From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  Abulafia bemoans the fact that, during the course of their exile, his people have forgotten their own original language, and his project is naturally for the Kabbalist to work toward the recovery of the true matrix of all seventy languages. It is the Messiah who will finally reveal the secrets of the Kabbalah, and the differences between languages will cease at the end of time, when all the existing languages will be reabsorbed into the Sacred Language.

  Once again, we find that the positions of Abulafia and Dante have something in common. For Abulafia there existed an equation between the Torah and the Active Intellect, and the schema according to which God had created the world coincided with the linguistic gift he had given to Adam, a kind of generative matrix of all languages that did not yet coincide with Hebrew. We find, then, on the one hand, Averroistic influences in Abulafia, which lead him to believe in a single Active Intellect common to all mankind, and, on the other, undeniable and proven Averroistic sympathies in Dante—the conception, for instance, that Nardi (1985: ch. V) sees as having its origins in Avicenna and Augustine, of a divine Wisdom that offers its forms to the Possible Intellect. The Modistae too (especially the group based in Bologna) and other defenders of a universal grammar were no strangers to the Averroistic tradition. So here we have a shared philosophical position that (without insisting on a direct influence) might incline both thinkers to consider the gift of tongues as the handing-down of a forma locutionis, a generative matrix comparable to the Active Intellect.

  This is not all. Historically speaking, Hebrew, for Abulafia, had been the protolanguage, but the Chosen People, in the course of the Diaspora, had forgotten that original language. Therefore, as Dante will say in the Paradiso, at the time of the confusion of Babel the tongue of Adam was “all extinct.” Idel (1989) quotes an unpublished manuscript by a disciple of Abulafia which says:

  Anyone who believes in the creation of the world, if he believes that languages are conventional, he must also believe that they are of two types: the first is Divine, i.e., agreement between God and Adam, and the second is natural, i.e., based on agreement between Adam, Eve and their children. The second is derived from the first, and the first was only known to Adam and was not passed on to any of his offspring except for Seth, whom he bore in his likeness and his form. And so, the tradition reached Noah. And the confusion of the tongues during the generation of the dispersion [at the tower of Babel] occurred only to the second type of language, i.e., to the natural language. (Idel 1989: 17)

  If we bear in mind that the term “tradition” refers to the Kabbalah, then the passage quoted is once more alluding to a linguistic knowledge, to a forma locutionis as a collection of rules for the construction of different languages.

  If the original form is not a language, but the universal matrix of all languages, this confirms the historical mutability of Hebrew itself, but also the hope that that original form can be rediscovered and made to bear fruit once again (in different ways, obviously, for Dante and Abulafia).

  All these remarks would make more sense if it could be demonstrated that Dante was familiar with Hebrew Kabbalistic thought and with Abulafia in particular.

  Abulafia had come to Rome in 1260 and had stayed on in Italy until 1271, when he returned to Rome with the idea of converting the pope. Then he continued on to Sicily, where we lose track of him toward the end of the 1290s. His ideas, then, undoubtedly influenced Italian Jewish circles. In fact in 1290 we witness a debate between Hillel of Verona (who probably met Abulafia twenty years earlier) and Zerakhya of Barcelona, who arrived in Italy at the beginning of the 1270s (cf. Genot-Bismuth 1988: ch. II). Hillel, who had been frequenting intellectual circles in Bologna, writes to Zerakhya with a question first broached by Herodotus, that is, what language would a child brought up deprived of linguistic stimuli express itself in? For Hillel (who appears not to be aware, or chooses to ignore, that Abulafia had been of a different opinion), the child would express itself in the same Hebrew that had originally been given to man as part of his very nature. In his reply Zerakhya accuses him of having surrendered to the sirens of the “uncircumscised” of Bologna. The sounds produced by a child who had not been exposed to a linguistic education, he objects, would be similar to the barking of a dog, and it cannot be argued that the sacred language was given to man by his very nature, because the aptitude man possesses for language is merely potential, and the only way he learns to speak is through the education of his phonatory organs.13

