A Health Warning
If ever a proverb were made to fit an occasion, it is that coined by the poet Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, that, "fools rush in where angels fear to tread"; and it applies to me; for the more I persist in trying to gain some insight into Dante Alighieri's masterpiece, the more it becomes apparent that I am out of my depth.
It's not that I have been living in a fool's paradise, it's simply that the deeper I dig, the more I sense the limits of my understanding, and the certainty that, for all my endeavour, I will never tarnish the gloss, let alone, "scratch the surface", of this literary masterpiece; a belief reinforced by the fact that I have just finished reading Dante Alighieri: a compilation of writings by distinguished authors, published under the heading Bloom's Modern Critical Views: men and women who, besides being familiar with the Dante canon, are also versed in the literature that went before and has come after; to say nothing of what other like-minded scholars have had to say on the subject.
And just as challenging as I turned the pages, was the greater or lesser sympathy that these contributors had for the reader: where, quotes in the vernacular, Italian, were not guaranteed a translation. And in this context, there is nothing better calculated to put you in you place, than assumptions by the writer, about the reader, that you know were not intended to apply to you. So where they wrote about Dante's Convivio and linked it to The Divine Comedy, not only was I reminded of the limits of my knowledge, but I know also that I had no intention of reading Convivio, or any other work of Dante, as I have several times, in whole and in part, The Divine Comedy. But there is one exception to this belligerence, for I have read in full, and at times been irritated by, Dante's De Monarchia, which is his rationale for supporting the role of the Holy Roman Emperor, as the lawful and divinely ordained authority in things temporal, (politics), thereby refuting the claim of Pope Boniface VIII, who, in his bull Unam Sanctum, stated, that, "It is absolutely necessary for salvation. that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff." (1)
And furthermore, in the light of some of the arguments posited in Bloom's collection, I found myself wondering as to whether or not, in attempting to interpret The Divine Comedy, my Catholicism, (with its inherent assumptions) might, in some respects, have been a hindrance.
And something else that occurred to me while reading the various contributors, is, that I may have made a mistake in refusing to read The Divine Comedy as prose.
In the third of these blogs I have something to say about the structure of the poem, and about the difficulties that are experienced when translating it into English. So some, who were not so much concerned with the poetics of The Divine Comedy, as they were with accurately conveying Dante's thoughts, have presented their translations as prose rather than poetry. And this is a salient point, because not only is The Divine Comedy not a lyrical piece in translations, (as popularly understood), but it is even less so, where stanzas in translation, are at times littered with Italian place and family names.
So why, you might wonder, have I bothered? and, What was the point in wading through Bloom's Modern Critical Views on Dante Alighieri?
Well rather than answer the first question directly, I will content myself with the hope that the answer will become apparent as you read the blogs. As for the second, it goes like this.
I don't deliberately seek out complex texts, but when I come across them and if the subject is important enough, I persevere. And as I write for a global audience and as this poem is unprecedented, it seemed especially important that I should not mislead the reader, but instead, try to explain to the unsuspecting, just how inadequate these blogs are. The fact that they are inadequate, does not mean that they are not worth while, for I use the word inadequate, in recognition of Dante's stature and my own limitations.
So what did I get from Bloom's Modern Critical Views, that you can set alongside my blogs, and know, for certain, that, "A Health Warning" is justified.
Well, here are a few pointers in that direction
1) A consideration of Dante in a broad literary context, and judged by the highest standards, those of his peers.
In that context, Harold Bloom offers this as a general assessment of Dante's significance, and compounds the compliment, by reminding us, that these eminent parsons are not necessarily in agreement with one another:
"Dante's progeny among the writers are his true canonizers, and they are not always an overtly devout medley: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shelley, Rossetti, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Borges, Stevens, Beckett. About all that dozen possesses in common is Dante, though he becomes twelve different Dante's in his poetic afterlife." To which he adds. "This is wholly appropriate for a writer of his strength; there are nearly as many Dante's as there are Shakespeare's".
