Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES)

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Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 12

by Lewis, R. W. B.


  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  There is no more pressing motif in the entire Purgatorio. Time and again Dante returns to the thesis that men choose to do good or evil; they are not predestined or the victims of faulty environment. They are given free will; and similarly, though humans cannot achieve redemption without divine guidance and help, they can take an active part in the process. But Marco Lombardo adds the inevitable Dantean principle that individuals cannot lead a truly good life unless they belong to a good society; and for this they need a system of laws and a ruler who can enact and enforce them.

  Virgil carries the discussion forward as the pilgrims make their way up to the fourth terrace, and after an angel’s wing has brushed away another P from Dante’s forehead. Love, Virgil instructs his companion, is what motivates the human will. Love is the seed of every virtue and of every deed that deserves punishment. The lecture is timely, for the two of them have now reached the fourth terrace, one occupied by the slothful: people guilty in their earthly life of inadequate love (lento amore, in Virgil’s phrase), love that is sluggish. The slothful, in large numbers, are forced to run headlong, without stopping, every so often shouting out the names of the great exemplars of significant haste: “Mary ran to the hill country” (after the Annunciation), “Caesar ... thrust at Marseilles, and then raced to Spain ... Hurry! Hurry!” Among those speeding by is the abbot of San Zeno in Verona, whom we took note of earlier.

  Higher on the mountain, on the fifth terrace, the avaricious are seen, bound hand and foot and lying face down on the ground, motionless. With Virgil’s help, as they climb from level to level, Dante is coming to perceive that sinners are subjected to two kinds of purgation. Some reenact their earthly sinning, like the wrathful, who clamor about killing. With others, the punishment reverses the sin: the slothful run feverishly, the proud are made humble under burdens of stone. If the avaricious lie with their eyes glued to the earth, unable to gaze upward, it is because they behaved so in their lives (says one of them, Pope Adrian V), taking thought only for material things.

  Encountering among the greedy (xx) Hugh Capet, who was the ruler of France from 987 to 996, the travelers are treated to a bitter-tongued survey of French monarchs, all of it expressive of Dante’s distrust of the breed and ending with an identification of Philip the Fair as “the new Pilate,” because of his assault upon Boniface at Anagni. There are references to other insatiable exemplars of avarice, like Midas, but suddenly the entire mountain trembles, as if in an earthquake, and a chorus of voices is heard singing “Glory to God in the highest.”

  When Dante’s terror has subsided, he learns that the upheaval marked the end of some soul’s purgatorial punishment and that soul’s freedom to ascend to heaven. The whole mountain rings with praise. The individual released turns out to be Statius, the Roman poet who died in A.D. 96. He was the celebrated author of the Thebaid, a long epic poem about the warfare between the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and the failed effort by Polynices to wrest the Theban throne from his brother. (The tragic aftermath of that event was dramatized by Sophocles in the Antigone.) Dante professed a high opinion of the Thebaid, though it is scarcely readable today. But in fact Statius in the Purgatorio is a mostly fictitious character, a necessary pivot in the poem’s dramatic sequence and its historical pattern.

  He is, to begin with, an ardent disciple of Virgil. Rehearsing his poetic career, Statius says, “The Aeneid was a mother to me, and a nurse for my poetry.” At this, Virgil gives Dante a quick look that says, “Keep silent.” But Dante cannot help smiling; and when Statius asks why, Dante, now with Virgil’s permission, reveals the truth. Before them is “that very Virgil from whom you drew power to sing of men and gods.” At this, Statius bends down to embrace his master’s feet.

  But Statius had been converted to Christianity in his late years, at least in Dante’s inventive account, and this too he attributes to the influence of Virgil. “Through you I became a poet,” Statius tells Virgil, “and through you a Christian.” The latter reference is to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, written in 40 B.C., in which, in flowing tropes, the poet predicts the return of a golden age and a newborn child who shall rule the world and bring it peace. Dante here bespeaks the long-established medieval belief that Virgil, under divine inspiration, had foreseen the coming of Christ and the age of Christianity.

