Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  THE LATIN: And Purgatory, what do you say about that?

  THE GREEK: What is Purgatory, and what Scripture do you learn it from?

  THE LATIN: From Paul, when he says that [men] are tried by fire: ‘If a man’s work be consumed, he shall suffer the damage, but he shall in this way be saved, as by fire.’

  THE GREEK: In truth, he is punished without end.

  THE LATIN: Here is what we say. If someone, after having sinned, goes to confess, receives a penance for the guilt, and dies before completing this penance, the angels cast his soul into the purificatory fire, that is, into the river of fire, until it has completed the time that remains of what has been set by the spiritual [father], the time it was unable to complete owing to the unpredictable suddenness of death. It is after completing the time that remains, we say, that it goes purified into this eternal life. Do you believe this too: Is this the way it is, or not?

  THE GREEK: Look, we not only do not accept this, we anathematize it, as do the fathers in council. According to the words of the Lord, ‘You go astray, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.’6

  The doctrine of Purgatory, as a place of purgation in the afterlife, was only officially defined by the Western Church by Pope Innocent IV in 1254.

  The specific Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory was of very recent development when Dante was born, and, as the above exchange shows – recorded at the time of Dante’s boyhood – large parts of Christendom did not accept it. It did not take long for the Church to abuse the belief, by promising indulgences in exchange for money. Scenes such as took place in the Jubilee Year, in which priests were literally raking money off the altars of Roman churches, would not have been possible had the faithful not been encouraged to suppose that their fate in the afterlife could be changed at the behest of the Church, more specifically of the Pope.

  But Dante was not a forerunner of Luther – for whom the sale of indulgences and a belief in Purgatory were the sticking points which made him rise up and splinter the Western Church. Dante consistently objected to abuse within the Church, and was repelled by the sale of indulgences and the sale of office, and the generalized atmosphere of money-worship. This did not make him question the doctrine of Purgatory. Aquinas defended the Western notion of Purgatory against what he called the errors of the Greeks, and the word purgatorium fills six columns in the Index Thomisticus. Aquinas hedged his bets a little, when answering the questions ‘Are certain abodes assigned to souls after death? And do souls go to these places immediately after death?’ He said that they go, as it were, to a place – quasi in loco.7 ‘Souls, because they know what place is assigned to them, conceive either joy or sadness therefrom: in this way their abode contributes to their reward or punishment.’8

  This suggestive phrase must have caught Dante’s eye as he read the Angelic Doctor. It is obvious how the doctrine of Purgatory evolved and became popular. Like the doctrine of reincarnation, it is essentially a merciful idea, based on the thought that whatever evil or mess we have made in one life, we shall have a chance to make correction in the next one. Hence, chantry chapels, Masses for the dead, pilgrimages, indulgences, and the faithful flocking to Rome for the Jubilee in 1300. But although the idea had gripped Western Christendom that there was a place called Purgatory where we must pass a period of purification, no artist had visualized it, and no philosopher, not even Aquinas, had seen its imaginative potential. For of all the three sections of the afterlife it is in Purgatory that most well-balanced and healthy-minded human beings could most imagine themselves to be. The smugness of believing oneself to be saved and therefore in no need of purification after death would be to the healthy-minded as repugnant as believing morbidly that one was destined to spend eternity suffering ingeniously contrived tortures at the hands of demons. It has been rightly said that ‘a little more than a hundred years after its inception, Purgatory benefited from an extraordinary stroke of luck: the poetic genius of Dante Alighieri… carved out for it an enduring place in human memory’.9 One could go further than that, and rejoice in the fact that Dante has been the most influential theologian of the afterlife ever since, and that when Christians think of what will happen to them when they die, they instinctively – such has been the extent of his influence upon popular thinking – think of it in Dantean terms, even if they have not read a word that Dante wrote. A certain type of puritan literalist would be dismayed that so serious a matter as what happens to Christians when they die has been determined not by the Bible, but by a medieval Italian poet, studying a pagan Roman poet. Others, of perhaps a more imaginative turn of mind, find it easier to believe that the Holy Spirit speaks through poets than through ecclesiastical formularies.

