The imperialist interpretation of the Comedy that we have proposed is subject to a major difficulty which we have hardly touched upon thus far and which it is now time to consider if we want to see just how far Dante wished to go in his thinking. We said that the autonomy of the temporal power in relation to the spiritual power implies as a corollary the autonomy of natural reason in relation to theology. As many scholars have pointed out, the two questions are inseparable, for if man has a supernatural destiny, his earthly happiness is to be subordinated to it, and the truths of the natural order that lead to this earthly happiness must give way to revelation. Such was the opinion of the theologians of the day, and it is hard to believe that the author of the Comedy would have found fault with it.
Nonetheless some Dante scholars, more sensitive to the ambiguous or polyvalent aspect of the poet’s language, have acknowledged that his political opposition to the papacy could have been joined to a spiritual opposition to Christian dogma itself, numerous signs of which could be found in the Convivio in particular, a work stamped by rationalism. Catholic by birth, Dante would have spent some time in heresy, perhaps even unbelief, then came to his senses and returned with enthusiasm to the doctrine of the Roman Church. He would have recalled these strayings in the scene in Purgatorio in which Beatrice succeeds in wrenching his acknowledgment of wrongdoing. “The enigma of Dante,” as Philippe Guiberteau puts it, “is that he is a convert.”1 This is a seductive hypothesis, the more so in that, if it turned out to be correct, it would resolve the mystery that has always hovered over his work. It nevertheless has the disadvantage of failing to take into account that the Comedy itself is filled with all kinds of enigmas that one would wish to clarify before making a definitive judgment on the poem’s deepest meaning.
Our consideration of the relations between Dante and Christianity can best begin with the dialogue that takes place among Dante, Virgil, and the poet Statius in cantos 21 and 22 of Purgatorio, which forms a decisive moment in the story that is told to us. This is a mysterious episode if there ever was one, especially since it introduces one of the most important characters in the Comedy. Statius figures in no less than thirteen cantos; in this he is surpassed only by Virgil and Beatrice. Like them he goes from one place to another, something no one else does in the poem. The reader has been prepared for what is to come by the allusion in the preceding canto to an earthquake that has just shaken the mountain.2 This tremor, as we soon find out, was not due to natural causes, whose effects are no longer felt in the upper part of Purgatory; rather it signaled the deliverance of Statius, whose soul had sojourned in this place for several centuries in expiation of his sins.3 What is the significance of Statius’s presence in the poem and to what does he owe this honor for which history does not seem to have destined him? Let us first recall the salient details of the three poets’ first meeting.
In the course of their journey toward the summit of Mount Purgatory Dante and Virgil come upon Statius on the fifth terrace. As soon as they come together, the three strike up a conversation. Statius, who as yet knows nothing of the travelers’ identities, begins to speak of his literary career and especially his admiration for Virgil, to whom he is quick to confess his indebtedness as a poet.4 There follows a recognition scene of the utmost finesse, at the end of which Statius, forgetting for the moment that he is but a shade, rushes forward to embrace his revered master.5
Virgil is astonished at first to see that, despite his “wisdom,” Statius foolishly allowed himself to be conquered by avarice.6 Statius explains that the vice he was in the process of expiating at the time of their arrival was not avarice but another, less reprehensible vice, the vice of prodigality, and that he was placed among the greedy because the vices opposed to the same virtue—in this instance moderation in the use of riches—are punished in the same place.7 In fact, the fifth terrace is the only one to hold more than one category of sinners, even though it is not easy to distinguish among them.
We learn subsequently that thanks to the famous prophecy in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue regarding the inauguration of a new order marked by the return of the Golden Age,8 Statius converted to Christianity, but that, fearing the persecutions of the emperor Domitian, he remained to the end of his life a secret Christian, “chiuso cristian.”9 This explains the absence of any refrence to his new faith in his two epic poems, The Achilleid, which he had not begun at the time of his conversion, and The Thebaid, which was then only half finished.10
Since there is no trace in the literary tradition either of Statius’s avarice or prodigality, or of his Christianity, we must assume that these two details were invented by Dante for a purpose that any more or less complete interpretation of the passage has to take into account. It is no less obvious that, in the absence of any evidence from outside sources, such an interpretation can find support only within the Comedy itself. Fortunately, the text contains a number of indications that lead one to think that Statius, as Dante imagined him, was indeed the victim of the vices for which he reproaches himself, but in a rather unexpected manner.
Let us first look at the four terzinas in which Statius attempts to dissipate the misunderstanding which his presence among the avaricious had occasioned. We discover in the form of an acrostic in their initial letters the word “VELO” or veil, one of the key words Dante employs to alert the reader to the presence of a hidden meaning in the text.11 Thus it may be that this passage should be given a meaning that goes beyond its literal sense. At the same time we observe that the first of these four tercets speaks expressly of the knowledge that occasionally renders intelligible what had hitherto been the object of doubt or wonder: “Indeed, because true causes are concealed, we often face deceptive reasoning and things provoke perplexity in us.”12 The antithesis between truth and its misleading appearance is ably accented by the willful interlacing of three terms designating truth and falsehood—veramente , falsa, vere. In typically Dantesque fashion, a correspondence is established between the intention of the passage and its literary form.
There follow three equally mysterious lines in which Dante misinterprets a verse of the Aeneid: “Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames!”13 This indignant outcry is provoked by Aeneas’s accidental discovery of the crime committed by the king of Thrace, Polymestor, a former ally of the Trojans who, after going over to the Greek side, had put Priam’s son Polydorus to death and confiscated the treasure that his father had entrusted to him. Statius gives to Aeneas’s words a meaning which is plausible only if one takes the sentence as is, but which is flatly excluded by the context and is even clearly contrary to what Virgil intended to say. Instead of deploring the detestable appetite for gain that stirs the depths of the human heart, he laments that it has so little power over him: “Why cannot you, o holy hunger for gold, restrain the appetite of mortals?”14 The contradiction is made all the more striking in that Statius explicitly states that he had at last understood what Virgil intended to say.15 Since Dante had already informed us that he was fully informed of all of the details of this sordid story,16 there can be no question here of a lapse of memory. The error is in all likelihood deliberate. Like the acrostic in the preceding verses, it suggests, among other things, that the text of the Comedy could also lend iself to more than one interpretation. We are thus brought to ask whether, in telling us about Statius’s presumed prodigality or avarice, Dante is not seeking to draw our attention to another form of prodigality or avarice into which it was plausible for the Latin poet to fall.
It is not very difficult to guess what this new wrong might be. To convey his thought, the poet disposes of a privileged instrument of communication—words. Now words, like gold, can be dispensed or withheld in an inordinate way. All that the Comedy has to say about Statius leads one to believe that, while there is no valid reason to suspect him of being prodigal in the common meaning of the term, he nonetheless succumbed to a less common but no less important kind of prodigality. As the Christian author of two epics renowned for their pagan character,17 it could be said that he showed himself prodigal in words, but also that his prodigality was unique in that in Statius it was accompanied by its opposite, in this case, taciturnity. Having said things about which it would have been better to keep silent, he ended up being silent about things that ought to be said. In that way he became guilty of avarice no less than prodigality.
As paradoxical as this hypothesis may seem, it becomes plausible when we think of the possible connection between the avarice at first gratuitously imputed to Statius and his secret Christianity. The two fictions may support and explain one another. In refusing to profess his Christian faith, Statius practiced what in the Middle Ages was called “oeconomia veritatis” or economy of truth.18 His avarice is in reality identical with the tepidity of which he accuses himself in the same passage and that cost him to be punished for four centuries among the slothful, before he could move on to the terrace of the avaricious and the prodigal.19 A more fervent Christian would have been less fearful and have spoken more frankly, even at the risk of his life. Thanks to his cowardice, Statius escaped persecution, but he gave up any possibility of helping his neighbor. His position is exactly the inverse of the one just attributed to Virgil. Living before Christ as he did, Virgil prophesied His coming without benefiting from it himself. The most he was able to do, as one “who goes by night and carries the lamp behind him,”20 was to show the way to those who walked in his footsteps. Statius, who was born a century later, knew of Christianity, but, although he embraced it for his own sake, he did nothing so that through him others might know of it in turn. Anyone reading his words would know nothing of the matter.21
Even if we find this interpretation correct, it seems that we have not advanced any further. What does it matter after all that Statius has shown himself a coward by not saying a word of his conversion to the Christian faith? His role in the Comedy seems no less adventitious and without any connection to the poem’s internal structure or doctrinal content. This is not the case, however. A moment’s reflection on the symbolic value of the three poets will reveal why Dante accorded Statius such an eminent position at this precise point in his odyssey.
