Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  At this particular stage of Dante’s journey, however, in the 1290s, there was unfinished business, with his earlier self, with the ideas and the poetics he had learnt from Guido, with his feelings for Beatrice. And the finishing of this unfinished business was the theme of his first book, the Vita Nuova.

  We should misunderstand the Vita Nuova if we formed our impressions of it from, for example, the great paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who depicted such famous scenes as Dante drawing an angel, while in distracted grief for Beatrice, or Beatrice in her Beatitude. From Rossetti’s painting, as from many a devout commentary on the book, you might form the impression that the Vita Nuova is about Beatrice, whereas centre-stage, and the book’s real subject, is Dante himself.

  Ezra Pound was probably right to say that Cavalcanti was more modern than Dante, if by modern is meant less orthodox. But the Vita Nuova is in some senses a very modern, even very modernist, book. And it is possible that in this fact consists the solution of the problem, as well as the problem itself, outlined above, of whether or not Dante rejected Beatrice in favour of the Window Lady or vice versa.

  When he was writing the sonnet already quoted – ‘Oltre la spera’ – his sigh was following Beatrice up to the Crystalline sphere. When he was writing Il Convivio, he was reflecting upon a time when he had devoted himself to free inquiry and philosophy. In one mood, Beatrice was to the fore, in another mood he loved the Donna Gentile. The positions would be incompatible if we were cross-examining counsel in a divorce case. But he is a poet, using the two women as figures for his own moods and preoccupations.

  The Vita Nuova is modern in the sense that it is a text which devours itself, reflects upon itself, and makes itself, and its author, its own subject. It is a solipsism within a solipsism, ostensibly a commentary on Dante’s poetic career to date and an exposition of his own poetry – some of which is sublime and some of which, the early stuff, is pretty dull. Young poets, as a breed, are as egotistical as any human beings you are likely to meet, but even by the standards of young poets, it is an extraordinary exercise. Who, you might suppose, would be expected to read this disquisition on Dante’s philosophical and poetic development?

  The answer, one suspects, is a very small number of people indeed – the circle to which Dante belonged, in which Guido had been preeminent. Dante is in effect saying in the Vita Nuova, ‘I used to write in your manner. I used to think like you. I used to share your “philosophy of love”. But now – Beatrice is dead, and with her “Beatrice” is dead. I am moving on until I can think of a way of using the Beatrician material to write something entirely different.’

  That could be one paraphrase of the Vita Nuova. So, one of the things he does is to take Cavalcanti’s ‘philosophy of love’ and discard it. Cavalcanti had portrayed love as an aberration of reason, an enemy of peace of mind, a terrible interruption to life. His poem ‘Donna me prega’, the one on which most of his commentators concentrate as the core of his philosophy, sees love as one of the appetites.

  Love, in Cavalcanti’s vision, is an illusion.40 Following Averroes, Cavalcanti had seen love as an interruption to contemplation. Only in the world of abstract contemplation can the reason be satisfied. The Vita Nuova is a tribute to Cavalcanti and to what he has taught Dante, but it is also a somewhat confused farewell to him. A far greater egotist even than Cavalcanti himself, Dante can yet see that there is something wrong with his philosophy of love. Love is not something which gets in the way of life. If any of these poems, any of these experiences of desire, longing, lust, worship, death, are true – love must be central to experience. But what exactly is it?

  Paradoxically, for so self-centred an imagination as the young Dante’s, he realizes that his experience of Beatrice in death and of the Donna Gentile in life is an experience of the other. Dante wrote well over three centuries before Descartes locked the Western imagination into the Cartesian conundrum – how can we know anything except our own existence, our own sensations, our own thoughts?

  Aristotle thought it was legitimate to question everything and so did his greatest medieval exponent, St Thomas. Dante was never going to be a philosopher professionally, but his sojourn among the philosophers had disturbed his sense that the intellectuals and poets within his own small Florentine circle possessed all the answers. By the end of the Vita Nuova, he has admitted both to loving the Other Lady – to following philosophical inquiry rather than blind piety, of moving on to new experiences and not being locked in childhood and youth – and he has said that Beatrice or ‘Beatrice’, that is the beautiful Florentine girl he has loved since nine and all she stands for, will remain the end of all his searchings and inquiries. The reader of the Vita Nuova finishes the book rather baffled, and the bafflement will not be diminished by many a re-reading of its circular, inward-looking, self-devouring manner. Like so much in Dante it shimmers with paradox. For it opens the heart of the reader to the possibility of new worlds, new imaginative possibilities. What these are, Dante does not himself know. But after this period he was ready to place his literary and intellectual career to one side and enter the arena of politics.

