Dante

Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317883364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dante's work has fascinated readers for seven hundred years and has provided key reference points for writing as diverse as that of Chaucer, the Renaissance poets, the English Romantics, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, American writers from Melville through to Eliot and Pound, Anglo-Irish Modernists from Joyce to Beckett, and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Walcott.In this volume, Jeremy Tambling has selected ten recent essays from the mass of Dante studies, and put the Divine Comedy - Dante's record of a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - into context for the modern reader. Topics such as Dante's allegory, his relationship to classical and modern poetry, his treatment of love and of sexuality, his attitudes to Florence and to his contemporary Italy, are explored and clarified through a selection of work by some of the best scholars in the field. An introduction and notes help the reader to situate the criticism, and to relate it to contemporary literary theory. In this anthology, Dante's relevance to both English and Italian literature is highlighted, and the significance of Dante for poetry in English is illuminated for the modern reader.This book provides students of English literature and Italian literature with the most comprehensive collection of important critical studies of Dante to date.

1
An Introduction to the Inferno

KENELM FOSTER OP¹

Kenelm Foster, who died in 1986, taught Italian at Cambridge University and wrote on Dante and on Petrarch. Expert in Thomism and medieval philosophy, deeply responsive to Dante’s poetry, and seeing Dante’s philosophy and theology as not entirely consistent with each other, Foster drew on the work of Nardi, especially Nardi’s demonstrations of Dante’s ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and unorthodoxy, especially as these impinged on Dante’s own commitment to philosophy, as recorded in the prose Convivio (c. 1304). In the Convivio Dante forgets the dead Beatrice, and speaks about the consolations of philosophy as though this was the way towards happiness – and happiness in the Convivio is primarily earthly, not divine. Using Aristotle’s Ethics, Dante has ‘a tendency to regard human life, properly speaking, as … directed to ends attainable on earth, and to relegate to a life after death the whole possibility and process of man’s divinization’.² And what of Dante in the Commedia! Between Christianity and the classical world, which includes Aristotle and Virgil, where do Dante’s sympathies fall? Foster’s The Two Dantes focuses on the Convivio and on Dante’s creation of Limbo in Inferno 4, which Dante developed out of all proportion to the place given to it in Catholic theology, to argue that paganism and Christianity are not wholly reconciled with each other in Dante’s thinking. Foster agrees with the medievalist philosopher Etienne Gilson, who argues that ‘there is a small part of Dante which has never been immersed in the waters of Lethe’³ – Dante does not leave the Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio the wholly complete Christian.

This essay is a model of an introduction in conveying so much and handling so many problems tactfully in a short space, and it becomes a discussion of Virgil’s importance. Why did Dante choose Virgil to be the guide through Hell? Foster meditates on the goal of happiness in this life proposed by Aristotle, and he refers to the allegorizing tendency in the twelfth century, especially in Bernardus Silvestris (f. 1150), to take the Aeneid – Virgil’s epic poem recounting the triumphant journey of Aeneas from Troy to Italy – as an allegory of attaining happiness in the earthly life. Foster suggests that Dante rewrites this, and abandons the Convmio, leaving it unfinished, by himself taking the place of Aeneas in the Commedia, with his journey to Rome as an allegory of reaching the other form of happiness, that which is divine. He suggests that Virgil offered the possibility of mounting an allegory on his work because Virgil had already hinted at the existence of a life beyond death. The instinct in Foster’s argument is to argue that Dante was not basically heterodox, that while he accepted the existence of the Earthly Paradise, he also went beyond that and accepted the existence of the Heavenly Paradise, which included within it, Beatrice, whom Foster also discusses.

Yet Foster’s essay recognises problems. Canto 10 of Inferno, which he discusses, shows the damnation of materialists who deny that there is a life after death. Dante’s friend, Guido Cavalcanti, seems destined for this place, and Cavalcanti seemed to hold to Averroes’s ‘radical Aristotelian’ argument about the soul, that there was no personal immortality. Dante, too, floats Averroist ideas in his writings. Further, after Virgil has guided him so far, Dante makes problematic Virgil’s sudden disappearance from the Earthly Paradise when Beatrice arrives. Virgil cannot enter it, because he was pagan; dying before the birth of Christ (19 BCE). His home is in Limbo; he cannot be saved, but Dante accentuates the difficulty.

Notes

1. Reprinted from The Two Dantes and Other Studies (London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1977) pp. 1–14.

2. The Two Dantes p. 160.

3. Etienne Gilson, Dante and Philosophy trans. David Moore (1949: Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith rept. 1968) p. 98.