Statius’s role is to escort the two other poets and to serve as interpreter for them through the higher regions of Purgatory. His role is in large measure similar to the one Virgil played during the whole first part of the journey. It would seem, however, that the ordering is rather lacking in harmony. Given Dante’s penchant for symmetry, we would normally expect a third epic poet to take over once the threshold of Paradise is reached. Beatrice, of course, will be there to accompany the traveler along the rest of his route, but since she is not a poet and it is not certain she is a historical figure, it seems difficult to place her in the same category as the two other guides.
The key to the mystery is furnished in part by the position of the three poets in relation to one another as they journey together, something which Dante is always careful to note with the greatest precision. In the scenes immediately following the first encounter with Statius, Virgil and Statius take the lead and Dante, who must rely on them, walks behind them respectfully. 22 As they prepare to cross the wall of fire, their positions are inverted: Dante goes before Statius and is described comically as a lamb between two shepherds.23 When they come to the extreme limit of Purgatory, a further change takes place as Dante suddenly takes the lead over his two companions.24 A short while later, Virgil retires definitively and, at that very instant, the name of Dante is heard for the only time in the poem and, as we are told explicitly, “by necessity.”25 The break marked by this scene comes out even more forcefully in that the pilgrim, filled with sorrow, cannot refrain from speaking Virgil’s name three times in sucession: “But Virgil had deprived us of himself, Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he to whom I gave my self for my salvation.”26 Everything takes place as though Dante, already crowned “emperor and pope of himself,” no longer has to place himself in the hands of some other poet and can henceforth advance on his own. The third part of the Comedy will not be without its own epic father, who is none other than the author himself now become his own guide so to speak.
Here, too, we ought to mistrust the apparent modesty with which he assures us that he mentions himself only by necessity, “di necessita.” Dante appears to be excusing himself, on the pretext, as he says elsewhere, that it is not becoming for an author to speak of himself in this manner in his own work.27 Yet at the very moment he seeks to be pardoned for this impertinence, he falls back and once again places himself in the forefront. The expression “di necessità” also contains, hidden under the form of a cryptogram, the name of the poet, which comes out once we read the letters (here in upper case) in the intended order, that is, from left to right and right to left: “D[i] NecessiTA.”28 It is hard to believe that Dante would have taken delight in what looks more and more like kabbalistic devices. His astuteness goes further, to the point of sketching the gesture the reader has to make in order to decipher the text. Upon hearing his name called, Dante himself in effect looks from left to right, “just like an admiral who goes to stern and prow to see the officers who guide the other ships.”29
In light of these observations, and keeping in mind what was said earlier of Statius, we may now deal with the unresolved problem of the symbolic value assigned to each of the three poets. The easiest case is without doubt that of Virgil, the pagan who has given us a manifestly pagan epic. The case of Statius, the poet par excellence of Purgatorio, is more complex but less unfathomable than it appeared at first. Thanks to the literary fiction invented by Dante, he represents the Christian who also writes a no less pagan epic than Virgil’s. For his part, Dante is immediately recognizable as the Christian who has taken upon himself to produce a Chrsitian epic. By this elementary process, the symmetry that seemed to be lacking is restored and the poem’s three canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, fit together without any evident lacuna. But is this in fact the case?
The problem with this explanation is that it presents us once again with an incomplete enumeration. A fourth possibility has been tacitly omitted and now confronts us with an insistence that is all the more forceful since we had not previously given it any thought, that is, the hypothetical case of a pagan who would have thought of writing a Christian epic. Since it seems that neither Virgil’s nor Statius’s situation can be altered, their disciple’s situation becomes questionable. It is no longer clear with which of the two categories he aligned himself. Could he too perchance have found it necessary to employ a strategy similar to the purely fictitious one he ascribes to Statius? It would to say the least be interesting if the author of the most celebrated Christian epic we have had abstained from saying outright all that he thought to have understood of the serious subjects he discusses.
There is no need to add that the idea that the subterranean levels of the Comedy would allow certain doubts to surface concerning the author’s religious convictions challenges the conventional interpretation of the poem and will appear inadmissible to a good number of modern scholars. Even if this idea deserved our full attention, it would still be necessary to explain why Dante put so much effort into concealing his thought. The reason is very simple, however, and we shall see that he did not fail to speak of it. In the meantime, one should not too quickly forget the rigorous sanctions by which past societies, less liberal than ours, prohibited the diffusion of any opinion that was seen as prejudicial to the common good. Statius’s secret Cristianity, which is rooted in the notorious hostility of the pagan emperors toward the new faith, might have its counterpart in the reticence affected by his medieval successor, who lived at a time when heretics and apostates were threatened with penalties once reserved to avowed Christians.
We have seen that, provided he knew how to handle himself, an author could avoid all direct confrontation with duly constituted authority without for that matter renouncing his freedom of thought. By posing as a defender of the estabished order, he creates a presumption of innocence in his favor and transfers to the injured party the responsibility for proving that the charges brought against him are well-founded. Even if he remains suspect, it would be difficult to find him guilty, since it is just about impossible to condemn someone for views that as such he never expressed, especially if they are contradicted by many statements he has made publicly. According to this hypothesis, Dante would have simply conformed in speech to the beliefs of his time, while seeing to it that an attentive and well disposed reader could discern what he truly meant. He would be an excellent example of that political mode that had already played such an important role in other periods of history. This is precisely what would constitute the superiority of his “wisdom” in relation to Statius’s. By holding to a just mean between verbal avarice and prodigality, the author of the Comedy displayed a “measure” that his predecessor had not attained.30 If Statius could be accused of speaking too much or too little, the same would not be the case with Dante. The strategy had the double advantage of allowing him to save himself and to instruct all of his readers, whatever their ability to understand what he had to say or what they hoped to gain from him.
Is it possible to affirm with certainty that Dante was fully conscious of the dangers that threatened him and that he expressed himself in this way only to escape the snares of his adversaries? In the event there remains any doubt on this score, we have only to consult the Comedy anew. Among the procedures the author employs in Purgatorio, one consists in placing in parallel the seven capital sins and the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. As soon as one of the sins inscribed on the pilgrim’s forehead is removed, the chanting of the corresponding beatitude is heard. Pride is replaced by the beatitude exalting the poor in spirit; wrath gives way to the beatitude exalting the peacemakers, and so on.31 The matter becomes complicated when we come to the fourth beatitude, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice,” which Dante divides by making two distinct groups of the hungry and the thirsty.32 In the view of some scholars, the division was necessary in order to arrive at the desired number of beatitudes.33 It is more apposite to note that along the way Dante has dropped two other beatitudes, the “meek” and the “persecuted,” which he could not reasonably exalt in a discussion that dealt precisely with the means of avoiding persecution.
