Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  The Cathars’ view of sex (and that of the troubadour poets) bears striking parallels with the ‘Tantrism’ which, beginning in the sixth century, spread rapidly over India, converting both Buddhists and Hindus. A secret force was believed to animate the Cosmos and sustain the gods themselves. This force is a Feminine principle, it is personified as a Wife and Mother, a Goddess. In Tantric sects the woman becomes a sacred object, an incarnation of the Mother. ‘Tantrism is par excellence a technique even though it is fundamentally a metaphysic and a form of mysticism… Meditation “wakens” certain occult forces, which slumber within every man, and these, once awakened, transform the human body into a mystical Body.’10 Tantric sex involved the ability to perform the sexual act without consummation. In one of the Upanishads, it is said that ‘he who keeps (or takes back) his seed into his body, what can he have to fear of death?’ In such actions, the woman was seen as entirely passive, and attention was given by the Indian mystics wholly to the mystical states of mind which could be achieved by the man, either by tantric sexual union, or by abstention from sex. Thereby the act which ‘in every form of asceticism symbolizes the state par excellence of sin and death’ – the sexual act – was transubstantiated into a mystic state.

  It is not clear to what extent the Perfect among the Cathars indulged in equivalents of Tantric exercises, or whether they were total celibates. The ‘idea’ behind Tantrism, however, can be seen very clearly to have much in common, not merely with the Cathar heretics, but also with the erotic mysticism which Dante himself would take to unparalleled heights in the Comedy.

  The Cathars were not merely different, but hostile, to Rome and to the power of the Pope. It was clear that they were preaching doctrines which undermined the Catholic faith entirely. They denied the Virgin Birth, they denied the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They were, said the great musical Abbess of Bingen, Hildegard, ‘worse than the Jews’. She implored her local clergy to expel them from their territories, since they were ‘contemptuous of the Divine command to increase and multiply… Meagre with much fasting and yet addicted to incestuous Lusts.’11

  Though the Church made every effort to extirpate the heresy during the twelfth century, it was not until the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) that a determined effort was made to root out the Cathars by force. By now, they were abundant all over Southern Europe, particularly wherever the great rivers flowed – the Danube, the Rhône, the Rhine, the Saône – for they were often merchants, weavers and craftsmen, and were attracted to the larger industrial and trading centres. In May 1204, Innocent addressed to his legate in Narbonne a letter calling attention to the demoralized state of the clergy in his province. Monks had abandoned any pretence to keep their vows. They openly went hunting, enjoyed gambling, kept concubines, ‘and turned jugglers or doctors’.12

  It was essential, if the ‘Crusade’ were to be successful, that the Pope should get the barony of Southern France on his side. Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful landowner in the region, was sympathetic to the Cathars, whereas some of his envious neighbours saw in the Crusade the chance themselves to increase their landholdings or influence. The Pope, who had already excommunicated Raymond’s brother-in-law King John of England for his lack of obedience in a different sphere to the Holy See, threatened Raymond with the same fate if he did not attack the heretics. Raymond feigned submission, but after a number of exchanges with the Holy See, marred by the murder of a papal representative by one of his officers, Raymond was indeed excommunicated. A Crusade was then proclaimed. The task of providing the intellectual justification for the outrage, and for preaching the virtue of it throughout France, was entrusted to the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. More than 20,000 armed knights and 200,000 foot-soldiers rallied to the Pope – or, as the poet who sang his Chanson de la Croisade termed it, to the Cross. Raymond of Toulouse was forced to submit, and in a humiliating ceremony in the cathedral at St-Gilles, he was made to swear upon the Gospels and upon holy relics that he would treat all heretics as his personal foes, and expel the Jews from his territory. By the end of the summer, Innocent could boast that 500 towns and castles had been wrested from the enemies of the faith. Simon de Montfort, the brutal knight who had forced King John to sign Magna Carta in England, was placed in charge of restoring order to the Languedoc after the massacres. But they did not submit easily. In 1215, a whole eight years after the initial Crusade, Simon de Montfort was proclaimed the ‘prince and sovereign of Languedoc’ at the Council of Montpellier, but this was after yet more mercenaries – ‘pilgrims’, as Innocent III called them – had flooded into the South of France in order to suppress and massacre heretics. Innocent died in July 1216, but his successor, Honorius III, maintained the policy of persecuting Cathars. Simon de Montfort was killed on 25 June 1218 when a huge stone was hurled at him from the walls of Toulouse by a mangonel. His brother Guy died at his side. Inspired by this success, the Cathars and their supporters attempted a resurgence. The Bishop of Saintes ordered a massacre at Marmande, when 5,000 men, women and children were put to death. In spite of these sufferings, the Cathars continued to preach their faith, though many fled to do so in Bulgaria and Croatia. Anthony, later St Anthony, of Padua went to Toulouse and Narbonne in 1226 to urge further hostilities against the heretics, and it was only with the Treaty of Meaux in 1229 that Count Raymond VII and the people of the Languedoc were forced to submit to what appeared to be a final humiliation, the acceptance of the Catholic faith and the destruction of the walls of Toulouse. After this period, the Inquisition was established for the suppression of heresy.

