The Virgin Mary, Christ, the actions and dramatic events of apostolic history, the saints with their penances and martyrdoms, are, it is true, even here individualities in the full sense; but Christendom is also to an equal extent concerned with the general conceptions of abstract spiritual qualities, such as will not comply with the concrete definition of actual persons inasmuch as the relation of _universality_ is precisely the mode under which they are presented, of which examples are Love, Faith, and Hope. And generally the truths and dogmas of Christendom are independently cognized by the religious consciousness, and a main interest even of their poetry consists in this that these doctrines are emphasized in their _universal_ aspect, that Truth is known and believed in as _universal_ truth. In that case, however, it is necessary that the concrete presentation should remain a subordinate factor, itself external to the content, and allegory is just the form which satisfies this want in the easiest and most sufficient way. Conformably to this the divine comedy of Dante is full of allegorical matter. Theology, for example, in this poem is run together in fusion with the image of his beloved lady Beatrice. This personification, however, wavers in the lines of its delineation; and this uncertainty of outline is that which constitutes the beauty of it, and places it halfway between genuine allegory and a vision of his youthful love. In the ninth year of his life he looked on her for the first time: she appeared to him no daughter of mortal men, but of God. His fiery Italian nature conceived a passion for her, which the years failed to extinguish. And conscious that it was she who awoke in him the genius of poetry he finally sets himself the task, after he had lost in her that which was most loved in the fairest flower of its promise, of composing that wonderful monument of the most intimate and personal religion of his heart in the poetic masterpiece of his life.
The _third_ sphere of content attached to the riddle and the allegory consists in the _imaged thing_ generally. The riddle veiled the still independently cognized significance and the mode of its shaping in cognate, albeit heterogeneous and distantly placed traits of definition was still of most importance. Allegory on the contrary emphasized the perspicuity of the significance so strongly as the predominant aim, that the personification and its attributes appear deposed to the rank of mere signs. The imaged thing now connects this clarity of allegorical expression with that impulse of the riddle to envisage the significance which stands out clearly before the mind in the form of an externality cognate with it; the result, however, is not that it gives rise to problems which have first of all to be solved, but rather that the imaged shape appears, by means of which the preconceived conception is revealed with absolute transparency, notifying itself as that which it really is.