The lacuna created by this omission is nonetheless filled by a new beatitude, taken from Psalm 31[32).1 and pronounced just at the moment when the chariot of the Church makes its solemn appearance: “Blessed are they whose sins are covered—Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata.”34 This time, we note, the author has eliminated the first half of the verse, which speaks of the “remission” of sins: “Beati quorum remissa est iniquitas.” Hearing it, one would easily believe that he was less concerned to be forgiven than not to be caught. One should add that if these sins are “covered,” they are such that they could be “uncovered” by any reader who is wise, just, and well disposed toward him.35
The same concern reappears, in yet more vivid terms, in canto 17 of Paradiso, which contains a prediction announced long before concerning the life of the poet. The prophecy is put in the mouth of his great-grandfather Cacciaguida and not, as it should be, in Beatrice’s.36 Dante, visibly moved by the portrait Cacciaguida has just painted of Florence’s internal strife,37 begins to ask questions concerning his own future, about which he has reason to be concerned. Given what has already happened, he can expect the worst. If he knows beforehand what woes lie in store for him, he may bear them more easily than if they were to hit him unexpectedly, as he puts it, “the arrow one foresees arrives more gently.”38
From Cacciaguida he learns that he will be banished from his native city and feel in his heart the unspeakable pain of involuntary exile. His accusers will easily find him guilty of anything they will want to fabricate against him. The blame, as usual, will be attached in the popular mind to the injured party.39 He will have to leave all that is most dear to his heart. He will discover how bitter is the bread one begs of others and how harsh the stairs the guest treads in a stranger’s house. The “insane, competely ungrateful and impious” scoundrels who will keep him company will soon turn against him, such that he will have to sever his ties to all political parties and form his own party of one.40
It is true that in his misfortune he will be able to count on the hospitality of a benefactor (usually thought to be Bartolomeo della Scala) who, like him, has nothing but disdain for all that others hold in highest esteem.41 It is also possible that a complete reversal of the situation could occur thanks to the deeds of a young man who is still only nine years old, but whose virtues will soon reveal themselves.42 Whatever happens, he will have to keep himself from seeking revenge, for, in spite of all of the snares that are set for him, his life is promised to a future that far outstrips the punishments that will befall his enemies.43
If there were no more to this prophecy than what we have just heard, we have good reason to feel deceived, since all the events it mentions either had already occurred at the time Dante wrote or never took place. The true content of the speech lies elsewhere. It has to do with neither the known past nor the uncertain future, but uniquely that part of the future whose broad lines can be discerned by a prudent and alert mind. In hearing that his glory is ensured, Dante is perplexed. A few moments’ reflection suffices, however, to convince him that he must “arm myself with foresight,” so that, if he should lose Florence, he might not lose other cities as well “through what my poems say.”44 If he were to tell all that he learned in the course of his long journey, he would incur the wrath of many readers.45 The alternative is to remain silent, but then he would have to give up all hope of living in the memory of those who would come after him. A “timid friend of truth” would easily save his life, only to lose it among “those who will call this present, ancient times.”46
This judicious answer evokes a smile of approval from his illustrious ancestor. The canto had begun with a somber allusion to the misadventures of Phaeton, the son of the Sun, who met his ruin for not following his father’s counsels.47 Once he is persuaded that this will not be the case with Dante, Cacciaguida can encourage him to put aside all falsehood and to reveal what he knows.48 His cry will be as the wind that sends its roughest blows against the highest peaks. As for those with dark conscience who find it harsh, “let them scratch wherever it may itch.” His words, bitter as they are at the first taste, will provide “living nourishment” once they have been digested and, without harming his current situation, will win him acclaim in generations to come.49
Cacciaguida’s prophecy, which occupies the literal center of Paradiso, is in fact a commentary on what Dante had earlier in the poem called the “art of returning.” In canto 10 of Inferno, when Dante and Virgil were wandering among the tombs of the heretics, they first encountered Epicurus and his disciples, who denied the immortality of the soul.50 It is curious that the only heresy to be named is Epicureanism, which is strictly speaking not a Christian heresy. Dante is burning with desire to see the Florentines lying in the open sepulchres but does not dare tell Virgil of his wish. Nonetheless he will have the pleasure of conversing with two among them, Farinata degli Uberti, the illustrious head of the Tuscan Ghibellines, and the father of Guido Cavalcanti.
The exchange with Farinata is particularly interesting in that it puts Dante in the presence of the great adversary of his family, which had belonged to the Guelph party. Farinata begins by recalling the two brilliant victories that he won over his enemies.51 For his part, Dante is content to reply that if his people were expelled they nonetheless “returned” each time, whereas the Ghibellines could not do the same since they were not well acquainted with the “art:” “ma i vostri non appreser ben quel arte.”52 Farinata acknowledges that this is the case, but he is quick to add that in less than fifty moons Dante himself will learn “how heavy is that art.”53 The event he is predicting seems to be the defeat of La Lastra, which took place fifty months later, in July 1304, and put an end once and for all to the hope Dante entertained of someday returning to Florence. The death penalty pronounced against him was never revoked—it was even reiterated—and, from what we know, he never again set foot in his native city.54 One might thus conclude that he, too, did not master this art of returning in which he glories, unless one should think he would have had some other way to return to his native city. But what could be this new way of returning? The story of the poet Tedaldo degli Elisei, the seventh story told on the third day in Boccaccio’s Decameron, will put us on the right track.
Tedaldo, we are told, fell in love with a woman named Ermelina, whom he visited as often as he could without arousing the suspicions of her husband, Aldobrando Palermini. All was going well until, without prior warning, he was rejected by Ermelina, who was determined never to see him again. In the throes of despair, Tedaldo changed his name and left Florence for Cyprus, where he soon became famous and prosperous. One day he heard a poem sung which he had composed in honor of his beloved. Overcome with desire to be with her once again, he returned to Florence disguised as a pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre and met his four brothers, who were in mourning for his supposed death. Tedaldo was thought to be the victim of an assassination that had just been committed and of which Ermelina’s jealous husband stood accused.
Without wanting to disabuse them, the next day Tedaldo went to visit Ermelina. He learned that she had lost none of her love for him and that it was only at the urging of her confessor, a rapacious and debauched monk, that she had renounced him. Thanks to Tedaldo’s intercession, Aldobrando was freed and, to celebrate this happy outcome, Tedaldo hosted a sumptuous feast at his own expense to which the two families, his and Aldobrando’s, were invited. Only now did he abandon his pilgrim’s disguise and, donning a green tunic, he revealed himself to his brothers. In spite of this, doubts regarding his true identity persisted for a long time. Many Florentines took him for a ghost and even his brothers were not convinced that it was really he. These doubts were only overcome with the chance discovery that the murder victim was a certain thief named Faziuolo, who looked so much like him that they could not be told apart.
It was still widely known in the nineteenth century that this story, which Boccaccio seems to have invented whole cloth, was probably a secret biography of Dante.55 Its hero immediately calls to mind the other poet who returns, in the garb of a pilgrim, to his native Florence after many years of exile. Like Dante, Tedaldo is filled with nostalgia when others intone his own love songs in his presence.56 His diatribes against the churchmen responsible for his misfortune recall the invectives of the author of the Comedy, who is no more soft on those “ministers of divine justice” whom one would think are rather “instruments of the devil.”57 Let us note without insisting that the thief whose disappearance coincides with his return is called Faziuolo, the pejorative diminutive of Bonifazio or Boniface. In itself this means nothing, but if we remember Dante’s troubles with Boniface VIII, the detail becomes that much more piquant.
Even the name of the hero, Tedaldo degli Elisei, suggests Dante’s name. Dante belonged to the ancient family of the Elisei. Boccaccio, who recalls this fact, also points out that his patronym, Alighieri, was originally written Aldighieri.58 Although there were several people by the name of Tedaldo in Florence, we know of none who was of the Elisei family.59 If Boccaccio, who did not ordinarily choose his names haphazardly, retained it, this is almost certainly because he combined the second syllable of Dante with the first two syllables of Aldighieri. As for Ermelina’s name, Boccaccio could have chosen it to evoke the idea of whiteness or ermine and to signify Florence that was once White and had since fallen into the hands of the Blacks, but to which the poet was always deeply attached. Nothing would then prevent us from seeing in the banquet Tedaldo hosts to celebrate the reconciliation of the two enemy families an image of the Comedy itself, which seeks in its own way to resolve the war that had broken out between the two opposing factions and had caused the author so much suffering.60 Dante was well acquainted with the metaphor, to which he had already devoted his Convivio.61
This old interpretation may seem affected from our vantage point in time, but its merit is to suggest how, despite the circumstances, Dante could say that he possessed a particular art, the secret of which would have eluded Farinata and his party. Banished from his homeland, he really and truly returned, if not in flesh and blood, at least in and by his poem.62 At the very moment he enters Florence in the company of Virgil, he strikes up a conversation with a banished Ghilbelline that is meant to put in broad daylight the tour de force that has just taken place before our eyes. This same poem allowed him to win a posthumous victory over his adversaries and at last obtain the honors which his fellow citizens were not disposed to grant him in his lifetime. By their intransigence, the Ghibellines only succeeded in sealing their own ruin. They were perceived as heretics and earned themselves death or exile. The fact of the matter is that from 1266 onward there were no more avowed Ghibellines in Florence.63 In their reduced state, only a more supple attitude could have reopened the city’s gates to them and ensured their survival. The heretics in canto 10 of Inferno are not true heretics; they are Epicureans who, by resigning themselves to their fate prematurely, in practice acted as though the soul died with the body.64 Dante admires their noble pride that finds any compromise with baseness repugnant,65 but he wants just as much to show us that even a situation as desperate as this one could in the end be transformed into a dazzling triumph.
