by A. N. Wilson
This book has been an attempt to make that reading easier. It is written with the knowledge that the Comedy is more than just a book. Once read, it will take on a life of its own inside you. No doubt we each of us, to this extent, make our own versions of it. But if the lifetime’s experience of one reader is anything to go by, it also has the power to make its own version of us. The dark wood into which it takes us in the opening lines is not safe. No more is the scorching light at the poem’s end. Nor is – however we define it, and whatever form it takes – nor is Love.
This book has been an attempt to sketch Dante and his age. But we may reasonably ask, what age was that? He lived from 1265 to 1321; but in so far as an author is not merely one who wrote books, but one who engaged with an audience of readers, a case could be made for believing that Dante was not really a medieval author at all, but belonged in a much later period – namely, the nineteenth century. He had a rather different life in the twentieth century. What his life will be in our century… that is perhaps for the reader, rather the author of such a book as this, to decide. My own suspicion is that in our age, Dante will have things to say which are rather different from the things he said to the Victorians and to the twentieth century. To the Victorians (to their painters especially), he said, ‘You can make something of sex-mysticism. You live in an age of unprecedented levels of sexual repression. But by idealizing beautiful barmaids and prostitutes and paid models with thick, long flowing hair and languid lips, you can (if male) achieve some kind of “redemption” even if religion has become meaningless.’
In the twentieth century, things were a little different. To the modernist poets, especially to Eliot and Pound, Dante was able to say, ‘Poetry does not need to be consoling, it does not need, exactly, to tell a story; its lyricism can be located in the city, among the meaningless crowds undone by death, among the isolated and never-to-be-reconciled snapshots of private experience and recent public history.’ To the fascist-minded European poets and critics, who were attractive to Eliot and Pound, Dante appeared to be saying some much simpler, cruder things – about the domination of lesser states by a resurrected authoritarian Italy. To others in the twentieth century, to the neo-Thomists and the Catholic intellectuals among whom perhaps Eliot was also numbered, Dante seemed to be saying: ‘The Christian revelation has not run out of imaginative possibilities.’
We have lived through many revolutions of taste since then, and it is as unlikely that we should be able to read the Comedy in the way that Eliot read it as it is that we could read it in the spirit of, let us say, Dante’s own sons or Boccaccio, or the early fourteenth-century commentators. Yet the poem remains in all its power. We live today in a time of fragmentation. The Western world no longer aspires, as did the Western Europe of Dante’s day, to be a place of a single faith. Eliot and intellectuals of seventy years ago regarded it as desirable to reclaim the classical and Christian past and to find a common culture. Such an idea is now repellent to many, unattainable to others. Two generations have passed since it could be taken for granted either that the Christian story or the basic texts of Latin literature were part of the average intelligent person’s mental equipment.
Dante comes to this generation as a stranger. They will read his poem as their Western parents or grandparents might have read, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, as a great ‘classic’ whose worldview and frames of reference are totally alien. None of the references will ring a bell. The reader starts from scratch.
But when read, even in such a spirit as that, the Comedy yields up peculiar satisfactions, excitements and challenges. What if – what if the world of popular culture which jangles and sings in the background of our lives, in TV soaps, in films, in pop music about this experience of being in love – what if this world has something in common after all with the now all-but-lost world of a shared religious culture? What if the Christian religion which once sang of Love Divine All Loves Excelling has a radical political agenda which could use the word Love in areas where others (Rawls, Popper, Levi-Strauss) would have spoken of Justice? What if the quest for the Just Society, the quest for the Ideal Lover, the Quest for God could be found in some grand imaginative coalition? And what about the survival, even in our own day, of that grand old Western institution, the Papacy itself, which still pops up from time to time in the consciousness of non-Catholics, sometimes inspiring admiration, sometimes its opposite? Dante’s reverence for an institution going back to the time of the Caesars must be shared by many Europeans and Americans regardless of their specifically religious opinions, for this is the sole link between our own times and the origins of Latin culture which stretches in an un broken line. Equally vivid, however, for our age, which recalls the Papacy’s silence during the Holocaust, or its slowness to admit to the scandal of child abuse, or its insistence in an overcrowded planet that it is wrong to limit human conception, will be Dante’s white hot rage that an institution purporting to be founded by the Incarnate God could fall so far short of its calling.
