For the _Divina Commedia_ ranges beyond the lyric exaltation of the individual poet. It is suffused with social sense, as constantly aware as the _Piers Plowman_ of the “fair field full of folk,” of the world of striving men and women. Its vision begins with society gone bad and frustrating itself; it arrives at society perfectly realized as immediate intercommunion and interaction. So the Church, the heavenly society, recurs constantly in communal echoes of hymns and canticles: _Ave_, _Agnus Dei_, _Benedictus qui venit_, _Salve Regina_. In the same spirit Cynewulf had composed his _Christ_ upon the seven great antiphons of Advent.[18] Familiar gospels are recalled. Most frequent echoes, as of symbols most suggestive of common human experience, are of the Psalms.[19] The artistic harmony is based upon the medieval conception of social history as the redemption of mankind. The word allegory has come to suggest vagueness, or conventionalization, or fancy. None of these has any place in the _Divina Commedia_. Allegorical, indeed, it may be called in a sense large enough to include _Piers Plowman_, the _Faerie Queene_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_; but no other allegory is so large in scope, so consistent and complete in composition. For such details as the sacred chariot, the eagle, wolf, and dragon (II. xxxii) we search the carved capitals and the windows; but including all these and ranging beyond them is the constant interpretation of the whole sensible, transitory world as typical of the eternal. Ephemeral matters, politics, even quarrels and grudges (I. xvi. 73), are interpreted permanently. The intensely specific realism is made constantly to serve idealization. Human life is revealed _sub specie æternitatis_. For life beyond is seen as the prolongation of the line that we give to life here and now. Its motive power throughout is love radiating from God and leading men back to him. The disturbance of life is sin. The horror of the _Inferno_ is of sin as perversion. The warpings of life there tormenting Italians or ancients are typical to the fearsome degree of revealing our own. Thus the course of the _Divina Commedia_ is of ideas and principles of action so embodied as to lead emotion on. What is familiar in lyric is here carried through a whole conception of life. Theology is translated through vision into emotion and will, as if lyric were carried through into drama. Thus the persons are typical, not merely as wearing recognizable costumes and uttering appropriate sentiments, but more intensely as acting in our drama. The thieves transformed into serpents, which in turn absorb them (I. xxv), are thus akin artistically to the sculpture of medieval capitals. They are not pictorial imitation of the other arts, as are the conventional descriptive pauses of the _Roman de la Rose_ and the _poetriæ_; for they are narrated. There is no ecphrasis.[20] The method is never static. The speaking flames move.