by A. N. Wilson
It is worth learning Italian just to see how incredibly deft and accomplished Dante was, almost from the beginning; just to enjoy his seemingly effortless craftsmanship. The drawings done by Picasso in his teens and boyhood show a total control of the pencil – not a line he drew ever seems to be a mistake. Mozart seemingly wrote music by instinct. Dante’s youthful poems are points of comparison. We are meeting genius of a like order. The poems are perfectly made, like wonderfully carpentered furniture which needs, so flawlessly close are the joints, no nails to hold it together. It is a safe bet to say, even though he tells us that he was not especially well grounded in Latin or its literature at school, that he read poetry in the modern language(s) of Europe. One book which we know he read, and knew intimately, was The Romance of the Rose. This book became known to English readers in the fourteenth century through Chaucer’s translation. It was begun, probably in 1237, by a Northern Frenchman named Guillaume de Lorris, and it began the fashion for allegorical poems in what is called the Courtly Love convention. Guillaume was in the service of his Lady. In his vision, he wanders into a beautiful garden, and among the flowers he sees a Rosebud, symbolic of his Lady’s heart. Wounded by Cupid’s arrows, he longs to possess the Bud, but is prevented from doing so by a crowd of allegorical figures – Chastity, Danger (which means Disdain here), Shame, and so forth. Partly through the intervention of Venus, he has some allies as well as these disagreeable enemies – Pity and Belacueil, or Welcome, who allows him to kiss the Bud. But after the kiss has been granted, Belacueil is put in prison and the Lover is banished from the garden.
At this point of writing over 4,000 rambling lines, Guillaume died. Forty years later, a very different writer took up the unfinished tale and made it into a philosophical tract. This was Jean de Meun, who seems to have been a learned type who had translated Boethius, Giraldus Cambrensis and that medieval gay classic author Aelred of Rievaulx. Jean de Meun extended Guillaume’s poem by a further 18,000 lines. By the end of them, the Lover gains possession of the Rosebud, but not before discoursing on theology, philosophy and science. Whereas Guillaume’s pursuit of the Rosebud had been a serious Love allegory, Jean de Meun’s is a scornful gay satire of Love. He has been called ‘the Voltaire of the thirteenth century’, who spent much of the poem making biting remarks about corrupt friars, shyster lawyers, incompetent doctors and women, whom he seems to have detested.
Dante evidently revelled in the poem, and produced a breathtakingly brilliant condensation of it in some 232 sonnets, which is a bit like having rewritten Homer’s Odyssey in limericks, or War and Peace as a Guy de Maupassant short story. For many years, scholars did not believe that Il Fiore, as this tour de force is entitled, was the work of Dante, but their modern editor makes out a strong case for believing that he was indeed the author.1 If so, he probably wrote the sonnets when he was in his early twenties, but we will discuss it a little out of chronological order, because it clearly suggests the reading he did in his late teens. In so far as Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose was one of the key books in the young Dante’s mind, we need to be aware of it before he wrote Il Fiore. The writing of that work, accomplished as it is, was less important than the reading which led up to it. And in so far as he was absorbing the ‘Voltaire of the thirteenth century’, we watch Dante’s imagination adopting some of its most characteristic mindsets. We see him fascinated, from the beginning, by Love and theories of Love. We see him writing about experience not directly, but allegorically. And we see him – though this is much more difficult to focus upon, because his meaning was deliberately concealed for reasons of self-preservation – dabbling with ideas which were dangerous and disruptive, ideas at variance with the Church and the Holy Inquisition.
