ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 1 - Introduction [September 4, 2008]

Chapter 1. Introduction: A Circle of Knowledge [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I'm going to give a short class, what is known a short class, they
call it it's an old idea. They used to call it lectio brevis, short class. I just want to give you a little
introduction to what the course will be like and an introduction also about the context of within
which Dante thrives, Dante grows, and writes this poem of his. A poem, that as you know, is called
the Divine Comedy. It's not really the title Dante gives to the poem. Dante called the poem simply
"comedy." "Divine" is the adjective, the epithet that the readers in through centuries have
assigned to it, to indicate both what struck them as this sublime quality of this text, and also the
content. It deals, after all, the fundamental theme of the poem is the encounter of a pilgrim, an
ordinary man, who you'll see, lived in the thirteenth century or the fourteenth century and who
imagines this journey to God. So it's divine also because of this particular content.
It's the it's a journey, it's a quest from nothing less than seeing God face to face and come back to
talk about it. Not just seeing God and be overwhelmed by it and dazzled by it, as probably is the
what do we know and it's most of the the tradition of visionary literature, this is really about
writing the poem about this fundamental experience. So we'll be reading this poem, and if I had to
give you something of a genre it's very difficult to speak of genres. Is it an epic? Is it an
autobiography? Is it a romance? I think it's all of the things above. It's all of these things and
probably the best way to talk about it is that it is an encyclopedia. What does the word mean? The
word means a circle of knowledge. It's an old classical idea, it was made I could tell you it was
made available in times in by an architect by the name of Vitruvius wrote actually and talked
about encyclopedia. It really means this, as I said, the circle of knowledge, in the sense that to know
you have to have a point of departure. And that the point of departure will take you along all the
various disciplines of the so-called liberal arts, and then they take you right back to where you
started. The beginning and the end in a liberal education will have to coincide. You are going to find
out things that now you will see with a different view, from a different standpoint, a different
perspective.
Dante writes an encyclopedia, which also means an ordering of the tradition of exactly the so-called
liberal arts. What are the liberal arts? Why are they called liberal? They are called liberal to
distinguish them from the so-called mechanical arts. This is an old medieval distinction and they're
called liberal also because the aim of these arts is to free us. It's as if knowledge has in itself the
power to give us some kind of freedom. Free us from all sorts of various sorts of tyranny. The
tyranny of action, above all, the tyranny of having to do things with your hands that will distract
you from the great aims and great aims are theory, contemplation, and thinking.
The liberal arts, what are these liberal arts? The liberal arts are so called the arts of words; they
distinguish them between arts of words, and arts of number. The arts of words are the grammar,
fundamental, which encompasses also poetry and history. They are they are dialectics and
rhetoric. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion; dialectics being the art of deciding what the truth of a
statement may be. It's really the most difficult of these arts. Then there are the arts of numbers. The
arts of numbers are arithmetic, geometry, music; it's based on rhythm, on number, and then
astronomy. The aim of these liberal arts would be ethics; it would be also theology, metaphysics and
then theology.
This is the way the Divine Comedy is actually structured as I'm going to show you as we're going to
read this the poem. The implication of calling the Divine Comedy an encyclopedia is that clearly
it deals with education. You cannot have an encyclopedia you do have the Encyclopedia
Britannica which gives you all the possible interesting, important items provided in a very
disconnected way, according to the laws of the alphabet. But the aim of the encyclopedia is really to
educate the readers. So, Dante actually shows, in this sense it's an autobiography. The poem is an
autobiography; it shows the process by which he comes to know the world around him.
So we are going to talk about things that have to do with politics, that have to do with questions that
Dante raises all the time. What is justice in the world? How do the claims of justice go along with
the realities of passions and conflicting, the collision of conflicting desires, conflicting parties and
so on? But also, we'll be talking about ethics, agency. Am I do I know things and because I know
things I'm all right, or are my problems a little bit different because my will is really weak? It's an
old idea, the weakness of the will, and if I know what I should be doing we all know we should
be just. That doesn't really make us just, right? We have will be a kind of frailty, a vulnerability
to wanting to do things that we normally should be doing. We even know that we shouldn't do them.
We talk of Dante raises some of these issues in a very lucid, and I think, a most probing manner
possible.
Then he goes on writing this poem, which is as you know, written about going into hell literally, and
trying to rectify the belief that you can really get out of it and rearrange the old your vision about
the world and about yourself. Because every time you talk about ethics and every time you talk
about politics, the real question is who am I and what am I doing in order to come to some kind of
understanding of the world around myself. We'll be talking about some of these issues in detail and
reading in a very unassuming way without any all the various cantos that are indicated in your
in the syllabus.

Chapter 2. Dante in a Historical Context [00:07:28]

Let me go to the other part, which is really probably the most concrete part. This is I gave you
the general scheme of the lectures. Let me just talk about the concrete context of Dante's life, the
contour of his life. Who is this man? How did he end up writing a poem that seven centuries or
more after he wrote it, is still read, and still been thought of as one of the major contributions that a
human being can make to a culture. Well he was born, as you know, probably in 1265 in a city
called Florence. A city that, by the time Dante was of school age, had 70,000 people. Seven
thousand these are little details to impress you about how crucial, how important that city was;
7,000 boys and girls who go to school; public schools were available to them. Dante was one of
these people.
He was born in a family that was somehow he claimed nobility and what not, but actually was an
impoverished family and he was even slightly embarrassed by the activities of his own father. He
never mentions him, but we do know by poems that others had written against him, attacking him
and attacking his genealogy, accusing the father of loan being involved in the loan and the kind
of usury activities activities of a usurer, lending money at a high, very high interest and so on.
When he Dante two events happened to him, private events happened to him, when he was a
child. The first is, by the time he was eight years old, his mother died. The second, a little bit
connected with it, is the fact that when he was nine years old, he will tell us later, he met a young
woman. He doesn't even know what her name is, that's the fiction of his own works, he knew
because she actually was a neighbor, he calls her Beatrice. The way he goes on transferring all the
love that he felt or wanted from his mother onto this young woman we don't know, unless we were
just involved in some kind of psychoanalytical speculations about his life. The facts we don't know,
however, he does talk about her as if she were a mother to him. He describes her in the poem in
very maternal language and a language of great generosity; the generosity of love actually.
These are the two events then he goes to school in Florence. The school of all his teachers
he'll have only one that he'll really will point out and will remember forever, a man by the name
of Brunetto Latini, we'll see him later in Hell. I like a lot of students they all want to send their
teacher to hell, but not you of course, but this was he does. Who was this man? Why was he so
important for Dante? Brunetto Latini would call him he's still talked about if you happen to
go to Florence and you read this kind of memorial stones that are all are everywhere on the walls
of the city, he was one of those who civilized the city of Florence. What was he doing? What did he
do actually? Well he was a rhetorician first of all, in the mode of Ciceronian the Ciceronian
tradition. A rhetorician, as we say of men who believed that politics and rhetoric go hand in hand.
That rhetoric is the art of persuasion within the parliament, within the streets of the city, where large
decisions can be made and can be reached. This was the essential work of Brunetto Latini, Dante
styles himself after Brunetto Latini.
Because Brunetto Latini was not only a great teacher, he actually translated and commented works
that we have by Cicero on rhetorical works of Cicero. In the belief that really the political problems
are ultimately problems of speech, problems of argument. But he also was a traveler. He went to
we do know that he went to Toledo, the city of Toledo in Spain. He did bring in translations of
Avveroistic texts. I will explain all these terms as we go on. Dante admires him especially because
he stands for the sort of teacher who gets involved in political the political realities of Florence.
Dante wants to follow him in turn.
Eventually, he would meet Beatrice again, writes a great poem inspired by her, which we'll be
looking at next time called the Vita nuova. The teacher his teacher Brunetto Latini will die and
Dante decides to enter we are already in 1290, decides to enter political life himself. It was his
biggest mistake. It was his biggest mistake because political life in Florence really meant being in
the throes of harsh partisan battles between the so-called Guelfs and Ghibellines. The issues are not
so clear-cut. The Guelfs supposedly are those who really believe in the loyalty to the Church. The
others, the Ghibellines, also believe in the loyalty to the empire. The two institutions of the time,
things are not that clear-cut as that as sharply separable as that. We'll talk about some of the
details about this. But Dante becomes an ambassador for the city of Florence, the way Brunetto had
become an ambassador for the city of Florence and he goes a little bit everywhere. He's sent to the
Pope in the year 1302; he's sent to the Pope on an embassy and he never makes it back to Florence.
Machinations had taken place so that he would be banned from the city. Not only banned from the
city, his property is confiscated and there is the threat on him, that should he return and should he
get caught he would actually be put to death.
The year 1302 is the beginning of Dante's new education and new experience. He goes into exile, an
exile which at the time was thought to be, nothing less than the fiercest condemnation on anybody.
Because we are that's the medieval idea, we are the value of each and every one of us depends
on the position that we occupy within the city. To be without a city, not be a holder of a place within
the city, means that one is actually nothing. So he goes literally begging from one city to another.
Maybe he even traveled as far as Paris, we don't know that, but exile though it turned out to be a
harsh punishment, turned out to be also nothing less than a blessing, a blessing in disguise because
it removed Dante from any sense of loyalty to partisan viewpoints. He was no longer to be a Guelf
or a Ghibelline, he was no longer caught in these internecine wars, he now became nothing less than
one who could occupy a transcendent viewpoint.
This is what the story of the Divine Comedy is. How does one go from perceiving the world that
armed oneself in this partial, provisional, fragmentary manner, how can one be pulling it together?
The Divine Comedy is the story of exile being the removal of oneself from the city; in order to best
see what the problems of cities can be. He ended his life in the year 1321 in a city called Ravenna
where he was buried. So that's he the way he wrote the poem was in exile. The poem came
out of his experience of exile. He begins his life as an exile, but I think a philosophical text called
The Banquet, in the tradition of well the title of the Symposium on ethics. He abandons his
project, starts a project on language trying to find a unified, a possibility of unifying all the
languages of Italy, writes a political text about the necessity of unifying the world with this empire,
the monarch, finishes that, but the real process of unification of all his experiences really is with the
Divine Comedy. And we'll be reading that in a couple of days. That's all I have to say to you.

Chapter 3. General Housekeeping [00:17:16]

Let me see if there are some questions and then I'll try to answer those. Yes?
Student: [Inaudible] for the final paper?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: What is the question again?
Student: When is the final paper due?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The final paper is due within two weeks of the end of classes. The
question was when is the final paper due?
Student: How important is the knowledge of the Italian language?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: How important is the knowledge of Italian language? The course is
in English. We are reading the translation with the original text by the side. If you can read it in
Italian good. If you want to write the paper in Italian you are welcome to do so, but the course is
going to be we are treating the poem as if it were an English poem. After all, as someone says,
Dante's an American poet, maybe we could explore that too. Other questions? Okay, we'll see you
on Tuesday.
[end of transcript]
Lecture 2 - Vita Nuova [September 9, 2008]
Chapter 1. An Introduction to Vita nuova and Its Autobiographical Structure
[00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Today we'll be discussing, and a little bit in haste of course,
because I haven't got much time to do this, but we'll devote the whole class to the Vita nova or
nuova, as it is called which is Dante's first work. I was going to say "first finished work," but in a
way, it's not a finished work. It is a deliberately unfinished work. Dante doesn't really finish many
of his works. He interrupts them; he breaks off and decides to move on to do other things. This is
the case with the philosophical Banquet, this text of ethics that he goes on writing once he's in exile.
It's true for the text on language, the so-called De vulgari eloquentia, about the vulgar language, a
second book he just won't go on. But it's also true, in a way, for the Vita nuova to know that ends
with a vision, but we do not know what's going to happen after that. This is there is a kind of
suspension about it, but this is the first work, let's call it, full work, that Dante writes.
The title means a "new life"; though new or new life, so it means probably youth; that describes the
story, an autobiographical account, the lover, the poet who falls in love with Beatrice. You may
remember I called it the first decisive event happening in his early life immediately after his
mother's death and describes the story of this love for Beatrice who then in the narrative dies. And
he goes he, the pilgrim, lover, poet, goes on recording the confusion, the sense of loss that ensues
this event of the death of Beatrice. His betrayals become an ethical drama, as most lyrical poetry of
the Middle Ages does, they're always dealing with treacherous presences, with betrayals, with
infidelity, etc., and then he ends up having a final vision. So it's youth, it's the new life meets, above
all youth, but youth means many other things which I think the narrative will go on the meanings
of which I think the narrative will sustain.
"New," in Italian, means surprising, unexpected, even strange, novel, marvelous, it's and it
therefore gives a kind of direction to the way we should be reading the story. Its primarily, well all
of these meanings are true and it's an autobiography, or what do we call, or we'll come to the
description of what an autobiography is, it's also what we call a novel of the self. Another way of
speaking about autobiography which literally means I write about myself. So let me say a few
things about this structure, this autobiographical structure, this form of problems before we get into
the narrative as such. From one point of view we might all agree easily that if you knew that this is
it belongs the Vita nuova belongs to the mode of Provenal poets, who would all write what
they would call, "vida" life. It's just a word that lingers, continues in Spanish, "life." So they
would write their poems and they would append a brief account of their lives. This is true for Jaufr
Rudel, they all would do that when they would publish their poems.
So let's say that Dante is writing about himself, and inserting the poems as part of the texture of his
own life. As an autobiography, though, the text echoes, and is modeled on, the most important
autobiography written in the Middle Ages. In fact, it's written by one who can be called the founder
of the autobiographical genre and it is St. Augustine, who writes as you know, the Confessions. A
confession, which is a witnessing, which is it's really the story of his life, from his childhood in
Africa, his growing up as a gifted young rhetorician, philosopher turned rhetorician, who then
moves to Rome where he becomes a teacher despised and paid by his students, moves on to Milan
and the whole narrative climaxes with a conversion. In fact, the whole idea of an autobiography for
Augustine is that it is it coincides with, it is coextensive, with a conversion. He writes he
achieves this conversion in a garden in Milan, it's a narrative that we may have at some point a
chance to go to and look at it in some detail and then goes on writing a hermeneutics of the biblical
Genesis as if the new life that he found, through the conversion, could only literally issue into a
commentary about all beginnings; Genesis is the beginning of all beginnings as it were.
After we say this and we say and I can say that Augustine writes in the full awareness that in
effect autobiography has to be the same thing as a conversion because autobiography demands two
voices all the time. It's necessarily ambivalent; it demands the voice of the narrator who is outside
of the narrative and who can look back in fact the mode of writing autobiographies is always
retrospection. I look back at my life and try to figure out what are the stages, what are the events,
what is it that makes me now the person that I am. There's a sort of necessary distance between the
protagonist and the narrator, two voices. A narrator who knows more than what the protagonist
knew. I am caught in time and I have encounters in my own life from day to day, and I never know
what those encounters really portend, nor what do they mean and that same thing for you.
You have you probably I don't know if you hold that which is a most abbreviated a unit of
an autobiography which is a diary, you go home at night and you jot down all the great events of the
day, but you may overlook the most important. You may have had a meeting with someone, you
may have caught sight of some person, who eventually ten years from now will reenter your life and
give an altogether different appearance and direction to your life. This is to say, that all
autobiographical experiments, like all diary entries, are always uncertain and fundamentally false
because you can never really write you can only write about what you know at that point and
you can never really write about the whole structure of your life. To be able to write about the
structure of your life you have to die, that's Augustine's idea of the necessity of conversion. It's a
symbolic death by means of which you come back into existence, you come back into life as a new
man, you have a new life, and now from that standpoint of yours being a new life you can have all
the necessary detachment to look at your past and decipher that which was in a haze, that which was
uncertain as things went on.
The other reason why you need this kind of structure in autobiographies, this double voice, is
obvious. Because if I go on writing about my life without any sense of what my life is about, can
you imagine what happens? I go on writing every single thing that I do which means that I would
need another life to be able to say well I got up in the morning, then I brushed my teeth, etc., etc. It
becomes a random, senseless, accumulation of facts without any particular meaning or direction.
Dante is aware of this type of complication of autobiographies. We don't have this kind of
autobiographies, you have autobiographical writings beforehand, you have a kind of self analysis,
think of the one the figure that is most powerful for Augustine is David, King David and his
Psalms with a kind of reflection, a kind of turning inward, and trying to pinpoint the shifts in
moods, moral judgments, temptations, the idea of one's own system is, but this really means a kind
of internalization of one's life. Augustine will not do this, Augustine will go into the interiority of
his self, into the interiority of his consciousness, but he will also describe what has happened to him
in the public space. Now he goes inside and outside all the time.
Dante's, Vita nuova, you have all read it, it's really a complicated text from this point of view,
because for it being an autobiography, it's amazing how little he tells us really about his own life.
There's nothing concrete about this text. We know that it has taken place in it takes place in
Florence, but Florence is not even mentioned as a city. We only infer that it's Florence because at
one point there is a description of a river that crosses by it and which Dante uses because he has had
an inspiration, words come to him with the same kind of strength and naturalness with which the
waters of the river flow, that's the implied meaning of that association or description of the
landscape, there's a river and fantastic words came to me which I jotted down which I wanted to
remember, it's the turning in point in poetic terms of the Vita nuova. When he addresses the he
understands that to write poetry he writes the famous line, "Women who have intellect of love."
It is a remarkable line, Donne ch'avete intelletto, it's a remarkable line and I will explain why it's a
remarkable line. It was never written that kind of perception was never really part of the
understanding of the warehouse of the poetic imagination.

Chapter 2. Double Poise Structure [00:10:52]

What does Dante do? It's a little bit abstract. It's a kind of an enigmatic account that he gives and
this is unlike Augustine. It begins with a reference to the book of memory. In that part of the book
of my memory, within which little has been written, I find words which I cannot go on repeating
and all, but I would just transcribe some sentences, the meanings of them, so he understands that
here we have, first of all, it's a book of memory, not necessarily an act of retrospection and memory
it has a number of other implications and dangers. What are the implications? Well, Dante is writing
this, he's about 25, 24; it's a provisional retrospection of his growth as a poet. He certainly knows
that memories of the mother, as you know of the Muses, this is the famous myth, right? There's the
old Greek myth that memory, Mnemosyne, lay with Jupiter for nine successive nights and from
their copulations the nine muses came into being, so Memories, the Mother, which means that art is
always an act of memory; a way of remembering, an act of remembrance, we could say.
It has also some dangers that Dante will go on reflecting about. It's that if you go on getting caught
in the activity of memory you run a serious risk, the risk of changing your sense of life and your
sense of reality into the phantasms of memory because that's what memory is. It's called, as you
know, the eye of the imagination. That's the famous description of memory. The Greeks, of course,
used to put memory in the heart, and in fact as you know, the ancient Greeks used to put memory in
the heart. In fact, as you know, in Italian we still do say or in Spanish, recordarse, which really
has the etymology, in English record, that's the etymology of the heart we remember. But in the
Middle Ages it's already part of the imagination; it's called the eye of the imagination which means
that it has a visionary component to it. This explains the emphasis of dreams, vision, strange
apparitions with which this text is punctuated from the beginning to the end. Dante, I repeat,
understands that there is a danger to memory and the danger of memory is the transformation of
experience into a phantasmatic reality; the whole living in the world. It's like you're always looking
backwards and you're not Janus-like, you don't look in all directions, you don't look ahead and
Dante will turn against memory.
The second thing that we get from that little exordium of in that part of the book of my memory,
we know that Dante's placed himself I find words which have been the inscriptions of memory,
I'm not going to repeat them all, but only some of them. We know that Dante has casted himself as
the editor of his own book, that's the double poise. This is the double structure of this little text of
his. First of all it's a double has duplicity all over, this text has, it's a book of poetry and it's a
book of prose. It's not an unusual structure: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy is written like
that. Dante also writes other texts like that, but what are the implications? Well, there's a lyrical self
who has been in the throes of a great passion for Beatrice, who struggles sometimes with his
inspiration, who waits. And that's the problem he has, that one of the crises that he has is that he's
always waiting for words to come to him, he's always waiting for Beatrice to say hello to him, there
is a way in which he casts himself as the passive, a passive protagonist, weak-willed, unable,
believing that the will can direct him wherever the will wants and that's another problem that we are
really going to talk about. Then, finally he understands that he better get out of that mode, and in
effect, and I will say this by making you turn, just talking about the formal structure now, the whole
text is written in the past mode, the whole text in that part of the book of memory; a
commemoration of a great event in the private life of Dante, the love which he doesn't even know
what it is, he doesn't even know the woman, he doesn't even know what the passion is and part of
what the tension of this text is, to ponder what it is that the passion means and what it is that it's
doing to him and to his mind.
But by the end of the in Chapter XLII, which by the way, let it be said in passing, its division in
numbers is completely arbitrary. We don't know, that's not the way books were written, codices
were written in Dante's time, it was a continuous to say page something, page something, people
really believe, but the modern editors have made it controversially into XLII, so this should be
XXX, and I agree with that. Let me read the last passage, the last paragraph which is not poetry
now, ends with prose. With a voice of reflection prose functions as the work of reflections on the
lyrical inspirations, on the immediacy of the lyrical voice, so that's the double voice. I'm an editor
and I'm a poet at the same time; sometimes the editing, the notes that he writes, say nothing about
the poem. They try to sometimes he goes on into formal mechanical description about love, this
sonnet is divided into two parts, that doesn't really add much to the inner life, to our understanding
of the inner life of the protagonist.
This is what he says in XLII, Chapter XLII, "After I wrote this sonnet," which is about the famous
vision of Beatrice sitting at the foot of God's throne, and so he decides that he has to go there. He
decides that he has to go and meet her, that's the last vision. "After I wrote this sonnet there came to
me a miraculous vision in which I saw things," like a visionary burden of the narrative is kept up
from memory now to vision, "that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one. . ."
"Blessed" in Italian, by the way is a pun on the name of Beatrice, the one who is blessed, the one
who is the bearer of the good, now that's really what it means ;". . . until I will be capable of
writing about her in a nobler way." That's the unavoidably unfinished quality of the text, I can't go
on to write about her, I need to do more work. I need to do more research and find out what I really
can say about this woman. So he will stop. That's what I call an unfinished, an inevitably unfinished
narrative. "To achieve this I'm striving as hard as I can, and this she truly knows. Accordingly, if it
be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live that my life continue for a few more years, I
hope to write of her that which has never been written before of any other woman. And that it may
please the One who is the Lord of graciousness that my soul ascend to behold the glory of its lady,
that is, of that blessed Beatrice who in glory contemplates the countenance of the One qui est per
omnia secula benedictus" and to all times blessed, and ends with a pun on, again, on Beatrice.
What is the most important to me the most important point of this paragraph, the intrusion of the
verb of the future. The only time you find it in the narrative, "I hope." The whole text is contained
between an exercise of memory, an idea of something which is past, and that tempts him greatly
because if something is past and you have you think that you can even control it, you can
certainly decipher it, you can hope to extract from it some particular meaning, complacently or not,
and then ends with a projection of the self into the future, another work is to come. This is the
preamble to something more which I cannot really contain, so memory is abandoned, the work ends
with an image, and within the horizon of the future. This is really very important.
The limitations of memory are can be understood only from this point of view because hope, as
you know, when you think of hope, hope grammatically this is what is the future. He says I hope
to write, there's no future there, I hope that's the present. But hope grammatically is a verb, those of
you who have studied a little bit of Latin, remember, always take the future participle. I hope that I
will do this; I hope I would have done this; it doesn't work. I wished I had done that, but so it takes
all it's a verb of the future. It is literally also in substantial terms, it's a virtue. This is a to say
"I hope" is a theological virtue, hope which always implies the future. It says that the past is not
really over and done with because once you include, or you intrude the category of hope, you really
believe you can change the meaning of the past. That things may be happening that whereby all
your past errors, all your past mistakes can be seen and will be seen in a new life, so much then for
this question of destruction.
I repeat, we have prose and poetry, we have the voice of the lover, and we have the voice of the
editor, we have a text of memory that at the same time turns against itself, points out the limitations
of memory, and opens to the future through hope, and you have this idea that something amazing is
going to happen. Something that, though nothing concrete is being given, everything will take place
within the self. It's the moment where Dante abandons Augustine. We began by saying, I began by
saying that the mode, the rhetorical mode that Dante really follows is Augustine's Confessions
which is a text of retrospection and ends with a commentary of Genesis, Dante ends with what we
call a prolepsis, a weird word that's not so weird, but all that means, a projection to the future;
autobiography has this kind of future dimension and cannot be contained. In other words, it's not
over and done with.
The mode which, just to make this really intelligible to you, the kind of text that is most like what
Dante has written in the Vita nuova is really Joyce who writes The Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. That's the way you can really if you cannot have a conversion, if you cannot die as
Augustine says you have to do when you write, write an autobiography, in order to come back as a
new man and be able to write your life story and find out the meaning of your life, then what you
can do is write about yourself with a kind of temporal distance that is brought by time. I'm no
longer the young man I used to be, but I do know those passions. I remove myself from them in
exactly the same way Joyce does it with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which ends with
the projection of going to the descending into the smithy of this whole and writing, and then
forge the epic of the future. That's really the it ends with a project for the future so this is a kind
of a mode of autobiographical writing that Dante really prepares and puts forth.

Chapter 3. Dante Writes about Love [00:23:41]

What happens in this text, so much for the this you by the way you can stop me at any
point as I'm talking if you want me to clarify things or we can leave a little bit at the end. What
happens in the text? It's a love story. It's a love story of a young man who meets, at the age of nine,
meets a young woman who is roughly the same age, he says she's in her ninth year, doesn't even
know who she is but feels a kind of bliss. Then he sees her again nine years later, so we know that
there is a kind of numerical symbolism running through. The number for Beatrice is three, 333, a
Trinitarian number, she comes she reappears and is convinced that this is going to be the love of
his life, but he doesn't even know what love is. He does not know what love is, what he does know
at the beginning, and this is what part of the whole the economy of this narrative really focuses
on trying to ponder what love may be.
The culture of the Middle Ages is filled with literature of love. This could be viewed as one of the
many love books of the Middle Ages, and in case some of you may be looking already for a topic
for your paper, you could write about the love books of the Middle Ages. What are the other love
books, the famous love books of the Middle Ages, which are completely different from the love
books of the Middle Ages coming before. For instance, The Art of Courtly Love of Andreas
Capellanus, which is as some of you know, it's a codification of what love is. The idea that love is
an art, the "art of courtly love," that it's obviously natural instinct or thrust or passion and yet has to
be changed as if there can be a sentimental education. One has to learn how to contain, how to hold
off excesses, how to hold off the potential disruptions and violence that love will commute. There
are the romances of Chrtien de Troyes that you may know about, which is all about love at the
court, the place of pleasure within the unfolding of responsible life. There are so many other texts, a
lot of the Provenal poets whom Dante really evokes. Dante writes about love.
Let me say a couple of things so that you can really it's not the first time that people reflect upon
love of course. The Greeks tried to do that and you may remember Socrates who always wonders
what love is. Is it a figure of speech, a manner of feeling or is there such a thing as love? It's
that's just a useless figure of love. Is it a god that possesses me? Is this a natural instinct that we call
love. This variety of passions, this variety of ways of understanding love all figure within this text.
The main thing is that Dante meets Beatrice, because if we don't know who she is, does not know
what's happening to him at the age of eight, it starts in an involuntary way. The whole point of this
narrative is that things seem to be happening to him, not only as a passive figure, but even love
comes to him. It's he doesn't will it, he doesn't look for it, and in many ways, look at this passage
here in book in Chapter II, "Nine times already since my birth the heaven of light had circled
back to almost the same point, when there appeared before my eyes," it's appearing, it's an
apparition, something gives itself to him, "before my eyes the now glorious lady of my mind, who
was called Beatrice even by those who did not know what her name was. She had been in this life
long enough for the heaven of fixed starts to be able to move a twelfth of a degree to the East in her
time; that is, she appeared to me at about the beginning of her ninth year," so she's a little younger
than he is "and I first saw her near the end of my ninth year. She appeared dressed in the most
patrician of colors, a subdued and decorous crimson. . . At that very moment, and I speak the truth,
the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so
violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it
spoke these words: Here is a god stronger than I who is coming to dominate me, to rule over me."
This is these are set descriptions of what love is, the point is that he doesn't will it, he does not
know what this is about. Why does he present himself as unwilling this passion? Because passions
which are unwilled seem to be more important than the things that we will. If they are unwilled and
they happen to me they may have the mark of a secret necessity. There may be a pattern behind
them that I do not know but it happened to me. Do you see what I'm saying? I do not have any
responsibility about it. I don't know what that is. He will find out in time that he cannot go on
obeying the rules of the will that he has to go on understanding that the will needs to be in turn
ruled by reason. Yet, nothing that he does is that this figure of love is a god, really a literary conceit.
He has no idea who speaks to him or around him. All around him he takes refuge in the chamber of
his house, the chamber of his mind and there he goes on engaged in deliriums, dreams, etc. That is
to say, all the clinical signs of love. He thinks that love is a passion that disabilitates him.
This whole problem will come to a head with the first sonnet that he writes, which by the way, is
really the poem we know. Dante's seventeen years old when he wrote this poem, we know that this
is really a kind of sort of it's a dream. It's a poem which appears as a dream which I'll read in
English in this so and so translation, but it's better than anything I could try. "To every captive soul,"
it's a horrifying dream as you can see.
To every captive soul and loving heart
to whom these words I have composed are sent
for your elucidation in reply,
greetings I bring for your sweet lord's sake, Love.
The first three hours, the hours of the time
of shining stars, were coming to an end,
when suddenly Love appeared before me
(to remember how it really was appalls me).

Joyous, Love seemed to me, holding my heart

within his hand, and in his arms he had
my lady, loosely wrapped in folds, asleep.
He woke her then, and gently fed to her
the burning heart; she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in tears.

It's a dream, a horrifying dream about a lady which is asleep, held in the arms of the lord of love.
She wakes and eats the heart, the heart was given to her. It's a story of clearly how the heart
nourishes love, that's the sense of it. The meaning, he says, it's a dream, another involuntary
experience, a dream comes to us without our will, without our wanting it, and he says the meaning
of this sonnet was unclear.
He writes the sonnet and sends it out to his fellow poets in Florence. He sends one of them to the
person who's going to become his best friend and to whom this text is dedicated. It will appear very
soon in the text. His name is Guido Cavalcanti; we shall see him in Hell by the way. Dante put him
in Inferno X and we'll talk about him at length.
Guido answers, because that was the fashion, just write the poem, and then by taking your own
rhyme scheme as a kind of response, they go on really writing about this. And Guido Cavalcanti
says to him, well you're really right you really had the vision which means that you cannot quite
trust love, that you really have to turn away. It's a kind of admonition to you: move away from all of
these figments of love and turn to philosophical studies. It's only in the mind that you can find, and
in the pursuits of the works of the mind, that you can find some kind of truth and stability for
yourself. Outside of it, there is only and if you pursue love there's the world of the arrangements.
By the way, another physician of the time, Dante his name was also Dante, Dante da Maiano, he
decides to write to him and also writes about the sonnet. He says, well this really means that you
have humoural problems: take cold baths and everything will be okay. You really need to rebalance
the new equilibrium for your humors.
One reduces love to a question of bodies, the physician, as if it were just a disease, the other one
reduces it to a question of love's danger vis-a-vis the stability of the mind. Dante will go neither
with one and will not listen neither to one nor to the other. The rest of the poem will be that of
trying to understand what this love really is. Crucial chapters will appear. Chapter VIII, he describes
his going to a funeral, you remember, he sees a dead woman, and you wonder what is the point of
this kind of seeing. And the point I think that of that scene is that there is a body and that body is
inert and dead and that there is no possible connection between him and this dead body. So that love
is not reusable only to bodies. There must be some kind of animation, there must be some kind of
soul that is or life that accompanies it. In Chapter XII finally, Dante seems to be moving a little
bit away from this Provenal this way of describing love in terms of conventional terms that I
have to describe to you, and he has this other dream about the god of love who comes to him and
says it's time for you to put aside all simulacra, all fictions and all emptiness.

Chapter 4. Understandings of Love and Friendship [00:34:53]

Let me just say a little bit about more of this point about love and a kind of questions that Dante
raises. Whenever we think about love in the modern era, as you know, these are not my ideas, but
particularly I believe in them. Others have formulated these ideas. Whenever we think about love in
modern times that the formulation of love is as we understand it today is essentially medieval.
The Greeks do not have the understanding of love the way the romantic idea of love the way we
do. They understand love as an intellectual pursuit, as an ascent up the ladder of being. That it's the
work of philosophers that the minds can go on from degrees through the various degrees of
reality and intellectual reality and one can grasp it. There is friendship of course, but there's not the
idea of the love of a man for a woman which is so crucial to the romantic understanding of love.
The Romans had no understanding at all about either, what the Greeks knew, what we know. The
most important Latin voice of about love is, for instance, I think, Catullus, who talks about love
as something to be slightly embarrassed about. It's a weakness, a serious guy does not involve
oneself in this kind of pursuits, this kind you have to do the serious work of living: the political
issues, going to the forum, negotiate, etc.
But come the Provenal world in the south of France, the Provenal courts, love changes, both its
meaning and its contours. Now love is the love of a man for a woman and it's usually described, and
you can see in Andreas Capellanus and The Art of Courtly Love, or in the texts of Chretien de
Troyes, it's described as maybe it can be a clandestine, secret relationship, it need not be within
marriage because marriages are usually are business propositions. It is a kind of emotion that's
potentially violent, in fact the effort one should what is the sociology of love? Can a noble man
fall in love with a plebian, can a noble woman fall love with a plebian man? It's an arrangement
about what love can be, and yet also they describe it, they always describe it as the experience that
causes insomnia, loss of appetite, the lover turns pale and can't speak in the presence of the beloved,
they go on describing the physical properties of love. The other great revolution about love is what
is contained in this text. He's not the only one; Dante's not the only one to have brought it about. His
teachers and people, the likes of Guido Cavalcanti and Guinizelli were going to the same direction,
namely, that love has to be explored for the changes it brings to the mind. How can it be? This is the
kind of problem that they raise. How can it be that I see a woman and the image of that woman
obsesses me? What is it about my mind? Why do I want to be better than I am? How am I going to
be educated in the light of the love that I feel for this woman? And in effect, this kind of
metaphysical aspect of love is the special burden of this text.
Let me just give you an idea, it happens the first time that this happens is exactly with the
famous poem that I mentioned to you that is the turning point, Chapter XIX. Let me just read this
paragraph. This is the turning point in Dante's understanding of what love is. "Then it happened,
that while walking down a path, along which ran a very clear stream" we guess that it's the
Arno River. He won't say, he's not interested in the outside world, he's only interested in what love
does to his inner self, to this thought of his mind "I suddenly felt a great desire to write a poem,
and I began to think how I would go about it." What an extraordinary moment, finally he's not just
jotting down words that come to him, he just starts thinking. This is not just about a self as desiring
or willing, or unwilling, and who lives that kind of strange world; oh it's a good thing that things are
happening to me because I can't help it. I can give up my whole exercise of what I can do, the sense
of purpose about what is happening, changing will into a rational activity.
Now he starts thinking and: "I began to think how I would go about it. It seemed to me that to speak
of my lady would not be becoming unless I were to address my words to ladies, and not just to any
ladies, but only to those who are worthy, not merely to women. Then, I must tell you my tongue,"
he's not out of it yet "as if moved of its own accord, spoke and said: Ladies who have,"
actually he says, "Women who have intelligence of love. With great delight I decided to keep these
words in mind and to use them at the beginning of my poem. Later, after returning to the
aforementioned city and reflecting for several days, I began writing a canzone," meaning a song,
which for Dante is the noblest form of rhetorical form and "using this beginning and then
constructed it in a way that will appear below in its divisions. The canzone begins:
Ladies who have intelligence of love
I wish to speak to you about my lady,
not thinking to complete her litany,
but to talk in order to relieve my heart.

Not thinking to complete her praise her praise, it's a poem of praise. Therefore, a religious kind
of very close to religious poems. As you know, they're also called laude, laudatory we say in
English, to come back to to give you a sense of what this kind of poems can be. To praise, which
he would like us to distinguish from flattery. There's a difference between praising someone and
flattering someone. Praising you really don't expect anything in return, you're praising as kind of
sense that you are just trying to describe and yielding to the allure and the power of what is in front
of you. Flattery always implies some kind of circuitness, some sort of desire to get something. You
flatter, it's a rhetorical form, you flatter because there's implies some degree of manipulation.
The most important word, it is "women who have intellect of love."
Finally, intellect and love are not two disjointed activities of the mind. It's not what Guido
Cavalcanti, who really believes in part, who really believes in a world in which one is sundered one
from the other, in a fragmentary world and we will come to that in Inferno X who really
thinks that time is all fragmented from itself anyway, experiences are all fragmentary, that love if
I have a passion I can never quite come to understand anything. In fact, when I am in throes of
passion my mind ceases its operations. This poem is written against Dante's best friend to whom
this text is dedicated.
We are forced to think, and I'll go back with this poem in a moment, but let me make a brief
digression about the relationship between friendship and love. They're two extraordinary virtues.
We call them passions, but they're also virtues. Is there anything better than friendship? Is there
anything better than love? Dante says this is the radical way of Dante's thinking he brings us
to the point where you really have to distinguish between things that seem to be equally powerful
virtues. What is friendship? The text is dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti which means that friendship
implies a conversation, a conversation of minds. The word conversation, as you know in Latin
means, things turning together. That's why the minds when you are conversing, minds are
turning together in some kind of harmonious turning, looking for some common agreements and
there is a sort of benevolence implied in friendship that presupposes even what you are going to
find.
We are going to not only its benevolence, it's the condition for friendship, it's really the point of
arrival, we've got to like each other even more after we discuss. We disagree, but we are doing it
benevolently. That's the gift of friendship. It's a virtue. In the Ethics of Aristotle, it counts as this,
one of the major virtues and so does Dante in his own rewriting of the Ethics of Aristotle which
is the Banquet. But love for Dante here is more important than friendship and it's more important
for friendship because it forces you to think. Something happens to you and that mobilizes your
mind. You've got to go looking for the signs of love; you try to look for what kind of sign is my
beloved sending to me, etc. The mind is engaged in an extended self mode of self-reflection. So
intellect and love now rolled together, that's the revolution.