  Statius is thus the indispensable link in the guidance of Dante through the afterworld and in the historical and cultural process there being traced: between the pagan master Virgil and the Christian figure Beatrice. Statius performs his function as well by asking about the fate of other classical writers and personalities: Homer, Antigone, Catullus, Terence and others. Virgil reports that they, along with other classical personalities, are down with him in Limbo, “in the first circle of the dark prison.”

  Statius himself had been held in limbo for seven hundred years, if we accept his arithmetic. Following that, he had been on the fifth terrace of Mount Purgatory for “five hundred years and more,” stretched face down on the earth for his sin of prodigality, the companion sin to avarice. At this stage in the poem’s thematic structure, the classical world and the Christian world, in Dante’s vision of them, were balanced together, as it were in converse.

  There are now three travelers mounting upward from the fifth to the sixth terrace. As they issue out upon it, Dante spies a cluster of hollow-eyed souls with emaciated faces, all of them utterly famished. They are the gluttonous, whose punishment, like that of the slothful, reverses their sin. Dante hears a familiar voice and with difficulty identifies a face; it is his old Florentine friend Forese Donati. Forese confesses to having “followed appetite to excess” on earth, eating and drinking without stint; he is undergoing the punishment—he calls it “solace,” for it prepares him for salvation—of utmost hunger and thirst.

  Dante is astonished to find Forese on Mount Purgatory, and so far advanced in his atonement there, “less than five years” after his death, in 1296. Having just heard Statius’s tale of a centuries-long wait for admission, Dante confides to Forese, “I rather thought to see you still down below,” among the late repentants, “where time for time is paid.” Forese explains that his special dispensation was due to his saintly wife Nella:“by her flood of tears,

  by her prayers devout and by sighs,

  she has brought me from the borders where they

  wait

  and set me free from the other circles.”

  This account, while helping to clarify the time system of Purgatory, is also a distinctive moment in Dante’s self-remaking. In one of the insulting sonnets exchanged in the tenzone with Donati in 1284, Dante had described Nella as coughing and sneezing pitifully the year round because of Forese’s neglect:not from wasted humors in her veins, but from desertion in her lonely nest.

  Now, in an act of self-purgation, Dante presents Nella not as a cough-ridden hag, but as a loving and devoted wife, saving her faithful husband from aeons of torment, through her prayers and tears.

  At Dante’s request, Forese offers news about his siblings. His sister Piccarda is in Paradise, where Dante will meet her. As to brother Corso, still alive in 1300, Forese correctly and pleasurably envisions his death before many years, falling from his rampant horse while trying to flee his enemies in Florence and dragged toward what Forese assumes is the Inferno, “the valley where sin is never cleansed.” The three Donatis are thus symmetrically distributed, in the Dantean manner, among the three domains of souls after death.

  Forese draws attention to other gluttonous shadows, one of them Martin V of Tours, who was pope from 1281 to 1285 and who died from eating too many eels plucked from Lake Bolsena and stewed in Vernaccia wine; his face is even more shriveled, Forese observes, than his fellow penitents. There is also Bonagiunta, a poet from Lucca recently dead, who murmurs to Dante about a woman, still young and unmarried, who will show hospitality to Dante when h
e goes to Lucca. The reference seems to be to Dante’s stay in Lucca half a dozen years before the time of writing. Bonagiunta also, out of his poetic lore, brings into play again a main recurring motif in the Comedy, that of Dante as a lyric poet.

  “Tell me,” he begs, “if I am seeing the man who invented the new rhymes (nove rime) beginning with ‘Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’amore’?” Dante in reply invokes the phrase dolce stil nuovo and defines himself as a lyric poet:“I am one who when love inspires me, takes note and goes setting it forth, in the manner love dictates.”

  The Italian tercet ends with the phrase “Vo significando”—literally, “I go signifying.” The Tuscan idiom meets with the verbal, “signifying,” so dexterously employed in current American black literary commentary. And there is an extra appeal in the use of vo, for the first person singular, vado, of the verb andare:“I go.” The usage, vo, is still heard in southern Tuscany.

