The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

Dante’s personal disaster arose from the entry into Florence in 1301 of Charles of Valois, brother of the king of France, under the pretext of keeping the peace between the embroiled factions of the Guelf party. Dante himself had gone to Rome to negotiate Pope Boniface VIII’s support for the city’s independence. When Dante’s mission failed, on his return to Florence he was arrested. His bitter exile was described in the prophecy of his ancestor Cacciaguida whom he meets in the “Paradiso.” “You shall leave everything beloved most dearly; and this is the arrow which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount by another man’s stairs … it will be for your fair fame to have made you a party by yourself.” An outcast from his native city, he easily imagined the medieval Christian’s exile into life after death, a place of eternal rewards and punishment. Dante himself would suffer a double exile—from his beloved city and from his beloved lady.

  Bizarre to the modern eye, courtly love was a fertile institution of the late Middle Ages, although hardly an inspiration for lovers today. The relation of a courtly lover to his lady resembled that of a feudal vassal to his lord. The sentiment appears first in the troubadours in southern France at the end of the eleventh century. The lover of whom they sang was supinely obedient to his lady, addressing her not as “my lady” but as midons (Provençal for “my lord”), and he did his lady’s bidding, however trivial or perilous. Medieval courtly love was always for another man’s wife. It is not surprising that sexual love in those days was an extramarital experience, for marriage in the courtly classes was a cold-blooded transaction, cementing an alliance or securing a dowry.

  Medieval authors had exploited their classic inheritance. The popular Ars Amatoria of the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17) told how to conquer women of easy virtue and also instructed women on seducing men. It was axiomatic for Ovid that love could not exist between husband and wife. “Ovid Misunderstood” (in C. S. Lewis’s phrase) was concocted with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and spiced with Arabic medical and mystical elements. By Dante’s day, the lore and institutions of courtly love were well established. The lady who would be his “judge,” his Beatrice, was the lady of courtly love.

  Courtly love, like the medieval afterlife, put lovers on this earth in another kind of exile. Dante’s poetic combining of courtly love with love of God, neither of which could be consummated in this life, merited Yeats’s praise of him as “the chief imagination of Christendom.” And Dante’s “medieval synthesis” summed up the loves that dominated his times. His Divine Comedy would describe the life in death that dramatized the Christian’s hopes and his. Vita nuova would depict the new life that came from unfulfilled earthly love.

  According to Dante, the experience that gave him a “new life” came when he was only nine, in the spring of 1274. Then, at his first glimpse of the nine-year-old Beatrice, “The glorious lady of my mind first appeared to mine eyes … clothed in most noble hue, a subdued and modest crimson, cinctured and adorned after the fashion that was becoming to her most tender age.” His pulse quickened and he trembled as he recalled Homer’s words, “She seemed not the daughter of a mortal man but of God.” Nine years passed before he saw her again, when she and he were both eighteen, and he had the good luck to see her among other ladies, “clothed in hue of purest white.” It was at the ninth hour of that day that she “gave me a salutation of such virtue, that methought I beheld the uttermost bounds of blessedness.” From then he never ceased to think and dream of her, but he was careful to keep this love a secret. When he saw her in a group he would fix his gaze on another lady who stood between them, so no one could detect his passion.

  This Beatrice probably was a real person, Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a Florentine banker. In 1287 she married Simone de’ Bardi, scion of a more powerful banking family. Dante appears never to have had physical contact with her.

  Meanwhile, at the age of twelve, Dante was betrothed by his family to Gemma Donati, a suitable person of Guelf noble stock. After twelve years of engagement, about 1298, his family arranged the marriage. It was said they did this at the time to solace him, still mourning over the death of Beatrice eight years before. And, of course, to provide an Alighieri heir.

  The miseries of this match are described by Dante’s admirer Boccaccio. “Dante formerly had been used to spend his time over his precious studies whenever he was inclined, and would converse with kings and princes, dispute with philosophers, and frequent the company of poets, the burden of whose griefs he would share, and thus solace his own. Now, whenever it pleased his new mistress, he must at her bidding quit this distinguished company, and bear with the talk of women, and to avoid a worse vexation must not only assent to their opinions, but against his inclination must even approve them.… He who had been used to laugh or to weep, to sing or to sigh, according as pleasing or painful thoughts prompted him, now must not dare, or, should he venture, must account to his mistress for every emotion, nay, even for every little sigh. Oh! what unspeakable weariness to have to live day by day, and at last to grow old and die, in the company of such a suspicious being!” They had four children, but Dante does not even mention his wife in his writings. At his exile from Florence Dante would leave Gemma behind and never see her again.

  The death of his ethereal Beatrice, a mere glimpse of whom had given him a new life, had left him disconsolate. He sought the consolations of philosophy in Boethius, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and immersed himself for thirty months in “the schools of the religious and the disputations of the philosophers.” The public declaration of his sacred love of Beatrice in La vita nuova about 1293 came only after she was safely in another world. This book, which has about the same length and form as Boethius’s, might have been called “The Consolation of Love.” But what attenuated love!

