Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  Clearly, in so far as it speaks of his relationship with a strange Lady who represents Philosophy, it is a book which is following the model of Boethius. It is a parallel which he draws himself [Conv. II.12]. But it is an intensely personal book, focusing as it does on his inward journey, and his obsession with the Lady (however she is interpreted), as the hated implications of his exile and his poverty begin to sink in. He is not here, as he will be in later prose writings, and in the Comedy itself, rehearsing his ineradicable obsessions with Boniface VIII’s misgovernment.

  Il Convivio makes clear that Dante had hoped to write a work comparable to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. It was to have taken the form of commentaries on fourteen of his poems. He was also going to write one of those medieval compendium-books which contained summaries of all knowledge – to expound the significance of astronomy, to catalogue the planets, and their arcane significances, as well as to continue his reflections upon rhetoric and language. (Very characteristically, we find him in Il Convivio taking the view of Latin vs Italian which is so much the opposite of what he had written in De Vulgari Eloquentia that it is almost its retort from the Looking-Glass. De Vulgari is a treatise written in Latin in praise of the vernacular. In Il Convivio, he writes in Italian that it would really have been more fitting to have composed the work in Latin, which is ‘più virtuoso e nobile’ [Conv. I.v.15] than Italian! Whatever qualities we seek in Dante, consistency of outlook is not one of them.) In the course of the commentaries, he was to have expounded all that he had learnt from the Lady Philosophy. But he runs into difficulties at the beginning of the third chapter, with his exposition of his superb ode, ‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’ (‘Love that discourses to me in my mind’). The school of poets among whom Dante had learned his trade believed that it was possible to analyse love intellectually, just as the Scholastics believed it was possible to define or analyse the Love of God. Dante comes close to suggesting [Conv. III.xiv.15] that the pursuit of philosophy will lead you to Heaven. He quotes Avicenna, the Arab philosopher, that Divine Light penetrates the mind and draws it up to Heaven. The Wisdom literature in the Bible is invoked to make the same point: from the Proverbs of Solomon, we read that ‘I am ordained from everlasting’. His ode, then, expresses the belief that the Lady Philosophy can enable us to perceive by reason much of what she has kept hidden or deemed miraculous. Faith, Hope and Charity themselves, the Theological Virtues, rise up to Heaven not as Virtues popularly understood but as the three Philosophical Schools – Stoics, Peripatetics and Epicureans ‘in that celestial Athens’. In traditional Christian thinking, the City which becomes a symbol of Heaven is Jerusalem, and it is sometimes contrasted with Athens. ‘Quid Athenae Ierosolimis?’ asked Tertullian scornfully. What is Athens to Jerusalem? ‘Quid Academiae et Ecclesiae? Quid haereticis et christianis?’9 What is an Academy compared with a Church? What are heretics compared with Christians?

  Dante is therefore taking a very bold step in this metaphor of Heaven as Athens. The very philosophers who deny the immortality of the soul, the Epicureans, are raised to the highest Heaven as emblems of Divine Love.

  There are some modern scholars who have believed10 that Il Convivio was interrupted because Dante suffered a crisis. He realized that philosophy could not lead him to a knowledge of God, and he felt the tensions which had been at work in the Church ever since the watershed of 1277 when the Papacy attempted to prevent the Schools of Paris from reading Aristotle. Since then, Signor Gagliardi, for example, believed, there had been an intellectual diaspora secretly defying the teachings of the Church and reading ‘heretical’ literature.

  Possibly there is some truth in this. But in Dante we discover perhaps a more inward tension which could very well have been provoked by what Gagliardi saw as an ‘intellectual tragedy’. We already spoke, in the chapter on the Vita Nuova, of the figure of Ulysses, whom Dante uses in the Comedy as a figure of his own exile, spiritual and intellectual. Augustine in the Confessions says that it is possible to be intellectually greedy as well as physically greedy. Possibly his sentence about slaves of such greed, who go far and perish, suggested Dante’s emendation of the Ulysses story.11 Even St Thomas Aquinas, who differed from Augustine in believing that you did not need specifically divine illumination to use your intellectual faculties, nonetheless believed there could be an intellectual curiosity which was excessive. (‘Curiositas non est studiositas, sed immoderate rerum cognitio.’12 ‘Curiosity is not the same thing as scholarly interest, but an immoderate prying knowledge of things.’)

