the propagation of the faith among the heathen—all these are proofs of the primarily pedagogical and moralizing purpose of the church. The church was the teacher of the world, and in Christ the church saw primarily the teacher of moral and eternal truths.
Dante, on the other hand, had in mind a part of the doctrine of Christ to which the Popes had given relatively slight importance: the idea of the Last Judgment. God is not only the God who enlightens and saves mankind, but the God who, on a terrible distant day, will judge the quick and the dead. The idea of the Last Judgment, so tragically expressed throughout the Middle Ages in hymns, in mosaic, and in painting, had not been hitherto associated with the idea of the Papacy.
Dante, aware that God is not only a teacher but a judge, and believing it necessary that God should have a vicar on earth, chose to represent Him rather as judge than as teacher. In this intent he conceived the Divine Comedy, which is, in fact, an anticipatory Last Judgment.
Dante knows that the world has not come to an end, that the roll of the dead is not yet complete; but he takes all peoples, all generations, from the Hebrew patriarchs to the leaders of his own day, and distributes them in the three realms even as God would have done. He takes the