Dante’s world has vanished, yet his poem survives. But whereas there are some poets who are read merely because the music they made was lovely and skilful, Dante’s poem is not merely an object of great beauty (comparable to one of the great European cathedrals with which it is contemporaneous), but it is also a way of reading the world. It offers a resolution to one of the problems which is central to our cultural collapse: how can one be a private person in a common culture? Or putting it the other way, what happens to the common culture when it no longer relates to what is going on inside the heads of individual men, women and children? Is it a sign of the confusion or debasement of our times that pop music ‘speaks’ to many of us – even to those of us who are sophisticated and have read Proust – more than contemporary poetry? Democracy offers to many of us, at each election, not the chance to place a vote in a spirit of positive optimism, but merely the chance to vote against the party we most abominate. Religious organizations, especially the mainstream Churches, have become as detached from the inner lives and inner concerns of many ordinary mortals as have political parties. It may be that in a twenty-first-century reading of the Comedy, Dante will be seen to have anticipated this state of things to a remarkable extent. His poem matches up two apparently disconnected phenomena. On the one hand, there is an abject disillusionment with institutions. The Church which had promised to be the Body of Christ turns out to be corrupt. The ideal Christian ruler who will recreate the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists. But although closely painful experience of the failures of Church and Empire make Dante angry, they do not destroy his sense of obligation to go on imagining the Good Place where men and women could be ‘godly and quietly governed’. This quest for the Good Place, the Good Church, is not detached from his revisiting of childhood and his belief that one beautiful Florentine girl with a lovely laugh contained – if not the secret of the universe – at least, enough of that secret to enable him to rebuild all his philosophies, all his political aspirations, all his experiences of sex, and to hope for better things. If Dante is writing for the twenty-first century, I think he is writing about one of the central dilemmas of our times – how we, having lost our common culture, can relate our inward preoccupations to the world of experience beyond us, to the shared world of politics and religion. The old political systems, like the old religions, assumed that we all spoke the same language about our shared inner life. That is no longer the case. Surfing the net we discover not a common culture, but a million million separate emptinesses. Human beings were never in history so alone as they are today, never less certain that they possessed anything in common. Dante, poet of dislocation and exile, poet of a new language, has immediate things to say to us which he has not perhaps said in history before. Burckhardt saw Dante as having helped the human spirit towards ‘consciousness of its own secret life’. Confusion about our secret inner lives, combined with something like certainty that we possess an inner, spiritual resource in spite of what the materialists insist, mak
es Dante’s writing, and especially the Comedy, an area of rich intellectual and spiritual nourishment. He seems to have been there before. Whether you are losing the Faith or returning to it (or a version of it); whether you are utterly disillusioned with politics or hopeful of political solutions to the injustices of the world; whether your deepest experience of love happened during childhood or is part of your sexual life as an adult, Dante, in his vast Summa of all these concerns, not only speaks of them more articulately than any modern poet, but actually is a modern poet.
NOTES
I WHY THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN
1 Walter Hooper, ‘Charles Williams’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), vol. 59, Oxford, 2004, p. 147.
2 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden, London, 1981, p. 231.
3 The Lampitt Papers – he was the figure of Rice Robey in those books.
4 Paget Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, from Chaucer to Cary (1380–1844), London, 1909, p. 86.
5 Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz, tr. Michael Hofmann, London, 2005, p. 153.
6 W. B. Yeats, The Poems, London, 1993, pp. 60–61.
II ROME
1 F. Du Plessix Gray, ‘The Debacle’, The American Scholar, 71, 2002, pp. 5–13; p. 6.
2 Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton 2007, p. 134.