  Dante tells us that he had seen people being burnt alive. This may or may not have been the burning of heretics. Women (and Jews) were burned for quite simple felonies at this period, such as theft.13

  Thirteenth-century Italian heretics were not, as were later victims of the Spanish Inquisition, strangled before the lighting of the faggots. Nor had gunpowder been pioneered as an agent of mercy. Opinions differ about when it was invented – Friar Roger Bacon had written about the explosive qualities of saltpetre as early as 1242; Berthold Schwartz is sometimes credited with the ‘invention’ of gunpowder, in Freiburg in 1354. In either event, the heretics of Dante’s day did not, as did later sufferers at the stake, enjoy the merciful addition of a bag of gunpowder hung round their necks to shorten the torture when the flames reached it. The culprit would be tied to a post set sufficiently high over a pile of combustibles to allow the crowd to watch every last stage of the victim’s screaming agony.14 The Inquisition, led by the Order of Preachers at Santa Maria Novella, was vigorous in Florence, and it needed to be, since Florence was a key centre of the Cathar heresy.15 It did not limit itself to the South of France. Peter the Martyr (Peter of Verona) was dispatched by Pope Innocent IV to stamp out Catharism in the city in 1244. The period of Dante’s life in Florence corresponds with the period of the strongest Cathar presence there. It was a doctrine which was naturally attractive – since it was so fiercely opposed by Popes – to Ghibellines, and many of the great Ghibelline families either followed Catharism or gave shelter to Cathars during the Inquisition’s police searches. Even after it had supposedly been stamped out altogether, a Cathar bishop, Cione di ser Bernardo, was arrested in the city in 1321.16

  It was no accident that the cult of Courtly Love grew up in the selfsame Southern France that was the chief nurse of the Cathar heresy. We can have no doubts about what Dante in his maturity thought of the Crusades in the South of France. Folco, Folchetto or Folquet of Marseilles (died 1213) appears in the circle of Venus in Dante’s Heaven.17 He had been a troubadour poet, and then a monk, and eventually the Catholic Bishop of Toulouse, that very city whose orthodoxy was bought at the expense of so much bloodshed and destruction. He is in the circle of Venus because he has given his life to Love – at first as a love poet, and then as a priest. But what has he meant by the word Love? (We’ll come back to this again and again, it is the central question for anyone reading Dante.) St
Bernard, who had preached against the Albigensians, has almost the highest place in Heaven. He it is who at the very end of the Paradiso leads Dante in his prayer to the Virgin Mary, and his eventual vision of God himself. It is the culmination of the entire work.