Written over the gate of Hell Dante read, ‘The primal love made me’; and long before Dante the fearful paradox expressed in these words had been written indelibly into Christian minds as a mystery which no theologian dared to think he could fully explain. Nor did the great poet, of course, explain it or even try to; but for our part, as readers of the Inferno, we do well to bear in mind that initial extraordinary declaration. Certainly we shall not read aright this third of the Comedy unless we bear in mind both Purgatory and Paradise; or at least have some notion of what Dante conceived goodness to be, before we read his description of evil. Evil can only be the negation of good; it is only conceivable in terms of goodness; and the whole Inferno, from this point of view, is nothing but a picture of the thwarting or destruction of types of goodness which are to be reaffirmed triumphantly in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. I say the Purgatorio also, because the goodness that gives indirectly its meaning to the Inferno is human as well as divine; it is represented by the Earthly Paradise at the end of the Purgatorio as well as by the heavenly Paradise beyond. Indeed, to a large extent it is already represented by the Good Pagans of Limbo (canto IV). As I have said elsewhere, most of the people whom Dante represents as damned ‘would be sinners in any world that was human at all’¹; their guilt, I mean, need not presuppose a specifically Christian standard of judgement. Most of the evil we meet with in the Inferno is ordinary human wickedness which any man, whatever his faith, could in theory recognize as such. Removed from the moral and poetic intensity of its setting in the work, much of it would even seem rather trivial – gluttony, for example, or ill-temper, or flattery, or thieving, or squandering, or various kinds of faking, or fortune-telling. There is nothing ‘mystical’ or sublime about all this. Indeed, everywhere in the Inferno the reader will do well to keep a critical eye on his sense of the admirable; otherwise he may miss the sense intended by the poet, and much of his deep irony. The high heroic colouring of parts of the Inferno belongs to the attitudes assumed by the sinners, not to the sins in themselves. Was Francesca’s adultery admirable in Dante’s eyes? Was Farinata’s materialism heroic? Or Jason’s random seductions, or Pier delle Vigne’s suicide, or Brunetto Latini’s sodomy, or the cunning of Ulysses, or the intrigues and betrayals of Ugolino? If these figures strike us as superb poetic creations, if they touch us as tragic heroes do, we need not suppose, indeed we do better not to suppose, that the poet thought them heroic as sinners. Dante was no romantic but a medieval Catholic with an extremely sharp eye for the irrational in human behaviour. The nobility and dignity of some of the sinners, the pity or admiration they arouse in the Dante who encounters them, these things are part of the action of the Inferno, of its ‘plot’. We should not forget that the Dante who goes through Hell is himself a character in the poem; moreover his character is that of a sinner in the poem (he starts in the dark wood), though in process of conversion and purification. And the point of view of this character is determined by his situation in that process; it cannot, therefore, be the point of view of the poet writing as if post eventum and describing the process. While the process is continuing the character called Dante is subject to feelings of pity and admiration for sinners whom the poet Dante, who selected them as symbols of evil, regarded quite differently. In the traveller Dante’s surrender to the seduction of Francesca, in his eager response to the greatness of Farinata and Ulysses, we must recognise – the plot requires that we do – a good deal of illusion: for according to the plot the traveller is a man still deeply disturbed by evil, still only in the early stages of moral recovery, still undergoing a moral re-education; which will only be completed at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory. Here and now, in Hell, he is undergoing the only remedy left to him, ‘so low had he fallen’; he is being taught to know evil, he is being shown ‘the lost people’ (Purgatorio XXX, 136–8). It was his last chance.

In short, Dante’s Hell is not only a picture of sin as it is (as one man saw it) but of sin as it would like to appear.

And the sin he encounters on his way is, I repeat, largely sin against the light of reason alone, apart from any ‘higher’ considerations. It is wrongdoing very much on the human level and in the give and take of ordinary social intercourse. A strong social emphasis marks the Inferno; and, since the poet was deeply involved in politics and his world was that of the medieval Commune, the more or less self-governing city-state, a strong political emphasis too. It is true that all wrongdoing, however social or political its circumstances, had for Dante a deep religious significance. Since human nature is God’s creation, to injure man is to offend God. And certainly the Inferno could only have been written by a believing Christian. Nevertheless the measure of right and wrong that governs, immediately, the greater part of it is a rational, not a specifically Christian, measure; it is drawn from moral philosophy (especially Aristotle’s) rather than from the Gospels.

A corruption of reason, then, rather than a refusal of grace; not an adequate summary, this, of the content of so rich and subtle a work (but the subtlety is far more in the presentation than in the content, complex though this certainly is) yet it may give us our bearings. We must not expect much explicit Christianity here. It seems a strangely un-Christian world through which pagan Virgil guides his Christian pupil – Virgil, symbol of the soul of man poised in a perfect yet limited equilibrium between animality transcended and divine grace not yet received, though glimpsed from far away and longed for:

tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum

desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,

casta fave Lucina.²

This ‘Virgil’ believes in God. He knows that an original Goodness glows through all creation; moreover he knows how creatures can deny and dishonour that Goodness and besmirch and violate its effects, particularly the noblest effect of which man has experience, his own rational nature. Virgil even knows something of the fall of the angels. ‘Behold Dis’, he says at the end, pointing to Satan; and we can suppose that he, like his pupil, knew that it was through pride that ‘he who was so fair … raised his brow against his Maker’. He is aware too of the Church even if, in the great ecclesiastical canto XIX, he will tactfully step aside and leave that unforgettable indictment of clerical materialism to flow from Catholic lips. But Virgil only knows of the Christian revelation, he has not personally received it; and though familiar with the topography of Hell, there is something about damnation itself that always escapes him. No wonder; never having known God incarnate, how could he understand a condition which is only definable as the consequence of a rejection of that God?