  This exchange is sufficient to demonstrate that Abulafia’s themes were debated on the Italian peninsula, to be precise in the same Bolognese circles that influenced Dante (and where, according to Corti (1981), he might have picked up a number of ideas concerning the forma locutionis). But the research of Genot-Bismuth supplies additional details about the period, in which we encounter a certain Yehudi Romano, who lectured to his coreligionists on Dante’s Comedy, or Lionello di Ser Daniele who will do likewise, using a copy of the Comedy transliterated into Hebrew, to say nothing of a figure like Immanuel of Rome who, in his own poetic compositions, seems almost to parody Dante’s themes, as if he were nursing the ambition of writing an anti-Comedy in Hebrew.14

  We are not talking simply about the influence of Dante on Italian Jewish circles. Genot-Bismuth proves that the influences went both ways, going so far as to posit a Jewish origin for the theory of the four senses of Scripture mentioned in Dante’s Epistle XIII—a bold thesis, when we think of the abundance of Christian sources Dante had at his disposal on that subject. Far less extravagant, and in many ways more convincing, is her thesis that Dante may have caught echoes of the Hillel-Zerakhya polemic in Bologna in the years following.

  We might conclude that in the DVE Dante comes close to the position espoused by Hillel (or by Hillel’s Christian inspirers, as Zerakhya suggested in his rebuttal), while in Paradiso XXVI he has become converted to Zerakhya’s thesis, which was also that of Abulafia—though it is also true that, by the time he came to write the DVE, Dante could already have been familiar with both opinions.

  Though Genot-Bismuth is able to document in detail a number of Jewish contributions to historiography that would appear as echoes and suggestions in the De regimine principium of Giles of Rome, it is enough for our purposes to recognize the existence of an intellectual climate in which ideas circulated as part of a constant polemic, made up of written and oral debates, between Church and Synagogue (cf. Calimani 1987: ch. VIII). Assuredly if, before the Renaissance, a Christian thinker had come close to embracing Hebrew doctrine, he would never have admitted it publicly. Like the Christian heretics, the Jewish community belonged—as Le Goff (1988) cogently puts it—to a category of outcasts that the official Middle Ages seemed to detest and admire simultaneously, with a mixture of fascination and fear, keeping them at a distance, but making sure the distance was close enough for the outcasts to be within reach. “What it called its charity towards them was like the attitude of a cat playing with a mouse” (Le Goff 1988: 316).

  Before its rehabilitation by the Humanists, Christian notions of the Kaballah were hazy, and it tended to be lumped together with the black arts. On the other hand, it has been suggested (Gorni 1990: ch. VII) that Dante refers a little too insistently to various divinatory and magical arts (astrology, chiromancy, physiognomy, geomancy, pyromancy, hydromancy and, of course, necromancy). He appears to have been somehow familiar with an underground and marginalized culture of which the Kabbalah was confusedly a part, at least in popular opinion.

  Thus, the interpretation of the forma locutionis as a universal matrix of language, even without referring it directly back to the Modistae, becomes still more persuasive.

  The only drawback is that, in the absence of concrete proof of these contacts, this is all merely conjecture—as Busi (2004) pointed out in his review of Debenedetti Stow’s (2004) book on Dante and Jewish mysticism, for whom the hypotheses we have just set forth are the object of passionate conviction, a conviction that results in her treating a number of hyp
otheses as if they were proofs.

  Still, when all we have to work with are the texts, certain textual analogies, while they cannot be taken as irrefutable proofs, deserve nevertheless to be stressed, if for no other reason than to encourage further research.

  We may close by imagining that, on his journey to Paradise—the one he took post mortem, not his literary journey—Dante actually met Abulafia. They may even be conversing amiably together at this very moment, smiling indulgently perhaps at the efforts we have been making to discover whether they had anything in common. And if at a certain point Adam too were to join in the conversation, it would be fascinating to discover what language the three of them were using to make themselves understood. But since the present author is somewhat skeptical concerning the existence of a Perfect Original Language, he prefers to think that the Angels will no doubt provide state-of-the-art simultaneous translation.

  A reworking of “Forma locutionis” published in Vattimo (1992), which also appeared in English, with the title “The Perfect Language of Dante,” in Eco (1995) and, in a somewhat different form, as “Languages in Paradise,” in Eco 1998b.