Chapter 5. The Sweet New Style [00:45:12]

Let me go back to them that I have been with which I started. This is the beginning of the so-
called "Sweet New Style." The kind of poetry that the Tuscans write and which is a sort of
rethinking of what the Provenal poets were doing. The Provenal poets are writing poetry in the
mode of "I tremble, and I shake, and the image of the beloved I cannot even tell anybody. I have to
keep my passion away from the flatterers because they are going to violate my secret and so I have
to always protect this, I have to protect the identity of the beloved," in a sense singularity and
uniqueness to this passion. The Tuscan poets Dante, Cavalcanti, Guinizelli they come along and say
no, no what matters is that love can become part of an intellectual experience and intellectual
ascent. And knowledge only favors love, and love mobilizes the mind to go on thinking.
See, I really don't want to say too much now because we have so much time ahead of us. The great
debate, philosophical debates in the thirteenth century, is always the following: it's between the so-
called voluntarists and rationalists. Very simple don't the voluntarists are those who believe that
if I want to know something, I have to love first, that love is crucial to my knowledge. If I
probably you remember from your own early youth, when some of you would be interested enough
in a boy, or the boy and the girl, someone would say, "oh you really love that person." What do you
mean? I don't know even know him; I don't even know her, that's really the issue if you love
so that you may know, that's the position of the voluntarists. Others would say you have to know
first in order that you may love, and it's a fierce debate; Dante's circumventing all of this. Intellect
and love are like the two feet that carry us along, and you move one and you move the other, and
only this way can you walk without being hobbled. They say it would be later when he starts in
Inferno.
So, this is the great change, what you call the Sweet New Style. The Sweet New Style means,
therefore, a highly philosophical, highly intellectual kind of poetry, a poetry where the woman or
the love of a woman can take you up to the divinity, love through love, and the understanding that
that which rules the world is not just an idea, it's just love and therefore love is the only way of
coming to it and pursuing it. Some examples of this kind of experience will happen very soon. I
want to mention this great poem that he describes, this little sonnet where he which also
which sort of pursues immediately after Chapter XX. Let's look at the sonnet. "After the canzone
had become. . ." this canzone about "Women who have intellect of love" ". . . had become
rather well known, one of my friends who had heard it was moved asked me to write about the
nature of Love. . ." that's not what he forget about the experiences about being sleepless, but
Dante starts as a Provenal poet, he's not refining their idea and wants to think about the nature of
love, philosophical idea about love having without losing sight of Beatrice ". . . having
perhaps, from reading my poem, acquired more confidence in me than I deserved. So, thinking that
after my treatment with the previous theme it would be good to treat the theme of Love and, feeling
that I owed this to my friend, I decided to compose a poem dealing with Love. And I wrote this
sonnet which begins:
Love and the gracious heart are a single thing
as Guinizelli [who's another poet of the Sweet New Style , is the father of the sweet new
 style] tells us in his poem:
one can no more be without the other
than can be a reasoning mind without its reason.
Nature, when in a loving mood, creates them

This is the shift now the full awareness that learning about love. Dante's gone to the school of the
philosophers, in order to learn about this.
This means that this whole text really is traversed by two inter-related themes, they're two stories,
two thematic strains running through. One is the story of a love for Beatrice, Dante's love for
Beatrice, and we have understanding what love is. Is it a physical impulse? Is it a demon? Is it a
figure of speech? Is it a simulacrum, another fiction that we tell each other? Or not, and he goes on
learning about this. The other thematic strain of this text has to do with learning to be a poet. Dante
is also telling us the story of his poetic growth. How he begins imitating the Provenal poets,
imitating now the poets of the Sweet New Style, and finally finding his voice, and how the two
themes really shed light on each other because I can only understand this about love and if I
understand really things about love that nobody else has understood, I can really go on writing
about the poem writing poems that nobody else can go on writing which is a famous promise,
the hope he expresses in Chapter XLII. And if I can go on writing about love in a way that nobody
else has ever written, it means that I understand love more than others have understood love. At any
rate, the great poem that he starts writing when he's, in a sense, even in a kind of rivalry with
Guinizelli, appears in the sonnet that starts here.

Chapter 6. The Apparition of Beatrice; Moving in Circles [00:51:56]

I could mention 21, "The power of Love borne in my lady's eyes," where now it's not only about the
nature of love but he goes on trying to find love within Beatrice. It's not the god of love that has
been abandoned, it's not the conceit of love, it's not the words, the strange and enigmatic words of
love that have come to him from oracles and traditions, now that is love for the concreteness of
Beatrice herself. As I said earlier, very much in passing, the text has an extraordinary sonnet that I
read in Italian a couple lines, a few lines so you can hear the sound of this poem. Chapter XXVI,
this is about Beatrice, the apparition of Beatrice, she goes by through the streets and the world is
silent, the world falls silent, it's a kind of general apparition, but also she's wrapped in a kind of
mystery and an inapproachable light. There's always some kind of distance. This is the poem.
Such sweet decorum, [page 57 of this edition, Chapter XXVI]
and such gentle grace
attend my lady's greeting as she moves
that lips can only tremble into silence,
and eyes dare not attempt to gaze at her.
Moving, benignly clothed in humility,
untouched by all the praise along the way,
she seems to be a creature come from Heaven
to earth, to manifest a miracle.

We are now Dante appears as a sort of poetical caress because of love, heaven, and earth mixed
up in his head. Beatrice brings heaven down to earth and asks of him that he can rise up to heaven
and these are the words in Italian. Listen to the repartitions, the sounds, the "n" sounds:
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand'ella altrui saluta,
ch'ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l'ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare
Only praise can come in toward her in her direction. Finally, how does he really how does
Dante really get out of this sense of constant wonder because that's a poem about wonder. Beatrice
appears and it's a miracle, wonder, and that's how you start thinking as soon as you believe that
what you perceive is a wonder that you don't quite understand. You want to go on trying to
understand it. Now that's the heart of the effort of reflection, right? So there's this kind of a sense of
constant perplexity, great excitement at the idea of Beatrice.
Now Beatrice has died, her death appears around Chapter XXIX. How real can she be now that
she's well how are you going to relate to someone who is dead? Dante will do that which
probably some others can could do. We try to find a replacement and we go looking for someone
who looks exactly like her or reminds him of her and then finds this, Chapter XXXII, XXXIII,
XXXIV; this woman who has a lot of so much mercy, sense of mercy for him that he's very
drawn to her. He understands that in the measure in which he tries to duplicate Beatrice, then the
love for Beatrice was not really singular; that his own project was at stake here. Either you believe
in the singularity of the figure you love, or if you believe in the duplication, then you are
undercutting your own project.
So he's caught in all this drama until finally he sees some pilgrims, and this is really the great
direction, and with this I will stop and see if there are some questions.
Chapter XL, some pilgrims, the pilgrimages that used to go to Santiago de Compostela, as they do
now. They used to go to the famous from the north of Europe, the so called they would go to
Jerusalem, they would go to the Via Francigena as it is called, that goes from the north following a
particular path, they go to Rome, and here this is some pilgrims going they're called romei. He
sees some pilgrims going to Rome and this is the poem he writes, this is an extraordinary poem.
"Ah, pilgrims. . . " he addresses them. They don't listen to him, they know nothing about him. He
addresses them:
. . .moving pensively along,
thinking, perhaps, of things at home you miss,
could the land you come from be so far away
(as anyone might guess from your appearance)
that you show no sign of grief as you pass through
the middle of the desolated city. . .

This is a phrase that normally is used for Jerusalem, "desolated, " "the abandoned city. " This is
Florence, though.
. . . like people who seem not to understand,
the grievous weight of woe it is has to bear?
If you would stop to listen to me speak,
I know, from what my sighing heart tells me,
you would be weeping when you leave this place:
lost is the city's source of blessedness,
and I know words that could be said of her
with power to humble any man to tears.

This is it's really another great shift in the movement of the poem. He sees pilgrims who are
going somewhere and he realizes that he is not like them; he's not going anywhere; he is moving in
circles. If you move in circles, you get nowhere. Now, something happens around him that will, in
many ways, shake him from that kind of circular self-absorption in which he finds himself. The
second thing is that he understands. This is an extraordinary poem. Read it again for yourselves
when you have a chance. He says he understands that the mythology he has been constructing about
Beatrice is an absolutely private mythology. It means nothing to anybody else. You who come from
afar, and he's like them, because he too is they are separated pensively, a word that implies
suspension. The same word, "to think" and "to be suspended," it's the same etymology in Latin.
They are halfway: they are here now going through Florence, going somewhere to a destination,
and nostalgically separated from the world they left behind. And Dante too, is not going anywhere,
but he doesn't have Beatrice with him and has no idea of where he though, unlike the pilgrims,
where to go. Above all, if I were to tell you anything, you would understand that this is a desolated
city but you do not know, an implication is, you may not care. My mythology is private. The effort I
have to make is to transform my private mythology into a public discourse.

Chapter 7. Vita nuova as a Preamble to the Divine Comedy [00:59:32]

This is the transition from the Vita nuova to the Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy would be a
text where finally Dante will go on literally, theatricalizing, literally staging his own passion,
through the passions of others, involving all others in his discourse and creating what I would call a
"public mythology." This is really the most important moment that which ends with another
journey of the mind that will make the next one,
Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round,
passes the sigh arisen from my heart;
A new intelligence that Love in tears
endowed it with is urging it on high.

Here he sees Beatrice far away and decides to undertake his journey, the journey of knowledge, the
journey of exploration of the journey which will which is the journey of life and which is the
journey at the heart of the comedy or the Divine Comedy with which we start next time.
This is really the kind of experience, poetic experience that Dante will go on at the start. He's still a
young man. He's exploring a lot of possibilities; he's gathering all the voices around him, but he
internalizes them. They are not it's not that it's still the kind of encyclopedic text that the Divine
Comedy will necessarily be, but he has to evolve all discourses, all whispers, all groans, all noises.
The whole world has to speak through his poem. That's part of the most inclusive vision, not
excluding anything, but this is a time is it's an effort to try to find himself as a poet with a project
and that project will be necessarily a project for the future.
There is no poet that I know in the Western tradition who is so given to the idea of the future and
who is more of a poet of hope than Dante is. I call him a lot of things, and I will call him a lot of
things. I'll call him the poet of exile, which he is. I'll call him the poet of love, which he is. I'll call
him the poet of peace, which he is. There's an irenic thrust underneath his whole even his
polemics, fierce polemics. But above all, and now, for now he appears as the poet of hope, in the
knowledge that hope is the most realistic of virtues. Because he tells us that the past, not even the
past may be dead, that really despair is the most crucial sin that one could have in this universe.
Belief is to say that things are over and done with. Dante says I'm not done yet. I still have a project
I can't even begin to tell you about it, but let me stop now because I have other things to do. That's
the substance of this poem, and in this sense, it's a preamble, a preparation for the Divine Comedy.

Chapter 8. Remarks on Dante's Life; Question and Answer [01:02:39]

Since I'm trying to give you a sense of Dante's own life as a flesh and bone kind of guy that he was.
What happens after this poem? Beatrice has died; literally in 1289 she dies. Dante now is married
marries a woman he will never mention, belongs to a decent family in Florence, the Donati,
troublemakers that Dante doesn't really like. And Dante will enter public life. This public life, which
also means, that he will have a great interruption to his intellectual pursuits. Until in 1302, as I
probably you remember, I mentioned, he's banned from Florence to go into exile. And once he's in
exile, then his production will start again. He started writing about the language, the theatre of the
language, one of the first treatises on language in the Western world. He writes a text of ethics
which is the Banquet and then the Divine Comedy. We'll begin next time; we'll find them in the
middle of his journey which is Canto I. Since we have a few minutes, do we have questions? I said
a lot of things. I hope it was I'll go back to some of these things so don't Questions?
Student: Well, this is not exactly about the lecture, it's about the text, do you recommend that we go
over the specific text that you recommend on the syllabus or I already own the Mandelbaum
translation that is that usable for this course as well?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, the question is, do I recommend that the students stick to the
text that I mention in the syllabus or can they go on using other texts such as Mandelbaum's
translation? The answer is yes you can, it's a very good Mandelbaum's translation is a very good
translation. I don't use it for one simple reason, because he's a dear friend of mine, he probably will
hear me now, everything will be on record. Poets have a weakness. When they translate they do it
out of great love for the texts. Deep down this idea, look at it, I can do one better than even Dante
and he lapses into that and I have told him more than once. I like this unpretentious translation by
Sinclair. Prose sometimes is wrong; I will tell you when it is blatantly wrong, but you can use
Mandelbaum, or if you have Singleton or you have Durling and Martinez, or if you have actually
I think is really better than all of these, Hollander's, Robert Hollander. Actually the translation is by
his wife Jean. You can use any translation you want. They are not really all that different from each
other, it's usually the sound, and of course, Mandelbaum as a poet has a sense of the rhythm in
English; but absolutely. Yes?
Student: I'm not quite sure I understand how love as a process of acquiring knowledge is different
or better than friendship, or like the harmonious turning [inaudible].
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah. The question is very good first of all, and is why should I
make a claim that love as a process of knowledge is better than friendship? You are really singling
out that which is the one of the dramas of the Vita nuova, a book dedicated to Dante dedicates
to his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, and yet it's about Beatrice. When Cavalcanti appears he says,
forget about love, just turn to philosophy in a sonnet that is very well known and that I quote in
some piece or other. There is a tension between the two, love and friendship, and we agree and you
seem to be agreeing with a very generic, not unusual, the description that I make of friendship. A
friendship is really the language of philosophers, right? Philosophers who get together and believe
in thought and believe also that friendship is a great virtue, there's a lot of drama within friendships
and in literature, friendships are trying to outdo each other. I'm a better friend than you. To me, I'm a
better friend to you than you are to me, as soon as you talk about that kind of rivalry you realize that
passions also are getting to that process.
I would say that Dante I understand Dante to imply here that love is better than friendship
exactly because it forces, it does violence on our ways of thinking, because it forces us never to take
anything for granted, and in and of itself, because this may even be something that you find very
romantic, people can find very romantic. The idea that in love you are going to be surprised by what
the signs of love are and ubiquitous of the idea of love, whereas, in friendship you really have a sort
of the clarity of an exchange. In love you are going to have the secret signs that lovers can give each
other. To me, a great text that maybe Dante I'm sure Dante read is really Ovid. You go and read
all these stories, great stories, but the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers who can see the smallest
chink in the wall through which to communicate and all the inventiveness that comes with it. In a
sense, it's really where the idea that love can I say, can force us to think about in ways that we
could never really imagine, because it is tied to the imagination. Okay? That's what I would say.
Other questions? Okay, I think that that's it. I will see you next Thursday in some detail and then
goes on writing a hermeneutics of with Canto I, etc. Thank you.
[end of transcript]
ital-310: Dante in Translation
Lecture 3 - Inferno I, II, III, IV [September 11, 2008]
Chapter 1. Explanation of Title; Three Levels of Style; Formal Structure
[00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We'll begin today with Inferno. Let me say a few things about the
poem in general, the structure of the poem, the formal structure, and then we get into the cantos I,
II, III, IV which have been assigned to you. I already, in passing, in my introductory remarks, I did
say something about the title as you recall, the title of the poem. The poem, we refer to it as the
Divine Comedy, it should be "Comedy." That's what Dante calls it and he called it comedy for a
number of reasons. The first reason is that it ends in with in happiness. It's a story that begins
with a kind of disorder, catastrophe if you wish; the pilgrim was lost in the woods and then works
himself out toward the light, toward the truth, toward God. That's so comedy describes the
thematic trajectory of the poem. It's going from one condition to another, and from this point of
view, it's literally the opposite of the tragic movement. In the tragic movement, you always have
some kind of initial state of cohesion or initial state of happiness that then goes on going toward
some kind of fatality or disaster.
There's a second reason for the title "comedy" and the second reason is stylistic. Dante, he calls it a
comedy because he adopts the vernacular, first of all. As opposed to the possibility would have
been writing it in Latin in a kind of the language of philosophy and the language of great cultural
exchanges but he calls it instead he uses the Italian vulgar language. It also means that
stylistically he adopts a humble style. You know what the theory of styles is coming to us from
ancient Greece and Rome.
There are three levels of styles. Three levels of style: there is the high tragic style or the sublime
style that describes exactly the events that involve kings since style is must have some kind of
aptness to the situation that the story describes. Then, there is a middle style or an elegiac style, and
then there is a low style, the style of comedy, the style that indeed Dante will adopt lowly; but this is
a kind of peculiar implication for Dante to call a story such as his, a "comedy" and this is the
implication: that, in effect, he undercuts the idea of a rigid hierarchy of reality.
There is no such neat separation of the high, the middle, and the low. That which is low and humble,
such as the experience he is describing, his own experience an ordinary human being of living
around the year 1300 who manages to have this extraordinary experience of going up to see the face
of God and come back to return come back to the earth to tell us about it. It's really a sign that
the low can become high and the high can become low. That this that the classical distinctions
that we read of which we read in the Poetics of Aristotle that Dante did not know, or in Horace's
Poetic Art that Dante did know, are really false, are really illusory. This is not the way to proceed,
so Dante has a number of items that he's pursuing in calling this text the "Comedy."
The other thing I have to say about the formal structure of the poem, as you all know, it's divided
into three parts: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Easy. Each of them has thirty-three cantos, with the
exception of Inferno. Inferno has thirty-four cantos, which means there's one Canto I, which we
are going to read in a moment, plus thirty-three. They are neatly separated in that, Canto I
represents and stands for a kind of general rehearsal. It's a journey that fails. Dante the real
journey will begin with Canto II.
It has 100 cantos, but the basic unit of his narrative is the number 3. In fact, it's written in so-called
a style or a metrical form, but there're key devices, a so-called terza rima, that I'm sure you recall
from your own readings in high school or in other courses, the terza rima, which is the rhyme
scheme, it's always going to be A, B, A, B, C, B and so on. Number 3 once again is the fundamental
symbolic number of division within this text. What is the reason for this? There is a large aesthetic
reason and the aesthetic reason that it can be found formulated, crystallized in a verse from the
Book of Wisdom, "You O God, have created everything according to number, measure and weight."
And so the Divine Comedy has to duplicate the symmetry and the order, and the harmony that he
thinks he sees in the universe. The poem is presented and introduced as a reflection of that superior,
divine order of the universe and wants to be part of it. So it's both as this kind of ambivalence to
reflect it and become what we call a metonymy: the part that wants to be attached to a larger whole.
So these are the some general concerns that you've got to have about the poem, some general
ideas that will help you understand the pattern of parallelisms that we're going to find within the
poem. And I can give you one very quickly now. Since I'm really asking you that when you read the
poem, you should be aware that it's a kind of linear structure from 1 to 100. And yet, within the
triple the tri-partition of the poem Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise there are cantos that
correspond to one another. Canto VI of Inferno, it prefigures Canto VI of Purgatorio and both of
them in turn, will prefigure Canto VI of Paradise, Canto VII and so on. It can be done, Canto X, X
and X, it can be done in a fairly systematic way. If you wish sometimes you could really read I, II,
III, IV and yet I, I, and I which is or maybe you wait for the end of the poem when you have read
the whole poem then you can go back and read it horizontally as it were as much as vertically down.
These are some ideas, general concerns and implications in Dante's structure of the poem.

Chapter 2. Canto I and Its Double Narrative Focus [00:07:13]

We begin now with Canto I; it's a very well-known canto where the it's the general preamble
you know how the poem starts. It's I'm just reading the famous lines, everybody reads and
everybody probably remembers. "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself." Those
of you who have a different translation will nonetheless get the gist and the changes, the shifts are
really minimal.
"I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to
tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear! So bitter it is
that death is hardly more. But to give account of the good which I found there I will tell of the other
things I noted there. I cannot rightly tell how I entered there. I was so full of sleep at that moment
when I left the true way; but when I had reached the foot of the hill at the end of that valley which
had pierced my heart with fear I looked up and saw its shoulders already clothed with the beams of
the planet that leads man straight on every road. Then the fear was quieted a little which had
continued in the lake of my heart during the night I had spent so piteously; and as he who with
laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to the perilous waters and gazes, so my
mind which was still in flight turned back to look again at the pass which never yet let any go
alive."
It's a great beginning. It begins in a very extraordinary way; it begins with in the middle to begin
with, right? That's the beginning is in the middle, the beginning is the present reality of the
pilgrim who finds himself lost, but it's more in that first line. "In the middle of the journey of our
life" what is he saying? I think it's fairly clear the first conceit and the fundamental conceit of the
poem is that life is a journey, which means that we are always on the way. I don't know where we
are going yet. He will find out soon, which means that we are displaced, which means that we are
going to have a number of adventures. It means that we are not yet where we want to be. Life is a
journey.
In fact, he will go on not only go in the middle of the journey; he also calls it our life. That
possessive, "our" life, it's his way of establishing one fact, that this is not really yet a unique
experience. It's something we all share and something which might also concern us. That we are
also, not only he is in the journey of his life, but we too are in that journey of the common
journey of our life.
Then in contrast to that, there is now an autobiographical focus. There is a stress of "I found," "I
came to myself within a dark wood" and so on, "I," so this is going to be very much the story, once
again, very much as the Vita nuova, an autobiographical story. It can only be a personal story, but
here the self is going to see the world is going to see himself through the prism of the world. He
will enter a public space.
The great difference, I will say, between the Vita nuova which we just looked at last time, and the
Divine Comedy is the following. The Vita nuova was destined to fail as a narrative, exactly because
the protagonist went on drawing us and drawing himself within the solitude, the interiority of his
own life; a life which was completely disengaged from the concerns for the outside world. The
Divine Comedy starts exactly with that kind of shipwreck, the shipwreck of some other intellectual
activities that he will go on describing and I will describe with you.
As soon as we read this first line, "I came to myself in a dark wood," and if you read a lot of
traditional commentators, traditional commentators will tell you, oh well Dante is here in a state of
sin, the dark wood is really the condition of spiritual maybe despair. He's at an impasse; we
know he doesn't know where to go. I think that this allegorizing is a little bit too easy and it's not
really we have no evidence for this in the poem yet. We don't know, but what we do know is that
Dante is lost in a landscape that is terrifying. He is caught within it; he's clueless about how he got
there. I don't even know how he goes on to say, I don't know how I got myself in that situation,
whatever that situation was, but he knows one thing that he wants to get out of it. He understands
that.
He does not yet know how he to get out of this situation, but he knows that he has to get out of the
entanglement of the wood. Then he goes on, oh how hard it is, etc., "so bitter is that death is hardly
more. But to give account" that's the next tercet "of the good which I've found there I will tell
of other things I noted there." In a way, the poem is already over. He's now shifting from the
narrative of events: I was lost in the dense, savage, harsh wood of the night. His gaze rends this
night, tries to find out; he cannot see anything beyond himself, and then immediately says, but to
tell you the good I noted there I have to tell you other things.
The poem has, right from the start, the double narrative focus. The first focus is that he's going to
tell us the story of a pilgrim who is caught in the what we call the diachronic, the time-bound,
the daily events a number of encounters which he cannot quite decide as to their meaning. So
he's led by Virgil as we're going to find out soon, but he doesn't understand what's happening to
him.
Then there is the second focus and it's the focus of the poet who has seen it all and enjoys what we
would call an omniscient perspective. The whole poem really moves around this double axis: the
axis of a synchronic view, synoptic view of the poet who has seen, who has he becomes a poet
because the pilgrim has had this experience, and then he goes on telling us about this experience.
That's what I call a synoptic and omniscient narrator and then he looks at the at what the pilgrim
did not know. There's a kind of irony in this discrepancy between the diachronic viewpoint of the
pilgrim and the synoptic viewpoint of the poet. It goes without saying that the structure is not that
neat, you will see that there are moments when Dante will go on one's point of view will
encroach upon the other, so I will tell you more about this particular structure and now he starts this
narrative.
Let's see what has happened. "I cannot tell how," this is the second paragraph of our translation, "I
cannot rightly tell how I entered there, I was so full of sleep at that moment." It's a kind of torpid
lethargic, the lack of consciousness, the lack of any everything his faculties are dormant
let's paraphrase it like that. "When I left the true way; but when I reach the foot of the hill at the end
of that valley which had pierced my heart with fear I looked up and saw the shoulders already
clothed within the beams of the planet that leads men straight on every road." What he does
dawn has come, dawn breaks, and he looks up toward the sun believing that the natural sunlight is
going to unveil to him the layout of the land and he may find an escape route from this particular
disaster.
I'll tell you one thing, that if this were a Platonic narrative the poem would come to an end right
here, because this is what happens in a Platonic narrative. You are in a cave, you know we are all
this is a famous myth of the Republic; we see nothing, we only see flickers of light, it's like being at
the movies, flickers of light, unreal. They are simulations of the truth; they are being projected on
the side of the cave, and we mistake those shadows for realities. If you are really wise and you are a
philosopher then you do know that you can turn your neck around and find out where the source of
true light is and then you are saved.
The whole experience of the cave is predicated on this premise: that knowledge saves you, that
knowledge is virtue. And knowledge does save you to the extent in which it really can heal what
one could call the wounds of the intellect: ignorance being the wound of an intellect which
knowledge, learning, education, philosophy, can really cure. Dante will find out very quickly that
that is a false promise; that in many ways, there are realities and that his own realities are going to
be a little bit more complex than what one can find in books, manuals of philosophy, about how we
get saved and how we can save ourselves.
Let's see what he says here and what happens. So he sees he turns toward the light, I saw already
that the sunlight and then he feared this passion, because it's a passion of the soul, the fear that
paralyzes him and paralyzes his discernment. He cannot it literally stops him, does not know
which way to go and it's the overpowering passion at this point of the poem was quieted a little
"which had continued in the lake of my heart during the night I spent so piteously." It's a dark night.
Some mystics Dante is not a mystic, but he's clearly alluding to the dark night. This is the dark
night of the soul, this is a spiritual experience that has found now; it's coming to a head, if you wish.
"And it is he who with laboring breath his escape from the deep to the shore turns to the perilous
waters and gazes, so my mind, which was still in flight."
Through the whole passage, I have to tell you, the two paragraphs we read is replete with neo-
Platonic language. He is talking about himself as if this were a flight of the soul, flight of the mind.
My mind which was still in flight, this is the idea that we have experiences which are purely
intellectual, the kind of experiences that we can all find when we are reading a book, we are
studying, we are thinking. The mind takes its flight; i.e., this is an intellectual problem. There are
many other terms here that remind us of the his use, his deliberate use of neo-Platonic language.
For instance the word wood which is in the Latin in the Italian is selva, which translates the
Greek hyle, which as you know, is the primal matter out of which the demiurge will form and shape
reality.

Chapter 3. Shifting the Language from Mind to Body [00:19:02]

Yet, immediately there is a great shift that I want to focus on briefly. "After I had rested my wearied
frame for a little, I took my way again over the desert slope, keeping always the lower foot firm;
and lo, almost at the beginning of the steep, a leopard light and very swift, covered with a spotted
hide, and it did not go from before my face but so impeded my way that I turned many times to go
back."
He has been just now talking about the flight of the mind; "my mind was still in flight." It's an
experience of a shipwreck, first of all, that many epic stories begin like that. Think of the Aeneid,
the shipwreck of Aeneas on the shores of Africa as he is about to enter the city that Dido is about to
build and that will bring him to a great revelation and a great love story with Dido. Here there's no
such a relief for him. It's the shipwreck of the mind, a mind that seems to be literally unable to
define both his whereabouts and his destination, but as soon as he does this, as soon as he
understands that that's what the problem is, he shifts the language from mind to body.
"My wearied body," and this is the great difference between neo-Platonic narratives and Dante's
kind of experience. The intrusion of body and what is the body what does the body stand for?
The body stands for the limit of purely intellectual journeys. The real journey that he has to
undertake is the journey of mind and body, and the body stands for the irreducible historicity of
one's self. The body stands for one's own reality, the passions; it stands for one's own will.
This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which
is one of knowledge, and Dante's idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may know
all where we are and we all may understand that we are not happy with the situation that we find
ourselves with, but we cannot quite solve it by knowledge because the problems are problems of
willing.
What is he doing? Let me just try to make this very simple. There are two schemes, I'm really
simplifying it too, because I think this is dramatic enough in and of itself. I don't have to overdo it
with unnecessary complications. There is a Socratic scheme whereby all issues are issues of
intellectual sorts. I know, and therefore I am virtuous. I know what justice is and the implication is:
I'm just. That's a false implication because if I go around the room here and ask you all to give me a
definition, of each and every one of you of justice, you'll all tell me something: that justice is a
justice within the self, that justice is a way I relate to my family, or justice is a way I relate to the
city, or justice is a way I take care of the problems or whatever of the world that I find myself in.
Dante will say this is not the knowledge of what the definition of justice cannot make you just.
The issue is one of willing, desire.
The other scheme that Dante opposes to the Socratic idea that all issues are issues of philosophy or
issues of knowledge is one of the will. In the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes, "The good that I
will do, that I do not do. The evil that I would do that I do." He draws attention to the essential
existential problem, the problem of the self. My will is divided against itself. The only way I may
know what to do, but I do not know really, I am not sure that I will, I will it. That's the fatality of
life. We all know what's good. How many of us go around choosing and doing what we know it's
not good for us, it's not the best in terms of our judgment of situations. So it's willing and the
perspective of the will becomes Dante's perspective in coming to terms with the limitations of
philosophy and intellectual knowledge.
We shall see Dante talks about the will in a number of ways. Last time, talking about the Vita
nuova, I began mentioning to you that the will is even better of course for him than unwilling, and
yet the best experiences of life seem to be those of one does not want to happen to us; such as a
dream, for instance, the dream of falling in love or sometimes in the death of the beloved. You don't
he certainly did not want the death of Beatrice. It's a way of understanding that unwilling is as
compelling as willing. And yet he understands that as soon as he focuses on Beatrice as the figure,
the real contingent historical figure of love, that he has to give a direction to his own desires, that he
has to define the will it's you understand what I'm saying? He understands that too. That's
already an anticipation of what of the problems of the will.
Now he starts exploring other problems, which we shall see, both as they relate to the self, to the
psychology of the character, but also as they relate to politics for instance. To a vision of the world
as an act of and the projection of our own will; that the world is the way we want it to be, and that
men are too to the way in which we relate to problems which are of problems necessary
problems, the problems of reality, etc. For the time being though, Dante takes the will as his own, or
the body, his own perspective.
He finds out that he cannot go up the hill that he has seen. Three beasts, just paraphrasing the text, a
leopard, a she-wolf, a lion, and the lion and the she-wolf will block his journey up and so he's going
right back where he finds himself and he's now back into the deepest despair possible because there
seems to be now really no exit.
Chapter 4. Meeting Virgil the Poet and Neo-Platonic Philosopher [00:25:31]
Then he sees something, "when I was rushing down to the place below, there appeared before my
eyes one whose voice seemed weak from long silence. When I saw him in that great waste," and as
you know, because this is the first words that Dante will say, the pilgrim, "have pity on me whoever
thou art, I cried to him, shade or a real man." These are the words taken from Psalms, "misere"
he's prostrating of King David, so he's prostrating himself and I stress this because the voice, the
Davidic voice will constitute an important strain in this narrative. How does Dante talk? That's one
of the ways and we shall see how discretely it will appear further down in the poem and now the
conversation what he meets is the fear he meets is Virgil.
"Not man, once I was a man." Look at what we can stop a little bit to reflect on what this
experience here has been like and can we define it in some ways. Dante finds himself lost in the
landscape. He does not know how he got there. He mistakes the sunlight, the natural sunlight, as the
light of truth by following which he thinks he can reach the plain of truth, up to the top of the hill,
the top of the mountain from which he can survey the land and find the exit, find an escape, find a
transcendence, we'll call it. Let's call it a way of getting out of that disentanglement. Then he comes
right back. He sees the three beasts that we don't know what they are. Are they sins? Are they
dispositions to sins? They are animals and therefore they stand for animal projections of our desires,
of his desires, the she-wolf, the lion and the leopard, that's all we can see about them. Then he meets
a figure that can't even know if it's a shade or a man.
He's dramatizing what a medieval thought, a medieval literature; it's called the land of dissimilitude,
the land of an unlikeness. He finds himself in a world where things are not what they seem. Where
there seems to be a disparity between, let's call it let's use the literary language, with the signs
and things signs and their meanings, things and what they stand for and part of this effort is to
literally stitch this to, this break between signs and symbols, meanings and signs, stitch them
together.
First meeting then is with this figure by the name of Virgil, who will become his guide. No man,
you know who he is. He's the author of the Aeneid, but look how he presents himself. I think it's
crucial you pay attention: "Not man; once I was man, and my parents were Lombards, both
Mantuan by birth. I was born sub Iulio," meaning Caesar, which is true, "though, late in his time
and I lived in Rome." And he gives a biography of himself, a self-presentation in terms of his life,
the historical circumstances and also his works. That's what we call a miniature biography: a sense
that I came into this world and somehow. This is what it all comes down to, this is really the sense
of my birth, and he speaks about his own birth.
"I lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and
sang of that just son of Anchises," Aeneas, "who came from Troy after proud Iliam was burned. But
you? Why are you returning to such misery? Why dost thou not climb the delectable mountain
which is the beginning and cause of all happiness?" meaning the Mountain of Purgatory that will
take him to Eden which is really what all things according to the biblical version of cosmology,
all things started.
He'll say, "art thou then that Virgil the fountain which pours forth so rich stream of speech? I
answered," etc., "O glory and light of other poets, let the long study and the great love that has
made me search thy volume avail me. Thou art my master and my author. Thou art he from whom I
took the style whose beauty has brought me honor."
This is Virgil, clearly, the poet. And the extraordinary recommendation, which I can tell you as a
teacher, every teacher really would love, years after the students have been studying with the
teacher, to give them this kind of great acknowledgement: how I remember your teaching. That's
what he does, very rhetorical; we'll call it the rhetoric of capturing the benevolence of the
interlocutor. It's clear that the exchange between them and the recognition of Virgil is as a poet, and
therefore I have to take a few minutes to tell you a little bit about this.
It's because Virgil, we know, he's the poet of the Aeneid, clearly the story of a journey, of a grand
epic journey by Aeneas. We'll talk a lot about it; I hope you've been reading that poem, if you
haven't already. That's not the way he was known. Virgil was not known this way in, what we call
the twelfth-century Europe, in the culture immediately preceding Dante's time. He, Virgil, more
than as a poet, was known as a philosopher. He was a neo-Platonic philosopher. That is to say, a
neo-Platonic philosopher is one who had written a poem, but the substance of the poem was not the
fiction about the burning of Troy, the journey of Aeneas to as an exile who could go around
looking for a new land with his father on his back and the kid the Ascanius by his hand; it was
nothing like that.
It really had some philosophical depth. It was a way of acknowledging that poetry is capable of
providing philosophical illumination. What was the philosophical message? I call it neo-Platonic,
because it was just very much like what they thought was the Odyssey in that same time: the
Odyssey, the story of Odysseus or Ulysses, who goes from Ithaca to Troy, and then after ten years
of the war in Troy goes back to Ithaca. It takes him ten more years to do that. The neo-Platonists,
the allegorizers, were viewing that poem as the metaphor for the journey and the experience of the
soul. It was the story of the soul that goes from the point of origin, one's home, one's home is
always we call once home a place of one's where one's soul is when one can find oneself
somehow and one is familiar, comfortable, whatever. He leaves Ithaca, goes to Troy, goes through
life, and then he has to purify himself in order to go back, as in a circle, a neo-Platonic circle back
to the point of origin.
This is the neo-Platonic allegory of the Odyssey. They will do the same thing in the twelfth-century
France. I could give you names if you wish: Bernard Sylvester, Fulgentius a little bit earlier, John of
Salisbury who was an Englishmen of the twelfth century, who will go on writing about the Aeneid is
the story of a hero who is born in Troy and then goes through the stages of life. Each book
represents a stage of life: childhood, youth, maturity, with all the temptations of the flesh that
happened with Dido and then he goes back to arrives in Italy and that's the Book VI. They would
never really bother reading the other book.
The Aeneid was viewed as a philosophical text illustrating the pattern and the movement of life. It
was really telling us, and that's really the promise of philosophical knowledge, that we all, like
Aeneas, are born, but with care and prudence can reach the Promised Land. Dante changes this
interpretation and he changes this interpretation by making and insisting that you that Virgil is a
poet. He replaces the philosophical promises with the idea of poetry in the belief that poetry is
better than philosophy. That philosophy cannot quite reach the depth of immense light that makes
two general promises for everybody. It tells that we can all be like Aeneas, going from Troy to
Latium.
And Dante says no; this is not really saying much, but saying at all about the reality and the
individuality of my life. Poetic language is for him, the language that addresses these issues, and
therefore, poetry here is seen as a version of history. This is you are the writer, he says to Virgil,
who wrote the poem dealing with Roman history. Poetry and history they deal with the world of
contingency and not the world of universal, and therefore, potentially empty promises. That's the
great change, the great new interpretation that Dante's advancing about Virgil.
What Virgil will tell him is that the they go on talking about Dante will call him master and
author, this is and great sage and all that. And Virgil says to him, this is very simple, you must
take another road; you are going the wrong way. This is the that's what I call the idea that Canto I
is a rehearsal to the whole poem. It gives the story of a journey, a journey that fails, a journey that is
aborted, that's not the way you go. It's not you find yourself lost, what do you do? You try to go
quickly up to the destination, you climb up the hill and you think you can make it. No, no, no. Virgil
replies that he has to go in a different way.
He may reach the same point, the same destination, the world of justice, the vision of God, the idea
of love, the good as he calls it, but he must go down. That the way up is down, he has to go through
the whole spiral, through the horrors and the suffering of Hell, then reemerge through Purgatory in
order to be able to reach the beatific vision. That's very simple. The way up is down and this is
something that marks the difference between philosophical presumption and the notion of a spiritual
Christian humility that he has to pursue and wants to pursue. This is the conversation between
them goes on with this prophecy of the so-called hound, page 27, line 100. It says, the world is in
such a disarray, and yet now there's very mysterious and enigmatic prophecy that we'll come to and
discuss by the time we come to the end of Purgatory and so now the journey begins, "then he set
out and they came on behind him."

Chapter 5. Canto II: Identity and Purpose of Journey [00:37:01]

That's the end of Canto I and we come to Canto II, where now it's what's the time of the year? If
this has to be a historical, a reducible, and essentially a biographical experience, Dante has to be
very careful. He will give us the time, the precise time and place of this experience. We are the
poem starts on Good Friday, on the evening of Good Friday of the year 1300. These are the so
it's a very Christo-mimetic we call it, an imitation of Christ-like experience, because he will emerge
to the light of Purgatory on Easter Sunday.
Dante says, why should I take this journey to extraordinary you here this is the whole brunt,
the whole substance of Canto II. "I'm not Aeneas," he says, "I'm not Paul." "Why should I go
there?" Why should I go on? "You poet" I'm on line 10, "you guidest me, consider my strength,
if it is sufficient. . . You tell us of the father of Sylvius as he went," meaning of course Aeneas, etc.,
and then you also tell us about the Paul and he concludes, "but I, why should I go there," line 32.
"Who grants it? I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul."
First of all, these are the coordinates, the imaginative coordinates for his own journey. Aeneas, the
hero who brings about the foundation of Rome and then Paul, the Apostle to the Gentile, the
thirteenth Apostle who really brings about who also goes to Rome, but he was also the spiritual
domain of the Church. So these are the two so who is he? That's the first question he must
answer. "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul." The implication is who am I? This whole part of this story is
to find out who he is and part of this journey is indeed to find out the beginning of this journey at
least, is to find out that the poem is written in order to bring some degree of redemption and clarity
to the world. He really believes in this, in what we call "salvific" role of his own voice. Not without
irony, not without discouragement, not without a sense that this may indeed be a proud arrogant
kind sort of posture.
This whole idea about who he is, is immediately countered by a reflection on his own divided will. I
just want to read this thematically, "and as one who one wills what he willed, and with new
thoughts changes his purpose, so that he quite withdraws from what he has begun, such I became on
the dark slope; for by thinking of it I brought to naught the enterprise that was so hasty in its
beginning."
It would take me really too long to give you a sense of an appropriate gloss to these lines. They are
lines about the limitations of willing. Dante begins by claiming the importance of the will in the act
of knowledge and we do see that he so aware of it there's one detail that I did not mention. You
realize how the pilgrim moves throughout in Canto I and he will move in the same way but he'll
never talk about it again. He hobbles in toward the light, he goes around hobbling and that
hobbling is part of his being wounded, having a wounded will that he must somehow heal. Someone
will say, good, Dante's a voluntarist, not quite. Dante doesn't believe in philosophy and intellect, not
quite.
He believes that the two faculties of the soul, intellect and will, are like the feet of one's body. They
got to if you really want to walk fast, at least, and safely, you got to be using both. You got to use
the intellect and the will. As soon as he claims the importance of the will, which the Socratic
experience had somehow neglected, he goes on reflecting about the limitations of the will. What are
the limitations? One of it is that the will can be divided against itself. The second one is that the will
needs something to regulate it, because I can will anything, I can will this and that, how do I order
what I will? The third limitation of the will, and we'll talk more about the some of these aspects
but there's a third limitation of the will is that I can never really go faster than my own will. I'm a
prisoner of my if I believe that that's all I have, my will I can't go faster than it. If the will is
weak and slow, and divided, that's what I am. I can't go past it, some of the difficulties.
Here he goes, Canto II, trying to think about the identity and the purpose of this journey who am
I? "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul," then who am I? That's the great question and as soon as he does
this, he admits he sheds light on the first internal issue that he must cure, the internal issue is the
divided will.

