by A. N. Wilson
As an adolescent, Dante would have studied what was basically known by well-informed medieval men of the movement of the heavenly bodies. We know that Dante was a lifelong scholar. He read so obsessively that he damaged his eyes thereby, until the stars appeared blurred to him, and he had to bathe his eyes with cold water, and this seems to have improved his vision once more [Conv. III.xiv.146–57]. We know that, like anyone who makes reading a lifetime habit, he corrected earlier impressions. He was constantly changing his mind. In the Paradiso, for example, he corrects mistakes which he made in Il Convivio about markings on the moon.
By his late twenties he had absorbed Alfraganus’s Chronologica et astronomica elementa and he had read a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Alfraganus is the westernized form of the name Ahmad ibn Muhammed Kathir al-Farghani, one of the brilliant astronomers who was gathered into the court of the Caliph of Baghdad in the mid- to late eighth century. This Caliph was al-Mansur, who first became interested in astronomy when a Hindu scholar came to his court. Al-Mansur ordered the Hindu astronomy to be translated into Arabic. When it became clear that this astronomy corresponded with the wisdom of the Greeks, the Arabs sought out the works of the Greek philosophers, which had been lost to the West. They had been preserved in the Nestorian monasteries of Persia and translated into Syriac. Al-Mansur’s son Haroun al-Rashid ordered the monks to translate Ptolemy’s Syntax into Arabic, and then for the works of Aristotle to be translated.5
This intellectual glory-age of the Baghdad caliphate took place some three and a half centuries after the Fall of Rome to barbarians, and the transference of the seat of Empire to Constantinople (in 330, though a Western Emperor reigned simultaneously until 476). In the years after the Emperors took up their seat in the East, there was a gradual separation of East and West. The centrality of Rome and its bishopric in the life of the Western Church coincided with a gradual dying out of the knowledge of Greek in the West. The great works of Greek literature and learning were not, on the whole, directly translated into Latin. In the classical age, translation was not needed, and by the time of the Dark Ages, the Greek manuscripts had been destroyed or forgotten. The Latin West would have to wait for hundreds of years until the Islamic conquest of Spain before the knowledge of Greek philosophy, astronomy and mathematics – greatly augmented and developed by Arab astronomy and mathematics – would reach the West. Gerbert of Aurillac, eventually Archbishop of Ravenna, studied under the Arabs in Córdoba and Seville and introduced Arabic numerals to the Europeans. But Europe would wait for the twelfth century until it could see the solution of its first quadratic equation, in the translations from Arabic of Plato of Tivoli, about a hundred years before Dante was born.6
Christianity is usually blamed for what are called the Dark Ages, the period when intellectual curiosity in Western humanity appeared to fizzle out. There is no doubt that such a fizzling occurred; nor could Edward Gibbon be blamed for drawing a contrast between the ‘wonderful revolution’ which took place between the time of Cicero and that of obscurantist desert fanatics such as Simeon Stylites. But as far as astronomy, mathematics, physics and speculative science in general were concerned, the Dark Ages really began with the Romanization of the world, long before Christianity. Dante quoted that celebrated passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Anchises, the father of Aeneas, when he meets him in the underworld, exclaims:
Roman! Be thou mindful how to sway the peoples with command. These be thy arts: to lay upon them the custom of peace, to spare the subject and fight down the proud.7
Just as the British Empire was administered by well-meaning minor public schoolboys who were ignorant of the finer points of music, poetry and science, so the Roman Empire, which was the imaginative inspiration of the British, was irredeemably philistine by the standards of the Greeks who preceded or the Arabs who followed it. True, Cicero himself translated Aratus, Manilius wrote a long poem on astrology, and Ovid repeated legends about the constellations. Strabo, Seneca and Pliny all alluded to Greek ideas about astronomy. But there was no great Roman astronomer. The calendar was dominated by the priests of the Roman religion who followed the old ten-month year (which is why in so many languages the tenth, eleventh and twelfth months of the year are still spoken of as if they were the eighth, ninth and tenth – October, November, December). By the time of Julius Caesar the calendar had fallen into such chaos that 25 March, which was supposed to be the spring equinox, came in the middle of winter. Caesar called in an Alexandrian astronomer, Sosigenes, who gave the Empire the calendar which, with very small variations, we still use.