3 From the Hebrew yobel, a ram’s horn trumpet blown to proclaim the festival. The Book of Leviticus (Chapter XXV) proclaimed that the Jews should hold a Jubilee every forty-nine years, to release debtors and slaves and offer amnesty to prisoners. Boniface VIII never used the word Jubilee because he wanted Holy Years to be every hundred years, not every half century.
4 Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Bonifacio VIII, Turin, c.2003, p. 218.
5 Lonsdale Ragg, Dante and His Italy, London, 1907, p. 13.
6 Ragg, p. 15.
7 Ragg, p. 134.
8 Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15, The Encyclopedia Press, New York, 1913, pp. 362–3.
9 Gary Dickson, ‘The crowd at the feet of Pope Boniface VIII’, Journal of Medieval History, 25, 4, p. 293.
10 See Rudolf Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages, tr. Angela Hall, Woodbridge, 1996, p. 51. Isadora of Seville (c.570–636) was the first writer to posit the possibility of the existence of Australia, and this was explored by later medieval writers. Pierre d’Ailly (1352–1420) was vociferously opposed to the possibility of a Southern Continent or an Antipodes existing. As a cardinal of the Church, he needed to believe that the Southern Hemisphere was uninhabited – else, how could they, out of touch with the possibility of meeting Christian missionaries, be saved by baptism?
11 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1981, p. 334.
12 Le Goff, p. 240 ff.
13 Dickson, p. 285.
14 Becket, Letter 74.
15 Ragg, p.38.
16 See Bagliani, p. 78.
17 Bagliani, p. 34. Four in the thirteenth century alone – Innocent III (elected 1216), Gregory IX (1227), Alexander IV (1254) and Boniface VIII (1294).
18 Alfred von Reumont, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. 2, Berlin, 1867, p. 705.
19 T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII, London, 1933, p. 242.
20 Ragg, p. 25.
21 J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Oxford, 1986, p. 209.
22 William Miller, Medieval Rome, London and New York, 1901, p. 103.
23 Boase, p. 361.
24 Miller, p. 96.
25 He was canonized on 5 May 1313. Kelly, p. 208.
26 Boase, p. 176.
27 Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante, Oxford, 1968, p. 164.
28 The Times, 20 August 1998. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, by J. N. D. Kelly, one of the most enjoyable works of reference ever written, was published twelve years before this discovery and states that Pope Celestine V died of an infection caused by an abscess – Kelly, p. 208. This needs correction.
29 Norwood Young, The Story of Rome, London, 1901, p. 222.
30 Young, p. 223.
31 Stephen Bemrose, A New Life of Dante, University of Exeter Press, 2000, p. 52.
32 Bemrose, pp. 57 ff.
33 Boase, p. 375.
34 In 1921.
35 In a humorous Latin eclogue, written to a young friend while he was living at Ravenna in 1315, Dante alludes to his white hair which was formerly golden, solitum flavescere, Egloga I, 1.44.
III DANTE’S FLORENCE, 1260–74
1 Miller, p. 111.
2 Boccadiforno, La Fortecatena, Boccadiferro, La Baciagatta – see Carol Lansing, The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune, Princeton, 1991, p. 97.
3 Lansing, p. 98.
4 The phrase is Dr Jeremy Catto’s – ‘Florence, Tuscany and the World of Dante’ in The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and His Times, ed. Cecil Grayson, Oxford, 1980, p. 3.
5 Giovanni Villani, Villani’s Chronicle, being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche fiorentine, tr. Rose Selfe, ed. P. H. Wicksteed, 2nd edn, London, 1906, p. 122.
6 Alberto Colli, Montaperti: La battaglia del 1260, Milan, 1999, p. 22.
7 Colli, p.21.
8 Bemrose, p. 3.
9 Steven Runciman, Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, 1958, p. 77.
10 Runciman, p. 255.
11 Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence from the Founding of the City through the Renaissance, New York, 1961, p.261.