Chapter 6. Canto III: Entering the Gate of Hell; An Idea of a Linear Novel
[00:42:21]
We come to Canto III, I'm sorry that we go a little fast but that's the way our will moves fast.
This is now Dante enters into the gate of Hell, the famous inscription, "Through me the way," pretty
scary and that scares him quite a lot. Dante meets the first sinners that he meets are the so-called
neutral angels, Canto III, around lines 30 and following, "And I, my head encircled with horror,
said: 'Master what is this I hear, and who are these people who seem so mastered by their pain?' And
he said to me: 'This miserable state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without
disgrace and without praise. They are mixed with that caitiff choir of the angels who were not
rebels, nor faithful to God, but were 'my text says, "for themselves." The right translation is, "by
themselves," because if you are for yourself, you are for someone. These are the angels called
neutral who in the great cosmic battle with which the world begins between God and the satanic
forces, just became spectators, just watching. The translation is per- in Italian it says "per se stessi,"
which we translate as "by themselves," sort of taking a separation. In other words, Dante begins by
dramatizing that which to him is the most serious of sins, not being disengaged, not taking sides,
in the belief that somehow you wait and see what the outcome is and then you can go on taking
sides. That's the start of this experience and then he goes on why are they he responds, "They
have no hope of death, etc., pity and justice despise them. Let's not talk of them but look at them
and pass."
He doesn't even name them, he won't even name them because to name them would be to bring
them into reality and the neutrality stands and is a sign the way in which they de-realize the world.
They reduce the world to a pure show of their own for their own spectatorship. So, he goes on
from here and now the second action is that he sees Charon the famous he goes into the ferry,
Charon who will ferry all the souls and gives an extraordinary description of this figure and the
souls who blasphemed God and the parents, the humankind.
And then there is an extraordinary image that I want to read with you when Dante describes the
souls and what he sees are souls that go on the boat of Charon. This is toward the end of Canto III,
lines 112 and following. "As in autumn the leaves drop off one after the other until the branch sees
all it spoils on the ground, so the wicked seed of Adam fling themselves from that shore, one by one
at the signal as a falcon at its recall. Thus, they depart, of the dark water and behold of the land on
the other side a fresh crowd collects again on this. 'My son, said the courteous master, 'all those that
die in the wrath of God assemble here from every land and they're eager to cross the river,' etc."
I really want to focus on this image of the autumn leaves, whereby Dante describes the dead souls
as the leaves in autumn that have fallen from the tree. The conceit is that the souls are leaves, and
it's an image that Dante takes straight from the Aeneid of Virgil. In Book VI, also Virgil describes
Book VI of the Aeneid, focuses on the descent of Aeneas into Hades and there he also waits and
he sees the souls waiting for reincarnation, the famous theory of metempsychosis. You may have
heard of this term, which means the reincarnation of the souls. The souls are waiting to be
reincarnated and come back in an endless cycle. Dante Virgil himself had taken this image from
Homer, of course.
Dante changes Virgil's, the thrust of Virgil's image, because in Virgil it's quite accurate since he has
a Pythagorean understanding of existence. That is to say, life is a continuous circle, the wheel of
becoming, Plato's wheel of becoming. Time goes on and on returning on itself. We always witness
these circles and cycle of the seasons, and this is also what happens with human life. There is
nothing really unique about us because we die and then we can wait for the reincarnation of our
soul. Death in Virgil is an elegiac experience: it's never really tragic and cannot be tragic, because it
lacks that edge of the uniqueness, the edge that something particular and special has been happening
to the world because I am here, certainly to my world, because I am here, and then I may disappear.
Dante changes this idea of this circularity, the elegiac quality of death and life that we have in
Virgil. Why do I call it elegiac? Because you die and yet you can come back, because we're really
like leaves: and just as leaves fall in the autumn, you just wait for the spring. We might not be the
same leaves, but leaves very much like those that have just fallen will return. Look what Dante
does. Dante goes on focusing on the idea of uniqueness of every leaf.
"As in autumn, the leaves drop off one after the other until the branch sees all its spoils on the
ground, so the wicked seed of Adam," we there is already some kind of some evil being
acknowledged at the root of our own existence, "the wicked seed of Adam, fling themselves from
the shore one by one at the signal, as a falcon at its recall. Thus, they depart over the dark water and
before they have landed on the other side, a fresh crowd collects again on this."
For Dante, this image shows not that leaves are our souls are like leaves, but that a leaf can be
described as a soul only if you insist on its own uniqueness and the fact that it will never return.
There is one fairly contemporary poet who understood this and I really want to quote to you a few
lines. I don't know that I remember them all, it's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some of you will have
read who read English literature remember this, you may remember this. He writes his famous
poem, called Goldengrove Margaret. Do you know the poem? Do you know what I'm talking
about? "Margaret, are you grieving of a Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves like the things of man
you . . . care for, can you? As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder," etc. and
continues.
What is Hopkins really is reading this image. What is he really saying? He's saying he
understands that leaves, like the things of man you care for, can you what comes back that's not
the life of human beings, but comes back are the things that human beings may use and waste and
those things. So the right analogy for Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a sense, really in the wake of
Dante, is between the things of man, the things that we have, the things that we can produce and
leaves, not souls.
In formal terms, this really means that Dante is replacing the notion of epic circularity that you find
in the classics, the classics of Homer, the classics such as the Aeneid, with an idea of linear novel.
The life of human beings is best described formally by a novel in the sense that we are caught in a
journey that goes on. It's unique and will reach its destination whatever it will be. We don't know
yet, at this point, of the poem.

Chapter 7. Canto IV: Into the Garden and Limbo's Fantastic Figures [00:51:31]
Now Dante enters into a circle, into the garden, the first experience in Canto IV. I will I want to
give you some time to I will have to deal with Canto IV and then I will stop. I'll have to come
straight to the point about Canto IV. Dante comes to what is called "limbo" the a word that
comes from Latin, in Latin it that's what limbo is, this is the edge, that's what it means, lembos.
In Italian you speak of the lembo, the edge of a dress or a jacket and so on; comes to the area of Hell
which really is outside of Hell. In fact, it's very much like the Virgilian after-life of the virtuous.
And he meets a lot it's described as a garden, one of the gardens, one of the three, four gardens
we find a sort of pre-figuration of the in many ways of the earthly paradise and gardens in
Purgatory, but it's also pre-figuration of the world of Paradise where the city, Jerusalem, is described
as a garden.
The first thing about this: it's called the locus amoenus in case you want to know what the technical
term, locus amoenus, the kind of idyllic place, and this is a term, a phraseology that belongs to very
much the epic world. And in the world, for instance, later in the Renaissance whether it's it could
be Spencer or Tasso, or Milton, there is always the story of the hero who reaches this idyllic bucolic
place and to relax.
It's really a place of the breakdown of the errancy of the hero, of the adventurous spirit, and always
shows, or maybe it's just the irony in literary structures, that whenever heroes seem to look for a
pause to the quest by reaching the garden and relaxing, that's where they find out they are in the
most dangerous situation. That whenever you think that you are safe and you can disarm, and there's
the running cool water of the river. There is the shade; there is the fragrance of the landscape, this is
the way that we're the wherewithal, the description of these bucolic gardens, that's exactly when
the snake will appear. That's exactly when the enemy will be capable of reaching you and
overwhelm you. This is also in other words there are all these places of temptation and that's
what happens here.
Dante here, arrives and he sees the poets, Canto IV, it's an extraordinary they're all virtuous
heathens, he sees the poets, and the great poets that he will see the first poets that he will see are
first of all he sees all the figures from he will enumerate the characters, scientists,
philosophers from the Greek and Roman world, but put a little bit at the edge. They really don't
seem to have much impact on the situation here. But then the dramatic situation is when here, lines
80 and following, "O you," he sees the poets, the classical poets from Homer to Horace and Ovid,
"O you who honored both science and art, who are these to have such honor that it sets them apart
from the condition of the rest?' And he said to me," Virgil speaking, "their honorable fame which
resounds in thy life above, gains favor in Heaven, etc. 'Honor the lofty poet, his shade returns that
left us.' When the voice has paused and there was silence... I saw four great shades coming to us;
their looks were neither sad nor joyful."
As befits limbo. It's clearly like life here. That's what the after-life is in Dante's conception. It's only
an extension of what we choose to do on this earth. If you really think that life, the beauty of life,
which is not a bad idea, is talking about having endless seminars of aesthetics or poetry, as these
poets do, that's what your after-life is. You sit down, sit on the grass and go on talking about
beautiful things, he says.
"The good master began: 'Mark him there with sword in hand who comes before the three as their
lord. He is Homer, the sovereign poet. He that comes next is Horace, the moralist. Ovid is the third,
and the last, Lucan," famous epic poet whom Dante will again celebrate in Purgatory, "Since each
shares with me in the name the one voice uttered they give me honorable welcome and in this do
well.' Thus I will assemble the noble school," school in Greek means it's also leisure, the
leisurely life, scholar, the world of play and the world of leisure, " the lord of loftiest song who flies
like an eagle," Homer, " above the rest." And the irony, of course, is that he's blind and the eagle to
have the sharp view, the sharp vision, but that Homer's vision is an inner vision. He looks he's
blind because he's looking inward in order to know what the song he is to sing will be about.
"After they had talked together for a time, they turned to me with a sign of greeting and my master
smiled at this; and then they showed me still greater honor, for they made me one of their number,
so that I was the sixth among those high intelligences. Thus, we went on as far as the light, talking
of things which were fitting for that place and of which it is well now to be silent."
Here is Dante. He inscribes himself in the history of Western poetry; from Homer to Dante, he
counts himself as sixth among them. Here's Virgil, here's Lucan, here's Ovid, here's Horace, and of
course, the master of them, all Homer. We go from Homer to Dante, it's a little history, if you wish,
of Western poetry and Dante thinks that he belongs to it. We could say a number of things about
what they are talking about. He says he doesn't say. We talk about beautiful things which we I
infer we can easily infer they talk about poetry: they talk about their craft. There may be a little link
that I would like you to reflect on, on your own, between the garden and the kind of poetry, the kind
of beauty that they are really talking about.
This is the way Dante's imagination works. You have to pull together things that don't seem to be
described. So this is the garden, there's some kind of self-absorption about this. There seems to be a
kind of self-enclosure about this kind of poetry. It's a little scene that reflects on what the spiritual
condition may have been like, but what is the most surprising and what constitutes the temptation of
this canto, the temptation of the scene for the pilgrim's own spiritual pilgrimage; he's involved in the
spiritual descent which turns out to be an ascent. He says at one point "I was sixth among such
genius."
Do you see the discrepancy? Do you see how this is jarring? Can you hear it? He is going down for
redemption. He is descending in humility, and yet now he talks as a poet, his poetic voice is one that
elevates itself. There seems to be a kind of discrepancy between the two, that's the great temptation
of Dante. To believe that as a poet he has been claiming that poetry is better than philosophy, that
poetry is like history, and the first concern Dante has is to reflect on the wholeness of this claim.
How this kind of claim about the importance of poetry can turn out to be a temptation for him. It's a
hubris and I focus on it, as I have focused on it, because in effect what we're going to discuss next
time. Canto V, it is an extended reflection, a way for Dante to reflect on this claim, an extended
reflection on the dangers of such a claim and the responsibility of writing poetry.
Dante will meet the great heroine of all love stories, Francesca. Everybody knows about this
fantastic figure, a lovely figure Francesca who dies for love, but Dante's actually encountering a
reader of his own poetry and he witnesses the kind of traps and risk that reading implies. We are
going to go on next time thinking about this whole question of reading and responsibilities of
writing.
Canto IV, by the way, I cannot leave without saying something about the epic quality because I have
been just talking about I have been defining the poem really as a novelistic vis--vis the circular
structure of an of Virgil's understanding of the reincarnation, and therefore, the great notion of
what an epic is and now I will say actually Dante goes on mixing his genres. As soon as you
formulate something, Dante has a way of undercutting that formulation. Canto IV ends with a
miniature representation of the epic quality of this text. It goes on enumerating all the souls that he
can see, which is really as you know, if you remember from your Iliad on the Gates of Ilion, at one
point Helen will go on numbering all the ships of the Greeks to the old Priam. You remember that
scene? Some of you may remember that, and this is the way Canto IV ends with lines 124 and
following:
"There before me on the enamelled green were shown to me the great spirits by the sight of whom I
am uplifted in myself. I saw Electra with many in her company, of whom I knew Hector and Aeneas
and Caesar. . .I saw Camilla, Penthesilea on the other side, and I saw the Latian king who sat with
his daughter Lavinia; I saw Brutus who drove out Tarquin, Lucrece, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia;
and by himself . . . I saw Saladin," a great sign of honor, Saladin who sits by himself as a kind of
lofty state and, " when I raised my eyes a little higher I saw the master of them that now sitting
amid a philosophic family. . . Socrates. . . Plato," the other one was Aristotle, "Democritus,
Diogenes. . ." all the Greek philosophers and then Orpheus, Cicero, Linus, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy.
A version of the classical encyclopedia: all of the knowledge is gathered here, and yet Dante has a
way of saying that traditional encyclopedias, these formal structures as he wanted to organize the
world of knowledge, there is something wanting about them. Why? What's wanting about them?
They never tell you how you can really educate yourself. They never describe the process of
education.
To know that to describe the process of education you go to have an encyclopedic poem where you
are showing the phases and the stages of learning; as the pilgrim will it was the second thing that I
have to say is that, in any enumeration as you have here, an epic enumeration, and I will close my
remarks for the day. Enumerations always imply the wish of a narrative such as an encyclopedia,
because it's as little bit of an encyclopedic form I say, to encompass the whole of reality: that's what
encyclopedias want to do. The reality of it, the intellectual reality, and yet enumerations by their
virtual being enumerations will tell you that no totalization is possible. There is something that
always escapes the formal ordering that the encyclopedias want to reach.

Chapter 8. Question and Answer [01:04:13]

And for now I stop with my remarks and we have a few minutes in case there are questions, as I
hope there are. I welcome questions. I will repeat your questions, by the way, for the benefit of the
videotape. Please.
Student: So when Dante talks about the first group of sinners who work for themselves who didn't
take a side, so you think that was also political commentary?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes. The question is, Dante talks about the neutral angels. He calls
them "for themselves" and we say it's "by themselves" and the question then really is, is that also a
political commentary? Before I could rephrase, I could repeat this the question I said yes,
absolutely. Dante will use the very same experience for himself later in Paradise where he will say
that in many ways being by oneself, there are times when that can become an act of virtue where the
notion of neutrality is going to be redefined. Dante doesn't like clearly neutrality, all right. Why is
he does he find neutrality? Because it's a language of privation for him, it's really way of it's
the decision not to take decisions because you are always making a decision even when we think
that we are not making a decision, so you really are. To him that is the sign of a great cowardice. He
explains that in cosmic terms. This is the metaphysics the great war in Heaven, which by the way,
enables me now to say that it gives the whole of Hell a kind of symmetrical structure because it
clearly begins with the neutral angels and ends with the encounter with Lucifer at the end. So
you that this is really the kind what frames the narrative of Hell. To go back to your question,
when Dante is going to talk about politics, he also believed, for a while, that he had to take sides.
He did, and he did by going back now to the few remarks about his language, his political
involvement, on the first class, the first seminar.
He was banned, he was sentenced to exile, and then he removed himself from all partisan politics.
How did he do this and why did he do this? For a while he was a Guelf being thrown out of
Florence with many others, also as an act of punishment for a decision he had made to throw out the
Ghibellines, among whom his own best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, who died in exile. He's thrown
out, and we do know these historical happenings. They spend the first few years of their exile
plotting and making, and going on through machinations as to how to get back to Florence and
damn it, really make them pay. He realizes very quickly the wickedness of this plan. He realizes that
his own party is no better than that of the Ghibellines and so he removes himself from them, the act
of removal from the criminal violence that he and his other accomplices were for a while thinking
about, turns out to be madness and so he decides in this act of virtue, absolute solitude and that is by
himself. There is a kind of judgment, but let me refine that, how can you go on really describing
that the act of neutrality is bad. And yet there is a way in which there are times where neutrality can
become nothing less than a virtuous decision as he will make. Other questions? Please.
Student: I have a question from last Tuesday's lecture.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last yes please.
Student: Last Tuesday you talked about friendship and love, love and [inaudible]. There was no
conversation about lust, and we know from this history that both of them, Beatrice and Dante were
married and that he had children and I'm wondering if the physical aspect above is irrelevant for the
poet.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question refers to the remark I made about that was picked
up by a student also, another student, the remark about love and friendship as the two are
dramatized in the Vita nuova. It refers wants to know, wants me to explore more the role of lust,
since we know that Dante was married and what does lust have to do with love. I take, that's really
the question. Let me just say that it's a very complicated question and I will talk about this next time
when we deal with Francesca, who is of course, the heroine of lust, if there was ever one. Then we'll
see what Dante means by that.
I mean the it clearly is an issue related to love, fundamentally related to love. But to believe and
I'm really probably have confused some of you here, but don't be confused, to believe that
Dante's judgment of Francesca is limited to the representation of Canto V, where he describes the
relationship between lust and love, lust and love, would be a grand mistake. Dante understands that
without physicality there could be no love, that there's no soul which is not connected to a body. In
fact, some of the remarks that I made today are really about can be construed I did not make
the point but it can be construed as his sense of the inevitability of the body, that the intellect in and
by itself, the soul in of and by itself, without materiality, without some degree of being wedded to
the body, is really not part of the human experience.
This is what I was saying today about the fact that the journey is not only just an intellectual
journey. It has to be done in the body; it's part of the sense of the inevitability of the body. After all,
this is really what his Christianity is about: it's about the incarnation. It's about the being embodied,
about the divinity being embodied and therefore entering our human condition.
Let me also say that Dante goes on thinking about Francesca. He condemns her and Francesca is
always circling around in this state of permanent desire with power, in other words by moving
around, they're really describing their unquiet hearts. If you are when you are at peace you just
stop and sit. She just goes on moving around and around; that's their punishment and yet, he
remembers her. When Dante reaches the Heaven and metaphysics in Paradise and he has to talk
about the kiss of creation, how creation God creates the world by imprinting a kiss on the
material that he had at his disposal. The language that he will use is going to be the language of
Francesca and that to me means that the kiss of Francesca can also be construed as the existential
encounter to God's ;the God's kiss on creation.
It's a way I don't think that he's redeeming her, there's no such thing as the redemption for the
infernal souls, and yet there is an idea there is something that may have gone wrong, and we'll
have to see what it is, and it's not the lust. We have to see what the situation is; it's not lust. I don't
think it's only lust and that is part of there's something even larger about her. What the
mistake that she seems to be making is of a different sort and I'll keep you hanging until next time
so that otherwise what's the point? We have to look at Canto V. Let's read Canto V for next
Tuesday, but before you go, there's some time so in case there are we have a couple of minutes,
other questions? Please.
Student: In Canto I, when he is talking to Virgil and he says, "you're the only one from whom my
writing drew the noble stuff of which I have been [inaudible]." It's really kind of a lie isn't it?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: It he says
Student: So he's saying that he's that he's taken his style from him and that's the style for which
he's been for which he's gained honor, but he's not honored as an epic poet, he's not that's not
what are the implications of what he's saying because it's really not actually true.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, the question is, a reference to the encounter between the
pilgrim and Virgil in Canto I of Inferno where Dante in what I called the captatio benevolentia,
what are captured in the benevolence of Virgil, the only living he doesn't even know if it's a
shade or a human being, turns out that he is a human being, he says, well you are the poet from
whom I took the style that has honored has made me honor. The sort of the real question is,
this is a little bit of a lie isn't it, because Dante by this time is not really known as an epic poet. I
would really say call it a lie, say it's part of the simulation, rhetorical simulation of captured
in the benevolence of the listener. At the same time it's really an acknowledgement of Virgil's
mastery, and what is Virgil's mastery? Dante really thought that his own poetry is that Latin is
not a dead language, that the vernacular is really the way Latin has become in time, so the
continuity between Virgil and him is real, so there's a kind of continuity of poetic continuity. You're
quite right that it's literally literally it's not true. At that point, Dante's more of a provincial poet
or the poet who follows the stilnovisti, the poets of the Sweet New Style from Bologna and Florence
and then Virgil. Thank you so much; we'll see you next time.
[end of transcript]
ital-310: Dante in Translation
Lecture 4 - Inferno V, VI, VII [September 16, 2008]
Chapter 1. The Ambiguities of Gardens [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time I finished we finished on a little note, as you'll recall,
that the detail of the garden where the pilgrim finds himself and meets the other poets. And he
declares, in a way that seems to be really prideful, on his place in this trajectory, this literary poetic
tradition. I was emphasizing last time that this is a detail that opens for us opens our eyes to the
ambiguity of gardens, the ambiguity as Dante will go on dramatizing this idea of this ambiguity
of gardens throughout Purgatory especially, and in other areas, in an oblique way. It's not
necessarily monotonously bucolic language, this idea of the ambiguity of gardens.
What are some of these ambiguities in Canto IV? We are drawn naturally to gardens and we are
drawn to gardens because they reflect for us some image of order, especially if you're traveling
through Hell, then you do want this sort of you explore, you enter willfully this place that bears
the fingerprints of the human hand, has this it's something which had elaborated by human
beings. This is a divine place, nonetheless gardens mean that for us. But at the same time they give
us a sense of security and in its enclosure, also a sense of a lordship over them. It's something we
can control, it's something that we see and where we feel we belong. This is exactly the temptation
that the pilgrim experiences in Canto IV. He relaxes, and this happens to all the heroes in the epic
tradition, when they enter gardens they even set aside their arms. They get disarmed in more ways
than one. That is to say, they come to understand that they are this is a place of shelter, a place
which is so peaceful and idyllic that one is no longer or need not fear that one is in danger. In
effect, that's where the danger is most powerful.
Dante experiences a danger, the danger he experience is that of a poetic hubris. He is descending
into humility, that's the trajectory of his journey, and there he rests with Homer, Virgil, Lucan, etc.,
and he just says he feels that he belongs that his high genius allows him to be right there with
them. I remind you of this little detail exactly because it allows me to say more precisely what the
problems are that a presentation of gardens, but especially to emphasize that Canto V and the drama
that is unfolded in Canto V, a drama ostensibly of desire. It's a story of the great passion of a
woman, one of the most famous women in literature, Francesca, has with her brother-in-law Paolo.
But, the point is that that drama stems directly from the crisis in the pilgrim's mind in Canto IV of
Inferno. In what way? It is as if the experience of hubris, about the celebrating one's own power and
prowess as a poet, now has to confront the consequences of that claim. Now Dante comes literally
face to face with a reader of his poetry, and the reader of his poetry who understands his poetry in a
way that was not necessarily the one intended by its author.

Chapter 2. Canto V: The Second Circle [00:04:10]

You have now in Canto V the confrontation of reader and poet, and we shall see Francesca is, of
course, as you remember from your reading, having read Canto V, is a great reader of text. She goes
on quoting Lancelot, not in the version of Chrtien de Troyes, but it's a parallel version. It's the
same romance, she goes on quoting from The Art Of Courtly Love, this text about the art of love by
Andreas Capellanus, and you may remember I alluded to at least one of the earlier talks, and goes
on actually quoting to Dante, Dante's own poem in the Vita nuova, which we shall go and look at in
a while.
Let's start with Canto V. Where are we in the poem? Where are we located? We are in the second
circle. This your notes will tell you. We're in the larger area of so-called incontinence and I really
should emphasize to you something about we shall look at it in more detail further on, but
something about the topography, the moral topography of Hell. What is the disposition? What is the
distribution of sins and sinfulness? What is actually sin? What are we to understand for sin? For the
time being I'll tell you that for Dante, it's the will which is the locus of sin. You cannot really sin
intellectually; you cannot have commit sins with your mind. You can have your mind which
partakes and becomes an accomplice of the will, but it's primarily in the will, in the voluntary action
that you find sinfulness. That's the first thing.
Where are we now? In the area of incontinence. What does that mean? Well one thing, a way of
making it very simple, you probably should know that the shape, the diagram of the soul for Dante
is very classical, very ancient, it's really Aristotelian, it's the idea of its more or less figured as a
triangle which on the left side you have, because it's always the left the will the area of the
will and then on the right side you have the area of reason. Where the two faculties of the soul, there
are two faculties, like two feet of the body there are two faculties of the soul that where they
meet it's well in the Middle Ages, using a classical term they call, synteresis. This is the area
where free will in other words, in free will you have a conjunction of both will and reason and
that's the beginning of the moral life. It's not the end of it at all, it's really when only when you
are really free, your will is free, that you can start making decisions and getting engaged in the
world around you.
Now the soul is divided into three parts. It's a tripartite structure and begins at the bottom, it's so
called I should put it on this side because it's a will. The concupiscent appetites, which is really
what Francesca experiences, the incontinence lost in this form later will be gluttony, etc., avarice,
prodigality. In the middle area here, you would have the sensitive appetite, which is really the
middle ground of Dante's Hell, violence, the kind of bestiality that takes over the human mind, and
then the third is the rational. The order, the geometry of Hell, in a way, is patterned on the order of
the soul, the idea of the soul, in of course in an inverted form.
We begin in the area of concupiscence, the area of lust. Someone was asking me what was lust last
time; I think that we're going to have some kind of understanding about this. This is where we are in
the area of incontinence, the first one is lust, or what Dante will call with a formula: it's the area of
the sinners who have inverted the order, the hierarchical order of the reason and the will. They have
made pleasure they have invested pleasure with supreme lordship over the order of rationality.
So, reason, though somehow dimmed, is always going to be used as a rational to explain as a
kind of way of creating alibis for the passion of Francesca. This is the way the canto begins.
The second thing that I have to mention as we read here, is the particular landscape that Dante
evokes. It's a landscape of souls that go around, swirling around in a kind and sort of circular
structure. Let me tell you a little detail here, that you have to be careful as you read the poem even
about the directions of the pilgrim. For instance, if I were to ask you which way is Dante
descending into this spiraled Hell? When you move into a spiral, it's very difficult to see if you're
really going left or right of course, but he's going out of the way that he's always going leftward.
Because he's descending and as soon as we get to Purgatory, he goes out of the way to tell us that
he's now going rightward, which is to say, that Hell is the inverted cosmos of Purgatorio. So it's
really he's always going the same way, only that as he goes into Hell it's he's going down and
he's inverted. When he has to go from Hell to Purgatorio, the operation is going to be that of turning
upside down in order to go finally in the straight way, the right way.
The other detail is that the symbolism of the circle, which as you know, is very ancient, very old.
There are a number of ways of understanding direction in the Middle Ages. For instance, the linear
direction implies that of human beings were caught in time and they are going to some kind of
purpose or precise destination. The angels are those who circle around the throne of God so that the
circle implies the plentitude and perfection of movement. Clearly, Francesca is involved, who is
caught in a world of love, in the passion of love, she's giving a kind of parodic version, a caricature
of the circular perfect movement of the mind, and of the angels around the divinity.
The spiral, which is the movement of the pilgrim, combines line and circle; implies that Dante is
really the mind is going in a circular way around the divinity, but he also has a purpose, has an
aim to reach. Here the two are Francesca and Paolo are going around in circles, circles that will
have and they will experience no rest.
I think that the principle behind this representation of desire is displacement; desire is always a part
of displacement. Something that Dante valorizes greatly, that's the ambiguity of Dante's thinking.
Desire is displacement because in this case, Paolo and Francesca they get nowhere and yet it's
exactly this displacement that makes us aware that we are never where we should be, that our hearts
are always out of place. It's what Augustine says in the Confessions that the he begins the
Confessions with the awareness of his heart, he says, is unquiet, that the idea of the unquietness of
the heart out of place, so that's where he's enacting. Dante's moving within the larger pattern of
Augustine's thinking about desire and there will be a lot of talk about that.
You know what the word "desire" by the way, which is in English as the same as it is in Italian or
Latin, you know what it means? It's linked to the stars, to have desire is to know that you are not
quite sidera, at the end de sidera, we are sort of a removal, removed from the world of stars. It's a
word that is linked, usually its "consideration," another word that implies that the mind moves
alongside, now you consider when I consider how I like suspense, when you consider is a way of
moving with along the mind manages to move with the circularity and perfection of the sun. All
of this irrelevant to the point that's at hand here.

Chapter 3. The Lustful in the Second Circle [00:13:14]

Dante meets so we are in the world of begins this canto with a number of metaphors of birds.
You realize that, first of all, he starts around lines 30, about the "hellish storm." It's the externalizing
of the storm inside, the inner storm, "never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting
and whirling them about," etc. It continues, "As in the cold season, their wings bear the starlings
along the broad, dense flock, so does that blast the wicked spirits. Hither, thither, downward,
upward, it drives them; no hope ever comforts them, not to say of rest but of less pain." And then
the cranes. And Dante asks Virgil, "Master, who are these people whom the black air so scourges?"
And now we have an enumeration, another application of the epic an epic device, enumerating.
The epic that has it's always driven by the desire for totality to include all things within the
compass of its representation. It always has the enumerative style and now here we have a number
of figures that Dante points out that Virgil points out. And they're all queens at the beginning.
They are founders of cities. Keep this in mind because I think that part of the issues that Dante is
raising, and you can think about it, we can talk about it if you wish, is the relationship between eros
and politics. Pleasure and the city. Where does pleasure what is the place of pleasure in the
economy of the city?
Let's see who they are, one is the "Empress of peoples of many tongues, who's so corrupted by
licentious vice that she made lust lawful in her law to take away the scandal into which she was
brought." And the emphasis of the line is this lust becoming lawful, lust becoming public and
accepted. And "she is Semiramis," of Assyria, "of whom we read she succeeded Ninus." Then the
next one is Dido, who is both Virgil's invention in many ways, where Virgil in the Aeneid; this is a
reflection on the Aeneid as a poem of love too.
Dante can not but think about the place of how Rome, Rome's conquest would appear to be libido
of power, libido dominandi and yet and he's really playing with the idea that the Rome or
Roma as you know is the what we call the I'm going to have to use this term because I can't
think of an English term, boustrophedon. You know what it means, the boustrophedon, right? A
boustrophedon, it's very easy, it's a Greek term meaning a reversal. Roma, as in a mirror, becomes
Amor, but it's Venus is the mother of Aeneas. So there is this idea again, of a link and inner link
between love, or love and politics and the city. And Virgil writes the Aeneid, literally, as a love
poem. That is to say, that the ideology of Rome is an ideology of based on of Rome, is an
ideology based on desire.
The idea, which Augustine will counter by saying, yeah this is not really love, this is lust for power
and the distinction that someone was raising here, the gentleman was raising last time about how
lust is related to love. You already start seeing the antagonism between the two of them. Augustine,
a Roman, an African, but a Roman thinker was really writing about and belongs and reflects on
the great myths, on the mythology of Rome. And for him this is true in the Confessions, but it's
especially true in The City of God, where he juxtaposes the earthly city, Rome to the heavenly city,
the heavenly Jerusalem. The two cities are opposed to each other. There he reflects on Rome as a
city based on lust for power, and from that point of view, really not different from any other
empires. They're all Rome, like say the Persian Empire, the Greek claims for empire, and what not,
are all part of a long sequel of violence and imperial fantasies.
Dante is thinking along these lines and we shall see where that will take him in a moment. Then
there is Cleopatra of Egypt, Helen and the story of the fall of Troy. Then finally, the story of Tristan,
who as you know belongs is really a medieval invention: Tristan and Isolde. We are going to see
now Lancelot and Guinevere in a moment. The presence of Tristan shows one thing, that all the
heroes and heroines of antiquity are viewed through the lenses of medieval romances. They may
belong to the grand epics of the classical world. Dante will see them through that optic of romances,
the literature of desire. "And he showed me more than a thousand shades, naming them as he
pointed, whom love parted from our life." This is the catalog of the epic catalog. "When I heard
my Teacher name the knights and ladies of old times, pity came upon me, and I was as one
bewildered."

Chapter 4. Overwhelmed by Pity, Dante Faints Like a Dead Body [00:19:40]

Now this is really the first time that Dante introduces the notion of pity in the poem. And we shall
see by the end of the canto, that he is going to be overwhelmed by pity and he is going to faint after
he hears the story of Francesca. He was so overwhelmed that he fell, he says, "like a dead body"
falls. It's a fainting. It's sympathy; maybe it's a little bit of a self-recognition, maybe it's we shall
see that it's a way of coming to grips with his own responsibilities, maybe some of his
responsibilities.
The point I want to make there with this pity is that you do know, but Dante does not know the the
Poetics of Aristotle, but he knows whatever is available through Horace and he knows quite a lot.
The point here is that Dante goes on reflecting it could become a paper topic for some of you
enterprising spirits, for some of you maybe on the relationship within pity and justice.
Throughout the poem he goes on thinking about these two terms. Does justice necessarily need pity
or is there some kind of justice that must learn how to be pitiless, that has no place for this kind of
compassion. Are they two necessarily antagonistic or is there some way of thinking of a meeting
point between them? This is the first time he introduces this idea of pity, a kind of recognition; a
sense that it could be he who is in that position.
And he begins, "Poet I would fain speak with these two that go together and seem so light upon the
wind." He doesn't talk to any of the major classical figures. He chooses two people from his own
time, two people from the ordinary life around him, two people in the by this time Dante may
very well be living in that area of Italy which is Ravenna, not quite Ravenna, but in that area of
Ravenna.
"'Thou shalt see when they are nearer us, and do thou entreat them then by the love that leads them,
and they will come.' As soon as the wind bent. . . 'Oh wearied souls, come and speak to us and
speak with us, if One forbids it not.'" You realize that the name of God is never mentioned here in
Hell, if not as a discourse that takes place here on Earth, but the souls in Hell will always use
periphrastic constructions, terms or phrases; as if it would be highly improper for Dante to allow
them, or even for them, to acknowledge that which they never really acknowledged: "now if One
forbids it not."
Then, "as doves summoned by desire, come with wings, poised and motionless to the sweet nest,
borne by their will through the air, so these left the troop where Dido is." Again, the presence of
Dido that the Virgilian myth of Dido and also the other possibility of Rome: Virgil is writing
about the great battle between Carthage and Rome as two ways of choosing a civilization, two ways
of deciding how one should organize one, how should one experiment with cities.
"Coming to us through a malignant air; such force had my loving call." Now listen to how
Francesca speaks, "Oh living creature, gracious and friendly, who goes through the murky air,
visiting us who stained the world with blood." She's killed, she was killed, by the way, by her
husband, who caught Francesca and his brother Paolo in a tryst, so it's that's what the allusion to
the blood is.
"If the King of the universe were our friend, we would pray to Him for thy peace, since thou hast
pity of our evil plight. Of that which thou pleased to hear and speak, we will hear and speak with
you while the wind is quiet as here it is." Now she begins the description of her life, where she was
born. Most of the narratives in Inferno begin with this idea of birth. You saw that in the case of
Virgil and you see it once here in the case of Francesca. They begin with birth for a number of
reasons, but because birth is for Dante the event that somehow could potentially have changed and
have imparted a different direction to the world, or could end in nothing, as in the case of
Francesca. Hence a great piece of literature, but she herself did not really achieve much. Now she
talks about her city, in terms that clearly contrast with this movement of the souls caught in the
storm.
There they go endlessly in the air and now she evokes the place of what she really wants is rest,
"The city where I was born lies." That's the image of the stability of a city she has lost. "Where the
Po, with the streams adjoin it, descends to rest." Now three tercets in Italian all beginning with the
word love. Love made into kind of transcendent divinity. It is the great subject of her experience,
look at this. "Love which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart, seized this man for the fair form that
was taken from me, and the manner afflicts me still. Love, which absolves no one beloved from
loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as thou seest, it does not leave me yet. Love
brought us to one death." What is she saying? Well, a number of things, and I really have to give
this to you. First of all, she's really quoting important literature. The first line "Love which," the
translation is, "Love which absolves no love which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart," and
you know that this is really a quotation from one of Dante's sonnets in the Vita nuova that you read,
Chapter XX. "Love," that's how Dante starts, "Love and the gracious heart are a single thing," and
Dante quotes the poetics of a sweet new sound. It's when it's early he says, tells us in his poem, one
can more be without the other, one can no more be without the other than one that then can the
reasoning mind without it's reason," etc.
It's clearly meant for Francesca to flatter the sensible authorship of the poet himself. It's part of a
seductive strategy also that she can use. The second image, but love that does not allow anyone who
loves from returning, reciprocating the love, it really comes from the so-called ruse of love that
Marie de Champagne dictates in Book III of The Art of Courtly Love and I want to read this. It's
the translation is not quite all that accurate but I think I'm sorry I got the wrong one, the
wrong book. The Art of Courtly Love, Book III, and these are the famous it ends with the rules of
love. I will I'll explain what they are and Rule 9 says I can really read some of them to you so
you have an understanding of what courtly love is. This is the mind of which applies very well to
Francesca. Francesca imagines herself as really a courtly love heroine. She lives in the world of
kings, the God is the king of the universe, she's in the court of the king of love maybe.
These are some of the concerns of the rules of love and The Art of Courtly Love. "Marriage is no
real excuse for not loving." It's a way of saying adultery is the law of courtly love. "He who is not
jealous," number 2, "cannot love." No one can be bound by a double love than the boys do not love
until they arrive at the age of maturity. It leaves that very unclear what the age of maturity can be; 7,
"when one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor." Number 8, "no one
should be deprived of love by the very best of reasons." Number 9, "no one can love unless one is
impelled by somebody else's love," which is exactly the line that Francesca mentions, number 9.
Why these rules of love? What are they? What is she saying? What Andreas, first of all, is doing by
having these rules of love and having and reducing love to an art, is a way of acknowledging that
love is the most transgressive, disruptive of all experiences and therefore it needs to be formalized.
It needs to be contained. It may be part of a game, as is perhaps the thrust of Andreas Cappellanus'
thinking, or made to be part of an acceptable ceremony, which is the possible reading of what is
happening. Francesca falls completely, squarely within this tradition of believing that she lives in a
world of love where there is no other possible resistance.
In effect, these tercets with which I read to you above love, love, and love: they are really meant to
cast love as a transcendent force that no one can really that she at least, cannot withstand. What
she is doing is abdicating the power of her will to the irresistible, omnipotent, presence of this love.
It's part of a strategy, of not acknowledging any responsibility. It's part of a strategy to instead find
for herself an alibi: I was made to do that. The literature of yours and the literature of Andreas
Cappellanus' were filters of love.
You understand what I mean how in romances you always have filters of love. No one is going
to take the responsibility saying well the I had too much to drink or I read the great poem or
whatever, and so I was doing that. It's a way for Dante to show the blindness of Francesca to the
reality of her situation, and this where she is, a kind of unwillingness to give up that which is
really the quality of sin and the trait of sin: habit. Is sin in the measure in which it has become a
habit, a way of clinging to it and not acknowledging that there may be some kind of alternative or
something different to it.
So Dante goes on now, entertaining the arguments. "When I answered I began: 'Alas, how many
sweet thoughts, how great desire, brought them to the woeful pass!' . . . Then 'Francesca, thy
torments make me weep for grief and pity, but tell me, in the time of your sweet sighing how and by
what occasion did love grant you to know your uncertain desires?' And she answered: 'There is no
greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery and this thy teacher knows; but if thou has so
great desire to know our love's first root," which is a way of almost even that metaphor of the
root of love, the origin of love, she calls it the root of love as if the passion, her passion were the
flower of love, "I shall tell as one may that weeps in telling. We read one day for pastime of
Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and had no misgiving. Many times that reading
drew our eyes together and changed the color in our faces, but one point alone it was that mastered
us; when we read for that the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who never shall be
parted from me, all trembling, kissed my mouth. A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it. That
day we read in it no farther.' While the one spirit said this, the other," Paolo whose name means
"little" in Latin, as you know paulus, small, "wept so that for pity I swooned as if in death and
dropped like a dead body."

