by A. N. Wilson
Even if you are not a Christian, common sense teaches us that the Cathar heresy is wrong. Of course, we are bodies not spirits! Yet, from Plato to Mrs Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists, from the Cathars to the Muslim men who swathe their women in burkhas, the human race has been attracted by the thrilling falsehood that their very bodily existence is sinful, that matter is illusory or evil. Common sense teaches us that physical existence – appetites of stomach or sexuality, the appearance of our bodies, the nerve endings in our brains – are what determine our existence.
The mature Dante had put behind him the false distinctions of sacred and profane love. These he had learned, not from reading theology, but from reading the ‘heretical’ love-religion of Arnaut Daniel and the Provençal poets, and perhaps from dabbling with the heresy of the Cathars.20 The religion of Courtly Love had set the ideal Lady on a pedestal. The ‘tragedy’ of Paolo and Francesca was that in reading Arnaut Daniel’s romance of Launcelot, they had moved away from the fantasy of literature into an actual sexual encounter. ‘That day we read no more’ – ‘Quel giorno più no vi leggemmo avante’ – a line of characteristic economy, irony, punch.
The confused erotic preoccupations of adolescence come to focus on an actual sexual object. The nine-year-old Beatrice, the little girl in a red frock, becomes an eighteen-year-old Beatrice, and Dante becomes aware of the body beneath the dress. Dante is walking along a street in Florence and sees her. We are not, surely, meant to suppose that Beatrice Portinari, who lived only yards from the Alighieri house, had really not been seen by a neighbour for nine years. There are seeings and there are ‘seeings’. This is not a regular good-morning, it is an epiphany – and for the moment the girl next door is little lower than the angels. She is between two other women. ‘The miraculous lady appeared, dressed in purest white’ [VN III, Musa]. She greets him, and he is overwhelmed. As he was to write of the incident after she had died, this was the first time that she had ever actually spoken to him. If this account of his meeting the adult Beatrice is to be taken as literally true, it would suggest that Florentines kept their women in purdah until they were free to be handed over to their husbands, but I do not think you need to take it as the literal truth, even though the customs of the time and the doctrines of the Church both conspired to agree that women were inferior beings. ‘Whether of good or bad character, women needed to be kept down, if necessary violently.’ Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone.21 The common greeting to a young bridegroom was to wish him, ‘Salute e figli maschi!’ – health and boy-children. When, towards 1318–20, Francesco da Barberino wrote his Reggimento e costume di donna he was not sure whether to recommend families of the middle class or the nobility to teach their children to read. As for the behaviour of young girls and women, their great virtue is reserve, modesty and stillness. To agitate the limbs too much signifies in a female child, affectation, and in a young woman, an inconstant heart.22
Beatrice, then, as she walked out with two female companions or chaperones, would have led an existence which was as restricted as that of the most strictly brought-up Muslim girl of today. Her daring to speak out of turn and to greet Dante, even if they had been neighbours for eighteen years, was a token of some boldness. Perhaps this was his reason – apart from the fact that she had for nine years become a goddess inside his head – for being so overwhelmed by the experience. He went home to his bedroom. We do not know where this bedroom was. Was it still with his half-brother and half-sister and stepmother? Or was it in the house of a guardian?
The vision of the child Beatrice had touched the most secret chamber of his heart. Here, once again, he goes to his secret chamber. His way of writing about these things, and his articulation of his feelings, signal a new development not only in literature, but in European consciousness. As the great Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt said, ‘The human spirit had taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life.’23
As he lay in his bedroom, Dante fell asleep. A fiery mist filled the room, and through its vapours he made out the fearsome Lord of Love, who declared that he was Dante’s Master. In the arms of the Lord of Love, a woman was asleep. She was naked, except for a blood-red cloth loosely wrapped around her body. Dante recognized the lady whom he had met in the street. In one of the Lord’s hands, Dante saw a flaming object. ‘Vide cor tuum’ – see your heart, says the Lord in Latin. (In the dream, which is related in Italian, the Lord of Love always speaks Latin, some of it unintelligible.) Then the Lord of Love woke up the young woman and forced her to eat the heart. The Lord, who had been joyful, started to weep, as he and Beatrice vanished, drifting upwards towards Heaven.