  The poetic motif is picked up again in Canto xxvi, through the appearance of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli. The three travelers, by this time, have reached the seventh, and topmost, terrace, with Statius discoursing lengthily to Dante, as they ascend, on the implantation of the human soul into the human body and the separate life of the soul after death. It is a necessary sermon, bearing later upon the crucial question of the resurrection of the body; but it is also prosily scholastic, steeped in Aristotelianisms—an intellectual interlude before the return to poetic drama.

  The seventh terrace is alive with flames, within which the lustful submit to purification by fire in requital for the burning passions that consumed them in life. Dante can hear contrasting sets of names being chanted: those of the Virgin Mary and Diana (the Latin goddess) as examples of chastity; those of “Sodom and Gomorrah” and “Pasiphae and her bull” as instances of uncontrolled lechery. (Pasiphae, wife of the ancient king of Crete, Minos, himself now assigning places in the underworld, was forced by angry Poseidon to become enamored of a bull and to beget an offspring, the Minotaur.)

  Dante greets all these spirits reverentially, as “souls who are certain of having a state of peace,” whenever it may be—again emphasizing the relative lightness of the sin in question and hence of his own erotic misdemeanor. There are clusters of bisexuals, along with the carnally “normal,” and it is from one of these that the voice of Guido Guinizelli is heard. He has been invoking the name of Pasiphae and explains that “our sin was hermaphroditic” (nostro peccato fu ermafrodito) but because they had behaved like beasts, they are required to call out the name “of her who behaved like a beast with a beast.” He then introduces himself: “Son Guido Guinizelli e già mi purgo.”

  The announcement springs out at us, as it did at Dante. In a canticle that offers a succession of ear-catching identifications, the most touching is that of Pia Tolomei, the most engaging that of Guido Guinizelli. Dante is enchanted to hear the poet “name himself the father of me and of others better than me.” The meeting, as was said, gives Dante an opportunity to rehearse his poetic ancestry, in particular Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal poet whom Guinizelli called the “migliorfabbro”(“greater maker” or “artificer”—the phrase T. S. Eliot used in dedicating The Waste Land to Ezra Pound). But if there is unwonted intensity in Dante’s presentation of his Bolognese predecessor, it is because Guinizelli’s career, public and private, was an uncanny foreshadowing of Dante’s own.

  The older man was born in Bologna in the 1230s of the well-regarded Principi family. As a young man, he consorted with other poets in the city, exchanging verses and refining his conception of the poetry of love and praise and the “corgentile.”Guido married an attractive young woman named Beatrice, of the della Fratta family. In addition to his prolific writing, Guido took his turn on the public stage, serving in 1270 as podestà of Castelfranco, a town to the east of Bologna. But in 1274, the poet and his family were forced into exile, following the expulsion from Bologna of the Lambertazzis, the leaders of the Ghibelline party to which they belonged. Guinizelli apparently found shelter in Verona, under the protection of Alberto della Scala, the father of Can Grande. He died there around 1276.

  The work of Dante that came out of this literary background was of course the Vita Nuova. It ended, we remember, with Dante’s declaring that he will write no more of Beatrice for the time being, but that in some future period he hoped “to say of her what was never said of any other woman.” He prays that then his soul might go to heaven and see there “the glory of Beatrice.” The review of his poetic development in these late cantos of the Purgatorio, through xxvi, prepares effectively for the actual appearance of Beatrice four cantos following, in the Earthly Paradise.

  To enter that celestial garden, the three travelers must pass through a wall of flames. Dante shrinks back in terror, beset by images of human bodies being burned alive. Virgil calms him, saying encouragingly that only this wall “stands between Beatrice and you.” Beyond the flame is the final stairway to the top of the mount. The three stretch out to sleep, one on each step; when he is awakened, Dante follows Virgil and Statius to the summit. Here Virgil must say his farewell: “You have come to the place where I can see no further ... No more expect my word or sign.” Human wisdom can take Dante no further; everything else that Virgil represents—classical poetry, the classical and medieval humanistic tradition—can no longer direct him. Christian revelation and Divine Wisdom are now the imperative need.

