by Dante
If we have been able to rid ourselves of the interpretive problems engendered by the “allegory of the poets,” here we have a still larger problem. How can Dante have written the Comedy in the same way that God wrote the Bible through his inspired human agents? Obviously he could not have. Then why does he make so outrageous a claim? Because what he is most concerned with is establishing the “right” of poetry to truth. This is a complex argument, and needs to be undertaken with a sense of the standing of poetry in a theological age. Let us say that it was not propitious. St. Thomas Aquinas had been clear about the issue. Poetry was the least of the human sciences, was basically devoid of cognitive value, and its practitioners were liars. In an intellectual climate of that kind, Dante was forced into making a choice. Either he did what all others who defended poetry had done (and as he himself had done in Convivio), admit that poets are literally liars who nonetheless tell moral and philosophical truths through (poets’) allegory, or he had to find a new answer to the attacks on poetry by friars like Thomas. Typically, he went his own way. If religious detractors of poetry say it lacks truth, he will give them truth. The Comedy is presented, from end to end (no reader can possibly miss this fact), as a record of an actual experience. Let us be honest with one another. You do not believe, and I do not believe, that Dante took a seven-day trip to the otherworld. But we can agree that his claims for total veracity are in the poem. Why? Because Dante took Thomas seriously. It is a wonderful game that he plays, daring and at times very funny, and surely he enjoyed playing it. Let me offer a single example, drawn from a pretty “serious” setting, the Earthly Paradise. Describing the six wings adorning each of the four biblical beasts that represent the authors of the Gospels in Purgatorio XXIX, Dante assures us that their wings were six in number (Ezechiel’s cherubic creatures had only four), that is, as many as are found in John’s description of the same cherubs (Revelation 4:8). The text puts this in an arresting way: “John sides with me, departing from him [Ezechiel].” No one but Dante would have said this in this way. “Here I follow John” would have been the proper way for a poet to guarantee the truthfulness of his narrative. Not for Dante. Since the pretext of the poem is that he indeed saw all that he recounts as having seen, his own experience, in completely Thomistic spirit, comes first—he knows this by his senses. And so John is his witness, and not he John’s.
The whole question of exactly how and how much the “allegory of the theologians” permeates the Comedy is not to be rehashed here. It is the subject of a number of books, including two by this writer. It is important to grasp that, by breaking out of the lockstep of other poets, who give us narratives that are utterly and only fabulous, i.e., patently untrue in their literal sense, Dante wanted to take poetry somewhere new. The greatest French medieval poem, the Romance of the Rose, is built around the presentation of a series of abstractions speaking to one another in a garden. Marianne Moore, borrowing from another writer, once referred to poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The Romance of the Rose is an imaginary garden filled with imaginary toads; the Comedy presents itself as a real garden containing real toads. If the student (or teacher) who is wrestling with this difficult matter for the first time takes only this much away from this discussion, it should be of considerable aid. The reader is not asked by the poem to see Virgil as Reason, Beatrice as Faith (or Theology or Revelation), Francesca as Lust, Farinata as Heresy, etc. We may banish such abstractions from mind, unless Dante himself insists on them. On occasion he does—e.g., the Lady Poverty, beloved of St. Francis [Paradiso XI.74], who is not to be confused with any historical earthly woman, but is to be regarded as the ideal of Christ’s and the Apostles’ renunciation of the things of this world. It is a useful and pleasing freedom that, in consequence, we may enjoy: “The allegory of the Comedy is not allegory as the commentators urge me to apply it. I may read this poem as history, and understand it better.” That, at least provisionally, is a good way to begin reading this poem.
(2) Virgil.
We should be aware that Virgil was not always Dante’s guide in poetry. The Vita nuova is essentially without major reference to him; De vulgari and the first three treatises of Convivio are similar in this respect. It is only in the fourth and last treatise of the latter that we can begin to see how the Comedy could make Virgil so essential a presence, for there Virgil’s texts are present in important ways, as Dante begins to think of moral philosophy, Roman polity, and the jettisoning of allegorical procedures in the same breath. As the world of political reality, of human choices made in time and with real consequence, for the first time becomes a stage for Dante’s thought, Virgil becomes his most important resource. As is widely understood, Dante’s recovery of Virgilian text is the most noteworthy example of this phenomenon that we find in the Middle Ages. We have not yet entered the world of the Renaissance, but we are getting close.