VIII
A POET’S APPRENTICESHIP
DANTE WAS EIGHTEEN WHEN HE HAD THE DREAM ABOUT BEATRICE related in the previous chapter. He encapsulated the experience into the form of the sonnet. It would seem that, as an aspirant poet in a city of poets, he circulated the sonnet, partly as a means of self-advertisement, and partly, perhaps, if we assume that he really had such a dream, in order to receive an explanation for it.
To every noble heart and captive soul
Who comes across this sonnet which I write,
That they may tell me what they think of it,
My compliments through Love, lord of us all!
Already the third hour was almost over,
That time when all the stars are shining bright,
When unexpectedly Love came in sight,
Whose memory alone fills me with horror.
Yet Love seemed happy, holding in one hand
This heart of mine, while in his arms he had
Madonna wrapped in cloth, and sleeping sound.
Then he awakened her, and reverently
Fed her my blazing heart. She was afraid.
I watched him weeping as he went away.
[VN III, J. G. Nichols’s translation]
An aspirant author wants, above all else, publication. In the days before the invention of printing, this clearly meant something rather different than it was to become in the modern period. Dante’s fame as a poet began in a small circle, with his poems being handed round in manuscript. When he became even more famous, and began to write books for general circulation, he would have taken his books to a stationer’s, where as many as several hundred copies would have been made by scribes.
The writing of the sonnet led to his close friendship with the finest poet of the age, Guido Cavalcanti. Guido was perhaps as much as fifteen years older than Dante, though some think less.1 The Cavalcanti family were in a different sphere from the shabby-genteel Alighieri. The chronicler Dino Compagni names the Cavalcanti as among the ‘great families’ of Florence.2 It is conspicuous how often the major European writers, who have entered high society in their maturity, and as a result of their own talents, have begun, not in the depths, but on the fringes of things. Proust, a doctor’s son and half-Jewish, develops the ambiguity of his attitude to the Faubourg Saint-Germain by being an outsider who wanted to get in, who worshipped and yet despised the aristocracy. Shakespeare, obsessed by his own social class, and by such matters as his coat of arms, was a glover’s son, who wrote sonnets to the son of an earl.3 Dante was proud of his crusading ancestor, and believed himself to be of ‘good’ family. But his own father, who does not get a mention in the Comedy, was not in the league of the magnates and grandees who figure in its pages – such figures as old Cavalcanti, met among the heretics of Hell, or of his poet son, Guido: good-looking, dashing, known for his sardonic wit and his scorn.
Two reactions to his sonnet suggest the mixture of tones which coexisted in the Florentine literary world. Dante was an intensely serious writer, but even he enjoyed bawdry, sexual jokes, innuendo. Having told of his strange dream, he would not have been surprised that another poet (also called Dante, as it happened, Dante da Maiano), should have replied with a ribald suggestion that Dante Alighieri should wash his balls, and maybe this would temper his lurid imagination.
<
br /> In your most need I give you this advice:
If you are sound of body and mind, I wish
That you would give your balls a thorough wash,
So that the noxious vapours may disperse
That rise into your head and make you ramble.
If you are suffering from some grave disease,
Then I must say you’re raving.4
Guido Cavalcanti, however, gave a reply which took Dante’s vision seriously, and responded with a profoundly philosophical sonnet – ‘Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore’:
All power, to my mind, is what you saw
All joy and everything man feels as good,
If you indeed were witness to the lord
Who rules the world where honour is the law;
He dwells on high where troubles come no more,
In the mind’s tower, where his thoughts abide;
Softly to those who sleep he goes, and glides
To steal the heart, but not to leave it sore5
The next section of the sonnet is dense, and difficult to understand. Guido appears to be saying that the Lord Love took Dante’s heart because he saw the Lady asking for his death; that he fed her with his trembling heart… Rossetti, in his translation, tries to make sense of the Italian by making it say:
Thy heart he took, as knowing well, alas!
