THE YEAR I WORKED FOR A newspaper in Buenos Aires, in my early twenties, I was sent into the countryside to interview a priest, Domingo Jaca Cortejarena, of the parish of Mones Cazón, who had translated the nineteenth-century Argentine national poem Martín Fierro, by José Hernández, into Basque under the title Matxin Burdín. He was a small, fat, smiling man who had come to Argentina in the late thirties and had entered orders during his exile. Out of gratitude towards the country that had welcomed him, he had decided to undertake the translation, but his passion, like that of the elderly Sherlock Holmes, was beekeeping. Twice during our interview he excused himself and went towards the hives that sat in humming rows under the jacaranda trees, and there he performed certain rituals which I didn’t understand. He spoke to the bees in Basque. When he answered my questions in Spanish, he gestured vehemently; with the bees his movements were gentle and also his voice. He said that their humming reminded him of falling water. He seemed utterly unafraid of being stung. “When you collect the honey,” he explained, “you must always leave some for the hive. Industrial collectors don’t do that, and the bees resent it and become avaricious. Bees respond to generosity with generosity.” He was worried because many of his bees were dying, and he accused the neighboring farmers of using pesticides that were killing not only the bees but also the songbirds. It was he who told me that when a beekeeper dies, someone must go tell the bees that their keeper is dead. Since then I’ve wished that when I die someone will do the same for me, and tell my books that I will not come back.
Walking through his untidy garden (he said he liked weeds), the little priest observed that Hernández had committed a curious error in his poem. Martín Fierro is the story of a gaucho who deserts the army after being forcibly conscripted. He is hunted down by a sergeant who, after having him surrounded and seeing that Fierro will fight alone to the death, says he will not allow a brave man to be killed, and, turning against his own soldiers, allies himself with the deserter. The priest said that in the poem the gauchos give a description of the land and the sky, and this is the mistake: that was something city people did, not men of the country, for whom the landscape was unremarkable because it was simply there. Hernández, a city intellectual, would have been curious about the natural surroundings; the gaucho Martín Fierro would not.
I was taught in school that the model for Hernández’s bucolic interests was Virgil, whose landscapes were not those of the Po valley of his youth (as Peter Levi has observed) but a much more deliberately artificial picture of amorous shepherds and beekeepers inherited perhaps from Theocritus. Virgil was the preferred classical author in the schools of the Spanish colonies, along with Cicero; Hernández would not have studied Greek, a culture neglected in Catholic countries because of its uncomfortable proximity to that of the scholars of the Reformation. In spite of the bucolic convention, Virgil’s woods, streams, and glades are conceivable as authentic landscapes, and his advice about beekeeping and farming is, I am told, perfectly sound. Hernández prefers to eliminate any sense of artificiality, and in spite of lending his gauchos philosophical ruminations and invocations to all the saints (as Virgil invoked Apollo and the Muses), he manages to ground his characters in a believable place. Martín Fierro’s pampas are immediately recognizable: the vastness, the sudden appearance of a hut or a tree, the endless horizon, which the French writer Drieu La Rochelle described as inducing “horizontal vertigo.” If Hernández fell into the mistake my Basque priest pointed out, it was because he must have felt, like La Rochelle, an outsider, a city dweller for whom it was impossible to stand in these empty spaces under an uninterrupted sky without being overcome by the whirling immensity. When Martín Fierro, in his loneliness, stares up at the stars, he sees them as a mirror of his emotions:
It’s sad, in the open countryside
To spend night after night
Gazing up at the slow courses
Of the stars that God created,
Without any other company
Than one’s loneliness and the wild beasts.
The observer is human, and the landscape he observes becomes contaminated with human aspirations and regrets: the underlying question is “What am I doing here?” In classical bucolic poetry, the landscape mirrors the nostalgia for a blissful Golden Age invented perhaps by the Greeks; in Hernández, the nostalgia is, of course, a literary conceit, but it is also historically true. When Hernández has his hero say the following lines, he is describing not a wishful magical age but the memory of Fierro’s own life, or what he felt his life was before the army hauled him away:
I have known this land
Where the peasant lived
And where he had his home
And his children and wife . . .
It was such pleasure to see
How he spent day after day.