An objection inevitably comes to mind as soon as we take seriously the possibility of such reserve on the part of the poet. It is indeed hard to see why Dante, who is considered one of the most courageous authors of his time, would have acted like Nicodemus in a manner worthy of the greatest coward. After all, he knew how to give free rein to his verve when his heart told him to, and he had no scruple in stating on occasion just what he thought of the political and religious institutions of the Middle Ages. Even the biting allusions we have seen to the malice and hypocrisy of Boniface VIII in canto 17 of Inferno only restate in another form the reproaches Dante addresses elsewhere to this pope whose conduct horrified him and for whom he did not fear to reserve a place in hell along with most of the other popes of the time. This boldness won him the implacable hatred of his enemies and from the beginning made him an author feared by church authorities. The Monarchy was burned in some cities of northern Italy upon its publication and was for a very long time on the Index of Forbidden Books.66 Had it not been for the patriotic zeal of the Italian clergy, the Comedy would likely have been subject to a similar fate at the time of the Council of Trent.67 It would be odd for Dante to be so concerned to conceal in one place what in another he revealed with astonishing frankness. His daring being well known to everyone, he had no reason to hide it.
Let us not waste time denying Dante’s proverbial boldness. The question is not whether he was bold but how far he took his boldness. It is not impossible that it is part of a more subtle travesty which it seeks to conceal from our eyes. We all know that a disguise is not effective unless it is itself disguised. Dante, who knew that as well as we do, also knew from experience that in general people do not easily believe that an author known for his intrepidity should be even more intrepid than he appears to be. Thus he was free to use his boldness to camouflage his true boldness and see to it that it would usually go undetected. Dante’s reason for acting like Nicodemus in the Comedy would thus be much more profound than we think. By focusing our minds on problems of a practical order, Dante would have given himself more liberty to raise indirectly certain problems that are otherwise dangerous, about which it was to his advantage to keep silent. His skill consists in “putting his readers on the trail of certain hidden senses that are easy to discern so as to more effectively distract their attention from another, truly hidden meaning, the one that is the most interesting but less easy to uncover.”68 This strategy, which Dante calls dissimulatio in the Convivio, resembles, he says, a general’s creating a diversion at the rear of a fortress with the intention of attacking it by the front once its defenders have been turned away.69 It was altogether appropriate for P. Renucci to say that “the Comedy is at once the most open and the most secret of books.”70 The allegory it employs is in reality a two-shot weapon, the first of which serves to make us forget the second.
On the other hand, we clearly will never be able to prove that a doubly secret intention lies hidden beneath the pages of the Comedy unless we can say what this intention is. Our analysis of canto 22 of Purgatorio seemed to suggest that in order to escape persecution Dante only did what Statius had done in maintaining a respectful silence regarding his religious beliefs. Now the idea that he would have rejected the Christian faith in his mind and heart is belied by the massive impression one gets from reading the entire poem. It may well be that, at the time he was writing the Convivio, Dante flirted with unbelief and underwent what could easily be taken as a “rationalist” crisis, echoes of which can be heard in the Purgatorio. These doubts, however, if indeed he had them, would have been soon overcome, else it is hard to imagine that he would have dedicated such sublime pages to the glory of the Christian faith as one finds throughout Paradiso. Dante, the poet of the beatific vision, could be nothing but a Christian. No reasoning, however ingenious, will ever succeed in shaking such a solidly rooted conviction in his readers.
The argument seems all the stronger in that it rests on the great many texts that could be adduced. Yet it nonetheless would be more convincing if Dante had not put us on guard against a too superficial interpretation, especially of the last part of his poem, which is by far the most difficult of the three.71 To resolve this problem, one would need to do a detailed analysis not only of the Paradiso but of the Comedy in its entirety. Since this would require a great deal of time, let us take up the handy abridgement provided in the three cantos that directly address the question of Dante’s Christianity, namely, cantos 24, 25, and 26 of Paradiso, in which, under Beatrice’s watchful gaze, the pilgrim undergoes an examination regarding the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. We will once again find something to think about.
The interrogation is confided in turn to the apostles Peter, James, and John, the favored disciples of the Lord, whom he called to share his most intimate secrets and who have become the patron saints of the three great centers of medieval Christendom, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Jerusalem.72 One would expect the candidate for the supreme honors of Paradise to undertake sooner or later a spiritual journey that would take him to these places in thought. In spite of everything, the pilgrimage is rather suspect, and the questioning to which Dante accepts to subject himself is not of a sort to give us complete assurance regarding his interior dispositions.
As has often been observed, the examination on faith from the start resembles a scholastic disputation. The “bachelor” arms himself with all of the reasons (ogni razione) he can muster and waits to be questioned before speaking. His duty is not to “resolve” (terminar) the question, which it belongs to the master to do, but to debate (approvar) it as best he can.73 Accordingly, his answers are proper beyond reproach. What is faith? It is, as St. Paul says, “the substance of things hoped for, the proof (argomento) for what we have no evidence.” It belongs accordingly to the dual category of “substance” and “proofs.” Since the things it deals with remain hidden to our eyes, their existence (esser) can only be the object of belief. There will nonetheless be “proof” in the measure one “reasons” (sillogizzare) on them in order to draw the desired conclusions.74
This raises a further question: Does Dante have this substance in his pocket, that is, does he himself have faith? Yes, he certainly does. The “syllogism” that attests to this truth consists of two premises, the Old and the New Testaments. In the face of such a clear “demonstration,” any other truth seems obscure.75 But what proves the divinity of Scripture? Miracles prove it.76 At this point, a new difficulty arises: Since these mariacles are themes-lves attested to only by Scripture, is this not a circular argument? Not at all, for even if none of them had ever occurred, the conversion of the world to Christianity would consititute by itself an event a hundred times more remarkable than any other miracle.77
St. Peter is so visibly impressed by this brilliant performance that he has only to congratulate the student and grant him his blessing.78 We, too, could rest satisfied if Dante had not insisted so much beforehand on the superiority of argument from reason over mere argument from authority. As Cacciaguida had already said, “the mind of one who hears will not put doubt to rest, nor put trust in you, if given examples with their roots unknown and hidden, or arguments too dim, too unapparent.”79 Let us note that the pilgrim has spoken, not of his own will, but because he was ordered to do so.80 Not surprisingly, then, his answers are aimed above all at “pleasing” his interrogator. 81 The answers are undeniably rigorous, but as the text insinuates, with a measure of irony, they are akin to those of a sophist.82 As for the victory of Christianity, one would have to see if it is not due as much to human causes as to a noteworthy miracle. Canto 32 of Purgatorio seems rather to attribute it to the support of the emperors from which the Church has benefited at various times.83 In any event, the miracle would be yet more complete if “the good plant that was once a vine” had not changed itself into a “thorn.”84
The candidate, as we learned at the start, was not asked to resolve the question; his task was only to examine the two sides of the question. Perhaps we would do well to imitate him. Indeed, there is hardly anything in this exchange of statements that could not refer just as well to the faith that Dante placed, not in Holy Scripture, but in his own writings, whose substance itself remains enveloped in a deep mystery.
By looking further into the text, we would discover no doubt many other elements that are no less indicative and hardly more reassuring. From the beginning we sense that Dante is appearing not so much before the heavenly court as the papal court, fully determined this time not to expose himself to a new disappointment. The “chosen fellowship, sodalizio eletto,” that receives him resembles in fact an assembly of well-fed Roman cardinals, while poor Dante, reduced like the Lazarus of the parable to a beggar’s state, must rest content with the crumbs that fall from their table.85 In their midst sits the “blessed lamb, benedetto agnello,”86 in whom the reader can here again detect Boniface VIII. His given name was Benedetto Gaetani, and he continued to call himself by that name even after his election as supreme pontiff.87 His vestments are so sumptuous that neither the pen nor the imagination of the poet could ever arrive at rendering all of their nuances. 88 The title of “Chief Centurion, alto primipilo,” is also apropos, especially when one thinks of Boniface VIII’s military campaigns.89 But are we certain that it is truly he who Dante has in mind? In case we had not noticed, Dante takes care to bring him to mind by once again playing on his name: “So may the Grace that grants to me to make confession . . . permit my thoughts to find their fit expression, faccia li miei concetti bene espressi.”90 In such a context, the pontifical blessing which customarily concludes an audience does not appear at all arbitrary.