  It is possible to see the crisis – of mind not measuring up to a definition of Love or a perception of the reality of God – as an ‘intellectual tragedy’. Another way of seeing it is to believe that Dante’s professions of mystic experience were sincere.

  There are at least three points in Dante’s prose works where he seems to place himself among the mystics. In Il Convivio III.ii, he quotes a Neoplatonist work (which he wrongly attributed to Aristotle) called De Causis, the Book of Causes:

  Love, if we truly recognize it and carefully consider it, is seen to be nothing other than a spiritual union between the soul and the thing loved; the soul by its very nature seeks this union, either quickly or slowly, according as it is free or impeded. The reason for this natural tendency may be given as follows: every substantial form proceeds from its first cause, who is God, as is stated in the Book of Causes; each form becomes diverse in individuals not through that cause, which is utterly simple, but through secondary causes and through the matter into which the form descends. So in that same book where it treats of the infusion of divine goodness, we find the words: ‘The various kinds of goodness and gifts are made diverse through uniting the things that receive them’. Since every effect retains something of the nature of its cause, every form receives the being of the divine nature in some way. This is not to say that the divine nature is divided and distributed among the forms, but that it is participated in by them in something like the way that the nature of the sun is participated in by the other stars. And the more noble the form the more it contains of that nature; so the human soul, which is the most noble of these forms generated beneath the heavens, receives more of the divine nature than any other such form.

  [Conv. III.ii.3–6, Ryan]

  Dante’s question, the question of his young fellow-poets – what is the nature of Love? – appears to be moving specifically in the direction of mystical theology. To this extent, the whole debate about the identity of the Donna Gentile, whether she ever existed, is irrelevant. The poem which she originally inspired already seems to its author to be about more than he realized at the time of the experience. In Dante, experience is constantly revisited and reinterpreted. The experience which he has had of fancying women from afar, loving their faces, fantasizing about them – these experiences themselves are no more than allegories of what has been going on in his intellectual journey – his attempts to make sense of philosophy. In both cases, he is confronted by the same phenomenon – that yearning, or inquiry, passes into Love itself. What appeared to be effort on his part was the reflection of a Divine Light leading him on.

  In two other places, Dante claims actually to have been a visionary. Both are contentious to Dante scholars. The first is the conclusion to the Vita Nuova where he claims, having written the sonnet ‘Oltre la spera’, to have received ‘a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessèd one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way’ [VN XLII, Musa]. The second moment occurs in the letter to his patron Can Grande.

  The letter, written in Latin, is an instruction about how to read the Comedy. We will consider it again in its chronological sequence. What arrests the attention at this juncture is Dante’s invoking the Scriptures and the great Christian mystics to insist that he too has had an authentic experience of God. Railing against the ‘carpers’ who doubt the authenticity of his experience, Dante fully admits his unworthiness to have rec
eived any such vision. ‘But if they [the carpers] yelp against the assignment of so great exaltation, because of the sin of the speaker, let them read Daniel, where they will find that Nabuchodonsor too was divinely enabled to see certain things against sinners, and then dropped them into oblivion’ [Ep. XIII.560, Wicksteed].

  The two passages are contentious for differing reasons. In the first case, as we have seen, there is the worry about the chronology of the ending of the Vita Nuova – was it written in the 1290s, or was it, in fact, reworked when he had begun to conceive of Beatrice as the sort of figure she became in the Comedy? In the second case, there are many sound scholars who doubt whether Dante wrote the letter to Can Grande.

  I am not in a position to adjudicate between the scholars who doubt and the scholars who aver the authenticity of the letter. If it is authentic, it challenges us to accept Dante as writing within the mystical tradition of medieval autobiography. Even if we do not believe he wrote it, the letter shows that there was a vigorous tradition of reading Dante in this way. In fact, it is hard to see how else to read him, whatever we make of mysticism and the questions it poses – about the state of mind of the mystics, about what their experiences teach us, if anything, about God.