That Death had claim’d thy lady for her prey:
In fear whereof, he fed her with thy heart6
which implies that, even in this early poem, Dante has a prophetic intimation that Beatrice is doomed to die young: a sense which the poem clearly does not bear. Cavalcanti’s modern translator, Marc Cirigliano, more accurately renders it:
he took your heart away seeing
your lady ask for your death
nourishing her with your trembling heart7
What is clear is that the group of poets of whom Guido was chief were exploring the ideas and conventions of Courtly Love. They were deconstructing the conventions which the Provençal poets had set up, asking what (if anything) in the Courtly Love convention made sense, corresponded either to our experience of sexual love, or threw light on more general philosophical questions. That is, that a young man sees a woman who becomes to him an ideal; he falls deeply under her spell; he is obliged to conceal his love. Immediately after the dream in which Love has given Dante’s heart to Beatrice to eat, we find the poet selecting another woman as his ‘screen love’, with whom he can pretend to be in love, to conceal the actual state of affairs.
But, asks Guido Cavalcanti, what is the nature of this ‘love’ which Dante is feeling, and which poets were celebrating? Dante gave many answers in his works to that question until he came to a synthesis, which was never allowed to Guido, between the current philosophical ideas of young intellectuals in late Trecento Italy and the traditions of Christianity. Ezra Pound said of Guido that his mind was ‘much more “modern” than that of his young friend Dante Alighieri’.8 Pound thought that Guido’s ideas ‘may have appeared about as soothing to a Florentine of AD 1290 as a conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and Bukharin [Pound was probably writing in the 1930s] would to-day in a Methodist Bankers’ board meeting in Memphis, Tenn’.9
Boccaccio repeats ‘gossip among the vulgar’ which held that Guido was an atheist.10 At least one modern commentator has said that such a viewpoint was an anachronism, an impossibility for someone living at that time,11 but similar accusations were made against Pope Boniface VIII, and although atheists, really until the nineteenth century in Europe, felt obliged to write in code, there is no reason to suppose that a human mind in the thirteenth century was incapable of forming the thoughts which can be clearly formed in the twenty-first. In his life, and in his literary afterlife, Guido Cavalcanti was known as a philosopher. His ‘Donna me prega’ poem was the subject of repeated commentaries for 300 years after its composition. Some saw in Cavalcanti nothing but the glorification of sensuous appetite. That was the opinion of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who maintained that Cavalcanti’s subject was merely amore volgare – something Pico himself considered unworthy of being called love. On the other hand, Marsilio Ficino, Pico’s teacher, goes to considerable lengths to claim Cavalcanti as a fellow Platonist. In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Ficino devotes more space to Cavalcanti’s Canzone d’Amore than to anything else not written by Plato himself.12
When we consider how vigilantly the Inquisition sought out potential victims, Guido’s poems are outspoken; they can only have circulated at first among a tiny coterie of like-minded, sophisticated readers and fellow-writers. There is, for example, the brilliant, self-consciously blasphemous sonnet which Guido Cavalcanti wrote to Guido Orlandi. In the Gothic church of Orsanmichele, now surrounded by Florence’s modern shops, is an image of the Blessed Virgin so beautiful that it was said to have been painted miraculously. One night it was a blank board; in the morning, it had been adorned with this image, presumably painted by the hand of God Himself. Many still resort to this miraculous Madonna. Cavalcanti is scornful. Some have wondered whether one of his mistresses was the actual model for the Madonna dell’Orto. In his poem, he assigns to his mistress all the powers given to the Madonna in the church. She cures the sick, she drives away the Devil. It is much more extreme than any troubadour would have dared to be in his idolatry of a mistress.13 He writes to his friend Guido Orlandi:
a figure of my Lady
is worshipped in San Michele in Orto, Guido,
honest and pure and beautiful
a port of refuge for sinners
and he who worships her
failing most finds more comfort
healing the infirm and chasing away demons
clearing blind eyes
in public she cures the very ill
of those who kneel before her
as she graces sunlit streets
word of her has travelled far
but the Friars Minor say it’s idolatry
out of jealousy she’s not near.14
Cavalcanti develops the philosophical ideas which were inherent in the troubadours’ love poetry but takes them much, much further. He applies to them the ideas of the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Averroes, who wrote lengthy commentaries on Aristotle and was one of the chief conduits through whom the ideas of Aristotle were revived in medieval Europe.