After such an equivocal confession, the idea expressed at the start of the next canto, in which the subject is hope, becomes almost irreverent. Dante has good hope that his “sacred poem” will overcome the cruelty that banished him from his native city as the enemy of the “wolves” that make of him their prey. He will then be able to return “with other voice, with other fleece” to put on at his baptismal font the laurel crown that is destined to be his, since there he entered into the faith for which Peter has just garlanded his brow.91 This says a good deal about the object of his hope for future glory. This hope appears to hold little in common with heavenly glory. The poet, dressed in a “double fleece,” expects rather to receive glory in his own land, which is none other than “this sweet life, questa dolce vita.”92 To a Christian this double garment which theology spoke of is the glory of the soul and of the body in the life to come.93 The refined ambiguity of the expression imitates very nicely the double appearance under which Dante has sought to present himself to us.
We shall say only a few words regarding the examination on charity, in which the pilgrim, dazzled as was Saul by the rays emanating from St. John, must use reason to compensate the temporary loss of his sight.94 The object of his love is the supreme good and the entire universe in the measure that he participates in its goodness. This “good inasmuch as it is good” is known to him as much by philosophic proofs as by the authority that comes from heaven.95 The ardor he invests in pursuing it has been revived in him, not only by this certain knowledge, but by all of the morsels that can turn the heart to God and have joined to draw him “from the sea of twisted love and set [him] on the shore of the right love: the world’s existence and his own, the death that He sustained that [he] might live, and that which is the hope of all believers, as it is [his] hope.”96 What is Dante trying to make us think of? Only the existence (essere) of the world and his own existence, as it is most often claimed? This does not seem to be the case, for neither the one nor the other is properly speaking a morsel, not to mention that the idea would duplicate what was just said concerning rational proofs of the divinity. The simplest approach is to take the word essere in the ordinary sense of a “state,” which makes the phrase perfectly intelligible. It is, as we have seen, the actual state of the world as well as the pitiful state in which Dante found himself, that awakened in him the dream of a happiness whose realization no longer depended on the political conditions of his time. The thought contained in the verse that follows would then be linked to the preceding verse, provided one sees that the death in question is not Christ’s death but Dante’s own political death, which gave rise to his new calling. Grammatically, the pronoun el can only refer to God, who is mentioned earlier, but, without any immediate antecedent, it could also designate the poet himself, or, more exactly, the first Dante, whose spiritual death we have already witnessed in the Inferno. This would not be the only instance of a doubling of this kind in the Comedy. The scene which follows affords us yet another instance. In any event, one would have expected statements that were a bit less amphibological.97
The discussion of the three theological virtues is barely over when a new spark manifests itself, that of Adam, to whom Dante, his sight now recovered, wishes to ask a few questions. He wants to know how many years have passed since the creation of the world, how long Adam sojourned in the earthly paradise, what the cause was of his expulsion, and what language he created and spoke.98
Adam, who already knows these questions without Dante needing to formulate them, is quick to respond, but he does not always do so directly or in the order they were raised. He answers that he was banished from the earthly paradise, not for having tasted the fruit of the tree, but solely for having trespassed the boundary (segno) that had been fixed for him.99 He stayed a total of 4,302 years in Limbo before being liberated by Christ.100 He lived on earth no less than 930 years.101 The language that he once spoke had completely disappeared at the time of the Tower of Babel.102 Finally his stay in the Garden of Eden lasted from the first hour of the day until the one following the sixth, that is, hardly more than six hours.103 With that Adam’s discourse ends abruptly without any further clarification.
Let us take a closer look at these answers and see if they contain anything more than what they state explicitly. First, let us consider the chronological information. It is no surprise to learn that Adam lived to the age of 930 years, since that is just what the Bible teaches in Genesis 5.5. Regarding the number of years that passed between his death and the descent of Christ into hell, there was a great deal of uncertainty in the tradition. Clement of Alexandria dated the birth of Christ to the year 5590; Hippolytus put it at 5503104 St. Augustine simply noted that, at the time he was writing, the world was less than 6,000 years old, without providing any more precision than the biblical data warranted. 105 To my knowledge, no one has yet observed that Dante’s chronology follows very precisely that of Orosius, according to which the Messiah, born in 5199, would have died 33 years later, in the year 5232106 By subtracting from that number the 930 years Adam lived on earth, we arrive at the number 4,302, the same number Dante adopts in the Comedy.
One would have to ask, however, whether Dante was content to slavishly reproduce the information provided by his predecessor or if he did not adapt it to serve his own purposes, as the text itself suggests. Adam in fact does say: “During four thousand three hundred and two returnings of the sun, while I was in that place from which your Lady sent you Virgil, I longed for this assembly.” 107 The place from which Virgil left to come to the aid of Dante can only be the Limbo in canto 4 of Inferno, where dwell the souls of virtuous pagans who died before the coming of Christ. Now, the first part of the poem from the start of canto 4 to the end of the canticle contains exactly 4,302 verses, excluding the last four verses, in which Virgil and Dante leave the infernal regions and see for the first time the stars that shine in the firmament of the southern hemisphere.
One might call this simply coincidental, but that is not possible, for the same procedure was already employed to explain the duration of Adam’s stay in the earthly paradise, which Dante reduces, as others before him had, to approximately seven hours.108 This piece of information has no support in Genesis either, which has nothing to say on the subject. On the other hand, it corresponds precisely to the duration of Dante’s own stay in Eden, situated at the summit of Mount Purgatory. He entered it at dawn, that is, according to the Comedy’s timetable, at six in the morning, and he left when the sun had just changed quadrant, a little after noon.109
The most curious aspect of all of this is that Adam has never answered Dante’s precise question concerning the actual age of the world. To arrive at that answer, one would have to add the 930 years of Adam’s earthly life to the 4,302 years between his death and Christ’s descent into hell, as well as the 1,267 years from the death of Christ to the year 1300, the year of the poem’s action.110 This yields a total of 6,499 years, or, considering that another year has already begun, 6,500 years. By itself, this detail is not particularly revealing. It becomes so, however, as soon as we note that, according to the Comedy, the world as we know it was to last another 6,500 years.111 This would come down to saying that Dante’s work symbolically occupies the center of human history. As the poem’s opening verse announces by way of allusion, the work is situated, not without some degree of presumption, “in the middle of our life’s way,” and not only, as is said again and again, in the middle of his own life.112 The new Adam whose coming it proclaims is not quite the one announced by the Christian tradition!113
Once this is recognized, it is likely that the parallel between Adam and Dante extends to other themes in the speech, such as the nature of original sin and the loss of the primitive language. One finds, in fact, that Adam’s idea of original sin bears little resemblance to the one upheld by the most esteemed theologians of the thirteenth century. According to St. Thomas, the precept forbidding Adam and Eve to touch the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in no way arbitrary. It was rooted in the intrinsic evil of this act, whereby man willed to attain knowledge to which by his nature he had no right or which could be obtained only by disordered means.114 For his part, Adam shows no concern for the reasons that seemed to justify such a precept. To listen to him, one would think that “the cause of [his] long exile did not lie within the act of tasting of the tree, but solely in [his] trespass of the boundary.”115 In other words, the act of which he was judged guilty was not forbidden because it was bad; rather, it was bad “solely” because it was forbidden. God comes across as a capricious tyrant whose decrees are incomprehensible and devoid of any wisdom. We do not see how, as a good Aristotelian, Dante could have sided with such irrationalism. However, we should not be taken by what is only a pretext to speak about something else. All the evidence indicates that the text does not have to do with Adam’s fault and his metaphoric exile, but with the very real exile to which Dante himself was condemned, not because he committed a crime—he never admitted to that—but solely for having crossed the tyrannical power that had taken hold of the city.116
By a surprise turn, what follows in the speech brings us back to that same idea. To satisfy his interlocutor’s curiosity, Adam launches into a dissertation on the evolution of human language. The language he himself spoke, he says, became extinct when “the race of Nimrod” was bent on the project it could not complete, the construction of the Tower of Babel. It is the same with human languages as it is with the leaves upon a branch: “one comes, another goes.” There is nothing strange in this, since, although language is natural to man, the idiom in which it is expressed is not fixed by nature. It is dependent on man’s good pleasure, and, “following the heavens, men seek the new, they shift their predilections.” Before Adam was “sent down to Hell’s torments, on earth the Highest Good . . . was called I; and then He was called El.” Nothing the human mind produces, however reasonable it may be, is immune to the vicissitudes of time.117
These details would appear quite superfluous if they contained nothing more than a philosophical theory, laced with a few historical considerations, regarding a question that bore no relation to the rest of the story. But is all this only about language? Dante, who is not in the habit of wandering from his subject, seems to have taken the term in a wider sense that is closer to the theme of this passage. To maintain that men no longer spoke the same language or that they called the highest good by another name is to affirm in so many words that from a certain time onward their common life underwent a radical transformation or that a new regime came to replace the one under which they had lived up to that time. In Florence itself, torn by bloody struggles between two irreconcilable adversaries, a revolution had taken place, in the course of which the “race of Nimrod”—one can see right away just who that refers to118—had intervened to add to the confusion and to tip the scales in favor of the Blacks. The human will is so fickle that it always ends up, sooner or later, preferring to the good that it possesses certain novelties that it would not hesitate to reject if it were more sensible.119 Such are the “hellish torments” down to which the Adam of the Comedy was sent for his misfortune. Precisely because he no longer shared the views of his fellow citizens, or no longer spoke the same language they spoke, Dante was banished from his native city forever. The questions he was so anxious to ask the first Adam are in fact related and can be fully understood only in terms of the identity they establish between the two characters.