Again, from Harold Bloom:
"One cannot discuss genius in all the worlds history without centering upon Dante, since only Shakespeare of all geniuses of language, is richer. Shakespeare to a considerable extent remade English: about eighteen hundred words of the twenty-one thousand he employed were his own coinage, and I cannot pick up a newspaper without finding Shakespearean turns of phrase scattered through it, frequently without intention. Yet Shakespeare's English was inherited by him, from Chaucer and from William Tyndale, the principal translator of the Protestant Bible. Had Shakespeare written nothing, the English language, pretty much as we know it, would have prevailed, But Dante's Tuscan dialect became the Italian language largely because of Dante. He is the National poet, as Shakespeare is wherever English is spoken, and Goethe wherever German dominates. No single French poet, nor even Racine or Victor Hugo, is so unchallenged in eminence, and no Spanish-language poet is so central [a]s Cervantes. And yet Dante, though he essentially founded literary Italian, hardly thought of himself as Tuscan, let alone Italian. He was a Florentine, obsessively so, exiled from his city in the last nineteen of his fifty-six years."
3) Interpreting the poem.
To begin with, here is a synopsis of The Poetics of Conversion: a commentary on The Divine Comedy, by John Freccero, whose work also features in Bloom's compilation: a summary that I have taken from Google Books, rather than from my own 1986 edition:
"John Freccero enables us to see the "Divine Comedy" for the bold, poetic experiment that it is. Too many critics have domesticated Dante by separating his theology from his poetics. Freccero argues that to fail to see the convergence of the letter and the spirit, the pilgrim and the poet, is to fail to understand Dante's poetics of conversion. For Dante, body and soul go together and there is no salvation that is purely intellectual, no poetry that is simply literary. . . .Thanks to Freccero we readers have the "Comedy" whole again. Freccero calls upon medieval philosophy, cosmology, science, theology, and poetics to enable us to traverse Dante's moral landscape without losing our way in the confusions of minute exegeses. [critical interpretation] In a secular age Freccero enables us to see the poem as what it is, something wholly other than what we might believe or write. In doing so he shows us the most that language can achieve in any age, secular or not."
Now following from this, and still in the context of interpretation, Harold Bloom, in his chapter entitled: The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice, takes us into that very area of exegesis, when he questions as to whether or not, (as it has been claimed by at least one author), that The Divine Comedy consciously seeks to imitate life.
But before we get to that, and as she figures in Bloom's remarks, I need to say a few words about Beatrice.
In the opening stanzas of the poem, Dante, having strayed from the right path, is lost in a "dark wood" when he meets a stranger, Virgil, who offers to lead him on the right way. But it is not until he convinces Dante that he has been sent by Beatrice, who was concerned about him, that Dante agrees to accept Virgil as his guide.
Elsewhere, Dante tells us that he first set eyes on Beatrice and fell in love with her when he was twelve and she was nine. And though there are those who tell us that "nine" is symbolic, rather than literal, we know that she died in her early twenties, and that Dante, though their relationship was platonic, was so distraught that he sought to console himself by studying the classics.
Now what is significant, in the passages below, in the context of The Divine Comedy "imitating life" is, that Beatrice, who is Dante's creation, comes as it were packaged. We know nothing of the details of her life, or her death. She comes from Heaven, and not withstanding the saints that we meet along the way, her role in the poem is preeminent: she takes over from Virgil in Purgatory and accompanies Dante through the Heavenly spheres to the Empyrean, (the place where God dwells); and all this raises huge question for Harold Bloom, when it comes to interpretation; and if I have understood him correctly ? leads him to conclude that the poem is more about Dante, than about the journey of the soul to God, for he has much to say about Dante's presence in The Divine Comedy, as compared to the absence of Shakespeare, in his works.
"The Purgatorio, in Dante's overt scheme, explores the Catholic argument that desire for God, having been displaced into wrong channels, must be restored through expiation. Dante's boldest assertion throughout his work is that his desire for Beatrice was not a displaced one but always led on to a vision of God. The Comedy is a triumph, and so presumably must be the supreme Western instance of religious poetry. It is certainly the supreme example of a wholly personal poem that persuades many of its readers to believe that they are encountering ultimate truth. Thus even Teodolinda Barolini, in a book professedly written to detheologize Dante, allows herself to say that " the Commedia, perhaps more than any other text ever written, consciously seeks to imitate life, the conditions of human existence."