  Alternating passages of thirty-one poems in the new dolce stil nuovo with prose commentary carry Dante’s recollections from the first words written in his book of memory—at the age of nine his glimpse of “the glorious lady of my mind” (la gloriosa donna della mia mente)—to the death of Beatrice “the gentle lady, who for her worth was placed by the most high Lord in the heaven of peace, where Mary is.” In between, the prose commentary describes Dante’s struggle to express and repress signs of his love. He writes his poems in Italian and not in Latin, he explains, “because he desired to make his words intelligible to a lady who had difficulty in understanding Latin verses.” To keep his sacred love secret, he feigned love for other women, his “screens of love,” though the insincere “trifles in verse” that he wrote for them some thought “beyond the bounds of courtesy.” He designs his sonnet to Beatrice as if it were for someone else. Finally,

  … there appeared to me a wondrous vision, wherein I beheld things that made me determine to speak no more of this blessed one until such time as I could treat of her more worthily. And to attain this I study all I may, even as she truly knoweth. So that if it be the pleasure of him by whom all things live, that my life persevere for some few years, I hope to write of her what hath never been written of any woman.

  (Translated by Thomas Okey)

  So even before his exile Dante prophesied the grand sequel to the “Legend of Beatrice Sanctified.”

  Fifteen years later he fulfilled his promise with the Divine Comedy. This, like La vita nuova, would be autobiographical, following the progress of Dante’s soul. But it was broader, more dramatic, more didactic. Dante explained why he called it a “comedy,” in his letter to Can Grande della Scala of Verona (1291–1329), patron of the arts and his protector, dedicating to him the Paradiso:

  The aim of the work is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and to guide them to a state of happiness.… The title of the book is “Here beginneth the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not by character.” And for the comprehension of this it must be understood that … comedy is a certain kind of
poetical narrative which differs from all others. It differs from tragedy in its subject matter,—in its way, that tragedy in its beginning is admirable and quiet, in its ending or catastrophe foul and horrible.… Comedy, on the other hand, begins with adverse circumstances, but its theme has a happy termination.… Likewise they differ in their style of language, for tragedy is lofty and sublime, comedy lowly and humble.… From this it is evident why the present work is called a comedy. For if we consider the theme, in its beginning it is horrible and foul, because it is Hell; in its ending fortunate, desirable, and joyful, because it is Paradise; and if we consider the style of language, the style is lowly and humble, because it is the vulgar tongue, in which even housewives hold converse.

  (Translated by C. S. Latham)

  The adjective “divine” was no part of Dante’s original title, and the word perhaps was first used by others to describe the “divine” Dante himself. The Venice printed edition of 1555 christened it the “Divine Comedy.”

  Dante summed up his universal theme, “The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is ‘the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed’.… But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically [which he urges], its subject is: ‘Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice.’ ” And so the work recounts adventures in death.

  Begun when Dante was about forty-three, the Comedy was written in exile. And the theme of exile remains in the foreground. With Virgil for his guide, Dante boasts of his parallel to the Aeneid, which also was a tale of exile. Just as Virgil himself had adopted the wandering theme from Homer’s Odyssey, the Comedy is an odyssey of Dante’s soul. In the grand tradition of epic and allegory Dante becomes the peer-companion of Virgil. In his chaotic time of warring cities, he seeks to fulfill Virgil’s promise of a single Italian nation—in the Italian language and with the world-unifying mission of Rome.

  The Divine Comedy is not a mere cosmology of the Middle Ages but the story of a man confronted with its consequences. It is the journey of a person, not a survey of theology. From the familiar first line—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—Dante puts himself in the story. It is “halfway” in the journey, because Dante is now midpoint in man’s appointed span of years. And the fear and sufferings of all the figures remain vivid. The ancient greats—Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucas—are excluded from Heaven only because they could not know Jesus Christ. As Virgil explains (in John Ciardi’s translation):

  For such defects are we lost, though spared the fire

  and suffering Hell in one affliction only:

  that without hope we live on in desire.

  (Inferno: IV, 40ff.)

  When we compare Aeneas’s brief hectic voyage to the underworld (Aeneid, Book VI) with Dante’s odyssey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, we see how Christian theology had refined, vivified, and elaborated thinking about good and evil, rewards and punishments. Virgil’s netherworld was a realm of confusion and disorder, of miscellaneous retribution. But Dante’s afterlife is beautifully and subtly symmetrical, rich in numerical and symbolic significance. Dante, someone has said, is “Saint Thomas Aquinas set to music.” The whole Comedy is dominated by the symbolic trinity—from the three books, or cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), to the terza rima (three lines rhyming, aba, bcb, etc.). Each cantica has thirty-three cantos, so the three parts together come to ninety-nine cantos, which, with the introductory canto total one hundred. While three was the number of the Holy Trinity, one hundred was ten times ten, the numerical symbol of perfection. After the Limbo of the virtuous unbaptized, the Inferno was divided into nine lowering circles where the damned were grouped under the three capital vices (incontinence, violence, and fraud). Francesca suffering in the second circle of the Inferno recounts the occasion of her sinful love with Paolo:

  On a day for an alliance we read the rhyme

  of Lancelot, how love had mastered him.

