by A. N. Wilson
In fact, the nineteenth-century Italian nationalists were about as wrong as they could have been when they claimed Dante as the kind of nationalist that they were; but they could say with some justice that the process by which Italian became a recognizably separate language and culture began in the time of Dante and that he was its chief instigator. So there is a paradox here, as there is with much of Dante. What could be more paradoxical than a treatise defending the use of the vernacular, but written in beautifully crafted Latin? Far from being an essay which encourages the fledgling Italian writer to ‘look in his heart and write’, Dante draws up lists of complicated proscriptions and prescriptions, illustrative of which grammatical constructions and sentence constructions are and are not acceptable in a vernacular canzone. Moreover, he urges the novice writer not only to follow the best Provençal, Italian and Northern French exemplars, but also to read Latin, to copy Virgil, Ovid, Statius, Lucan, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus, Paulus Orosius ‘and many others whom an affectionate interest invite us to consult’ [DVE II.vi.8, Botterill]. The great medievalist Ernst Curtius wittily replied in his masterpiece of 1948, ‘Must one really have read Orosius before one can write a canzone in the lofty style?’11
The Curtius question is a reductio ad absurdum and there is an aspect of De Vulgari Eloquentia which strikes the modern reader as absurd. What survives from it, and indeed, what is quite extraordinary about it, is its determination to make the Tuscan dialect which Dante himself spoke into something like an official language for Italy.
We are accustomed to think Latin is a ‘dead’ language. Plainly, that is not how Dante viewed either the Latin language or the Latin culture. Latin was still the lingua franca of Europe. It was what bound Europeans together, not merely because it was so convenient that law, philosophy, diplomacy and, indeed, much ordinary conversation could be conducted in a language understood by the literate of disparate parts of Europe. It bound them too because its literature and its theology and its pre-Christian mythologies were a shared imaginative experience.
At the same time, in the lifetime of Dante something quite new was happening in Europe. There was a dawning awareness of nationality. And although it was anachronistic of the Italian nationalists of the nineteenth century or the Fascists of the twentieth century to enlist Dante to their cause, Dante did in one sense invent Italian as a new literary construct, as a form. At the time when Sismondi and Mazzini were looking to Dante as their inspiration for the Risorgimento, Metternich the Austrian could dismiss the notion of Italy as a mere geographical term. It was always much more than that – witness many references in the Comedy to Dante’s sense, clearly shared by his fellow-countrymen, of where Italian-speaking ended and Provençal- or French- or German-speaking began.
The experience of exile was what liberated him to become the poet, not merely of Florence, not merely of Tuscany, but of Italy as a whole. During the period of his exile when he was writing De Vulgari Eloquentia, it is not known for certain where he was. He described himself as reduced to absolute poverty. After the Florentines threw him out, ‘through well-nigh all the regions whereto this tongue extends, a wanderer, almost a beggar, have I paced, revealing, against my will, the wound of fortune, which is often wont to be unjustly imputed to him who is wounded. Verily have I been a ship without a sail and without helm, drifted upon divers ports and straits and shores by the dry wind which grievous poverty exhales’ [Conv. I.iii.5, Christopher Ryan’s translation].
It was in this displaced and dispossessed condition that he quickened his sense of the whole of Italy as a linguistic and political entity. At the beginning of his life, Dante was the citizen of a proudly independent city state. He had been born into a family which was broadly speaking a supporter of the Papacy against the outside-interference of a German-born Emperor. There was nothing nationalist or pan-European in this outlook. His patriotism was for Florence. Then he suffered a double disillusionment. He was betrayed by the Black Guelfs. Then, having been cast by them into exile, he quarrelled with the White Guelfs. He had, in fact, ceased to be a Guelf at all. De Vulgari Eloquentia is not just a treatise on language. It is a signpost along the high road of his ever-changing political and religious outlook. A key passage is in the first book, Chapter XVIII, where he envisages an Italy which has a centralized parliament or curia, a court which was the shared home of the entire kingdom – the ‘totius regni comunis est’ [DVE I.xviii.2].
