The Inferno, which is presented to the reader from the text of Dante's greatest translator, treats of the corruption of the will. It teaches that the germ of all sin lies in the substitution of self for God; the various punishments to which the different sinners are subjected are but external symbols of many phases of sinful self-consciousness.
Man is free, and himself holds the measures of his doom: each soul creates for itself its own hell by allying itself with sin. This teaching of the old mystic is directly opposed to the materialistic thought of our day, and to that of many of our modern poets of Goethe, for instance, whose Faust allies himself with the incarnation of sin and makes the devil the instrument of his salvation.
Dante's teaching will, however, be found to accord with that of One greater than Goethe who came "to take away the sin of the world," not to nourish it as an instrument of man's salvation. Christ, when tempted by Satan and offered the good of the world, rejected his alliance and put the evil tempter to flight.
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