The word gaucho, used as an insult by the Spanish colonists towards the locals, was adopted with pride by those who fought against the Spanish crown, but soon after independence the word relapsed into its pejorative connotation to label those who lived off the land without attempting to congregate in cities. A gaucho was seen by the urban dwellers as a barbarian who refused civilization, as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento made clear in the title of his classic Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Superb horsemen and herders, settling wherever they chose, far away from the sprawling metropolis, the gauchos lived off small crops and stray cattle, and worked occasionally as hired hands for the wealthy hacendados who had bought or had been given titles to vast extensions of virgin land. Obligatory conscription, expropriation of their homes by the government, and the increasingly frequent incursions of native raiders changed all that, and Martín Fierro incarnated the change. The pampas were no longer an open space where anyone could live without benefit of deed of sale or real estate contract: it had now become, for the gauchos, an alien place that allowed no roots except to those who claimed to have bought it and felt entitled to exploit it. For the gaucho, he and the land were vitally entwined, and what affected the one affected the other; for the landowners, the land was property, to be used as effectively as possible in order to extract the greatest economic profit. “What do you think we’re doing here on this earth?” my priest asked, without expecting an answer. “All I know is that whatever it is we’re doing, the bees are dying.”
Vladimir: What are we doing here? That is the question.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, Waiting for Godot, act 2
Two planes of existence are explicit in all three of Dante’s realms, that of reality and that of reflection on that reality. Dante’s landscapes, as well as the souls he encounters in them, are simultaneously real and imaginary. No detail in the Commedia is arbitrary: the reader retraces Dante’s voyage following the path Dante followed and seeing the things he saw. Darkness and light, smells and sounds, rock formations, rivers, water that falls with the sound of humming bees (as my Basque priest had remarked), open spaces and chasms, crags and hollows carefully constitute the worlds beyond the world. Or, rather, the first two: in Heaven there are sensible presences but no tangible geography, since in Heaven there is no time and no space.
Three main woods grow in the Commedia: the dark forest from which Dante emerges before the encounter with Virgil, the awful Wood of Suicides in Canto XIII of the Inferno, and the Garden of Eden on the summit of Mount Purgatory. Heaven is devoid of vegetation, except for the monstrous rose that congregates the souls in the Empyrean. All three forests exist in relation to their inhabitants: they are defined by that which takes place under their boughs, as settings for the story. As always in Dante, our actions determine our geography.
John Ruskin, commenting on the discovery of what he calls “the laws of beauty” in the thirteenth century, remarks that “these discoveries of ultimate truth are, I believe, never made philosophically, but instinctively.” No doubt a vast library of learning underpins the Commedia, but as Ruskin rightly warns us, not every detail can be the result of a scholarly process: the total creation is too precise to have been consciously justified word by word. “Milton’s effort,” Ruskin notes, “in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante’s, to make it definite.” For this reason, Ruskin says, upon reaching the Garden of Eden after daring to cross the purgatorial wall of flames, Dante enters a lovingly described “dense wood” which reminds the reader of the “dark forest” of the poem’s beginning. And the “pathlessness of the wood, the most dreadful thing possible to him in his days of sin and shortcoming, is now a joy to him in his days of purity. And as the fencelessness and thicket of sin led to the fettered and fearful order of eternal punishment, so the fencelessness and thicket of the free virtue lead to the loving and constellated order of eternal happiness.”1
An even more poignant example is given at the Wood of Suicides. After being guided by the centaur Nessus across the River of Blood in which those guilty of murder are punished, Dante and Virgil reach a gloomy wood where, again, no path is visible. This wood is made of negatives, punctuated by a hail of nos that begin each of the first three tercets of the canto, and all the verses of the second. This is a place where being itself is denied.
No, Nessus had not yet returned
When we moved deep into a wood
That was not marked by any path.
No green foliage, but of a murky hue,
No smooth branches, but all knotted and warped,
No apples were there, but dry and poisoned twigs.
No undergrowth so rough and thick
Have the wild beasts that loathe the farmer’s plots
Between Cecina and the Cornetto.