There are few surprises awaiting the reader of the Comedy as unsettling as to find a pagan poet serving as guide in a Christian poem. We have perhaps gotten so used to the idea of Dante’s Virgil that we forget to be surprised by it. For reasons that we find it difficult to fathom, Dante needed Virgil in order to make this poem; and he wanted him to serve as a central character in it. Lesser minds would have made a less provocative choice: an anonymous friar, a learned Christian theologian, anyone less troubling than Virgil. One tradition of Christian reception of Virgil, which is at least as old as the emperor Constantine, held that his much-discussed fourth Eclogue actually foretold the coming of Christ. Had Dante so believed, his choice of guide might have been less burdensome. However, we may be certain from Monarchia (I.xi.1) that Dante knew that Virgil’s “virgin” was not the blessèd Mary but Astraea, or “justice.” Any number of passages within the Comedy make it plain that Dante did not consider the Roman poet a Christian avant-la-lettre. We must conclude that he willfully chose a pagan as his guide, leaving us to fathom his reasons for doing so.
In recent years a growing number of Dante’s interpreters have been arguing for the view that Dante deliberately undercuts the Latin poet, showing that both in some of his decisions as guide and in some of his own actual texts he is, from Dante’s later and Christian vantage point, prone to error. If this is the case, we must not forget that Dante at the same time is intent upon glorifying Virgil. And then we might consider the proposition that Dante’s love for him, genuine and heartfelt, needed to be held at arm’s length and chastised, perhaps revealing to a pagan-hating reader that Dante knew full well the limitations of his Virgil. Yet he could not do without him. Virgil is the guide in Dante’s poem because he served in that role in Dante’s life. It was Virgil’s Aeneid and not the works of Aristotle or of Aquinas which served as model for the poem; it was Virgil who, more than any other author, helped to make Dante Dante.
It may take readers years of rereading before they discover an extraordinary fact about Dante’s Virgil. For all the excitement, even exhilaration, brought forth by Virgil’s mere presence in this poem (a text that would seem to need to exclude him on theological grounds), sooner or later the fact that he is treated, on occasion, rather shabbily begins to impress us. This is so obvious, once it is pointed out, that one can begin to understand how thoroughly trained we have all been to look with pleased eyes upon a Dantean love for Virgil that heralds Renaissance humanism. To take only a few examples from the goodly supply presented in the text of Inferno (and Purgatorio will add many another), we witness Virgil embarrassed by the recalcitrant fallen angels who deny him entrance to the City of Dis (Inf. VIII and IX); later teased by his pupil for that momentary failure (XIV); being careful to get Dante out of observing distance lest Geryon prove as difficult as the rebel angels had been and thus embarrass him again (XVI); completely fooled by the demons of the pitch, who cause him acute discomfort over three cantos (XXI–XXIII). If such scenes make it seem more than unlikely that Virgil could possibly represent Reason (and commentators who think so grow silent at the margins of these scen
es, only occasionally being honest enough even to say, “here the allegory is intermittent”), they also make us wonder about Dante’s motives in treating his “master and author” so disrespectfully. It is perhaps only because he loved Virgil so deeply that he feels the need to remind himself and his reader that the pagan was, in the end, a failure, capable of causing another Roman poet, Statius, to convert to Christianity, but not of taking that step himself. All of that seems wrong to us. There is perhaps no doctrine in the entire Comedy so hateful to modern readers as that which makes pagans—and others outside the Christian dispensation—responsible for knowing Christ. When we consider Dante’s situation, however, his motives may seem more understandable to us. Having fought off the temptation to make Virgil a Christian, Dante must now show himself and his reader that he has not gone overboard in his affections.
