by A. N. Wilson
St Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1090–1153) is the last human spirit with whom Dante converses in his Comedy. Clearly, he provides a counterpoise to Virgil, the companion in the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Equally clearly, his choice to be accompanied by Bernard, rather than, say, Francis of Assisi or Thomas Aquinas, is of the utmost significance.
Bernard is famous in the sense that his name survives to our time, and many of us have heard of the breed of dog which is named after him. But his name perhaps sends few ‘signals’ to the modern reader. Some will know his hymns – and a later taste would perhaps condemn them as saccharine – Dulcis Jesu memoria3 – ‘Jesu, the very thought of Thee, with sweetness fills my breast’. History remembers the fanatical monk who was drawn from the life of the Burgundian aristocracy to the rigid austerities of the reformed Benedictinism practised at Citeaux. In the Vale of Bitterness, the Vallé d’Absinthe, he built his monastery and renamed it Clairvaux. So powerful was his influence that between 1130 and 1145 no fewer than ninety-three monasteries were founded and affiliated to Clairvaux. One of his protégés, a monk of Clairvaux named Bernardo Pignatelli, became Pope Eugenius III. He was a holy Pope, always wearing his Cistercian habit and keeping the rule in all its strictness. St Bernard thought little of him and indeed – perhaps this was one reason why he appealed to Dante – Bernard was a scourge of Popes, denouncing Eugenius’s predecessors for their worldliness just as he criticized Eugenius for his lack of administrative experience and ability.
It was Eugenius, probably under St Bernard’s influence, who called the Second Crusade, after the Muslims conquered Edessa (modern Turkey, then Syria). St Bernard’s religious temperament was, to put it mildly, austere and unforgiving. His loathing of dissent, which he regarded as heresy, and of the infidelity of the Muslims currently occupying the Holy Land justified, in his view, the exercise of a bloody war.
Judicial torture had not yet been invented, but St Bernard did advocate the use of the Ordeal – that is, forcing the accused person to tread on, or be touched by, hot iron as a test of their innocence – particularly in heresy trials.4 The King of France, Louis le Jeune, Queen Eleanor, the Emperor Conrad and his nephew Frederick Barbarossa were literally willing to prostrate themselves before this fanatical ascetic.
Devotion to Mary was a more noticeable feature of Eastern than Western Christianity until the eleventh or twelfth century. It is plausibly believed that the Crusades, and the opening of trade routes between West and East, enabled Western Christians to catch some of the Marian fervour of the Eastern Churches, which had long venerated Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother of God. Anselm of Canterbury (died 1109), considered the father of Scholasticism, composed three great prayers to Mary – ‘Queen of angels, mistress of the world, mother of him who purifies the world, I confess that my heart is exceedingly impure, so that it is rightly ashamed to turn to so pure a one’.5 Anselm did not believe in the sinlessness of Mary (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception). He stated definitely that ‘the Virgin was born in original sin, because she too sinned in Adam’. She derived her purity, according to Anselm, from her Son, and it was the symbiosis between them which enabled her to become the Pure Mother and Advocate, through whom mortal sinners dared to turn to Christ.
This is very much the tone of Dante’s approach to Christ, needing the intercession of the Mother. In the early twelfth century the Western Church introduced new Marian hymns and antiphons, most famous of which is the Salve Regina. ‘Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our cries, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.’ It could almost be a summary of the opening of Dante’s Comedy. In the Purgatorio, the negligent rulers – Rudolph, Ottokar II, Philip III of France, Henry of Navarre and the rest – sit mournfully among the grass and the flowers singing the Salve Regina. ‘Turn then most gracious Advocate thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile, show unto us, the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’
In the dark wood, Dante had needed Mary’s advocacy. With the negligent rulers he sang the Salve. Paradise will see the fulfilment of the prayer. The Salve was, and is, one of the most popular prayers of Western Christendom. It was adopted by the monks of Cluny, the Cistercians and by the Dominicans, who still sing it each day after Compline. It was once wrongly attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux.