  “Without waiting more,” Dante recalls, “I left the mountainside, crossing the plain with lingering step” and approached the Earthly Paradise. Virgil had assured him, at the moment of departure, that his moral nature was now “free, upright and whole.” The long drama of Dante’s moral self-discovery and judgment has apparently come to an end. All the more jolting is the moral denunciation in store for him in the garden.

  The Earthly Paradise (il paradiso terrestro), the summit of Mount Purgatory and the anteregion to Paradise proper, is the scene of the final six cantos of the Purgatorio. As he enters, Dante observes a lady singing happily and gathering flowers. This is Matilda, the genius of the place, whose task it is to instruct Dante in celestial meteorology. The water from the nearby streams of Lethe and Eunoe, for example (streams that cleanse the memory), come not from rain but from a fountain supplied by the will of God. Matilda is dimly related to the great Contessa Matilda of Tuscany, ruler of her region for more than fifty years (she died in 1115) and the most politically active woman of her time. But the historical person disappears into the allegorical figure, one who sings so sweetly as she moves along the bank of the streams that Dante is enraptured.

  Dante, and his poem, have indeed entered the domain of allegory, and he now sees a divine pageant coming toward him, a panorama of divine revelation, and it is pure allegory. But it is also gleamingly pictorial, in modern parlance it is cinematic, and Dante summons all his resources to describe it. Seven lights appear above, with rainbow streamers filling the sky; they represent the sevenfold gifts of the spirit, as described in the Book of Revelation—wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.

  Below the lights there tread four and twenty elders, walking two by two and crowned with flowers: the twenty-four books of the Old Testament (by Dante’s count). Following them are four creatures, each with six wings, their plumes full of eyes. Dante forbears from portraying them. “Read Ezekiel, who depicts them as he saw them,” Dante suggests to the reader, in an allusion to Ezekiel 1:4-14, with its prophetic vision of a chariot and four beasts. “... I spill no more rhymes ... I cannot be lavish.” (The creatures are a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, standing respectively for the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.) Between the creatures, moving majestically, is a chariot drawn by a griffin; his double being represents the divine and the human nature of Christ. Three ladies come dancing in a round by the chariot’s right wheel: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. At the left wheel, four other ladies clad in purple “made a festival
”: the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude.

  The pageant, in its entirety, is Dante’s allegorical image of essential Christianity and of the Christian church as it should be. The chariot is the church, propelled by the two wheels of the active life and the contemplative life. As the chariot pauses, blessed spirits float above it, singing, and from its midst, within a cloud of flowers,olive-crowned over a white veil,

  a lady appeared to me, clad with hue

  of living flame under a green mantle.

  It is Beatrice. The sight of her affects Dante as it did when first “it pierced me before I was out of my childhood.” Dante turns to Virgil intending to say that his blood trembles and that “I recognize the traces of the ancient flame.” This is itself a Virgilian quotation: Dido’s confession to her sister after listening to Aeneas’ tale of his wanderings. Only a moment before, angels had been heard chanting another line from the Aeneid: “O give me lilies in full hands” (Anchises’ closing words to Aeneas in Book VI). Dante has contrived a final poetic tribute to Virgil, even as the Roman disappears; and Dante weeps for the loss of him.

  The Beatrice who confronts Dante is the personification of Divine Wisdom, that transcendent understanding that can illuminate the human mind and lead it to God. As such, she will be Dante’s guide and teacher on the journey up through the heavens. But she is also and emphatically Beatrice Portinari, formerly of Via del Corso in the sestiere of San Piero Maggiore in Florence. By way of demonstrating this, she now berates Dante unmercifully. While Dante’s tears fall for the departed Virgil, Beatrice says, “Dante”—the sound of his name is like a clarion—“do not weep yet. You will have other things to weep for.” As Dante stares at her, she tells him, “Look carefully, I am indeed Beatrice.” Then in an icy tone, “How did you dare come close to the mount?” She is so stern in manner that the attendant spirits ask, “Lady, why do you shame him so?”

 

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