THE ESOTERISM OF DANTE
initiatic and not religious, but which had their roots in Catholicism. If Dante belonged to some of these organisations, which seems to us indisputable, this is not a reason to declare him a "heretic"; those who think so evince a false or incomplete idea of the Middle Ages: they only see, so to speak, the outer aspect of things, because ultimately, for all other aspects, terms of comparison are no longer to be found in the modern world.
Such being the real character of all initiatic organisations, there are only two cases where an accusation of "heresy" might with apparent justification be leveled at some of them (or at least at some of their members), and in both cases the charge is connected with disclosing matters-very real ones-that were never meant to be expressed openly, and that must occasion great scandal if they are. In the first case certain initiates indulge in inopportune disclosures, risking a disturbance in minds as yet unprepared for knowledge of higher truths, and so provoking disorder at the social level. The authors of such disclosures err in encouraging a confusion of the esoteric and the exoteric, a confusion that sufficiently justifies the reproach of heresy. This situation has arisen on a number of occasions in Islam [6], where the esoteric schools do not however normally encounter any hostility at the hand of the religious and judicial authorities representing exoterism. In the second case, the same accusation is simply taken as a pretext by a political power to destroy adversaries thought all the more formidable for being so difficult to reach by ordinary means. The destruction of the Order of the Temple [7] is the most celebrated
instance of this type, and this event has a direct connection with the subject of the present study.