But one might ask whether Dante himself assessed it in these terms; for certainly, as I have said, all specifically Christian concepts remain, through much of the Inferno, well in the background. But two reasons can be given for this. First, as a medieval Christian Dante was not in the least inclined, as the modern reader is, to find the very idea of damnation unacceptable. He could take the idea for granted, and this left him free to elaborate it in his own way, a very personal and original way. And secondly, this distinctively Dantean way of representing evil was naturally coloured by the poet’s temperament and special interests and experiences. An obvious point, to be sure; but worth some attention in detail. Two minor stresses and a major one are discernible in this Dantean ‘way’. The first appears in canto III, in the very characteristic contempt for the neutrals, for the inert ‘who never were alive’; and it led to three lines (37–9) of rather queer theology.

Another relatively minor stress, though more frequent and important, can be felt in Dante’s strictures on the clergy, which, after some preliminary sniping in cantos VII and XI, rise to a crescendo in canto XIX, and again in canto XXVII. It would be misleading to call Dante an anticlerical, but he was very much disposed to find fault with priests, or at any rate with prelates; and there were political as well as religious reasons for this. As for the major stress, which is Dante’s dominating and pervasive concern in the Inferno with injustice, this was affected through and through by his political experience and especially by the circumstances which led to his banishment from Florence early in 1302. It is true that behind Dante’s concern with political justice was a purely religious impulse, such as breaks through, magnificently, in canto XIX; but on the surface at least the chief moral theme of the Inferno is social justice in the human order. The concept of justice can serve, in fact, as the key to the poem’s moral pattern, at least from canto XI onwards.

This pattern may strike us as strange, and it is certainly an original one so far as the bulk of Hell, comprising the whole of the City of Dis (i.e. from canto IX to the end) is concerned. Outside that city – if we exclude the neutrals and Limbo (cantos III and IV) – Dante seems to have been working with the traditional Christian scheme of the seven ‘capital vices’, the scheme he was later to use for the Purgatorio. But from canto IX on (omitting the heretics of canto X, who form a group apart – an important one as we shall see) Dante is using a scheme of his own based on an analysis of injustice, a vice not included in the traditional seven vitia capitalia. This new scheme represents in the main a free handling of Aristotle’s Ethics, blended with a pregnant hint from Cicero’s De Officiis and having the Bible as its presupposed background. As expounded, drily and lucidly, by Virgil in canto XI it all centres on one term, malizia, understood as a force aimed against one or other aspect of total reality – one’s own self, or other men, or the order of nature, or God. Malizia indeed is virtually injustice in the widest sense of the term. Its special ‘end’ is ingiuria, ‘wrong done to someone’ (‘injury’ would be too weak a rendering); and the wrong is done, Virgil continues (and here comes in the hint from Cicero) either by violence (forza) or by craft (frode); which are then correlated as respectively less or more evil and analysed into subdivisions. Craft is worse than violence as involving a deeper corruption in the agent, a misuse of the gift of reason that both defines man and is his special likeness to God. When crafty malizia is aimed against one who ‘trusts’ the wrongdoer it becomes tradimento, ‘betrayal’, the sin of those damned to the icy lake at Hell’s base. But the extreme of tradimento is to betray one’s benefactor; hence ingratitude is the worst sin of all; its embodiment is Satan who had been the fairest work of God (cf. Paradiso XIX, 46–8). From another point of view Satan’s sin was pride, and this aspect is stressed in the Paradiso (ibid.) but in the pattern of the Inferno it is rather an ultimate ingratitude, a total break off from and scorn of the primal Love, which is symbolised in that frozen and ferocious colossus of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Dante and Modern Criticism
• 1 An Introduction to the Inferno
• 2 Inferno: Fame and Children
• 3 Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia
• 4 Shipwreck: Interpretation and Alterity
• 5 Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante’s Comedy
• 6 ‘Nostro Peccato Fu Ermafrodito’: Dante and the Moderns
• 7 An Introduction to the Paradiso
• 8 Theology and Exile
• 9 The Conclusion of Dante’s Commedia
• 10 ‘Significar per verba’: Notes on Dante and Plurilingualism
• Glossary of Terms
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• Index to Names and Subjects