Aristotle saw the human being as having three basic capacities. The first was just being alive – what he calls vegetative life. This is the sort of ‘life’ we might share with plants. The second is a sensitive life, the capacity to feel which we share with the other animals. The third is intellectual capacity, the capacity which distinguishes us from plants and animals. Averroes followed Aristotle by saying that the cultivation of the intellect according to reason, that very distinctly human ability, was the highest destiny of a human being.
Unlike Christians, Averroes (and Aristotle) believed that this capacity was what made human beings part of a universal consciousness. When a person dies, the capacity to use the intellect dies. It returns to the universal consciousness. There is no survival of a soul after death, no afterlife. Nor do the intellectual faculties have any individual identity per se. It is your body, not your soul, which gives you your individual identity. The perfection of your intellect, which should, according to Averroes, be the end of all good people, is almost literally a selfless ambition. The final goal of life is to balance physical and intellectual needs.
Clearly, love is a disruption to the life of the intellect thus conceived. The troubadours saw it as a benevolent emotion guided astrologically by Venus. Cavalcanti saw it as a malign emotion, governed by Mars. It diminishes the reason. Love is not a divinity, it is something created by human activity. It upsets the equilibrium, the bonum perfectum. Love was to be avoided because it made moderation impossible. In Guido’s poetry, says Bruno Nardi, ‘the Middle Ages begin to fade as the Florentine Renaissance begins’.15
Guido Cavalcanti was the leading spiri
t in a group of poets whose work gained the title or nickname the New Sweet Style, il dolce stil novo. Dante himself uses the phrase. When in Purgatory, he meets the poet Bonagiunta of Lucca, Bonagiunta Orbicciani degli Overardi. He was a notary, of an older generation to Dante, flourishing in the 1240s and 1250s. Bonagiunta salutes Dante as the author of a celebrated poem. ‘But tell,’ he says, ‘if I see here him who invented the new rhymes beginning: “Ladies that have intelligence of love”’ [Purg. XXIV.49–51, T. Okey’s translation] – ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’. Barbara Reynolds translates it as ‘Ladies who know by insight what love is’. ‘Intelletto’ is a tightly wrapped parcel. The language of poetry takes on board with apparent lightness what looks like hand luggage but contains more than the cumbersome trunks and bulky suitcases which prose has been obliged to stow in the hold. Intelletto! Women are simply brighter, more intelligent, when it comes to matters of love. You did not need to be Dante to be told that. Visit any bar, any social club, any school. But much more is going on with Dante’s use of the unforgettable phrase ‘intelletto d’amore’. He is in love with Beatrice, but he does not shower her with any compliments from the common stock of Courtly Love convention. Rather, he seems to learn from Guido Cavalcanti that love represents an intellectual puzzle. What is it? How does it have this power to unsettle us, to change us, to cause chaos? How do we come to use the word ‘love’ for such a different set of phenomena, or apparently different – which include powerful sexual attraction, religious emotion, and that weird sensation, which contains sexual attraction but is so much more than lust, which seems like religious rapture but is not obviously directed towards God – that is, ‘being in love’? Mark Musa renders it thus:
