Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  On November 1, Charles entered Florence and occupied it with a large army, all the while making promises to preserve the peace. But soon, with Corso descending on the scene and issuing threats and curses left and right, Charles permitted widespread looting and burning, as urged by the Black extremists. Dante’s house was vandalized and his wife and children were forced to flee to relatives. By April, all the White belligerents had been made to abandon the city. In January 1302, Dante was charged by the newly elected Black priors with accepting bribes and diverting municipal funds to his personal use, for which gargantuan fines were assessed against him. Though the charges were fabrications, Dante’s failure to appear in person to answer them brought down on him (and on fourteen other former officials) the condemnation of death by burning. Dante, not quite thirty-seven years of age, would never again be able to return to his native city.

  Dante in red in a fresco in the chapel of the Bargello, Florence. (Photo Credit 7.5)

  Released at last by the pope and making his way back to Florence, Dante had reached Siena by the time he had news of the charges against him. He lingered in Tuscany awhile, allying himself briefly with the Ghibellines of San Godenzo, then with those of Forlì to the east. But within a few months, despairing that any good could come of these associations, he took off north to Verona, where he found shelter and welcome in the shadow of Bartolomeo della Scala, “il gran Lombardo” (the great Lombard), as Dante would call him and from whom he received “lo primo tuo refugio e ’l primo ostello” (“first refuge and first lodging”), words that carry a warm exhalation of relief after trials too chilling and too many.

  Though Dante would remain forever grateful to the great Lombard, the Veronese refuge was short-lived. During the winter of 1303–4, Bartolomeo died and was succeeded by his antipathetic brother Alboino. Dante was on the move once more. In leaving Verona, he was also cutting himself off from his connections to the White Guelphs. He had first come to Verona as their emissary. Now, finding his party “malvagia e scempia” (evil and stupid)—never a winning combination—he resolved to set off on his own, “parte per te stesso” (a party of one). Anyone who has ever come to find his fellow partisans as dismaying as the opposition will understand the abiding loneliness that enveloped Dante.

  There is a portrait of Dante in profile in the chapel of the battlemented Bargello, the massive “Palace of the Captain of the People,” official residence of the podestà, and Florence’s oldest surviving government building, constructed a decade before Dante’s birth. Dante may be found among the blessed in Heaven in the fresco of the Last Judgment on the altar wall. Though the fresco was made sometime after Dante’s death, there is every reason to believe that if it was not painted by Giotto himself it is from the hand of one of his assistants, at any rate someone who had known Dante, the citizen of Florence, but never saw him again after his banishment. The fading Dante on the chapel wall is a tall, thin, handsome man in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven, dignified in rich, dark-red velvet, and learned (for he carries a book). He has a strong, well-defined jaw; thin, firmly closed lips; and the aquiline nose of the ancient Romans. Many of the contented beati around him are smiling sweetly, looking here and there, as people will. Dante stares straight ahead, serious, intense, meditative, resolute. The portrait is a just one, according well with everything else we know about the man.

  But the years to come would not be kind to Dante. For several years we have incomplete information on his whereabouts. He stays at Arezzo, Treviso, Padua (where he runs into Giotto, then at work on the Scrovegni Chapel), Bologna, Venice, the Lunigiana, and Lucca, and with several different hosts in the Casentino Valley. We lose track of him from time to time, but always he appears to be wandering in or near Tuscany, circling Florence, hoping. For ten years after the death sentence of 1302, Dante will almost never spend as much as a year in any one place; often enough his stay will be far shorter. He will learn, as one of the characters in the Commedia will tell him, the bitterness of exile:

  “Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta

  più caramente; e questo è quello strale

  che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

  Tu proverai si come sa di sale

  lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

  lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale.

  E quel che più ti graverà le spalle,

  sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempiae

  con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle.”

  “And everything you loved most dearly there

  You shall abandon. This opening shaft the bow

  Of banishment will shoot into the air.

  How salt another’s bread is you shall know;

  How hard the step will tread, mount or descend,

  Upon a stranger’s stairs where you must go.

  And what will most of all weigh down and bend

  Your shoulders is the venomous and foul

  Mob that will walk with you to this vale’s end.”

  The young, attractive, enviable presence that almost assaults us from the chapel wall of the Bargello will be transformed during these ten years of wandering into a very different older figure, “peregrino, quasi mendicando” (pilgrim, almost beggared), as he tells us, “a ship without a sail and without a rudder, cast about to different harbors and inlets and shores by the dry wind of humiliating poverty.” By the time he returns to Verona again—for the youngest of the della Scala brothers, the admirable Can Grande, had become lord of Verona on the death of the antipathetic Alboino—Dante is a stooped, prematurely aged man in his late forties whose large, dark eyes flicker starkly from a dark, thickly bearded face. As E. M. Forster describes him in his magical tale “The Celestial Omnibus,” he is “a sallow man with terrifying jaws and sunken eyes.” He walks slowly and always looks thoughtful and sad, though his manners are impeccable and his unfailing courtesy to all is a cause for comment. Boccaccio, who will interview many Veronese for his biography of Dante, tells of a cluck-clucking clutch of Veronese ladies who were taking the air one day and were terribly frightened by Dante when he appeared, as if from nowhere, and walked past them. With his gaunt, clouded face and air of sadness, he seemed as if he had suddenly emerged … dal inferno!

  Indeed, Hell was much on Dante’s mind during this time, for he had begun his great poem, which he called simply Commedia (and which would earn the adjective Divina centuries later). It is divided into three parts (called canzoni, or song sequences): Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (Hell, Purgatory, Heaven), each canzone having thirty-three canti (songs, lyrics, or, in this case, rounded episodes), with the Inferno having an extra introductory canto, thus making one hundred canti in all. The tightness of the structure cannot be overemphasized, for there is nothing like it, nothing so thoroughly architectural, in all the rest of literature, whether ancient or modern. The Comedy is a series of storeys, apartments, rooms, and frames in which everything fits into everything else, all planes leveled, all lines plumb, all corners perfectly squared. Even the novel rhyme scheme is amazing in its completeness. Terza rima, Dante called it: aba, bcb, cdc, and so forth, never deviating and never failing to rhyme—and rhyme gracefully and naturally—through its 14,233 lines of eleven syllables each.

  If this sounds—to the reader who has never attempted the Comedy—like an invitation to dry schematization and considerable pain rather than to the normal pleasures of literature, I plead with you to lay aside your prejudice. The real problem for the English-reading reader lies not in the poem’s architectonics, which (once you have been alerted to them) fade imperceptibly into the background, but in the language. Dante’s Italian is simple—like its predecessor, medieval Latin—and can be understood by anyone reading a straightforward bilingual translation.f But the use of language—the severity of diction, combined with an ambiguous allusiveness—is unlike almost anything in English. There is in Dante some of the music we hear in Milton, but whereas Milton overwhelms us with his gorgeously vibrating organ chords, Dante, poor in resources, stic
ks to the chastity of chant. There is something of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in Dante (or rather something of Dante in The Faerie Queene), but this comparison is more misleading than helpful, because Spenser’s bullheaded politics have grown entirely irrelevant and his elaborate allegory weighs one down after a while and becomes at last a bore. Dante’s politics remain universal, his allegory so subtle that one seldom need advert to it; he seems rather to be telling a poignantly personal story. The only English poet to approach language in a way truly close to Dante’s is George Herbert, who can be sweet but severe, confessional but colloquial, realistic but hopeful, symbolic but ordinary all at once. Yet Herbert never attempted anything remotely similar in scale to the Comedy.

  Enough of comparisons. Let us approach the work, beginning with the most famous first line in all of literature:

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

  ché la diritta via era smarrita.

  Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

  esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

  che nel pensier rinova la paura!

  Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;

  ma per trattar del ben chi’i’ vi trovai,

  dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

  Along the journey of our life half way

  I found myself in a dark wood

  Wherein the straight road no longer lay:

  How hard it is to tell, make understood

  What a wild place it was, so dense, adverse

  That fear returns in thinking on that wood.

  It is so bitter death is hardly worse.

  But, for the good it was my chance to gain,

  The other things I saw there I’ll rehearse.

  In his first three lines (literally, “In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself again in a dark wood / where the straight way was lost”), he alerts us to three things: he is thirty-five, halfway to his allotted “three score years and ten”; this, though his personal story (“I”), will have universal meaning (“our life”); he is lost. The verb form ritrovai can mean “I found” or “I found again.” To find oneself lost is paradoxical but also the beginning of a realistic assessment of one’s position. Because mi ritrovai, considered by itself without the phrase that follows, suggests “I found myself again,” there may even be a slight hint, here at the very beginning of the work, that Dante will in the end find his way out of the savage (selvaggia) darkness.

  This first canto, Canto I of the Inferno, is set on Good Friday 1300, the same year that Dante was elected a prior of Florence and the same year the dreadful Boniface proclaimed as the first Holy Year. In 1301, Dante voted in the Council of Florence against aiding the pope in his war; in the same year, Charles occupied Florence, while Dante was detained at Rome. In early 1302, Dante was condemned to death in absentia and banished. The tumult of these three years—and Dante has an endless fascination for threes and their multiples—forms the personal backdrop of the Comedy: they are the years of Dante’s life when “all changed, changed utterly.”

  Dante, writing nearly a decade later, is looking back on his former self, the intense young man with prospects in view, whom we met on the wall of the Bargello. The Comedy is an allegory because it presents Dante, its main character, on a pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, a pilgrimage not unlike the one the Holy Year pilgrims made to Rome. But whereas they visited an earthly city—and one where, as Dante (thinking of Boniface, who sold church offices for a price) says, “Christ is bought and sold the whole day long”—Dante will journey to the world beyond the veil, even to the heavenly city itself. The great poem is a comedy because it ends well. But in the course of a largely painful journey, Dante the poet has so universalized the sufferings of Dante the man that his personal story can serve as a template for the lives of all readers in every age.

