by A. N. Wilson
Dante had presumably visited Venice before. The well-known lines in the Inferno about the Venetians in winter in their Arsenal, boiling up clammy pitch to caulk their ships – an image which suggests to his vindictive mind the demons in the Malebolge dunking those who trade in public office and prodding the arses of corrupt public officials beneath the bubbling, boiling surfaces – has some of the suggestion of an eye-witness account. At any event, whether Villani’s grandson’s apocryphal story about his not being allowed to speak is true, Dante left Venice. Hearsay further tells us that the Doge insisted that Dante go back, not by ship, but over the marshes.
It was here that he contracted malaria, the disease which had killed his ‘first friend’ Guido Cavalcanti. A cruel appropriateness there. It was in Ravenna that he died. Though the date is disputed, tradition has it that the death occurred on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14 September 1321.
Giovanni del Virgilio composed an epitaph, though it was never engraved upon his tomb. It reads: ‘Here lies the theologian Dante, well versed in every branch of learning that Philosophy may nurture in her shining bosom, the glory of the Muses, and an author loved by the unlearned: with his fame he strikes both poles. It was he who assigned the dead to their places and defined the roles of the twin swords [i.e. the Empire and the Papacy]. And thus in both Italian and in Latin. Most recently, he was playing his Pierian pipes in the pastures; but envious Atropos, alas, cut short that joyous work. Ungrateful Florence, a cruel fatherland, rewarded her bard with the bitter fruit of exile; but compassionate Ravenna is glad to have received him in the bosom of Guido Novello, its revered leader. In the year of Our Lord, one thousand, three hundred and thrice seven, on the ides of September, then did he return to his stars.’11
Guido da Polenta arranged a stately funeral in the Franciscan church of San Pier Maggiore. His dead brow was adorned with a laurel crown. After the Requiem Mass in the church, the congregation returned to the house where Dante had been living, and Guido himself delivered the funeral oration ‘to commend the high learning and virtue of the deceased and to console the friends whom he had left behind in this sorrowful life’.12
Guido intended to build Dante a great tomb, but this was never executed. In September 1322, Guido da Polenta was deposed by his cousin Ostasio. The present neat little mausoleum was erected in 1780 by Cardinal Gonzaga. Byron, who described the ‘little cupola more neat than solemn’, hit off its character exactly. It does not seem an appropriate architecture for Dante, even though the setting of Ravenna itself, its feeling of vanished glory and faded Imperial power, was perhaps an apt setting for Dante’s everlasting exile. ‘Ungrateful Florence!’ exclaimed Byron in Childe Harold, ‘Dante sleeps afar,/Like Scipio buried by the upbraiding shore’. When Pope Pius IX visited the tomb in 1857,13 he wrote in the visitor’s book three lines from the Purgatorio:
Worldly renown is nothing other than
a breath of wind that blows now here, now there
and changes name when it has changed its course.
[Purg. XI.100–103, Mandelbaum]
There was an appropriateness in the lines. By the time the mausoleum was erected, Dante’s reputation in Italy was assured as the great national poet, but in the rest of Europe he had been quite largely forgotten.
XX
IN PARADISUM
WHEN DANTE DIED, IT SEEMED AS IF HE HAD LEFT THE COMEDY unfinished. He had been in the habit, when he finished six or eight cantos, of sending them to Can Grande della Scala. When Can Grande had read them, Dante would then have copies made and distribute them to those who wished to read them. The last sections of the Paradiso to be copied in this way before the poet’s death were those which concluded with Canto XX. The last thirteen cantos appeared to be unwritten.
Dante’s sons Iacopo and Pietro were urged by the surviving circle of Dante’s friends in Ravenna to complete the Comedy themselves. Then, in the eighth month after Dante’s death, one of Dante’s pupils, Piero Giardino, received a visit from Iacopo Alighieri just before dawn. In his sleep, said Iacopo, he had been given a vision of his father Dante in white robes, and with a shining light on his face. Iacopo had asked his father whether he had completed the Paradiso. To this, the answer was Yes. The phantom or spirit-Dante then led Iacopo by the hand into the room where the poet had been accustomed to sleep. ‘What you have been so long seeking is here,’ he said. At this point, Iacopo woke up and the vision vanished.