Chapter 5. A Story of Reading; References to Time [00:32:34]

And that's the end of the canto. Well, we could say it's an amazing story and we will talk about a
number of things. The first thing is that this is a scene represented through reading, a story of
reading. You are aware of that, right? This is clearly, she reads, they read he says that when one
day they were reading for delight, that's probably part of the concerns that Dante has. How should
we read if we read for delight? They read for delight. Is there some other way of reading? Is delight
clearly it's the constitutive elements of reading literally text, but is there something else that we
could do along the way? What is our problem really? Let's continue with this idea of reading.
She's reading the story of Lancelot, Lancelot and Guinevere, you do know the story, it's not the
story of Chrtien de Troyes, but you could easily go on, if you want to write about Chrtien de
Troyes Lancelot and Canto V, you can. Dante does refer to the stories of Chrtien de Troyes often in
his theoretical works. The story of Lancelot is the story of adultery at court. Lancelot is the secret
lover of the queen; clearly out of the desire and that says something about the nature of desire, to
really supplant the king, Arthur. There's a triangle here at stake, a triangle of desire, and Francesca
imitates this triangle and we'll talk about it in a moment.
The story of Lancelot is a story of let me go a little bit into that. It's the story of like all the
stories Chrtien de Troyes, they begin on the great feasts of Christianity. It's, I think, usually the
Ascension, Easter, the Pentecost, one of the great feasts. And the heroes are sitting around boasting
about themselves. Not one of them is doing anything heroic, but they all talk about how great they
were. It's a little bit like the parodic version that you have of the battle of the argument between
Ulysses and Ajax in the last book of the Metamorphosis where they talk about who is the hero
worthy of inheriting the arms of the great Achilles. And they talk about not the present prowess now
but what they were.
In the story of Chrtien clearly the idea is that the heroic age is over and done with. And the whole
romance goes on exploring, and pondering about that which the reasons why the heroic age may
have come to an end. What it is, is that the secret love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. The
story starts, it goes on where they're sitting around drinking ale, and talking, a mysterious figure
comes from the outside and kidnaps the queen. The knights who were sitting around don't move and
everybody's expecting Lancelot to get up and go and rescue the queen, but he won't out of fear that
if he were to impetuous, it would be the secret affair that he has with the queen would probably be
discovered.
That hesitation, that moral hesitation of Lancelot is really the cause of it's the emblem of the
falling from aristocratic virtues. There is now the intrusion of a time, a temporal wedge between the
thought and the action, and then of course Lancelot would have to go on that famous cart of shame,
exposed to the ridicule of the whole town, before he can go on really trying to rescue the queen.
This is but if you think about it, then Chrtien is already reflecting on the crisis of the city in
terms of the private passion. Something is really gnawing at the heart of the city and it's really the
question of desire. The inability to distinguish between the public and the private, the inability to
separate somehow the two, or find some sort of a heart threading the line between those two
concerns. In Canto V this is really what Francesca does.
Dante's exploring reading, so she is reading the text of Lancelot and lapses into an imitative strategy
of reading. She wants to be like the heroine that she reads about. She refuses to take an
interpretative distance from whatever specular image: she wants to feel like a queen. And she thinks
of Paolo can be like Lancelot, and this is exactly what we call the mimetic quality. It's not my term,
it's the term Ren Girard who has written about this question of the imitative structure of desire.
Between us and the object of desire there is always the presence of a mediator, and in this case the
mediator is Lancelot for Paolo, and it is Guinevere for Francesca.
But there's more to this story. For instance, you cannot read the story without thinking about how
Dante frames the experience of Francesca with the language of time. Do you see how many
references there are to time? There's no greater grief than remembering happiness, a past happiness,
and this, your doctor, meaning Virgil, knows very well. Then she starts talking about her adventure,
"we were reading one day," remember, "that day we read no further." It's all about time, about the
question of time as if an experience so what is the problem with this idea of time? Why is
Francesca understood? Why is her story represented in terms of time?
In effect, I think Francesca want there's one great passion that she has and her passion is to do
away with time. She's expressing the desire that her happiness that last year, very briefly, a brief
instance may really last an eternity, or maybe, just maybe, she may be expressing the wish that
or the idea, the insight more than the wish, that one moment of happiness is well worth an eternity
of pain. Or maybe she's just saying that it's not too bad that the love story I had only lasted the
briefest possible time. At any rate, all this shows is that primarily Francesca not only abdicated
choice and not only thought that her own will was powerless, vis--vis, the irresistible force of this
transcendent idea of love, but above all, she has betrayed the order of necessity and time. Her
passion violates the order of time. Above all, from this point of view, Dante goes on reflecting about
his responsibilities of an author as an author when he's confronted with the reader. What have I
done? What have I written? That what I write has been understood in a way that is not necessarily
the one that he meant, the meaning that he meant to assign to the Vita nuova. These are some of the
concerns and we can find some others.

Chapter 6. Canto VI: The Third Circle; Ciacco [00:40:29]

Let me just pass onto Canto VI, which is really not completely unlike what we have been describing
here. Now we go into canto Dante goes that's another part of this other strategy. Whatever
Dante has found out about passion, about desire, about this in the world of appetites and whatever
he has decided about himself and the meaning that this may have for him as a poet, and that scene
of fainting at the end, he will go on this will become the premise for other concerns raised in
Canto VI, which as you know, is a political canto.
This is the strategy of Dante. Let me see, I found out certain things about me, my responsibility, I
found some things about the disruptive quality of desire, vis--vis, the political order, now let me
find out let me see if let me find out how authentic this finding may be. Let me move into a
public realm, so we go from the world of the court, the private world of Francesca, now to literally
the world of the city, the world of Florence where we are still talking about incontinence in a
different form: the question of gluttony and politics. And let's see so he takes elements that he
has already anticipated here in Canto V, the political, and goes on thinking about politics in Canto
VI. Here we go then with Canto VI, the third circle, the gluttonous. "With return of my mind, with
the return of my mind that was shut off when the piteous state of the two kinsfolk, which was quite
confounded me with grief, new torments and new souls in torment I see about me, wherever I move
and turn and set my gaze."
I find first of all the presence of the word mind, in Italian it is mente, in line 1, very suggestive. We
are dealing here now with bodies. Canto VI is all about bodies: it's all about gluttonous souls who
were bodies who took care of the bodies. Dante uses as a counterpoint the question of mind, as if
the sin of these bodies, the sin of these gluttonous has also been the sin of not thinking in terms of
mind. The mind is a necessary counter, a necessary compliment to the presence of bodies.
The word mind, of course as you know or in Italian in English we have mental, in Italian it's
mente, Latin mens, really comes from the Latin for measure. The mind is that which measures
things, the mind is that which gives a sense of the measure of even our own desires. The metaphor
of mind appears throughout Canto VI. We are asked to think of that which is missing in this
biological reflection, a reflection about the what I call the biology of politics. Politics now
reduced to the question of appetites of bodies. It's not normally we have the pride of minds when
we think about all the people who have whatever fantasies, whatever megalomanias, whatever
desires, but mental above all when we talk about politics, but here it's really a question of politics in
terms of the inexhaustible appetites of bodies.
We are going to talk about politics and gluttony, politics and bodies. Dante here meets the figure
that is presiding; the mythological figure that is presiding over this canto, this area of gluttony is the
classical figure of the three-headed Cerberus, a way of hinting about the voraciousness, the many
mouths of this monstrous animal. "Cerberus, a beast fierce and hideous" and so on. And we do
know that the landscape is stinking under an endless rain; there are hints that this is really one of
some kind of repulsive form of waste and food. "The rain makes them howl like dogs, and the
profane wretches often turn themselves, of one side making a shelter for the other. When Cerberus,
the great worm perceived us, he opened his mouths and showed us the fangs, not one of his limbs
keeping still and my Leader."
And so on. "As the dog that yelps for greed and becomes quiet when it bites its food, being all
absorbed and struggling to devour it, such became these foul visages of the demon Cerberus. . . We
passed over the shades that were beaten down by the heavy rain, setting our feet on their emptiness
which seemed real bodies." This is actually the great the description and figuration of gluttony.
Bodies that are always empty and they are empty now. They are punished to be empty, as empty
forms; and they seem they are not bodies, they seem real bodies.
"They were all lying on the ground except one who sat up as soon as he saw us passing before him.
'O thou who art led through this hell,' he said to me, 'recall me if thou canst; thou wast begun before
I was ended.'" Another little reference to birth, the birth of Dante and the death of it's part of a
cycle. There's no necessary connection between the three heads. The death of the name is
Ciacco, meaning a pig, that's the way he was surnamed in the streets of Florence and the death
and the birth of the pilgrim.
"I said to him, 'The anguish the anguish thou hast perhaps taken thee from my memory," and the
word is mente, the mind, "so that I do not seem ever to have seen thee. Tell me who you are, put in a
place of such misery and under such a penalty that, if any is greater, none is so loathsome.' And he
said to me, 'thy city," we are talking about Florence, this is the politics of the city. "Thy city," it
doesn't say our city, your city. He's already Ciacco views himself as outside of it, not really
occupying a place within the city, "which is so full of envy that already the sack runs over, held me
within it in the bright life, when you citizens," once again the distance of Ciacco from the city of
Florence, "called me Ciacco. For the damning fault of gluttony, as thou seest, I lie helpless in the
rain; and in my misery I'm not alone, for all these are under the same penalty for the same fault.'
And he said no more."
Okay here I have to stop a little bit to tell you what something that you already caught of course,
what the basic metaphor, what the basic conceit is in this canto, and it's the conceit of the city and
the body. You in the classical world you're used to the conceit between of the correlation
between the soul and the city, but for Dante this is a soulless city. The only way to talk about is
through this image which is very ancient, very Roman actually, the story of the city as a corporate,
as a body, as a corporate structure. The image, some of you readers of Shakespeare you may
remember your Coriolanus, where Coriolanus makes the same speech about the city and the body.
But it really goes back to a historian of the classical world that Dante absolutely loves. He's not the
only one, all the way Augustine is using the name is Livy who wrote this famous book about
from about the from the foundation of Rome, a Roman historian who tells the history of
Rome.
One of the stories he tells is that of the famous civil war in Rome: the civil war between the
patricians and the plebeians. The plebeians, the workers, were so tired of what was happening in the
city. They were doing all the work; that's the way they complained, but they had few of the
pleasures coming from living in the city that they decided to secede. It is the famous secession
whereby they go it's a kind of schism, they go on the they retreat on the Aventine Hill, one of
the seven hills of Rome, and the patricians, the city is paralyzed as you can imagine, it's a strike, the
patricians send one of their an emissary, a man by the name of Menenius to convince the
plebeians to return to the city. Menenius manages to do this by telling the plebeians a famous fable
which called, is still known as The fable of Menenius.
What does he tell them? He said, look, the city's really like a body. When you have a body the
hands work. Yes, it seems that the mouth enjoys and savors the great pleasures of foods and so on. It
seems that the stomach can be full, but actually whatever they produce and take in and they ingest,
they redistribute to the body, to the rest of the body, to the hands, the feet, etc. The city is like a
body. That's the analogy. Between the corporate structure of the city, the idea that the city is a
corporation and which by the way we carry on a reminder of this, how vital this is, we carry on a
dime. I don't have a dime with me, but if you have a dime you can read e pluribus unum. And it says
one body out of many limbs, out of many members, still an image that we carry. It's still a conceit
that we have, right?
The idea is that the city is like a body and plebeians are convinced and they go back to order and
they recompose the order of the city. This is the fundamental structure here. I said something else
which is really is going to does Dante believe in the corporate structure of the city? Can it really
hold together and I go on submitting to you that he no longer believes in this. If you when you
read the canto you will see that all the body parts are literally littering the city, they're all mentioned.
The nails, the hands, the heart, the beard, the hair, etc., the mouth are sort of spread all over, and as
if to imply the impossibility of constituting these body parts into an organic unified totality.
There's another little issue here that is being raised and that I want to talk about before the end of
the hour: the question of civil war and what Dante understands by civil war because Dante's
political thought, the reality of his political thinking is always the civil war. Let me just give you
some textual evidence and then we'll go on.
"I answered him Ciacco, thy distress so weighs on me that it bids me weep. But tell me if thou
canst, what the citizens of the divided city," this is now Florence, "shall come to and whether any
there is just, and tell me the cause of such discord assailing it." An amazing image discord because
it's a musical metaphor: accord, discord but it really comes from it makes the 'heart,' that's where
the word comes from; discord makes the heart the place, the receptacle where all the envy, all these
jealousies that destroy the city are placed, are located.
"He said to me, 'After a long strife this shall come to blood and the party of the rustics shall drive
out the other with much offense; then by force of one who is now maneuvering," meaning the Pope,
"that party is destined to fall." This is the Guelfs and Ghibellines that within which the city is
divided. "To fall within three years and the other to prevail, long holding its head high and keeping
the first under grievous burdens, for all their tears and shame. Two men are just and are not heeded
there. Pride, envy and avarice," these are the cause, these are "the sparks" he calls them. "'These are
the causes that have set these hearts on fire.' Here, he made an end of his grievous words."
And then Dante goes on literally evoking a street scene in Florence, goes on asking about some
other characters in the city. "I would still learn from thee and I beg thee to grant me further speech.
Farinata," he mentions about whom we shall see next Thursday in Canto X of Inferno, "Tegghiaio,
men of such worth, lacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca and the rest whose minds were set on
well-doing, tell me where they are and give me knowledge of them; for I'm pressed with a great
desire to know whether they share in Heaven's sweetness, or the bitterness of Hell."
I would like to point out to you the presence of this of the language of gluttony throughout:
sweetness, bitterness, pleasant, unpleasantness. This really runs through the canto and gives its
and links together gluttony and the politics. It's the body: you can see the body metaphor, but also
these other experiences. What is happening here he asks, as Dante asks about these other famous
Florentines, the "men of such worth"? He says, where are they? They achieved so much worth, so
set on well-doing in the city and the English cannot quite render the ambiguity of the Italian. The
ambiguity of the Italian is benfare which is really very difficult to translate, which you don't know if
it means "doing well" or "doing good," and that impossibility of deciding what the sentence really
means is exactly what Dante's dramatizing here. What he's dramatizing is the distance between
human perspective, the judgments that we make as human beings, and the divine judgment on the
dealings and doings of these famous people; the discrepancy between them here on earth when they
judge one way, then the real the reality of the worth and value of these other people that can be
different.
We are talking about he's talking about them, the black souls, that is to say they're further down
in the fire and different faults weigh them down to the depth. What an extraordinary metaphor, the
weight, the burden of sin, but it's really an image that goes back, the gravity, the question of gravity.
This is we speak of civic gravity, but here it's a different kind of gravity. It's an idea of it's an
old idea. When you want to talk about the weight that we carry within us, the gravity we have
within us, that gravity is love.
The way of deciding, the way of understanding this line: there's a passage in the Confessions of
Augustine, where Augustine says, that he wants to exemplify why some people go up, other people
go down, and he says it's like the gravity of objects around us. A stone, you drop a stone and the
stone goes down out of its own gravity, its own specific weight. A fire, he says, goes up out of its
own specific weight. We are carried wherever our love carries us. We are our love is our own
gravity, inner gravity, and whether we go up or down, it depends according to the direction of our
desires.
Let me just go back to this is to give you a sense of all the resonances of this canto, but at the
heart of it all, there is the question of civil war. Between Guelfs and the Ghibellines, between
patricians and plebeians: Dante sees the whole of history, Roman history, whether he is going to
read Virgil, or will read Lucan, or he will read Statius, which actually deals not with Roman history
in this great epic the Thebaid. He reads he's really reading Greek history, the story of Oedipus
and Eteocles and Polyneices. They view history from the point of view of the civil war.

Chapter 7. Dante's Political Understanding [00:57:47]

Let me just formulate the question of the political understanding Dante has. For those of you who
may have read a little bit of Monarchia, for instance, which is the treatise about the desirable form
of a universal confederation of states, under the one emperor: that's the grand vision that Dante has
in Monarchia. He thinks about the needed unity of all states, a kind of sort we could call it today,
a confederation of states, very much patterned on the Roman Empire. The idea of the in fact the
Roman Empire becomes the model for this kind of unification. That's really what most of us think
that Dante's political vision is.
In effect, Dante sees history especially as and it's kind of inevitable a satanic form of civil
war. So harsh is he going to be about the realities of the cities, that you really wonder how can he go
on elaborating a theory of, a constructive theory, of politics. You see what I'm saying? Once you are
so harsh about the reality of politics, then you really wonder how can one go around really thinking
that politics can be necessary. It's necessary that you can explain, that it's somehow useful, that it's
feasible. Where does it say where does this understanding of Rome come to him?
Dante does not really agree with Virgil. And Dante does not agree with Virgil's greatest critic who is
Augustine in The City of God. For Virgil, Rome is the providential empire, an empire that can really
bring about, unify the whole world. Augustine writes against Virgil and says, no because even
Rome, as I just indicated to you a little earlier, even Rome is part of the history of violence.
Dante comes along and pulls together within the Divine Comedy the question of Rome and the
needed empire and the question of the civil war. What do they have in common? What is it that
connects them? Dante's argument is the following: you, Virgil, are right in believing in the unity of
all mankind, a Stoic idea that we all live in a cosmopolis, in a city which is the city of the world
where we all find a place. And you, Augustine, are right in claiming that the empire is all built and
based on the libido and lust. You're right; you are both right, and yet you are both wrong, precisely
because you contradict each other.
What Dante says to Augustine, if there is no empire, then we are living in a world of disorder and
lawlessness. The empire becomes the necessary remedy to the evils of the civil war. The civil war is
the condition where my own brother, my own neighbor, can become my own enemy. Augustine
does not acknowledge the reality of civil war. To him, it's just empire and the empire is evil. And
we'll finish with the famous line: what do I care who governs me, provided that they don't make me
sin? It's the famous Christian response to the idea of the evil, the historical evil of empires. Let me
retreat into myself and find within myself some kind of comfort and some kind of shelter. And
Dante will respond to him, says no that's not enough because once you think that you have retreated
into yourself then there is the reality of the civil war that will reach into you.
What I have been explaining to you and I will stop because I want to talk about something else
before we go, Canto VII. What I've been trying to explain to you is that the movement from Canto
V to Canto VI of Inferno, it's a movement from the internal world of desires that seem to be so
private and so personal. Then, I said, Dante has to go outside of himself to test, to find out what the
authenticity is of what he has found out in Canto V. In Canto VI, the political canto will tell them
there is no such comfort zone of one soul in the world, that the inner world is necessarily part of the
outside world and the outside world will encroach upon it and it will enter one's own inner world.
The terms for this kind of movement between the inner and the outer are really Virgil and
Augustine. Virgil with the idea of the defense of the empire, Augustine with his undermining of the
notion of the necessity of the empire. Dante will go on harmonizing the two visions. He will
endorse the idea of the empire, aware that that's the only possible best response to the tragedy of
civil wars.

Chapter 8. Canto VII: The Avaricious in the Fourth Circle [01:03:05]

Let me say just a few things about Canto VII and then I'll give you a chance to ask some questions,
there should be two or three minutes for questions. Canto VII also is a canto that can be read
symmetrically with the other Canto VII of the Divine Comedy, Purgatorio VII, just as Canto VI. I
neglected to mention it, but Canto VI of Inferno is about the city and politics; Canto VI of
Purgatorio about the nation; Canto VI of Paradise about the empire, so they're really connected; the
same thing with Canto VII.
This is the only canto that's not individualized sinners. He meets avaricious, the avaricious and the
prodigals, and they are sort of taken in a kind of they have no there's no individual figuration
for them. It is as if this became a kind of an anonymous, therefore a more collective kind of
problem, avaricious and prodigality, which he represents in terms of the counter movement of
Scylla and Charybdis, and here we have the great figuration of Fortune. You remember as I call her
the Vanna White of the time, the lady who is at the Wheel of Fortune, turning blindfolded and let
me say something about this figuration. Dante describes it as what is it? It's a great an idea
that I what is it about the avaricious and the prodigals who could turn around, so one against the
other, how can this be possible? What is why are we so attached to the things of the world?
And then Dante goes on explaining on Canto VII, lines 80 and following, he will say, "He ordained
them," He meaning God, "for them for worldly splendours, a general minister and guide who should
in due time change vain well from race to race, and from one to another blood beyond the
prevention of human wits, so that one race rules and another languishes according to her
sentence. . . She foresees, judges, and maintains her kingdom as the other heavenly powers do
theirs. Her changes have no respite. Necessity makes her swift, so fast men come to take their turn.
This is she who is so reviled," meaning Fortune, "by the very men that should give her praise,
laying on her wrongful blame and ill repute. But she is blest and does not hear it. Happy with the
other primal creatures she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss."
It's Fortune at the wheel, but it's a figuration that in many ways it needs some explaining. How can
Dante believe in God as Fortuna? How can he go on talking about this pagan deity, she is Roman
deity, Lady Luck, how is he doing this? How can that do you see how he lives in a world of
providentiality where there is well and he does say that Fortune is an intelligence of God. That is
to say, not the though she's blindfolded; there is also a kind of there's some criteria, there is an
intelligence, there is a will, and a meditation behind it. What it means is that what is up will
inevitably turn down to go down, it's an endless rotation of fortune. In a certain way when you are
down you only the only it's the best time to be at, because you only get to you can only go
up. We are always though on the precariously poised on this on the curve. We are never quite
stable in our own achievements. How can Dante relate this fortune idea of fortune to the
providential scheme that he that regulates and shapes his own vision?
What I would have to tell you is that the two things. The first thing is that as you see, Canto VII
begins with an illusion to the great war in Heaven. The angels, the primal struggle that disrupted the
order of the cosmos, in other words, Fortune is for Him the divinity that rules over the world, this
sublunary world of generation of corruption. That is to say, she is a minister within the world of the
fall, first thing. There is still a fallen world and that's how perception of all the changes that take
place. And the other thing is, that Dante is intimating that the only way to conquer Fortune is to
really give up. It's a kind of mystical idea. Mystical in the sense of a spiritual idea, that is, give up
the attachment to the things of this world. Let's stop here with the briefest summary of Canto VII.

Chapter 9. Question and Answer [01:08:17]

Let me see if there are questions about some of the weighty issues that I raised in Canto V and VI.
And there is much more that we can say, but let me, if you want to ask questions and maybe I can
qualify things that were left in the background. Please?
Student: In Canto V, [inaudible]?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is a very good question, what is the significance of
Francesca doing all the talking and not Paolo, I guess. I take the significance is that this is to me
is that this is a canto where Dante understands some of the elements that he had put forth in the Vita
nuova. You remember where we discussed the Vita nuova? There I indicated that the great poem,
"Women who have intellect of love," where the he discovers that they are the interlocutors about
love. Not only are they the interlocutors about love, there are also those the privilege of
interlocutors because they know how to combine; because they understand the necessary
independence of intellect and love. They are not two separate entities, they are not two separate
aspects, and therefore, now he has Francesca as a woman who can become indeed his own
interlocutor.
That's one aspect, the other one is that medieval romances had made this extraordinary discovery
and I think that it's the most revolutionary change that has taken place in the consciousness of in
the imagination of the in the Western world in modern times. That is to say, before it became a
sociological issue, before it becomes a philosophical problem, the dignity and worth of the woman
was already retrieved and vindicated by romances. It's there that the woman becomes either the
figure in charge or the partner, or friend of the man. Does that answer your question?
Student: [Inaudible]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: By the way the answer was yes. That could not be picked up by the
video. Other questions? Well, okay thank you, we'll see you next time with Canto IX, X, and XI, I
guess.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 5 - Inferno IX, X, XI [September 18, 2008]
Chapter 1. Introduction to Cantos IX-XI [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Today we are going to look at three cantos. They are connected in a
number of interesting ways: Cantos IX, X, and XI. They describe they focus on the pilgrim and
the guide, Virgil, being approaching the city of Dis. So we are moving they are moving and
we with them, away from the area of incontinence, which is the section of Inferno we read through
from Canto V to Canto VIII.
They are approaching the gates of the city of Dis in Canto IX and the pilgrim experiences a serious
impediment, an impasse, we will call it. He cannot go any further. The guidance of Virgil fails him
and we are going to examine why it fails him and what is the problem that the pilgrim will have to
solve. Once he is in canto within the city of Dis, the first sinners he meets are the so-called
heretics, heresiarchs, among whom chief among whom is really Epicurus, the Epicureans, and in
many ways you understand already that link between the city and these philosophers.
Let me just add one thing so you have the idea is a bit clearer: Dante acknowledges in this
philosophical text that he writes called the Banquet three schools of philosophy. The so-called
academics or Aristotelians, then the Stoics, and the third Epicureans; now he handles he just
examines who these Epicureans are and for him they appear as those who are guilty of some form
of pride, if you wish, intellectual pride, since heresy is a question of intellect and not of will, we'll
talk about that. They deny the immortality of the soul, and in fact, it's really a problem to figure out
why should Dante think of them as sinners at all.
In antiquity they were viewed as one more school of opinion, a philosophical opinion: my mind
does not convince me, my reason does not find it convincing the belief in the immorality of the
soul. Why should I be punished? It's intellect, since the logic of Dante's own idea of sinfulness is
that the will has to be involved, the will is at the center of the habit to sin.
We'll talk about this, then in Canto XI, there really is no great action. Dante goes on explaining the
so-called topography of evil, goes on explaining the arrangement of sins. What is the principle of
construction of Inferno? There now he turns to Aristotle, we'll turn to Aristotle's Ethics first of all as
the plan, as the model to for the arrangement of sins and then also we shall see in a very
interesting way he will turn to he will allude to his Physics.
You see he goes on talking about from a personal problem which we have to understand in Canto
IX, the crisis of, then the questions of the intellect and its relationship to the will; and then in Canto
XI this idea of what are the dispositions to sinfulness and we shall see and the turn to Aristotle.

Chapter 2. Canto IX: The Three Furies and Medusa; Address to the Reader
[00:03:52]
Let me go back to now looking at exactly the crisis of Canto IX, Dante's progressing in this
journey. He reaches the gate of Dis and now this is around lines 40 and following. Three Furies,
the so-called three Erinyes of Greek mythology: Alecto, Tesiphone, and Megaera. They appear and
they stop him. They say you cannot go into the city, a city described very much as a medieval city.
In fact, it's a kind of swamp for reasons that we having nothing to do with really ecology but the
idea that medieval cities were built near swamps because the land was always more malleable and
there was water clearly in the that's not the reason for Dante but the reason for the certain ways
of understanding medieval cities.
The three Furies, Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera will stop and they call on Medusa who doesn't
come, but they summon Medusa. That's why they say, "let Medusa come." They threaten the
pilgrim, with the sight of the Medusa, "let Medusa come," she isn't here, I repeat. This is if you
had to translate it into let's say from English into Italian you would use a subjunctive, "may she
come, I wish she came, we wish she came, let her come and we will turn him to stone." That's the
threat.
A threat of petrifaction, because according to the myth, and if you don't know all of it for instance,
you may have seen a movie about the Medusa, if you look at the if you gaze at the face of the
Medusa, one who gazes at the head of the Medusa who was a great virginal beauty, a vestal in the
Temple of Neptune, according to the myth. It was violated by Neptune and Minerva takes revenge
on her by metamorphosing her into this ugly repulsive figure with her hair turned into snakes and
yet she has this power, this magic power of turning all the onlookers into stone. That's the threat.
"Let Medusa come and we will turn him to stone they all cried looking down. We avenged ill, the
assault of Theseus," Theseus who also violated the boundaries of Hell to free the Eurytus, another
little story that there were Theseus was successful in the liberation of Eurytus.
The drama involving the pilgrim directly, this is a menace on him. "Turn thy back," this is Virgil
who intervenes, "and keep thine eyes shut, for should the Gorgon" the Medusa, "show herself and
thou see her there would be no returning above." And now that's the turn. Listen to this: "My Master
said this, and himself turned me round and, not trusting to my own hands, covered my face with his
own also."
The poet interrupts the narrative and talks to us as a poet. This is the first so-called address to the
reader. I will talk about this little technical detail. That is to say, this is no longer part of the action,
now it's no longer the pilgrim, the story of the pilgrim, but the poet who is sitting in his study and
who says, "you who are of good understanding," the Italian says, "you who have healthy intellect,
who you have a good an understanding, note the teaching that is hidden under the veil of the strange
lines." The poet assuming authority turns to us readers, and in a sense, he needs readers so that his
authority can be constituted and he warns us. He admonishes us, to engage in what clearly appears
is as an allegorical operation. We have to read, and the language is the language of allegory. We
have to know how to read underneath the veil of language, there's something hidden underneath
this. What is the allegory about?
Let me just give you more about the story of the myth of the Medusa, so you will see the relevance
maybe of that myth and the what I left out of the myth to this scene. As you know, the Medusa
will be conquered, will be defeated. She will be defeated by the poet, by Perseus who it's the
origin of Pegasus, the horse of poetry. Pegasus I'm sorry, Perseus who, using the shield of
Minerva the shield Minerva had given him and by looking not at Medusa directly, at her face
directly, but at a reflected image in this shield, in a mirror, the shield of Minerva, manages to see her
and will kill, he will slay the Medusa in the story. Within the Ovidian narrative, this is clearly a
means to evoke for us the need for a kind of not a direct vision but a mediated vision. That is to
say, through the mediation of poetry for us, for the mediation of I'll come back to the scene in a
moment, but through the mediation of the shield can Perseus really take flight, kill and then take
flight on the back of Pegasus.
For us, the shield of Minerva is the text, because at this point there is a sort of direct let's say,
divergence between what the pilgrim is enjoined to do. Virgil says to him, "don't look, shut your
eyes," and not trusting the pilgrim, either his quickness, he must have been awed by this situation
such a situation he doesn't understand. He covers, Virgil covers, the pilgrim's own eyes.
In turn, the poet addresses us and tells us to open our eyes. You open your eyes and look. You can
because you have the shield of Minerva. You have this textual mediation that will allow you to
escape the direct threat and glance of Medusa. So you do know that the story Mercury, who is the
messenger, that clearly the figure of the interpreter. That's what the messenger means, the bearer
of messages, the bearer of words. He comes and manages to make a breach within the wall of the
city and the pilgrim and the guide can continue their descent. This is really the story.

Chapter 3. An Allegory at Work [00:11:01]

What is happening? What how do I can we explain? What is this allegory? Let me say a few
things so that you can understand the whole technique of allegories. Whenever you read the Divine
Comedy, probably much more than I would ever do, other scholars will tell you that the Divine
Comedy is a vision, which it is, and that it's allegorical which at times it is, and the allegory is
supposed to explain everything that the pilgrim finds himself lost in the woods. That's not the
woods to me it's the woods, but they say it's a state of sin in a way and there he meets three
beasts that stand for pride, and wrath, and what not; they're three beasts and they may stand for
other things.
The significance of that initial landscape, as you may recall when we talked about that scene is not
all that clear and that's part of the problem. That's what I call the land of unlikeness within which
the pilgrim will find himself. The inability to join together signs and their significations, the
awareness that there are no signs which are so self-transparent as to be understood or de-codified in
a particular way. What is this idea of allegory? Dante here is clearly asking telling us that it is an
allegory at work. 'You readers have good understanding of healthy minds look, open your eyes and
look underneath the veil of the strange verse.' Why are they so strange? What's so strange? What is
the story? What's going on here?
What is allegory first of all? Allegory, as you know, the word means to speak otherwise. It's a figure
but it related but not quite, to enigmas within the manuals, the primers of rhetorical primers
from medieval and classical times. Enigmas, irony, when you say one thing and you mean another,
but to say this, is to say very little because Dante has been very thoughtful. He has been probing this
issue very deeply, and in a couple of places in his works. In the Letter to Cangrande that he writes,
about which I will talk later it's a letter that he sends as an introduction to the first ten cantos of
Paradise, Cangrande being the lord of Verona where Dante had lived for awhile. And also in the
Banquet, this philosophical text where he explores the idea of what how a meaning can be
arrived at. I have a statement. How can I go on drawing a particular significance, or more than one
significance out of a statement?
He distinguishes two types of allegory. And there is a so-called allegory of poets and allegory of
theologians. How does he distinguish them? How would he ask us to distinguish between them?
The allegory of poets is an allegory where the literal in which, the literal sense is a fable, is a
fiction. To say, that's the example he gives, Orpheus by the power of his language moved stones,
that's an allegory of poets. It really means that the power of the voice of the poet manages maybe to
edify cities, whether we need poetic myths for the edification of a city. That's understandable. Or to
say Orpheus, that by the power of his words, tamed lions. It's to say that whatever ferociousness we
may have inside us can partly be tamed by the music, the song, the poetry, and so forth. That's the
allegory of poets. The literal sense is a fiction.
To say that it's an allegory of theologians is completely different. The example that Dante gives is
taken sends us to Exodus, the biblical story of Exodus. You all know, I take, what the biblical
story is, so once again movies help. The biblical story of Exodus, the story where the Jews abandon,
leave the bondage, the slavery of Egypt, go through the desert and reach the Promised Land. This is
happening historically, it's true. This is not a fiction, this is the Red Sea did open up and the Jews
could pass through the Red Sea, could cross the Red Sea that way. This is history and in the allegory
of theologians, the literal level must be historical. It must be an event. So this is the distinction.
Of course, the question is what kind of allegories are used here? We'll come to that in a moment, but
keep that in mind. This is I hope it's more than of archaeological interest. Within the allegory
of theologians, they distinguish four levels of exegesis, exegesis being a word meaning
interpretation. Four levels: the literal, the moral. . . An allegory is telling you what to do, teaching
you. It has an ethics involved: that you read and there is an ethics when you are reading. You have
more or less a text. It's time to direct your will or tell you what you should be doing. A tropological
telling you what tropological meaning what does it mean in terms of your whole life, not just an
action in a particular case. And then the so-called analogical or eschatological. So that the story of
the Jews crossing the wilderness and going to the Jerusalem means having a kind of a spiritual
conversion, moral conversion, means that this is really the way that life ought to go. You go from
sin to glory or the peace of the city, and then anagogically, this is the story of the soul. It prefigures
what the soul ought to be.
In the case of the allegory of poets you only have two levels, the literal and the moral. There are a
lot of difficulties with this way of distinguishing between the two types of allegory because both the
allegory of theologians and the allegory of poets, even if the allegory of theologians refers to events,
it's still words that we are reading. There is a way in which Dante seems to at one point dodge the
whole thing of how can you really distinguish between the two modes the rhetorical modes
independently one from the other. And actually he goes on saying, really, the difference is in how
you take the literal sense. In the kind of act of faith that you may have, that the literal sense that
the Bible is the word of God, then you are reading it theologically. But if you decide, and one
might, to say that the Bible is really a collection of extraordinary poetic stories, then you are reading
according to the allegory of poets.
How is Dante circumventing this whole issue? He's circumventing the whole issue by saying, my
story may well be taken as a story of allegory of poets, but it's also an allegory of theologians
because the literal sense is 'I.' The historical sense is in me. I am the historical cipher moving
through these experiences, and therefore, it is my life that they will give a particular sense, a
particular truth value, to whatever poetic fable I may be relating.

Chapter 4. Understanding the Threat of Petrifaction [00:18:30]

We only have taken care of one little problem here, very external to the story, the allegory of poets
or allegory of theologians. It's time to decide that this is what is going on here, but, how are we to
understand this threat of petrification. And you cannot really understand it, but I'm here to tell you.
You cannot really understand it on your own, so you have to trust my words. The fact is that Dante
had written in his youth a number of poems for a so-called Lady Stone. In Italian, it's not as bad as
that, though 'stone' could be a good word in English, Donna Petra petra meaning stone, and the
passion it's a description of a love that was unrequited, but a passion for this woman was such
that he felt that his intellect would be petrified, that he could be in other words he was unable to
go anywhere. It's a statement of despair, if you wish, whenever you have this sense of a death that is
going to take over and you are going to be paralyzed in your will, then this is a petrification. This is
what I think is happening here. Dante is engaged in retrospection, to an experience of his past, and
that experience of his past is now ahead of him threatening him once again.
He has to cleanse himself, he has to move beyond it, but to explain better this idea of the closing of
the eyes this is why Medusa, though he talks of Medusa there and this lady Petra is a kind of
Medusa. Let me give you read a little scene from that I think really explains what's going on
and prepare us to move forward to the next canto, Canto X. It's a little scene from the Confessions
of Augustine. As you know, a book that Dante knew very well. Dante even goes on quoting it at
very strategic places, so there's not issue of bringing it in gratuitously to explain this scene. It's
actually direct it could be viewed forgive the reversal, but this would be viewed as a gloss on
what Dante will go on writing.
The Confessions is written with it's an intellectual autobiography: the story of a young man who
will go on being fascinated by various schools of philosophy. He's a Manichean, and then he will
turn into a neo-Platonist, goes on is very flattered by a skeptical, rhetorical way. He's a professor
of rhetoric a rhetorical way of dealing with values and the world around him. And then in Book
IX, he'll go on telling the story in the garden of Milan, the famous story under the fig tree, very
emblematic. We could talk about these things, about why the fig tree in Milan, which leads many
scholars to go on wondering, were there fig trees in Milan? Isn't the climate too cold? You need
really the southern climes for that kind of thing, forgetting that the fig tree is always in the Bible. It
appears as the tree under which the prophets go and rest in the mistaken belief that everything is
over and that somehow a time for complacency may come. They're denouncing it of course. This is
all done in a mode denunciation, and that's exactly where Augustine puts himself, under the fig tree
and there he goes on experiencing a particular drama by reading St. Paul, etc.
Throughout this text, though this is about neo-Platonists and Manicheans. As you know Augustine
as you probably know, Augustine goes on reflecting about his love of shows, the biggest one of
them, at the beginning of Book III, is his love of theatre and his critique of the theatre. Now, why do
I go to the theatre and how do I explain the fact that there may be some well-meaning young man
who sees the maid in distress and jumps on the scene to free her. And he goes on talking about how
can I be a spectator, what does it mean to be a spectator? What does it mean to be involved?
And then there is another little scene. A friend of his, Alypius Alypius is a Greek intellectual in
the best sense of the word. A man who believes in self-mastery, in intellectual self-mastery, a young
man who witnesses Augustine's own experiences. In narratives you always have Sancho accompany
Don Quixote; there's always the other, more or less skeptical, who gives authenticity and who
exactly will go on making claims for the truth value of what the narrator or the protagonist will go
on experiencing. His name is Alypius. Alypius will eventually rejoin him. He's in Carthage. They
grew up together. Augustine and he grew up together.
Augustine goes to Rome. Alypius will rejoin him in Rome, and they go on from there, eventually
going to Milan. When in Rome, Alypius does what nobody we would all do, first thing he wants
to do is to go and watch the games played at the amphitheatre, at the Colosseum and the games are
horrifying games to Augustine. He says, how can an intellectual such as you, want to go to the
games where actually human beings are being thrown, for the delight of the crowds, are being
thrown to beasts, to lions. Alypius, of course, he tries to justify himself. I really want to go, but
exactly because, he'll say, but I really do, because I'll read you the whole passage: 'I will go but
because I'm an intellectual, I promise that at the crucial moment when the sign is given for the
animal to devour the human being lying there I will not watch. I will I'm going to turn my eyes
away and I will shut my eyes.' Let's see what happens. This is from Book VI, Chapter VIII.
It's a great little story. By the way, a scholar of romance philology who used to teach here many
years ago by the name of Eric Auerbach, a great Dante scholar and he wrote this book called,
Mimesis, he reflects on this scene, not connecting it with Dante, but it doesn't matter. I read it first in
his book and says, this is really it's a little scene that marks the end of Hellenic rationalism. Let's
read this; it's interesting just because of that, and then we'll see how we could apply it to Dante. I
think it's very clear.
"He had gone to Rome to study law," this is Alypius, "and there he was carried away incredibly with
an incredible eagerness after the shows of gladiators. For being utterly adverse to and detesting such
spectacles, he was one day by chance met by diverse of his acquaintances and fellow students
coming from dinner and they with a familiar violence, hailed him vehemently refusing and resisting
into the amphitheatre during this cruel and deadly shows. He thus protesting, 'Though you hail my
body to that place,' this is Alypius, "And there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my
eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present and so shall overcome both you and them.
They, hearing this, led him on, nevertheless, desirous per chance to try that very thing, whether he
could do as he said."
"When they will come thither and had taken their places as they could, the whole place kindled with
that savage pastime, but he," Alypius, "closing the passage of his eyes, forbade his mind to range
abroad of such evil, and would he had stopped his ears also. For in the fight when one fell, a mighty
cry of the whole people striking him, strongly overcome by curiosity and as prepared to despise and
be superior to it, whatever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes and was stricken with a
deeper wound in his soul, than the other whom he desired to behold was in his body. And he fell
more miserably than he upon whose fall that mighty noise was raised, which entered through his
ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul. Bold rather
than resolute, and the weaker in that it had presumed on itself which ought to have relied on Thee
for so soon the " the whole confession is addressed to God, for it's a confession, a witnessing to
God so in case you are confused about the references.
"For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drank down savageness, not turned away, but fixed
his eye drinking in frenzy, unawares and was delighted with that guilty fight and intoxicated with
bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto. Yea, a true
associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried
thence with him, the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew
him thither, but also before them, yea and to join others. Yet, thence it did start with a most strong, a
most merciful hand, pluck him and taught him to have confidence not in himself but in Thee. But
this was after," and that's really the story.
What is the meaning of this story? In the Confessions, I think that Augustine is very clear: the
failure of the mind to master its own will. It's about the crisis. It's about the weakness of the will to
begin with, but it's also the pride: the belief that one can rise above the contingency of temptations
and be in control of oneself. And yet, it's a story of a temptation which he, Alypius, cannot quite
resist. I think that this is exactly what's happening in Canto IX. Dante's dramatizing not only the
failure of the intellect; he's already been talking about the early part of the canto, the failure of
Virgil to guide him. He's discussing now the failure of his will, at least seen in as an event of the
past but clearly is seen as something that can happen to him again.

