his life but his great poem radiates the spirit and doctrine of the
Church. Hettinger says of Dante: "In truth he anticipated the most
pregnant developments of Catholic doctrine, mastered its subtlest
distinctions and treated its hardest problems with almost faultless
accuracy. Were all the libraries in the world destroyed and the Sacred
Scripture with them, the whole Catholic system of doctrine and morals
might be almost reconstructed out of the Divina Commedia."

Intensity, indeed, is the characteristic of Dante's spiritual life. In
bringing that quality to his faith and religious practice he was only
manifesting the operation of the dominating quality which regulated his
whole life and shaped all his mental and emotional habits. The realm of
his thought and feeling was truly the land of the strenuous life. Having
once set out to say of Beatrice what had never been said of any woman,
Dante applied himself to his prodigious task with a consistency of
purpose that was unmoved by persecution and unshaken by time. In all
the years that he spent in the composition of the Divina Commedia there
was no flagging of interest, no indication of weakness. No one ever
applied himself with more complete absorption or with greater power
of unfaltering concentration, just as no one ever felt more deeply
the outrageous arrows of fortune or the transcendent supremacy of love.
It is precisely because of this intensity that his thoughts and feelings
affect us so profoundly six centuries later.

Intense in his own life Dante had no sympathy with slackers or the
lukewarm whom he characterizes as never having been alive, i.e. of never
having awakened to responsibility to take part in good or evil. As a
consequence they never contributed anything to society. Because in this
life they shifted from one side to another, they are now depicted
running perpetually after an aimlessly dodging banner. Here is the