In a highly Dantean image, it was Bernard who focused on Mary as a guiding star. ‘If you will not be submerged by tempests, do not turn away your eyes from the splendour of this star! If storms of temptations arise, if you crash against the rocks of tribulation, look to the star, call upon Mary!’6 Bernard, like any Catholic mystic of the Middle Ages, had a devotion to Mary but only 3.5 per cent of his voluminous works (four stout volumes of the Patrologia Latina edited by Migne!) have a specifically Marian theme.7 Outside the Marian texts, Bernard did not make more than a score of references to the Blessed Virgin. When controversy broke out during the twelfth century about the Immaculate Conception, the new doctrine that Mary was unlike other mortals and had been con ceived and born without sin, Bernard took the conservative line, rejecting the doctrine as an unnecessary innovation. (‘As for me, what I have received from the Church, I am determined both to hold and to hand on; what I have not, I would only accept, I must admit, with great difficulty.’) This remark comes from Bernard’s celebrated letter to the Canons of Lyon, explaining why he did not think it necessary to believe that Mary, like her divine Son, was conceived without sin. Aquinas also rejected the teaching of the Immaculate Conception, which was not made a doctrine of the Western Church8 until Pius IX’s bull Ineffabilis Deus of 1854. Dante does not mention the controversy anywhere and perhaps, like most people, medieval and modern, was unconcerned by it.
With Bernard, however, he identifies. Bernard is one of the self-projections in the poem. Virgil, and even Beatrice are (as well as being themselves) self-projections. Bernard called himself the ‘chimaera’ of his age. ‘My strange life, my troubled consciousness, cries out to you! For I am by way of being a Chimaera of my age, generically neither clergy nor lay.’9 The mystic poet-monk who yearned to lead a life of austere contemplation as the Abbot of Clairvaux was constantly allowing himself to be drawn into the public arena. Pope Eugenius III’s crusading bull Quantum praedecessores possessed no chance of being acted upon until, at Christmas 1145, Bernard persuaded King Louis VII to call for a Second Crusade. Thereafter, Bernard, a public speaker of hypnotic eloquence, assured the faithful that they could be absolved from their sins in exchange for taking up arms. Thereafter, as, with no false modesty, he wrote to the Pope, ‘towns and castles are emptied, and one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive’.10
Dante, like Bernard, had been an extremely popular figure – he as a poet, Bernard as a hymn-writer, preacher and orator. Both had known deep frustration and become objects of scorn. Bernard, for his unbelief in the Immaculate Conception, was believed by some to have suffered in Purgatory before entering Heaven.
The Second Crusade was a disaster. Dante nevertheless condemns contemporary Popes for their failure to preach Crusade. Bernard was the advocate of cleansing the Papacy of corruption. Neither Bernard in the twelfth nor Dante in the early fourteenth centuries had any chance of succeeding. Dante would surely have warmed to Bernard’s idea that life itself is an inevitable failure (‘perdite vixi’).11
But there was another and more obvious reason why Bernard was selected as the companion on Dante’s final steps towards the celestial vision. That is the saint’s particular devotion to the Virgin Mary. It was Mary who first took pity on Dante’s plight [Inf. II.94], calling Lucia to call upon Beatrice to help him out of the tangles of the dark wood. It was Mary to whom Bernard prays at the end, for Dante, and us, to be allowed to experience the supreme light [Par. XXXIII.67].
Bernard’s works extend to many thousands of words and we do not know
which of them Dante read. The letter to Can Grande (if authentic) said that Dante drew on three of the classics of Western Christian mysticism – Augustine’s De Quantitate Animae, Richard of St Victor’s De Contemplatione and Bernard’s De Consideratione. But it has been rightly pointed out that even if the Can Grande letter is not Dante’s work, it gives a clue to the kind of books which ‘some anonymous intellectual of the 1320s’12 believed to lie behind Dante’s Paradiso.
Dante’s early commentators were less concerned than modern scholars to determine what, of Bernard’s, Dante had read. They notice, rather, Bernard’s function in the poem as it reaches its climax. Bernard leads Dante to Mary, and it is Bernard who utters the superb poem-prayer which begins the final canto of the whole Comedy.
Something which the actual, historical Bernard himself would perhaps have approved in the poem which Dante places in his mouth in the Comedy, is its rigorously theological quality. It is ‘a rigid composition of dogmatic statements’.13 It is not simply a ‘flowery’ hymn of affection for Our Lady. Bernard helps Dante to gaze towards Mary, the ‘Virgin-mother, daughter of thy Son’ [Par. XXXIII.1].