  As the Inferno took shape in Dante’s brain, he casts down into an emblematic Hell all those parts of himself and of his own experience which had held him back from Christianity pure and simple: love of women, lust, poetry and philosophical inquiry are arrayed near the surface of his Hell. Clearly, deeper down there were many other things which held Dante back from God – his anger, his resentment, his pride, his disloyalty to friendship – Guido – his kindred, his city, his wife, though she receives no mention. The furthermost pits of Hell are reserved for the disloyal.

  But before he can confront this side of his nature, he meditates upon the figure of Ulysses. Even before Tennyson adapted the passage in Inferno XXVI into one of the finest nineteenth-century poems about doubt and intellectual adventure, Dante’s account of Ulysses’s last voyage must have been seen as a nobler thing than the timid path trodden by those who sought the way of salvation through orthodoxy.

  No one knows exactly when Dante wrote the Inferno, but it can be dated with approximate accuracy. We know that his letter to Moroello Malaspina about his Alpine love belongs to 1307. We also know that the Inferno could not have been composed at this date. When Dante and Virgil get to the circle of Hell reserved for the sowers of discord, the chief of the sinners in this regard, Mahomet, rejoices at schism in the Catholic Church. In particular, he praises the discord sown by one Fra Dolcino of Lombardy. Benvenuto tells us that Fra Dolcino’s heretical sect came into being at about the time Dante was beginning to write the Inferno.10 Fra Dolcino was brought up and educated by a priest at Vercelli. He stole some money from his benefactor, and allowed the blame to rest on a servant, who in turn unmasked him. He fled to Trent, where he assumed the garb of a friar and began a sect in the surrounding mountain villages. The tenets of the sect were ones which have proved popular since at various stages of human history. Having announced that he was God’s special apostle, Fra Dolcino announced to his followers that they should have all things in common, including money and women – doctrines which will always be attractive. He was joined by 3,000 young men, some of noble birth, and they presumably found an equal number of gullible women to gratify their communal wishes. A Crusade was preached against them, and volunteers came from as far afield as Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul, from France and Provence and Savoy, to put down the tempting new religion. The widows of Genoa alone financed a contingent of 400 Crusaders to fight the menace. The heretics were driven into the mountains and survived for about a year of sporadic fighting before Fra Dolcino and his beautiful paramour, a rich lady of Trent by the name of Margaret, were captured, tortured and, on 2 June 1307, publicly burned. So Canto XXVIII of the Inferno could not have been written before this date.

  The landscapes of the Inferno are suggestive of the poet’s whereabouts during the period of its composition. If I am right in suggesting that the experience of falling in love in the Casentino was the catalyst which sparked the poem, and sent Dante back in his mind to his childhood love of Beatrice, and so on through the subsequent years of his Florentine experience, then the valley of the Casentino is of central importance to the poem itself. In the midst of some of the most obscenely hideous scenes of Hell, Dante comes across a forger of coinage called Maestro Adamo. We have by now witnessed people being submerged in boiling pitch, an
d in shit; we have seen people turned into half-trees, so that to tear off a leaf or twig from their tormented bodies is a torture. But for Adamo, an almost worse torture is given: simple thirst, and the vivid memory of the Casentino, ‘the little brooks which from the green hills of the Casentino run down into the Arno’ [Inf. XXX.64–5, author]. It is a key moment in the Inferno, for it is one of the most striking examples of how Dante’s personal journey is always one shared with the reader. This is the journey of sanctification of one Christian soul – but it is also the story of all his contemporaries – and of all who in after-years are to read his words. A nineteenth-century traveller, Ampere, in his Voyage Dantesque, says of the Casentino that, ‘In Dante’s untranslatable verses about it, there is a moist freshness. In reality, one is bound to say, that the Casentino is less moist and less verdant than it is in the poetry of Dante. In this arid and rocky environment I myself underwent some of Maestro Adamo’s torment.’11 The point, however, is not that Dante was writing a travelogue. He who was never slow to be autobiographical finds in this valley where he had himself fallen in love so painfully a memory not of himself but of a figure who threatened to undermine the very source of Florentine supremacy. A Marxist reading of the Comedy would probably start here, with Adamo’s ponderous denunciation of three brothers, the Counts Guidi, who had employed him to falsify gold florins, minting coins of twenty-one carats, rather than the twenty-four of the genuine Florentine florin.