  There are many paradoxes, of course, about the fact that the Church which persecuted the Albigensians for their cult of personal virginity should themselves worship a Virgin, that a Church which resented the Manichaean fear of the flesh expressed by the Albigensians should itself celebrate those human beings who had forsworn sexual relations. But the ‘paradox’ is in this instance simply explained. The Church owed much to the ‘heretical’ Albigensians. Much of its own asceticism derived from theirs. In order to win converts from the Cathar ranks, it was necessary to borrow Cathar clothes. It was no accident or paradox that in the years when the Cathar threat to Catholicism rose to its height, the Church should have seen a revival of ascetic monasticism and the growth of the two most eloquent itinerant religious orders, those of St Francis and St Dominic.

  The love poets of the Languedoc region, the inventors of Courtly Love, were themselves deeply imbued with the Cathar contempt for the body. In Purgatory, Dante and Virgil enter the circle of the sodomites.18 There they are greeted by the poet Guido Guinizelli, who was praised by Dante in his prose writings. Dante acknowledged Guinizelli as his literary father or forebear. When he has recognized his old hero as Guinizelli, he exclaims:

  It is your sweet lines that, for

  as long as modern usage lasts, will still

  make dear their very inks.

  [Purg. XXVI.112–14, Mandelbaum]

  But here is something strange. Just as his old friend Brunetto Latini is among the sodomites in Hell, so his two heroes among the poets, Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel, are in Purgatory being purified of their sin of… once again, sodomy. Why they are in Purgatory when Brunetto is in Hell, Dante does not tell us.

  They confess: ‘Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito’ [Purg. XXVI.82]. Mandelbaum translates ‘our sin was with the other sex’, but Dante is surely subscribing to the view of gay sex which Proust adopted (much to Gide’s rage) at the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe, namely that gay men are somehow hermaphroditic, or that they are women struggling to get out of men’s bodies.

  St Augustine of Hippo recalled that, during the exodus from Egypt, the Hebrew women stole the jewellery of the Egyptians. When Christian thinkers took from the wisdom of the pagans – as in his own borrowings from Plato – it was ‘plundering the Egyptians’. The Church has always borrowed most shamelessly from those whose viewpoints it claimed most articulately to deplore. From the Albigensians, it derived its high medieval asceticism, its belief in a celibate clergy and, in part, its exaggerated cult of the Virgin. Dante, likewise, is able to borrow and develop the quasi-idolatrous worship of Idealized Woman of the troubadours and of the Courtly Love convention. But while doing so, he can dismiss Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel to the company of the sodomites. He is saying that this treatment of women as an idealized figure, unapproachable, is a bit gay. This, perhaps, is what Dante is partly saying about his great precursors as love poets. Yet it beggars belief that this is all he is saying. Arnaut Daniel and Guido Guinizelli could have been suffering in Purgatory for any of the sins. Dante chose to specify this one.

  The figure of Arnaut is, Momigliano says in his commentary, among the most delicate and nuanced in the entire Purgatorio. He was one of the most famous of the great Provençal troubadours. Petrarch gives him the first place among non-Italian love poets – he calls him the ‘gran maestro d’amor’.19 He represents all that is best in the Courtly Love tradition.

  We might suppose that as Dante became more ‘mature’, he gave up believing in the courtly conventions of romantic love, that he in some way or another ‘saw through’ it as a sham. It would seem, though, as if the opposite were the case. He began a cynic. Trained by sour, misogynistic Jean de Meun, he had written in Il Fiore that love was just another word for pain (see the sonnet called ‘Reason’ [Casciani and Kleinhenz, p. 109]). ‘Separate yourself from him or you will die.’ Reason teaches us, in Jean de Meun, to shun love. The many cynical sonnets in the later part of the sequence entitled ‘The Old Woman’ – La Vecchia – could have been written by Becky Sharp in old age:

  If I had been a true expert

  In the game of love when I was young,

  I would be richer than any young noble woman

  Or lady, whom you can see today.

  [Casciani and Kleinhenz, p. 327]

  Or

  Many times my door was broken down

  And battered, when I was sleeping:

  But despite this I said nothing to them,

  Since I had the company of another man;

  I made him believe that his sexual pleasure

  Pleased me more than any other thing in the world.