"The judgement is puzzling. Do the Inferno and the Purgatorio, let alone the Paradiso, seek to "imitate life" more consciously than King Lear or the even the Dante-influenced Canterbury Tales? Whatever Dante's realism may be, it does not give us what Chaucer and Shakespeare bestow upon us: characters who change, even as actual human beings change. Only Dante changes and develops in the Comedy, everyone else is fixed and immutable. Indeed they have to be, because the final judgement has been made upon them. As for Beatrice, as a character in a poem, which is truly all she can be, she is necessarily even more removed from the imitation of life, for what has she to do with the conditions of human existence? Charles Williams, despite his gurulike attitudes, is sounder on this subject than the Dante scholars begin to be, when he observes of the Comedy, "Even that poem was necessarily limited. It does not attempt to deal with the problem of Beatrice's own salvation, and Dante's function there."
4) The Divine Comedy and the question of Truth.
In my Dante moments, (those few thought processes that are outside the norm), and in the context of a desire to know what is true, I have found myself wondering about the nature of the relationship between Christ and Pontius Pilate, and I can't help feeling that in other circumstances they might have been friends. Certainly Christ spoke to Pilate in respectful terms and patiently answered his questions; and Pilate, in asking the question, "What is truth?" (however casually), seems to have had some sense of mystery, of possibilities that lay beyond the limits of his own power and authority, hence a concern to know "What is truth?" So bearing in mind the nature of Christ's response to Herod, and not withstanding the fact that Pilate finally handed Christ over to his executioners, a part of me lives in the hope that Pilate, (who had not been a witness to Christ's teachings, or miracles), is among the redeemed.
Be that as it may, for those who have the religious faith that Dante had, belief in God is the ultimate Truth. Of course it is not a scientific truth, but a personal truth, born of faith and experience. And in respect of his poem, and as a justification for his judgements, Dante claims that it is a divinely inspired prophetic work. Now as to whether or not for Dante, that was a literal truth, or a device calculated to cause the reader to sit up and pay attention, is a matter for speculation, but what we can say for certain is, that the question of what is Truth, for Dante, is a recurring and many layered theme, that at times, draws us in to the philosophical and theological worlds of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and into the sphere of politics.
One such layer, is that moment of self awareness in Purgatory, when, Dante, under relentless questioning from Beatrice is reduced to tears. It is part of that necessary process of cleansing, from the consequences of sin, that Dante, (who is still a mortal), has, like the souls in purgatory, to undergo, before he can pass with Beatrice into Paradise.
A second such layer, has to do with Dante's exile from Florence and his view of the lawful exercise of temporal power, an issue, that as previously mentioned, put him at odds with Pope Boniface VIII. In this regard, it is worth returning to De Monarchia, where Dante, in making his case, argues that the Roman Empire was the lawful authority, (ordained by God), by which Christ would be put to death, from which he extrapolates the view, (supported by scripture)! that the lawful exercise of temporal power resides in the Holy Roman Emperor, to whom lesser rulers must defer, and all of whom, in turn, must recognize the lawful, spiritual authority of the pope. (3)
And a third, among these many layers, (and one that brings us back to an earlier point), comes in the from of a challenge from Teodolinda Barolini, (another contributor to Bloom's Modern Critical Views), who, in characterizing Dante's approach to the pursuit of truth as, "aggressive," identifies what she sees as his awareness of the poem's, "Achilles' heel." In summary, she argues, that Dante's credibility rests on his claim, and the readers willingness to accept it as true, or at least as sincerely held, that the poem is: "a true prophecy vouchsafed by God"; otherwise, he leaves himself open to the charge of being "self-deluded" or "self-promoting" and guilty in his judgements of the very presumption that he is cautioning the reader against: that of claiming to know, "what cannot be known."
And fourth, and last, for now, and still in the context of truth, (and paraphrasing), some observations on the question of truth in interpretation, taken from William Franke's contribution to Bloom, in a chapter headed, Dante's Interpretive Journey: Truth Through Interpretation.
In the context of literature and culture n Dante's day, Franke reminds us that the objective was to affirm the established ultimate truth, from the ultimate source, the Bible, a truth that affected humankind from its beginning to its end. No one, he tells us, was looking for new horizons or "continents" and such was the power of this literary and cultural objective, that it was not unknown for copies of commentaries or revered works to be "substantially augmented" to that end. As for Dante, the fruit of his interpretative journey as expressed in The Divine Comedy, was the affirmation of that truth, to the extent of total submission to the will of God: so as to be in harmony with the cosmos: the Divine plan, as expressed in the final tercet of the poem:
"but already my will and desire were being revolved
as a wheel which is moved uniformly
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
From there Franke brings us to the present day, with our sense of history and scientific understanding and asks, is it possible, in the context of our interpretative journey, to find common cause with him, or is it simply the case that Dante is a dogmatist, with whom no dialogue is possible?