  Aristotle in his Ethics believed that money was invented for the common utility and benefit of humanity. To forge money, or devalue it, is therefore to commit a fundamentally anti-social act, one which introduces disorder and injustice like a virus. For this, Maestro Adamo is down in the depths of Hell with Sinon, the lying Greek who persuaded the Trojans to take in the Wooden Horse. Economic instability is not at the very basis of all evil – Satan himself is that – but Dante places it very near the basis.

  His Italy, and the Italy through which he travelled as the Inferno took shape, the blessed land where they say sì for ‘yes’ (‘dove ’l sì suona’ [Inf. XXXIII.80]), forms the landscape of his imagined vision, and surely gives us some clue as to his whereabouts when he was writing. One of the most memorable physical features of Hell are the Evil Pouches, the Malebolge, met with in Canto XVIII. The poets move from one trough to the next as if crossing an ancient earthworks of gigantic structure built around a hill. (Truly gigantic – the radius of Malebolge is seventeen and a half miles and the diameter thirty-five miles.) The damned are suffering in each of these pouches, but Virgil and Dante are able to cross by means of stone bridges. The great Vernon, one of the finest English commentators on Dante, surely errs when he says that Dante and Virgil are ‘represented standing beside what looks like a piece of ornamental rock-work in a suburban back garden’12 when they reach the Mountain of Purgatory. For the huge bridges over the mile-wide Malebolge were inspired by an actual geological phenomenon. In the mountains above Verona, to the east of Lake Garda, are found natural arches of rock which make just such bridges – though less gigantic than their hellish equivalents – as Dante describes in the Inferno.

  Hell is both horribly alien and horribly familiar. The landscapes come from familiar reading – the hot sands of Libya as described by Lucan, for example, and which tormented Cato, openly inspire the sands tormenting those such as the sodomites who do violence against nature [Pharsalia IX, 580; Inf. XIV.15]. The embankments in Canto XV which enable the two poets to avoid burning the soles of their feet remind us of the embankments built by the Flemings between Ghent and Bruges to keep back the floods, or the earthworks constructed along the Brenta by the Paduans to prevent their castles and towns from flooding. The passing mood of Virgil produces the beautiful image of a peasant in winter, believing the landscape to be snowbound and then realizing that it is soon-to-be-melted ground frost [Inf. XXIV]. In another bucolic passage, just before we meet the souls of Ulysses and his companions, we share the experience of the Tuscan peasant at that point of an evening when the fireflies hide themselves and the mosquitoes rise into the air [Inf. XXVI.25]. In all these comparisons, far more than a mere grammatical simile is at work. This Hell is populated by Europeans, and it is much like their own world – though it is a gigantic and nightmare version of it.

  Dante is very fond of the rhetorical device which medievals called occupatio. It is when you say that you are not going to mention something in order to mention it. ‘Here is not the place to allude to…’, and then you make the allusion. At certain points of the Inferno, the whole poem becomes an exercise in occupatio. He mentions in order not to mention. And one of the narratives which is taking place in the polyphonic and multi-layered narrative of his Comedy is the writing of the poem itself, So, the Malebolge are both the bridges of Hell and the mountain landscape north of Verona where he was by now living. In the long passage about the blind hermaphrodite prophet Tiresias’s daughter Manto, after whom Mantua is supposedly named, Virgil gives what is in effect a Lake Garda travelogue. ‘Where the surrounding shore lies lowest, Peschiera, a beautiful and powerful fortress, faces Brescia and Bergamo. There, all the water which cannot be contained in Benaco flows out and becomes a river, flowing through green pastures. As soon as the stream gathers head and becomes a river it is known as the Mincio where it flows as far as Governo and falls into the Po’ [Inf. XX.70–76, author].

