Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  c What Thomas Aquinas’s encyclopedic masterpiece, Summa Theologica (Sum Total of Theology), did for the thirteenth-century Hans Kung’s 700-page masterpiece of summation, Christ Sein (On Being a Christian), has done for our age, raising the hackles of defensive conservatives everywhere but welcomed gratefully by any Christian who appreciates the need for a new synthesis. The Swiss theologian’s reliance on ponderous Germanic theoreticians, especially Kant (and such neo-Kantians as Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger), may one day appear—inevitably—as useless as does Thomas’s reliance on Aristotle, but for us Kung’s analysis remains fresh and unlikely to reach its expiration date anytime soon.

  d Francis allowed himself to be ordained deacon but never priest, a status to which he refused to aspire despite pressure from the church’s hierarchy, which took his refusal as a sign of humility. But Francis always considered himself a layman; his refusal to take the least step toward becoming part of the hierarchy (for priests can become bishops but deacons cannot) may have been dictated more by his quiet disapproval of priestly displays of power than by simple humility. Deacons, however, are permitted to proclaim the gospel in church and to preach on its text. The text of the Christmas midnight mass gospel is Luke 2:1–14, which takes us from the scene of a pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph, setting out from Nazareth for Bethlehem “to be taxed” by the Roman occupiers, through the birth of Jesus in the stable at Bethlehem, to the appearance of an angel who informs local shepherds of the miraculous birth and is then joined by a heavenly choir singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

  e Greek ikons had flooded into Italy especially in the eighth and ninth centuries, as ikon artists and ikon-venerating monks migrated there to escape persecution by Greek ikonoklasts. Ikonoklasm (or image breaking) had the backing of many of the Byzantine emperors, who had come to believe that Islam’s rejection of human images found favor with God and was therefore responsible for Muslim military successes.

  f Of course, such symbolic dramas continued to be staged. Everyman itself is later than Francis. But Francis opened up new possibilities.

  g Since the Thomistic terminology of substance and accident (based on Aristotelian science) and, therefore, the Thomistic explanation of the Eucharist are no longer serviceable, readers of a speculative bent may find the painfully convoluted probe by the celebrated (and reviled) Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx in The Eucharist to be of some help in assessing contemporary approaches to eucharistic theology—but it is not for the fainthearted.

  h The Holy Grail figures especially in the stories of the Arthurian cycle, though it may have had an earlier origin. It is the ultimate object of quest for the Knights of the Round Table, though only a perfectly pure knight can find it. It seems occasionally to change its shape (and even its function and meaning), but it is generally to be identified with the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. It was believed to have been brought to England after Jesus’s Passion by Joseph of Arimathea and buried in Chalice Well in Glastonbury.

  SIX

  Florence, Dome of Light

  The Poet’s Dream and Its Consequences

  Dante and Shakespeare divide

  the modern world between them;

  there is no third.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  THOUGH ASSISI CONTAINS THE WORK of Giotto best known to the world and Padua the crown of his achievement, Giotto left his charmed handiwork in other places as well: Rome, Rimini, and Naples for sure, Bologna and Arezzo most likely, and especially Florence, where he decorated the still-extant, if much abused, Peruzzi and Bardi chapels of Santa Croce and carried out many other commissions, only some of which remain in our keeping. We know that late in life he even undertook architectural works: the classically graceful Carraia Bridge spanning the River Arno (reduced to dust in the Second World War) and the jocund bell tower that stands beside Florence’s great cathedral and is still known as the Campanile di Giotto. For in 1334, less than three years before his death, the humble painter was named chief of public works for the city of Florence and capomaestro (master builder) for the construction of its new cathedral.

  Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, in Florence, surmounted by Brunelleschi’s dome; to the right is the Campanile, designed by Giotto. (Photo Credit 6.29)

  Giotto hardly had time to leave his mark on the architecture of the Duomo di Santa Maria del Fiore (Dome of Saint Mary of the Flower), as the new cathedral would be called. But the appointment of the greatest artist of his age to be overseer of municipal planning is typical of the role proud Florence had begun to play along the length of the Italian peninsula—as unfailing magnet for creative genius. From the last decades of the thirteenth century, through the fourteenth and the fifteenth, and well into the sixteenth, Florence—Firenze, originally Fiorenza, the Flowering City as its name indicates—seemed almost continually to be burgeoning like a spring garden, blooming with fresh works of art and architecture. Spearhead of the Renaissance, Florence became in the course of these centuries undisputed leader of European learning in arts and sciences and the first city in seventeen hundred years to lay legitimate claim to the intellectual preeminence of ancient Athens. It was here in 1436 that Filippo Brunelleschi finally completed the dome of the cathedral, largest, highest, and most astounding building in the world of its time—“big enough to cover in its shadow all the Tuscan people”—and set a fashion in architecture that has scarcely run its course; it was here in the last years of the fifteenth century that Michelangelo transformed forever the art of sculpture; and it was here in the last years of the sixteenth century that a group of aristocratic intellectuals resolved to resurrect the art of ancient Greek drama in a new form, which came to be called opera.

  But already in the time of Giotto, Florentines knew their city to be the navel of the world, unsurpassable in achievements intellectual and artistic. So it is almost unremarkable in such a city that as the teenage Giotto di Bondone was learning to be a painter in the cluttered bottega of Cimabue, the teenage Dante Alighieri, perhaps a year or two older than the painting peasant, was learning to be a poet, and an exceedingly architectonic one at that, as he strolled freely through the streets of his native Florence, observing the progress of its many architectural novelties. Like James Joyce, self-exiled from Dublin at the start of the twentieth century, the young Dante committed everything he saw and heard to memory—including his lessons in the liberal arts—and such ecumenical absorption would serve him well when, far from home, he began his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, which would be, as are all works of art to some extent, an exercise in memory. But whereas Joyce was recalling the details of a paralyzed provincial capital, Dante would be remembering what was for him the bountiful center of the known world: “fiorian Fiorenza in tutt’ i suoi gran fatti” (“Florence flowering in feat and deed”).a

  Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence. (Photo Credit 7.2)

  The octagonal Baptistery of San Giovanni—“il mio bel San Giovanni” (my beautiful San Giovanni), as Dante called the place of his baptism—had stood next to the old cathedral for centuries and had perhaps preceded it, dating possibly to as early as the fourth century. A smaller version of Rome’s pagan Pantheon, the baptistery was never left to be just another lovely old building. In the eleventh century, an operation was begun to encase the entire facade in white marble from Luni and green marble from Prato, a fashion that would migrate throughout Tuscany and return at last to Florence, there to enjoy its apotheosis in the white, green, and pink of the new cathedral. In the twelfth century, porphyry columns, booty taken by the Florentines in war, were added to either side of the Baptistery’s main entrance. In the early thirteenth century, a splendid mosaic pavement was laid within the building; in later years, in fact through the whole of Dante’s childhood and early manhood, the vault of the building was being decorated with colorful mosaic images, enclosed in elaborate geometric patterns. In the months preceding Dante’s death in 1321, Andrea Pisano would erect a se
t of gilded bronze doors, illustrating the life of John the Baptist; and in the early fifteenth century, Lorenzo Ghiberti would follow with two additional sets of bronze doors, one set illustrating in exquisite detail the life of Christ, the other principal scenes from the Old Testament, this last so fine that Michelangelo would call it “the Gate of Paradise.”

  Mosaic of Satan in Hell, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence. (Photo Credit 7.3)

  The perpetual drama of Florence—building, adding, embellishing, transfiguring—held the attention of the young Dante, not only in his beloved Baptistery but at so many other sites around the city: the decorative medieval fortress of the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace), now the town hall; the nearby grain market, designed by Arnolfo di Cambio and burned to the ground in 1304; the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge), spanning the Arno (along with three other handsome bridges), crowded with medieval houses, and reconstructed in the fourteenth century after a flood; the tenth-century churches of Santi Apostoli and Badia Fiorentina, the Benedictine Badia (or Abbey) containing a “rich complex of chapels, gardens, libraries, and shops,” which spread out just across the way from the Alighieri family house; and, farther on at opposite ends of the city, the Dominican foundation of Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscan foundation of Santa Croce, both built in the poet’s lifetime and at each of which he received instruction in philosophy and theology.

