From our small array of factual data we learn that Dante’s life in this period included other things than tremulous sighs and visions. In 1289 he took part in the battle of Campaldino and the capture of Caprona. In 1295 appears the first record of his political activity. In the same year he made himself eligible for public office by enrolling in a guild, the Apothecaries’, where the books of that day were sold. In the following year it is recorded that he spoke in the “Council of the Hundred.” By 1299 he had advanced to fill a minor ambassadorship. In the meantime he married Gemma, kinswoman of his friend Forese Donati and of the hot-tempered Corso. As the mature but still youthful Alighieri was playing an ever more prominent role in politics, familiar tensions were once again building up within the republic. Thirty years without a serious threat from their common enemy put too great a strain on Guelf unity; and again it was a murder, though in nearby Pistoia, which precipitated open conflict. The Florentines took sides and in the late spring of 1300 the two parties, called “Blacks” and “Whites,” fought in the streets. It was at this particular moment that Dante’s political career was crowned with the highest success and he was elected one of the six supreme magistrates, called priors. Himself a moderate White, he found it necessary during the two-month term to join in banishing his brother-in-law, Corso Donati, and his “first friend,” Guido Cavalcanti, as ringleaders respectively of the Blacks and Whites. (Cavalcanti died very soon of an illness contracted during his banishment.) As friction continued, the Blacks conspired for the intervention of the Pope, Boniface VIII, who was delighted with the chance to strengthen the Papacy’s claim on Tuscany. In spite of frantic White opposition he sent Charles of Valois ostensibly as impartial arbitrator and peacemaker. What the Pope’s secret orders were became instantly apparent when Charles was admitted in November 1301, for he set upon the Whites, admitted the banished Blacks and stood by as they gave themselves over to murder and pillage. The matter was then legitimized by a series of “purge trials” of the sort only too familiar to us. Among those accused, and of course convicted, of graft and corruption in office was Dante Alighieri. Fortunately he had been absent and had stayed away; but from early in 1302 his voluntary absence became exile under penalty of being burned alive.
We know even less of the remaining 19 years except that they were spent largely with a series of patrons in various courts of Italy. The exile had no funds, no reputation as yet, no powerful friends. He stayed at various times with the Scala family, then with the Malaspinas; tradition has it that he studied at Paris, and even at Oxford. As time passed and his reputation grew, his way became easier and his last years were spent in relative comfort at Ravenna as the honored guest of Guido Novello da Polenta, nephew of Francesca da Rimini. On the way back from a diplomatic mission to Venice he fell ill and died soon after his return. In the Paradiso XVII he left one of the most poignant descriptions of life in exile ever written: “Thou shalt prove how salty tastes another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.”
That Dante had ample reason to feel that the political chaos of his day was a prime menace to man’s pursuit of happiness should be quite apparent. It should also be understandable that he used the Comedy to protest this evil and to suggest a remedy. His analysis and conclusions took years of reading and meditation, during which he denounced all existing parties, Whites, Blacks, Guelphs, and Ghibellines, in order to “make a party by himself.” As his compatriot Machiavelli was to do two hundred years later and from very similar motives, he sought his material in the literature of Ancient Rome, with the difference that the later scholar had the advantage of the humanistic revival and the free inquiry of the Renaissance, whereas Dante was a pioneer circumscribed by scholasticism. He had already begun his study of ancient philosophy a few years after the Vita Nuova and before his political disaster. In his next work, the Convivio or Banquet, he tells how difficult he had found it: the Latin he had learned proved quite different from that of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy. Cicero’s urbane and complex style was much harder and, more confusing still, his whole mode of thought, his concepts, viewpoints, allusions were as if from a different world. The young explorer from medieval Christendom went doggedly on from one work to another which he had seen mentioned, without adequate teachers, courses, reference works, or indeed, the works themselves, except as he could beg or borrow the manuscripts. Eventually he mastered and assimilated all the learning available in Latin or Latin translations, from the Timaeus of Plato, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Statius and Lucan through St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church, to Averröes, St. Thomas and the great mystics. But the wastefulness, the needless difficulties, the groping aroused his indignation, as injustice always did. He had been “educated” but how much had it helped him in the pursuit of real learning? He knew that there were others, too, who longed for such knowledge but lacked his extraordinary mental equipment (he allowed himself no false modesty) and thus failed to win through. What was lacking were real schools with competent teachers and high standards, available to all who had the talent and the desire to learn. But what agency would set them up and maintain them? Not the Church; for, though it was no longer ignorant of philosophy, the Church was suspicious of it and not inclined to grant it that primacy in the conduct of human affairs which Dante assigned to it. This was another problem, to be studied along with that of political instability and strife. In the meantime he, Dante Alighieri, could contribute the fruits of his own efforts in the form of an encyclopaedia or compendium of knowledge which would at the same time earn for him badly needed prestige. Not only would it gather together the knowledge which he had found scattered piecemeal in many works and in different forms, it would make that knowledge accessible by use of the vernacular instead of Latin. Such a thing was revolutionary in the first decade of the fourteenth century and called for an explanation which Dante gave in the form of an impassioned defense of what we call Italian. He concluded with the following prophetic words, referring to the new language as
“. . . a new light, a new sun, which shall rise whereas the accustomed one (Latin) shall set, and which shall give light to those who are in darkness because the accustomed sun does not give them light.”