It was still dark. Piero Giardino came back with Dante to the Alighieri house and they entered the poet’s bedroom. At the spot indicated in the dream, there was a stove fixed against the wall, but they moved it and found behind it a little window which they had never known was there. In the window-seat they found the manuscript of the missing thirteen cantos of the Comedy, mildewed and damp. They duly had them copied and sent to Can Grande.1
Such was the story related by Boccaccio at the end of his Life. The anecdote has a quasi-Biblical flavour, and is comparable to – if it does not actually derive from – the scene in the Second Book of Chronicles when Hilkiah the priest ‘finds’ the Book of the Law of Moses (Deuteronomy) during building work in the Temple and takes it to King Josiah [2 Chronicles 34:14–16]. This is not to suggest that the last thirteen cantos of the Comedy are faked by Dante’s sons. The point of the story, however, is to authenticate Boccaccio’s authority as a narrator – he receives the story direct from Dante’s family; and to elevate Dante himself beyond the sordid borders of party politics into a celestial sphere where he is at one with the spirits of the Blessed.
To read the Inferno, especially to read it for the first time, is to be gripped by an extraordinary story, a series of scenes which are so alarming, so disgusting, so grotesque, that we read on enraptured. Many first-time readers of the Inferno must have finished it in a few sittings. The Purgatorio continues the narrative interest. It can likewise be read quickly, in a few days, in the knowledge that the reader will return to master the identities of some of the characters, or to puzzle out some of the more obscure points. The third section of the Comedy is different. The Paradiso is a work of prodigious originality. The effects it achieves are found in other artistic forms, but not often in literature. Those who have stood in front of Duccio’s Maestà at Siena have had their eyes drawn in the same direction as those of saints and angels towards the Mother of God at its centre. This vision, surrounded by gold, has some of the qualities of Dante’s Paradiso. Seeking parallels in music is to be reminded of how modern Dante feels in this the most demanding cantica of the Comedy. The complexities of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, or the revolutionary qualities of delay of emotion and vision withheld, which confronts the audience of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, achieve cognate tantric equivalents of intense, delayed union. For Dante is going to achieve what the Fourth Gospel said was impossible – at the end of this cantica he will see God, or at the very least, as words and vision fail, he will have come as close to seeing God as anyone else in literature. The reader who breezed through the Paradiso in a day or two might – just – grasp ‘what happens’. Even this exercise, however, is by no means guaranteed to provide illumination, any more than reading the plot summary of Tristan und Isolde could prepare you for the incredible effect of hearing the Overture and realizing yourself in a new dimension. It is almost worth saying that one should spend a minimum of several months reading the Paradiso, if necessary only a few lines a day, contemplating what it offers, and where it is claiming to lead. It is the boldest work of Western literature, since, if it achieves its effect, it will have ceased to be an imaginary narrative and will have led the reader to the vision experienced by the pilgrim-poet. Its aim is nothing less than to enable us to see God.
Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio were imagined journeys. Although some of his medieval readers wondered, in their commentaries on the great work, the extent to which it is a fictio (a simple invention) and the extent to which it is a visio (a vision of something true), no reader can ever ha
ve thought that it was meant to be read as a ‘literal’ account of a real journey – in the way that we might suppose that, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer might actually have made a pilgrimage to Canterbury which formed the framework of his Canterbury Tales collection. The Paradiso is different. It only really works for the reader if you allow yourself to be taken by Dante’s hand and believe that it is in some senses actually happening. He has lost his guide, Virgil. Did the Latin poet return to Limbo, or was he allowed to remain behind in the Earthly Paradise where they last set eyes upon one another? His guide is now Beatrice, but even she is, in the end, to give place to the mystic St Bernard – and even he stands back in the final vision, allowing Dante to do what many Christian writers, not just the fourth Evangelist, believe to be impossible (in this life and in this body at any rate): he gazes upon Almighty God. But the vision takes on a rhetorical character which makes the reading of it unlike most (all?) other reading experiences. Dante, having been the one who was led, is also the one who leads us. The allegory of the poem has become an allegory not only of his life, but of the individual reader’s. This is why it is best taken slowly. The effect of reading is to be unclothed before the searchlight of Heaven. We too, if we read at the right pace and in the right frame of mind, are going to be led to Heaven. The malfunctioning and corrupted systems in which Dante took such passionately engaged interest, the Empire and the Church, are not seen, ultimately, in collective terms. This is one of the extraordinary Christian paradoxes of the poem. The crowds swarming over the bridge of Castel Sant’Angelo in the Jubilee Year could not be less like the visitors to a Communist International, or a political party convention in the United States, where the swelling throngs of people represent a collective endeavour e pluribus unum. Dante’s crowds are collections of solitaries, and as the journey reaches its conclusion, he is increasingly isolated, the reader is increasingly alone with the implications of the vision. Heaven is crowded, but it draws its citizens one by one.
Dante and Beatrice make an interplanetary journey. In the Heaven of the Moon (the Inconstant), they meet his childhood friend Piccarda. He learns at last the incredible simplicity of the Gospel, as well as its paradox: that Christ is one whose service is perfect freedom, that by the surrender of the will to God we do not become slaves but free. In the second Heaven, of Mercury, they meet the Emperor Justinian and revisit once more the questions which had burned in Dante’s soul ever since he entered into public life in the 1290s – what constitutes a Good City? Justinian the Lawgiver rehearses the part played in Divine Providence by the Roman Empire. Justinian, a former heretic, was led to orthodoxy as he had been led to draft the foundations of European law, by Primal Love [Par. VI.11].
In the third Heaven, the Heaven of Venus, the full effulgence of Dante’s originality of vision shines ever more brightly. For it is in the Planet of Love that he and Beatrice hear an extraordinary combination of messages: the place in life of erotic love, and the establishment of a just political order. It was the harlot Rahab [Par. IX.115] who led the people of God into the Promised Land. Sordello’s old mistress, Cunizza, reveals that Heaven is not for puritans. Far from worrying their heads, as body-hating puritans have done in all ages of Christendom, about whether this or that expression of bodily love is sinful, the Blessed have left even repentance far behind them. ‘Here we do not repent, we smile’ [Par. IX.103]. In the same section of Heaven Charles Martel remembered Dante’s poem to the intelligent angels who guard the Planet of Love, and saw, as Justinian did, that just as Love cannot be a purely private thing, it is political.
In the fourth Heaven, that of the Sun, the Saints contemplate the extraordinary mysteries of the Resurrection. Christianity, in all its glory, in all its paradox, had known a remarkable revival with the coming of the mendicant orders to the West. In St Francis of Assisi had been recovered the Gospel-call to Holy Poverty which lay at the heart of the story in the New Testament and which in intervening ages, scandalously and amazingly, had been forgotten. Now the Lady Poverty who had been mourning her husband, Jesus, for 1,000 years [Par. XI.64] found a new lover. And Christendom was reminded of the physicality of its religious profession, of its faith in a God who took the flesh up into the Godhead, by the marks of the Crucified appearing on the body of his servant Francis. The Stigmata was a miracle with profound theological implications for the world. The mystery to which it returns the faithful mind is the same mystery which is at the centre of Dante’s Comedy – that Love in the Flesh, Love in the Spirit, Love in the Individual, and Love in the Communality are all one Love. Hence the importance of St Dominic, the sacred athlete [Par. XII.56], and his order of intellectual friars, tireless in their hostility to nonsense, ardent in their Christian brainwork.
