by A. N. Wilson
That is – he was ready, after the Alpine Ode, to begin the Comedy. The mountains of the Casentino, where he had the love affair, are heavily wooded. It was here, of course, in his forties, that he reached that rock-bottom crisis which was the real ‘mezzo del cammin’ of his life, his mid-life crisis. He was literally in a dark wood.
The shattering experience caused him to make two very major adjustments to his thinking. In the first place, he had to rethink the position which he had got himself into during the writing of Il Convivio – in which he had placed Epicurus, the denier of the soul’s immortality, in a symbolic ‘Celestial Athens’. Dante had found himself embracing the heretical theories of Averroes about the soul. If he now changed his mind, it was necessary also to rethink his first book. Philosophy (the Donna Gentile) was not, after all, to be his forte. The whoever-she-was who was to be the heroine of the Vita Nuova was written out of the picture. Beatrice had returned. The first love was also to be the last. In his beginning was to be his end.
One of Dante’s English editors, who discounts the Alpine Ode as merely ‘playful’, sees it as a sign of Dante’s ‘insincerity’ because he so truthfully admits to having had other loves, and other women, while he was living in Florence. Looking at the waters of the Arno as they flow through the mountains of the Casentino, Dante apostrophized the river beside whose banks he always seems to be falling in love. ‘This allusion to past loves in Florence is another mark of the insincerity of the love he is depicting in this Ode,’ snorts H. S. Vere-Hodge, editor and translator of the Odes for the Clarendon Press edition of 1963. For a man of forty-two to admit that he had been in love before would scarcely be surprising, even if there were no other works by Dante’s hands, including the joking, playful poems about the sixty most beautiful women on his ‘list’; and even if we did not follow Boccaccio’s prompting that ‘in the midst of such virtue and learning… found in this marvellous poet, lust found a large place, and not only in his youth but also in his mature years. This vice, although it be natural and common and, as it were, necessary, cannot in truth be commended or even excluded. But who among men shall be a judge so just as to condemn it? Not I. Oh, what lack of firmness in men, what bestial appetite! What influence over us can women not have, if they choose, seeing that, without their choice, they have so much?’3
It would be to miss the point of Dante, and of his Comedy, if we thought of him as a man who was so fixated upon one, idealized love – that for Beatrice – that he never looked at another woman. It would also be completely to miss the significance of Beatrice in his imaginative life, and in his masterpiece.
When he was a youth in Florence, and becoming the protégé of the Cavalcanti family, Dante would have been aware of the presence in their household of a distinguished old lady named Cunizza da Romano. She was the daughter of Ezzelino II, Count of Mangona, a Ghibelline magnate who had placed her in an arranged marriage with a Guelf captain from Verona, one Count Riccardo di San Bonifazio. Not long after her marriage she fell in love with the great troubadour poet Sordello,4 one of Dante’s role-models as a love poet. It was the discovery of his affair with Cunizza (whose brother the murderous Ezzelino III resented it) which caused the poet to flee to Provence, in whose dialect most of his best poetry was to be written.
Cunizza had other liaisons in her life – she was four times married before she retired to Florence, and attempted to undo the misery caused by her brother’s behaviour by acts of mercy. (In the year of Dante’s birth, Cunizza executed a deed which granted freedom to her brother’s and her father’s slaves.) Given her rackety past, we might have expected this benign old lady to have been in Purgatory when Dante encounters her in the Comedy. But she is in the Heaven of Venus. ‘One does not do penance here: one smiles’ [Par. IX.103], another devotee of Love tells the Pilgrim-Dante shortly after he has met Cunizza. Cunizza herself says:
But in myself I pardon happily
the reason for my fate; I do not grieve –
and vulgar minds may find this hard to see.
[Par. IX.34–6, Mandelbaum]
In his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound would imagine her as the missing link between Dante and the great troubadour poet Sordello.
Sordello he [Dante] might also have touched in spoken tradition. Cunizza, white-haired in the House of the Cavalcanti, Dante, small gutter-snipe, or small boy hearing the talk in his father’s kitchen or, later, from Guido, of beauty incarnate, or, if beauty can by any possibility be brought into doubt, at least and with utter certainty, charm and imperial bearing, grace that stopped not an instant in sweeping over the most violent authority of her time and, from the known fact, that vigour which is a grace in itself. There is nothing in Créstien [sic] de Troyes’ narratives, nothing in Rimini or in the tales of the antients [sic] to surpass the facts of Cunizza, with, in her old age, great kindness, thought for her slaves.5
Paolo and Francesca were not in Hell because of lust, but because their love had been an égoïsme à deux. Cunizza, perhaps a little like an aristocratic version of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, is one who has enjoyed the love of men; lust, now forgotten with death and age, has perhaps passed, but the love which led her to elope with Sordello remains. The experience of the Alpine love had taught Dante to forget his Neoplatonic fantasies about some rarefied ‘love’ leading him up to Heaven. The love of God was not a dream. It was real. Therefore only real love(s) could point the way towards it, and these included loves in the body.