  Our own experience of reading Dante is going to confront these questions in any event. That is central to his purpose as an artist and as ‘the chief imagination of Christendom’, as Yeats called him – I quoted the poem in Chapter i. It is in that capacity that the popularized Platonism of Il Convivio will strike us. There surely is not much mystery about why he abandoned it. The book is a reflection on the poems he had written to date and his attempts to form an amateur ‘philosophy of love’ based on reading a handful of books on the subject. He might, or might not, have had ‘mystic’ experiences at this date. It is hard to imagine the man had not had mystic experiences who was found, when in mourning for Beatrice, drawing an angel. But the developed Dantean thinking about Love – the love of women and the love of God – lacked, until this juncture, the element of embodiment. He had had affairs. To judge from the ribald exchanges between Dante and his fellow young poets, he had a dissolute youth. He was also married and a father. He had on more than one occasion fallen spiritually in love with the eyes, face and soul of some unattainable beauty. But in all these experiences, he was somehow able to place them in neat compartments. Nothing had quite happened so far to his imagination which would enable it to encompass the mystery of the Incarnation: that is to say, the mystery of Love enfleshed. This was now going to happen. For someone whose entire literary output was devoted to the question of Love, and what it is, there should not have been anything very surprising about what happened. But it surprised Dante.

  XVI

  DANTE IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN IN CASENTINO. THE ORIGINS OF THE COMEDY

  NOW SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENS – A MAJOR CRISIS IN DANTE’S emotional and imaginative life. The Vita Nuova and Il Convivio had both been exercises in autobiographical allegory, or allegory-as-autobiography – attempts to make the events of Dante’s emotional life into emblems of something else. Critics and scholars have divided between those who wished to peer behind the allegory and discover the ‘real life’ story behind it; and those who wanted to emphasize that all we have are the words on the page, the artefact of Dante’s making. There is no point, such would argue, in imagining that we could ever discover, for example, what lay behind the story of the Donna Gentile. This was certainly the way that Dante’s son Pietro wanted us to read his father’s work: to see the Donna Gentile as a figure for Philosophy – and not as part of the messy emotional past. Pietro became a judge, and wrote a commentary on his father’s work; reassuringly, he sometimes admits he does not understand it.1 Perhaps as a respectable lawyer he was embarrassed by his father’s emotional life.

  Some time in 1307 or 1308, however, Dante wrote two autobiographical pieces of a very different character from the Vita Nuova. The first is a very fine poem – ‘Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia’; and the second is a letter to his friend Moroello Malaspina, explaining that he had fallen hopelessly in love.

  After his spell in Lunigiana as a guest of the Malaspina family, Dante spent some time in eastern Tuscany. We do not know where his wife was, or at what point, if any, she joined him in his exile. He was in the upper valley of the Arno in the mountains. It is perhaps the most dramatic mountain scenery in Tuscany, and perhaps Dante, always extremely sensitive to landscape, was in a state of heightened excitement in these high hills. In Purgatorio, Buonconte speaks of the spot where the Apennines climb above the Hermitage [Purg. V.96] and it is from this spot that you can look down on the whole Arno valley. You can actually see from here all the sites along the river, culminating in Florence itself, which Dante was to denounce. And it was in this dramatic mountain spot, here, in his early forties, that he fell in love again – unhappily, unrequitedly, miserably. The poem which it inspired, one of his best,2 makes much of the fact that this blow had befallen him on the banks of the Arno. Here we read, in a very spirited, accurate and poetic recent translation by Anthony Mortimer:

  Here, in a mountain valley, Love, you have

  Brought me to such a state

  And by this stream I always feel your strength.

  You knead me at your will, dead or alive,

  Thanks to the cruel light

  That with its flashes shows the way to death

  [Rime, Mortimer, p. 183]

  Notice what is happening. Dante is moving towards the terza rima in which he is going to write the Comedy. He is putting the intensity of this experience into taut, three-lined confinement. Terza rima was a rhyme-scheme of Dante’s invention, much used in the Quattrocento by Petrarch and Boccaccio for their narrative verses. The first line of each tercet or terzina rhymes with the third of the same tercet; and the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next tercet – producing the intricate scheme ABA, BCB, CDC and so on. With his characteristic combination of perfectionism and flair, Dante seems to have spent a long time honing the technique of the new poetic form. Its Trinitarian significance suited his purpose, but so too did its forward movement. The rhyme-scheme is always anticipating the next incident, the next thought, the next encounter, and as the ingenuity of the rhymes builds and rises, Dante would find it a marvellously versatile form, allowing for the violent alternations of mood which the Comedy would eventually encompass. The Comedy is like a conversation in which the dominant voice is wanting to add, ‘Oh, and another thing’; and this is what the rhyme-scheme of the terza rima everlastingly suggests. Anthony Mortimer renders the second strophe:

  She comes unchecked to my imagination;

  I can no more stop this

  Than I can block the thought that brings her there.