Their love whose warmth allowed this flower [Jesus] to bloom
Within the everlasting peace – was love
Rekindled in your womb;
[Par. XXXIII.7–10, Mandelbaum]
The central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, that God became Man as Jesus in the Virgin’s womb, is central not only to this hymn of praise but to the whole of the Comedy. The Fourth Gospel has the Eternal Word becoming flesh – born not of the will of the flesh but of God. Thereby is effected the symbiosis which had been the state of humanity when first created, when God made man in his own image; an image which was tarnished by original sin and needed restoration in Christ. Therefore, to approach the ineffable, scorching blinding light in which God dwells, mere flesh betakes itself to her in whom the Word had been germinated – Mary.
Mary is never a mere plaster saint in Dante’s work. As in Christian theo logy, she is always active. In a wonderful intellectual paradox, Virgil says that it is precisely because no human brain could encompass the mystery of God three-in-one that Mary consented to bring Christ into the world. When in Purgatory, the green-clad angels swoop down into the valley of negligent rulers during the singing of the evening hymn, Sordello tells the pilgrim Dante, ‘Both of them come from Mary’s bosom’ [Purg. VIII.37, author].
Mary is above all the figure in human history who most crucially exercised free will. Free will is a central obsession of the Comedy, the idea that we are not, as human beings, so programmed by the fates that moral choice is pointless. This idea gains its power at the moment when Mary says ‘Fiat’. She chose to become pregnant by God. Had she not done so, the work of Redemption could not have happened. This is why it makes sense for all humanity to honour her even though history knows next to nothing about her.
The vision which he sees of Beatrice and the saints in their mystic dance is in all senses peculiar: it is very odd, and it is his alone. He ends his poem, however, with a return to the language and imagery of Western Catholicism which he would have held in common with all his original readers, whatever their level of sophistication. Canto XXXIII begins with a long, but simple prayer to the Virgin, delivered not by the pilgrim-poet, but by St Bernard:
‘Virgin and mother, daughter of your son,
greater than all in honour and humility,
you are the point that truth eternally
is fixed upon. And you have made the nature
of the human being proud.
[Par. XXXIII.1–5, Kirkpatrick]
Mary was wholly human (hence Bernard’s objection to the idea of her being conceived without sin – the Immaculate Conception). God was born in the womb of a woman who was only different from other women in the extent to which she had surrendered her will with such totality to the Divine that she had been able to bring the Incarnate Godhead to birth. She was therefore seen as the natural conduit through whom a sinful mortal might approach God Himself. Dante, in a mystic vision, is now able to become detached from self, detached from thought, able to bear what would otherwise be intolerably painful, the rays of pure light:
Grace in all plenitude, you dared me set
My seeing eyes on that eternal light
So that all seeing there achieved its end.
[Par. XXXIII.82–5, Kirkpatrick]
Dante has entered a condition of pure contemplation, a state where
My spark of words will come more short –
even of what I still can call to mind –
than baby tongues still bathing in mum’s milk.
[Par. XXXIII.106–9, Kirkpatrick]
The poem ends with one extraordinary bravura image. It is the image of the failure of a geometer to square the circle. Likewise, no imagination, no language, could ever express the being of God:
Eternal Light, You only dwell within
Yourself, and only You know You; self-knowing,
Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!
That circle – which begotten so, appeared
in You as light reflected – when my eyes
had watched it with attention for some time,
within itself and colored like itself,
to me seemed painted with our effigy,
so that my sight was set on it completely.
[Par. XXXIII.124–32, Mandelbaum]
‘God is the Known, Beatrice is the Knowing’, Charles Williams wrote in his great book on the poem.14
The last lines of the Paradiso, like the first lines of the Inferno, are ones which ‘everyone knows’. But ‘everyone’ usually forgets what the main verb of that last, stupendous sentence actually is. Some people suppose that the ‘point’ of the poem is to persuade us that it is Love which moves the sun and other stars. But this, for Dante, was taken for granted. Although he wishes the Paradiso to end with the word ‘stars’, as had the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and although this necessitated the last line being the one we know, it is not the movement of the stars which primarily concerns him, or us, at the end. Hitherto I have quoted Dante in translation, but at the last it is necessary to look at the Italian. The main verb of the sentence is volgeva – ‘ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle’, ‘And now my will and desire were turned’ [Par. XXXIII.143]. The poem ends, not in mere passivity of contemplation. The will and the desire of writer and of reader have been turned around. The poem has begun with ultimate dislocation. Lost in the dark wood, the soul is godless, rudderless, directionless. Reunited by Love to the source of Love, it is ready for action. Movement of soul and limb, life, the positive, the Eternal Yes, become possible.