The Alexandrian astronomers had calculated that the time taken by the sun to pass from one vernal (spring) equinox to the other was 365 days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, forty-five seconds. Since the tropical solar year is only eleven minutes and fourteen seconds shorter than this, many centuries would elapse before the months of this calendar would depart from their proper seasons and a further reform would be required.
It is interesting, given how intelligently the Alexandrian astronomers studied the heavens, that they persisted in a belief that the earth was the still centre of a moving universe, and that the sun revolved around it. Aristarchus of Samos (fl. 280 BC) was the first to suggest what we now know to be the truth, that the earth revolved around the sun. He was condemned, just as Galileo would be condemned nearly 2,000 years later by the Inquisition, and for the same reason. It was deemed to be impious. But whereas Galileo was condemned and placed under house arrest, Aristarchus was merely neglected, for this aberration at least. His mathematical skills were appreciated, and he made a good fist of calculating the size of space, and the distances between the sun and the moon.8
The universe which Dante saw, which his medieval contemporaries saw, was fundamentally that of Ptolemy, who had flourished in Alexandria during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. (His first recorded observation was in AD 127, his latest in 150.9) The most obvious difference between the Ptolemaic universe and the Copernican one which (with very significant adaptations and variations, post-Einstein, Hubble etc.) we see is that it was geocentric. A central and spherical earth was surrounded by a series of hollow, transparent globes, each larger than the one below. These are the spheres, sometimes known as the heavens. Fixed in these spheres is a luminous body, a planet, which gives the sphere its particular character. Starting from the Earth, their order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Then, beyond the sphere of Saturn is the Stellatum to which belong all the fixed stars – fixed because their position, unlike those of the moving planets, is invariable. And beyond the Stellatum is a sphere called the First Movable, the Primum Mobile.
Beyond the Primum Mobile, few have ever ventured, but Dante was to do so in his poem. Aristotle had taught in De Caelo that ‘outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time’. Christianity was to imagine that in this place was caelum ipsum, the ‘very heaven’ which was full of God.
The earth was a point in the universe; by comparison with the other planets, it was tiny. Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher who lived a century before Dante, maintained that every star was ninety times as big as the earth. The distances were, of course, impossible to measure at that date, but C. S. Lewis was surely right to look at the humdrum South English Legendary in order to find there ‘better evidence than any learned production for the Model [of the universe] as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of “forty mile and yet some del mo” a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum in 8,000 years.’10
Lewis was also right, in his marvellously lucid lectures to Cambridge undergraduates in the early sixties, from which I draw freely here, to remind us that the medieval model was vertiginous. The earth was in effect the lowest point in the universe. Medieval humanity was forever looking upwards. The universe itself was finite. ‘To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building
’ (than it is like our looking into ‘space’).11
The other feature of medieval astronomy which makes it very different from the discipline in post-Enlightenment times was that it mingled what we should regard as physics with astrology. A belief that the planets influence us is not unique to the Middle Ages. Dante shared the belief. Three times in his Purgatorio, he invoked the stars to bring justice and righteousness upon earth.12 The stars were, for Dante, God’s method of moulding the destinies of human beings. It is their movements which manifest His will [Ep. V.124–5]. They are the hammers, earth is the metal [Par. II.127]. They are the seals, earth the wax [Par. II.130–32].
The difference between Dante and some of his contemporaries was that – at any rate by the time he came to write the Comedy – he was rigidly orthodox in his astrological views. The Church did not condemn astrology, as such. It did not deny that the planets and spheres influence human destiny. What it regarded as illegitimate were, first, an unseemly curiosity about the future; secondly, the worship of the stars or planets as gods, as, for example, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had worshipped them. Thirdly, and most difficult – it regarded as illegitimate any deterministic philosophy which derived from astrology. For the Gospel to be true, human beings had to have free will. They had to be free to choose to accept or to reject the love of God.