Upon these ghastly thorny trees the Harpies make their nests. These monstrous creatures of wide wings and human necks and faces, with feet like claws and feathered bellies, endlessly utter woeful shrieks that announce the sorrows to come.2
Before advancing farther, Virgil tells Dante that they are now in the second cornice of the seventh circle and instructs him to pay attention so as to see “things that will strip away belief from my speech” because in this place of shadows speech is disembodied: Dante hears wailings but sees no one, and he wonders whether there are souls hiding in the undergrowth. To dispel his doubts, Virgil instructs him to break off a small shoot from one of the trees around him. Dante obeys, and the tree cries out in pain, “Why do you rend me?” From the stump, dark blood begins to flow.
It said again: “Why do you tear me?
Have you no single breath of pity?
“Men we were, and now we’re become stumps:
Truly your hand should have been more merciful
If we had been the very souls of snakes.”
As Dante steps back in horror, blood and words gush out together from the broken splint. In the Aeneid, Virgil had described how Aeneas, after leaving the coast of Troy, seeking to honor his mother, Venus, and the other gods with a sacrifice, tears up cornel bushes and myrtle to deck the altar. Suddenly, he sees with amazement that the stumps begin to ooze drops of black blood, and a voice from below the ground tells him that this is the tomb of Polydorus, treacherously killed by the Thracian king to whom his father, Priam, had entrusted him.3 Virgil, realizing that Dante has forgotten this episode from his epic (on the imaginary plane), has thought it necessary to prove to him empirically the prodigious fact that trees can bleed (on the plane of factual reality). Doing so, Virgil reminds Dante that both planes are necessary to experience existence fully.
However, “to make amends,” Virgil now asks the wounded spirit to say who he is so that Dante might later restore his fame in the world of the living. (Throughout Hell, Virgil, whose own fame on earth is assured, assumes that the dead care about what the living think of them.) The weeping tree proves to be the politician and poet Pier delle Vigne, chancellor of the Two Sicilies and minister to Frederick II, the emperor who so disastrously conducted linguistic experiments with children. Delle Vigne committed suicide after being falsely accused of treachery, and is now punished because his soul, thinking it could escape shame through death, “made me unjust against my just self.”4
The trees can speak only as long as their blood flows. Having had no pity on themselves, they now beg it of Dante, and seeing them Dante feels a pity as strong as the one he felt only once before in this pitiless realm, after hearing Francesca’s story in the circle of the lustful. Since pity is always in some measure pity for oneself, Dante the poet, throughout his own painful exile, may have considered the possibility of suicide and rejected it. Certainly the question of suicide was for him a troubled one. Within the dogma of the Catholic Church, suicide was clearly a sin committed against the body as temple of the soul. Saint Augustine had reduced suicide to a simple equivalence to murder, forbidden in the Sixth Commandment: “It remains that we take the command ‘You shall not kill’ as applying to human beings, that is, other persons and oneself. For to kill oneself is to kill a human being.”5 But among Augustine’s (and Dante’s) beloved pagan authors, suicide was often considered a noble and honorable act.
In a profound meditation on this episode, Olga Sedakova asks what Pier della Vigne means when he says, “men we were,” and suggests that to be human is to be heard, to be able to speak. “Man is first and foremost a message, a sign,” she writes. But what sign? Certainly one that links blood with language, suffering with the need to express the suffering in words. This is perhaps why, taking Sedakova’s remarks a step farther, we could say that, considering the ancient metaphor of the world as book, the writing in nature’s book mirrors both human suffering and the suffering inflicted by humans upon nature. Suffering, whether of a human being or of the earth itself, must be translated into words of revolt, repentance, or prayer. (Some years ago, a poster in British Columbia depicted a landscape devastated by clear-cutting overlaid with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers,” equating the land with Caesar’s butchered body.) Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, remarks that after the expulsion from Eden, every human being begins a life of suffering uttering a word that denotes pain: “Ahi!”6
Sedakova believes that for Dante life and violence are two absolute opposites, and violence, in every sense, belongs to the realm of death. If this is true, then we can argue that when violence erupts in life, it translates the vital, creative human vocabulary into one that denotes its shadow side, the loss of what has been granted us. And since in the Commedia language constructs the landscape where all action takes place, the intrusion of violent language transforms that landscape into something deadly, a sterile forest fit for the Harpies. In the ancient world, the Harpies embodied dead souls intent on despoiling the souls of the living.7 Consequently, if violence to the self robs the sinner of his or her own being and transforms the suicide into a tongue-tied and fruitless tree that can only express itself through blood, then violence to nature, the deliberate act of creating such a forest, might be seen as a form of collective suicide that kills the world of which we are part by turning the living ground into a wasteland.
