Dominic of Dante

Extract

In the popular mind Poetry is synonymous with anything but exact and definite truth. ‘People,’ says Thomas MacDonagh, ‘simply refuse to take words in Poetry at their face value.’ And when we find that Dante, in his great poem the Divina Corn-media, has painted for St. Dominic a character almost mythically splendid, one cannot wonder that the picture is often considered with a little incredulity, until the perfection of the original has been gauged by the standards at one’s disposal—that is, principally, by the Chronicles of St. Dominic’s life. Measured by these standards, however, Dante’s picture of the Saint does not lose any of that brightness with which it has been painted by the Poet; on the contrary, one finds that he has limned it with such exquisite fidelity that one is inclined to postulate for him a connection with the Order even closer than that claimed for him by his Dominican admirers. Dante’s appreciation of Dominic is to be found chiefly in Canto XII of the Paradiso, where he naturally begins by describing the birthplace, the coming and the infancy of the Saint, whose soul was