Dante was not the first, or the last, artist to see his spiritual journey as an Odyssey. The figure of Ulysses, to give Odysseus his Roman name, is one of the most attractive in the Inferno. Just as Paolo and Francesca have inspired painters and subsequent poets to see everlasting romance in their destructive adultery, so most readers of the Inferno will feel that the heroic journeying of Ulysses is magnificent, rather than damnable. Certainly, Tennyson thought so – for he bases his ‘Ulysses’ poem on this passage in the Comedy, making Ulysses the very type of the Victorian Honest Doubter:
For always roaming with a hungry heart…
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.13
Dante did not know Greek. The version of Ulysses’s wanderings which he tells in the Inferno was either taken from some strange Latin version of the legend, or he invented it. That is, that, having returned home from the Trojan War, Ulysses became restless and bored.
Ulysses stands for that period of Dante’s life when he gave himself over to intellectual journeying – to freethinking. The passage in the Inferno which describes his restless voyage could well be made to sound absurd if all that seized the attention of the modern hearer was the erroneous medieval geography. Together with his companions in a ship, Ulysses crosses the Equator, sees in the distance the brooding Mountain of Purgatory, and then his ship is caught up in a whirlwind, and is covered by the waters of the sea. It is, in fact, one of the finest passages in all Dante’s writing, unforgettable in its heroism. Indeed, like the Victorian admirers who distorted Dante by singling out favourite scenes and passages and ignoring the overall structure of the Comedy, we find it hard when we think of the Ulysses passage to remember that he is supposedly being punished. He is so noble to the end, and his quest, to pursue knowledge wherever the quest may take him, is the ideal of Modern Man.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of work and knowledge
[Inf. XXVI.118–20, Mandelbaum]
The attractiveness of Ulysses, and of his ideal, is not accidental. A modern scholar has seen it as Dante’s ‘intellectual tragedy’ that he felt constrained to abandon the freethinking philosophical life of his friend Cavalcanti and become, for whatever reason, a believing Catholic, who had to put such freethinking into the straitjacket of orthodoxy and consign Ulysses, symbol of intellectual freedom, into Hell.14
Certainly, we misread Dante if, as some pious Catholic commentators have tried to do, we ignore the very great tension in his work between reason and faith, and if we ignore the slow degrees by which that reason was reconciled with faith. Indeed, in the 1290s he was a far distance from being a committed Christian. He was a seeker.
He tells us after the death of Beatrice that he gave himself up to the reading of philosophy and two of the works which he studied were Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, and Cicero’s On Friendship, in particular that passage known as the Dream of Scipio, on which Macrobius wrote a commentary. These are two of the most popular ‘classics’ of the medieval world and in order to understand Dante’s work (or, indeed, the medieval mind generally) one should have a knowledge of them.
Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius (480–524) was a Roman aristocrat who served as a government minister to the first barbarian King in Italy, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Theodoric was an Arian Christian – that is to say, he followed the teachings of Arius, the Libyan who denied the Trinity. Boethius was an orthodox Christian, and he wrote a tract on the Trinity. It is not for this, however, that he is remembered. He was implicated – history cannot guess whether justly or otherwise – in a plot formed by the Roman Senate and the Eastern Emperor to oust Theodoric from his position. He was put in gaol in Pavia and eventually killed by having ropes twisted round his head until his eyes popped out. He was finished off with a bludgeon.
Although he was canonized as St Severinus, very few ever think of him by this title. (The church of Saint Sévérin in Paris, for example, commemorates a quite different person, a sixth-century hermit who lived in a hut on the site of what would become the Latin Quarter.) Our man is always known as Boethius. And he is famous for the book he wrote while he was awaiting sentence of death, The Consolation of Philosophy, a book translated into English by Alfred the Great, by Chaucer, and by Queen Elizabeth I, and which Edward Gibbon deemed ‘a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or of Tully’.