From the time of the earliest Neolithic farmers, our relationship with nature has been an increasingly troubled one, as we have responded in contradictory ways to the question of how to benefit from the fruits of the earth without rendering it sterile. Throughout our histories, practical strategies for plowing, sowing, and reaping, irrigating and fertilizing, protecting crops from pests and storing food for times of need run parallel with poetical imaginings of nature as the Great Mother.
In the ancient world, noted Ruskin, forests were considered “sources of wealth and places of shelter,” sacred, haunted sites that were by and large benevolent towards humans.8 In the Middle Ages, this vision changed and was reimagined as a dichotomy: the countryside was now seen either as dangerous, the demonic shadow of the civilized city, or as a place of ascetic cleansing, opposed to the vices of Babylon. It was depicted both as a savage place of refuge for criminals and wild beasts, outlawed sects and unspeakable practices, and as a paradisiacal realm, home to a lost Golden Age, a sanctuary from the sordid business of everyday life. This dichotomy was reflected in the visual arts. In the early Middle Ages, many artists, concerned with obeying as far as possible the tenets of faith and the requirements of portraiture, gradually abandoned certain mundane genres popular in Hellenistic Rome such as decorative landscape painting and turned to allegorical scenes and biblical stories, with depictions of daily life appearing as background. Dante himself, a keen observer of the cycles and changes in nature and knowledgeable about the techniques of agriculture and animal husbandry, describes the landscapes through which he passes in startling detail: they are stages for human events and examples of the inspired creation of the godhead. Whether in the gloom of Hell, where the whiteness of the naked bodies reveals with excruciating clarity their torments, or in the earthly Purgatory, with its dawn, dusk, dark night, and brilliant sunlight illuminating or shading the painful ascent of souls, the landscapes Dante describes are both intensely real and deeply symbolic, form and meaning revealing each other throughout the journey.
For Dante, all possible wisdom, all knowledge of one’s own being, all intuition of God’s will is made explicit in nature itself, in the stones and stars, “when divine love / first set in motion these lovely things.” The experience of nature is the experience of God’s hand in the world, and knowing how to interact with all other living things is a way of recognizing our own place in the cosmos. What we do to ourselves, we do to the world; therefore, following Dante’s method of contrapasso, what we do to the world, we do to ourselves.9 Dante’s moods and doubts, fears and revelations are echoed in the everyday life of the landscapes he crosses; the broken rocks of Malebolge, the agonized trees of the Wood of Suicides and the exultant vegetation in Matilda’s grove, the burning sands of the seventh circle of Hell, and the breeze-swept meadow of Eden affect Dante in body and in spirit.