‘In the Fascist State the “unity of command” which Dante propounded as an essential for the wellbeing of citizens in a State or a nation is finally achieved.’12 No figure had emerged, when Dante wrote his treatise, who could plausibly give Italy this kind of leadership; Dante had not yet found his political hero, nor developed his sense of a resurrected Roman Imperium as the solution (ideal or practicable) to current difficulties. But the basis of his future imperialism was established: it was his belief in the people. ‘It would not be true to say that the Italians lack a tribunal altogether, even though we lack a monarch, because we do have one, but its physical components are scattered’ [DVE I.xviii.5, Botterill]. The components are the people of Italy. Sovereignty in Dante’s politics derived from the people. Changeable as he was in many of his ideas, this view remained fairly constant – both as a selected politician who benefited from the advance of the popolo against the magnates in Florence, and as a later political theorist who saw the/an Emperor as the best way of securing power for the Italian people themselves. To this degree, the Italian heroes of the Risorgimento were not being entirely fantastical in seeing Dante as their forerunner, and nor were the Fascists.
Like his other prose works written in exile, De Vulgari Eloquentia is incomplete. He probably stopped working on it by the beginning of 1305.13 By 1306, he had found refuge which brought his wanderings, at least temporarily, to a close – with the great aristocratic family of the Malaspina. They were on the whole Imperialists (though Dante’s closest friend among them, Moroello, was actually a Guelf), whose chief possessions were in the Val di Magra in Lunigiana. Corrado Malaspina I (who died in 1225) had been a son-in-law of the Emperor Frederick II. When Dante meets his grandson’s shade in Canto VIII of the Purgatorio:
‘In your domains,’ I answered, ‘ne’er was I,
But, through all Europe, where do those men dwell,
To whom their glory is not manifest?
The fame that honours your illustrious house,
Proclaims the nobles, and proclaims the land
[Purg. VIII.121–5, Cary]
Never one to be wholly consistent, the Dante who elsewhere sends usurers to Hell and pines for the aristocratic olden days of chivalry, praises the modern way in which the Malaspina family gave glory both to the world of commerce and of chivalry:
I swear
That your great lineage maintains intact
the glorious honor of the purse and sword.
[Purg. VIII.128–9, Musa]
One can see these lines being underscored by the Victorian admirers of Dante – by Gladstone, for example, as he sat in his wife’s aristocratic domains in North Wales, reading Dante while contemplating the growth of the capitalist cities of Northern England; or those Lord Vernons whose Dantean scholarship was underpinned by a life of leisure paid for by government bonds and the London Stock Exchange.
The Malaspina were among the most powerful families in Italy. To this day, the Malaspina family claim that Dante began to write the Comedy in one of their castles, and there exists a tradition going back to Boccaccio that Dante dedicated the Purgatorio to Moroello Malaspina. It was probably while he was staying with them that he resumed work on the book known as Il Convivio, a work which was in effect an exercise in autobiography.
XV
MEDIEVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I AM PUTTING INTO OPERATION AN ENTERPRISE OF WHICH THERE are no previous examples, and which will never have any imitators in the future. To my fellow creatures, I am going to reveal a human being with all the truthful candour of nature itself; and that hum
an being is going to be myself.’1 But like many assertions in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s great masterpiece of egotism, the statement is untrue. The enterprise of autobiographical con fession was not invented by Rousseau or by the Enlightenment. It would be truer to say, with the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye, ‘Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore functional impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern. This pattern may be something larger than himself, with which he has come to identify, or simply the coherence of his character and attitudes. We call this very important form of prose fiction the confessional form, following St Augustine, who appears to have invented it, and Rousseau, who established a modern type of it.’2
It is important to emphasize that autobiography is a form of fiction. Dante the pilgrim in the Comedy or even Dante the ‘I’ of his Vita Nuova or his Canzoni or Ballate is not a police witness on oath. He is a literary creation. Of course, he is based upon a real-life person of the same name who lived at a particular time, and in a particular series of places in history. But we don’t get very far if we start thinking he has something to hide, or that he should be writing about his wife rather than Beatrice and this other ‘gentle’ lady. That’s not the point of what he is doing. And one of the things he is doing is expanding the Augustinian idea of Confession – that deeply personal thing – as a reflection upon the general condition of human sinfulness. If Dante’s Comedy works – if it takes you over, which is what it is trying to do – then, in the end you become the pilgrim; your fears and terrors find you isolated in the dark wood; your sins are purged as you climb the mountain; you are led by Beatrice/Grace into the heavenly vision. His journey becomes the human journey. The difference between Dante and Rousseau encapsulates the difference between the medieval and the Romantic-revolutionary world-outlook. Dante’s experience is meant to be of universal application. Egomaniac as he might sometimes appear, he brings himself forward in order, eventually, to fade into the background; whereas Jean-Jacques brings himself forward, tout court.
