I HAVE NEVER FIRED A WEAPON. In my last year of high school, one of my friends brought a gun to class and offered to teach us how to use it. Most of us refused. My friend, I later found out, was a member of one of the Argentinian guerrilla movements that fought the military government; his father, whom he loathed, had assisted as a doctor at the government-endorsed torture sessions in the infamous Mechanical School of the Navy.
I left Argentina in 1969, the year in which the atrocities began. I left not for political but for purely private reasons: I wanted to see the world. During the military dictatorship, more than thirty thousand people were kidnapped and tortured, and many were killed. The victims were not only active dissidents; any relative, friend or acquaintance of a dissident could be detained, and anyone who for any reason displeased the Junta was considered a terrorist.
I returned only once to Argentina during the years of the military regime, and while there became aware of the atmosphere of terror that the military had created, but I didn’t become part of a resistance group. “During such times of injustice,” another friend once told me, “you can do one of two things. You can either pretend that nothing is happening, that the screams you hear next door are the neighbors having a quarrel and that the person who seems to have disappeared is probably on a long and illicit holiday. Or you can learn to fire a gun. There are no other choices.” But perhaps becoming a witness is another choice. Stendhal, who thought that politics was a millstone tied to the neck of literature, compared political opinions in a work of fiction to a gun fired at a concert, implicitly endorsing the third option.
The head of the military government, General Jorge Rafael Videla, justified his actions by saying that “a terrorist is not only someone who carries a bomb or a pistol but also someone who spreads ideas contrary to Western Christian civilization. We defended Western Christian civilization.” Such justifications for murder are commonplace: defense of the true faith, survival of democracy, protection of the innocent, prevention of greater losses have all been invoked to justify the killing of others. The British engineer and freelance journalist Andrew Kenny, in an article in the London Spectator, used just such an argument to defend the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which killed more than 60,000 people instantly and 120,000 more slowly and painfully: “However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese.” On a visit to Hiroshima, Kenny admired the Promotion Hall, a four-story block with a small green dome designed by a Czech architect in 1915, which was close to the center of the target. “The atomic bomb,” wrote Kenny, “vastly improved it as an aesthetic object, changing it from a mundanely ugly building into a masterpiece of stricken form.”
That day in class, seeing the gun in my friend’s hand, I too looked upon it as an aesthetic object. I wondered how such a lovely thing had come into being. I asked myself (like Blake observing the tiger) what its maker had imagined when he wrought it, and whether he had justified his intentions to himself; just as I wondered whether the craftsman who so keenly perfected the military’s instruments of torture had dreamt of the precise uses to which his work was to be put. I remembered a legendary account of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin being put to death by his own invention during the French Revolution; that final act must have fulfilled for Guillotin an artist’s wish to know the meaning of his art. I thought that my friend’s gun was a beautiful thing if one ignored its use. It reminded me of the skull of a small creature I once discovered in Patagonia, polished by the insects and the rain, with an elongated snout and a single gaping socket, like a miniature Cyclops. For the longest time, I kept the skull on my desk as a reminder.
Einstein: But all the same, we cannot escape our responsibilities. We are providing humanity with colossal sources of power. That gives us the right to impose conditions. If we are physicists, then we must become power politicians.
—FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT, The Physicists, act 2
Learning as a dog does the rules of faithfulness and obedience is for Dante a long and painful process. At the foot of Mount Purgatory, not knowing what path to take (in the Commedia’s Wonderland there are no signposts), Dante and Virgil meet a group of figures coming slowly towards them. These are the souls of those who, up to the moment of their death, refused spiritual obedience to the church, and then repented with their last breath. Because they rebelled against the Chief Shepherd during their lives, they must now remain shepherdless for thirty times the length of their earthly wandering. Virgil, following Dante’s suggestion, asks them courteously if they know “where the mountain slopes down / so that it may be possible to ascend.”