  [Casciani and Kleinhenz, p. 329]

  This breezy cynicism which so appealed to the very young Dante would give place, when he was broken and middle-aged, to a sense of the overwhelming power of romantic love. Arnaut Daniel had written of it in his now lost romance of Launcelot, the book which beguiled the lovers Paolo and Francesca. This is the passage of the Inferno that even the most cursory readers of Dante remember. And again, as in the encounter with the totally charming Brunetto, suffering for the sin of sodomy, we are so made to sympathize with the adulterous lovers that we all but forget that what they have done is a sin. Thus, while being the most famous and most haunting passage in the Inferno, it is also the most subversive of the very doctrine of Hell, and of eternal punishment.

  When I had listened to those injured souls

  I bent my head and held it low until

  the poet asked of me: ‘What are you thinking?’

  When I replied, my words began, ‘Alas,

  how many gentle thoughts, how deep a longing,

  had led them to the agonizing pass!’

  Then I addressed my speech again to them,

  and I began, ‘Francesca, your afflictions

  move me to tears of sorrow and of pity.

  But tell me, in the time of gentle sighs,

  with what and in what way did Love allow you

  to recognize your still uncertain longings?’

  And she to me: ‘There is no greater sorrow

  than thinking back upon a happy time

  in misery – and this your teacher knows.

  Yet if you long so much to understand

  the first root of our love, then I shall tell

  my tale to you as one who weeps and speaks.

  One day, to pass the time away, we read

  of Lancelot – how love had overcome him.

  We were alone and we suspected nothing.

  And time and time again that reading led

  our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale,

  and yet one point alone, defeated us.

  When we had read how the desired smile

  was kissed by one who was so true a lover,

  this one, who never shall be parted from me,

  while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.

  A Gallehault [Queen Guinevere’s steward] indeed, that book and he

  Who wrote it too; that day we read no more.’

  And while one spirit said these words to me,

  the other wept, so that – because of pity –

  I fainted, as if I had met my death.

  [Inf. V.109–41, Mandelbaum]

  Arnaut speaks to Dante in his own language of Provençal. He says that he ‘plor e vau cantan’, he weeps and sings at the same time. In thought he sees his past madness; with joy, he looks forward to the day of joy which awaits him [Purg. XXVI.142–8]; but there is still some purging to be completed, so he retreats back into the refining fire.

  In the dualistic mindset which possessed, and possesses, most Christian thinking, there would be no difficulty in seeing Arnaut Daniel as a representative of false love; he laments his
devotion to profane love, and rejoices because he is looking ahead to sacred love. It may even be the case that at certain points of Dante’s career, he too would have thought in this way. But the reason that Charles Williams thought that the world was still not ready for Dante was that the Comedy is much bolder than this. In Dante’s finished and mature work, there is no such thing as profane love. Arnaut Daniel, and the Italian love poets who imitated him, and the traditions of Courtly Love poetry into which Dante, as a young man, were initiated were not idolaters – in the sense of focusing their love on false idols. What Dante was to venture was the possibility that in loving a woman, a man is not turning away from God but towards Him; that the meaning of Incarnation was that men and women, in the flesh as well as in the spirit, became like Christ. The Comedy is much too subtle a work to make its points loudly or by banging a drum. But the pity of the poet-traveller in Hell is more powerful, rhetorically, for the reader, than the supposed orthodoxy which condemns the lovers everlastingly.

  The Cathars had believed that matter was evil, that the body was in itself impure, that the only good was spiritual good. The Church had rejected the heresy and persecuted it with the most terrible cruelty. But although the Church saw that the ideas of the Cathars were false, it was itself seduced by the very heresy which it purported to suppress. After the suppression of the Cathars, the Church laid more and more emphasis on the need for priestly celibacy. Sex itself was suspect. The body was suspect. Christianity lives, to this hour, with those old Cathar falsehoods – as is demonstrated from time to time when ‘orthodox’ Christians rise up to persecute, for example, gays in the twenty-first century.