Chapter 5. Canto X: The Heretics [00:29:53]

The passage to the city can take place after this scene and now he enters into the City of Dis and
against the walls of the city, he finds the Epicureans again, those who do not believe in the
mortality of the soul. Let me just read in Canto X some passages. By the way, each Canto X of the
Divine Comedy, they're really are all cantos intimately related with each other. So if you were
looking for a paper you want to connect Canto X of Inferno, Canto X of Purgatorio, and Canto X of
Paradise, I would encourage you to do so. Let me just read a few lines.
Dante asks who these souls are and the answer he gets is this line 12, "All will be shut in when they
return from Jehoshaphat," which is the valley in Jerusalem; in the valley, into the valley of
Jerusalem where, according to the law, the resurrection of the dead will take place. That's where
they would be meeting. It's interesting then, that there is this contrast in the canto between the so-
called Epicureans, who do not believe in their immortality of the soul, and clearly, this view, this
opposition as one could call it, between Athens, very classical, Athens, and Jerusalem.
You may have heard of this, the city of Athens by the way, the word itself means immortality, the
immortality of athanatos, the immortality of wisdom. Wisdom survives, but not the people. There is
a kind of the kind of contrast between the two cities, very old, very ancient contrast. And now we
have in this part, Epicurus and all his followers, what we call the Epicureans. Let me just gloss the
Epicureans a little bit further from than I did before. There are two types in the mythography
of the Epicureans, there are two types of Epicureans. Whenever we think about the Epicureans, we
think about those, the vulgar Epicureans, those who think about worship their stomach, the
pleasures of food, an Epicurean in that sense.
I think that Dante has dramatized that kind of Epicurean in Canto VI when he meets, remember
Ciacco, whose name means "pig." In fact we talked about the hogs of Epicurus, the herd of
Epicurus. But then there is the noble version of the Epicureans, the canto here, in Canto X those
who are interested in intellectual pleasures, the pleasures of conversations, the pleasures of
friendship, the pleasures of meditation. And they are those who do not who remove themselves
to the garden, do not seem to really care much about what happens around them, because in the
belief that they should really take cultivate their soul and cultivate their own pursuits, take care
of their own pursuits. That's what we are having here. These are the noble, philosophical
Epicureans, not the vulgar sort that believe in the supremacy of bodily pleasures.
Nonetheless, pleasure is the aim of an Epicurean ethics, my pleasure. This continues, "in this part
Epicurus and all his followers, who make the soul die with the body have their burial place." How
fitting, how fitting is the punishment for this crime, this sin. It's perfect because these people never
really believed in the immortality of the soul and they are condemned to be dead. That's what they
think and they dwell literally in sarcophagus, in sarcophagi, entombed. That's how they appear.
There is another little detail I have given you sometimes we may wonder about the
appropriateness of a sin, of a punishment for a particular sin, but here we have no reason to really
be surprised at all by this kind of destiny reserved for the Epicureans.
"But for thy question to me, thou shalt soon have satisfaction from within there, and for the desire
too about which thou art silent." Then they're interrupted. All of a sudden, now Dante's once again
involved, and what's here primarily is no longer the question of immorality of souls, but how the
political aspect, the political implications of this kind of belief, of believing in immorality of the
soul, how is this refracted onto the political scene as it were? Again, therefore, this is almost a
Platonic conceit, the relationship now between no longer bodies and cities, as we saw in Inferno VI,
but here soul and city. Is this a soulless city? What happens? How do we experience it? How
livable? Which is I mean it is also a pun, how livable is this kind of city? What happens and
what is the what are the relationship what is the relationship between various figures?
Dante singles out two people, one a Guelf and one a Ghibelline. We are in the middle of the civil
war of Florence once again. It's going to be Farinata, a Ghibelline and Cavalcanti, the father, the old
man, who is a Guelf. By the way, they're also related to each other because Cavalcanti's son, Dante's
best friend you remember he dedicates his Vita nuova to him, he calls him 'my first friend Guido
Cavalcanti' had married the daughter of Farinata. They stand there in their tombs ignoring each
other and each ignoring the pangs, worries, and perplexities of the other. It's a little picture of what
we call "any city."
This is the city in the beyond where everybody's squabbling. Nobody's paying attention to anybody
else, and everybody believes that one's own passion, one's own concern is really paramount and
foremost. There's nothing that can come near to it, so it's all it's a canto that interestingly enough
is marked by interruptions: one is speaking, the other says forget it, I got to talk now it's my turn.
And so it is the it is a little vignette of Florence in the year 1300 probably, or later but 1300 is a
good date for us.
So, he's interrupted, Virgil and Dante are interrupted by someone who says, "'O Tuscan who makest
thy way alive through the city of fire and speakest so modestly, may it please thee to stop at this
point: thy tongue shows thee native of that noble fatherland to which I was perhaps too harsh.'
Suddenly this sound issued from one of the chests," and so on. So they go on, "Turn round, what
ails thee?" says Virgil "See there Farinata who has risen erect; from the middle up thou shalt
see his full height." He appears from the navel up in the tomb.
Now, a little historical detail. There used to be in Rome, a church is still there, but it was already
there in the year 1300, when Dante went on an embassy to Rome: the church so-called of the Holy
Cross in Jerusalem which, according to the legend, was built with material, with stones from
Jerusalem that had been brought to Rome by Constantine's mother, Helena.
In the basement of that church, which would be opened only once a year around the Easter season,
there would be a mosaic showing and you can say it would only on Good Friday that the
that basement would be open. And that mosaic, it's no longer there so I cannot I'm not
encouraging tourism; it's just I'm giving you a little detail. There used to be a mosaic of the rising
Christ from shown from the navel up and it's clear here that the representation of Farinata
showing himself from the navel up is meant as a caricature of the belief in the Resurrection. There
are two this is the really of the story of a man who doesn't believe in the Resurrection, and
iconographically Dante will go on focusing, insisting on this on the counter. This man doesn't
believe in the Resurrection. That is another possibility of looking at it so there is a the
description is clearly meant to evoke all of that.
There is a great exchange between them: who defeated whom, the continuous battles between
Guelfs and Ghibellines and Dante claims that his own family managed to take good revenge when
the time came. And clearly the implication is that more revenge, since Dante has been, will be
necessary. They're interrupted by the sight of by the old man Cavalcanti.
Look at what the story of the canto is: Farinata worries about his ancestors; Cavalcanti worries
about his son. So these are the Epicureans who have a sense of continuity somehow, a sense of
dynastic continuity: all within the immanence of personal concerns and family. So they go they
move beyond the fragmentations of self from the others. They seem to have a kind of extended idea
of themselves, in spite of themselves, in spite of their beliefs.
This is what happens, an extraordinary scene: "Then rose to sight," line 55 and following, "beside
him a shade showing as far as the chin; I think he had lifted himself on his knees. He looked round
about me as if he had a desire to see whether someone was with me, but when his expectation was
all quenched he said, weeping: 'If thou goest through this blind prison by height of genius, where is
my son? Why is he not with thee?"
The reference clearly is to Dante's best friend, to Guido, whose name also means that he should be
guiding him. Maybe the old man the old father was hoping that the son, according to his name,
could really be leading the younger poet, as he had led him in his early poetic experiments in
Florence. And then he answers, he's disappointed, and Dante answers, I answered him, "I come not
of myself, he," doesn't even mention him, meaning Virgil, "he that waits yonder is leading me," so
this is the pun on "guido" "through here perhaps to. . ." That's very unclear. The text here, my
translation is "to her" and so does yours, but many other translations probably say something
different. I would say "to one, your Guido held in disdain."
It's unclear because the "her" would mean he's leading me, Virgil leads me to Beatrice, whom Guido
held in disdain. Why would Guido hold Beatrice in disdain? Is this really the story of the Vita
nuova? The antagonism between Guido and Beatrice? There's nothing that really suggests all of
that. "To one" would be to God or to some aim that Guido held in disdain, we'll see what that
means. "His words, and the nature of his punishment had already told me his name, so that I replied
thus fully. Suddenly erect, he cried, 'How saidst thou 'he held'?" That's Dante uses the past
preterite, "he held." The old man, infers because of the use of the past preterite, that his son is
already dead: a mistake, an equivocation. "He held? Lives he not still? Strikes not the sweet light on
his eyes?' When he perceived that I made some delay before replying he fell back again and was
seen no more."
Farinata is unconcerned. He goes on saying, well yeah you drove us back but we drove you back,
brings the subject to the political strictly to the war between Guelfs and Ghibellines so that we
really have to ask Dante goes on saying, please before leaving, reassure the old man that his son
is still alive, because by the year of the journey Dante Guido was supposed to be alive. Though
he will die very quickly afterwards.
What is this story of political disarray of Florence? And the story of the memory of Dante's friend
with whom he had just the friendship was just had finished. The friendship was over. Dante,
for those of you who are interested in the biography of the poet one of the early and toughest
decisions he had to make was to banish Guido Cavalcanti from the city because he thought that
Guido was the cause of some unrest within the city. Guido went into exile and never made it back.
He died three months later in the swamps of near of Liguria, a little bit north of Tuscany. Dante
lives in many ways with a kind of guilt, personal guilt, I suppose. He won't talk about it openly
about the what had been happening between them.
What is how are we trying to understand this scene? Let me just give you some details about
some other details about this canto. "If you go through this blind prison by height of genius. . ."
There's a little bit of irony there. Cavalcanti clearly does not understand, nor can he understand, that
Dante's journey in the beyond is not due to height of genius, but these are the philosophers and he
has a kind of philosophical idea about how certain experiences are going to be possible. "Why is not
my son with you?" Etc. "I come not of myself; he that . . . to one whom your Guido held in
disdain." Well, what has happened here? Who is Guido really?
Guido is what we call an Averroist. Did you ever hear the term, Averroist? Probably not. Averroes,
Dante actually mentions him in Limbo. He was an Arab philosopher and a famous commentator of
Aristotle. And of all the texts, he commented just as now, in the Middle Ages they would be reading
the great classics of philosophy, especially very difficult text such as the On the Soul of Aristotle
with following the commentators. Averroes was known as the "Great Commentator." He was the
great commentator of Aristotle's On the Soul.
And he argues that Aristotle does not believe in the immortality of the soul. That's the argument that
he's going to be challenged by Aquinas and by many others, but that's the primary Guido
Cavalcanti follows Averroes' understanding about the soul. The one who is here, a heretic so to
speak, is not just the old man, but also Guido Cavalcanti himself.
At this point, before I go any further telling you more about the who is an Averroist, what does it
mean to be an Averroist, I really have to raise a point with you. What does heresy mean? Because I
did indicate that in antiquity it was never really thought of as a sin because it's a question of mind.
The word comes from the Greek haeresis, meaning "to choose." One who is a heretic is someone
who makes a particular intellectual choice. To be viewed as a sinner, you have to also indicate some
kind, an element of pride behind a particular belief and so Guido is held responsible for spreading,
disseminating this idea of Averroism.
What is then Averroism? Well one of the ideas that Averroes says is that we in the commentary
On the Soul that we human beings are not even capable, intrinsically capable of thinking. That
we are made remember the famous structure? The diagram about the soul? That we are a
concupiscent entities and sensitive entities. We're also rational entities, but rationality occurs to us
intermittently. Thoughts, we even say that in English, 'a thought came to me.' That reminds me the
best way of understanding Averroism: we don't think all the time, occasionally thought comes to us,
and there's no way that really. And when we think we are really existing in a sort of break, a
discontinuity from the world of feeling. So there's a fairly tragic understanding, making human
beings the object of thought, not subjects of thought. We are not agents capable of producing
thoughts, thoughts come to us and also tragic because it sort of presents a break between the
sensitive part of our experiences and the rational part of experiences.
We live like animals more often than not: we eat, we drink, we sleep and so on. Then occasionally
we manage to disengage ourselves from all of this and capable of contemplative thoughts. At that
point we no longer really live we are just we are abstracted from ourselves, we are removed from
ourselves. Not only Guido believed in these ideas, these ideas shape one of the most beautiful
poems written at the time of Dante by Guido Cavalcanti himself, and the poem is called, A Lady
Asks Me.
I want to tell you what the poem is about. It's a poem where there's a fiction: the poet Guido
Cavalcanti imagines that a woman, which may have been the case, asks him to define love. You
poets are always talking about love, and I don't understand what you mean by love, and nor do I
understand what the effects of love. And he writes a song, this long song, saying that love a lady
asks me to talk about the nature of love, the function of love, and the effects of love. And he goes on
almost scholastically, taking one case after the other.
He begins by saying, in the exposition, that love is a passion that comes from Mars, not from Venus.
That is to say, the nature of love is always to be one of conflict and one of war and chaos, not one of
an order, the benevolent Venus. He goes on too saying that it's it induces death and it's
characterized by deliriums of the mind. It's a very clearly, grim idea of love.
What Dante's doing in this Canto X is connecting Guido's ideas of love and the politics of civil war.
He finds that there is a strict necessary connection, a necessary correlation between the thinking
about love of Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante opposes. As you know from the Vita nuova, he
believes that Beatrice can indeed be someone who can lead him to God and to the knowledge of
God, in the persuasion that it is not by truth that you come to the knowledge of God. If you cannot
come to the knowledge of God by truth, then how do you come to the knowledge of God? By love,
by thinking about love: that's the way of the ascent.
On the other hand, Dante will have this idea that the political that the order of civil that this
disorder, the civil disorder, the civil war is nothing else than the phenomenon of a theory put forth
by the Averroist, by Guido Cavalcanti. This is really what I think the double focus of this canto:
love and politics and the connection between them. A connection which, by the way, the Averroists
whom Dante links with the Epicureans, deny. But he's making this connection, imaginatively, a
connection denied by the philosophers themselves.

Chapter 6. Canto XI: The Sins of Fraud [00:51:49]

With Canto XI and Dante will go on. We have a few minutes and I can talk about this. Dante, as
I said, explains the order of on the face of it, the juxtaposition is clear. To the disorder of the city,
we are now going to have a reflection, a rational reflection on the order that sustains the City of
Hell. If there is any disordered place, it is as if there's a logic even to the disorder of evil. And the
idea is that there is a tripartite division to Hell, the plan of Hell. All of the sins are divided into three
parts, sins of incontinence that we saw from Canto III, IV, V, actually to Canto IX. The middle area
which is called the area of violence and then the third area, the sins of fraud. And Dante calls fraud
the sin peculiar to human beings because it's not just a sin of the will, but there is also the
premeditation of the mind, the complicity of the mind, the sense of fraud which is also a sense of
treachery. Dante sees the conjunction of will and, at the same time, the order of reason in the
performance of that evil.
The canto comes to ends with a question. Dante says that this is all from the Ethics of Aristotle
and then Dante wonders, look, he'll say, lines 90: "Oh Sun that healest all troubled sight, so dost
thou satisfy me with a resolving of my doubts that it is no less grateful to me to question than to
know. Turn back again a little', I said,' to the point." You know he's been explaining everything;
actually he didn't explain everything. He never explained heresy, which we took some time to talk
about and he never really explains Dante tells him, you never really say anything about usury.
The point that's, "the usury offends Divine Goodness, and loose that knot."
Why is usury what is usury exactly? The question is why does Dante ask this question of usury?
How does he answer it? We can understand why he asks about it. How does he answer what usury
is? Let me just read this passage lines 98 and following: "'Philosophy, for one who understands,' he
said to me, 'notes, not in one place only, how nature takes her course from the divine mind and its
art, and if thou note well thy Physics," another text of Aristotle, the Ethics is mentioned for us, now
the Physics, "thou wilt find not many pages on, that your art, as far as it can, follows nature as the
pupil the master, so that your art is to God, as it were, a grandchild. By these two, if you recall to
mind Genesis, near the beginning," the biblical book of Genesis, "it behoves mankind to gain their
livelihood and their advancement, and because the usurer takes another way he despises nature,
both in herself and in her follower, setting his hope elsewhere. But now follow me, for I would go;
the Fishes are quivering on the horizon and all the Wain lies over Caurus and farther on there is the
descent of the cliff.'"
To explain the sin of usury, Dante puts forth a theory of art. That's what's happening, as if usury
were a violation of art. How does he understand art? Art, what is art? He understands art as work,
that's the best way to explain it. Talking about the beginning of Genesis when a human being
when Adam was thrown out of the Garden of Eden and was told that in order to recover, retrieve the
garden, he had to go back to work, that work becomes an ascetic not a punishment. Here Dante
doesn't see work as a punishment, but an ascetic exercise whereby one can regain or transform the
wilderness into paradise.
That's really the idea, but I think there is more that is happening here in this connection. This is the
general thrust of the canto. What is art in the Middle Ages? You may want to know because first of
all, I did say that there is a general coherence. You remember those were my initial words when I
started today's class from Canto IX to Canto XI? Art is understood by the Scholastics as a virtue of
the practical intellect, in the order of making, a virtue of the practical intellect.
You may go, what is this practical intellect? How many intellects do we have? Well there's a
speculative intellect. When Dante talks about the immortality of the soul and those who do not
believe in the immortality of the soul, that's a question of the speculative intellect. If I went on
thinking about God, suppose that I had this weakness of mine to think about justice, for instance, an
abstract of idea, justice, not particular cases of justice, then I'm involved in an exercise of the
speculative intellect. He ends the canto with the practical intellect, an emphasis on the practical
intellect is the mind that worries about doing or making, and they are not the same thing.
What is the difference? To say that there is a practice intellect in the order of doing would be to
worry about when you talk about prudence: a virtue of doing, because it's not the artisan's work. To
say that it's a virtue of practical intellect in the order of making, it means that the work of art is a
thing that one elaborates.
From this point of view, the issue is never really one of does it tell the truth about whatever. It
has its own thingness; it's a thing, the work of art is something made and therefore as made, it has
its own reality; it has its own laws; it has its own rigor. That's one thing. It's work, but look at all the
images that Dante is using to reflect on this problem.
"Philosophy, for one who understands,' he said to me, 'notes, not in one place only, how nature takes
a course from the divine mind and its art. And if thou know well thy Physics," which is it's a theory
of nature really, it's a theory of motion, it's a theory of how things grow, how things are born, grow,
and perish, "thou will find not many pages on, that your art as far it can, follows nature as the pupil
the master, so your art is to God as it were a grandchild."
I just want to talk about these metaphors here to make you understand what Dante how Dante
understands art. On the face of it, he's saying that art must be an imitation of nature. You have
followed nature. Does Dante then have a mimetic idea of art? Not at all, not at all, because look at
the metaphors he's using: two metaphors.
"Your art, as far as it can, follows nature as the pupil the master, so that your art is to God as it were
a grandchild" because art follows nature, nature is the child of God, so art is a grandchild, but it's an
image of fecundity and fertility. You can understand why Dante opposes art, finally, to usury. Usury
is viewed as the activity that is sterile, an activity that produces what's symbolic, money out of
money. So it's a symbolic kind of operation; as opposed to it, Dante opposes to it, Dante casts the
virtue of art as work, but one of production, one of generation: the "grandchild" of God. Art is the
grandchild of God.
Then there is this other metaphor, "as the pupil follows the master," which is not a gratuitous
metaphor, because after all within the context, here Dante has Virgil who is teaching him, so there is
almost a kind of flattery, if you wish. One little detail, he's flattering the relationship. He
acknowledges his discipleship to Virgil, which he does all the time, but it implies the educational
aspect of art, in the most etymological sense of the term. Art educates, in the sense that it leads us
out of a particular state of barbarity, ignorance, darkness, etc. So it has an educational and a non-
mimetic role, because art imitates the productive rhythms of the natural world. Dante views an art
that is open to beginnings, to life.
This is the meaning of Genesis, the idea of Genesis, an art that always that is original, but not in
a romantic sense of originality, but an art that leads us back to the thought of origins. The thought of
how things come into being because only then, do we understand how what the ends are. To
understand the ends, we got to know something about the beginnings, about the seeds that make us
whatever it is that we think we are.
We have gone then from Canto IX to Canto XI, from concerns about the pride of the mind, which
we could even call the wound of the intellect and the weakness of the will, to the view that really is
no distinction between an Epicurean thinking about oneself and the state and distinct from some
kind of theorizing. Dante sees a connection between them, to finally an idea of art.
And I think that this idea of art is also for Dante remedial for the evils that to which we are
prone. Dante thinks that should we apply to ourselves the same kind of care and rigor with which an
artist produces the work of art, then what we call the cultivation of the soul may indeed begin to
take place. Art Dante's attention to art is part of this ascetic exercise.

Chapter 7. Question and Answer [01:03:08]

Let me finish here and we'll give another few minutes I touched on a number of issues and I'm
anxious to hear your perplexities, questions, comments, suggestions, whatever. Yes?
Student: With the heretics, he makes it so clear that they sin, because it's both intellect and will. It's
because with the heretics he makes it clear that they sin both because of intellect and will, it's not
just because they're thinking something false.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, with the heretics that we are not really dealing
only with the question of thought, or it's a freedom of thought, but it deals with the fact the heretics
are engaged in act of acts of intellect which are supported or shaped by also acts of the will; that
was exactly what I maintained.
Student: Then that makes sense, but then does he ever really try and explain to them I mean
everyone wonders about the virtuous paintings and why they're there, and it seems that theirs is just
a failure of intellect and there's really no failure of will.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: For the for Dante you mean?
Student: Yes.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is about the pagans, does Dante think that theirs is not
just the failure if I understood the question, the failure of the intellect but also the failure of the
will. Yes, I think that this is the case. We shall see a number of pagans where probably we can
highlight we can see highlighted some of these concerns that he has. Concerns you will read
Ulysses who is represented as engaged in a flight of the mind, the wings of the intellect. You know
they are wings of desire, Platonic wings of desire. And then Francesca, Canto V, remember she is
like a dove, etc., called by desire, the open wings, clearly the wings of desire. And then in the case
of Ulysses, you're going to have the wings of the intellect, the mind that tries to reach, the flight of
the mind.
He too, appears as a rhetorician. That is to say, it would seem that we like to believe that there is a
distinction between let's say, a metaphysical, it's a little bit physics, as a kind of metaphysical
intellectual flight and Dante's always saying, look, is always trying to probe the presence of
passions, the rhetorical aspect of the claims to reach the truth, or the plain of truth. Yes, am I
answering your question?
Student: Yes, I mean it's also just they were put there because they did Christ hadn't come yet,
which is why they were still in Hell, why Virgil came to Hell? I'm just wondering is that like
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, good. I have been missing the mark in answering and the
question really is how are the pagans in Hell because Christ had not yet come and in what way
did they violate
Student: That just seems the failure of intellect rather than
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The failure of intellect? No, the answer is no. Let me give you a
general idea of why it's no, and then a particular idea. First of all, generally, if Dante were to judge
and he does, judge the world, the culture of let's say Greek the classical world. He puts most of it
in Limbo. That's a judgment, saying you're really marginal, you're really liminal to my story. That's
what he's saying, though in Paradise he will go out of the way to reclaim Plato, Aristotle, and all the
possible Aristotelians. If he were to do that from a perspective which is outside, he really would be
a boring poet, in my view. You don't believe in the immortality of the soul, as if he were saying to
Epicurus. I do, you are a fool and therefore I am saved and you I put you in Hell. That's really
not worthy of a great mind, because one can imagine Epicurus saying, well you are the fool and you
think you are saved, I know what I have been doing. You can take sides. Dante never does that,
what he does do is take the perspective of the sinners themselves. Let them talk and gives them a
rope with which they hang themselves. That's really what's happening, that's the best way to present
this argument.
He's not judging the pagans, now I'm coming straight to your question, he's not judging the pagans
from a Christian standpoint alone that is outside of it. For a number of reasons, because he believes
actually that whatever that the pagans are adumbrations of the Christian view, the Christian
vision. They are not just "other" to be rejected, on the contrary. And then in particular I can say, that
Dante will go on praising some pagans among the saved. He even praises one figure the so-called
Ripheus, who was only mentioned once, and we know nothing about him, a Roman who was a
sailor in with Aeneas, and only because Virgil refers to him as justus Ripheus, the just Ripheus,
which is, to me, a way which Dante says, not just the kings but every simple, humble worker can
also be saved, Trajan, the emperor Trajan and so on and a number of other cases.
In the case of Virgil, I'm not going to go there because I'm going to be on TV for the next six
months I don't know, because reams of books have been written by people who wish to see him
saved. I mean that's such a good guy throughout Inferno and Purgatorio and the people who go on
arguing that he might he may be saved. One thing we know is that he comes as far as the Garden
of Eden and just as Beatrice is going to arrive then the pilgrim, the lover now, Dante trembles at the
idea that here she is, the destination of his journey, and he needs the help of Virgil. He turns around
and his eyes will never see him again. He had vanished, so we know that, there is a kind that
seems to be the limitation of how far he can go.
To say this is really to say very little, because within Dante's cosmos, Dante has an idea of the
curvature of space. This is the sphere. A redemption means that all things will go back to the
beginning, that's what happens, so only from that point of view, we don't have a lot of thematic
reflections about this aspect, who is going to be saved at the end of that, who knows. The whole
question is the unfathomable quality of God's justice. Dante wonders though, we're talking about
Christ and Christ, and what about the in those living in near the banks of the Hindus? They
never heard the name of Christ? Are they going to be saved? They are just, can they be condemned?
These are questions that he will not answer. He raises these questions in Paradise.
You're a little bit impatient I say but that's I think that from the point of view of eschatology, he
must have an idea of otherwise Redemption has failed. If some people are damned then there is
no Redemption, you see what I'm saying? The measure in which evil if you get into this
metaphysical framework, if there is going to be residues of sin, then there is also residue of
injustice. I don't know that I answered your question. I think I did but Yes?
Student: Thinking about the Medusa, I understand the idea of Medusa as an allegory for the
mediation of poetry, but is it also a connection between the figure of the woman and the act of
petrification? Thinking about the Donna Petra, I'm wondering if Dante's also saying something
about the dangers of love or the dangers of misplaced love.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Thank you. The question is about the story of the Medusa and the
part about the mediation of poetry to conquer Medusa is clear, but the question also wonders
whether this has to do with, first of all, the fact that the Medusa is a woman, and also that
petrification is the petrification of misplaced love. Is that an accurate paraphrase?
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, the answer is that's a great question. I sense there your
awareness of the Freudian reading of the myth of the Medusa as castration, as indeed a kind of
literalization of the threat, at least, not castration but the threat of castration on the male from the
point of view of Medusa. I will take the second part of your remark to explain also the first part. I
think that this is a question of misdirected love, but what Dante has seen I would urge you to go
and read the poems about this lady Petra, the lady of stone because they are poems where Dante
literally engages in fantasies of violence against her. If I could get my hands on her with a passion,
unrequited makes him it's almost like a sort of sadistic coloring about it. I think it's clearly
misdirected love. What he understands though is the kind of death that that sort of desperate love
has brought to him. You call that you can view that death as the fear of castration. I think it's an
extreme version of that, so I would agree with what I hear is behind your question. Yes?
Student: So why does he draw us into that allegory of Medusa and petrified love?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well he I you mean if it's the question is why does he
draw us into that allegory if it's about petrified love? Right, this is the question and I presume I
don't want to explain your question, I have to answer your question, but I presume that your
question stems from your this kind of concern you have. If it's such a private story, why us? In
what way are we involved in that? This is his story, right? The answer that I could give is yes, this is
can be seen as Dante's own confession and the confession and that's why I read the passage from
Augustine, from Augustine's own Confessions: a confession that can also be exemplary to us. And
because he thinks, I think, that there are no experiences that are irreducibly private and therefore
unshareable. It's part of the concern of this writing of this writer, that anything that will happen
to him we are I have to say this.
We are going to find moments when he tells us its night dreams, pretty heavy night dreams, but
treated with an extraordinary, I think, care. We are going to have his we are going to enter into
his psyche, why part of way of entering into his psyche? Because he has to understand not only
how shareable his experience is, but also, what is the root of the way we make decisions? Do can
we really be ever all the time vigilant? This is in the case of the dream. Am I responsible if I
perceive the world in a certain way? Am I responsible if dreams come to me in a certain way? Then,
am I accountable for this kind of dreams? The concern is always that of trying to delimit an area
where there is some common ground between his experiences and ours, and that's the transaction of
allegory. Yes?
Student: At the end of Canto IX, I don't know if it's significant, but Dante turns to the right as he
enters the City of Dis, did you find that significant just going back to what we talked about last
time?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Of course, this is fantastic. The question is I have been talking
about the fact that in Inferno Dante goes to the left, seems to which I also said though that that is
really very difficult to visualize, so we say counter-clockwise or clockwise, that his descent is
clockwise in Inferno. And yet, I'm so grateful to you for noticing this. Here in Inferno IX, Dante
actually goes out of the way to say that he turned to the right and the I don't have a position of
my own on this but there will also be well this is to emphasize that heresy is primarily the
disease of the intellect.
You remember that I specified that there is the will and the intellect, and the will is always the left
and the intellect is the right. I think that Dante is this is the point where Dante is sleeping. It
happened to Homer occasionally to fall asleep and this is the only time that you have caught him
dozing off. Thank you so much we'll see you next time.
[end of transcript]
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 5 - Inferno IX, X, XI [September 18, 2008]
Chapter 1. Introduction to Cantos IX-XI [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Today we are going to look at three cantos. They are connected in a
number of interesting ways: Cantos IX, X, and XI. They describe they focus on the pilgrim and
the guide, Virgil, being approaching the city of Dis. So we are moving they are moving and
we with them, away from the area of incontinence, which is the section of Inferno we read through
from Canto V to Canto VIII.
They are approaching the gates of the city of Dis in Canto IX and the pilgrim experiences a serious
impediment, an impasse, we will call it. He cannot go any further. The guidance of Virgil fails him
and we are going to examine why it fails him and what is the problem that the pilgrim will have to
solve. Once he is in canto within the city of Dis, the first sinners he meets are the so-called
heretics, heresiarchs, among whom chief among whom is really Epicurus, the Epicureans, and in
many ways you understand already that link between the city and these philosophers.
Let me just add one thing so you have the idea is a bit clearer: Dante acknowledges in this
philosophical text that he writes called the Banquet three schools of philosophy. The so-called
academics or Aristotelians, then the Stoics, and the third Epicureans; now he handles he just
examines who these Epicureans are and for him they appear as those who are guilty of some form
of pride, if you wish, intellectual pride, since heresy is a question of intellect and not of will, we'll
talk about that. They deny the immortality of the soul, and in fact, it's really a problem to figure out
why should Dante think of them as sinners at all.
In antiquity they were viewed as one more school of opinion, a philosophical opinion: my mind
does not convince me, my reason does not find it convincing the belief in the immorality of the
soul. Why should I be punished? It's intellect, since the logic of Dante's own idea of sinfulness is
that the will has to be involved, the will is at the center of the habit to sin.
We'll talk about this, then in Canto XI, there really is no great action. Dante goes on explaining the
so-called topography of evil, goes on explaining the arrangement of sins. What is the principle of
construction of Inferno? There now he turns to Aristotle, we'll turn to Aristotle's Ethics first of all as
the plan, as the model to for the arrangement of sins and then also we shall see in a very
interesting way he will turn to he will allude to his Physics.
You see he goes on talking about from a personal problem which we have to understand in Canto
IX, the crisis of, then the questions of the intellect and its relationship to the will; and then in Canto
XI this idea of what are the dispositions to sinfulness and we shall see and the turn to Aristotle.
Chapter 2. Canto IX: The Three Furies and Medusa; Address to the Reader
[00:03:52]
Let me go back to now looking at exactly the crisis of Canto IX, Dante's progressing in this
journey. He reaches the gate of Dis and now this is around lines 40 and following. Three Furies,
the so-called three Erinyes of Greek mythology: Alecto, Tesiphone, and Megaera. They appear and
they stop him. They say you cannot go into the city, a city described very much as a medieval city.
In fact, it's a kind of swamp for reasons that we having nothing to do with really ecology but the
idea that medieval cities were built near swamps because the land was always more malleable and
there was water clearly in the that's not the reason for Dante but the reason for the certain ways
of understanding medieval cities.
The three Furies, Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera will stop and they call on Medusa who doesn't
come, but they summon Medusa. That's why they say, "let Medusa come." They threaten the
pilgrim, with the sight of the Medusa, "let Medusa come," she isn't here, I repeat. This is if you
had to translate it into let's say from English into Italian you would use a subjunctive, "may she
come, I wish she came, we wish she came, let her come and we will turn him to stone." That's the
threat.
A threat of petrifaction, because according to the myth, and if you don't know all of it for instance,
you may have seen a movie about the Medusa, if you look at the if you gaze at the face of the
Medusa, one who gazes at the head of the Medusa who was a great virginal beauty, a vestal in the
Temple of Neptune, according to the myth. It was violated by Neptune and Minerva takes revenge
on her by metamorphosing her into this ugly repulsive figure with her hair turned into snakes and
yet she has this power, this magic power of turning all the onlookers into stone. That's the threat.
"Let Medusa come and we will turn him to stone they all cried looking down. We avenged ill, the
assault of Theseus," Theseus who also violated the boundaries of Hell to free the Eurytus, another
little story that there were Theseus was successful in the liberation of Eurytus.
The drama involving the pilgrim directly, this is a menace on him. "Turn thy back," this is Virgil
who intervenes, "and keep thine eyes shut, for should the Gorgon" the Medusa, "show herself and
thou see her there would be no returning above." And now that's the turn. Listen to this: "My Master
said this, and himself turned me round and, not trusting to my own hands, covered my face with his
own also."
The poet interrupts the narrative and talks to us as a poet. This is the first so-called address to the
reader. I will talk about this little technical detail. That is to say, this is no longer part of the action,
now it's no longer the pilgrim, the story of the pilgrim, but the poet who is sitting in his study and
who says, "you who are of good understanding," the Italian says, "you who have healthy intellect,
who you have a good an understanding, note the teaching that is hidden under the veil of the strange
lines." The poet assuming authority turns to us readers, and in a sense, he needs readers so that his
authority can be constituted and he warns us. He admonishes us, to engage in what clearly appears
is as an allegorical operation. We have to read, and the language is the language of allegory. We
have to know how to read underneath the veil of language, there's something hidden underneath
this. What is the allegory about?
Let me just give you more about the story of the myth of the Medusa, so you will see the relevance
maybe of that myth and the what I left out of the myth to this scene. As you know, the Medusa
will be conquered, will be defeated. She will be defeated by the poet, by Perseus who it's the
origin of Pegasus, the horse of poetry. Pegasus I'm sorry, Perseus who, using the shield of
Minerva the shield Minerva had given him and by looking not at Medusa directly, at her face
directly, but at a reflected image in this shield, in a mirror, the shield of Minerva, manages to see her
and will kill, he will slay the Medusa in the story. Within the Ovidian narrative, this is clearly a
means to evoke for us the need for a kind of not a direct vision but a mediated vision. That is to
say, through the mediation of poetry for us, for the mediation of I'll come back to the scene in a
moment, but through the mediation of the shield can Perseus really take flight, kill and then take
flight on the back of Pegasus.
For us, the shield of Minerva is the text, because at this point there is a sort of direct let's say,
divergence between what the pilgrim is enjoined to do. Virgil says to him, "don't look, shut your
eyes," and not trusting the pilgrim, either his quickness, he must have been awed by this situation
such a situation he doesn't understand. He covers, Virgil covers, the pilgrim's own eyes.
In turn, the poet addresses us and tells us to open our eyes. You open your eyes and look. You can
because you have the shield of Minerva. You have this textual mediation that will allow you to
escape the direct threat and glance of Medusa. So you do know that the story Mercury, who is the
messenger, that clearly the figure of the interpreter. That's what the messenger means, the bearer
of messages, the bearer of words. He comes and manages to make a breach within the wall of the
city and the pilgrim and the guide can continue their descent. This is really the story.