Virgil too understood the complexity of our relationship to nature, and how our behavior determines nature’s fate and our own. Virgil had lost his family farm after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C.E., but his farming experience is evident throughout the Georgics, which could be read as an agricultural manual in verse. Describing the pests and weeds that attack the crops, for example, Virgil admonishes the farmer: “Therefore, unless time and again your hoe assail the weeds, your voice affright the birds, your knife check the shade of the darkened land, and your vows invoke the rain, vainly, alas! will you eye your neighbour’s big store, and in the woods shake the oak to solace hunger.”10
Virgil’s views harked back to those of ancient Greece, where two ideas prevailed regarding the responsibility of humans towards the natural world. One, proclaimed by the followers of Pythagoras for instance, maintained that trees had souls. In the third century C.E., the philosopher Porphyry wrote: “Why should the slaughter of an ox or sheep be a greater wrong than the felling of a fir or oak, seeing that the soul is implanted in trees also?” The other, following Aristotle, taught that animals and plants existed solely to serve humankind. Echoing Aristotle’s judgment, Pliny the Elder, in the first century C.E., pronounced: “It is for the sake of their timber that Nature has created . . . the trees.”11
In the mid-second century B.C.E. in Rome, it became clear that the peasant families who had long cultivated their small plots were being forced out by powerful landowners, who employed slaves for investment farming. In order to revive the traditional agricultural mentality, in 133, the Gracchi brothers, then serving as tribunes, set up laws to control land reform. At the same time, agricultural manuals became popular throughout the Roman republic: a few were translations, such as that of the Carthaginian Mago, while others were original works by Cato, Columella, and Varro. Later, the emperor Augustus encouraged poets to take on agricultural themes so as to foster the notion that farming in the traditional way was a Roman gentleman’s true occupation. Whether giving practical advice on how to farm, reworking the myths of nature, or comparing the delights of country life with the arduous business of the city, the Latin poets adopted the theme, and echoes of their work persisted for centuries.12
Not much documentation has come down to us regarding the development of agricultural methods in the Middle Ages. In places where two-field rotation was used, more labor and irrigation were required than in ancient Greece and Rome, and this led to the invention of more efficient instruments. The Arab conquests brought into Europe a number of new crops and cereals that required no irrigation: above all, hard wheat (which became the staple in most of the Mediterranean region) and sorghum. Though times of hardship were mainly due to natural causes such as floods and droughts, human factors, including over-cultivation and excessive logging, contributed to creating frequent periods of famine. In the Arab world, over-grazing and over-cultivation were minimized by a system called hima, which gave tribes in some regions collective rights over certain lands, but the system proved impractical in Europe. By the tenth or eleventh century, much of the land had been laid waste, rural security had waned, the monetary economy had failed to provide assistance to farmers, and a succession of plagues had led to a general decline of agriculture in Europe. Dante has Virgil say that certain souls in the seventh circle are being punished because they lived “disdaining Nature and her goodness.”13 Of the opposing notions of how we should behave regarding the natural world, Aristotle’s had become obviously prevalent.
The Aristotelian attitude towards nature has had long-lasting consequences. In 1962, an American marine biologist who had been writing since the early fifties about the noxious effects of human activity on nature published a book, Silent Spring, that was to change the health policies of many countries and initiate the environmental movement around the world. Rachel Carson’s early work at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had made her aware of the effects of dumping atomic waste into the sea, as well as the then still undetected phenomenon of global warming; her research into the misuse of pesticides revealed that the agricultural industries were both dangerously inefficient and untruthful in their reports to the public. As her biographer Linda Lear noted, with Silent Spring “Carson did more than challenge the scientific establishment, or force the implementation of new pesticide regulations. The hostile reaction of the establishment to Carson and her book was evidence that many government and industry officials recognized that Carson had not only challenged the conclusions of scientists regarding the benefits of the new pesticides, but that she had undermined their moral integrity and leadership.” Dante might have judged them sinners against nature, like the woeful souls in the seventh circle who, because they never recognized their responsibility to the natural world, must run eternally on the burning sand, in a desecrated landscape, looking towards that which they have offended. “In these circles of the Violent,” noted Charles Williams, “the reader is peculiarly conscious of a sense of sterility. The bloody river, the dreary wood, the harsh sand, which compose them, to some extent are there as symbols of unfruitfulness.”14
Carson conceived the danger of chemical use as one bred from the stubborn unwillingness to look at consequences other than those desired by the practitioner. She understood (as Dante intuited) that deliberate ignorance of collateral lethal results implied a willful blindness towards the “cose belle,” the “beautiful things” that nature offers, and is simply a form of self-destruction resulting from lack of humility and overwhelming greed. “Control of nature,” wrote Carson, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”15