Il Fiore is not an inspired book, but it is one of admirable brio and competence.2 But the poem takes some getting used to, if most of your poetic reading is post-nineteenth century. The mindset whereby everything can be read allegorically is artificial to us, but to Dante’s generation it was normal. It was, for example, their way of reading the Bible. St Paul may be said to have started this way of reading the Scriptures, as far as European readers are concerned, when he speaks of Abraham having two women – one a free woman, the wife Sarah, and the other a slave-woman, Hagar (Galatians 4:24). He urged his readers to see themselves as Isaac, the free son of the covenant, and not as Ishmael, the son of the bonded concubine. And this was an allegory of Christians and Jews. The sons of the free wife were free – they could eat and drink what they liked, they did not need to circumcise their children; the sons of the concubine were in bondage – they were the Jews who still felt the need to keep the dietary laws and to circumcise. Clearly, a modern ‘literal’ reading of the story of Abraham and his women will say that this explanation of the text is preposterous. Obviously, the original folk tales were written years before the Jews developed their strict religion of dietary laws, and certainly years before St Paul discarded them. In their original form, the stories are not allegories about keeping the Torah. But Paul makes them allegories.
By the time Augustine, the greatest philosopher and Scriptural exegete of the Latin Church in late classical times (354–430), had begun to write, allegorical interpretations of Scripture were commonplace. The Good Samaritan is not just a story – as we should suppose – telling us to be kind to our neighbour. It is an allegory. When the Samaritan picks up the half-dead stranger on the road and takes him to an inn, this is an allegory of the Christian soul being led to the Church. And when he offers the innkeeper two pennies to look after the stranger, this is an allegory of Christ the Good Samaritan giving the innkeeper (St Paul) two sacraments – Baptism and Holy Communion.
By the time of the High Middle Ages, this allegorical way of reading Scripture had been institutionalized, especially by the influential Abbey of St Victor in Paris.3 Dante thought it was natural to read the Bible like this, as with his, to us astounding and almost blasphemous, belief that the story of the Resurrection itself was an allegory about Philosophy – the three Marys found at the Tomb in Mark 16 being the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Peripatetics. They had gone there hoping to see the Lord by the exercise of reason alone and they could not do so. The Saviour (‘that is, Happiness’) could only be found by Contemplation. (Dante believed the word ‘Galilee’ meant ‘white’, and that the injunction by the Angel to go to Galilee to see the Saviour was to contemplate intellectual virtues if you wished to be happy [Conv. IV.xxii].)
Dante came to understand his own poems allegorically, and his own experience which led to the creation of those poems was also an allegory. One thinks of John Keats here, in that long letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana in spring 1819: ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative – which such people can no more make out than they can the Hebrew Bible.’4 This was not to abandon a belief in the surface meaning of stories and events, but to expand that meaning. When we read a book, according to Dante, we experience it on four levels. The first, obviously, is literal. But the second is allegorical. When Ovid tells us that Orpheus could make wild beasts, and even stones and trees, follow his music, it means that art can tame and soften cruel hearts. The third sense is moral. The moral lesson of the story of the Transfiguration in the Gospels, when Jesus went up a mountainside and was seen in a shining vision by the three Apostles conversing with Moses and Elijah, is that we should only have a few companions in matters which touch us most closely. And finally, Dante’s fourth level was that we should be able to read anagogically – that is, relating the text to The End – to one’s own death or to the End of the World. He gives as an example, that when we read of the Israelites escaping Egypt, we should see it as an anagogue for the soul escaping sin.
When he came to write his Comedy, his life itself had become an allegory. His wandering and homelessness were emblems of the human exile from Paradise. The decline of Florence was an allegory of
the decline of the world into sin and corruption. Beatrice would always continue to be Beatrice, but she was also an allegory for the perception of Divine Truth by an acceptance of grace, rather than by the exertion of reason. Having been the object of his devoted love, she would become its emblem.
Clearly, by the time Dante was steeping himself in vernacular literature and in the ‘modern classics’ of his day, such as Jean de Meun, the allegorical/anagogical method of reading both experience and books had become inseparable. To read, to write, to experience were to allegorize. Everything, including your first experience of love, ‘stood for’ something else.