C. S. Lewis, in his Cambridge lectures, said that, ‘Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.’15
It is certainly to be recommended, if you are to become a real Dante reader, that you read Boethius. To start with, however, it is perhaps enough to know a few salient points. First, Boethius, although a Christian, devoted his last work to seeing what consolation could be derived from the exercise of pure reason. There would come a time for imploring the grace and mercy of God – when he laid down his pen in the evenings, and, presumably, when he came to face his executioners. But the lofty purpose of his book is not to dip into the consolations of piety. It is to see how a rational person, and it must be added, a gentleman, faces up to adversity, injustice and death. In doing so, Boethius the Roman senator and aristocrat draws himself up to his full height, as it were, and he writes in the polished prose of classical Latin; he lards his text with allusions to Pythagoras, to Homer, to Herodotus and Livy, to Tacitus and Cicero. Condemned by a barbarian king for wishing to preserve the Roman Senate,16 he says that the documents being used to condemn him are forgeries but, ‘what is the point of talking about those forgeries in which I am accused of having striven for Roman liberty?’17
What he leaves behind, then, is the classical era’s last shout in a world taken over by barbarians. In a world where the Dark Ages have engulfed Europe, in which literacy is confined to the few (Theodoric was illiterate) and books were more and more to be found in monastic libraries or not at all, Boethius gives us the world seen through the eyes of a classically educated person. If there were to be a classical revival in our own day, there would be worse ways of starting it than by putting The Consolation of Philosophy on the school curriculum. Here are many of the tropes and types which will become commonplace in so much medieval literature, and which, fairly obviously, are central to Dante. First, the Consolation is an allegory in which, in his distress, Boethius is visited by the figure of a woman who seemed both eternally young and very old. She is Philosophy, but we shall be visite
d again and again by this image, of a male figure, whether in a dream-vision or not, being visited by an allegorical female figure. Clearly, the figure of Philosophy as she appears to Boethius influences, not so much Dante’s feelings about the Lady of the Window, as of Beatrice in the Comedy.
Central to the whole book is the puzzle of how God can permit such chaos in human affairs, and how the wise person conducts himself in relation to the unpredictable mutability of things. Boethius is one of the great popularizers of the idea of Fortune’s Wheel. ‘Will you really try to stop the whirl of her turning wheel?’18 He also paints the classic, as well as classical, picture of the Unmoved Mover. By the completion of Book IV, with its exposition of how to retain an equable temper in the face of adversity, we are conscious of Boethius’s debts to the classical moralists, and also of the influence he spreads over the Elizabethan poets (Spenser above all), on the Augustan moralists such as Pope and Johnson, right down to Kipling meeting with Triumph and Disaster and treating those two imposters just the same. Yet there is nothing trite about Boethius. As well as recognizing his influence in so much of later moralizers, we shall feel there is something which he possesses in common with the Vedic wisdom of India. To be wise is to become close to God’s simplicity.
In reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Dante likewise puts himself in touch with one of the few classical texts widely known by medieval literates. In this book may be found a potted version of Plato’s creation myths in the Timaeus – it is the closest Dante ever got to reading Plato. Here too are the accounts of the soul’s journeys through the universe as it returns to Heaven upon death. (There is no resurrection for Cicero.) Dante came to these classics of the educated medieval man comparatively late in life. He was old enough to absorb them, hold on to them for what would be useful to him when he came to write his masterpiece. There would always be what a wise English Dante scholar, Father Kenelm Foster OP, called ‘the two Dantes’:19 the classical Roman man who was, if not exactly pagan, a self-conscious continuer in the footsteps of Virgil and Cicero, and the Catholic pilgrim-poet, who would write a Comedy which was about personal sanctification in the Christian mould.