12 Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopedia, London, 1983, p. 612.
13 Norman Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, London, 1974, p. 258.
14 Ragg, p. 208.
15 Villani, tr. Selfe, p. 53.
16 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. J. G. Nichols, London, 2002, p. 85.
17 Ghiberti won the competition for the North Doors of the Baptistery in 1401, but they were not completed for another twenty years – Schevill, p. 422. Dante died in 1321.
18 William Warren Vernon, Readings on the Inferno of Dante, vol. 2, London, 1905, p. 74.
19 The origins of the Medici were obscure, but it was in 1378 that they first sprang to prominence, with Salvestro de’Medici the effective leader of the revolt of the wool-carders, the Ciompi, an essentially populist uprising of the lower guilds. It was in the next generation that Giovanni, son of Averado Bicci de’Medici, used his immense wealth, made in trade, to found the banking dynasty which was the vehicle of the Medici power. Giovanni was father to Cosimo the Elder (1389–1464) and Lorenzo the Elder (1395–1440). Cosimo’s line was to produce, among others, Popes Clement VII and Leo X, and Queen Caterina of France, mother-in-law to Mary Queen of Scots. From Lorenzo’s line sprang Marie de Medici, whose marriage to her Medici cousin Henry IV of France produced Louis XIII, Gaston, Duke of Orleans, Elizabeth, wife of Philip IV of Spain, Christine, Duchess of Savoy, and Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England. During the heyday of the Renaissance, when Cosimo was patronizing the likes of Donatello and Brunelleschi, the court historians put it about that the family could trace its lineage back to Perseus. But there is something even more remarkable in the fact that the most illustrious royal families of Europe owe their origins to the ruthless brilliance of the rebellious wool-carders.
20 Encyclopaedia Britannica (13th edn), vol. X, p. 533.
IV GEMMA DONATI AND BEATRICE PORTINARI
1 Quoted Lionel Allshorn, Stupor Mundi, London, 1912, p. 193.
2 Villani, tr. Selfe translation, p. 256.
3 Dino Compagni’s Chronicle of Florence, tr. Daniel E. Bornstein, Philadelphia, 1986, p. 84.
4 Schevill, p. 163.
5 By Piero Boitani in The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, Cambridge, 1989, p. 219.
6 Vernon, Readings on the Purgatorio of Dante, vol. 2, London, 1909, p. 313.
7 Says Ragg, p. 214.
8 John M. Najemy, A History
of Florence, 1200–1575, Oxford, 2006, p.51.
9 Najemy, p. 56.
10 Najemy, p. 34.
11 Toynbee, Dante Dictionary, p. 503.
12 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, tr. Nichols, pp. 19–20.
13 Vita Nuova, tr. Mark Musa, Bloomington and London, 1973, pp. 3–4.
14 Vita Nuova, tr. Musa, p. 101.
V DANTE’S EDUCATION
1 Najemy, p. 45.
2 Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, Leiden and Boston, 2007, p. 3.
3 Barbara Reynolds, Dante: the Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, London, 2006, p. 9.
4 Pierre Antonetti, La Vie quotidienne à Florence au temps de Dante, Paris, 1979, p. 235.
5 Toynbee, Dante Dictionary, p. 115.
6 Assuming Dante is the author of the epistle to Can Grande. See the arguments for his authorship powerfully advanced by Barbara Reynolds in her introduction to her (and Dorothy L. Sayers’s) translation of Paradiso, Penguin, 2004, pp. 37–47.
VI A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR FLORENCE AND THE SICILIAN VESPERS
1 Most scholars attribute the Dies Irae to the Franciscan Thomas of Celano (c.1220–50).
2 The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, tr. Joseph L. Baird et al., Binghampton, 1986, p. 160.
3 Ragg, pp. 166–7.
4 Najemy, p. 76.
5 Salimbene, tr. Baird et al., p. 519.
6 Runciman, p. 287.
7 Runciman, p. 76.