  The eleventh-century San Miniato al Monte, surmounting a green hill, affords incomparable views of the city below. One of the most beautiful churches in Italy, it has been a model for many. But for Florentines like Dante it was always a place to recall that “the city is born out of the valley, its monuments enclosed by an amphitheatre of hills,” in the words of Marco Chiarini, former director of the Palantine Gallery in the Pitti Palace, “its architecture … created by the human mind in imitation of its natural setting.”

  We all know citizens of such vibrant cities as New York, London, Paris, and Rome (and of many smaller burgs) who would be forever cast down were they to be permanently separated from the city they love. Still, according to R.W. B. Lewis, “Dante associated himself with his native city to a degree almost incomprehensible in modern times. Florence was not merely his birthplace; it was the very context of his being.” There are three things everyone seems to know about Dante: that he was a native of Florence; that he fell in love with a girl named Beatrice, with whom he scarcely ever spoke and who became the vehicle for the concluding insights of his great poem; and that he died in exile.

  All these things are true, as well as a few others that Lewis relates compactly:

  He was Dante Alighieri, a distinct individual with a classic profile and a sometimes tempestuous disposition. He had intimate friends, like his sportive neighbor Forese Donati; literary colleagues, like the older poet Guido Cavalcanti; and deadly enemies, like Forese’s brother Corso. He was the dedicated lover, from a distance, of Beatrice Portinari, until her death at an early age in 1290 [less than a year younger than Dante, she would have been twenty-four], and a few years later he composed in her memory his first major work, the Vita Nuova, the story in prose and poetry of his devotion to her from the age of nine. In the course of time Dante became a married man (his wife was another and more sedate member of the Donati clan), with three [more likely, four] children. But he was an ardent personality, and more than once, in pursuit of other Florentine maidens, he lost the straight way, to borrow his phrase at the opening of the Inferno. Even in his lifetime, as the first two canticles of the Divine Comedy began to circulate (around 1315), he was recognized as the greatest Italian poet, the somma poeta, of his age. But he was first and last a Florentine, and indeed, on one level, his masterwork, the Comedy, is an expression of his passionate feelings about Florence, his rage against the conspirators who had driven him out, his longing to return.

  In the eyes of today’s visitor, Florence seems a small polished gem of a city. But in Dante’s youth it was, with its population of eighty thousand, the largest city in Europe after Paris, home to Europe’s most influential bankers, and issuer in 1252 of the gold florin,b which quickly became Europe’s leading coin. Florence, run as a capitalist republic by merchant oligarchs, was the principal source for many of the continent’s most desirable luxuries—silks, tapestries, jewelry, embossed leather—an altogether more powerful nucleus than it would later be. What happened here commanded the attention of everyone.

  Unfortunately, what happened here in Dante’s lifetime—an endless feud among the city’s leading families—was not atypical of city life in medieval Italy. Dante came from a well-established (if second-tier) family of landowners. He had lost his mother when he was seven and his father when he was still in his teens. He took an early and prominent role in the life of his city, first as a soldier in arms, then as a municipal official. It was this prominence that would bring him to grief when the tides of political power shifted.

  The main fight was between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, two families to begin with, and, later, factions that drew to their sides other families and associations of partisans, till they had drawn towns, cities, provinces, and whole countries into their blood-soaked conflict. The names of the parties altered somewhat depending on the vernacular in which they were invoked: in Germany, where they had originated, the Guelphs were the Welfs; in the Norman tongue of Britain and Ireland the Ghibellines were the Fitzgeralds. Though the conflict had religious and political dimensions, it was always at base a struggle of willful and unyielding factions whose professed ideologies shifted and blended as circumstances required. The feud, which began in the reign of Frederick Barbarossa and grew out of his project to reassert imperial rule over Lombardy, lasted a century and a half, petering out only halfway through the fourteenth century, as the Black Death stalked Europe. The official line was that the Ghibellines were supporters of the emperor, the Guelphs of the pope—but only più o meno (more or less), to use modern Italian’s most characteristic phrase.

