United States or Pitcairn Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's entire and absolute dependence on the divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue is to submit his will to theirs: In la sua volontade è nostra pace.
And as regards temporal power she adds perhaps borrowing the idea from Dante’s De Monarchia, and anticipating Napoleon’s dream that in order to ensure peace on earth, it is necessary that one supreme ruler should reign over the whole world. “La sua volontade e nostra pace,” sang a soul in Dante’s heaven of the Moon the lowest in the celestial system when questioned whether it was content with its lowly place.
take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil "Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange, Nè fiamma d'esto incendio non m'assale ..." take the simple, but perfect, single line "In la sua volontade è nostra pace." Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth's expostulation with sleep
And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer, Dante. The accent of such verse as "In la sua volontade è nostra pace ..."
The accent of high seriousness, born of absolute sincerity, is what gives to such verse as "In la sua volontade è nostra pace..." to such criticism of life as Dante's, its power. Is this accent felt in the passages which I have been quoting from Burns?
Word Of The Day