Like little sheep come edging from the pen
One, then two, then three, the others standing there
Turning shyly eyes and noses to the ground,
And what the first one does the others do,
Huddling up to her if she stands still,
Foolish and humble, and not knowing why,
So I saw, moving on towards us, the forerunner
Of that fortunate elected flock
Modest in appearance, and dignified in pace.1
Meekly the souls tell Virgil that he and Dante must turn and go ahead of them. Suddenly, one of the flock detaches itself from its companions and asks whether Dante recognizes him. Dante looks carefully and sees that the inquiring soul “was blond and handsome, with a noble look / But one of his eyebrows had been cloven by a blow.” Dante, whose memory is, like himself, mortal, denies having met the man. The soul then, pointing to an identifying wound high on his chest, like that made by the Roman lance in the side of the dying Christ, tells Dante that he is Manfred, grandson of the empress Constanza, whom Dante will eventually meet in Paradise.2
Manfred, though he identifies himself to Dante only as the grandson of the empress, was in fact the illegitimate son of Frederick II, the emperor condemned with other Epicureans to the circle of the heretics in the Inferno. (Later, Frederick would become a Romantic hero; in German folklore, he was supposed to have lived on after the hour of his death, thanks to a magic spell, in an underground castle, away from the world, guarded by ravens.)3 The historical Manfred was an ambitious, conniving, ruthless character. He became the leader of the Ghibelline cause, opposing the alliance of the pope with the Guelphs and with Charles of Anjou. On his father’s death, he was made regent of Sicily until his half-brother Conrad could take the throne; a few years later, when Conrad died, Manfred assumed the regency on behalf of Conrad’s son. In 1258, after a false rumor had announced his nephew’s death, Manfred had himself crowned king of Sicily and Puglia.
The newly elected pope, Urban IV, proclaimed him a usurper and placed the crown of Sicily on the head of Charles of Anjou. Branded the antichrist because of his fierce opposition to Rome, Manfred was excommunicated twice, once in 1254 by Innocent IV and once in 1259 by Urban. Seven years later, Charles succeeded in killing his rival at the battle of Benevento and, as a gracious victor, had him honorably buried under a cairn of stones, though in unconsecrated ground. With retrospective rancor, however, the new pope, Clement IV, ordered the bishop of Cosenza to have Manfred’s body disinterred “with tapers extinct” and thrown into the River Verde, which marked the border with the Kingdom of Naples.4
Dante’s contemporaries were strongly divided in their judgment of Manfred. For the Ghibellines, he was a heroic figure, a freedom fighter against the tyrannical ambitions of the papacy. For the Black Guelphs, he was a murderer, an infidel who had associated with the Saracens against Pope Alexander IV. Brunetto Latini accused Manfred of killing his father, his half-brother, and two of his nephews, as well as attempting to murder Conrad’s infant son. The blond, handsome hero with the cleft eyebrow would later appeal to Byron and Tchaikovsky.
Dante, who sided with the White Guelphs (now associated with the Ghibelline cause), thought of Manfred, the last representative in Italy of the Holy Roman Empire, as a symbolic incarnation of the conflict between empire and church, a leader of the opposition to the church’s interference in worldly affairs. In Dante’s view, the civil powers of the church had demeaned its spiritual endeavors and turned the institution into a vulgar, politicking arena. No less a presence than Saint Peter, Christ’s anointed, in the Heaven of Fixed Stars inveighs against the corruption and abuse of the Holy See:
He who usurps my place on earth,
My place, my place which is now vacant
In the presence of the Son of God,
Has made my burial site a sewer
Of blood and stench, which the perfidious
Who fell from here above, delights in below.5
Empire and church must follow Christ’s dictum of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s: Manfred fulfilled the first part of the equation. Just as in the Inferno the soul of Muhammad tears open his chest as a symbol of the schism he has caused among Christian believers (“see how I rend myself,” he says to Dante), Manfred’s wounded chest is the symbol of the wounds in the body of the empire, an empire nevertheless redeemed, in the eyes of God, through Manfred’s labors. Manfred is, for Dante, the Christian champion who attempted to mend the disastrous effects of the legendary Donation of Constantine.6
According to medieval legend, the emperor Constantine on his deathbed ceded the imperial secular rights to the church, limiting the imperial authority and allowing the pope to meddle in civil affairs. (In the fifteenth century, the humanist Lorenzo Valla proved that the Donation of Constantine was a clever forgery.) Beatrice will later compare Constantine’s Donation to a catastrophe as great as Adam’s Fall. In spite of what he judges to be the emperor’s grievous error, Dante places Constantine in the Heaven of the Just Rulers and, through the voice of the eagle, excuses him because he acted “with good intentions that bore bad fruit.”7