  Pope Boniface VIII, wearing the papal crown, which he would soon forsake for the triple tiara. (Photo Credit 7.4)

  Florence was a Guelph city, which after many humiliations had managed to expel its Ghibellines soon after Dante’s birth. Though Guelph by familial, civic, and religious loyalties, Dante nonetheless attempted to play fair. When in 1300 he was elected a prior of Florence—one of seven priors who, working together, were the highest civil authority—he ruled as harshly toward errant Guelphs as toward fugitive Ghibellines. But by this time, the Guelphs were fighting among themselves, divided into two factions, White and Black. After a sixteen-year-old White lost his nose, sliced off by one of the Blacks in a street fight, Dante and his fellow priors banished the ringleaders on both sides. That mutilation—“the destruction of our city,” as one chronicler termed it—and the subsequent banishments would prove Dante’s undoing as a Florentine.

  One of the banished Blacks—Corso Donati, a relative of Dante’s wife—determined to have his revenge and fled to Rome, where he found an abundance of coconspirators, including the reigning pope. Boniface VIII, who had just proclaimed the first Holy Year to coincide with the turning of the century (and to rake lots of pilgrim gold into papal coffers), was one of the vilest men ever to sit on the throne of Saint Peter, a cleric wholly concerned with his own power and aggrandizement, who took to parading about in the costume of an emperor (“I’m pope! I’m Caesar!” he shouted) and who remodeled the papal crown into the novelty of the triple tiara, symbolic of his vaunted authority as high priest, king (of the Papal States), and emperor over the emperor. These last two roles were justified by a spurious eighth-century document, known as the Donation of Constantine, in which the first Christian emperor had supposedly made donations of vast tracts of land in central Italy to the papacy and had awarded to the pope “the privileges of our supreme station as emperor and all the glory of our authority.” Boniface’s overriding ambition was to establish clerical, and particularly papal, control over every aspect of European life. “Outside this [Cath
olic] Church,” he shouted in the historic bull Unam sanctam, “there is neither salvation nor remission of sins,” and “it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”c Needless to say, this was not a bull the reigning emperor found agreeable.

  Boniface was also a man who enjoyed involving the papacy in wars and skirmishes. In June 1301, he sent off a formal request that Florence supply him with two hundred horsemen to help with a small war he was waging to deprive the notorious Margherita degli Aldobrandeschi, the Red Countess of Tuscany, of her lands south of Siena, the rival city that served the Ghibellines as their Tuscan stronghold. It’s true that Margherita was quite an act, having (among other things) urged her lover to murder his wife, which he did. But Dante wisely advised the Council of Florence to sit on its hands. “Nihil fiat” (Let’s do nothing) is the phrase of Dante’s that echoes down the ages, an awfully good maxim for so many political situations in which violence is urged by some authoritarian hothead. In the end, the council capitulated to the pope, who never forgave Dante his daring.

  Because the popes had long had an on-again, off-again alliance with the French monarchy against the German emperors, Boniface invited Charles de Valois,d the weak-kneed brother of the French king, into Italy, where he soon found himself at Siena plotting an invasion of Florence with Dante’s mortal enemy, Corso Donati. The invitation did not mean that Boniface had a high regard for Charles, any more than for any Frenchman. “I’d rather be a dog than a Frenchman,” shouted the pope, leaving earnest literalists to wonder if this bull of a pope believed in the soul (or in anything), since he would rather be a soulless dog than a Frenchman whose immortal soul had the possibility of reaching Paradise. Dante was sent by the Florentines, along with two other ambassadors, to plead with Boniface to call Charles off. The pope heard their plea, made no reply, released the other two ambassadors to return to Florence, and detained Dante.