He probably composed it in the last decade of his life and chose Latin as a medium rather deliberately, I suspect, for discretion’s sake. It is certain, at any rate, that copies of it were sought out for burning by the Papacy some years after the author’s death, and it was among the first books placed on the Index. The Church, struggling to wrest from the enfeebled Empire its supremacy as a temporal power, had made it a matter of dogma that the emperors were as dependent on the popes as was the moon on the sun. The De Monarchia denied and denounced this position, affirming that the two powers were rather like two equal suns, each dependent only on God and designed to guide man toward his two goals: peace and happiness in this world and spiritual salvation in the next.

“To these states of blessedness, just as to diverse conclusions, man must come by diverse means. To the former we come by the teachings of philosophy ... in conformity with the moral and intellectual virtues; to the latter through spiritual teachings which transcend human reason ... in conformity with the theological virtues .... Now the former end and means are made known to us by human reason ... and the latter by the Holy Spirit .... Nevertheless, human passion would cast all these behind, were not men, like wild horses in their brutishness, held to the road by bit and rein.

“Wherefore a twofold directive agent was necessary to man in accordance with the twofold end: the Supreme Pontiff to lead the human race by means of revelation, and the Emperor to guide it to temporal felicity by means of philosophic education.”

Failure of the two guides to cooperate prevented peace and bred injustice. Part of the blame rested on the Empire for neglecting its duties, but the larger share fell on the Papacy. In its greed for temporal power, which Dante believed rooted in the ill-conceived “Donation of Constantine,” it not only deprived mankind of a strong civil government but neglected its proper task of spiritual guidance, so that most men were damned not only in this life but in the life to come. Dante’s ideas have long been ridiculed as quixotic, yet history has seen a Declaration affirming man’s right to “the pursuit of happiness,” the separation of Church and State, education secularized and rendered accessible to the public, while to many today the idea of peace and justice through a world government seems not so much chimerical as indispensable.

Whatever fate might have befallen the De Monarchia would have mattered little, for its essential thesis was preserved in the enduring beauty of the Divine Comedy, interwoven with the other themes, expressed at times openly, at other times merely implicit in the structure. For the same reason it was unimportant that the Banquet lay unfinished, for all the erudition Dante had planned to present in that indigestible work found much nobler, more convincing expression in the poetry of the Comedy. Even the beautiful little youthful work, the Vita Nuova, found itself continued and sublimated on the slopes and summit of Purgatory, where Beatrice reappears in womanly glory first to confront and then to guide her lover. For one of the marvels of this great poem is the way in which all of Dante’s learning, his speculations, observations and experiences were blended together in its intricate fabric.

The poem’s complex structure is itself a marvelous thing. Before we examine it briefly we should, however, remember that Dante lived in a Catholic world or, rather, universe, in which every slightest thing was encompassed in the will and knowledge of an omnipotent and omniscient Deity and that the supreme attribute of that Deity was the mystery of His Trinity and Unity. Evidences of that mystery were sought and found everywhere and such numerical symbolism was not as today comical abracadabra but a serious and even sacred matter.

Now let us look at the Comedy. It is made up of three nearly equal parts which are distinct yet carefully interrelated to form a unified whole. Each part moreover is the expression of one Person of the Trinity: Inferno, the Power of the Father, Purgatory, the Wisdom of the Son, Paradise, the Love of the Holy Spirit. Each part, or cdntica, contains 33 cantos for a total of 99. If we add the first, introductory, canto we obtain a grand total of 100 which is the square of 10; 10 is the perfect number, for it is composed solely o: the square of the Trinity plus i which represents the Unity of God. Even the rhyme scheme itself is the terza rima or “third rhyme” which Dante invented for his purpose. There are other symmetries and correspondences, but this should suffice to demonstrate that Dante planned his own creation in as close an imitation of a divinely created and controlled universe as was possible to the mind of man. Almost literally nothing was left to chance.

We today are more than inclined to despise such concern with what seem to us trifles, externals, Victorian gingerbread, because we are convinced that the mind preoccupied with them cannot have much of importance to say. In our utilitarian scorn we are in danger of forgetting that a certain preoccupation with form (and even today’s straight line betrays such a preoccupation) is essential to beauty. In the Divine Comedy we must remember that Dante had for his subject the whole world, the entire universe, all of man’s history, his learning, his beliefs, plus his own particular messages. To him preoccupation with form was not extrinsic, not a luxury; it was his salvation. As Mr. Gilbert Highet points out, it is this that sets Dante apart from his contemporaries, this was the great lesson he had learned from his master and author, Virgil. The medieval digressions which infest the Banquet have been eliminated by the “fren dell’arte.” I doubt whether there is another work of this size which is so economical in its use of words. The reader always has, as Mr.