It is particularly in our own age and in recent years that the Florentine poet has become a favourite subject of study and meditation. 'Dante', M. de Lamartine has said, 'appears to be the poet of our time; for each age adopts and rejuvenates in turn one of those immortal geniuses who are also men bound by circumstance; it sees itself reflected in them, finds in them its own image, and thus betrays its nature by its predilections.'1 These words are true only up to a point. If Dante appears to be the poet of our time, it is certainly not because of the solutions which he gives, but rather

because of the questions which he raises. We share his anxiety, we are indifferent to his system. We listen to him as the harmonious echo of our own sufferings, we remain deaf to his voice as a legislator of the world and organizer of humanity. Who among us believes in the universal Monarchy as it was imagined by the ardent spirit of the great Ghibelline? Who is in the least bothered now about agreement between St Thomas and Aristotle, or St Bonaventure and Plato? Is scholasticism for us, as it was for Dante, a faith and a law? It is at most a question of history, a subject of curiosity for a few serious scholars or for others who pretend to be. Which of us would choose to live in a world like that created by the poet's ideal, under the sway of two swords balancing each other and both threatening our freedom of action and our freedom of thought? Would we not be right to prefer even the state of the world as it is at present, this state which is yet very similar to the first circle of Dante's Hell ('primo cerchio, che l'abisso eigne'), where, like all those 'who did not possess enough merit and did not adore God as they should' we are condemned 'to live in desire without hope.. .'?2 Once again, it is not an organizing principle, a directorium vitae as they said in the Middle Ages, that we look for in the great religious epic of the fourteenth century. We seek only the image of our own anguish, a flattering image perhaps, but one full of similarity. Dante lived in an age of transition and dissolution like our own. He stood on the brink of a new future which he apprehended, which he wished to shape in the way that he would like and according to his ideal, and which he scarcely understood We too stand on the brink of a new future of which, like him, we have some sense, which we, like him, would like to construct according to our ideas and our systems, and which, like him, we are perhaps a long way from understanding That is why Dante is the poet of our age. We are not concerned with his ideal, but we share his idealizing. We dream of a different 'Monarchy', but we see the same spectacle, the eternal comedy, which perhaps posterity will call divine, as it called that of Dante, but which to us still seems less than human The philosopher who organized a world according to the categories of Aristotle and St Thomas is but a simple curiosity for us; the man who damned his times and foretold the fall of Nineveh is a moving subject for us to meditate upon. The martyr's cause is extraneous to us, but our heart hangs bleeding on the thorns of his crown. It is not a common interest

that joins us, it is only a common suffering; but-let this be said to the honour of our nature - the ties of a shared pain are sometimes as strong as those of a shared interest And that is why we love Dante.