Dante had been preparing ever since the Jubilee Year and the great conflict with Boniface VIII to put his experiences into some grand shape; but what form this synthesis would take, he almost certainly had no idea. Certainly, his discourses in Il Convivio in which he looks back on his earlier poetry suggest no clue as to the emergence of the Comedy. But now he is able, very nearly, to begin. He is looking for some catch-all scenario in which, like Giotto in his frescos at Padua, he can depict the journey of the Christian soul – his own – but that of each reader too – against the grand backdrop of the Saving History of the Bible. He needs to be able to find a new realism, as Giotto did, with focused portraits of individuals as they confront both the central moral questions of life, but also come to terms with the broader political situation of Dante’s own lifetime. It is an autobiography of the kind he had been sketching in Il Convivio. It is a Scrovegni chapel. It is also the whole journey of Catholic humanity towards understanding the heart of its faith. Clearly, the final idea, the one which enabled him to start his poem, was his choice of a mentor, one who would lead him on the road.
A highly sympathetic modern writer on Dante, Father Kenelm Foster OP, wrote a book called The Two Dantes, meaning the Christian Dante and the classicist who loved the pre-Christian literature and mythology. Dante the Latinist, Dante the European, would not have been content if his journey had simply consisted of a pious ‘retreat’ in the company of, let us say, St Francis of Assisi. The whole story (Dante’s own, and Europe’s) had been richer and more complicated than that. It was the story, stylized in the Bible story of the Exodus and the wanderings and strayings of God’s People, of rejection and return, of loss and gain. The first guide, for the early stages of the journey at any rate, should not be a Christian at all.
Freud’s analysis of Mahler was that the basis of his neurosis was mother-love. No doubt if he had met Dante he would have wanted to remind Dante that he had lost his father at about the onset of puberty or shortly thereafter and that he was on the lookout for father-figures. Also he was fixated by the mother he had lost in infancy. So, Freud would say if he had Dante lying on his couch, you, Signor Alighieri, are going to need to find yourself a father-figure who will lead you through an analysis of contemporary history and culture; but in the end you will abandon this figure and reach a grand culmination in which you find your mother again and sing the great hymn to the Virgin – daughter of her own son (‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio’ [Par. XXXIII.1]).
But 500 years separate the death of Dante and the
birth of Freud, so no such analysis is needed. In fact, in turning from his own private self to the Catholic who kneels in prayer to the Virgin, Dante was hardly to be accused of indulging in a private whim. This was the religion of Christendom. It was to the wisdom of the Church, away from his private judgement, that he repeatedly turns in the Comedy. Without rejecting his experiences of love, as carnal lover, as friend, as father, as husband, he is guided by Beatrice, who has become an embodiment of Divine Love – Grace – the spokesperson of the Love which moves the sun and other stars.
This process of transformation will take him the rest of his life, both to turn into a work of literature and to attempt to accomplish in his own person. It is nothing less than the journey of sanctification in which none perfectly succeed and few get anywhere near. And his father-figure on the first part of the journey would be the poet who made a sort of fascist-mysticism out of the mythology of the Roman Empire in the early days of the Emperor Augustus’s establishment of an authoritarian substitute for the Republic – namely, Virgil.
There is one reference to Virgil in Il Convivio, Book I, two references each in Books II and III, and six references in Book IV. This suggests that he was returning more and more frequently to the pages of one whom he calls ‘our greatest poet’ or ‘the supreme poet’ [Conv. IV.xxvi.13]. Virgil was the Latin author Dante knew best. There are some 200 quotations from Virgil in Dante’s works, compared with his other favourite authors – a hundred from Ovid, fifty from Lucan and thirty to forty from Statius.5 It is noticeable, however, that in all his pre-Comedy work, Dante only refers to Virgil as a great poet, not as a guide, not as a maestro, a father or an emotional companion – all the things he so inspiredly became when Dante started to write the Inferno.
Perhaps in the wretched condition occasioned by the Alpine love affair, Dante took to dipping into Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid, not simply in the spirit of literary inquiry, but with the superstition of the fortune-teller. The habit of opening the Aeneid at random and applying the verse to your own circumstances, as a form of fortune-telling, used to be a universal superstition in literate Europe. The tag found at random was known as a sors Virgiliana, and there are many cases in history of sortes Virgilianae appearing to tell the truth. When King Charles I went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford during the 1630s he was shown a handsome Aeneid and Viscount Falkland suggested that the King take a Virgilian sors. That unfortunate monarch opened it at Book IV – where Dido, Queen of Carthage, has been abandoned by Aeneas, and prays that he will be driven from power, or his realm, by a bold and warlike people.
