Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MYSTIC VISION IN THE DIVINE COMEDY Jesu, quern velatum minc aspicio, Oro, fiat illud quod tarn sitio Ut, te revelata cernens facie, Visu aim beatus tuae gloria;. — Thomas Aquinas THE MYSTIC VISION IN THE DIVINE COMEDY When we come to the consideration of the eucharistic influence in the Divine Comedy we are conscious of a very different atmosphere from that of the Grail romances, and the difference is not merely a matter of literary expression, but also of devotional mood. The romantic treatment is not only chronologically much nearer the first emphatically material statements of transubstantiation, but it represents the secular reaction to them; it records popular piety with its crudely literal acceptance of the miracle and its occasional glimpse of the spiritual thing. The romance writers, though they might possess a saving acquaintance with the teaching of the church, cannot be supposed to have either known or cared much about the arguments which supported any article of faith. If we find theological propositions here and there we are likely to consider them traces of a monkish original, or to suspect that they were inserted at the request of an ecclesiastical patron. But Dante is not only a conscious literary artist, accepting or rejecting material as it is or is not adapted to his highly organized and carefully balanced structure, but an expert theologian as well, incapable of treating casually or crudely any part of the divine science. Moreover, theological discourse itself had undergone changes in the course of a century, and the schoolmen, by formulating and emphasizing the distinction between substance and accidents, had done much to modify the startling materialism of the earlier statements of transubstantiation, explaining that though the "substance,...