Manfred is also an example of the limited powers of papal excommunication. God’s mercy, Dante repeatedly asserts, is infinite, and even a late repentant, uttering his confession with his dying breath, can be saved when he turns “weeping towards Him who willingly forgives.” In Dante’s time the church attempted to exclude from the pope’s anathema the codicil that acknowledges God’s prerogative of pardoning whoever “in the end repents.”8 For Dante, absolute curses were intended to advertise the temporal powers of the pope rather than the overriding quality of God’s mercy. A true conclusion to a sinner’s life must be not a full stop but an ongoing phrase, an endless questioning of the sinner’s own actions, a process of spiritual regeneration driven by the spirit of curiosity towards a better understanding of the self. To emphasize his argument, Dante compares the wounded Manfred to the risen Christ showing his wound to the doubting Thomas in the Gospels of Luke (24:40) and John (20:27). John Freccero, in an enlightening essay on Manfred’s wounds, notes that the Gospel text is “filled with signs that demand of the reader the same assent that is demanded of the doubting Thomas. As Christ’s scarred body is seen by the disciples, so John’s text is read by the faithful.” Freccero points out that the same analogy is operative in Dante’s poem: “Manfred’s wounds, slashed across a body made of thin air, stand for Dante’s own intrusion into the course of history. They are, as it were, writing itself, Dante’s own markings introduced across the page of history as testimony of a truth which otherwise might not be perceived.”9
Manfred explains himself to Dante in these words:
Horrible were my sins;
But infinite goodness has such wide arms
That it embraces all who turn to it.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By their curse a soul is not so lost
That the eternal love may not return
So long that hope retains a trace of green.
It’s true that he who dies scorning the church,
Even though he might repent at last
Must stay upon the outside of this bank
For thirty times as long as he has lived
In his presumption, unless this stern decree
Be not made shorter by kind prayers.10
The story of Manfred is one of wounds and bones. Earlier in the canto, Virgil signifies the hour by noting that it is already evening in Naples where his mortal body lies after it was taken from Brindisi; Manfred explains that his bones might still be under the bridge near Benevento had they not been strewn by the river, washed by the rain, and stirred by the wind. Virgil’s bones were dispersed by order of the empire, Manfred’s by that of the church; in both cases these were temporary displacements, awaiting the promised Day of Resurrection. In a world in which death by violence was an everyday occurrence, and war not the exception but the rule, the promise of redemption for the repentant sinner, an answer to the prophet’s question “Can these bones live?,” was of the essence.11
A near-contemporary of Dante’s, the French poet Jean de Meung, argued that the violence of war was a contest in which we were all pawns; his version of the story of Manfred presents it in terms of a game of chess. The image is ancient, going back to Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata. In the early-fourteenth-century Welsh epic the Mabinogion, two enemy kings play chess while in a nearby valley their armies clash. At last, one of the kings, seeing that his adversary will not surrender, crushes the golden chessmen to dust. Shortly afterwards, a messenger arrives covered in blood and announces that his army has been slaughtered. So commonplace was the image of war as a game of chess that Charles of Anjou employed it when referring to the forthcoming battle with Manfred at Benevento: he promised to checkmate the miscreant “by moving a pawn which had gone astray in the middle of the chessboard.”12
The Battle of Benevento, fought on 26 February 1266, is the historical core of Manfred’s narrative, and another emblematic episode in the conflict between empire and church. Dante’s century had seen several important changes in the art of warfare: increased use of mercenaries, “shock tactics” such as cavalry charges to frighten and scatter the enemy troops, and the deployment of projectile firearms such as bombards, which enabled armies to kill larger numbers of the enemy from a greater distance.13 At Benevento, both armies employed mercenary forces, but it was Charles who adopted the shock tactics that proved so successful against the confident Manfred. However, neither side made use of projectiles: traditional weapons were enough to inflict on Manfred the wounds that prevented Dante from recognizing the handsome warrior. A fourteenth-century illumination of the Nuova cronica shows Charles piercing Manfred with his lance (the depiction is of course allegorical, since we have no historical evidence that this was what happened), while the gash on the eyebrow may have been caused by a sword or by a doloire or ax.14 Swords, lances, and axes were the armies’ common weapons; bombards and other projectile firearms were still fairly rare at the time.
Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Discovery of Manfred’s Body After the Battle of Benevento, 1266, 1838. (© DcA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY)
Projectile firearms were probably invented in China in the twelfth century, and gunpowder some three centuries earlier. (The formula for gunpowder appears for the first time in a Daoist manual of the ninth century, which warns alchemists not to mix inadvertently the component substances.) Traditionally, Chinese gunpowder was associated with ancient “smoking out” practices, fumigation rituals carried out by law in every home. These practices were used not only as prophylactic measures but also in warfare as early as the fourth century B.C.E. to enable advancing troops to hide behind smokescreens during sieges, as well as to bombard the enemy with toxic fumes produced by pumps and furnaces. In his monumental study of Chinese science and civilization, Joseph Needham noted that “a cardinal feature of Chinese technology and science” was “the belief in action at distance.” In warfare, this manifested itself in the use of flame-carrying arrows and the so-called Greek fire, incendiary wagons that used as the inflammatory material a distillation of petroleum (naphtha) first produced in seventh-century Byzantium and probably brought to China by Arab traders.15
Although bombards did not make their first appearance in Europe until after Dante’s death—in 1343 the Moors of Algeciras used them to attack Christian armies—the first European mention of the composition of gunpowder appears in a text by the English scholar Roger Bacon a century earlier. “We can,” Bacon wrote in 1248, “with saltpeter and other substances, compose artificially a fire that can be launched over long distances. . . . By only using a very small quantity of this material much light can be created accompanied by a horrible fracas. It is possible to destroy a town or an army.”16 Bacon, who entered the Franciscan orders and was a friend of Pope Clement IV, might have learned about gunpowder after witnessing a display of Chinese fireworks, which were brought to Europe by other Franciscans who had been to the Far East.
Ironically, the first European bombards or cannons were constructed by the craftsmen who made the traditional symbols of peace: the bell founders. It is likely that the first bombard was a bell, turned upside down and filled with stones and gunpowder. These early cannons were crude, inaccurate, and dangerous to both users and targets. Nor could they be moved with ease: in the fourteenth century, they were mounted on huge blocks and then dismantled when the siege was over.17
Assault of Mara: detail of a tenth-century mural from Dunhuang, Ginsu Province, showing Chinese demons carrying incendiary weapons. (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
Nowhere in the Commedia does Dante speak of gunpowder, but in his description of the chasm in which the traffickers in public offices are punished the Arsenal of Venice is mentioned, depicted not as the place in which warships are built but as a repair shop where damaged boats are caulked in wintertime. It is a center of reparation, not of death-mongering, and it contrasts with the hideously farcical scene of the traffickers wallowing in boiling pitch, their flesh torn off by the hooks of angry demons.18
The scene bears on Manfred’s story in another way. Here Dante shows himself a cowardly onlooker, comically afraid of what the demonic custodians might do to him. Following Virgil’s orders, he hides behind a crag to watch undetected the obscene goings-on until, after negotiating with the demons, Virgil calls him forth:
And my guide said to me: “Oh you that sit
Squatting and cowering among the splinters of the bridge,
Securely now return here to my side.”19
On other occasions, as when crossing the murky Styx where the wrathful and sullen are punished by being plunged into the putrid mud, Dante had been pleased to watch the torture of the sinners. But among the punished traffickers, Dante’s curiosity is different. Now he wants to watch but not be seen, and his voyeuristic enjoyment stems from something undefined and archetypal.
In a story that J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, later told friends, he was greatly influenced by a similar instance of perverted curiosity in Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann. He learned by heart the passage in which Mademoiselle Vinteuil goads her lesbian lover to spit on a photograph of her deceased father: “Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate,” Proust notes of Mademoiselle Vinteuil, “had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”20 It is this indifference to the suffering of the traffickers that distinguishes Dante’s reactions from earlier scenes.