  After a night spent in fear “in the lake of the heart,” Dante sees beyond a hill the rays of the sun—“the beams of the planet that leads men straight on every road”—and heads east, only to have his way blocked by three beasts escaped from Hell: the spotted leopard of lust, the hungry lion of pride, and the lean she-wolf of avarice. They represent his (and everyone’s) temptations. In flight from them all, he runs smack into the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who is Dante’s principal model, “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore,” as Dante most touchingly addresses him. “You are he from whom alone I took the beautiful style [lo bello stilo] that has brought me honor.” Beautiful style, most surely. Dante’s studious attention to Virgil’s felicitous refinements, transferred to the emerging Italian vernacular and widely praised as the dolce stil nuovo (the sweet new style), had brought him fame. His early poems, all in the rampant tradition of courtly love, made him preeminent among the fedeli d’Amore, the devotees of the god of Love, always in thrall to one mistress or another. But now as Dante meditates on the crisis of his life, his supple poetry, still dolce, must stretch itself considerably to embrace the all-encompassing theme of suffering.

  There is no way past the she-wolf, so Virgil proposes to guide Dante by another route—through Hell—and what a tour it will be, though much of it so famous that it need not greatly delay us here. In Canto III they move through the entranceway that bears the awful notice ending with the words ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE. Their first encounters, if they can be called that, are with the Drearies, who, having no place of their own, mill about Hell’s entrance, “those who lived without blame or praise,” whining wraiths who never truly lived at all, the lukewarm, who are “as hateful to God as to his enemies,” the people no one claims. Among them Dante identifies a pope, Celestine V, a silly, weak-willed man who resigned the papacy at the urging of his ambitious counselor, who then engineered his own election—as Pope Boniface VIII.

  Next, they cross the river of death on Charon’s boat and find themselves in a combination of the Greco-Roman Hades and Limbo, the place where the souls of the good who were unbaptized go after death: the heroes, poets, and philosophers of antiquity, Muslims, et al. (This is also where the “saints” of the Old Testament remained till they, as Christians by anticipation, were rescued by Christ, who, according to the ancient creeds, “descended into Hell” after his death to liberate all the Jewish saints from Adam and Eve to the latter prophets.) Though Dante is openly contemptuous of many of the men who occupied the throne of Peter, he is unquestioningly orthodox, in fact Thomistic,g in his theology. The problem of what happens to good pagans after their deaths may be the only point on which Dante appears uncomfortable with standard Catholic doctrine: he accepts the prevailing theory of his time—that, because the pagans were never saved by Christ through baptism, they lack the capacity for seeing God and must be kept somewhere apart from Heavenh—but it goes against the grain; and in the Paradiso he even manages (with courageous inconsistency) to sneak a few pagans into Heaven.

  Sinclair puts it well when he writes, “The relation of the virtuous pagans to the Christian scheme of salvation was a matter of acute and peculiar difficulty for Dante. With his deep conviction of the divine ordering of secular history (represented mainly by the story of Troy and Rome [as told in Virgil’s Aeneid]) as a kind of parallel and complement of sacred history (represented by the Old and New Testaments and the Church), with his strong sense of the unity of humanity and of all its spiritual values, and with his profound reverence for all that was best in what he knew of pre-Christian paganism [especially Thomas’s version of Aristotle], the exclusion of the virtuous heathen from salvation, inevitable as he conceived it to be, put a great and painful strain on his mind.” Dante’s solution here is to give the good pagans “a noble castle” in Limbo, “seven times encircled by high walls and defended all around by a lovely stream,” and “a meadow of fresh verdure, where there were people with serious eyes which do not dart about and with great authority in their demeanor: they spoke seldom and with gentle voices.”i For unbaptized pagans, they’re doing
well—and they don’t know what they’re missing.

  It’s only after Limbo that the real Hell begins. The Drearies, clustered near the entrance, are betwixt and between; the good pagans in the First Circle exist in a sort of Greek Elysium. But in the Second Circle of Hell, where the Lustful are confined, there is real, if mitigated, suffering. It should be borne in mind that anyone who repents before death will not be found in any of Hell’s circles; only the unrepentant are here—in the case of the Lustful, usually those who had no time to repent. They are blown about like small birds on fierce gusts of wind. Virgil points out Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Paris, Tristan, “more than a thousand shades, naming them as he pointed to each, whom love had parted from our life.”

  Dante recognizes a pair of lovers, bound together, who “seem so light upon the wind,” and speaks to them kindly as they are borne near him. They are Paolo Malatesta, who had been the dashing Captain of the People of Florence when Dante was an impressionable teenager, and his mistress Francesca da Polenta of Ravenna. Dante certainly knew members of her family and may even have known her. Like all Italians of the time, he knew her story. She had been married for ten years to the crippled son of the lord of Rimini but fell in love with Paolo, her husband’s younger brother. At the time, she had a daughter of nine; Paolo was married, with two children. While they were making love, the cripple surprised and murdered them both.