There is another disturbing element to Dante’s Virgilianism. Not only is Virgil the character forced to undergo some seriously humiliating moments, but his texts are also on the receiving end of Dante’s playful mockery. Perhaps the most evident moment of this occurs in the twentieth canto, where Virgil is made to revise an episode in the tenth book of the Aeneid so that it accords better with Christian ideas about divination. It is a richly woven scene, and is extremely funny (Dante is a much funnier poet than we like to acknowledge), once we begin to understand the literary game that is being played under our eyes. And this is not the only time that Virgil’s texts receive such treatment. We will even find the Aeneid remembered in the very last canto of Paradiso, with its reminder of what the Sibyl told of Christian truth to an ear that could understand her utterance—if not Virgil’s.
It is simply impossible to imagine the Comedy without Virgil. And no one before Dante, and perhaps very few after, ever loved Virgil as he did. At the same time there is a hard-edged sense of Virgil’s crucial failure as poet of Rome, the city Dante celebrates for its two suns, church and empire, but which Virgil saw only in the light of the one. For Dante, that is his great failure. As unfair as it seems to us, so much so that we frequently fail to note how often Virgil is criticized by the later poet who so loved him, it is the price that Dante forces him to pay when he enters this Christian precinct. And it may have been the price that he exerted from himself, lest he seem too available to the beautiful voices from the pagan past, seem less firm as the poet of both Romes. The Virgilian voice of the poem is the voice that brings us, more often and more touchingly than any other, the sense of tragedy that lies beneath the text of the Comedy.
(3) The Moral Situation of the Reader.
How are we meant to respond to the sinners in hell? That seems an easy question to resolve. In the Inferno we see the justice of God proclaimed in the inscription over the gate of hell (III.4): “Justice moved my maker on high.” If God is just, it follows logically that there can be no question concerning the justness of His judgments. All who are condemned to hell are justly condemned. Thus, when we observe that the protagonist feels pity for some of the damned, we are probably meant to realize that he is at fault for doing so. Dante, not without risk, decided to entrust to us, his readers, the responsibility for seizing upon the details in the narratives told by sinners, no matter how appealing their words might be, in order to condemn them on the evidence that issues from their own mouths. It was indeed, as we can see from the many readers who fail to take note of this evidence, a perilous decision for him to have made. Yet we are given at least two clear indicators of the attitude that should be ours. Twice in Inferno figures from heaven descend to hell to further God’s purpose in sending Dante on his mission. Virgil relates the coming of Beatrice to Limbo. She tells him, in no uncertain terms, that she feels nothing for the tribulations of the damned and cannot be harmed in any way by them or by the destructive agents of the place that contains them (Inf. II.88-93). All she longs to do is to return to her seat in Paradise (Inf. II.71). And when the angelic intercessor arrives to open the gates of Dis, slammed shut against Virgil, we are told that this benign presence has absolutely no interest in the situation of the damned or even of the living Dante. All he desires is to complete his mission and be done with such things (Inf. IX.88; 100-103), reminding us of Beatrice’s similar lack of interest in the damned.
The complex mechanism that Dante has developed to establish what we today, after Henry James, call “point of view” has perhaps not been examined as closely as it should be. If we consider it, we realize how “modern” it is. The essential staging of any scene in Inferno involving a confrontation with a sinner potentially contains some or all of the following voices: (1) the all-knowing narrator, who has been through the known universe (and beyond!) and knows and understands everything a mortal being can understand; (2) Virgil, the wise guide who understands (most of the time) all that an extremely intelligent pagan can understand (which is considerable, if at some times more limited than at others); (3) the gradually more-and-more-informed protagonist, who moves from alarming cowardice and ignorance to relatively sound moral competence and judgment before the Inferno ends; (4) a sinner (sometimes more than one) who may or may not be trying to tell his or her story in a distorted, self-serving way, seeking a better reputation, whether in Dante’s eyes or in the view of posterity. That is a brief morphology of the possible combination of speakers in any given scene. We all should be able to agree that such an arrangement is, if nothing else, complex. If the only speaker were Dante the narrator, we would always know where he (and we) stood. When we reflect that he hardly ever intervenes with moral glosses within scenes, we learn something important about this poem: it will not do our work for us. Most of the speakers are, thus, at best usually reliable, at worst completely unreliable. The gradations of their qualifications may change with every scene. And we are left with the problem of evaluating the result. Let us examine only a single scene to see how this grid of potential understanding functions.