Oppenheimer has been called a modern version of the Romantic hero, who like Byron’s Manfred (but not like Dante’s) is unable to repent of his sins and is torn between his urge to explore the forbidden unknown and feelings of guilt for having done so. The son of a wealthy Jewish family that had abandoned its faith, Oppenheimer grew up in New York City in a vast apartment where his philanthropic father had accumulated a remarkable art collection. There Oppenheimer grew up among Renoirs and van Goghs, while being instructed by his parents in the obligation to help the less fortunate by funding such organizations as the National Child Labor Committee and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Oppenheimer was a precocious, solitary, questioning child, passionately interested in science, especially chemistry. Mathematics, however, was his weak point, and later, when he became known as a brilliant theoretical physicist, his mathematics, by professional standards, were considered by his colleagues to be less than impressive. Like Manfred, the material workings of the substances that made the world interested him more than the abstract rules that governed them.21
As a lonely young man, Oppenheimer behaved somewhat erratically. He was sometimes melancholy, refusing to speak or acknowledge the presence of others; sometimes oddly euphoric, reciting lengthy passages of French literature and sacred Hindu texts; a few times he appeared to his friends to be verging on madness. Once, during his year at the University of Cambridge, he left a poisoned apple on his tutor’s desk, an affair that was hushed up after his father promised to have his son seen by a psychiatrist. Years later, when Oppenheimer became director of the Los Alamos atomic laboratory, his colleagues found him unnerving. On one hand, he seemed often lost in his own abstractions, silently aloof; on the other, he submitted without compunction to the supervision of military authorities, even though the Intelligence Services suspected him of being a Communist spy because of his liberal opinions and treated him with little regard. When, after the war, Oppenheimer pleaded for the United States and the Soviet Union to share their technological knowledge in order to avoid a nuclear showdown, his opponents found in his conciliatory attitude reason enough to brand him a traitor.
The question of how to make a nuclear bomb, that vastly evolved descendant of the crude early bombard of Dante’s time, presented not merely a theoretical problem but one of engineering as well. Because of the fear that the Germans might develop such a bomb before the American scientists, the construction of the Los Alamos site had to proceed rapidly, even while basic problems of physics were still being solved: the strategies for “action at distance” needed to take shape before the question of what that action was to be was fully formulated. When Brigadier General Leslie Groves chose Oppenheimer for the post of director of the Los Alamos lab, what impressed him most was that this scientist understood, far better than his colleagues, the practical aspects of the problem of how to go from abstract theory to concrete construction.
The situation changed on 7 May 1945 when Germany surrendered, thus ending the threat of a nuclear attack. In July a petition began circulating among Oppenheimer’s colleagues urging the government not to use the bomb “unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender.” Oppenheimer was not one of the seventy signatories to the 17 July petition.22
The day before, 16 July, the bomb was tested at a site that Oppenheimer had dubbed Trinity. Observing the effects of the controlled explosion behind a protective barrier, Oppenheimer must have looked like Dante behind his crag observing the demonic activity. As the first atomic bomb exploded, unleashing its famous mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer, as he noted two decades later, was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, when the god Vishnu tries to convince the mortal Prince to do his duty, and says to him: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”23
After the successful test, four Japanese cities were proposed as targets of the bombing: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. It was only a few days before the attack that the final decision was made: because it was the only one that did not have an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, the choice fell on Hiroshima. On 6 August, at 8:14 A.M. local time, the Enola Gay, a plane named after pilot Paul Tibbets’s mother, dropped the bomb. Two shock waves followed a blinding glare, Tibbets recalled. After the second one, “we turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.”24
The dichotomy that had struck Oppenheimer so strongly in the Proust passage was apparent in his own life. On one hand, he revered scientific pursuit with the intelligent curiosity that led him to question the intimate mechanics of the universe; on the other, he faced the consequences of such curiosity, both in his personal life, where his self-centered ambition verged on a Manfred-like egotism, and in his public life, where, as a scientist, he became the man responsible for the most potent killing machine ever conceived. Oppenheimer never spoke of these consequences in terms of degrees and limits, not to curiosity itself but to the instrumentation of that curiosity.
After the bombing, a Jesuit priest, Father Siemes, who was in the vicinity of Hiroshima at the time, wrote this in a report to his superiors: “The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?” Dante’s response is given by the eagle in the Heaven of the Just: God’s justice is not human justice.25
One of Oppenheimer’s biographers, quoting the Proust paragraph, compared it to a statement Oppenheimer made towards the end of his life at a conference that was partially sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-Communist organization founded after the war (and funded by the CIA):
Up to now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. . . . It turned out to be impossible . . . for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth . . . and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realise that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.26
So does Manfred. His own views are not enough, he must tell his story to Dante, not only to procure the redeeming prayers of his daughter, the “good Constanza,” when the poet returns to earth. Manfred, as symbol and as allegory, as a pawn in the game of history and as lines of verse in an immortal poem, needs to know what Dante sees translated into the words of his narrative. In this reflective action Manfred will perhaps feel a redeeming compassion for the victims, understand the import of his full repentance, and believe in the assurance of his salvation, delivered in spite of his undoubtedly “horrible sins.”