  XII

  THE DARK WOOD

  THE QUESTION ‘WHAT IS LOVE?’ AND THE QUESTION ‘WHAT IS THE Just Society?’ seem like two very different ones. For Dante they were to coalesce by the end of his life, as were all questions which resolved in the ultimate question of how we all prepare ourselves to know and see God. Dante was not alone, however, in supposing that political questions make no sense outside the framework of much larger, metaphysical considerations. In the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, a series of mural paintings by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290–1348) reveal the seriousness with which the republicans of the Italian city states took their political ideas. The Allegory of Good Government is expressed in gentle, beautiful women dressed in cool greys and blues. Peace sits back with one hand against her golden hair. Fortitude sits upright, and beside her, crowned and wimpled like one of the queen-saints of medieval Christendom, is Prudence. On the opposite wall, Bad Government is equally easy to recognize. A horned tyrant has subdued Justice to his feet. Vainglory and Avarice, bad angels, hover over him and he is ably assisted by demonic embodiments of Division and Violence.

  From the time when Plato wrote the Republic, and Aristotle his Politics in the fourth century BC, down to our own day, the realities depicted in these paintings have been clear to the human race. Get it wrong and you end up with Tyranny trampling on Justice – you end up with the sort of mayhem visited on many of the Italian cities for much of Dante’s lifetime, just as you end up with the oppression of human rights in eighteenth-century France being followed by the Terror; you end up with the Irish Potato Famine presided over by a British government which held simultaneous banquets in Dublin Castle; you end up with a whole catalogue of horrors, which include the European dictatorships of the 1930s, and the many abuses of order and justice which persist to this day. Indeed, however good we might consider such works of political achievement as the Constitution of the United States (and, as political phenomena go, it is remarkable both in its longevity and in its apparent solution of the twin demands of order and justice), most societies do not seem to have mastered the virtues, or overcome the vices, depicted in Lorenzetti’s Siena murals. Export these murals to Russia, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe and so on, and many would respond warmly to the depictions of bad government, and wonder how you get to the cool virtues of the paintings on the opposite wall. Certainly, no one in the Middle Ages knew how to master this art.

  Writing shortly after Dante’s death, Marsilius of Padua was the most radical political thinker of the Middle Ages. Political historians can see that the solutions he proposed for the problems of contemporary Italian statecraft in Defensor pacis were radically secular. He was in some senses the absolutist of absolutists, since he believed that it was the coercive power of the state, as a purely human institution, which was the origin of law, not some airy metaphysic. The state he saw as a purely
human construct, a natural organism. But, as his title shows, the first and fundamental requirement of a state is that the populace should be at peace. And, said Marsilius, among the many causes of unrest in Europe, there was one which was ‘a unique and hidden cause of discord which has long troubled and continues to trouble the Roman Empire, one which is contagious, equally bent on insinuating itself into all other civil bodies and kingdoms, and has already greedily attacked many of them – the Papacy, with all its ill-fated pretension to the plenitudo potestatis’.1 Dante did not live to read Marsilius (who, incidentally, seems to have made an oblique allusion to Dante’s own later political treatise);2 he would have been shocked by Marsilius’s radicalism and secularism. But in the Paduan’s censure of the political pretensions of the Papacy, Dante would have seen the cause of all the political troubles of Florence and all his own private tragedy.