The Banquet was to consist of fifteen sections: an introduction and fourteen of Dante’s longer philosophical lyrics, each followed by an expository prose passage. Only four sections were completed. Among the possible reasons for its abandonment, two in particular seem valid. First, the work is a failure in organization and style, typically medieval in its discursive rambling. Second, it was written to exalt philosophy, “most noble daughter of the Emperor of the Universe,” and thus constituted a perilous deviation for a medieval Christian. It is at least possible that this frame of mind was included in the “Dark Wood” in which the Comedy begins, and it almost certainly inspired the repeated warnings against over-dependence on philosophy and human wisdom which the poem contains.
Evidence that Dante had already begun to formulate his solution to the evils of his day may be found in the Banquet, but it is in the De Monarchia, last of his more important minor works, that we find the full statement of his theories. This is the best organized and most complete of his treatises. He probably composed it in the last decade of his life and chose Latin as a medium rather deliberately, I suspect, for discretion’s sake. It is certain, at any rate, that copies of it were sought out for burning by the Papacy some years after the author’s death, and it was among the first books placed on the Index. The Church, struggling to wrest from the enfeebled Empire its supremacy as a temporal power, had made it a matter of dogma that the emperors were as dependent on the popes as was the moon on the sun. The De Monarchia denied and denounced this position, affirming that the two powers were rather like two equal suns, each dependent only on God and designed to guide man toward his two goals: peace and happiness in this world and spiritual salvation in the next.
“To these states of blessedness, just as to diverse con
clusions, man must come by diverse means. To the former we come by the teachings of philosophy . . . in conformity with the moral and intellectual virtues; to the latter through spiritual teachings which transcend human reason . . . in conformity with the theological virtues. . . . Now the former end and means are made known to us by human reason . . . and the latter by the Holy Spirit. . . . Nevertheless, human passion would cast all these behind, were not men, like wild horses in their brutishness, held to the road by bit and rein.
“Wherefore a twofold directive agent was necessary to man in accordance with the twofold end: the Supreme Pontiff to lead the human race by means of revelation, and the Emperor to guide it to temporal felicity by means of philosophic education.”
Failure of the two guides to cooperate prevented peace and bred injustice. Part of the blame rested on the Empire for neglecting its duties, but the larger share fell on the Papacy. In its greed for temporal power, which Dante believed rooted in the ill-conceived “Donation of Constantine,” it not only deprived mankind of a strong civil government but neglected its proper task of spiritual guidance, so that most men were damned not only in this life but in the life to come. Dante’s ideas have long been ridiculed as quixotic, yet history has seen a Declaration affirming man’s right to “the pursuit of happiness,” the separation of Church and State, education secularized and rendered accessible to the public, while to many today the idea of peace and justice through a world government seems not so much chimerical as indispensable.
Whatever fate might have befallen the De Monarchia would have mattered little, for its essential thesis was preserved in the enduring beauty of the Divine Comedy, interwoven with the other themes, expressed at times openly, at other times merely implicit in the structure. For the same reason it was unimportant that the Banquet lay unfinished, for all the erudition Dante had planned to present in that indigestible work found much nobler, more convincing expression in the poetry of the Comedy. Even the beautiful little youthful work, the Vita Nuova, found itself continued and sublimated on the slopes and summit of the Purgatorio, where Beatrice reappears in womanly glory first to confront and then to guide her lover. For one of the marvels of this great poem is the way in which all of Dante’s learning, his speculations, observations and experiences were blended together in its intricate fabric.
The poem’s complex structure is itself a marvelous thing. Before we examine it briefly we should, however, remember that Dante lived in a Catholic world or, rather, universe, in which every slightest thing was encompassed in the will and knowledge of an omnipotent and omniscient Deity and that the supreme attribute of that Deity was the mystery of His Trinity and Unity. Evidences of that mystery were sought and found everywhere and such numerical symbolism was not as today comical abracadabra but a serious and even sacred matter.
Now let us look at the Comedy. It is made up of three nearly equal parts which are distinct yet carefully interrelated to form a unified whole. Each part moreover is the expression of one Person of the Trinity: Inferno, the Power of the Father, Purgatory, the Wisdom of the Son, Paradise, the Love of the Holy Spirit. Each part, or cántica, contains 33 cantos for a total of 99. If we add the first, introductory, canto we obtain a grand total of 100 which is the square of 10; 10 is the perfect number, for it is composed solely of the square of the Trinity plus 1, which represents the Unity of God. Even the rhyme scheme itself is the terza rima or “third rhyme” which Dante invented for his purpose. There are other symmetries and correspondences, but this should suffice to demonstrate that Dante planned his own creation in as close an imitation of a divinely created and controlled universe as was possible to the mind of man. Almost literally nothing was left to chance.