Le Roman de la Rose grew out of the convention of Courtly Love. It is a tradition to which Guillaume de Lorris so clearly subscribed and Jean de Meun (who was obviously a gay misogynist) equally clearly thought absurd. Guillaume, as has been said, was a Northern Frenchman. In the Provençal South, and the regions where Oc was the word for Yes – the Languedoc – the troubadours (lyric poets) fervently developed this religion of Love.
The Courtly Love code was an adulterous one: that is one reason why the Church from the beginning rejected it, and why it was developed as a rebellion against the Church. In the House of the Countess of Champagne in 1174, the semi-serious proclamation was delivered:
We declare and affirm by the tenor of these presents, that love cannot extend its rights over two married persons. For indeed lovers grant one another all things mutually and freely, without being impelled by any motive of necessity, whereas husband and wife are held by their duty to submit their wills to each other and to refuse each other nothing.
May this judgement, which we have delivered with extreme caution, and after consulting with a great number of other ladies, be for you a constant and unassailable truth. Delivered in this year 1174, on the third day before the Kalends of May, Proclamation VII.5
The classic expression of the Courtly Love ideal was the story of Tristan and Iseult. According to one of the greatest French cultural historians, Denis de Rougemont, Happy Love has no history in European literature. ‘Tristan and Iseult do not love one another. Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.’6 Real life is elsewhere, as Rimbaud observed. Suffering and understanding are deeply entwined. Death and self-awareness are in league. ‘On this alliance Hegel was able to ground a general explanation of the human mind, and also of human history.’7
It is in this tradition that Dante was to cut his teeth as a teenage reader and as an apprentice poet. The ideals and archetypes of Courtly Love were never more fully exemplified than in the troubadours of twelfth-century Provence, where it was called fin’amor – amor cortese in Italian. They in turn were the great influence upon the poets who flourished at the Sicilian court of the Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250). The poets personified Love as a king, a god, a figure who commanded the absolute obedience of his slaves, who were people of noble heart, full of virtues such as courtesy and fidelity to the object of their worship – the Lady. By the mid-thirteenth century, as Tuscany grew in political and commercial affluence, it was the Tuscan cities, rather than Sicily, which became the centre of literary interest and activity. The greater number of surviving manuscripts recording the Sicilian poets was written in Tuscany.8 By the time Dante began to write, the most notable ‘Siculo-Tuscan’ poet was probably Guittone d’Arezzo, who began as a conventional love poet, and then, after a religious conversion, wrote poems of a moralistic character.
Dante’s friends in Florence deplored Guittone and his influence, and thought much more highly of the work of Guido Guinizelli (who probably died about 1276), and whose canzone provided Dante with a model for his early work. He called Guinizelli
The father
of me and of the others – those, my betters –
who ever used sweet, gracious rhymes of love –
[Purg. XXVI.97–9, Mandelbaum]
In another place (Vita Nuova [hereafter VN] XX) he speaks of Guinizelli as the sage, ‘il saggio’. Guinizelli’s poems see the experience of love as essentially ennobling. ‘Null’om pò mal pensar fin che la vede’, one of his most celebrated lines, sums up his message: ‘No man could have evil thoughts as long as he sees her’.
Of all the cities in Europe, Florence was now undoubtedly the centre of an exciting poetic flowering. Vernacular literature was still in its youth. The circle of very young men were producing lyrics of crystalline beauty, and they were also dabbling, as young men like to dabble, in ideas which their parents, and the religious authorities, would have regarded as dangerous. During Dante’s teens Florence was not merely becoming the centre of a poetic flowering and an exciting literary coterie. It was also a hotbed of the heresy which more than any other was seen by the authorities of the medieval Church to undermine the roots of Christianity.
Denis de Rougemont could write in his history, Love in the Western World, ‘that all European poetry has come out of the Provençal poetry written in the twelfth century by the troubadours of Languedoc is now accepted on every side. This poetry magnified unhappy love.’9 There was no doubt in the minds of the Italians that they owed the beginnings of their vernacular poetry, both its form and its subject matter, to these Provençal models. Nor can it have been an accident that this highly stylized way of addressing women – the expression of abject love with no hint of physical union with love’s object, the spiritualization of the Adored One, the treatment of the woman as an allegory – should have sprung from the same soil which simultaneously adopted the most potent heresy of the Middle Ages: dualism.