  We were alone with innocence and dim time.

  Pause after pause that high old story drew

  our eyes together while we blushed and paled;

  but it was one soft passage overthrew

  our caution and our hearts. For when we read

  how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,

  he who is one with me alive and dead

  breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss.

  That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.

  That day we read no further.

  (Inferno: V, lines 124ff.)

  Of course Satan was at the bottom.

  While Hell is a pit, Purgatory, on an island at the antipodes of Jerusalem, is a mountain that questing souls can climb up. As Dante reaches up out of Purgatory, his guide, Virgil, suddenly disappears, but Beatrice comes, with a reproach:

  “Dante, do not weep yet, though Virgil goes.

  Do not weep yet for soon another wound

  shall make you weep far hotter tears than those!”

  (Purgatory, Canto XXX, lines 55ff.)

  “Look at me well. I am she. I am Beatrice.

  How dared you make your way to this high mountain?

  Did you not know that here man lives in bliss?”

  I lowered my head and looked down at the stream.

  But when I saw myself reflected there,

  I fixed my eyes upon the grass for shame.

  I shrank as a wayward child in his distress

  shrinks from his mother’s sternness, for the taste

  of love grown wrathful is a bitterness.

  (Purgatory, Canto XXX, lines 73ff.)

  The way up is divided into the seven deadly sins. Just as in Hell, the graver sins are at the bottom, and at the very top is the Earthly Paradise. Then Paradise consists of heavenly spheres. The seven planetary heavens starting from the Earth are the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These are surrounded outside by two stellar heavens—the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, and of the Primum Mobile. Beyond is the Empyrean, and finally God. Even the perfections of Paradise thus have clear division, and the planetary heavens (corresponding to the seven deadly sins) are staged around the seven cardinal virtues. They range from the secular and the active toward the highest contemplative. Each of the three cantiche ends with the word “stars” (stelle).

  And the Paradise ends with Saint Bernard’s prayer for Dante, urging the Virgin to intercede to give him at least a moment’s direct vision of God:

  “Virgin Mother, daughter of thy son;

  humble beyond all creatures and more exalted;

  predestined turning point of God’s intention;

  thy merit so ennobled human nature

  that its divine Creator did not scorn

  to make Himself the creature of His creature.…

  Now comes this man who from the final pit

  of the universe up to this height has seen,

  one by one, the three lives of the spirit.

  He prays to thee in fervent supplication

  for grace and strength, that he may raise his eyes

  to the all-healing final revelation.…”

  (Paradise, XXXIII, lines 1ff.)

  The Virgin lifts her eyes upward and so does Dante. Now in a flash he perceives the Divine Essence that conquers speech and memory—“the Light in which everything the will has ever sought is gathered … and … every quest made perfect.”

  We can taste the beauty of Dante’s Italian:

  All’ alta fantasia qui manco possa;

  ma gia volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,

  si come rota ch’ igualmente e mossa,

  l’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

  High fantasy lost power and here broke off;

  Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,

  My will and my desire were turned by love,

  The love that moves the sun and other stars.

  (Paradise, XXXIII
, lines 142ff.; translated by Dorothy L. Sayers)

  Dante’s feat of prosody has daunted even the ablest translators. His work on the Comedy from 1308 to 1321 “had made him lean for many years.” To translate fifteen thousand lines in tightly rhymed terza rima requires that many triple rhymes. John Ciardi concluded that the English language, unlike Italian, had no such rhyming resources and so settled for something less. Still the English reader should not be frightened by the language barrier. English translations in prose and verse—by Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Ciardi, and others—can be read with the same pleasure and suspense that attend the reading of the Odyssey or the Aeneid. The adventure story in verse takes the reader along, from the picturesque, malodorous, and horrendous to the glamorous, fragrant, and delightful. The searing heats of Hell and the dazzling lights of Paradise are as much a part of the story as the allegorical scholar’s meaning. Dante wrote in the vernacular “to be of more general use … for he knew that if he had written metrically in Latin as the other poets of past times had done, he would only have done service to men of letters.”

  It is remarkable that he could produce so coherent a structure in years of wandering. After the decree of exile in 1302, Dante went to Forli and Verona in 1303, then he was taken in by Bologna until 1306, when all the Florentine exiles were expelled. As a refugee he moved on to Sarzana, then to Lucca and Casentino with other stops in Tuscany, before returning to Verona, which he left in 1318 for his last honored years in Ravenna. There scholars and poets became his disciples. After the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” became public, Dante’s reputation spread. But when he was invited to Bologna to receive the poet’s laurel, he declined an honor that he said he would accept only from his native city. Dante’s patron, Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, sent him with an embassy to the doge of Venice to settle a dispute over the death of some Venetian sailors. When the unfriendly Venetians refused them permission to return to Ravenna by sea, they had to return overland along the malaria-infested coast. The malaria contracted on the way proved fatal to Dante, who died in Ravenna in 1321 at the age of fifty-six.