We today are more than inclined to despise such concern with what seem to us trifles, externals, Victorian gingerbread, because we are convinced that the mind preoccupied with them cannot have much of importance to say. In our utilitarian scorn we are in danger of forgetting that a certain preoccupation with form (and even today’s straight line betrays such a preoccupation) is essential to beauty. In the Divine Comedy we must remember that Dante had for his subject the whole world, the entire universe, all of man’s history, his learning, his beliefs, plus his own particular messages. To him preoccupation with form was not extrinsic, not a luxury; it was his salvation. As Mr. Gilbert Highet points out, it is this that sets Dante apart from his contemporaries, this was the great lesson he had learned from his master and author, Virgil. The medieval digressions which infest the Banquet have been eliminated by the “fren dell’arte.” I doubt whether there is another work of this size which is so economical in its use of words. The reader always has, as Mr. Ciardi aptly puts it, “. . . a sense of the right-choice-always-being-made”; and this applies to everything from the smallest word to the harmonious interrelation of the principal divisions.
This awareness of intelligence at work is clearly felt throughout the Inferno. This is the realm—or condition—of the “dead people,” those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen. As subject matter it is the lowest, ugliest, most materialistic of the whole poem. Now in his unfinished treatise on the vernacular, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante had established a basic rule that the poet must make his style match his material. In accordance with this we should expect the style of the Inferno to be lower than that of the other divisions—and that is exactly what we find. The poet has used throughout it a low level of diction, common, everyday words and constructions and relatively simple figures. Yet with this prosaic equipment he has obtained incomparable effects, from the poignant sensuality of Francesca (V), the dignity of Farinata (X), the pathos of Ser Brunetto (XV), to demoniac farce (XXI) and revolting ugliness (XXIX). He employed not only ordinary words but, where he thought it useful, those which in our language seem to require only four letters.
It is Mr. Ciardi’s great merit to be one of the first American translators to have perceived this special quality of the Inferno and the first to have reproduced it successfully in English. In order to achieve this he has abandoned any attempt to reproduce Dante’s complicated rhyme scheme and has even had to do some slight violence to conventional poetic usage. The resulting effect to the ear, which must be the supreme judge in these matters, is a good likeness of the original. It may also be something of a shock to those who insist on a uniformly hieratic approach to all things Dantesque; let them come really to know the vigorous, uncompromising Florentine who, even in the Paradiso, wrote:
“E lascia pur grattar dov’è la rogna!”
(“And let them go ahead and scratch where it itches.”)
—ARCHIBALD T. MACALLISTER
Canto I
THE DARK WOOD OF ERROR
Midway in his allotted threescore years and ten, Dante comes to himself with a start and realizes that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error (Worldliness). As soon as he has realized his loss, Dante lifts his eyes and sees the first light of the sunrise (the Sun is the Symbol of Divine Illumination) lighting the shoulders of a little hill (The Mount of Joy). It is the Easter Season, the time of resurrection, and the sun is in its equinoctial rebirth. This juxtaposition of joyous symbols fills Dante with hope and he sets out at once to climb directly up the Mount of Joy, but almost immediately his way is blocked by the Three Beasts of Worldliness: THE LEOPARD OF MALICE AND FRAUD, THE LION OF VIOLENCE AND AMBITION, and THE SHE-WOLF OF INCONTINENCE. These beasts, and especially the She-Wolf, drive him back despairing into the darkness of error. But just as all seems lost, a figure appears to him. It is the shade of VIRGIL, Dante’s symbol of HUMAN REASON.
Virgil explains that he has been sent to lead Dante from error. There can, however, be no direct ascent past the beasts: the man who would escape them must go a longer and harder way. First he must descend through Hell (The Recognition of Sin), then he must ascend through Purgatory (The Renunciation of Sin), and onl
y then may he reach the pinnacle of joy and come to the Light of God. Virgil offers to guide Dante, but only as far as Human Reason can go. Another guide (BEATRICE, symbol of DIVINE LOVE) must take over for the final ascent, for Human Reason is self-limited. Dante submits himself joyously to Virgil’s guidance and they move off.
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God’s grace.
How I came to it I cannot rightly say,
so drugged and loose with sleep had I become
when I first wandered there from the True Way.
But at the far end of that valley of evil
whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear!
I found myself before a little hill
and lifted up my eyes. Its shoulders glowed
already with the sweet rays of that planet
whose virtue leads men straight on every road,
and the shining strengthened me against the fright
whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart
through all the terrors of that piteous night.
Just as a swimmer, who with his last breath
flounders ashore from perilous seas, might turn
to memorize the wide water of his death—
The Divine Comedy Page 4