  My rash soul, working to its own destruction,

  Depicts her, as she is,

  Shapes its own pain, this image fierce and fair:

  Gazing its fill until it cannot bear

  The unsated longing that her eyes incite,

  The burning soul ignites

  With anger at itself who lit the fire.

  What argument can reason offer where

  This sudden tempest rages round about?

  Anguish, which cannot be contained, breathes out

  Sighs through the mouth and forces men to hear,

  And also gives the eyes their meed of tears.

  [Rime, Mortimer, p. 181]

  In this Alpine Ode, the love-wretchedness meets the wretchedness of exile, and in a neat farewell at the end of the canzone, he imagines the poem flowing down the mountains in the waters of the river until it reaches the city which has barred him entrance. There, the poem is to announce that, for once, Dante cannot come to make war on the inhabitants because he is enchained – by love of course – in the mountains.

  This is as straight a love poem as you will find in his entire œuvre. He is not pretending that the unnamed lady, who does not return his affections, is a figure of Philosophy o
r Divine Grace. She is a woman, and he is in the grip of a lunacy:

  My rash soul, working to its own destruction

  Depicts her, as she is

  Shapes its own pain, this image fierce and fair

  [Rime, Mortimer, p. 181]

  To his friend Moroello Malaspina, Dante wrote in Latin, ‘O quam in eius admiratione obstupui!’ (‘O how I was stupefied by her appearance!’) But stupor gave way to terror of the thunder which followed. ‘For just as rumbling thunder is followed by flashes of lightning so when the flame of this beauty had appeared a terrible and overpowering love overcame me. Like a lord long driven into exile and now returning, furious, to his home-land, he slew or banished or enchained any resistance in me’ [Ep. III.25, Wicksteed]. Dante tells Moroello that the experience destroyed the meditations which he had been making into things of Heaven and of earth – in other words, all his work on Il Convivio was now abandoned.

  It is out of this crisis that Dante would emerge, lay aside the botched prose works which he had started and begin the work which would guarantee him immortality. Hitherto, the exercises in self-projection had been introverted, convoluted and confused. In Il Convivio, he had begun to tie himself up in knots with a level of disordered argument which actually undermined the Christianity he was attempting to express. Dante was steeped in ideas, but he was not a philosopher, and the attempts to serve the Lady Philosophy had shown him that he was never going to write either a work of straight philosophy such as Aristotle or Averroes had done; nor to write a sequence of philosophical allegories in the manner of Boethius. The metaphor which comes to mind is that Dante needed to be turned inside out. The passages of prose in Il Convivio attempt to provide a commentary on some highly personal (if allegorized) love poems. Along the way, he makes observations about the condition of Italy, the languages and dialects spoken in the peninsula, the political chaos, the boorishness and stupidity of the inhabitants and of the human race in general. But none of it coheres. It is a mess. We feel that the autobiographical compulsion, the obsession with his own tragic predicament, is trying to match up to the tragedy of his country and of Europe – but the two things remain forever apart. Then, Il Convivio is lain aside, because of the love crisis which the Alpine Ode and the letter to Moroello Malaspina describe. After this trauma, Dante is ‘turned inside out’. He discovers a way of writing finely wrought verse which both dramatizes his own emotional and spiritual crisis, and allows him to reflect on what had interested him all along – namely, the Nature of Everything – the crisis in the Church, the crisis in the Empire, the recent history of Italy, the destiny of the human race in general, and of each and every human soul in particular as, made in the image and likeness of God, soiled, wrecked and ruined, we each turn towards Him for healing, or away from Him to our own damnation.