  This is almost a geographical signature: I am now in Northern Italy, bordering on the Alps, and writing my poem. One of the most brilliant of Dante’s special effects is that as the two poets come down to the centre of the universe and the very pit of Hell, their direction changes. They cross a time zone and a space zone. Having descended down Satan’s shaggy side, they find that what had begun as a descent is, in fact, taking them upwards and that what had been evening is now morning. Nearly all readers would expect the centre of Hell to be very hot, volcanic, but Dante has taken us metaphorically to the borders of the blessed land ‘dove ’l sì suona’. He has taken us out of Italy. The terrible blasts of cold wind which have been afflicting the poets for several cantos turn out to be caused by the flapping of Satan’s horrific bat-like wings. The snow and ice are positively Alpine. This is the Italy, this Italy of the extreme north, which was to be Dante’s peripatetic home for his remaining years. Here, from 1312 to 1318, we find him in Verona and thereafter until his death in 1321 in Ravenna. But before that, as we shiver in the Alpine snows, we are awaiting an arrival from the north; the arrival of a new Emperor upon whom Dante placed enormous hopes. Like most of Dante’s hopes, they were destined to be dashed.

  XVII

  CROWN IMPERIAL 1310–13

  SINCE THE DEATH OF FREDERICK II IN 1250, THERE HAD BEEN NO crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Italy. (And his coronation was as long ago as 1220.) The Imperialist dream of the Ghibellines had been based on notions alone. They had no figurehead upon whom to fix them. On 1 May 1308, however, the notional Emperor – Albert the German, as Dante called him – was assassinated by his nephew. Philip the Fair would have liked to take over the Emperorship, or for it to be given to his brother, Charles of Valois. But there emerged a candidate for the vacant Imperial throne who was, mirabile dictu, agreeable both to the Pope and to the German princes. This was Henry, Count of Luxembourg (c.1269–1313). His first language was French, and he had been knighted by Philip the Fair. His father had been killed in battle when Henry was nineteen and inherited his tiny feudal fiefdom. He ruled Luxembourg wisely and justly, and the sharpest crisis he had to face was a quarrel with the citizens of Trier, future birthplace of Karl Marx, over the question of paying tolls to cross the Rhine. In 1292, he had married Margaret, daughter of John I, Duke of Brabant.

  Then came the death of Albert I, the German King, in 1308. Henry, insignificant as Luxembourg must have appeared to some of the electors, was the heir of the Hohenstaufens – the chief royal family of Germany – and he put himself in place for the Emperorship. The Rhenish bishops were appeased – they were allowed to keep the tolls
over the Rhine. It so happened that the Archbishop of Trier was Henry’s younger brother. Seven German electors, including the fraternal Archbishop, gave their vote to the thirty-four-year-old Henry. Philip IV’s approval was sought, and won. The French Pope, Clement V, by now resident in Avignon, gave Henry his support. And from Italy, Henry received an appeal from the great Ghibel line warlords. There was a rival candidate – German Albert’s son John. But with Henry’s wide range of support, he seized the moment. There really seemed to be a chance that once again the Hohenstaufens, once on Italian soil, could unite not merely the warring factions of the peninsula but the greater part of Germany and Italy. The Empire, rather than being a mere dream, looked like becoming a reality, with a united Catholic Europe ruled by a single monarch. From his French fastness, the Pope even entertained the unrealistic hope that Henry, once crowned as Emperor, would be able to reconquer the Holy Land for the Christian West.

  To be the successful feudal king of tiny Luxembourg was a very different thing from being the universal monarch. Henry had little notion of how much Italy had changed in the period since the death of Frederick II. Feudalism in Italy was dead. Power was perceived to derive, in Ghibelline, as in Guelf city states, from the popolo, rather than being dispensed from above. The internecine rivalries within the city states themselves, their attitudes towards one another and, the further south you got, their attitudes towards the southern Kingdom of Naples, were matters of the utmost complexity, calling for a political and diplomatic skill, and a range of knowledge, which Henry did not possess. Charles II of Naples died on 3 May 1309, and he was succeeded by Robert, Duke of Calabria, who never really accepted Henry’s claim to the Imperial crown.