  Dante’s political career happened in the generation previous to Lorenzetti and Marsilius. It began with intense involvement in the day-today business of practical Florentine politics from 1295 to 1301. Later, when he had been forced out of political office and become an impassioned theorist writing and speaking from the sidelines, he would eventually3 pen De Monarchia, described by one historian of medieval political thought as a masterpiece.4 As Dante’s life all too painfully demonstrates, the hazards of falling foul of the political snakes and ladders board were dire in Italy during this period. But it is a fascinating period, and this fascination breathes through not only his one specifically political prose work, but also through much of his poetry; and it is one of the subjects of the Comedy. As so often with Dante, one is faced with a paradox. He rejoices in the modernity and newness of the situation. He is engaged in politics – something which would have been impossible for someone of his social standing in the previous generation in Florence. Yet his standpoint seems always to be that of the extreme conservative who deplores the arrival of new money and new ways. He is fervent for Florentine independence and for the independence of the Republic. Hence, again a paradox, but this time one made by history not by Dante’s character, his preparedness to support the Guelf package of French protectionism and papal political power. Then, after the debacle in his personal political life, we find a short period in which he supports the White Guelfs – those who continue to support the Papacy. Then, a change once more to a kind of freelance Ghibellinism, a support of those Ghibelline families who are opposed to the Papacy, and eventually a fervent admiration, all but worship, of one individual occupant of the Imperial throne. So, Dante’s political career spans the entire possibility of opinion and standpoint at that period. It is as if we have watched a man within a ten- to fifteen-year period of the mid-twentieth century change from being a Trotskyite to being a Fascist.

  In March 1294, Dante was twenty-nine. As a poet, he had reached a particular plateau of achievement. The death of Beatrice, the love of the Donna Gentile, who was perhaps his wife Gemma, the steeping of himself in philosophy had provided a natural pause, an interval of world-experience which was waiting for change. He had married, had children, and established himself as a writer of the first rank, a poet of extraordinary technical accomplishment, but also one who was prepared to use poetry in a way which it had never, quite, been used before by anyone.

  Like his contemporaries, he had explored, in poetry and in discourse, the nature of love. He had weighed the conventions of Courtly Love and Provençal song against the cynical philosophy of his friend Cavalcanti. He had known a life of sensuality. He had also known what it was to idolize a woman. He had been in love, he had known loss, grief, disillusion. He had known the spiritualized love of an ideal girl on a pedestal, who died; and he had known the day-to-day love of (some say5) a very difficult and in some ways unloveable wife.

  But love was something more than the expression of literary clichés about women, however prettily these were achieved. Love, certainly as it was expanded as an idea in the Comedy, was a concept in politics. Since Plato and Aristotle, politics had been a question of love. How might men and women, in their various orders and degrees, best live together? What was the duty of a citizen?

  Dante’s career as a writer was inseparable from the politics of the age. Not only did he take a view on the mainstream political issues of his times, but he also became involved with them as a practical politician. The origin of this phase of Dante’s life would seem to have occurred in the spring of 1294 with the arrival of the son of Charles II, King of Sicily, to spend three weeks in Florence.

  This son was also called Charles, and is usually known by the auspicious name of Charles Martel – the very name borne by that mythic figure in the history of European monarchy, Charlemagne’s grandfather. This Charles Martel was born in 1271, and he was fortunate enough to die (on 19 August 1295) before Dante’s changes of fortune or opinion. Therefore, when Dante reached the Heaven of Venus, he encountered Charles Martel as a holy light, a ‘lume santo’ [Par. IX.7].

  Venus, as well as being the planet of love, is also the planet associated with the art of rhetoric.6 The twenty-two-year-old Charles Martel’s visit to Florence was attended by much music and pageantry. He was accompanied by 200 French and Neapolitan knights and for three weeks there were feasts, speeches, High Masses, jousts and music. It was a splendid affair. In the state archives of Florence survives a document in which expenditure is sanctioned for cloth of gold for the ceremonies.7 During one such spectacular, Dante’s poem ‘Voi che ’ntendendo…’ was recited by the poet.

  It is a remarkable poem to have chosen for public recitation upon a political occasion. Its ostensible subject is both his continued idealization of Beatrice and the growing obsession he feels for the Donna Gentile – the Window Lady/wife Gemma. It is a poem located in the sphere of the third planet, Venus, and when encountered in the Heaven of Venus, Charles Martel flatteringly remembers it. Dante also uses his meeting as an opportunity to reflect on political philosophy, and on the state of politics in Italy between his embarkation upon a political career and his settling down in exile, some twenty years later, to finish the Comedy. The particular passage in the Paradiso is a good example of the apparent arbitrariness of Dante’s political judgements (why does he single out Charles Martel for such praise when he abominates the French presence in Italy, and the influence both of Charles’s father and his brother Robert, King of Naples?) and of the remarkable transformation in Dante’s political views over the course of his lifetime.