This was, as noted, Aristotle’s supposition. For Aristotle, property, not work, provides the means of making a living, and entitles a man to be called a citizen. Property consists of that which nature offers for human sustenance: cattle driven by nomad farmers, game taken by hunters, fish and birds caught by fishermen and trappers, and the fruits of harvest. “We must believe,” he wrote, “first that plants exist for the sake of animals, second that all other animals exist for the sake of man.” (Also slaves, since Aristotle argued that capturing “inferior people” and making them slaves was a natural human activity.)16
Aristotle’s entwined arguments—our right to exploit nature and our right to exploit other “inferior” human beings—run throughout our economic histories to this day. In 1980, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) reported that desertification caused by deforestation threatened 35 percent of the world’s land surface and 20 percent of the world’s population. The vast process of deforestation in the Amazon, for instance, which after a steady decline spiked again in 2012 by more than a third, employs today tens of thousands of people working under slavelike conditions. A report from the World Wildlife Fund notes, “Poor people, lured from villages and deprived neighbourhoods, are brought to remote soy estates [planted after the trees have been cut down] where they are put to work in barbaric conditions— often at gunpoint and with no chance of escaping. . . . Those who fall sick are abandoned and replaced by others.”17
In recent years, a new branch of psychology has explored the relationship between the human psyche and the natural surroundings. Under the somewhat fanciful name of ecopsychology (first used in 1992 by the historian Theodore Roszak, who also coined the term counterculture), it is the study of a phenomenon that poets have understood since they first associated storms with the raging of passion and flowering fields with moments of happiness; John Ruskin characterized it as the “pathetic fallacy.” Attempting to analyze our mirroring in nature, ecopsychologists argue that because we are an intricate part of the natural world, separation from it (through neglect, indifference, violence, fear) results in something like psychological suicide. With a possible reference to Aristotle, the psychologist and poet Anita Barrows says, “It is only by a construct of the Western mind that we believe ourselves to be living in an ‘inside’ bounded by our skin, with everyone and everything else on the outside.”18
In order to explain his own state of mind and his fantastic encounters, Dante will often describe a memory of natural surroundings. Reaching the stone bridge that would have allowed them to pass from the Cornice of the Hypocrites to the Chasm of the Thieves, Dante and his guide discover that it has been shattered, and a feeling of anguish overwhelms them. To explain to the reader what he felt, Dante conjures up a memory:
During that period of the boyish year,
When the sun tempers his locks under Aquarius
And the nights already wane towards half the day,
When the hoar frost copies out onto the ground
The image of his sister white as snow,
Though only a short while his pen holds out,
The peasant, whose supplies now are gone,
Rises and looks, and sees the fields
All white, at which he slaps his thigh,
Goes back into the house, and grumbles to and fro,
Like a poor fool who knows not what to do.
Then he comes out again and hope returns,
Observing how the world has changed its face
In such short while; so he picks up his staff
And chases out his lambs to go and feed.
In passages such as this, Dante is recalling, not Aristotle’s utilitarian view of nature, but Virgil’s, not the lyrical artifice of the Eclogues but the considered reflections of the Georgics, where Virgil abandoned the idyllic vision of country life and concentrated instead on the hardships and rewards of farming, and the farmer’s responsibilities towards the natural world. “Toil conquered the world,” Virgil wrote, “unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard.” But, he continued, “Nature has ways manifold for rearing trees. For some, under no man’s constraint, spring up of their own free will, and far and wide claim the plains and winding rivers. . . . But some spring from fallen seed, as tall chestnuts, and the broad-leaved tree, mightiest of the woodland, that spreads its shade for Jove, and oaks, deemed by the Greeks oracular.” This natural generosity, as both Virgil and Dante understood, entails an obligation.19
On 31 March 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report about the effects of “man-made climate change around the world.” A total of 309 specialized writers drawn from 70 countries were selected to produce the report, with the help of a further 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers. Their conclusion was that since the nature of the risks brought on by climate change have become increasingly clear, governments need immediately to make drastic choices between suffering the consequences of these changes and for-going or decreasing the financial profits sought by our national economies. The report identified vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems worldwide and found that the risks from a changing climate come from our societies’ vulnerability and lack of preparation in the face of future catastrophes. The risks from a changing climate depend strongly on how fast and how intensely those changes will occur; these will determine whether they are irreversible. “With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits,” said one of the chairmen of the panel, adding that climate change has already severely affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and people’s livelihoods from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest.20 Once again, we have been warned.
Dante may have considered Aristotle the supreme thinker, “master of those who know,” as he calls him, but throughout the undergrowth of the Commedia creeps the intuitive suspicion that, with regard to our relationship to God’s other book, the “maestro di color che sanno” was wrong.21