  1. Or again: “Nihil est enim aliud loqui ad alterum, quam conceptum mentis alteri manifestare” (“For to talk to someone else means precisely to make known one’s thoughts to them”) (Summa Theologiae I, 107, 1.). This idea of a relationship with another person or persons reappears in various other authors.

  2. Biblical quotes, here and elsewhere, are from the King James Version.

  3. “Oportuit ergo genus humanum ad comunicandum inter se conceptiones suas aliquod rationale signum et sensuale habere; quia, cum de ratione accipere habeat et in rationem portare, rationale esse oportuit; cumque de una ratione in aliam nichil deferri possit nisi per medium sensuale, sensuale esse oportuit; quare, si tantum rationale esset, pertransire non posset; si tantum sensuale, nec a ratione accipere, nec in rationem deponere potuisset. Hoc equidem signum est ipsum subiectum nobile de quo loquimur: nam sensuale quid est, in quantum sonus est; rationale vero, in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad placitum” (DVE I, iii, 2–3). “So it was necessary that the human race, in order for its members to communicate their conceptions among themselves should have some signal based on reason and perception. Since this signal needed to receive its contents from reason and convey it back there, it had to be rational; but, since nothing can be conveyed from one reasoning mind to another except by means perceptible to the senses, it had also to be based on perception. For, if it were purely rational, it could not make its journey; if purely perceptible, it could neither derive anything from reason nor deliver anything to it. This signal, then, is the noble foundation that I am discussing, for it is perceptible, in that it is a sound, and yet also rational, in that this sound, according to convention, (ad placitum) is taken to mean something” (Dante 1996: I, iii, 2, p. 7. Subsequent citations in English are from Steven Botterill’s translation (Dante 1996). Botterill’s facing Latin text is based on the critical text established by Mengaldo (1979).

  4. “Qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur, nisi culpa presumptionis humane dissipata fuisset, ut inferius ostendetur. Hac forma locutionis locutus est Adam; hac forma locutionis locuti sunt omnes posteri eius usque ad edificationem turris Babel, que ‘turris confusionis’ interpretatur; hanc formam locutionis hereditati sunt filii Heber, qui ab eo dicti sunt Hebrei. Hiis solis post confusionem remansit, ut Redemptor noster, qui ex illis oriturus erat secundum humanitatem, non lingua confusionis, sed gratie, frueretur. Fuit ergo hebraicum ydioma illud quod primi loquentis labia fabricarunt” (DVE I, vi, 4–7).

  5. Maria Corti’s thesis has been challenged, especially by Pagani (1982) and by Maierù (1983): (i) there is no convincing proof that Dante knew Boethius of Dacia’s work, (ii) in a number of instances Corti draws untenable analogies between the two texts, and (iii) the linguistic notions we find in Dante were already circulating among other philosophers and grammarians even before the thirteenth century. Even if we grant the first two points, however, there still remains the third, that the idea, that is, of a universal grammar enjoyed wide circulation in medieval culture and, as none of Corti’s critics has placed in doubt, Dante was familiar with these discussions. To say, as Maierù says, that there was no need to be acquainted with Boethius’s writings to know that “grammar is one and the same in all languages, even though there may be surface variations,” because the same affirmation is already to be found in Roger Bacon, is if anything proof that Dante could indeed have been thinking of a universal grammar.

  6. It was thought in the Middle Ages that the panther had a richly perfumed breath and left a trace of its passage wherever it had been. But, for the hunters who attempted to entrap it, it was practically impossible to locate. So they would smell its perfume but never succeed in catching it. This explains how the panther became a metaphor for poetry itself.

  7. See in Marmo (1994: 124, n. 39) the interesting reference to Simon of Faversham, who claimed that there exists in language a difference between natural signification and positive (or conventional) signification.

  8. “The tongue I spoke was all extinct before Nimrod’s race gave their mind to the unaccomplishable task; for no product whatever of reason—since human choice is renewed with the course of heaven—can last forever. It is a work of nature that man should speak, but whether in this way or that nature then leaves you to follow your own pleasure. Before I descended to the anguish of Hell the Supreme Good from whom comes the joy that swathes me was named I on earth, and later He was called El; and that is fitting, for the usage of mortals is like a leaf on a branch, which goes and another comes” (Dante 1961: 379).