A paradox lies at Christianity’s heart. On the one hand, Christians are asked to deny themselves; on the other, in order to purify themselves to approach God’s mercy seat, they must examine themselves and confess their innermost sins. How can the latter be done without self-obsession? Whether personal religion of this kind begins or ends in egotism is a question which must have puzzled many of Dante’s readers. Whatever the answer to it, there is an inevitability about the fact that for most of the Middle Ages, autobiography was a religious genre. This is true even of such accounts of military exploits as the splendid Mémoires of Philippe of Novara with their accounts of derring-do in the Fifth Crusade of 1218–20, since the aim of Philippe is to hold up a mirror to the ideal Christian knight for his readers to imitate – and to this extent, even this hero’s story becomes (as Dante’s does or intends to) a story of Everyman.3 Poet, clerk, knight and lover he might have been, but his eye and heart are set not merely upon the Holy Places of Jerusalem but on the faith which sees their significance.
Dante’s Comedy was in verse rather than prose. It is, however, among other things, a piece of confessional autobiography, which owes a certain amount to the tradition of confessional autobiography initiated by the North African father of the Latin Church. Augustine’s Confessions tells the story of how he was born in Numidia, the child of a pagan called Patricius and a Christian called Monica. He was not baptized, and the years of his early manhood were devoted to literature, rhetoric, of which he became a distinguished teacher, and dissipation. We are told little in the Confessions about his common law wife, or of his child, both of whom he abandoned together with his addiction to Platonic philosophy and rhetoric, when he went to Italy and came under the influence of St Ambrose of Milan, who baptized him in 387. Thereafter, Augustine was a voluminous apologist whose writings consist of long sermons, commentaries upon the Scriptures, and the final summation of his philosophical position, The City of God. It is probably true to say, however, that the work for which he is best remembered is the Confessions, an apologetic work addressed to the Almighty which demonstrates in one single particular how the work of grace is carried out. ‘Cet homme ce sera moi’. Dante’s autobiographical journey is to have a comparable particularity and generality. It is the very specific journey of Dante the pilgrim, encountering the individuals who have been of significance to himself, either in life or in imagination. It is also, however, the journey of Sanctification which every reader or hearer of the Comedy must make if he or she hopes for Paradise by finally making sense of the word ‘love’.
Augustine appears in Dante’s Paradise in a seat below St Benedict and St Francis. He is not given any great speeches as, for example, are the medieval saints Thomas Aquinas or Bernard; and Dante does not often quote Augustine in his work. Nevertheless, Augustine is a presence in Dante’s work, and we know from Dante’s Lectures in The Banquet that he had read, or at least looked into, the Confessions. The sentence which he quotes confronts the highly pertinent question of how a Christian, devoted to humility and self-effacement, can justify the egotistical exercise of writing about himself. ‘For by the progress of his life, which was from bad to good, and from good to better, and from better to best, he gave us example and teaching, which could not have been received through any other such true testimony’ [Conv. I.ii.14, author].