During the Middle Ages, Virgil was believed to have been a wizard or a prophet. This was partly because, in his Fourth Eclogue, he seemed to have foreseen the coming of Christ. But it was also because of the nature of his epic. Homer, whoever he, she, or they were, had left Europeans two great story-poems – the story of the affliction of war, in the Iliad, and the story, in the Odyssey, of a wanderer who defies the fates and reaches where we all wish to be – home. Virgil in his Homer-soaked genius wrote both – the first half of the Aeneid is an Odyssey of a wanderer from Troy’s flames, bearing the Trojan gods and his old father Anchises on his shoulders, and destined against the fury of Juno and the vicissitudes of fate to land in Italy and found the Julian dynasty. The second half of the (unfinished) epic recounts the Iliad-like fights he had with the indigenous inhabitants when he got there. Jove decrees that he will win, but only by subsuming himself to the Latin language and the Latin culture.
The Aeneid, like the Torah, was always both a national epic and a story of our individual journey. Medieval and Renaissance commentaries on the epic all brought out its personalized significance – hence its use as a fortune-telling device. For them, the story was allegorical. Book I, with Aeneas on storm-tossed seas, is a man being born into the storms of life. Book II, when he recounts the story of Troy and the wooden horse, is childhood with its need for fairy stories. When Aeneas has his affair with Dido, he is man yielding to passion. As he leaves that behind, and his old father dies, he begins to shuffle off the allurements of the flesh. When his friend Palinurus, the helmsman, falls asleep and drops off the boat to a watery grave, this symbolizes, for such readers, the moment when sensuality and secular wisdom are finally abandoned in favour of the religious quest which leads man to the banks of the Tiber. If you think this way of reading the poem went out with the Renaissance, read Ronald Knox’s A Spiritual Aeneid, written just after the First World War.
Virgil’s Aeneid, while it is primarily a national poem about the fate of the Roman people to govern the known world, is also intensely personal and religious. It is analogous in this respect to the Ramayana, the great Indian national epic. It was therefore very much to Dante’s purpose, when he began the Comedy, to have Virgil as his companion on his journey through the underworld.
There was another reason why Virgil was so peculiarly apt as a companion, and that was that Virgil had been there before. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, when he has been cast by a storm on the Italian shore and arrives at Cumae to sacrifice to Apollo, Aeneas is given the opportunity to enter the underworld and to meet the dead. The terrifying figure of the Cumaean Sybil, a shrieking witch whom he meets in the caves near the altar of Apollo, directs him. There he is destined to meet the shade of his dead father Anchises.
The modern reader treats Virgil as fiction. The story of the survivor of the Trojan War coming to Italy in order to found the great new Roman Empire is seen as a self-defining, self-justificatory myth for the dictatorship of the Emperor Augustus. But Dante obviously regarded the story as historically true, putting Virgil’s mythology about the founding of Rome (and the prose versions of Livy) on the same infallible level as Holy Scripture. Likewise, a modern reader regards the journey of Aeneas through the cave and into the underworld as a piece of fiction. Dante was not alone in regarding it as a realistic account of what might happen to us after we die.
Until the beginning of the twelfth century, the Church taught that after death, souls will await the Last Judgement, when Christ will come to divide them, sending the wicked to Hell and the Blessed to Heaven. There were traditions, dating back to the Jewish First Book of Maccabees, of praying for the dead. Origen, the great Christian Platonist of Alexandria who died in 253/4, had not been able to conceive of a God who would not in the end extend mercy to all, even to Satan himself. From such tenuous sources had emerged a generalized hope that it was possible to improve the lot of the dead – before the Last Judgement – by offering up prayers for them on earth. St Augustine prayed for his dead mother. Quite what was happening to the dead, which would enable them to enjoy the bliss of Heaven (which, as C. S. Lewis told us, will be an acquired taste), opinion remained a bit vague. In so far as Christianity looked for guidance upon the matter, it looked to Virgil’s Aeneid. In the sixth book, the shades tell Aeneas that they are trained with punishment, that they are hung up helpless to the winds, while for others, there is a purgation through fire. The Greek Church accepted the generalized notion that the soul could be purged after death, but disputed the idea, which came into being during the twelfth century in the Western Church, that there was an actual place called Purgatory. After the Great Schism, this was one of the points, together with the Filioque clause in the Creed, which divided Christendom.
When they tried to reunite, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, the Pope attempted a compromise which he hoped would be acceptable to the Eastern Emperor Michael VIII. In a document which he hoped would appease Greek scepticism, he said that the dead suffered purgatorial punishments, or purification (he uses the Greek word catharteriis) but he did not use the word purgatorium. In replies to various Popes written in the later years of the 1270s, the Emperor does speak of the penalties ‘of Purgatory’. But the truth is that ‘on the ground’ the beliefs of the West and the East had diverged, as Thomas of Lentini, the Dominican friar who had received Thomas Aquinas into the Order of Preachers, discovered when he – as Latin Patriarch of Jeru
salem – interrogated two Greek monks in Cyprus in 1276.