  9. Even a contemporary Hebrew scholar like André Chouraqui translates: “Poétisez pour Elohim, chantez son nom; frayez passages au chevalier des nues: Yah est son nom! Exultez en face di lui!”

  10. I am reminded of that nineteenth-century congressman from Texas who opposed the introduction of foreign language teaching in the schools declaring: “If English was good enough for the Lord Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me!”

  11. All my information about Abulafia and the quotations that below come from Idel (1988a–c, 1989).

  12. Other Kabbalists point out that Christians are lacking the letter heth and the Arabs do not have the pe; and in the Renaissance Yohanan Alemanno will be of the opinion that the variations in pronunciation with regard to the twenty-two Hebrew letters are comparable to the sounds made by the different animals (some are like the grunt of a pig, others like the croak of a frog, others still like the honking of a crane). So that the very fact that they produce different sounds reveals that the other languages belong to peoples who have abandoned the proper conduct of life. In this sense, the multiplication of letters is considered to be one of the results of the confusion of Babel. Alemanno is aware of the fact that other peoples have recognized their own languages as the best in the world, and he cites Galen, for whom the Greek tongue is the most pleasing and the most respondent to the laws of reason, but, not daring to contradict him, he admits that this is because there are affinities between Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Assyrian.

  13. Zerakhya uses a proof that we shall encounter after the Renaissance in other, Christian authors—cf. Brian Walton, In Biblia polyglotta prolegomena (1657) or Francisco Vallesio, De sacra philosophia (1652)—if the divine gift of an original sacred language had ever been made, every human being, no matter what their mother tongue, would have to have an innate knowledge of the sacred language as well.

  14. See Romano (2000). Cf. Battistoni (1995, 1999).

  8

  The Use and Interpretation of Medieval Texts

  8.1. The Modernity of a Paleo-Thomist

  In 1920 Jacques Maritain published Art et scolastique (Art and Scholasticism)1 a slim volume containing 115 pages of text and 73 pages of notes (the most important of which are given titles of their own in the book’s table of contents). In it the author assumed (i) that a medieval school of aesthetic though
t, attributable in particular to Thomas Aquinas, had existed, and (ii) that this same school of thought was still sufficiently relevant to account for various aspects of contemporary modern art. Let us recall the climate of the time: avant-garde movements had been coming one after the other for forty years; French philosophy was washing down the last scraps of positivism with a strong draft of Bergsonism; Neo-Scholasticism, after its nineteenth-century revival, was still flourishing in the episcopal seminaries, in perpetual polemic against contemporary thought, which for its part paid it not the slightest bit of attention.

  If, on the other hand, we can speak today of a medieval aesthetic school of thought, and if no one believes any longer that the allusions to the beautiful contained in the Summae and Commentaria were simply scattered and shapeless flotsam left over from the repertory of ancient philosophy, it was not so pacifically accepted, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, that the Middle Ages had had an aesthetic vision of its own (with differences and nuances from one thinker to another and from one historical moment to another). People persisted in believing that the object of investigation known today as the medieval school of aesthetic thought did not exist. Furthermore, its texts did not exist either, since the texts that are today recognized as such were understood at the time to be discussions of metaphysics or physics or of the banal rules and regulations of technical rhetoric.

  There had of course been plenty of orthodox Neo-Thomistic thinkers, who had reconstructed, shrewdly at times, at other times more ingenuously, the aesthetic themes present in Thomas’s work, presenting their reconstructions as theoretically valid for the modern world (driven by a Neo-Thomistic faith in the philosophia perennis). But, on the one hand (and unlike Maritain), they had not attempted comparisons between medieval texts and the artistic problems of later centuries, and, on the other (providing Maritain with a series of negative examples), they had usually oscillated between historiographical reconstruction and their own theoretical projects, so that it was not always easy to tell when it was Thomas speaking and when it was them.2 In any case, we had to wait until 1946 for the fundamental and historiographically correct texts of De Bruyne and Pouillon to appear. We will come to them in due course.