Such a conclusion, he suggests, "would be the case only for a shallow or at any rate unsophisticated understanding of faith." And having first asked the question as to whether or not Dante's metaphysical theology might not have been undermined by his subjective, and at times, highly biased interpretation of history, he suggests a link: a starting point, by reminding us of how much of what we believe to be true, is still based on faith: a faith that may or may not be rational, and that, despite the advance in scientific understanding and our historical sense of place in time.
There are so many truly interesting angles from which this poem has been approached, that I am tempted to list more of them here, but as my purpose in this Introduction has been to persuade the unsuspecting, not to attach too much importance to these blogs, something that I hope I have achieved, I will stop here. The blogs, which are a sharing of my experience, are here to be enjoyed and provide some small insight, and maybe, for the uninitiated, a desire to know more. That said, I will conclude by borrowing from St. Paul, from his letter to the Ephesians, 3:18, on the knowledge and love of God, and apply them to Dante, for there is truly a "breadth and length and height and depth" to his work, that I lack both the capacity and time to exploit, in any truly meaningful sense.
__________
© Cormac McCloskey
Sources used in the composition of these blogs:
The Divine Comedy
Translated by C.H. Sisson
Introduction and Notes: David H. Higgins
(Oxford World's Classics)
Oxford University Press (2008)
ISBN: 978-0-19953564-4
Dante: The Divine Comedy
I: Hell
Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers
Penguin Classics (1953) edition
The Complete Danteworlds
A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy
Guy P. Raffa
University of Chicago Press (2009)
ISBN:10: 0-226-70270-7
The De Monarchia Of Dante Alighieri
Edited With Translation And Notes
by Aurelia Henry (1904)
Facsimile edition
Printed in Great Britain
by Amazon.co.uk Ltd
Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol's 1,3,7,11,14 and 28
in respect of a variety of related topics (1991 edition)
Vol 14: Aristotle. 28: Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
A very Short Introduction
by Jonathan Barnes
Oxford University Press (2000)
ISBN: 978-19-285408-7
BBC Radio 4 archive
In Our Time, 17th September 2009
"Melvyn Bragg discusses the life, works and enduring influence of the medieval philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, with Martin Palmer, John Haldane and Anabel Brett." here
Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Editor, Harold Bloom
Chelsea House Publishers,
Philadelphia U.S.A. (2004)
ISBN: 0-7910--7658-X
The Poetics of Conversion
by John Freccero
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London England (1986)
ISBN: 0-674-19225-7 (alk, paper (cloth)
ISBN: 0-674-19226-5 (paper)
Saint Augustine
City of God
Penguin Books 2003
ISBN-13: 978-8-14-044894-8
Evangelii Gaudium
The Joy of the Gospel
Pope Francis
The Word Among Us press 2013
ISBN : 978-1-59325-262-5Penguin Books 2003
ISBN-13: 978-8-14-044894-8
Evangelii Gaudium
The Joy of the Gospel
Pope Francis
The Word Among Us press 2013
(1) Wikipedia unam sanctam
Virgil (70-19 BC) Regarded as one of Rome's greatest poets
(2) Wikipedia, for an excellent broad sweep of The Divine Comedy, go here
(3) De Monarchia Book II: XIII (13). In the chapter headed "Christ in dying confirmed the jurisdiction of the Roman empire over all humanity", Dante argues the case for the Roman Empire being the lawful authority by which Christ was put to death, (lawful in the sense of having been ordained by God), and at Book II: XIII.4, (13.4) he writes: "Wherefore let those who pretend they are sons of the Church cease to defame the Roman Empire, to which Christ the Bridegroom gave his sanction both at the beginning and at the close of his warfare. And now I believe, it is sufficiently obvious that the Roman people appropriated the Empire of the world by Right."
The next blog in this series will be posted on Wednesday nest 14th Jan.
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