The great Dante scholar Edmund Gardner (1869–1935) believed that it was from Augustine that Dante derived the notion, ascribed to Pythagoras, of a philosopher, not as a wise man, but as a lover of wisdom [Conv. III.ii.22–54] – ‘a conception which, coloured by the allegorical figuration of Boethius in the De Consolatione Philosophiae, becomes the basis of Il Convivio, and translated into the language and adorned with the imagery of the love-poets of the dolce stil nuovo, takes lyrical form in the allegorical Rime in honour of the mystical lady of the poet’s worship, whose body is wisdom, and whose soul is love’.4
Medieval autobiography nearly always came to fruition in what St Catherine of Siena (‘one of the noblest and most truly heroic women that the world has ever seen’5) called the Cell of Self-Knowledge, ‘la cella del cognoscimento di noi’. The ultimate test of the truth of religion is whether the individual soul can have an experience of Almighty God. In the Western tradition which developed in the second millennium, the realization of God took two forms. There were the spiritual espousals, in which souls were betrothed or wedded to Christ, as in the mystical writings of St Catherine of Siena, or, in a later period than ours, St Teresa of Avila. And there was the intellectual anticipation of the vision of the Divine, the locus classicus of this path being the moment in Augustine’s Confessions when his mother Monica is dying, at Rome’s port, Ostia. (Dante remembered this, surely, when Casella tells him that the souls set out for Purgatory from the Tiber estuary, ‘dove l’acqua di Tevere s’insala’ [Purg. II.101].) Augustine and his saintly mother discourse of sacred matters, until – ‘while we spoke and panted after it, we just touched it with the whole effort of our hearts and we sighed, and even there we left behind us the first fruits of our spirits enchained to it.’6 Augustine and his mother break their silence, paradoxically, to discourse on the desirability and need, in such a moment, for silence. ‘If the soul could only be silent in itself, and sur mount self by forgetting self, if every dream and imaginary revelation could be silent… then it might be possible to perceive God.’7 A similar moment occurred in the life of Thomas Aquinas, when, having dictated millions of words, and suffered a nervous breakdown, he felt he should have declared that all his efforts to put religious truth into words had been mere straw.
But the beings who have such thoughts go on being themselves. The human being remains the conduit through which God is revealed to other human beings. Hence the importance of autobiography. Dante’s rewritten autobiographies struggle with this paradox, belonging as they do to the Augustinian tradition, aspiring in the recitation of personal exp
eriences towards a moment of intellectual enlightenment, a ‘momentum intelligentiae’.8
Augustine’s Confessions inspired a whole series of mystic works in the Middle Ages, such as those of the German mystics Mechthild of Magde burg (c.1207–82), Margarethe Ebner (1291–1351), Christine Ebner (1277–1356) and Heinrich Seuse or Soso (1293–1366). In English, the Yorkshireman Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the solitary anchoress Mother Julian of Norwich provided other examples of a soul’s direct encounters with the Infinite Majesty of God.
Dante’s work is fairly obviously sui generis, but it does have kinship with these traditions of autobiography. Any reader of Augustine’s Confessions knows that the heart will find no rest until it rests in God. This will be the end of Dante’s story. The fascination of mystical autobiography, especially one as complex as Dante’s, is that the obvious ending is withheld from the protagonist.
Something of this kind seems to be happening in Il Convivio. It is an unfinished work and, as we have already hinted in discussion of the Vita Nuova, it is a puzzling one, because the version of the Beatrice story which it tells is at variance with the supposedly earlier book. In the Vita Nuova, Dante rejects the Donna Gentile and returns to a mystic vision of Beatrice. In the unfinished Convivio, he seems still to be in pursuit of whatever wisdom or visions the Donna Gentile can offer. The Lady of the Window is, he insists, a figure who stands for Philosophy. The poems he wrote to her and the emotional experiences which were associated with them were emotional experiences of the mind. He has been involved in an intellectual journey, and he is coming towards an intellectual crisis. That is what Il Convivio seems to be saying. But mysterious, and unfinished, it remains. Scholars believe that he was at work on it from perhaps 1304 to 1308. It was not published until years after Dante’s death – towards the close of the fifteenth century, when Francesco Bonaccorsi brought out a printed edition.