One more question remains, which the Comedy raises only indirectly and which concerns the reason why the encounter with Adam follows immediately upon the the examination on the three theological virtues. It was no doubt fitting that the new Adam should only emerge after giving “proofs” of his Christianity. But how does this new Adam differ from the first? At the end of Purgatorio, Dante already appeared as an “Adam subtilis,” the protopype of a humanity restored to its primitive nature and endowed with all of the attributes proper to his species.120 Will it always be maintained that the Adam of Paradiso is simply joined to his predecessor as the supernatural order is added to the natural order, to complete it and elevate it to a higher degree of perfection? We would be more comfortable with such an interpretation if Dante had not alerted us through the intermediary of Statius that he was not bound to reveal himself fully to us and if his own confession of faith did not leave so much to be desired.
There exists another interpretation, formerly more widespread, according to which Dante would have abstained from passing judgment on the truth of Christianity so as to let the reader draw his own conclusions on the matter. Instead of a converted Dante, we would then have a Dante who presents himself as a Christian without truly being one or who at least rethinks his faith in terms of the new objections that could be raised against it. Let us not forget that the situation he faced was without precedent in the West, thanks especially to the rising tide of Aristotelianism, which was growing stronger day by day. This phenomenon is evident in the nearly contemporary work of Marsilius of Padua, which is already so different in its inspiration from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the heat of this crisis, other possibilities were opening which would not have been thought of at an earlier time. The disaffection of certain thinkers for Christianity suddenly became a social phenomenon that could no longer be ignored and that fanned serious concerns.
We shall perhaps never know what Dante thought in his inmost heart of this problem to which, it seems, he wishes to draw our attention without telling us just how we could resolve it. But we do not need to know. The secret of his language, and thus the true novelty of his poem, resides elsewhere, in the unequaled splendor of the renewed Christianity of which he is the spokesman. Other writers, such as Marsilius of Padua, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to name but a few, were almost as circumspect, but none of them were ever taken to be one of the glories of medieval Christendom. If Dante succeeded in getting himself to be spoken of as “the most Christian of poets,”121 it is not because of his “avarice,” which will always be open to discussion; it is because of his “prodigality,” which leaves no room for any doubt and concerning which no one will ever be mistaken.
Perhaps the persuasive force of the arguments we have marshaled to bring to light all that might be ambiguous about the Christianity of the Comedy will be judged to be very weak, particularly since the evidence is most often indirect and thus open to question. Does this mean that the pursuit should be abandoned and that one should renounce trying to attain clarity in this matter? Before replying in the affirmative, it would be good to reflect once again on the nature of the proofs at our disposal.
Since it was accepted from the start that we could not find the author at fault, we have no reason to complain that there are no more explicit statements on his part, nor to deplore the apparent weakness of certain arguments which, in his thinking, were not meant to lead to conclusions that were immune to attack. In the domain of theoretical science, one apodictic argument alone is without doubt preferable to a whole array of probable arguments, but in other instances the conviction produced by the accumulation of converging indices is tantamount in the long run to moral certitude. In no way do we hold that the few remarks we have made suffice of themselves to produce such a certitude. If they recommend themselves to our attention, it is only as a hypothesis. But all hypotheses are not equal. As a general rule, a hypothesis will be more acceptable if it allows us to reconcile a greater number of heterogeneous or discordant observations. The hypothesis we have championed has the advantage of acknowledging the Christian aspect of the Comedy, without obliging us to close our eyes to numerous elements of the poem which seem to contradict it. The apologists of the poem’s Christian orthodoxy must, on the other hand, acknowledge their impotence in the face of this opaque residue that again and again disturbs our rest and calls everything into question.
The truth is that this exclusively Christian interpretation is of rather recent date and does not have behind it the weight of an uninterrupted tradition going back to the Middle Ages. It is false to say that Dante’s contemporaries, who were better situated than we to know him, completely overlooked this dark background of his thinking. As we have seen, even the brilliance of his renown never succeeded in overcoming the doubts that for centuries continued to hover over him. Like Pascal, though for other motives, he was never fully integrated into the main current of Christian thought. The objection to Pascal was that he did not place sufficient confidence in reason and so contributed to the dismantling of the cosmology upon which theology had for long sought to lean. If Dante has always been the subject of misgivings, it is not for his having denigrated human reason; it is rather for having esteemed it too highly.
Let us take a further step and suppose that the ecclesiastical authorities were aware of the situation. Could they say so publicly? Such an avowal would only have served to make Dante a sworn enemy of the Church, something which would not have served their cause and even done it great harm. It was better to feign ignorance and act as though there was no cause for concern. By treating an enemy as a friend and giving him the honors that seemed due him the authorities avoided any new hassles. Here was a solution that could satisfy all of the parties involved.
In his Life of Dante Boccaccio tells of an incident that suggests that this is just how this matter came to be handled. A few years after the poet’s death, one of his adversaries, Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget, the papal legate in Lombardy, heard of the use that the supporters of Louis of Bavaria were making of Dante’s Monarchy. At first he thought of having Dante’s mortal remains burned so as to make of him a posthumous heretic. He was dissuaded from his plan, not by Dante’s friends, as might be expected, but by his own friends, who immediately understood the immense harm such an act would have caused. Either most people would have found it unjust, or else a secret no one wanted to divulge would be revealed to all the world.122
In the same way one can explain the fate reserved at the time to Guido Vernani’s De reprobatione Monarchiae, in which for the first time Dante is accused of Averroism. The worth of the arguments on which the accusation rests matters little. What is mysterious is the silence that surrounded this little treatise in the wake of its publication. Vernani’s name is not to be found anywhere in the catalogues of Dominican authors of the Middle Ages.123 The omission would be less flagrant if these lists were less complete and if they did not include the names of so many authors who were hardly more meritorious and are today largely forgotten. Despite his vigorous defense of religious orthodoxy and papal policy, the author of the De reprobatione Monarchiae seems to have been himself the object of his superiors’ tacit reprobation. Perhaps they simply thought he was mistaken in his views, but in that case all they had to do was to say so, as was done in the case of so many of his contemporaries. It is more probable that, although they sensed that he was on the right track, his superiors were against him because he spoke too openly. Vernani’s treatise was rejected not because its author was mistaken regarding Dante’s intentions, but because he saw them only too well. He did not understand that exposing the theses of the Monarchy to broad daylight was to run a new risk for the Church. Unfortunately, the religious authorities could not allow themselves the luxury of an adversary of Dante’s proportions. Vernani would have had greater success if he had been more perspicacious or less perspicacious. He had succeeded in piercing the veil beneath which Dante hides his thought, but not enough to grasp the subtle lesson to be drawn from the use of such a veil.
Philippe Guiberteau, L’Énigme de Dante (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1973), 264. On Dante’s so-called “intellectual crisis,” see also Étienne Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, trans. David Moore (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), 94–100; Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 70–71; and Francis Fergusson, Dante’s Drama of the Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 78–79, 99–104.
See Dante, Purgatorio 20, 127–129.
See Dante, Purgatorio 21, 55–72.
See Dante, Purgatorio 21, 82–102.
See Dante, Purgatorio 21, 103–136.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 19–24.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 25–54.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 70–72; and Virgil, Eclogues IV, 1–5. On the Christian appropriation of Virgil’s prophecy, see Jerome Carcopino, Virgile et le mystère de la quatrième Églogue (Paris: L’Artisan du livre, 1943), 201; and Pierre Courcelle, “Les exégèses chrétiennes de la quatrième Églogue,” Revue des études anciennes 59 (1957): 294–319.
