Dante and St. Louis

The various commentators who have followed every step of Dante’s journeys through either what we call the true “ cammin di nostra vita,” or what to him was truer yet, the road to the city of woe, the mount of cleansing, and the orbs of bliss, seem to take little or no note of one most undisguised trait in the man — his malignity. No weaker word will answer. Sternness, severity, a strict sense of God’s justice, are not adequate terms for the fierce delight with which he consigns this enemy and that friend to one or another torture, equally with the men and women of history whom he never saw, and of mythology, who never existed. He consigns to the self-same rain of fire Capaneus, whose only offense was blasphemy against a false god, for which Isaiah would have blessed him, and his own beloved master, whose crime he would have buried in eternal silence, if he really knew of its existence. Such hard-heartedness has not passed wholly without comment ; but there is one instance of Dante’s insensibility to the right, when his own enmities stood in the way, that I have never seen mentioned.

In his childhood, all Europe was ringing with the death of Louis IX., King of France, the leader of the sixth and seventh crusades ; his virtues in every public and private relation of life were so conspicuous that he was canonized within thirty years of his death, and will never be known by any other name than St. Louis. By every conceivable title which Dante recognizes, he should have been admitted into that paradise where Dante’s utterly unknown ancestor Cacciaguida blazes in the cross of Mars, with other armed champions of the church, or higher yet, where Rhipeus, existing only by the fiction of two lines of Virgil, gleams among just monarchs in the eagle of Jove. But St. Louis was King of France ; the Pope, who canonized him, was outraged by his grandson Philip the Fair, the same who transported the papal see to Avignon, under Clement V. For this Babylonish captivity, this outrage on Christ’s vicar by a French monarch, Dante has no terms too severe ; half a canto of Purgatorio is devoted to the exposition of its naked horrors ; and apparently for no other reason but his hatred to the grandson, Dante leaves without mention the memory of a man who came up to the very highest standard, religious, moral and political, known to his own age, and who scarcely deserves a different reputation, judged by the entirely different standard of our own age ; one whom the poet must have heard named forty times a year for every once he heard of some of his pet heroes and villains to whom he distributes eternal suffering and eternal happiness with such complacent partiality.