In the Heaven of Mars, Dante is reminded that Christians fight a good fight. As flesh-and-blood creatures, we live in a world where warfare is not yet accomplished and there are still battles to be fought. He meets his old Crusader ancestor Cacciaguida and together they lament the state of Florence and the state of the world. Florence has been ‘undone’, as balls of gold hang over the former glory-days of simplicity of life and military aristocratic prowess [Par. XVI.111]. It is Cacciaguida who warns the pilgrim Dante (it is still 1300, remember) that he is destined to taste the bitter salt of another’s bread and to tread the lonely stair of another’s house in his exile [Par. XVII.58–60]. In the Heaven of Jupiter, Dante and Beatrice see the Just Kings – and find that the Jewish David and the pagan Trajan are closer to Christ than many a Christian. In the Heaven of Saturn they encounter the contemplatives. We are moving towards the final consummation in which argument and ratiocination are stilled before an astonishing revelation, a vision. One of the mystics, Peter Damian, gives utterance to one of those Dantean proverbs with which the Paradiso is full and which has overt designs upon the reader, wanting the reader’s conversion of mind – ‘La mente che qui luce, in terra fuma’ (‘The mind which shines here, is smoky on earth’) [Par. XXI.100, author]. Heaven is more reasonable than earth, not less; but it is the reason of pure uncon-fused light for which the earth-bound mind and soul are unprepared.
In the Heavens beyond the planets, the pilgrim Dante, still accompanied by Beatrice, glimpses the Blessed Virgin and sees the Apostles. Here at this moment, which is so close to the poem’s conclusion, St Peter, Prince of the Apostles, reveals that even in Heaven there can be anti-clerical and above all anti-papalist wrath. The journey which Dante has undertaken, and above all the journey made in the Paradiso, is a journey of personal sanctification; it is also the journey which all Christendom makes together. In the Incarnation of Christ, and the fellowship of the Apostles, Divine Providence left on earth a means of grace by which all human beings could turn to Christ. He left the sacramental life of the Church, He left confession and absolution; He left the Eucharistic offering of the Mass. And it is precisely this well of redemption which the clergy, and above all the Papacy of Dante’s day, have defiled. Dante, at an earlier point in the poem, was able to draw a distinction between his personal animosity against Boniface VIII and his reverence for the papal office – likening the intrusion of the fleur-de-lys [Purg. XX.86] into the Pope’s palace at Anagni to the mockery and Crucifixion of Christ Himself. But St Peter himself seems to have forgotten such niceties when he declares that as far as he is concerned his throne is now empty. Three times he repeats the phrase ‘my place’ – ‘il luogo mio’:
He who on earth usurps my place, my place,
My place that in the sight of God’s own Son
Is vacant now, has made my burial ground a sewer of blood
[Par. XXVII.22–6, Mandelbaum]
The Paradiso, then, gathers together some of Dante’s most immediate political and satirical concerns with some of his most mystic flights of desire for union with the Godhead. But how is he going to end the story? He holds in store an extraordinary surprise.
Beatrice is going to disappear from Dante’s side, to appear, not as his companion, but as an object of v
eneration, a petal in the celestial Rose. Dante had devoted himself from the age of nine to contemplating this girl. She has been his first crush, his early erotic obsession, the Unobtainable Beauty of Courtly Love. She is also, from an early age, a figure of Grace, of Divine Love. In Heaven, however, sacraments will cease. ‘Novo cedat ritui.’2
I raised my eyes up there
and saw her, mirroring eternal rays,
to form a crown or aureole around.
From that high region where the thunder rolls,
no mortal eye could ever be so far –
though sunk beneath the ocean’s utmost depth –
as my sight was from Beatrice now.
Yet that meant nothing. For her image came
not blurred or lessened by the space between.
‘In you, beloved, my hope grows strong. All this
you bore: To greet me and to make me whole,
you left your footprint in the depth of Hell.
The inward strength and grace of everything
I since have seen has come to me, I know,
through you, your goodness and your grace and power.
[Par. XXXI.70–84, Robin Kirkpatrick’s translation]
Dante is helped towards the consummation of his vision, not by the smiling-eyed girl who had been his lifetime obsession but by an old monk, ‘il santo sene’ [Par. XXXI.94]. Beatrice takes her place among the ranks of ‘Hebrew dames’ [Par. XXXII.17] who are singing God’s praises in Heaven. From now onwards, his companion is Bernard.