A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
[Par. XXXIII.142–5]
XXI
DANTE’S AFTERLIFE
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF HIS DEATH, DANTE EXCITED violently differing views. As far as the Papacy was concerned, Dante was a dangerous heretic. The Dominican friar Guido Vernani wrote a violent attack on Dante’s De Monarchia, denouncing it for its implicit republicanism and its dependency on the philosophical ideas of the Muslim Averroes. (‘Here I would first like to ask Dante, whose was this Empire then? From other sayings of his I believe he would reply it was the Roman people’s.’1) In 1329, the book was condemned by Cardinal Bertrand de Pouget, Pope John XXII’s legate in Lombardy, and the book was publicly burned. When, in the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation, an Index of forbidden books was drawn up under the Papacy of Paul IV, De Monarchia was included, a fact which was formalized by the Council of Trent in 1564. It was only removed in 1881.
On the other hand, as the exquisitely illuminated manuscript tradition shows, the Comedy was accorded quasi-Scriptural status by its admirers. Over 800 manuscripts of the Comedy survive. Man
y of them carry elaborate commentaries. The earliest of these was written by Dante’s son Iacopo. In Cambridge University Library may be seen the beautiful manuscript, dating from Northern Italy in the mid-fourteenth century, of the Comedy, with the first commentary on the entire poem, that of Iacopo della Lana. Such attention was normally only given to the most pored-over classical texts, such as the philosophy of Aristotle, or to the Bible itself.2
We have already seen that in the generations after Dante’s death, he was highly regarded in the English-speaking world, with Chaucer being among his greatest interpreters and imitators, and such great poets as Chaucer’s contemporary the anonymous author of Pearl paying Dante the compliment of many an imitative allusion.
In Renaissance times, however, Dante’s reputation had begun to fade. Pico della Mirandola admired Dante’s Ballate but he did not esteem the Comedy as highly as the Carnival Songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Guarino of Verona dismissed the Comedy as a ‘piece of bungling plagiarism’ and Niccolò de’ Niccoli took the strange view that Dante was ‘a poet for bakers and cobblers’. (We have already observed how the Comedy treats almost entirely of those nobly or royally born.)
Boileau (1636–1711), author of L’Art poétique and arbiter of taste for the age of Racine in France, does not even mention Dante, while he excoriated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata on the grounds of its profanity. But he would surely have deplored Dante on the same ground that he hated Tasso: the introduction of sacred themes into a poem in which there were also pagan and profane elements. His advice, ‘Souvent trop d’abondance appauvrit la matière’, would surely damn Dante’s Comedy out of hand.3 By the seventeenth century, only three editions of Dante’s verse were published, compared with the many dozens of Petrarch. By the time of the eighteenth century, Dante might, as far as the general reader was con cerned, have ceased to exist. When Joseph Addison published his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, he did not deign to mention Dante once. In Maximilian Misson’s New Voyage to Italy, he noted when he came to Ravenna that it had been the residence of ‘the poet Dantes [sic]… a man of quality’. At least Horace Walpole had dipped into Dante sufficiently deep to form the not-altogether-erroneous impression that he was ‘a Methodist parson in Bedlam’. By the standards of the Enlightenment, Dante was a Methodist parson – that is, a mystic who took religion passionately seriously – and he was in Bedlam – he wrote openly, as a modern poet would do, about his most passionately felt inner life, rather than concealing it beneath a polite veneer. Walpole’s dismissal of him, however, reveals the obscurity into which not merely the reputation of Dante but that of the Catholic religion itself had fallen in the intelligent European mind. When Goethe travelled to Italy, a young man upset the haughty German by assuring him that no foreigner could ever really do justice to Italy’s greatest poet. Goethe claimed, not altogether believably, that he had made repeated attempts to come to grips with the Comedy but he had come to wonder how anyone could busy himself with the effort. ‘The Inferno was to me completely horrible, the Purgatorio neither one thing nor the other, and the Paradiso boring.’4 When he corresponded with Schiller about the possible usefulness of terza rima, however, he quoted examples from Petrarch but did not even mention the Comedy.