Dante, Purgatorio 22, 90.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 88–89; 21, 92–93; 22, 55–60.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 28–39. The letters appear in the following sequence: V(eramente), O(r), L(a), E. The usual method of deciphering consists in taking the first letter of the group, followed by the last, then the second, then the next to last, and so on. See Walter Arensberg, The Cryptography of Dante (New York: Knopf, 1921), 56.
Dante, Purgatorio 22, 28–30.
Virgil, Aeneid III, 56–57.
Dante, Purgatorio 22, 40–41.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 38. The verb intendere, to understand, often means in the Comedy “to penetrate the hidden meaning of the text.” See Grandgent, La Divina Commedia, 506. Grandgent refers to an analogous usage in Inferno 4, 51; and 24, 74; Purgatorio 19, 137; and Paradiso 14, 126.
See Dante, Purgatorio 10, 114–115.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 41.
The word “oikonomia” seems to have been used for the first time in this sense by the Fathers of the Church. On the various uses of the term among the Church Fathers, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: S.P.C.K., 1969).
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 92–93. On acedia, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 35.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 67–68.
The problem raised in canto 22 has been foreshadowed, it seems, in the interlude at the end of the preceding canto. Statius has just voiced his profound esteem for Virgil, unaware that one of the two people with whom he is speaking is Virgil himself, whom he would so liked to have known personally, even at the cost of prolonging his stay in Purgatory by a whole year (see Purgatorio 21, 200–102). Dante is on the verge of revealing the name of his illustrious companion but is held back by a signal from Virgil. For a few moments he is torn between the two poets, one of whom begs him to speak and the other enjoins him to be silent. In the face of Statius’s impatience, Virgil gives in and the revelation takes place. The meaning of this very amusing but apparently inconsequential little game of hide and seek is not evident at first sight. However, if one bears in mind that the Comedy is composed in such a way that sequences of episodes are interwoven, in imitation of the overlapping rhyme scheme in each canto (aba, bcb, cdc), one may be tempted to see here a subtle anticipation of the antithesis between speech and silence that will shortly be made fully evident.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 127; and 24, 143.
See Dante, Purgatorio 27, 46–48, 85–86.
See Dante, Purgatorio 28, 82, 145.
Dante, Purgatorio 30, 55, 63.
Dante, Purgatorio 30, 49–51.
See Dante, Convivio I, 2, 12–14, in which Dante explains at length why and when it is sometimes necessary to speak of oneself. He cites two examples, Boethius and St. Augustine. Boethius sought “under the pretext of finding consolation, to defend himself against the everlasting disgrace of his exile by showing that it had been unjust.” Augustine in his Confessions spoke of himself to instruct his readers, for in narrating “the development of his life, which progressed from not good to good, from good to better, and from better to best, he gives us example and instruction which no account by a mere witness, however faithful, could have supplied.”
See Arensberg, Cryptography, 55–56. Note that the letter “d” is written as “di” in Italian.
Dante, Purgatorio 30, 58–60. This detestable ego, which Dante only half suppresses, shows through again in the unusual rhyme scheme found verses 55 to 69. Of these fifteen rhymes, twelve end uniformly in “a.” The series is interrupted by only three rhymes in “io” (mio, appario, rio), the Italian “I,” which again draws the reader’s attention to the person of the author. It is to be noted that the pilgrim’s gaze rests obligingly on the “veil” that covers the face of Beatrice without fully concealing it from his view: “I saw the lady who had first appeared to me beneath the veils of the angelic flowers look at me across the stream. Although the veil she wore—down from her head, which was encircled by Minerva’s leaves—did not allow her to be seen distinctly” (Purgatorio 30, 64–69). See also, earlier in the same canto: “a woman showed herself to me; above a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs; her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red” (Purgatorio 30, 31–33).
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 35, in which Statius reproaches himself for his lack of measure, “dismisura.”
See Dante, Purgatorio 12, 110; 15, 38; 17, 68–69; 27, 8.
See Dante, Purgatorio 22, 6; and 24, 151–154.
See Grandgent, La Divina Commedia, 504.
Dante, Purgatorio 29, 3. These words are spoken at the very moment when the Church makes its official appearance in the poem, under the form of a chariot accompanied by the virtues and sacred writers.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 104–105.
See Dante, Inferno 10, 130–132.
See Dante, Paradiso 16, 46–154.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 27.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 46–54.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 55–69.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 70–75.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 76–90.
See Dante, Purgatorio 17, 97–99.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 109–111.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 116–117.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 118–120.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 1–6. On the myth of Phaeton, which is found in several places in the Comedy (Inferno 17, 107–108; Purgatorio 4, 72; and 29, 118; Paradiso 31, 124–125), see J. Pépin, Dante et la tradition, 111–114.
See Dante, Paradiso 17, 124–129.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 130–135.
See Dante, Inferno 10, 13–15.
See Dante, Inferno 10, 46–48.
Dante, Inferno 10, 51.
Dante, Inferno 10, 81.
See Michele Barbi, Dante: Vita, opere e fortuna (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), 21–22; and Umberto Cosmo, Vita di Dante (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965), 92–94, 100.
See L. Valli, Il languaggio segreto di Dante e dei fedeli d’amore (Rome: Optima, 1928), 434–435.
See Boccaccio, Decameron III, 7, 8; and Dante, Purgatorio 2, 106–114.
Boccaccio, Decameron III, 7, 34–43; see Dante, Paradiso 11, 124–139; and 29, 82–126. On Dante’s critique of the mendicant orders, see Gilson, Dante, 242–252.
See Boccaccio, Life of Dante, ch. 2; and Leonardo Bruni Aretino, The Life of Dante, ch. 2.
Boccaccio, Decameron, I ed. V. Branca (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1960), 379 n. 2.
See Dante, Paradiso 6, 31–33, 97–108; and 28, 46–54.
See Dante, Convivio I, 1, 7–15. Dante adds that the bread he confects is “made from my own grain” (1, 2, 15). See Paradiso 10, 25: “I have prepared your fare; now feed yourself.”
See Dante, Paradiso 25, 7–8.
See A. Pézard, Oeuvres complètes, 939.
See Dante, Inferno 10, 13–15.
See Dante, Inferno 10, 32–36, 73.
See Boccaccio, Life of Dante, ch. 16. The Monarchy was condemned in 1329 and placed on the Index in 1554. It was not removed until 1881.
See G. H. Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome, II (New York: Putnam, 1909), 308. The Supplement to the Index published at Lisbon in 1581 prohibited the reading of the Comedy until such time as the text would be officially expurgated. At its chapter meeting held in Florence in 1335, the Roman province of the Dominicans forbade its study to all of its religious. Robert Bellarmine’s defense of Dante, found in his De controversiis christianae fidei, is concerned chiefly with controversies of the time between Protestants and Catholics. In his encyclical letter In praeclara, published on the sixth centenary of Dante’s death, Pope Benedict XV used the occasion to protest ideas then in fashion that belief in God is harmful to the arts and sciences. On Dante and the Index and on papal testimonies to Dante, which are all of relatively recent date, see A. Valensin, Le christianisme de Dante (Paris: Aubier, 1954), 137–138, 141–142, 183–185.
P. Guiberteau, L’Énigme, 59.
“This is a most graceful and useful figure, to which we may give the name dissimulation. Its strategy is similar to that of a wise soldier who attacks a castle on one side in order to draw off the defences from another, for the intention to bring help and the assault are not directed to the same side” (Dante, Convivio III, 10, 7–8).
P. Renucci, Dante (Paris: Hatier, 1958), 136.
See Dante, Paradiso 2, 1–18.
See also Dante, Vita Nuova, 40.
Dante, Paradiso 24, 46–51. On the structure of the scholastic disputation and the roles of the master and bachelor, see M. D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A. M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 88–91.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 70–78.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 85–96.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 97–102.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 103–108; see also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 1, 6.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 151.
Dante, Paradiso 17, 139–142. See also Purgatorio 3, 79–102; and Paradiso 13, 112–113; 20, 88–93.
Dante, Paradiso 24, 52, 85, 122–123.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 148, 154.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 81.
See Dante, Purgatorio 32, 124–141; and Paradiso 6, 94–96; 20, 55–60.
Dante, Paradiso 24, 111.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 1–9; and Luke 16.19–31. The same analogy also appears in Convivio I, 1, 3.
Dante, Paradiso 24, 2.