Chapter 3. An Allegory at Work [00:11:01]

What is happening? What how do I can we explain? What is this allegory? Let me say a few
things so that you can understand the whole technique of allegories. Whenever you read the Divine
Comedy, probably much more than I would ever do, other scholars will tell you that the Divine
Comedy is a vision, which it is, and that it's allegorical which at times it is, and the allegory is
supposed to explain everything that the pilgrim finds himself lost in the woods. That's not the
woods to me it's the woods, but they say it's a state of sin in a way and there he meets three
beasts that stand for pride, and wrath, and what not; they're three beasts and they may stand for
other things.
The significance of that initial landscape, as you may recall when we talked about that scene is not
all that clear and that's part of the problem. That's what I call the land of unlikeness within which
the pilgrim will find himself. The inability to join together signs and their significations, the
awareness that there are no signs which are so self-transparent as to be understood or de-codified in
a particular way. What is this idea of allegory? Dante here is clearly asking telling us that it is an
allegory at work. 'You readers have good understanding of healthy minds look, open your eyes and
look underneath the veil of the strange verse.' Why are they so strange? What's so strange? What is
the story? What's going on here?
What is allegory first of all? Allegory, as you know, the word means to speak otherwise. It's a figure
but it related but not quite, to enigmas within the manuals, the primers of rhetorical primers
from medieval and classical times. Enigmas, irony, when you say one thing and you mean another,
but to say this, is to say very little because Dante has been very thoughtful. He has been probing this
issue very deeply, and in a couple of places in his works. In the Letter to Cangrande that he writes,
about which I will talk later it's a letter that he sends as an introduction to the first ten cantos of
Paradise, Cangrande being the lord of Verona where Dante had lived for awhile. And also in the
Banquet, this philosophical text where he explores the idea of what how a meaning can be
arrived at. I have a statement. How can I go on drawing a particular significance, or more than one
significance out of a statement?
He distinguishes two types of allegory. And there is a so-called allegory of poets and allegory of
theologians. How does he distinguish them? How would he ask us to distinguish between them?
The allegory of poets is an allegory where the literal in which, the literal sense is a fable, is a
fiction. To say, that's the example he gives, Orpheus by the power of his language moved stones,
that's an allegory of poets. It really means that the power of the voice of the poet manages maybe to
edify cities, whether we need poetic myths for the edification of a city. That's understandable. Or to
say Orpheus, that by the power of his words, tamed lions. It's to say that whatever ferociousness we
may have inside us can partly be tamed by the music, the song, the poetry, and so forth. That's the
allegory of poets. The literal sense is a fiction.
To say that it's an allegory of theologians is completely different. The example that Dante gives is
taken sends us to Exodus, the biblical story of Exodus. You all know, I take, what the biblical
story is, so once again movies help. The biblical story of Exodus, the story where the Jews abandon,
leave the bondage, the slavery of Egypt, go through the desert and reach the Promised Land. This is
happening historically, it's true. This is not a fiction, this is the Red Sea did open up and the Jews
could pass through the Red Sea, could cross the Red Sea that way. This is history and in the allegory
of theologians, the literal level must be historical. It must be an event. So this is the distinction.
Of course, the question is what kind of allegories are used here? We'll come to that in a moment, but
keep that in mind. This is I hope it's more than of archaeological interest. Within the allegory
of theologians, they distinguish four levels of exegesis, exegesis being a word meaning
interpretation. Four levels: the literal, the moral. . . An allegory is telling you what to do, teaching
you. It has an ethics involved: that you read and there is an ethics when you are reading. You have
more or less a text. It's time to direct your will or tell you what you should be doing. A tropological
telling you what tropological meaning what does it mean in terms of your whole life, not just an
action in a particular case. And then the so-called analogical or eschatological. So that the story of
the Jews crossing the wilderness and going to the Jerusalem means having a kind of a spiritual
conversion, moral conversion, means that this is really the way that life ought to go. You go from
sin to glory or the peace of the city, and then anagogically, this is the story of the soul. It prefigures
what the soul ought to be.
In the case of the allegory of poets you only have two levels, the literal and the moral. There are a
lot of difficulties with this way of distinguishing between the two types of allegory because both the
allegory of theologians and the allegory of poets, even if the allegory of theologians refers to events,
it's still words that we are reading. There is a way in which Dante seems to at one point dodge the
whole thing of how can you really distinguish between the two modes the rhetorical modes
independently one from the other. And actually he goes on saying, really, the difference is in how
you take the literal sense. In the kind of act of faith that you may have, that the literal sense that
the Bible is the word of God, then you are reading it theologically. But if you decide, and one
might, to say that the Bible is really a collection of extraordinary poetic stories, then you are reading
according to the allegory of poets.
How is Dante circumventing this whole issue? He's circumventing the whole issue by saying, my
story may well be taken as a story of allegory of poets, but it's also an allegory of theologians
because the literal sense is 'I.' The historical sense is in me. I am the historical cipher moving
through these experiences, and therefore, it is my life that they will give a particular sense, a
particular truth value, to whatever poetic fable I may be relating.

Chapter 4. Understanding the Threat of Petrifaction [00:18:30]

We only have taken care of one little problem here, very external to the story, the allegory of poets
or allegory of theologians. It's time to decide that this is what is going on here, but, how are we to
understand this threat of petrification. And you cannot really understand it, but I'm here to tell you.
You cannot really understand it on your own, so you have to trust my words. The fact is that Dante
had written in his youth a number of poems for a so-called Lady Stone. In Italian, it's not as bad as
that, though 'stone' could be a good word in English, Donna Petra petra meaning stone, and the
passion it's a description of a love that was unrequited, but a passion for this woman was such
that he felt that his intellect would be petrified, that he could be in other words he was unable to
go anywhere. It's a statement of despair, if you wish, whenever you have this sense of a death that is
going to take over and you are going to be paralyzed in your will, then this is a petrification. This is
what I think is happening here. Dante is engaged in retrospection, to an experience of his past, and
that experience of his past is now ahead of him threatening him once again.
He has to cleanse himself, he has to move beyond it, but to explain better this idea of the closing of
the eyes this is why Medusa, though he talks of Medusa there and this lady Petra is a kind of
Medusa. Let me give you read a little scene from that I think really explains what's going on
and prepare us to move forward to the next canto, Canto X. It's a little scene from the Confessions
of Augustine. As you know, a book that Dante knew very well. Dante even goes on quoting it at
very strategic places, so there's not issue of bringing it in gratuitously to explain this scene. It's
actually direct it could be viewed forgive the reversal, but this would be viewed as a gloss on
what Dante will go on writing.
The Confessions is written with it's an intellectual autobiography: the story of a young man who
will go on being fascinated by various schools of philosophy. He's a Manichean, and then he will
turn into a neo-Platonist, goes on is very flattered by a skeptical, rhetorical way. He's a professor
of rhetoric a rhetorical way of dealing with values and the world around him. And then in Book
IX, he'll go on telling the story in the garden of Milan, the famous story under the fig tree, very
emblematic. We could talk about these things, about why the fig tree in Milan, which leads many
scholars to go on wondering, were there fig trees in Milan? Isn't the climate too cold? You need
really the southern climes for that kind of thing, forgetting that the fig tree is always in the Bible. It
appears as the tree under which the prophets go and rest in the mistaken belief that everything is
over and that somehow a time for complacency may come. They're denouncing it of course. This is
all done in a mode denunciation, and that's exactly where Augustine puts himself, under the fig tree
and there he goes on experiencing a particular drama by reading St. Paul, etc.
Throughout this text, though this is about neo-Platonists and Manicheans. As you know Augustine
as you probably know, Augustine goes on reflecting about his love of shows, the biggest one of
them, at the beginning of Book III, is his love of theatre and his critique of the theatre. Now, why do
I go to the theatre and how do I explain the fact that there may be some well-meaning young man
who sees the maid in distress and jumps on the scene to free her. And he goes on talking about how
can I be a spectator, what does it mean to be a spectator? What does it mean to be involved?
And then there is another little scene. A friend of his, Alypius Alypius is a Greek intellectual in
the best sense of the word. A man who believes in self-mastery, in intellectual self-mastery, a young
man who witnesses Augustine's own experiences. In narratives you always have Sancho accompany
Don Quixote; there's always the other, more or less skeptical, who gives authenticity and who
exactly will go on making claims for the truth value of what the narrator or the protagonist will go
on experiencing. His name is Alypius. Alypius will eventually rejoin him. He's in Carthage. They
grew up together. Augustine and he grew up together.
Augustine goes to Rome. Alypius will rejoin him in Rome, and they go on from there, eventually
going to Milan. When in Rome, Alypius does what nobody we would all do, first thing he wants
to do is to go and watch the games played at the amphitheatre, at the Colosseum and the games are
horrifying games to Augustine. He says, how can an intellectual such as you, want to go to the
games where actually human beings are being thrown, for the delight of the crowds, are being
thrown to beasts, to lions. Alypius, of course, he tries to justify himself. I really want to go, but
exactly because, he'll say, but I really do, because I'll read you the whole passage: 'I will go but
because I'm an intellectual, I promise that at the crucial moment when the sign is given for the
animal to devour the human being lying there I will not watch. I will I'm going to turn my eyes
away and I will shut my eyes.' Let's see what happens. This is from Book VI, Chapter VIII.
It's a great little story. By the way, a scholar of romance philology who used to teach here many
years ago by the name of Eric Auerbach, a great Dante scholar and he wrote this book called,
Mimesis, he reflects on this scene, not connecting it with Dante, but it doesn't matter. I read it first in
his book and says, this is really it's a little scene that marks the end of Hellenic rationalism. Let's
read this; it's interesting just because of that, and then we'll see how we could apply it to Dante. I
think it's very clear.
"He had gone to Rome to study law," this is Alypius, "and there he was carried away incredibly with
an incredible eagerness after the shows of gladiators. For being utterly adverse to and detesting such
spectacles, he was one day by chance met by diverse of his acquaintances and fellow students
coming from dinner and they with a familiar violence, hailed him vehemently refusing and resisting
into the amphitheatre during this cruel and deadly shows. He thus protesting, 'Though you hail my
body to that place,' this is Alypius, "And there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my
eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present and so shall overcome both you and them.
They, hearing this, led him on, nevertheless, desirous per chance to try that very thing, whether he
could do as he said."
"When they will come thither and had taken their places as they could, the whole place kindled with
that savage pastime, but he," Alypius, "closing the passage of his eyes, forbade his mind to range
abroad of such evil, and would he had stopped his ears also. For in the fight when one fell, a mighty
cry of the whole people striking him, strongly overcome by curiosity and as prepared to despise and
be superior to it, whatever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes and was stricken with a
deeper wound in his soul, than the other whom he desired to behold was in his body. And he fell
more miserably than he upon whose fall that mighty noise was raised, which entered through his
ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul. Bold rather
than resolute, and the weaker in that it had presumed on itself which ought to have relied on Thee
for so soon the " the whole confession is addressed to God, for it's a confession, a witnessing to
God so in case you are confused about the references.
"For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drank down savageness, not turned away, but fixed
his eye drinking in frenzy, unawares and was delighted with that guilty fight and intoxicated with
bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto. Yea, a true
associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say more? He beheld, shouted, kindled, carried
thence with him, the madness which should goad him to return not only with them who first drew
him thither, but also before them, yea and to join others. Yet, thence it did start with a most strong, a
most merciful hand, pluck him and taught him to have confidence not in himself but in Thee. But
this was after," and that's really the story.
What is the meaning of this story? In the Confessions, I think that Augustine is very clear: the
failure of the mind to master its own will. It's about the crisis. It's about the weakness of the will to
begin with, but it's also the pride: the belief that one can rise above the contingency of temptations
and be in control of oneself. And yet, it's a story of a temptation which he, Alypius, cannot quite
resist. I think that this is exactly what's happening in Canto IX. Dante's dramatizing not only the
failure of the intellect; he's already been talking about the early part of the canto, the failure of
Virgil to guide him. He's discussing now the failure of his will, at least seen in as an event of the
past but clearly is seen as something that can happen to him again.

Chapter 5. Canto X: The Heretics [00:29:53]

The passage to the city can take place after this scene and now he enters into the City of Dis and
against the walls of the city, he finds the Epicureans again, those who do not believe in the
mortality of the soul. Let me just read in Canto X some passages. By the way, each Canto X of the
Divine Comedy, they're really are all cantos intimately related with each other. So if you were
looking for a paper you want to connect Canto X of Inferno, Canto X of Purgatorio, and Canto X of
Paradise, I would encourage you to do so. Let me just read a few lines.
Dante asks who these souls are and the answer he gets is this line 12, "All will be shut in when they
return from Jehoshaphat," which is the valley in Jerusalem; in the valley, into the valley of
Jerusalem where, according to the law, the resurrection of the dead will take place. That's where
they would be meeting. It's interesting then, that there is this contrast in the canto between the so-
called Epicureans, who do not believe in their immortality of the soul, and clearly, this view, this
opposition as one could call it, between Athens, very classical, Athens, and Jerusalem.
You may have heard of this, the city of Athens by the way, the word itself means immortality, the
immortality of athanatos, the immortality of wisdom. Wisdom survives, but not the people. There is
a kind of the kind of contrast between the two cities, very old, very ancient contrast. And now we
have in this part, Epicurus and all his followers, what we call the Epicureans. Let me just gloss the
Epicureans a little bit further from than I did before. There are two types in the mythography
of the Epicureans, there are two types of Epicureans. Whenever we think about the Epicureans, we
think about those, the vulgar Epicureans, those who think about worship their stomach, the
pleasures of food, an Epicurean in that sense.
I think that Dante has dramatized that kind of Epicurean in Canto VI when he meets, remember
Ciacco, whose name means "pig." In fact we talked about the hogs of Epicurus, the herd of
Epicurus. But then there is the noble version of the Epicureans, the canto here, in Canto X those
who are interested in intellectual pleasures, the pleasures of conversations, the pleasures of
friendship, the pleasures of meditation. And they are those who do not who remove themselves
to the garden, do not seem to really care much about what happens around them, because in the
belief that they should really take cultivate their soul and cultivate their own pursuits, take care
of their own pursuits. That's what we are having here. These are the noble, philosophical
Epicureans, not the vulgar sort that believe in the supremacy of bodily pleasures.
Nonetheless, pleasure is the aim of an Epicurean ethics, my pleasure. This continues, "in this part
Epicurus and all his followers, who make the soul die with the body have their burial place." How
fitting, how fitting is the punishment for this crime, this sin. It's perfect because these people never
really believed in the immortality of the soul and they are condemned to be dead. That's what they
think and they dwell literally in sarcophagus, in sarcophagi, entombed. That's how they appear.
There is another little detail I have given you sometimes we may wonder about the
appropriateness of a sin, of a punishment for a particular sin, but here we have no reason to really
be surprised at all by this kind of destiny reserved for the Epicureans.
"But for thy question to me, thou shalt soon have satisfaction from within there, and for the desire
too about which thou art silent." Then they're interrupted. All of a sudden, now Dante's once again
involved, and what's here primarily is no longer the question of immorality of souls, but how the
political aspect, the political implications of this kind of belief, of believing in immorality of the
soul, how is this refracted onto the political scene as it were? Again, therefore, this is almost a
Platonic conceit, the relationship now between no longer bodies and cities, as we saw in Inferno VI,
but here soul and city. Is this a soulless city? What happens? How do we experience it? How
livable? Which is I mean it is also a pun, how livable is this kind of city? What happens and
what is the what are the relationship what is the relationship between various figures?
Dante singles out two people, one a Guelf and one a Ghibelline. We are in the middle of the civil
war of Florence once again. It's going to be Farinata, a Ghibelline and Cavalcanti, the father, the old
man, who is a Guelf. By the way, they're also related to each other because Cavalcanti's son, Dante's
best friend you remember he dedicates his Vita nuova to him, he calls him 'my first friend Guido
Cavalcanti' had married the daughter of Farinata. They stand there in their tombs ignoring each
other and each ignoring the pangs, worries, and perplexities of the other. It's a little picture of what
we call "any city."
This is the city in the beyond where everybody's squabbling. Nobody's paying attention to anybody
else, and everybody believes that one's own passion, one's own concern is really paramount and
foremost. There's nothing that can come near to it, so it's all it's a canto that interestingly enough
is marked by interruptions: one is speaking, the other says forget it, I got to talk now it's my turn.
And so it is the it is a little vignette of Florence in the year 1300 probably, or later but 1300 is a
good date for us.
So, he's interrupted, Virgil and Dante are interrupted by someone who says, "'O Tuscan who makest
thy way alive through the city of fire and speakest so modestly, may it please thee to stop at this
point: thy tongue shows thee native of that noble fatherland to which I was perhaps too harsh.'
Suddenly this sound issued from one of the chests," and so on. So they go on, "Turn round, what
ails thee?" says Virgil "See there Farinata who has risen erect; from the middle up thou shalt
see his full height." He appears from the navel up in the tomb.
Now, a little historical detail. There used to be in Rome, a church is still there, but it was already
there in the year 1300, when Dante went on an embassy to Rome: the church so-called of the Holy
Cross in Jerusalem which, according to the legend, was built with material, with stones from
Jerusalem that had been brought to Rome by Constantine's mother, Helena.
In the basement of that church, which would be opened only once a year around the Easter season,
there would be a mosaic showing and you can say it would only on Good Friday that the
that basement would be open. And that mosaic, it's no longer there so I cannot I'm not
encouraging tourism; it's just I'm giving you a little detail. There used to be a mosaic of the rising
Christ from shown from the navel up and it's clear here that the representation of Farinata
showing himself from the navel up is meant as a caricature of the belief in the Resurrection. There
are two this is the really of the story of a man who doesn't believe in the Resurrection, and
iconographically Dante will go on focusing, insisting on this on the counter. This man doesn't
believe in the Resurrection. That is another possibility of looking at it so there is a the
description is clearly meant to evoke all of that.
There is a great exchange between them: who defeated whom, the continuous battles between
Guelfs and Ghibellines and Dante claims that his own family managed to take good revenge when
the time came. And clearly the implication is that more revenge, since Dante has been, will be
necessary. They're interrupted by the sight of by the old man Cavalcanti.
Look at what the story of the canto is: Farinata worries about his ancestors; Cavalcanti worries
about his son. So these are the Epicureans who have a sense of continuity somehow, a sense of
dynastic continuity: all within the immanence of personal concerns and family. So they go they
move beyond the fragmentations of self from the others. They seem to have a kind of extended idea
of themselves, in spite of themselves, in spite of their beliefs.
This is what happens, an extraordinary scene: "Then rose to sight," line 55 and following, "beside
him a shade showing as far as the chin; I think he had lifted himself on his knees. He looked round
about me as if he had a desire to see whether someone was with me, but when his expectation was
all quenched he said, weeping: 'If thou goest through this blind prison by height of genius, where is
my son? Why is he not with thee?"
The reference clearly is to Dante's best friend, to Guido, whose name also means that he should be
guiding him. Maybe the old man the old father was hoping that the son, according to his name,
could really be leading the younger poet, as he had led him in his early poetic experiments in
Florence. And then he answers, he's disappointed, and Dante answers, I answered him, "I come not
of myself, he," doesn't even mention him, meaning Virgil, "he that waits yonder is leading me," so
this is the pun on "guido" "through here perhaps to. . ." That's very unclear. The text here, my
translation is "to her" and so does yours, but many other translations probably say something
different. I would say "to one, your Guido held in disdain."
It's unclear because the "her" would mean he's leading me, Virgil leads me to Beatrice, whom Guido
held in disdain. Why would Guido hold Beatrice in disdain? Is this really the story of the Vita
nuova? The antagonism between Guido and Beatrice? There's nothing that really suggests all of
that. "To one" would be to God or to some aim that Guido held in disdain, we'll see what that
means. "His words, and the nature of his punishment had already told me his name, so that I replied
thus fully. Suddenly erect, he cried, 'How saidst thou 'he held'?" That's Dante uses the past
preterite, "he held." The old man, infers because of the use of the past preterite, that his son is
already dead: a mistake, an equivocation. "He held? Lives he not still? Strikes not the sweet light on
his eyes?' When he perceived that I made some delay before replying he fell back again and was
seen no more."
Farinata is unconcerned. He goes on saying, well yeah you drove us back but we drove you back,
brings the subject to the political strictly to the war between Guelfs and Ghibellines so that we
really have to ask Dante goes on saying, please before leaving, reassure the old man that his son
is still alive, because by the year of the journey Dante Guido was supposed to be alive. Though
he will die very quickly afterwards.
What is this story of political disarray of Florence? And the story of the memory of Dante's friend
with whom he had just the friendship was just had finished. The friendship was over. Dante,
for those of you who are interested in the biography of the poet one of the early and toughest
decisions he had to make was to banish Guido Cavalcanti from the city because he thought that
Guido was the cause of some unrest within the city. Guido went into exile and never made it back.
He died three months later in the swamps of near of Liguria, a little bit north of Tuscany. Dante
lives in many ways with a kind of guilt, personal guilt, I suppose. He won't talk about it openly
about the what had been happening between them.
What is how are we trying to understand this scene? Let me just give you some details about
some other details about this canto. "If you go through this blind prison by height of genius. . ."
There's a little bit of irony there. Cavalcanti clearly does not understand, nor can he understand, that
Dante's journey in the beyond is not due to height of genius, but these are the philosophers and he
has a kind of philosophical idea about how certain experiences are going to be possible. "Why is not
my son with you?" Etc. "I come not of myself; he that . . . to one whom your Guido held in
disdain." Well, what has happened here? Who is Guido really?
Guido is what we call an Averroist. Did you ever hear the term, Averroist? Probably not. Averroes,
Dante actually mentions him in Limbo. He was an Arab philosopher and a famous commentator of
Aristotle. And of all the texts, he commented just as now, in the Middle Ages they would be reading
the great classics of philosophy, especially very difficult text such as the On the Soul of Aristotle
with following the commentators. Averroes was known as the "Great Commentator." He was the
great commentator of Aristotle's On the Soul.
And he argues that Aristotle does not believe in the immortality of the soul. That's the argument that
he's going to be challenged by Aquinas and by many others, but that's the primary Guido
Cavalcanti follows Averroes' understanding about the soul. The one who is here, a heretic so to
speak, is not just the old man, but also Guido Cavalcanti himself.
At this point, before I go any further telling you more about the who is an Averroist, what does it
mean to be an Averroist, I really have to raise a point with you. What does heresy mean? Because I
did indicate that in antiquity it was never really thought of as a sin because it's a question of mind.
The word comes from the Greek haeresis, meaning "to choose." One who is a heretic is someone
who makes a particular intellectual choice. To be viewed as a sinner, you have to also indicate some
kind, an element of pride behind a particular belief and so Guido is held responsible for spreading,
disseminating this idea of Averroism.
What is then Averroism? Well one of the ideas that Averroes says is that we in the commentary
On the Soul that we human beings are not even capable, intrinsically capable of thinking. That
we are made remember the famous structure? The diagram about the soul? That we are a
concupiscent entities and sensitive entities. We're also rational entities, but rationality occurs to us
intermittently. Thoughts, we even say that in English, 'a thought came to me.' That reminds me the
best way of understanding Averroism: we don't think all the time, occasionally thought comes to us,
and there's no way that really. And when we think we are really existing in a sort of break, a
discontinuity from the world of feeling. So there's a fairly tragic understanding, making human
beings the object of thought, not subjects of thought. We are not agents capable of producing
thoughts, thoughts come to us and also tragic because it sort of presents a break between the
sensitive part of our experiences and the rational part of experiences.
We live like animals more often than not: we eat, we drink, we sleep and so on. Then occasionally
we manage to disengage ourselves from all of this and capable of contemplative thoughts. At that
point we no longer really live we are just we are abstracted from ourselves, we are removed from
ourselves. Not only Guido believed in these ideas, these ideas shape one of the most beautiful
poems written at the time of Dante by Guido Cavalcanti himself, and the poem is called, A Lady
Asks Me.
I want to tell you what the poem is about. It's a poem where there's a fiction: the poet Guido
Cavalcanti imagines that a woman, which may have been the case, asks him to define love. You
poets are always talking about love, and I don't understand what you mean by love, and nor do I
understand what the effects of love. And he writes a song, this long song, saying that love a lady
asks me to talk about the nature of love, the function of love, and the effects of love. And he goes on
almost scholastically, taking one case after the other.
He begins by saying, in the exposition, that love is a passion that comes from Mars, not from Venus.
That is to say, the nature of love is always to be one of conflict and one of war and chaos, not one of
an order, the benevolent Venus. He goes on too saying that it's it induces death and it's
characterized by deliriums of the mind. It's a very clearly, grim idea of love.
What Dante's doing in this Canto X is connecting Guido's ideas of love and the politics of civil war.
He finds that there is a strict necessary connection, a necessary correlation between the thinking
about love of Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante opposes. As you know from the Vita nuova, he
believes that Beatrice can indeed be someone who can lead him to God and to the knowledge of
God, in the persuasion that it is not by truth that you come to the knowledge of God. If you cannot
come to the knowledge of God by truth, then how do you come to the knowledge of God? By love,
by thinking about love: that's the way of the ascent.
On the other hand, Dante will have this idea that the political that the order of civil that this
disorder, the civil disorder, the civil war is nothing else than the phenomenon of a theory put forth
by the Averroist, by Guido Cavalcanti. This is really what I think the double focus of this canto:
love and politics and the connection between them. A connection which, by the way, the Averroists
whom Dante links with the Epicureans, deny. But he's making this connection, imaginatively, a
connection denied by the philosophers themselves.

Chapter 6. Canto XI: The Sins of Fraud [00:51:49]

With Canto XI and Dante will go on. We have a few minutes and I can talk about this. Dante, as
I said, explains the order of on the face of it, the juxtaposition is clear. To the disorder of the city,
we are now going to have a reflection, a rational reflection on the order that sustains the City of
Hell. If there is any disordered place, it is as if there's a logic even to the disorder of evil. And the
idea is that there is a tripartite division to Hell, the plan of Hell. All of the sins are divided into three
parts, sins of incontinence that we saw from Canto III, IV, V, actually to Canto IX. The middle area
which is called the area of violence and then the third area, the sins of fraud. And Dante calls fraud
the sin peculiar to human beings because it's not just a sin of the will, but there is also the
premeditation of the mind, the complicity of the mind, the sense of fraud which is also a sense of
treachery. Dante sees the conjunction of will and, at the same time, the order of reason in the
performance of that evil.
The canto comes to ends with a question. Dante says that this is all from the Ethics of Aristotle
and then Dante wonders, look, he'll say, lines 90: "Oh Sun that healest all troubled sight, so dost
thou satisfy me with a resolving of my doubts that it is no less grateful to me to question than to
know. Turn back again a little', I said,' to the point." You know he's been explaining everything;
actually he didn't explain everything. He never explained heresy, which we took some time to talk
about and he never really explains Dante tells him, you never really say anything about usury.
The point that's, "the usury offends Divine Goodness, and loose that knot."
Why is usury what is usury exactly? The question is why does Dante ask this question of usury?
How does he answer it? We can understand why he asks about it. How does he answer what usury
is? Let me just read this passage lines 98 and following: "'Philosophy, for one who understands,' he
said to me, 'notes, not in one place only, how nature takes her course from the divine mind and its
art, and if thou note well thy Physics," another text of Aristotle, the Ethics is mentioned for us, now
the Physics, "thou wilt find not many pages on, that your art, as far as it can, follows nature as the
pupil the master, so that your art is to God, as it were, a grandchild. By these two, if you recall to
mind Genesis, near the beginning," the biblical book of Genesis, "it behoves mankind to gain their
livelihood and their advancement, and because the usurer takes another way he despises nature,
both in herself and in her follower, setting his hope elsewhere. But now follow me, for I would go;
the Fishes are quivering on the horizon and all the Wain lies over Caurus and farther on there is the
descent of the cliff.'"
To explain the sin of usury, Dante puts forth a theory of art. That's what's happening, as if usury
were a violation of art. How does he understand art? Art, what is art? He understands art as work,
that's the best way to explain it. Talking about the beginning of Genesis when a human being
when Adam was thrown out of the Garden of Eden and was told that in order to recover, retrieve the
garden, he had to go back to work, that work becomes an ascetic not a punishment. Here Dante
doesn't see work as a punishment, but an ascetic exercise whereby one can regain or transform the
wilderness into paradise.
That's really the idea, but I think there is more that is happening here in this connection. This is the
general thrust of the canto. What is art in the Middle Ages? You may want to know because first of
all, I did say that there is a general coherence. You remember those were my initial words when I
started today's class from Canto IX to Canto XI? Art is understood by the Scholastics as a virtue of
the practical intellect, in the order of making, a virtue of the practical intellect.
You may go, what is this practical intellect? How many intellects do we have? Well there's a
speculative intellect. When Dante talks about the immortality of the soul and those who do not
believe in the immortality of the soul, that's a question of the speculative intellect. If I went on
thinking about God, suppose that I had this weakness of mine to think about justice, for instance, an
abstract of idea, justice, not particular cases of justice, then I'm involved in an exercise of the
speculative intellect. He ends the canto with the practical intellect, an emphasis on the practical
intellect is the mind that worries about doing or making, and they are not the same thing.
What is the difference? To say that there is a practice intellect in the order of doing would be to
worry about when you talk about prudence: a virtue of doing, because it's not the artisan's work. To
say that it's a virtue of practical intellect in the order of making, it means that the work of art is a
thing that one elaborates.
From this point of view, the issue is never really one of does it tell the truth about whatever. It
has its own thingness; it's a thing, the work of art is something made and therefore as made, it has
its own reality; it has its own laws; it has its own rigor. That's one thing. It's work, but look at all the
images that Dante is using to reflect on this problem.
"Philosophy, for one who understands,' he said to me, 'notes, not in one place only, how nature takes
a course from the divine mind and its art. And if thou know well thy Physics," which is it's a theory
of nature really, it's a theory of motion, it's a theory of how things grow, how things are born, grow,
and perish, "thou will find not many pages on, that your art as far it can, follows nature as the pupil
the master, so your art is to God as it were a grandchild."
I just want to talk about these metaphors here to make you understand what Dante how Dante
understands art. On the face of it, he's saying that art must be an imitation of nature. You have
followed nature. Does Dante then have a mimetic idea of art? Not at all, not at all, because look at
the metaphors he's using: two metaphors.
"Your art, as far as it can, follows nature as the pupil the master, so that your art is to God as it were
a grandchild" because art follows nature, nature is the child of God, so art is a grandchild, but it's an
image of fecundity and fertility. You can understand why Dante opposes art, finally, to usury. Usury
is viewed as the activity that is sterile, an activity that produces what's symbolic, money out of
money. So it's a symbolic kind of operation; as opposed to it, Dante opposes to it, Dante casts the
virtue of art as work, but one of production, one of generation: the "grandchild" of God. Art is the
grandchild of God.
Then there is this other metaphor, "as the pupil follows the master," which is not a gratuitous
metaphor, because after all within the context, here Dante has Virgil who is teaching him, so there is
almost a kind of flattery, if you wish. One little detail, he's flattering the relationship. He
acknowledges his discipleship to Virgil, which he does all the time, but it implies the educational
aspect of art, in the most etymological sense of the term. Art educates, in the sense that it leads us
out of a particular state of barbarity, ignorance, darkness, etc. So it has an educational and a non-
mimetic role, because art imitates the productive rhythms of the natural world. Dante views an art
that is open to beginnings, to life.
This is the meaning of Genesis, the idea of Genesis, an art that always that is original, but not in
a romantic sense of originality, but an art that leads us back to the thought of origins. The thought of
how things come into being because only then, do we understand how what the ends are. To
understand the ends, we got to know something about the beginnings, about the seeds that make us
whatever it is that we think we are.
We have gone then from Canto IX to Canto XI, from concerns about the pride of the mind, which
we could even call the wound of the intellect and the weakness of the will, to the view that really is
no distinction between an Epicurean thinking about oneself and the state and distinct from some
kind of theorizing. Dante sees a connection between them, to finally an idea of art.
And I think that this idea of art is also for Dante remedial for the evils that to which we are
prone. Dante thinks that should we apply to ourselves the same kind of care and rigor with which an
artist produces the work of art, then what we call the cultivation of the soul may indeed begin to
take place. Art Dante's attention to art is part of this ascetic exercise.

Chapter 7. Question and Answer [01:03:08]

Let me finish here and we'll give another few minutes I touched on a number of issues and I'm
anxious to hear your perplexities, questions, comments, suggestions, whatever. Yes?
Student: With the heretics, he makes it so clear that they sin, because it's both intellect and will. It's
because with the heretics he makes it clear that they sin both because of intellect and will, it's not
just because they're thinking something false.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, with the heretics that we are not really dealing
only with the question of thought, or it's a freedom of thought, but it deals with the fact the heretics
are engaged in act of acts of intellect which are supported or shaped by also acts of the will; that
was exactly what I maintained.
Student: Then that makes sense, but then does he ever really try and explain to them I mean
everyone wonders about the virtuous paintings and why they're there, and it seems that theirs is just
a failure of intellect and there's really no failure of will.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: For the for Dante you mean?
Student: Yes.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is about the pagans, does Dante think that theirs is not
just the failure if I understood the question, the failure of the intellect but also the failure of the
will. Yes, I think that this is the case. We shall see a number of pagans where probably we can
highlight we can see highlighted some of these concerns that he has. Concerns you will read
Ulysses who is represented as engaged in a flight of the mind, the wings of the intellect. You know
they are wings of desire, Platonic wings of desire. And then Francesca, Canto V, remember she is
like a dove, etc., called by desire, the open wings, clearly the wings of desire. And then in the case
of Ulysses, you're going to have the wings of the intellect, the mind that tries to reach, the flight of
the mind.
He too, appears as a rhetorician. That is to say, it would seem that we like to believe that there is a
distinction between let's say, a metaphysical, it's a little bit physics, as a kind of metaphysical
intellectual flight and Dante's always saying, look, is always trying to probe the presence of
passions, the rhetorical aspect of the claims to reach the truth, or the plain of truth. Yes, am I
answering your question?
Student: Yes, I mean it's also just they were put there because they did Christ hadn't come yet,
which is why they were still in Hell, why Virgil came to Hell? I'm just wondering is that like
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, good. I have been missing the mark in answering and the
question really is how are the pagans in Hell because Christ had not yet come and in what way
did they violate
Student: That just seems the failure of intellect rather than
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The failure of intellect? No, the answer is no. Let me give you a
general idea of why it's no, and then a particular idea. First of all, generally, if Dante were to judge
and he does, judge the world, the culture of let's say Greek the classical world. He puts most of it
in Limbo. That's a judgment, saying you're really marginal, you're really liminal to my story. That's
what he's saying, though in Paradise he will go out of the way to reclaim Plato, Aristotle, and all the
possible Aristotelians. If he were to do that from a perspective which is outside, he really would be
a boring poet, in my view. You don't believe in the immortality of the soul, as if he were saying to
Epicurus. I do, you are a fool and therefore I am saved and you I put you in Hell. That's really
not worthy of a great mind, because one can imagine Epicurus saying, well you are the fool and you
think you are saved, I know what I have been doing. You can take sides. Dante never does that,
what he does do is take the perspective of the sinners themselves. Let them talk and gives them a
rope with which they hang themselves. That's really what's happening, that's the best way to present
this argument.
He's not judging the pagans, now I'm coming straight to your question, he's not judging the pagans
from a Christian standpoint alone that is outside of it. For a number of reasons, because he believes
actually that whatever that the pagans are adumbrations of the Christian view, the Christian
vision. They are not just "other" to be rejected, on the contrary. And then in particular I can say, that
Dante will go on praising some pagans among the saved. He even praises one figure the so-called
Ripheus, who was only mentioned once, and we know nothing about him, a Roman who was a
sailor in with Aeneas, and only because Virgil refers to him as justus Ripheus, the just Ripheus,
which is, to me, a way which Dante says, not just the kings but every simple, humble worker can
also be saved, Trajan, the emperor Trajan and so on and a number of other cases.
In the case of Virgil, I'm not going to go there because I'm going to be on TV for the next six
months I don't know, because reams of books have been written by people who wish to see him
saved. I mean that's such a good guy throughout Inferno and Purgatorio and the people who go on
arguing that he might he may be saved. One thing we know is that he comes as far as the Garden
of Eden and just as Beatrice is going to arrive then the pilgrim, the lover now, Dante trembles at the
idea that here she is, the destination of his journey, and he needs the help of Virgil. He turns around
and his eyes will never see him again. He had vanished, so we know that, there is a kind that
seems to be the limitation of how far he can go.
To say this is really to say very little, because within Dante's cosmos, Dante has an idea of the
curvature of space. This is the sphere. A redemption means that all things will go back to the
beginning, that's what happens, so only from that point of view, we don't have a lot of thematic
reflections about this aspect, who is going to be saved at the end of that, who knows. The whole
question is the unfathomable quality of God's justice. Dante wonders though, we're talking about
Christ and Christ, and what about the in those living in near the banks of the Hindus? They
never heard the name of Christ? Are they going to be saved? They are just, can they be condemned?
These are questions that he will not answer. He raises these questions in Paradise.
You're a little bit impatient I say but that's I think that from the point of view of eschatology, he
must have an idea of otherwise Redemption has failed. If some people are damned then there is
no Redemption, you see what I'm saying? The measure in which evil if you get into this
metaphysical framework, if there is going to be residues of sin, then there is also residue of
injustice. I don't know that I answered your question. I think I did but Yes?
Student: Thinking about the Medusa, I understand the idea of Medusa as an allegory for the
mediation of poetry, but is it also a connection between the figure of the woman and the act of
petrification? Thinking about the Donna Petra, I'm wondering if Dante's also saying something
about the dangers of love or the dangers of misplaced love.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Thank you. The question is about the story of the Medusa and the
part about the mediation of poetry to conquer Medusa is clear, but the question also wonders
whether this has to do with, first of all, the fact that the Medusa is a woman, and also that
petrification is the petrification of misplaced love. Is that an accurate paraphrase?
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, the answer is that's a great question. I sense there your
awareness of the Freudian reading of the myth of the Medusa as castration, as indeed a kind of
literalization of the threat, at least, not castration but the threat of castration on the male from the
point of view of Medusa. I will take the second part of your remark to explain also the first part. I
think that this is a question of misdirected love, but what Dante has seen I would urge you to go
and read the poems about this lady Petra, the lady of stone because they are poems where Dante
literally engages in fantasies of violence against her. If I could get my hands on her with a passion,
unrequited makes him it's almost like a sort of sadistic coloring about it. I think it's clearly
misdirected love. What he understands though is the kind of death that that sort of desperate love
has brought to him. You call that you can view that death as the fear of castration. I think it's an
extreme version of that, so I would agree with what I hear is behind your question. Yes?
Student: So why does he draw us into that allegory of Medusa and petrified love?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well he I you mean if it's the question is why does he
draw us into that allegory if it's about petrified love? Right, this is the question and I presume I
don't want to explain your question, I have to answer your question, but I presume that your
question stems from your this kind of concern you have. If it's such a private story, why us? In
what way are we involved in that? This is his story, right? The answer that I could give is yes, this is
can be seen as Dante's own confession and the confession and that's why I read the passage from
Augustine, from Augustine's own Confessions: a confession that can also be exemplary to us. And
because he thinks, I think, that there are no experiences that are irreducibly private and therefore
unshareable. It's part of the concern of this writing of this writer, that anything that will happen
to him we are I have to say this.
We are going to find moments when he tells us its night dreams, pretty heavy night dreams, but
treated with an extraordinary, I think, care. We are going to have his we are going to enter into
his psyche, why part of way of entering into his psyche? Because he has to understand not only
how shareable his experience is, but also, what is the root of the way we make decisions? Do can
we really be ever all the time vigilant? This is in the case of the dream. Am I responsible if I
perceive the world in a certain way? Am I responsible if dreams come to me in a certain way? Then,
am I accountable for this kind of dreams? The concern is always that of trying to delimit an area
where there is some common ground between his experiences and ours, and that's the transaction of
allegory. Yes?
Student: At the end of Canto IX, I don't know if it's significant, but Dante turns to the right as he
enters the City of Dis, did you find that significant just going back to what we talked about last
time?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Of course, this is fantastic. The question is I have been talking
about the fact that in Inferno Dante goes to the left, seems to which I also said though that that is
really very difficult to visualize, so we say counter-clockwise or clockwise, that his descent is
clockwise in Inferno. And yet, I'm so grateful to you for noticing this. Here in Inferno IX, Dante
actually goes out of the way to say that he turned to the right and the I don't have a position of
my own on this but there will also be well this is to emphasize that heresy is primarily the
disease of the intellect.
You remember that I specified that there is the will and the intellect, and the will is always the left
and the intellect is the right. I think that Dante is this is the point where Dante is sleeping. It
happened to Homer occasionally to fall asleep and this is the only time that you have caught him
dozing off. Thank you so much we'll see you next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 7 - Inferno XIX, XXI, XXV, XXVI [September 25,
2008]
Chapter 1. Returning to Canto XV and Brunetto Latini; The Prophetic Voice
[00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time we looked at Canto XV of Inferno, the canto of Brunetto,
the teacher of Dante's teacher, and the teacher of the Florentines, and we pointed out the rhetoric
of the canto. After all, Brunetto is a master rhetorician, so it was quite appropriate that Dante's
account of his meeting with his teacher would be carried out through a careful, very careful,
highlighting of the ambiguities of language; the way a language is used very carefully to mean one
thing for one order of experience: Brunetto's for instance, anthropocentric, political understanding
of the world and then Dante's own understanding of the world which we could call theological, but
it really means the point of view of someone who is questing, who is moving and who will move
beyond Brunetto. And how a language oscillates. The same words seem to acquire different
meanings in those different contexts. In many ways, that language would become, that language,
that rhetoric, which should be the instrument of persuasion and agreement, becomes in and of itself
the cause of two of the misunderstandings between them, between master and disciple.
The canto, Brunetto, for all of its the intensity and poignancy of a personal confrontation of a
disciple who meets his teacher and in many ways shows even there, there is a great deal of
ambivalence, a great deal of acknowledgement, a recognition of the importance of Brunetto's
teaching on him, but, at the same time a sort of distance taking, leave-taking from that teaching.
That too, though, for all of its private quality, the quality of the great humanistic values of
acknowledging a teaching that shows the way to how man makes himself eternal, that is
anthropocentric as it can be; that kind of aphorism, in a way, which is the way Dante seals the
personality of rhetoric.
Yet, it always had or actually has as always this and personal encounters do in Dante, a
political focus. There was something a little bit larger than their own private story. It is the
encounter between them was placed within the crisis of Florence. The city of Florence, the divisions
between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and then there's also the announcements to Dante by Brunetto that
he is going to go into he's going to end up in exile.
That the comfort, the human bonds, the comfort of the city and family, and what not, even that will
be denied to him. For Brunetto, of course, that is also a strategy of thinking that Dante's own
experience is really the mirror image of his own, because as you remember, and I said this at the
beginning of my remarks last time, Brunetto also experiences exile as he was in Roncesvalles, the
classical place of the most traumatic experience in medieval history, the place where the paladin,
Roland, in Italian, Orlando, and the Carolingian drama, the Charlemagne's soldiers are defeated and
Brunetto, that's where he that's how he views his own defeat in the city of Florence.
So there was always a public focus. The public focus was not just a context for their relationship,
but it was really a way of shedding light on the very nature of their own divisions. It is as if the
oscillations of language that they experience in the exchange between them are really a
consequence also of larger divisions, larger suspicions, that these characters living in Florence
entertained toward each other. I mentioned that because I'm going to move today to Canto XIX.
We are taking quite a jump. We went through XVI; we saw the flight on the back of Geryon or
some adumbration of that flight on the back of Geryon. Canto XVII, if you were to read it on your
own, it's an extraordinary canto. It's the only time that Virgil leaves Dante alone and Dante has to
meet the usurers and it is as if he had to be left without any guidance. It is as if he had to discover
by himself and by his own powers what those temptations are and what the implications of usury
would be for him. Let me be biographical, a biographical resonance there, in the sense that not only
the poet is edging toward the condition of the usurer, engaged in illusory recreations, illusory
productions, but also a biographical reference to Dante's own father who was engaged in that sort of
activity.
Then we go through Canto XIX, which is really a canto I don't want to talk about now. That's the
point of my remarks about my recapitulations of what I said about Brunetto. Dante now takes a
public voice, not only he takes a so you have an experience of the shifts in his own voice. You do
know the kind of romance atmosphere and the encounter with Francesca. You do have the kind of
seminar-like tones that he uses in the encounter in Limbo with the poets of antiquity where he either
goes on talking about art and the secrets of the craft, etc.