In one of the most celebrated passages in all of literature, Francesca da Rimini tells the protagonist her story (Inf. V.72–142). As is usual, the omniscient narrator tells us nothing but the facts. From him we learn that the protagonist was overcome by pity (72—is this a good or bad thing?); that the sinners look like doves (82–84—what is the “iconography” of these doves, birds of Venus or signs of the Holy Spirit [the two most usual medieval associations for these birds]?); that Francesca and Paolo come from a line of sinners that includes Dido (85—Dido has a pretty rocky medieval reputation as adulteress; does Francesca suffer from guilt by association?); that the protagonist’s summoning call was full of affection and was effective (87—is this to be applauded?). Later, he will tell us that Dante was greatly stirred by Francesca’s first speech (109–111—again, what moral view should we take of his behavior?). And he concludes the canto with the information that Paolo was weeping all through Francesca’s second speech (139–140—what do we make of these tears?) and that the protagonist, filled with pity, collapsed in a faint (141–142—what moral view should we take of that?). The omniscient narrator could have given us answers to all these questions; he is content to raise them (intrinsically, he rarely asks questions outright) and leave them in our minds. Often, and surely in the Romantic era, many readers have thought that we are meant to identify with the protagonist’s view of the scene. And that view, at least, is unambiguous. He is intrigued by the sight of these two handsome shades (73–75), cries out to them with courteous regard for their prerogatives (80–81), bursts into a passionately-felt sense of identification with them (112–114), tells Francesca as much (116–117), and then asks her to spell out exactly how she was overcome by love (118–120). And that is all he says. Of course the narrator tells us that, at the conclusion of Francesca’s words, he faints from pity, perhaps his single most eloquent response. We at least know where he stands.
What of Virgil, Dante’s guide? He only speaks twice, first to assure Dante that these lovers will come if he but summon them in the name of love (77–78—his laconic remark may be read either as a
mere statement of fact or as the world-weary remark of the poet who knows all too much about what my friend John Fleming calls “Carthaginian love,” i.e., the passion that undermines reason, exemplified in Dido, as Virgil himself has told the tale in Aeneid IV). And then he has only one more two-word utterance (in Italian it is the laconic “che pense”): “What are your thoughts?” (111—is he merely asking, seeing Dante so deep in reverie about the lovers, or is he delicately reminding Dante that he should be thinking, rather than feeling, since we have already been told by the narrator [at verse 39] both that the sin of lust makes “reason subject to desire” and that the protagonist has understood this?). Virgil has fewer than three verses of the seventy-one dedicated to the scene. What would he have said if the poet had allotted him more? It is interesting to speculate.
What about Francesca herself, the most loquacious of the four? She has thirty-eight verses to tell her story, well over half of the scene (88–107; 121–138). What she tells is moving and beautiful, like the woman herself, we imagine. In this reader’s view, one common element in both her speeches is that someone or something else is always being blamed for her unhappiness: the God who will not hear her prayers, the god of Love who made Paolo fall in love with her beautiful physical being and made her respond similarly to his, her husband for killing them, the book that, describing an adulterous kiss, encouraged them to engage in an adulterous embrace, and the man who wrote that book. I admit that I am here taking a dour view. Are we meant to read the scene this way? Most people do not. (A. B. Giamatti, with whom I used to converse endlessly about Dante, loved the Romantic reading of this canto. He once cursed me, complaining, “Are you going to try to ruin this scene for me too, Hollander?”) I hope it is clear that we all need to watch more carefully the actual exchanges among the various characters that might help establish a point of view from which we can study the events brought forward in the poem. Whatever else we can say, we should all be ready to admit that this is complicated business. Dante is beautiful, yes, but he is complicated.