See R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 148–149; and Friedrich Gontard, The Chair of St. Peter: A History of the Papacy, trans. A. J. and E. F. Peeler (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 302.
See Dante, Paradiso 24, 25–27. Dante says often that he is at a loss to convey his thought. See, for example, Inferno 4, 145–147; 28, 1–6; Paradiso 1, 4–9; 10, 43–48; 33, 55–57; Convivio III, 4, 4, 11–13; and Letter to Cangrande, 29. But perhaps one ought to wonder whether the alleged impotence in such cases is not rather feigned, as Dante suggests in Paradiso 4, 49–57. What passes just about everywhere today as Dante’s mysticism might be but one aspect of the philosophical allegory of which we have already cited a number of examples.
See Dante, Inferno 27, 85–90.
Dante, Paradiso 24, 60.
See Dante, Paradiso 25, 1–12.
Dante, Paradiso 25, 91–93. See also Inferno 16, 127–128, in which Dante solemnly swears, not by the Bible, but by his own book.
See Isaiah 61.7 and 10; and Bonaventure, Breviloquium VII, 7.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 1–6.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 25–48.
Dante, Paradiso 26, 55–63, slightly rearranged.
Dante’s indebtedness here to the Book of Revelation does not seem to differ from what he already knew through Aristotle, to whom he alludes in Paradiso 26, 37–39: “My mind discerns this truth, made plain by him who demonstrates to me that the first love of the eternal beings is their Maker.” Aristotle’s authority is not invoked, on the other hand, when it comes to hope, which is not properly speaking a pagan virtue. For a literal interpretation of cantos 24, 25, and 26, see A. Valensin, who concludes his discussion by saying that “all these declarations are rigorously orthodox. What right does one have to cast doubt on them and ascribe secret thoughts to Dante that are incompatible with them?” (Le christianisme de Dante [Paris: Aubier, 1954], 27–31).
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 109–114.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 115–117.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 118–120.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 121–123.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 124–138.
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 139–142.
On these various chronologies, see V. Grumel, “La chronologie,” in Traité d’ études byzantines, I ed. P. Lemerle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 3–25.
See Augustine, The City of God XII, 11, and XVIII, 40; and Jerome, In epistolam ad Titum 1, 2.
See Orosius, Historiae adversus paganos I, 1. Orosius states that 3,184 passed between Adam and Abraham and 2,015 years from Abraham to the birth of Christ, for a total of 5,199 years. Orosius no doubt follows Eusebius, who gives 5,199 as the year of Christ’s birth.
Dante, Paradiso 26, 118–121.
“Quidam tradunt eos esse in paradiso septem horas” (Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Genesis, 24 [P.L. 198, col. 1075]). For reasons of fittingness, the expulsion from the earthly paradise was sometimes made to coincide with the death of Christ at three in the afternoon. See Pézard, Oeuvres, 1604.
See Dante, Purgatorio 28, 2, 12, 16; and 33, 104.
This date is known from Inferno 21, 112–114: “Five hours from this hour yesterday, one thousand and two hundred sixty-six years passed since that roadway was shattered here.” In line 112 modern editions uniformly adopt the reading of 1266, “mille dugento con sessanta sei.” Several manuscripts, however, have “mille dugent’un con sessanta sei,” that is, 1267. The latter reading, which is the more difficult, could well be authentic. Unfortunately, we do not have Dante’s own manuscript to verify the text. See the critical edition of G. Petrocchi, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata (Milan: Mandadori, 1966), 358. See also Rodolfo Benini, Scienza, religione ed arte nell’ astronomia di Dante (Rome: Reale academia d‘Italia, 1939), 25–26.
See Dante, Paradiso 9, 39–40, in which it is said that the fame of Folco of Marseilles “will not die away before this hundredth year [centesimo, that is, the year 1300] returns five times [s’incinqua].” The text goes on to say, “see then if man should not seek excellence—that his first life bequeath another life.” Dante likely intended to show not that Folco’s fame would last another 500 years—there is no reason why he would choose that number arbitrarily—but that 1,300 should be multiplied by 5, for a total of 6,500 years corresponding to the preceding 6,500 years. According to Benini, this detail is confirmed in Paradiso 18, 71–79 and 27, 142–148, which also assume a future duration of 6,500 years. In the first passage the letter DIL formed by the lights would signify 549 (D = 500 and IL = 49). Assuming that in 100 the world was 6,500 years old, Jupiter, where Dante is at the moment, had already begun its 549th rotation around the sun, at the rate of 11 years and 316 days for each rotation. Other details suggest that there remained an equal number of rotations for Jupiter to complete. In the second passage, Beatrice, deploring the absence of government on earth, asserts ironically that “before a thousand years have passed (and January is unwintered by day’s hundredth part, which they neglect below), this high sphere shall shine so, the Providence, long waited for, will turn the sterns to where the prows now are, so that the fleet run straight.” The neglected “hundredth part” is apparently an allusion to the thirteen minutes or hundredth part of a day overlooked by the Julian calendar, the cumulative of which would eventually result in spring beginning in early January. Without Gregory XIII’s reform of the calendar, approximately 6,500 years would have to pass for that to happen. See Benini, Scienza, 31–32.
In the second verse of the opening canto, Dante abruptly passes from the plural to the singular: “mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.” This should not prevent us from thinking that he also wanted to speak of his own life at the same time. He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and had thus attained what the Convivio refers to as the highest point in life. See Convivio IV, 23, 9. See also Isaiah 38.10: “In the noontide of my days I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years.”
Even the words Dante uses suggest that Adam’s identity could be other than it appears to be: “And the primal soul—much as an animal beneath a cover (coperto) stirs, so that its feelings are made evident when what enfolds it (invoglia) follows all its movements—showed me, through that which covered him (coperta) with what rejoicing he was coming to delight me” (Paradiso 26, 97–102). Note the acrostic “I(o) Dante” in the initial letters of these two and the adjoining tercets. See Arensberg, Cryptography, 58.
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 163, art. 2.
Dante, Paradiso 26, 115—117.
The views Dante ascribes to Adam resemble closely enough those he expresses elsewhere in his own name and according to which the fall of the first couple would have been caused by their temerity. That temerity of theirs made it impossible for them to bear the veil beneath which they should have stayed: “just indignation made me rebuke the arrogance of Eve because, where earth and heaven were obedient, a solitary woman, just created, found any veil at all beyond endurance” (Purgatorio 29, 23–27). It is sometimes supposed that the veil which Eve had the insolence to reject in eating the forbidden fruit is the veil of ignorance, given that the fruit came from the tree of knowledge. See J. D. Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 386 n. 2. We have seen, however, that with Dante the word “veil” almost always refers to some kind of disguise. One would think that Adam and Eve were expelled from the earthly paradise less for having sought knowledge they did not possess than for not having failed to conceal the knowledge which they did possess.
Dante, Paradiso 26, 124–138.
See Dante, Inferno 31, 46–81, in which Nimrod is depicted as a giant whose “face appeared . . . as broad and long as Rome can claim for its St. Peter’s pine cone” (58–59) and “through whose wicked thought one single language cannot serve the world” (77–78).
See Dante, Paradiso 26, 127–129.
It is noteworthy that the connection among the ideas is about the same in both instances. In Purgatorio, Eden is depicted as a sort of image of the golden age or age of Saturn, of which the poets of old sang (see Purgatorio 28, 136–144). There follows the Church and her cortege in canto 29, the encounter with Beatrice in canto 30, and the birth of “Adam subtilis.” See Purgatorio 32, 37: “‘Adam,’ I heard all of them murmuring”; and 33, 142–145: “From that most holy wave I now returned to Beatrice, remade, as new trees are renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was pure and prepared to climb unto the stars.” In Paradiso, Dante first crosses the heaven of Saturn, the dwelling place of contemplative spirits, which is also of the color gold (see Purgatorio 21, 25–30). He then ascends to the heaven of the fixed stars, where he appears before the Church and her representatives in cantos 23 to 26 and reveals himself beneath the traits of a new Adam, theoretically adorned with the theological virtues.
“His autem christianissimus poeta Dantes poetriam ad theologiam studuit revocare” (Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Comoediam, introduction, 1, 9). See Boccaccio, Life, ch. 14, and, on the connection between poetry and theology, ch. 10.
See Boccaccio, Life, ch. 16.
See Matteini, Il più antico oppositore, 9; and U. Mariani, “I trattati politici di Guido Vernani,” Il giornale dantesco 30 (1927): 18–30.