pter 2. The Prophetic Voice and the Writer of Epistles [00:06:58]

Now Dante takes what I do not hesitate to call a prophetic voice. He plays now, he sees himself as a
public role. The shift or the change, the departure from the political rhetorical tone used in the
encounter with Brunetto could not be more could not be sharper or more radical. This is an
argument now that engages him as a public figure, as it were, indeed, as a prophet.
What does it mean to be a prophet for Dante? What kind of how can one take on this sort of
voice? How does one go on talk how does a prophet talk like? One thing that you may want to
keep in mind as I go on, to understand this canto, is that if clearly the pattern for all of this, the
model would be the prophetic voice in the Bible, the biblical prophets. Do not make a mistake of
thinking for a moment that prophets are those who foretell the future; that's not really their role.
In fact, Dante goes out of the way, and I'm not going to talk about that, we really haven't got time, in
Canto XX, highlighting the differences as it were between prophets and diviners. The diviners are
those who foretell, predict the future, so if the prophets do not foretell the future, what do they do?
They are literally readers of the present. This is the point. For Dante, the biblical prophets are those
who read the present history in its unfolding from the perspective of what they perceive to have
been God's promise to Israel and to them.
The prophets are, in a way and I do not I don't say this in any way to degrade them, but on the
contrary, to highlight the importance of their intervention into the present that you could call them
as commentators. Those who are in the true sense of the word, those who remember, that's what a
commentator is. A commentator is an exercise of memory, a way of bringing ancient memories to
bear on the present. That's the way Dante understands the prophetic voice.
Another little detail before we go on with the canto, you do not know, some of you may know that
Dante actually is a writer of many epistles. He was a letter writer. We do not know the letters he
wrote on behalf of his patrons, but we do know that the letters that he wrote in his own name, and
he would be writing letters that the array of which is can be sometimes moving. For instance,
when he writes to a friend, he would like to attend the funeral of his friend's wife and cannot. He's
practically begging because he doesn't have the adequate clothes to go to the funeral; so he's clearly
begging for some kind of assistance.
He writes also letters that probably never reached their destination. He wrote letters, for instance, to
the Italian cardinals who were in conclave. You understand what I mean when I say "conclave." A
conclave means that they are shut under key and kept in some place where they can make decisions
about electing from within themselves or from the outside, a pope, and they could not agree about
whom to choose.
He writes a letter, a letter to the Italian cardinals and he begins the letter addressing them, saying
perhaps all of you will wonder who is this man, who gives him the authority to say to speak to us
and address us and spur us on to action. Doesn't he remember this is Dante speaking and
attributing his thoughts to the cardinals the possible objection to the intervention of a layman's
voice within sacred things? Doesn't he remember the lesson of the biblical prophet which he
doesn't mention the name that's mentioned who, on seeing the ark of the alliance being
carried into the city of Jerusalem and seeing the ark tottering, he stretches his hand trying to protect
it, to make sure that it won't collapse and it breaks into pieces? And God intervenes and through
lightening and fulminates and then kills him.
Dante is aware of the danger of taking on that's the point he goes on saying, spurring them,
saying, I'm not really touching the ark, I'm really spurring the oxen who are not going anywhere.
That's the substance of the letter, but this does not concern us here. But the point that concerns us
here is that in the background to this canto where he takes on the prophetic voice. He's aware of the
possible profanation that he is engaged in, in addressing as he does the so-called simonists.

Chapter 3. Canto XIX: Simony, Sacrilege and the Sacred [00:12:12]

It's time to get into the canto of the so-called simonists. Who are the simonists? In fact let me just
I was just reading this little story, "The Sisters" of Joyce. I have been reading that before but I
know that that is really a story of I don't know how many of you are English students, students of
English literature, but he writes this story. This is a story about it's early twentieth-century
version of simony, and if someone of you might want to write a paper connecting "The Sisters," this
beautiful gem of a story by Joyce, and Canto XIX. You can, and you see the differences that
between the two of them. The simonists are the followers. It's a word, like we said the
Machiavellians for instance, they are the followers of Machiavelli, those who think like
Machiavelli. The simonists are the followers of Simon, who was called a magus, or a sorcerer, or a
magician, Simon, and actually we call this phenomenon when you have a name that gives or sort of
creates a trend or a way of thinking, it's called an eponym. I thought that you might from the
Greek, eponym. This is an eponym.
Simonists are the followers of Simon, the magician. So it's Dante's beginning this story with
reference to a founding event in the constitution of the church. It goes back to the Acts of the
Apostles where there is this story that of a sorcerer, a man engaged in witchcraft and illusions,
Simon who wants to buy the gift of prophecy and the power of making miracles from Peter. And
therefore then he challenges him to let's see who can fly, etc., and they go up on a tower and try to
fly. Simon, of course, will go down and will die.
What Dante is doing, he's now encountering the popes of his own time: Nicholas V, Boniface VIII
one of the great minds and a great jurist, by the way. In fact there are those historians who really
think that Dante is badmouthing him, that there's something personal but we can't quite see.
Boniface VIII and Clement VI V, I'm sorry. The three popes are under whom Dante lived, who
are engaged in simony. What is simony? It's a sacrilege. Simony is the act, exactly like Simon in the
Acts of the Apostles, who wanted to buy the gift of prophecy. It is a sin, whereby one can go on in
making commerce of sacred things and thereby engaging in blasphemy.
The question then is, what does Dante think the sacred is? It's a constant theme in his reflections; it's
a constant theme of his thoughts. What is the sacred? How do we determine it? What does it mean
to violate the sacred? Simon violates the sacred. The popes now, who are of his own generation, are
engaged in the same kind of blasphemy and the same kind of profanation.
In effect, let me just give you a little detail that you might appreciate this ambiguity, the other name
of Peter, St. Peter, the guy with the two keys we saw an illusion to him with Canto XIII. The other
name of Peter is Simon, so in fact he's known as Simon Peter. It is as if by having this too, the
sorcerer, the magician called Simon and the pope called Simon Peter, and this should be whose
successors, the popes should be, the first pope and the others. He's Dante's actually giving us a
sense of what we call, forgive them, the rhetorical term, a metonymic proximity, a contiguity, a
nearness between them. The nearness between the prophetic mode and the profanation of the
prophetic mode. How precarious is the boundary line that divides the two? How precarious the
divided line that separates the sacred from the profanation of the sacred? So this is really what
Dante is doing.
Let's see how he dramatizes all of this. First of all and the question that I raised with you is, how do
prophets talk? One thing that you will see here is the apostrophe. This is a canto written in terms of
apostrophes. Look at this and we read the canto, so I'm reading the canto. This is for the transcriber
Canto XIX. "Ah, Simon Magus," see there is the apostrophe. Think about why the apostrophe.
What is an apostrophe? "You his wretched followers who, rapacious, prostitute for gold and silver
the things of God which should be brides of righteousness." That's the definition of simony. Viewed
as an adultery, a corruption therefore of the chastity of the marriage between God and the soul.
"Now must the trumpet sound for you, for your place is in the third pouch. We were now at the next
tomb and had climbed to that part of the ridge which hangs right over the middle of the ditch."
Another invocation we call it, but it's I'm not so sure that we can quite decide the difference
between an invocation, which is obviously a prayer, for an apostrophe, a calling on, an address,
that's what the apostrophe is.
"How great is the art Thou showest, in Heaven, on earth, and in the evil world, and how justly does
Thy power dispense! I saw along the sides and on the bottom the livid stone full of holes all of one
size and each was round. They seemed to me of a width no more or less than those that were made
in my beautiful St. John," the baptistery of St. John in Florence. These are the wells where baptisms
take place; they're usually octagonal in shape. It was the eighth day, the idea that the Resurrection is
on the eighth day. It's the idea of history based on the seven days of creation, the eighth day of the
Resurrection.
"They. . . were made in my beautiful St. John as fonts for baptism, one of which, not many years
ago, I broke for one that was drowning in it and to this I set my seal, to clear the mind of
everyone." What Dante is doing is acknowledging what could have been seen as an act of
profanation. He broke one which is really a figurative, because they are huge and I can't believe
that he could have you need ten people to break these things apart so it's a figurative idea that
he stretched his hand into holy things and violated the holy things, but he did it and that's the excuse
he's giving. He did it in order to save someone's life.
There is nothing gratuitous that's the point, in his own intervention as it is called. It's called an
interventio in sacris, stretching the profane hands into holy things, into safer things. What he is
really removing himself from is the charge that his act may appear purely gratuitous. If it's not
gratuitous what is it driven by? Where does it come from? If it's not one can say well it's a
gratuitous act, which means you can dismiss it, but this is not gratuitous. So what is the reason
behind it and he if he's serious enough he should provide us the description.
"From the mouth of each projected, of each projected the feet of a sinner and the legs as far as the
calf, and the rest was inside." He's representing the Popes who were here upside down, that's the
way Simon fell, and I'll have a little story about that too. It was also the position that, according to
legend, St. Peter wanted for himself. He asked that he be buried upside down because he wanted to
show what the true direction of for the souls are sent for the perfection of being that idea that
remember in an inverted world, a world which is upside down and therefore to be with the head
down, you are really are right side up. You're going toward your proper destination.
Dante is playing with this iconographic motif of Peter who asks to be crucified up with the head
upside down and the story of Simon who, very much like him now, is as a punishment is with the
head upside down. How are they punished? In an overt parody of the Pentecost and the flames of
fire. You know the story of the Pentecost: that's the story of the Pentecost, is the story of the gift of
language. They come down as a rain of fire on them, now they have flames on their feet. This is
what this is the sort of horrible turning around of prophecy and of the gift of languages, meaning
that we all speak everybody else's language, which clearly means I'm sure that there are
polyglots among you, but it clearly means that we all speak one language: the language of charity.
And therefore we can all understand each other that way.
"That they would have snapped withies or ropes. As flames on oily things," the oil of unction. So
it's a further illusion to the desecration that is taking place here," moves only over the outer surface,
so it did there from the heels to the toe. 'Who is that one?'" Dante asks. He wants to know who it is,
but he sees.
"Master that writhes in his torment more than any of his fellows,' I said, 'and is licked by a redder
flame?' And he answered me, 'If thou wilt have me carry thee down there by that more sloping
bank, thou shalt know from himself of him and of his misdeeds.' And I, 'All is well for me that is
thy pleasure. Thou art my Lord and knowest that I depart not from thy will; thou knowest too what I
do not speak.' Then we came onto the fourth dike, turned and descended on our left down to the
pitted and narrow bottom, and the good master did not set me down from his haunch until he
brought me to the hole of him that so lamented with his shanks. 'Whoever thou art,' I began,
'unhappy soul that art held upside down planted like a post, if thou art able, speak.'"
Now the series of inversions is introduced here. "I," Dante says, "stood there like the friar" he is
the layman, the changing of roles, and the pope who is going to be unveil his own reveal his
own identity in a moment, he is there like an assassin, a perfidious assassin, meaning the one who
brought faith. That's what the word "perfidy" means. "That shrives the treacherous," in Italian it's
the perfido, "assassin who after being fixed calls him back so that he delays his death, and he cried."
This is one of the popes, Nicholas, who misunderstands, but this misunderstanding is highly
suggestive. He's telling Dante and us that the reigning pope while Dante's writing, Boniface VIII,
one of the Orsini family, one of the great families, Roman families, has already arrived and he says,
"Standest thou there already Boniface? By several years the writing lied to me. Art thou so soon
sated with these gains for which thou didst not fear to take that by guile, the Lady Beautiful and
then to do her outrage." This is the coming the accusation that Dante can launch at the figures of
power. The prophet who takes on power and unveils its abusers.
"I became like those that stand as if mocked, not comprehending the reply made to them, and know
not what to answer.' Then Virgil said: 'Tell him quickly, I'm not he, I'm not he thou thinkest,' and I
answered as if I was bidden. At that the spirit twisted his feet together, then, sighing with lamenting
voice, he said to me, 'What dost thou want with me then? If to know who I am concerns thee so
much that thou hast come down the bank for it, know that I was invested with the great mantle."
And so on. And Dante will go on into a general attack, which is really the prophetic moment. "I do
not know," I'm reading from lines 90 and following, "I do not know if on that I was overbold when
all my answer to him was in this strain: 'Pray, tell me now, how much treasure did our Lord require
of St. Peter before He gave the keys into his charge? Surely he asked nothing but "Follow me," nor
did Peter or the others take gold or silver from Matthias," and so on.
This is Dante now the prophet. Dante, the man who speaks because and he feels that he ought to
speak and that's the distance taking from the gratuitousness of the accusation because all figures of
authority are lacking. In the presence of this eclipse of authority, he thinks that it is incumbent upon
him to go on taking that authority. It's a usurpation of a voice; it's a usurpation of authority in order
to make up for what he thinks is missing.
The problem, this whole question about the confusion of orders, the confusion between the secular
and the sacred, the profane and the sacred, is brought back to one great event which was known in
the Middle Ages as the second sin of Adam. It was so great you understand what the first sin of
Adam was: the transgression of the command given to him not to eat of the tree of the forbidden
tree, the forbidden fruit of the tree. The event that Dante goes back to is the event of the so-called
Donation of Constantine, about which I want to say a few things and then we move onto the next
cantos.
It's the Donation of Constantine. It refers to the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine,
whose name I think I have mentioned, gave extended, gave the land to the pope. In other words,
made the pope the ruler of a secular domain. To Dante, this was a confusion of registers, a
confusion of responsibilities, that the pope should be only engaged in spiritual pursuits and spiritual
matters. He becomes instead involved in secular matters. The sin of simony is really the problem
between the has to do with the Donation of Constantine.
An issue, by the way, I will tell you why this is important in a second. The issue is will be really
clarified around the fifteenth century when two people, two figures, one is Cusanus, some of you
may know him. Nicholas of Cusa went home repeating the moral arguments against the Donation of
Constantine as much as Dante does here, but the one who really proved the falseness of the
documents with which Constantine supposedly made the donation to the pope was Lorenzo Valla,
with a philologist who went on examining the language of that text and by examining that language,
found out that the donation was not really the document had not possibly been written in the
fourth century because it bore the traces of eleventh-century Latin. And so he went on specifying
that that Donation had been a forgery and the forgery had been committed in a convent in the south
of France with extraordinary linguistic precision.
Why is this important to Dante? Dante makes this issue of the Donation of Constantine, the
confusion of orders, the spiritual and the secular which simony embodies; simony crystallizes the
real problem of the crisis of his own time. So huge, I repeat, that it's called the second sin of Adam.
Dante wrote a political text called Monarchia, which is really an argument in favor of the separation
between these two orders, the Church and the State: it had to be neatly divided, both to protect the
State from the intrusions of the Church and to protect the Church from the likely intrusions of the
State. So it's really an argument that goes in two directions. So much then for Canto XIX.
The last thing I have to say because I began talking about the rhetoric of the prophets, I said the
prophets really used apostrophes. Apostrophes which are forms of lament, "Ah, Simon," you can
see it's a kind of mourning. It's the language of grief primarily, but there is also, from a linguistic
point of view, something else about an apostrophe, because an apostrophe it has in
indeterminacy of its own. It's not really language. It says nothing. It's a scream, but it's the sense of
a need to break the silence. In other words, you use an apostrophe or emit a cry because you cannot
be quiet and that's really exactly what makes this aspect of prophetic language so crucial. It's
between silence, one is overcome by what one the enormity of what one sees and the refusal to
acquiesce. And I could give you "Ah Constantine," that's another apostrophe that we saw. The
whole canto is punctuated by this rhetorical form that wants to break the silence and cannot quite
find the words. That's what I call the indeterminacy of the rhetorical artifice.

Chapter 4. Short Remarks about Comedy and the Fall [00:32:24]

Let me just go I know that I said that I would read XXI; maybe I can talk about it. I have to say
very little about comedy. Dante uses the language of comedy and what I had we time, I would
talk about how Dante goes out of the way, in XXI, and says here, "Now my comedy, the language,
the humble style." It is as if he wants to free himself from the shackles, the complications of using a
lofty language or taking on this extraordinary position of being the prophet of his own times.
He goes on to say, "my comedy," but this comedy is also link to a peculiar experience that he tells in
Canto XXI: the fear of falling. The devils are after him and the devils, of course he calls them
Guelfs and Ghibellines. Another way of thinking about them was the war between, he says, whites
and blacks, bianchi and neri. That's the way they would distinguish themselves. These demons are
his enemies are the blacks, the Ghibellines who are trying to throw him down, and the point is
that comedy is always attached, always flanked with the idea of the fall. Laughter, as it were, begins
at the moment when someone falls, someone slips and so we could really talk about that a little bit
more, but not much more, if we had a chance to if we had a little bit more time.

Chapter 5. Canto XV: Reenacting the Aesthetic Temptation [00:33:56]

I'm anxious to get into XXVI, and before we get to XXVI, there is a passage in Canto XXV that I
have to read. Dante's been going through the realm of the thieves, Canto XXIV and XXV, and he is
overwhelmed by the metamorphosis: the form of punishment of these thieves that go on changing
form. They become snakes. They are human beings bitten by snakes, they become snakes, they turn
into ashes, and they recompose themselves in an endless cycle. This is the punishment. Dante goes
on writing as a poet, breaking the flow of the narrative of what has been happening to him, and this
is what he says. This is from Canto XXV, lines 90 and following. He describes the actually
reading from lines 80 and following:
"As the lizard under the great scourge of the dogdays, passing from hedge to hedge, seems
lightening if it crossed the way, so appeared, making for the bellies of the other two, a small fiery
serpent, livid and black as a peppercorn; and that part by which we first received our nourishment, it
transfixed in one of them, then fell down before him stretched out. The one transfixed stared at it,
but said nothing, only stood still and yawned, as if sleep or fever had come upon him. He kept
looking at the serpent and it at him; the one from the wound, the other from the mouth, smoked
violently and their smoke met."
Now here is Dante talking as a poet. He breaks the account, the chronicle of what he has seen, the
witnessing since that's what he is, he's the witness in all these experiences and that's what he says:
"Let Lucan now be silent with his tales of wretched Sebellus and Nasidius, and let him wait to hear
what now comes forth. Let Ovid be silent about Cadmus and Arethusa; for if in his lines he turns
him into a serpent and her into a fountain, I do not grudge it to him, for two natures face to face he
never saw transmuted that both kinds were ready to exchange their substance."
On the face of it, Dante's saying that the kind of metamorphosis he's describing really is more
horrifying than anything that Ovid, the author of the Metamorphosis, who has always guided his
metamorphosis by a belief in the bondage, in the bond of in the solidarity between humans,
human beings and the natural world. We can go on shifting forms and there is a kind of serene
transformation happening in Ovid. He also says that he's different from Lucan, another author of
scenes of metamorphosis in his story about the civil war. The point that I think is really crucial here
is that it's a different one.
Dante is repeating and reenacting exactly the kind of aesthetic temptation that we already witnessed
in Canto IV of Inferno, in Limbo, where Dante meets the poets and he's so taken, so complacent
about undoubtedly the great temptation of sitting with can you imagine Homer, Virgil,
Horace, Lucan, Ovid, exactly the people that he mentions. Retrospectively, that scene of harmony
that Canto IV seemed to dramatize, now is completely vanquished.
Here he is, he's really saying, I am their rival, I am even better, I'm seeing things that they didn't
even imagine. If you had the illusion of an idyllic relationship among poets, you are disabused at
this point. It is a temptation nonetheless, because once again Dante is going down for in a
descent, which is a descent of spiritual humility, and yet his voice seems to be going in an opposite
direction, one of hubris, the same kind of temptation that he had in Canto IV. This is what happens,
again, the structure repeats itself.
In Canto IV, Dante claims that he builds fellowship with the great poets. He comes into Canto V and
he has to confront the responsibilities of writing, the responsibilities of being a writer and he
encounters his own a reader of his own.

Chapter 6. Canto XXVI: Ulysses as a Mode of Being for Dante [00:38:50]

Dante merges into Canto XXVI and meets none other than Ulysses, the master rhetorician, whose
experience and whose journey will lead himself and his companions to a tragic end.
For Dante this is an extraordinary moment for a number of reasons. Ulysses is a steady point of
reference for his own adventure. He will keep thinking of him in Canto XIX of Purgatorio and in
Canto XXVIII of Paradise, when Dante is about to live beyond the whole the physical universe.
He looks back to see the distance he has traveled, and the only thing that he sees is really that
passageway where Ulysses violated all boundaries. Clearly, what kind of boundaries am I violating?
Ulysses is a mode of being, a possibility of being, for Dante himself.
We come into Canto XXVI and I would like to take as much time as I possibly can without tiring
you all about this canto. Let me begin with as a sort of preamble tell you a general point.
Every school child in antiquity and in Dante's own time knew one thing, that Ulysses was a famous
Greek hero, polytropic as Homer calls him: the man of many terms, a man who knew it all, the man
who had been seasoned in all experiences. They know that he had gone to the War of Troy, that he
was the one to suggest the building of the Trojan horse and the stealing of the Palladium, as you
know, the simulacrum of Minerva. Wisdom, the figure of the image of wisdom and then it took
him that he was involved in the battle about inheriting Achilles' arms with Ajax and then
everybody knew that it took him ten years to return to Ithaca.
This is the story of the Odyssey. He returns, he goes to we do know only that the nostos as the
Greeks call it, the return, the journey of return. He becomes the hero of nostalgia, the going back to
a place that he has. Everybody knew this in Dante in antiquity and in Dante's time.
In antiquity they knew it very well because then the story of Ulysses had become an allegory, a
philosophical allegory of the fate of the soul. The idea of Ulysses who goes from Ithaca to Troy and
then goes back for ten years after a war of ten years, another ten years of vicissitudes, cleansing
himself in order to reach to go back to and testing himself to go back to his home town, was
really the story of the soul. That's what the soul does. It incarnates itself, strophe and antistrophe, it
goes through the soul goes through the planets and gets tainted by the attributes of the planets.
Some of us are lunatics, others are mercurial, others are saturnine. That's from the planets, but then
by cleansing ourselves the soul can go back to its place of origin. That's the circle of the return.
That's the way the Alexandrian neo-Platonists understood the allegory of the Odyssey. This is clear.
Dante violates this rule: that's what you have in Canto XXVI. Dante begins with Ulysses who has
returned to Ithaca and starts his journeys of exploration all over again. The idea of the eternal
return, the idea of a closure that he has come back home, is not part of Dante's imagination or
sensibility. He is the poet who is truly restless and always placing himself and his heroes on some
kind of quest, on a method, on a road, on an address or whatever the idea, the philosophers who are
always on always thinking about some way of reaching wisdom, reaching truth. That's where he
puts them and that's what happens with the story of Ulysses.
Ulysses starts all over again and goes to die. He's involved in a journey that is absolutely gratuitous:
a journey for wisdom, a journey for wisdom into the unpeopled world. We're going to see this in a
moment, and he dies. That's it. From one point of view and I want you to be careful as you read
the canto because you will see you will notice one thing, the first thing you will notice that it's
not Dante who conducts the interview with Ulysses. It is Virgil, the poet of Latin antiquity and
supposedly they speak maybe Greek or some form of clearly Greek. It is Virgil, the poet of the
Aeneid who thinks of himself as the fitting interlocutor of the great Greek hero. Not Dante, Dante's
excluded. Dante just watches and witnesses this, but there's more to this idea of stylistic decorum.
One can say well Virgil this is in fact as tragic as a text could ever get, sublime. This is not a
comical text, this is Virgil the author of a tragedy. That's what Dante calls it, the tragic style, the
sublime style, and Ulysses speaks in the most in the loftiest way possible. It's not just a question
of stylistic decorum, at stake there is something else. Ulysses disguises himself as Aeneas and tells
the story of his life as if he were Aeneas.
Now, let me just tell you one little thing and then we'll get into the canto. This is part of the story in
many ways. If you ask readers of Virgil and Homer, they probably will tell you well Virgil is a
good poet, but let's face it the first six books are just the Odyssey and the second books are just the
Iliad that he sort of gives a resume of and so on. Not at all. The difference between the two heroes is
this: Ulysses has a place to go back to. He goes from Ithaca to Troy, back to Ithaca. Aeneas has no
place to go to. His is the open quest, the road, on open-ended road, and open-ended journey and this
is the way Ulysses will think of himself.
For the last thing, and then really we'll get into the canto, the last thing I'll say is that the
extraordinary ambiguity I want to point out the extraordinary ambiguity with which Dante
represents Ulysses. But the ambiguity of Ulysses is part of the story of Ulysses from the start. From
the very beginning, Ulysses is a philosopher and he is a rhetorician. He is someone who can
manipulate all knowledge for his own ends, and it is this ambiguity that in many ways Dante finds
very alluring.
Let me start with the canto. The canto starts with another very topical relation, a very topical
allusion. Dante is drawing their attention to a specific place, to the city of Florence. It is as if he
wants to moor himself, anchor himself to something as concrete as is immediate with immediate
place, his own native place. And it's an apostrophe to Florence: "Rejoice Florence, since thou art so
great." Let me just stop here a moment.
Pay attention as you read the canto, pay attention to one stylistic element: the antithetical use of
'great' or 'tall and small' at the same time. Rhetorically sometimes, all with the idea that of
making us ask and wonder what is the relationship between that which claims to be so large and so
big, and that which claims to be so small. Ulysses obviously thinks of himself in terms of loftiness
and Dante now rhetorically starts with Florence: "so great," the satire is obvious, "that over land and
sea thou beatest thy wings and through Hell thy name is spread abroad." The whole point is that he
has seen some Florentine thieves, and named even: "Among the thieves. . . five such citizens of
thine that shame for them comes." Once again the prophetic voice of Dante appears here and you
will see that this is fairly important in the narrative.
Second paragraph, "We set out, and, on the stairs which the projecting rocks had made for a descent
before, my Leader mounted again and drew me up, and, following the lonely way among the rocks
and splinters of the ridge, the foot made no speed without the hand. I grieved then and grieve now
anew" ;then, when he was a pilgrim, watching and witnessing the stories that he is going to tell.
And now, as a writer. There's a double focus that Dante's using: the focus of the pilgrim and the
focus of the narrator.
"I grieved then and I grieve now anew when I turn my mind to what I saw, and more than I am wont
I curb my powers." And this is going to be at least the attempt of Dante to curb his powers as he
witnesses the story of immoderate hunger for knowledge of a flight of the mind. That's what we
have here. The flight of the mind which is like the flight of Daedalus, which is like the flight of
Icarus that seems to know no boundaries.
Ulysses is he who transgresses all boundaries, but doesn't Dante also transgress boundaries? He
won't say so here, he wants it seems that he takes Ulysses as an exemplary figure that would lead
him to one to curb his powers. Let's continue, "lest they run where virtue does not guide them."
The language is that of horses, of course, the horses of the soul. And virtue is the ability to hold the
black and the white horse of the chariot, to hold them together and that's the allusion that Dante
is using in neo-Platonic language.
"If favoring star or something better have granted me such boon, I may not grudge it to myself."
Now, the first description of the landscape: a somber landscape, "as many as the fireflies which the
peasant resting on the hill in the season when he that lights the world least hides his face from
us..." What an extraordinary image, a periphrasis, to talk about the sun, to describe the night, when
the sun is hiding, and you'll see the implications of this metaphor I hope in a moment.
"Sees along the valley below, in the fields, perhaps, where he gathers the grapes and tills; with so
many flames the eighth ditch was all gleaming, as I perceived as soon as I came where the bottom
was in sight. And as he that was avenged by the bears saw the chariot of Elijah at his departure
when the horses reared and rose to heaven, who could not follow it with his eyes so as to see
anything but the flame alone like a little cloud mounting up; so each flame moves along the gullet
of the ditch, for none shows the theft and every one steals away a sinner."
Dante's not comparing himself to Elijah, he's comparing to someone who watches Elijah. Elijah is
also engaged in a flight to a flight of the soul, exactly like Ulysses who is going to be
represented as is the antithesis to Ulysses, but Dante is neither like Elijah and he would like us to
believe that he's not really like Ulysses. He is like Eliseus, the one who inherits the mantle of
prophecy from Elijah, and the one who witnesses, who watches. It's his way of trying to avoid the
extreme of the prophet and now, as it turns out, the rhetorician. This is the way the layout here is
between Ulysses and Elijah.
"I was standing on the bridge," and then he goes on. He's told that within the flames are the spirits.
There's a forked flame and there are two souls: Ulysses and Diomedes. Pay attention to this little
detail. Except in the case of the suicides, Dante always sees pairs of sinners. Here's Diomedes who
doesn't talk and he sees also Ulysses, and I suppose that the reason is that Dante really wants us to
know about the social quality of a moral violation, that a moral violation always implies somebody
else. It's not quite ever except for the suicide which has a peculiar form because you have
witness, homicide, and victim all in one but in the other sinners you always have a sense of a
witness, somebody else who has been touched or an accomplice of the sinner. "Within," we know
what he answered who are these people. "I already wished to ask thee who is in that fire which
comes so cloven at the top that seems to rise from the pyre with Eteocles was laid with his brother."
The story is the Thebaid, the two brothers were enemies, Eteocles and Polyneices, Thebes we
already have an introduction of this is all about Greek mythology. In Greek mythology with
brothers the city of the story of Thebes which Dante knows through Statius, the idea of
Oedipus, of course and Jocasta, and the tragic city. The Thebes becomes the term, becomes the
metaphor, the basic metaphor of the tragic city because in effect it presents also one of the
reasons for Dante it's crucial, it presents birth, Eteocles and Polyneices, the children of Oedipus and
Jocasta, as tragic events. This is something that distinguishes radically the Greek idea, as Dante
understands it, the Greek idea of cities and birth from say, Virgil's idea of birth, something to be
celebrated all the time and Virgil is always the one who celebrates the birth Assinius Pollio, etc.
Now we know who these are. "He answered me: 'Within there are tormented, Ulysses and Diomed,
and thus together they go under vengeance as once under wrath..." etc. "'If they're able to speak
within these lights,' I said, 'I earnestly pray thee, Master, and pray again that my prayer avail a
thousandfold that thou do not forbid me to stay tils the horned flame comes near; thou seest how I
bend toward it with desire.' And he said to me, 'Thy prayer deserves much praise, therefore I
consent to it. But do thou restrain thy tongue.'"
Earlier he wanted to curb his powers, now Virgil asks him to restrain his tongue, "Leave it to me to
speak, for I have understood what thou wishest; for perhaps, since they were Greeks, they would
disdain thy speech." We have really a sense of the hierarchy of styles: Virgil and Ulysses, and then
in Canto XXVII it's going to be Guido da Montefeltro and Dante.
"You who are two within one fire, if I deserved of you while I lived, if I deserved of you much or
little," once again, the oscillation between high and low, "much or little, when in the world I wrote
the lofty lines, do not move on, but let the one of you tell where, being lost, he went to die.' The
greater horn of the ancient flame began to toss and murmur, just as if it were beaten by the wind,
then, waving the point to and fro as if it were the tongue that spoke, it flung forth a voice and said:
'When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it,"
so you see clearly Ulysses tells his story through the myth of Aeneas. Claiming priority over
Aeneas, but also the knowledge in one thing. It's an incredibly I find it a very moving line that
Aeneas names places in memory of his nurse. He names the city of Gaeta, he's a founder of cities,
and names the city of Gaeta.
"Not fondness for his son, not duty to an aged father, not the love I owed Penelope. . ." Look at this,
it's what we call heavily ethical language. Ulysses speaks in terms of what his duties are: the duty to
an aged father Laertes, "the love I owed Penelope, which should have gladdened her, could conquer
within me the passion I had to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men."
This is seems to be an ethical quest and nothing can stand in the way of this virtuous action.
Ulysses thinks of himself as a virtuous quester after vices, understanding and gaining experience ". .
.of vices and virtues and the worth of men; and I put forth on the open deep with but one ship. . .
The one shore and the other I saw as far as Spain. . . Morocco. . . Sardinia. . ."
And he's a man of mentions places all the time, in this narrative. He always mentions places,
cities, Morocco, Seville, Ceuta on the other side of the Mediterranean. It is as if here is a man who
lives in space. He left his father, he left his son, that would be temporal description of him, but he
lives in space. It's as if he never really knew his own place in the world. He's always looking for
something, he doesn't even he doesn't know where he belongs. "My companions were old and
slow when we came to that narrow outlet where Hercules set up his landmarks so that men should
not pass beyond. On my right hand I left Seville, on the other had already left Ceuta."
And now the speech he makes to his own companions. Look at the rhetorical wisdom with which he
moves. He addresses them as brothers which is the biggest captatio benevolentiae: we are all
together, there is no hierarchy here, I'm not your leader, I'm not your king: "O brothers,' I said, 'who
through a hundred thousand perils," look at the hyperboles. If you want to seduce people to come,
companions to come with you, you have to tell them they that theirs are mighty actions and he
does, and then magnify all the possible dangers. "A hundred thousand perils have reached the west,"
not a definite place, the west, vague and yet lofty, "to this so brief vigil of the senses." The modesty,
the oscillation between hyperbole and litotes, as it were, the recoiling into the sense of ordinariness
and small.
"That remains to us, choose not to deny experience," which I find an extraordinary word, an
experience, and I probably will stop here with this. Experience, as you know, is a word only with
prepositions, experire. It's a journey, it's a going through, an experience. It's understood as a
journey, it is as if knowledge that's the etymology of the word is, it's a going through. If
knowledge literally is compared to a displacement through a traveling, through a katabasis even, in
this case, which is the term to indicate the descent into the beyond.
"In the sun's tracks of the unpeopled world. Take thought of the seed from which you spread." If
you want to know the end of things you have to know the beginnings, you have to know the seeds.
This is the his is Ulysses' perception and because you have a noble seed then you do know that
you are there's a kind of natural determination in his own mind that he will reach, indeed, the
noble end.
"You were not born to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge." That's an extraordinary
line. He promises that human beings will leave behind the allusion maybe to the metamorphosis
of Circe, that had changed the companions into pigs, the Epicureans, the hogs of Epicurus into the
voluptuary experiences and he promises to restore in them not only the human image but to
bring them to virtue, knowledge. It's an extraordinary promise; it's a very difficult promise. It's
almost an impossible promise; it may even not be a correct promise, because he's making a promise
that virtue is knowledge. I lead you to virtue and knowledge, and they may not be the same thing. I
may have knowledge, but it doesn't mean that I have the virtue that I claim to have knowledge
about. It could be anything, anything at all. I can know what prudence is. It doesn't that doesn't
really make me prudent.

