Dante and the Renaissance 195
the day just before. The very souls in Purgatory, accord-
ing to his poem, observe the church ritual which to him was
part of the unchanging order of the universe. That church,
at the very moment of his writing, was shaken to its founda-
tions, never again to be the all-inclusive spiritual power
whereof he dreamed. At the time when his Vision came to
him, Boniface VIII was celebrating at Rome the greatest
jubilee the Eternal City had ever witnessed; but within a
few years the papacy was subjected to the degrading “Cap-
tivity of Babylon”; the Pontiff was the tool of the French
king. Then followed the long scandal of schism—two and
three Popes hurling anathema at each other’s heads.
Hardly was unity restored when the seamless garment was
rent once more by the hands of Luther. The church is
eternal; but the unity to which the Middle Ages so pas-
sionately aspired, and which was the key of Dante’s thought,
was shattered for centuries, and, as far as we are able to
foretell, forever. His theology harks back to the magnifi-
cent achievement of the greatest of schoolmen, Thomas
Aquinas. But scholasticism had already reared too high its
dizzy fabric on the slender basis of Aristotelian logic: with
Duns Scotus, Dante’s contemporary, it was already top-
pling down into the inane. The once great names were
soon to be turned into terms of reproach : the Most Subtle
Doctor enriched our vocabulary with the word Dunce;
scholasticism was to become synonymous with “intermi-
nable and pedantic disputations about points remote from
any spiritual or material reality—a logical mill grinding
naught.” Already Roger Bacon had sounded his sharp
note, heralding the morn.
Dante’s political dream was no less obsolete. The days
of the Ottos, the Henrys, the Fredericks, were gone never to
return. No genuine Cæsar was to come at his passionate