  When Charles Martel actually came to Florence in March 1294, Dante was a member of the Guelf party, which saw Italy’s best hope in support of the Papacy, defended by the armies of the French. He was not alone in becoming disillusioned with this view. Boniface VIII himself, his great enemy, would eventually pay dearly for allowing himself to fall into the hands of Philip the Fair. Nevertheless, even by Dante’s paradoxical and self-contradictory standards, there is a panache amounting to insolence, a paradox amounting to absurdity, about using Charles Martel as the mouthpiece for his ideal political philosophy. Yet – to leap ahead to the Comedy, from the moment of Dante’s actual meeting with the real Charles Martel – there is a method in the apparent madness. Choosing Charles Martel as his Holy Light makes the insults to his surviving brother all the more wounding; and moreover, they drive home how close Dante believes Italy came, during this brief period of his own entry into politics, to solving its difficulties, to uniting Guelf and Ghibelline. Charles Martel, by definition – he is in Heaven! – is dead when he makes his political speech to Dante in the Comedy. He died aged twenty-three, having achieved nothing politically. But this, apart from the fact that he had met and presumably got on well with Dante at the start of his political career in Florence, is what makes Charles Martel an appropriate mouthpiece both for insulting his own relations and explaining how narrowly Europe avoided solving its difficulties.

  Spring 1294 was not merely a good time to be entering politics, from his point of view. It was the first time that such a thing would in Florentine life
have been possible for a man who was not one of the major magnate families.

  None of the old Guelf families from among the magnates held office during the period 1267–80. It was a time when the banking families were coming into their own politically. In the decade 1282–92, 156 families provided Priors. Of these, the noted family of Girolami held the office twelve times. But shortly following them were the Bardi with ten appearances – the Bardi into whose family Beatrice Portinari had married.8 Only the year before Charles Martel’s visit, a Florentine nobleman, Giano della Bella, who supported the popolani or middle classes gaining power, introduced a series of political reforms known as the Ordinances of Justice. The Priors, the chief executives of the Florentine government, would exercise office for no longer than two months and they would have to wait for two years before re-election; and seventy-two magnate families were excluded from office. Such figures as Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi, grandees whose feuding had led Florence into such trouble, were forced to stand aside to allow figures from a less privileged setting to stand for office. It was in these circumstances that Dante took his fateful first steps in politics.9

  Power now lay in the hands of the guilds or popolo. It was necessary, if you wanted power, to join a guild. Dante enlisted in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries. Since he was neither a physician nor an apothecary, this perhaps deserves some comment. First, it should be noted that the greater Florentine guilds operated a little like the London livery companies today. You do not today have to be a barber or a surgeon to belong to the Company of Barber-Surgeons. The Merchant Taylors are not all engaged during office hours in measuring bespoke suitings.

  But secondly, it should be noted that the decision to join the Physicians and Apothecaries was not entirely whimsical. It was the Florentine guild which controlled the book publishing trade: appropriate for a writer. It was also a guild of professionals. The lofty Dante could join it without feeling he was thereby attaching himself to a trade. It was also one of the major guilds. To join it showed that Dante intended to rise to the top in Florentine politics. After the change of government following the Guelf return to power, ‘control of the comune shifted from the podestà to six Priors, elected from the most powerful guilds and representing the different sestieri’10 or wards. On 1 November 1295, he was elected onto the Special Council of the Capitano del Popolo, and from May the following year he was a member of the executive parliament, the Council of One Hundred. His contributions included a speech opposing the admission of Pistoian refugees into the city, on the grounds that any more immigrants would upset the already volatile and fractious political atmosphere in Florence, and another was to increase the power of the legislature against anyone who physically assaulted a holder of public office. Both these interventions give us some of the flavour of Florentine political life as the thirteenth century drew to a close.