If the incursion of Islam upon Christian lands represented the greatest outward threat to the Christendom of the Middle Ages, and if the schism between the Churches of the West and the East was Christendom’s deepest historical tragedy, the dualist heresy was a third great threat, which the Popes and theologians of the Catholic Church attacked with the most utmost violence. Perhaps it was the Popes’ very inability to convert the Muslim infidel or to contain the great Churches of Byzantium, Antioch and Egypt which quickened their resolve to overcome the sectaries of Southern France, known variously as the Cathars (from the Greek adjective katharos, meaning pure) or the Albigensians (from the proximity of some of them to the city and diocese of Albi). Or it could be seen in a different light.
The official Churches of East and West, each claiming to be more orthodox than the other, had split apart, seemingly forever. While these monoliths proclaimed Catholic orthodoxy, or orthodox truth, was it not inevitable that the Natural heresy should reassert itself? The periodic proclamation of orthodoxy has always been the assertion of a paradox, a wrestling with something which, even to the brilliant and contorted mind of Augustine in the fourth century or Aquinas in the thirteenth, was Against Nature: that is to believe in the Unity of God. The Natural way of viewing the world is the one against which Christianity has been wrestling ever since the Apostle Paul.
That heresy in its different variations is the dualist manner of seeing the world which has often surfaced in the human mind. The Gnostics and Manichaeans of North Africa in the early ages of the Church had comparable doctrines. Most modern forms of ‘materialism’ are, when examined, repetitions of the Manichaean idea that matter interferes with, or conquers, spirit. If you believe God to be good, and His true followers to be spiritually wise, how does it come about that there is so much evil in the world – whence comes the confusion of sensuality, the pain of disease, the simple phenomenon of change? To Plato, the first truly popular and articulate monotheist, and his followers, it had been clear that God who was all spirit had nothing to do with the physical world. The world must be the creation of a Demiurge, and human souls had fallen, either through inadvertence (some said boredom) or sin, into a physical existence. By leading a spiritual life and by concentrating upon things of the mind, it would be possible for the earth-shackled soul to rise once more and to ascend, when it had shuffled o
ff this mortal coil, to the spirit-world which was its home.
Cathar beliefs were similar, but they were formalized into rituals and doctrines, some of which, happily, have survived, even though nearly all their books were destroyed by the Inquisition of the larger and more powerful Catholic Church.
The essence of the Cathar faith was that the world had been created by Satan, who had also inspired the less edifying passages in the Old Testament. Human beings were imprisoned in flesh as a result of the great war in Heaven between Satan and the loyal angels. They believed that if a man died still entangled in sin, he would have to be reincarnated to suffer the pains of the flesh once more, since there will be no resurrection of the body. The purified soul will eventually fly to God who is its home.
There were two grades of Cathar – corresponding to the two grades of Christian in the early Church, namely the catechumens and the baptized. The Cathars were divided into the Perfect, or the ‘consoled’, who had received the gift of the Holy Paraclete, and the Believers, who had not been so blessed. Only the Perfect could say the Lord’s Prayer, for only in the bosoms of the Perfect did the spirit cry out ‘Abba, Father!’
They were extreme ascetics, keeping three Lents each year, in contrast to the forty-day fast of the Catholics. Most Believers postponed becoming Perfect until their deathbeds, since the rule of life was so strict. If married Believers had sexual intercourse, they had to fast afterwards for three days. All sexual relations were on a par with fornication, and the Perfect were celibates. The passages in the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, in which he feels tormented guilt for continuing sexual relations with his wife, would have found an echo among the Cathars. Like Indian ascetics, they abstained not merely from meat but also from dairy produce, though they were allowed to eat fish. (Fish were believed to have been born without sexual union between male and female, and hence to be pure.)