Chapter 7. Question and Answer [01:02:31]

Let's stop here, I want to stop here and I want to see if there are some questions and then resume
next time with the canto. Yes?
Student: [Inaudible] with Aeneas with Ulysses because they both aren't going to any definite
place. Is that what you said? Aeneas is like Ulysses because they both don't have a definite place to
return to?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, I mentioned actually Ulysses mentions
knowing that he speaks to Virgil, mentions Aeneas and so that's the answer, why Aeneas and
Ulysses vaguely. That's the they clearly were fighting the same battle in Troy. Virgil Ulysses
must know that Aeneas had lost his home town and he took his son, unlike Ulysses, he took his
father on his back literally, he's an immigrant and his son and lost his wife Creusa, and goes looking
for a place without really knowing what place for him. Ulysses knows where he wants to go; he has
a certain idea of his destination, which is Ithaca. He has a lot of temptations along the way:
Nausicaa, and what a temptation; Circe, another great temptation. He manages to move beyond
those temptations in order to go back to Ithaca. That's the great difference from the Roman myth of
the immigrant.
Student: But in this version aren't they still really different because Ulysses doesn't I mean he
his quest doesn't have any direction at all, it's just experience, and Aeneas' quest, he doesn't know
where he's going but there's still an overall plan so that there is a definite [inaudible].
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Exactly, absolutely, so there is a the difference between them
becomes that Aeneas will stop at one point. He has temptations to stop in Sicily, you remember that
there are famous games, the games ritual games in memory of his father who had died, the death
that hallows that ground, the death of Anchises, the women burn the ships this is too this is
utopia. I don't we don't want to go around into this epic adventure, let's stop here, he won't. He's
always misunderstanding oracles. He doesn't know where to go. He's always looking backwards,
but looking forward at the same time, but at one point he stops. And that's part of, if you wish, the
realism of Aeneas. He stops at one point; he will not go any further. Ulysses goes back home and
then he starts all over again, but that's Dante reading of Ulysses. He's really reading him as very
much like, as if he were a variant of Dante by the way. Yes?
Student: Is it possible for Ulysses and Aeneas to represent the dichotomy between Dante the poet
and Dante the narrator? One has a definite place as looking back and has a definite place where he's
going and the other is taking a journey of experience and is not sure where he's going?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is very interesting and is it possible to think of
Aeneas and Ulysses as two functions, as it were, of Dante: the pilgrim and the poet. Yes and no. It's
a very interesting question, but I would not I really hesitate to agree with you for one reason.
Because writing, for Dante, is a prolongation of the search. Dante literally cannot stop. It's not that
he on the face of it, he has seen the beatific vision, right, that's really the story. A story of a man
who goes from the wilderness, goes through Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, and has a beatific vision and
now he starts telling us about it. Fighting against forgetfulness, he has a lot of as a writer, he has
a lot of temptations and yet the writing itself is fraught with dangers, temptations. It's a different
sort of journey, but it's the journey of writing and therefore there's no clear-cut distinction between
the two.
In fact, I just read in Canto XXV the little scene when he challenges Lucan and Ovid, which really
is, let the past yield to the present, that's really the kind of claim that they can make. Let them be
quiet, because I know what is happening and the story is that as a writer he is lapsing, he is falling
into a number of temptations, as if he were a pilgrim. You can expect that from a pilgrim, to being
fascinated by Francesca, having all these inner divisions. Dante is a deeply divided man, he has to
condemn and at the same time has to sympathize even as a pilgrim. So that's really the that's the
only little detail where I would not agree with you, but maybe you're right, I don't know. Yes?
Student: Can you speak about the fact that Dante changes the ending because his story's [inaudible]
in Ithaca and why he [inaudible].
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, can I speak about how Dante changes the ending
of Ulysses' story? The answer is this. Dante makes Ulysses go back to Ithaca, but then he breaks the
circle of this closed circle let's call it the circle of the epic. Let me talk formally about it. The
idea is that you what are some traits of the epic? The epics deal with foundations of cities and
destruction of cities, all the time, no matter what that city may be. So he has destroyed the city, goes
back to his old city to cleanse it. That's which is Homer's way of saying I think you Greeks
were so great when you went out into the world at Troy, let us see how that heroic ethos is going to
help you now that you are back home, where probably you are going to need more courage and
more determination as much courage, at least as much determination as you did have in that
great celebration of the newly found Greek unity in Asia Minor in Troy.
That's Dante takes that and he says, there's no closure here, because he rejects the idea of Dante.
To the epic he replaces the epic with the novel. This becomes a kind of novelistic story, wherein
experience is being arrived at, as one goes. You see what I'm saying? In the epic you have a kind of
indeed things return to the point of departure, so that's the difference. It's a difference between
two radically different ways of understanding experience and the self. Dante will put himself on the
open road, but Ulysses will remain the constant reminder to him. He's a phantasm, he can never
quite exorcise. It will return to him, as I said, when a siren appears and tempts the pilgrim and says
look I made I gave happiness to Ulysses, why don't you stay with me? And the implication is,
first of all, she's lying because this is the story of Ulysses putting the wax in his ears, which is
nicely omitted, but it's in a way a temptation to Dante to feel that he, too, is an epic hero like
Ulysses. Did I answer? Other questions? We'll come back to this canto which is truly plays a
crucial role in Dante's imagination and in the Divine Comedy, the unfolding of the Divine Comedy,
so read carefully and then we'll go onto the other cantos. Thank you.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 8 - Inferno XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII [September 30,
2008]
Chapter 1. Returning to Canto XXVI and Ulysses's Sin [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We'll continue the discussion we left open last time. Remember we
are we were saying a few things about Ulysses. The overarching question of my remarks and
your questions actually took my remarks in a different and sometimes deeper direction than I had
intended is the whole issue of Ulysses but around Ulysses, Dante's reading of what we call the
Hellenic world. Around Ulysses Ulysses is appears in Canto XXVI with Diomedes who is
silent. Ulysses, the polytropic intelligence of classic antiquity, the crafty mind is he appears as a
philosopher, but also as a rhetorician and this is exactly that kind of complicity between the two
modes that Dante wants to explore.
Let me continue with this overarching theme. The overarching theme is the reading of the Greek
world. You remember that we saw Eteocles and Polyneices, that clearly for Dante is the
knowledge of which is filtered through a Greek Roman poet, Statius, who was born and lived in a
Greek Roman city, Naples. So he's discussing through Eteocles and Polyneices the whole story of
Thebes. The two brothers, who are enemies, the enemies-brothers, and therefore the tragic history,
the tragic knot of Theban mythology. It is Diomedes who is silent and but above all the focus of
the canto falls on the greatness of this hero.
Ulysses, who I repeat, plays a pivotal role in Dante's imagination. He is a paradigm, he has a
paradigmatic role. Dante can't quite get enough of him, nor can he get over the phantasm of
Ulysses. Ulysses literally appears in his dreams in Canto XIX of Purgatorio, and then Ulysses will
also appear when Dante has to measure the great imaginative distance that he traveled when he's at
the border of the physical and the metaphysical worlds. He looks back and he will see Ulysses, or
he'll remember he will see the place which has been the place of Ulysses' transgression, because
this is apparently Ulysses' sin.
Ulysses' sin is to have counseled his companions to go beyond the boundaries of knowledge. This is
so, it's the effects of counseling. Let me just say one thing, that for Dante there's no figure which
is more interesting, more important, more full of for whom he has so many questions than the
figure of the counsel. A counsel was of course Pier della Vigna, how does he advise? How does he
take the pressure? He's the secretary, the counsel. How does he take the pressure of the court? What
does he counsel Frederick the Great, his emperor? And then we're going to see other counsels. We're
going to find very soon, later today, a Provenal poet who literally advises war between father and
son. He divides father from son. He breaches the unity of the body politic and we'll come to that in
Inferno XXVIII.
Ulysses is the counsel who he gives the wrong counsel to his companions. He makes rhetorical
promises which he knows he cannot quite keep. They are grand questions, but are what questions
does he pass on to these companions? What he says is, after the captivity, after they're being in
bondage to Circe, he wants to reform them the companions who as you know, are caught into
the story that Dante may have read in medieval accounts with Ulysses: they had been
metamorphosed into hogs, into pigs, into Epicureans. They had yielded to the pleasures of sensual
happiness, the sensual understanding of happiness. He says, "you were not made," this is part of the
speech that he makes to his companions, "you were not made to live as beasts," an illusion to Circe,
to Circe's metamorphosis, "but to pursue, to follow virtue and knowledge."
This is grandiose advice that he gives. Grandiose advice, but which has one little problem that
Dante places him and that's not necessarily the major problem he places Ulysses and his
companions as they are going to go beyond, as they are going beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It is as
if Dante implies and seems to agree with, if one were to read the trajectory of the Divine Comedy,
that there is no knowledge worthy of its name unless it is connected to some degree of
transgression. That somehow transgression is part of knowing, of an original and new knowing.
Ulysses has to go beyond the limits of the known world in order to truly uncover, discover
something anew that nobody else knew. That makes him, as they used to say, a Renaissance figure
avant la lettre; that's the way he's known. There is the famous joke of Ulysses, and the graduate
paper refers to Ulysses as the great hero who is with one foot firmly rooted in the Middle Ages and
with the other one, he salutes the rising sun of the Renaissance. It's a little bit of a comical account
of Ulysses but it gives you a sense of how the novelty that he represents.
There is this bit of a transgression, but Dante doesn't seem to be terribly bothered by it, since he
himself, in the different circumstances, is engaged in exactly the same kind of transgression of the
perimeter. Apparently the geographic, even the cosmic, perimeter, he goes beyond the sun. He's
even he even goes farther than Daedalus and certainly farther than Icarus: these other mythical
coordinates with him.
How does Dante find out how does he want us to know that somehow the promises Ulysses
makes to his companions he wants to lead them to virtue of knowledge may really be a faulty
promise. This is, I think, the substance of the canto. Dante will refer to it with a famous metaphor as
a "mad flight." Remember Ulysses recounts how they made a mad flight out of the oars, mixing
metaphors as Dante had done before the maritime journey and the air journey. This is the
journey, the flight of the mind, the flight of the intellect as if it were described by a sailor; Ulysses is
a sailor.
How does Dante make us aware that this is indeed there is madness in what Ulysses is trying to
accomplish? Very simply, he puts him within a peculiar, distinct political and rhetorical context so
that you really have to wonder: can he really deliver these promises and what are the political
consequences of the promises that he makes?
The whole Canto XXVI is literally littered with fallen cities. From this point through it begins with
Troy I'm sorry with Florence Dante has this apostrophe against the city of Florence: the city
of Thebes, that's what he calls it, spreading its wings as if it were also as if cities were like
heroes, engaged in great flights. That is a clear desire on Dante's part to have us connect the story of
Ulysses' self-degradation, turpitude, with the story of Ulysses, Florence's turpitude and Ulysses'
own fall. Then there is a reference to the city of Troy, a fallen city. There is a reference to Thebes
with through Eteocles and Polyneices. There is also a reference to Rome. The canto is full of
references to cities from this point of view.
Canto XXVI is a version a brief version of the epic, because the impulse of the epic is always
political. There is no epic that you can think of which doesn't think about it's not trying to
represent the either the falling cities and the edification of new cities, or for that matter, some
locating of a city that could be in a great, grand metaphysical drama. It could be in the heavenly
Jerusalem, or it's Rome, it's Carthage, it's Thebes. Falling cities and rising cities: so this is the
strategy of Dante.
Dante's strategy is to show then how the grand philosophical claims of Ulysses have effects that
make it appear as empty rhetoric. Dante places Ulysses nowhere, somewhere in the ocean without a
particular place. He goes from one city to another, and at the same time because of this, he can
never quite doesn't seem to be able to deliver on what he has promised. It's a reflection on one
particular aspect of the tragic story of Ulysses. It's the tragedy of language: a language that contains
with itself all the most incredible mirages and yet, it falls short of reality. Ulysses is literally placed
in the empty ocean away from all responsibilities and all locations, and it is this gratuitousness of
his quest that also counts for his being in Hell among the evil counselors. This is what I was trying
to tell you last time and I think that I have added on today a few other details but we can go back to
that if there is to be a discussion, and I hope there will be, a little later.

Chapter 2. Canto XXVII: Counter Myth to the Story of Ulysses [00:11:14]

Let me turn now to Canto XXVII which I really like to read in conjunction it should be read in
conjunction with Canto XXVI, because here we have what I would call a counter myth to the story
of Ulysses. There is a contraction of focus; there's even a revision of the claims of epic grandeur
that we have in Canto XXVI.
Dante meets, and he's the one to become the interlocutor of, Guido da Montefeltro, an extraordinary
figure, a political leader, that's what he was, who then experienced the conversion. He became a
Franciscan friar and historically this is a historical figure historically he is called in by the
Pope Boniface VIII, by now you know him. He's not someone that Dante really holds in the highest
esteem possible, but Boniface VIII, in an inversion of the relations between priest and cleric, high
priest and cleric, asks Guido da Montefeltro for some advice.
We are dealing again with evil counselors and the advice is the following: you have to teach me,
you are a great man of arms, you have to tell me what is what are the strategies I should pursue
in order to conquer Palestrina, a small town. You may know it as a place of the origin of a great
musician from there, but a small town near Rome. I want to conquer and destroy the city of
Palestrina; you tell me how I am to do this.
We're really dealing with a Machiavellian world of counselors. For Machiavelli, it's actually the
language of Machiavelli avant la lettre. Machiavelli uses, takes the language I think that Guido will
deploy for himself. At one point Guido says, my works were those of not of a lion but of a fox,
and you remember, these are the two attributes in The Prince of Machiavelli that the man the
perfect prince ought to have. That is to say, the perfect prince is the one who knows how to use
strength, but how to use also slyness. You have to know when you have to be crafty and foxy. You
have to know when to be violent and lion-like. Two images that clearly originate from Cicero. They
are not Dante's own invention but and it's likely that Machiavelli got them from Cicero, as well
as from this canto.
The connections between the two cantos are several. Let me just go first of all, it begins
Canto XXVII there is this reference to the Sicilian bull, clearly a counter to the Trojan horse of
the previous canto. "As the Sicilian bull which bellowed for the first time and it was just with
a cry of him who had shaped it with his file, used to bellow with a voice of the victim so though it
was of brass, and yet it seemed pierced with pain; thus. . . " etc.
What is the story? It's exactly the same version, a demotic, vulgar version of the great situation
of what has happened to Ulysses. Ulysses is condemned to be held prisoner of the flames and the
two tongues of fire, literally tongues of fire, because here is a rhetorician, the philosopher, the neo-
Platonist who actually is a rhetorician, trying to persuade others about his ideas, and managing, and
being very proud of this his success, but then he gets caught by his own tongue.
It's always the temptation of the artist himself, it's Daedalus who builds the labyrinth and gets
caught by it. It's the story of the artist who becomes a captive of that which he himself is
constructed. This is true for Ulysses, a rhetorician caught by his own language, and here Dante
begins with a story of the Sicilian bull, the first victim of which was the artist itself. So I think it's
literally a way of reflecting on the scene that precedes it.
Virgil and Dante are interrupted, line 20: "O thou to whom I direct my voice and who now just
spoke in Lombard." What an extraordinary little misreading of the language, of the rhetoric
deployed in the previous canto. You remember in the previous canto, Dante has Virgil go out of his
way to say don't talk to these people they are Greeks, so let me talk to them. But now from the
perspective of Guido da Montefeltro they are not speaking some kind of Homeric, Attic Greek,
they're speaking a dialect of Italy. Which is to say, that language it's not a question of what kind
of style you are using, language always shows a sort of distance. It shows you yourself where you
are and the kind of distance that you have from the world of truth, or the kind of proximity that you
may have to some self-complacency, as in the case of Ulysses.
"You who . . . now spoke Lombard. . . " Clearly a way of reading the pretence the rhetorical
stylistic pretensions of the other two speakers in the previous canto saying, "Now go thy way, I do
not urge thee more, though I have come, perhaps, somewhat late, let it not irk thee to stay and speak
with me; thou seest that it irks not me, and I am burning. If thou hast fallen but now into this blind
world from the sweet land of Italy, whence I bring all my guilt, tell me if the Romagnoles have
peace or war, for I was of the mountains there between Urbino and the height where Tiber is
released."
As opposed to the lofty rhetoric of Ulysses in the previous canto, who speaks through the grandest
generalities about what is the destination and destiny, and fate of human beings: virtue, knowledge,
the journey to the west, going through a hundred thousand perils. Here the language becomes
there's a sort of deliberate diminution, a contraction of focus, as if the language becomes one of
indeed local, peace and war between neighboring towns. "I was still bent down and. . . " etc. And
then, as a way of adjusting the register, the stylistic register, Virgil will say to Dante, "Speak thou;
he is Italian."
Once again, on the surface, the observance of degrees of style and the laws of rhetorical decorum
are always observed and now he continues: "O soul. . . " etc. And he will the pilgrim will inform
Guido da Montefeltro about the situation of Italy, and this is the whole paragraph on page 337. And
then Guido goes on saying, "If I thought my answer were to one who would ever return to the
world, this flame should stay without another movement. But since none ever returned alive from
this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer thee without fear of infamy."
This is a passage that most of you remember very well; you may know this very well. It's a passage
that Eliot, T.S. Eliot, uses an epigraphy, an epitaph actually, for "The Love Song of Prufrock." So it
gives you an idea of the kind of reading that Eliot has of his own modest the solitary this man
Prufrock and the kind of infernal reality that this figure also evokes.
What I want to emphasize though here, at the level of style, is how Guido speaks. Curses,
hypothetical sentences, parenthetical remarks, not just a style that is deliberately goes contrary to
the smooth high once again high style of Ulysses in the preceding canto. Then, "I was a man of
arms, and then a corded friar, thinking, so girt, to make amends; and indeed my thought had come
true, but for the Great Priest," here is the curse against Boniface, "may ill befall him! who put me
back in the old sins, and how and wherefore, I would have thee hear from me. While I informed the
bones and flesh my mother gave me." Another reference to birth with which, as you know,
characters start telling us their story. The making of birth, the first major event of their lives and
then whatever happens, whatever biographical account may be a descent from or a deviation from
the promises that that birth may have held.
"While I informed the bones. . ." etc., "my deeds were those not of the lion, but of the fox." This is
Machiavellian eventually will become Machiavellian language. We are moving into the secret
halls of power. There where big deals are struck, big deals of the destruction of cities, where the
pope will ask the secret advice from his counselor. Let's see what he says.
"I knew all wiles and covert ways and so practice their arts. . ." I cannot but remark to you how
Canto XXVI also takes place through the language of concealment and covertness. Even which is
in Italian it's actually the language for thievery at the same time, the furtiveness of it all. You
remember Dante speaks of the sun through a periphrasis, to say that it was hidden, that sinners are
hidden and concealed from view in the tongues of fire. This is the language of manipulation of the
political stratagems and machinations and here it becomes highlighted and made visible to us. He
continues the covert ways.
"When I saw myself come to that part of my life where every man should lower their sails," as if he
were another mariner like Ulysses, "and gather in the ropes that which before had pleased me then
grieved me, and with repentance and confession I turned friar and woe is me! it would have
served. The prince of the new Pharisees being at war near the Lateran and not with Saracens or
Jews, for every one of his enemies was Christian and none had been at the taking of Acre or trading
in the land of the Soldan regarded neither the supreme office and holy orders in himself, nor in
me, that cord which used to make its wearers lean; but as Constantine. . ."
It's really we are moving within the I said within the halls of we say the Vatican today, but
at the time it was the Church of St. John the Lateran, which was the residence of the Bishop of
Rome. And it was famous then as it is famous now, for the mosaics about Constantine's Donation to
Pope Sylvester. The whole issue of the temporal power of the papacy really is to be seen it's to
be glimpsed through this scene of Guido and Boniface.
"He asked counsel of me, and I was silent, for his words seemed drunken; and then he spoke again."
This is the extraordinary caricature of the holy office, giving the absolution before even the
commission of the crime. You can go and do what you want, I give you absolution before you do
anything, so it's, "Do not let thy heart mistrust; I absolve thee henceforth, and do thou teach me how
I may cast Palestrina to the ground. I have power to lock and unlock," the new Peter, "Heaven, as
thou knowest, for the keys are two which my predecessor did not hold dear."
This is the famous story of Celestine V, who gave up the office of the papacy and who stands even
in the historical recollections and scholarship of today as the embodiment of one of a pope, of a
figure who understood that the drama and the issue is always between power, maybe a little bit too
dualistically, and holiness and how the two for Celestine were really incommensurable and cannot
quite there could not be a dialectic between the two and he gave up. Dante refers to him with a
little bit of harshness for not being heroic enough and withstanding the tide of corruption and
deciding to retreat to a contemplative life.
"Then the weighty," let me continue this is a little sermon that I apologize for, let me continue
with this." Then the weighty arguments drove me to the point where silence seemed to me the worst
offense and I said," and this is the advice he gives: simple and spectacular in its simplicity, "Father,
since thou dost cleanse me from this sin into which I must now fall," I love the "I must." I cannot
I find it so irresistible especially because now I am guaranteed of this absolution, I can really go on
and do whatever I want. So there is not just a coercion on Guido, but a kind of pleasure that he
feels.
He feels now that it is a necessity for him to go out and perpetrate and commit the evil he will
perpetrate and this is the advice: "Large promise with scant observance will make thee triumph in
the lofty seat." What is he saying? Make promises and plan not to keep them. Go and tell the people
in Palestrina that you are going to respect them, that you are going to make them even rich,
whatever you want to tell them. Then of course, as soon as they open the gates of the city, don't
keep any of these promises.
This is the a restatement by the way that one that finds its original source in Cicero's text
about rhetoric which is known as it's not really Cicero's but it was thought to be Cicero's and this
is the text. From the person to whom it was dedicated, it was meant for this Ad Herrenium. It was
thought in the Middle Ages to be Cicero's rhetorical treatises and the rhetorical treatises is based
all treaties like many other treatises are based on one premise, that rhetoric is the art of making
the city and the citizens agree in order to keep the city going. In a properly governed city promises
are made and are always going to be observed. It's a way of explaining rhetoric in moral terms.
What Dante's saying is those kind of dictates, those kinds of propositions can easily be turned
around and they are being turned around in the practice, the historical practice.
"Then, as soon as I was dead, Francis came for me," there is a little rivalry between Francis and the
devil, fighting over the soul of Guido and Guido is Francis loses and Guido is, of course, here in
Hell. I mention these details because you will see that Dante will pick up this genre of medieval
disputation when later in Purgatorio in a couple of weeks we'll hit the canto where Dante
meets Guido's son, because in this poem fathers and sons do not necessarily belong in the same
moral space and sons do not necessarily follow in the footsteps of their fathers. So you will see how
Dante echoes this whole scene and this is a kind of pre-figuration. I'm giving you a pre-figuration of
things to come.

Chapter 3. Canto XXVIII: Bertan de Born among the Makers of Discord

[00:28:47]
Then we come and I really want to pay a little bit of attention to this Canto XXVIII because
we're entering the world of the truly tragic world, the tragic the most tragic section of the Divine
Comedy. And I mention that because from here to Canto XXXIII, the story of Ugolino, we're going
to talk about what does Dante think of tragedy and how can he go on really envisioning the tragic.
After all, I just called the poem, as he calls it, a comedy. What is the role and the place of the tragic?
Is there room for the tragic vision in Dante's comedy? The point is that the tragic I want to make
this point now and I will be elaborating it as we go on next time especially next time the
tragic is never the final vision.
I will go on even saying something now that the essence of tragedy is always linguistic for Dante. It
has to do with issues of the inherent ambiguities of language, the impossibility of decoding and
deciphering what is being said by one particular by one statement as opposed to another. Here
Dante begins then with a reflection about tragedy.
Where are we now? We are in Canto XXVIII; it's the Dante encounters the one figure, the figure
of Bertran de Born who was a Provenal poet, a Provenal poet whom Dante actually admires
greatly. In the treaties on language that he writes, this famous I have been referring to it, De
vulgari eloquentia, he singles him out as Dante singles out Bertran de Born as a great poet
because he knew how to write the most difficult genre. He was Provenal poet, you know who they
are the area of Provence, wedged between the Ligurian part of Italy and France because he
was such a great poet, because he knew how to rhyme and write war poems. This is really the most
difficult type of poetry, aesthetically very difficult to sustain and Bertran de Born was a genius at
this.
Now Dante places him among the so-called makers of discord. This is Canto XXVIII, Bertran de
Born. Let's see how Dante starts with a reflection of war. I want to tell you a couple of things.
This is a canto, a difficult canto. Dante begins with the story of by with a reference to ineffability
would you please read the passages? I my version is my English version from Canto
XXVIII, the first paragraph, who could? Yes, do you want to do this would you like to do it
please?
Student: Sure. "Who could ever tell, even with words untrammeled and the tale often repeated, of
all the blood in the wounds I saw now? Surely every tongue would fail, for our speech and memory
have not the capacity to take in so much. Were all the people assembled again who once in the
fateful land of Apulia, bewailed their blood shed by the Trojans and in the long war which made the
high-piled spoil of rings as Livy writes who does not err with those who suffered grievous
strokes in the struggle with Robert Guiscard and those others whose bones are still in heaps at
Ceperano where every Apulian was faithless, and there by Tagliacozzo, where old Alardo conquered
without arms; and were one to show his wounded limb and another his cut off, it would be nothing
to compare with the foul fashion of the ninth ditch."
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Very well read. Thank you so much, excellent. What is this
metaphor? It's the we could call it the adoption of the so-called ineffability topos. You
understand what I mean by ineffability topos? That is to say, usually it's a device, a poetic device,
where the poet admits the difficulty, or even impossibility of describing a particular reality. It's
called ineffability. It's so sublime; it usually has to do with, let's say, the vision of God. I cannot
really go on: whoever has seen God, whatever mystic may have had a vision, they always fall into
the contingency, the facticity of language that cannot quite grasp the sublime quality of what they
have seen. Dante now deploys the same device for the world of let's call it for what it is, the evil
world. It is as if Hell now has its own sublimity, a sublime quality that is a parallel and counter to
that which Dante will witness in the divine spectacles at the top of Paradise.
This is the first thing; language cannot quite be adequate to the reality it wants to represent. What
he's talking about now is all the he wants to describe the whole of Hell. And all the limbs, the
dismemberments of bodies from old wars cannot quite come close to what he has seen in this area
of Hell. This is really the idea. What Dante first of all will go on describing is first of all then, the
question of the ineffability topos, which we'll see what it means in the unfolding of the canto, and
let me just continue actually with this. Then the canto really comes to a close with a meeting of a
with a poet Bertran de Born.
So we go from the language of the ineffable and a language of the ineffable that is has also this
little detail, a reference to Livy, a Roman historian. And his voice, and his authority, are
unquestioned. Livy cannot make mistakes. They are unerring in their chronicles, in their accounts of
what they have seen, but somehow the poetic voice is not quite the same thing as the historian's
voice. You see what the tension is in the first few lines of the poem, and then the canto comes to a
close with a different form of poetic reflection. Dante is here describing something altogether
different, the meeting of Bertran de Born, and look how this scene this is the end of Canto
XXVIII: "I stayed to watch the troop and saw a thing I should fear simply to tell without more
proof," another, the threat of the ineffable once again. The poet is unable to represent feels the
difficulty of representing that the extraordinary quality of what he has seen.
". . .but that conscience reassures me, the good companion which emboldens a man under the
breastplate of his felt integrity. Verily I saw, and I seem to see it still, a trunk without a head, going
as were the others of the miserable herd, and it held the severed head by the hair, swinging in its
hand like a lantern, and that was looking at us and saying: 'Woe is me!' Of itself it made for itself a
lamp, and they were two in one, and one in two."
Strangely mathematical language, the divided body of Bertran de Born: he's a maker of discord and
he's being punished by having his own body divided from itself. I'll come back to this metaphor in a
moment, but the idea for now stylistically is that the two is one, and one is two; "how it can be He
knows who so ordains." A mathematical language, as if there is no equality even possible.
Remember that was exactly the language that he was he used for the metaphor, the impossible
metaphor to contain all the description of all the battlefields and all the dead people at the
beginning of Canto XXVIII. I cannot find a metaphor that somehow can equal, can give an idea, a
fair idea, a proportionate idea of what I have seen in these bodies one on top of the other, limbs
accumulated one on top of the other. And now Dante's using again the language of a quantity but
sort of making us think that somehow there is some equality or some rationale in the disparity of
one being two. I don't know, he says, but He knows, God knows, who so ordains. I don't know,
that's what the statement means.
"When it was just below the bridge, it raised its arm high, and with it the head so as to bring its
words near us," and they were: "See now my grievous punishment, thou who, breathing, goest
looking on the dead; see if any other is so great as this." Clearly, this is the first character in Hell
who complains that the punishment inflicted on him is really beyond all justice, beyond all
proportion. And there's no proportionality between what the punishment he gets and the crime he
has committed. And he proceeds to explain:
"And, that thou mayst bear news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born. He that gave evil backing
to the Young King." And he explains, "I made rebellion between the father and the son; I divided
father and son; Ahithophel did no worse," a biblical typology, "for Absalom and David with his
wicked goadings. Because I parted those so joined I carry my brain, alas, parted from its root in this
trunk; thus is observed in me the retribution."
What is going on here? It's a number of things. Let me just explain a few things. Why should the
Bertran de Born, the poet, be the one who bears now visible, the mark of the division on his own
body? We know that this is the way punishments occur. The idea of a punishment in Hell is that a
punishment is just usually the prolongation of what the extension of what one has chosen to do in
this life. You choose to create division and it means that that's where you belong. You did not
believe in the mortality of the soul and you are always after death you are going to be dead and so
on. This is the reflection on punishment, or if you wish, on the justice that regulates this world of
Hell or what Dante calls the retribution.
The word he uses is, in Italian, contrapasso, means a counterpart I would say, or counter suffering.
The last word in Italian is contrapasso which really means that there is passo comes from
passion, to suffer. You suffer equally for what you have done, that's it. It's in a sense it's really the
not quite, but the equivalent of the eye for the eye and the tooth for the tooth. The whole idea of
retributive justice: there is a fair correspondence between what you have done and what you are
going to suffer. And Bertran de Born seems to do why, what is the issue with the body? The
whole point of this canto is that Bertran de Born divides father and son. He violates a principle of
fundamental principle of political theology.
Whereby, if some of you are interested in this issue, you can read the work of a historian, a great
medieval historian who died actually almost half a century ago: it's The King's Two Bodies by a
historian by the name of Kantorowicz. Some of you may know it. What is the idea of the king?
What do you mean by the king's two bodies? Yes, a king has always two bodies, the visible body
that one has and also the mystical body of the royalty. They used to say in the Middle Ages, and we
still do maybe, if you are into the news about royalty: the king is dead, long live the king. The king
never dies. The king never dies because he has always two bodies; there are two bodies of the king.
I may die as an incumbent but the office of the king always remains, this is fundamental.
That's one idea. So, by dividing the father from the son, Dante has Bertran de Born breaching the
unity of the mystical body of the king. The two, father and son, are really one. The other metaphor
that is behind it, which we already saw a little bit sort of traced, finally traced in the canto of
Ciacco in Canto VI of Inferno was the idea of the body politic that you may remember I mentioned
to you. The famous fable of Menenius, who thinks that the body, the city is really constructed like a
body: an organic set of correspondences, organic correspondences like the human body. There's no
difference between there is a difference between patricians and plebeians. That's Menenius'
argument, but they're all part of one organic unified whole.
That is true for the body politic, from a Roman point of view, but it's the principle of so-called
mystical body of the Church. Saint Paul, in the Letter to the Ephesians, refers to the Church as the
mystical body of Christ a kind of so that the State becomes a secular counter, a secular extension
of this mystical body. The Church, we are all members, some of us thumbs, other are just toes, or
whatever, hair or whatever in this body, mystical body of Christ.
I mention this because Canto XXVIII you have a political focus on Rome, or Bertran de Born,
breaching the unity of father and son but also reference to Mohammed and I know there are a lot of
people who just find this just absolutely odious that Mohammed should be placed, the prophet
should be placed here in this area of Inferno. The only argument that one can have about this, is
that, for Dante, Mohammed was actually a member of the Church who created a schism, which is
different from heresy. We saw the heretics in Cantos IX and X. The heretics are those who do not
believe in certain tenets of the doctrine. The schismatics are those who want to double, who divide.
The word "schism" in Greek means to tear apart the unity, the world of unity, and doubling it. So
this is really the argument, the symbols and images of Canto XXVIII.
Let me go to the actual heart of this problem, the question of justice and the question of Bertran de
Born. We will go back to that. "When I was just below the bridge. . . See now my grievous
punishment, thou who, breathing, goest looking on the dead; see if any other is so great as this."
Bertran thinks that there is no justice in this hellish world that he inhabits. All the ideas that the
Ethics of Aristotle really account for devices that are so prevalent here, it's just not true. Not only
that's not true, this idea of the retribution is it an idea, this idea of the contrapasso, is that an idea
that Dante really believes in? There is a lot of what kind of justice is that what are the justices
that we have in Inferno?

Chapter 4. A Poet of Justice [00:46:29]

Let me just give you a little bit of a piece of intellectual history about this whole issue. I want to
make it very simple, because it's really not a difficult problem anyway. It's not that I'm simplifying
the issue, it's there are two types: the people who think that the the thinkers who think about
this issue and of course, Aristotle in the Ethics. And Dante's aware of the great commentary on
Aristotle's Ethics by Thomas Aquinas. He keeps them in mind and they discuss justice and they
wonder what is justice. This is a great problem for Dante, because Dante is I have been calling
him a number of things, but he's clearly a poet of justice. He really believes the whole point of his
quest is to establish some degree of justice in his soul, try to find out justice in the city, and probe
the possibility of some universal justice, as opposed to Lucretian ideas of anarchy and chaos in the
cosmos. So there can be some continuity between the outside and the inside world.
What is the idea of justice? What main types of justice do they have? They usually think about two
types of justice. The so called the retributive justice which is the one that we have in Hell here,
but also distributive justice. Is Dante is Dante aware of the two? Yes, it's impossible not to think
of the representation of the Wheel of Fortune in Inferno VII, as anything less than a case of
distributive justice. The distributive justice follows an arithmetical model. That is to say, in a
distributive justice, as imagined in the Wheel of Fortune, some have more, some have less. If
someone has five, you want to establish some justice, you take away from one who has five and
give to one who has zero or one, and you create some kind of equality. Distributive justice has
equality as its aim.
In retributive justice, things are a little bit different because if I say and Aquinas reflects on this,
this is not a concern at all of Aristotle if I say an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, am I
really establishing justice or am I just doubling the offense that has been perpetrated? If I
someone takes an eye, plucks an eye out of me, if I do the same to whoever has damaged me that
way, am I having am I being restored in my original position? No, that doesn't happen. So how
do you how does one go around thinking about the whole question of retributive justice?
Aquinas, and this also Aristotle, who goes on thinking, he says, well of course it's always very
difficult to find exact counterparts between crime and punishment. If a clown were to slap the king,
it's not enough for the king to slap the clown back because, one might say, well, its one slap. There
is the violation of the office and then both Aristotle, that is implied, and it can never quite be
restored by having the king slap the clown back. Both Aristotle and Aquinas say that's why money
was invented, so one can really give whatever, there is a principle of inequality, one can go on
repaying it through other forms, other punishments.
The fact is, I think, that Dante first of all, I want to go back to the structure of the canto. It's
crucial that Dante should think about this fundamental problem of justice which is the aim of the
ethical structure of the poem, in Inferno in particular, through the poet, through Bertran de Born.
Not only through the poet, it's Dante himself who has just been announcing the impossibility of
finding through language the exact metaphor, the exact correspondence between a reality and its
representation. What Dante is doing, is telling us how arbitrary are his own judgments in Hell, how
the notion of a position in the way punishments and crimes are related are never quite reliable.
This is the to understand this, and I know that I did not ask you to read it for today, but I have to
I have a few minutes and I want to go the ask you to turn to the very beginning of Canto
XXIX because I think it becomes a retrospective gloss here on the problems that I've been trying to
explain in Canto XXVIII. Dante goes through other forms of he will enter the world of the so-
called alchemists, those who are engaged in diabolical mutations, unnatural mutations,
personifications, impersonators, disguises, etc., but before he gets there, there is a little long
passage. It's the first time in the whole poem that usually you know how what the narrative
economy of each canto is, Dante comes to the end of the poem of a canto and usually closes off
with the particular sin or the particular sinner, this is an exception. Dante goes into Canto XXIX and
whatever situation he has been describing in Canto XXVIII keeps reappearing, it worries him and
somehow well let's see what worries him about this.
"The many people and the strange wounds had made my eyes so drunken that they were fain to stay
and weep; but Virgil said to me: 'What are thou still gazing at?'" The pilgrim is looking back at what
he has seen. "Why does thy look still rest down there among the miserable maimed shades? Thou
hast not done this at the other depths. Consider, if thou think to number them, that the valley goes
twenty-two miles round and already the moon is beneath our feet. The time is now short that is
allowed to us and there is more to see than thou seest here."
Once again numbers, arithmetical language. What is the measure? What is the how do we
measure? How are we going to determine what is the exact correspondence? Let me just give you a
little aside about this. As you know, a great reader of Inferno, and actually he began his career as a
commentator of Dante, was Galileo, the scientist. That was the first work that he did, he published a
famous work on Inferno. He tried to find out what the actual size of the whole of Inferno was, just
by going by this little detail that Dante gives, the radius. And he comes up with the idea that Inferno
is as large as the city of Florence, which is something that he probably would have said anyway,
whether it was a mathematical there was a mathematical proof for it or just his own joke. I'll
leave it to you to decide.
Let me continue with this. "If thou hadst given heed to my reason for looking,' I answered then,
'perhaps thou wouldst have granted me a longer stay.' Meantime the Leader was going on and I
went after him, already making my reply, and I added: 'Within that den where I held my eyes so
intently just now I think a spirit," a kinsmen of his, "one of my blood, weeps for the guilt that cost
so much down there." Dante knows that a relative of his is in this den of Hell.
"Then said the master: 'Let not thy thoughts be distracted about him henceforth; attend to other
things and let him stay there; for I saw him below the bridge point at thee and threaten fiercely with
his finger, and I heard him called Geri del Bello," reminding him, here I am. "Thou was so wholly
occupied with him who once held Hautefort that thou didst not look that way till he was gone."
Dante responds, "'O my leader,' I said, 'the violent death which is yet unavenged for him by any that
is a partner in his shame made him indignant, and for that reason, as I judge, he went on without
speaking to me and by this he has made me more compassionate with him.'"
What's going on? How is this related to the previous canto? I think it's fairly clear. Dante meets a
kinsmen of his who has been killed and that death is unavenged and clearly is going to be
unavenged, is going to remain unavenged. Dante is so overwhelmed by pity and compassion, but he
does not say, nor does he promise that he's going to go out and take revenge against the killers of his
relative, Geri del Bello. What he is doing, he is redefining the notion of justice. The idea that justice
is a doubling, or could be, of the crime. Someone is doing something, kills a kinsmen of mine, I'm
going to go out and kill your kinsmen, because that's the way justice could be understood. The idea
of justice as revenge, as a way of establishing the precise relationship is what Dante is giving up
here completely.
It's retrospectively a gloss on what I have been saying, that the notion of justice as the eye for the
eye, or the tooth for the tooth, is no longer valid in this context. I think this is the beginning then of
Dante's worrying about what is the nature of God's justice. What is how arbitrary is my own
claim of authority in describing these very issues, and continuing with this reflection as we shall see
next time.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [00:57:00]

Let me see if there are questions now about this whole problem the problems we have been
dealing with today or whatever problems you may have. Yes?
Student: I'm curious to know, how knowledgeable Dante was of the Hellenic world since he did not
read Greek.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is how knowledgeable Dante was of the Hellenic
world since he did not read Greek. My answer is yes, indeed, he did not read Greek at all. He for
that matter nor did Aquinas really read Greek. So he knew the Hellenic world through Latin
translations of texts like Aristotle's was being the Ethics, the treatise On the Soul. Plato, he knew.
He knew medieval romances that we'll be dealing with, the so-called medieval romances deal with
the matters of France, the matters of Rome, the matters of Brittany, the Roman of Alexander which
is part of the Hellenic world. He knew the he lived in Ravenna which was part, by the way, until
the year 1200 and more and later was part of the exarchy, a Greek exarchy, the church of Ravenna
Exarchate, as it's called. So he knew this is where the resources and the conduit of his knowledge of
the Greek world. Latin, and whatever survives in Latin, I mean for the philosophical schools of the
Greeks. Clearly Cicero on the ends of man, De finibus, that is really the sourcebook for whatever he
I've been saying about Stoics, Epicureans, Aristotelians, etc. He had some idea, Dante had some
idea of the Metaphysics. He writes about in the Convivio he writes about the need to connect
ethics and metaphysics for instance. So he knew that's what he knew. I could even add that I'm
sure that Actually there is going to be in Washington D.C. in about a year, we're going to have a
conference. We're going to hold it in Washington for a number of reasons, but on Dante and the
Greeks. So if you stay in touch with me, I'll let you know what happens. One thing that we are
really looking at are the mosaics, the art world, the relations, the connections with Greek artists who
have been traveling and were in Rome, in Sicily that's what he knew. Yes?
Student: Why is it appropriate for Dante to move on contrapasso punishment but for God to keep it
in place in Hell? How does Dante reconcile those two things that Hell is supposedly a just place, but
he's not supposed to look back towards like Canto XXVIII, that he's not supposed to
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is going back to the problem of justice in Canto
XXVIII and then XXIX. How can Dante go on having some kind of hesitations about the idea of
justice and at the same time hold the place in Hell, and plays according to some criteria. The answer
is it will appear a little bit complicated, but I'm not sure that it's complicated. This whole
language of doubts about authority that Dante is the authority of himself as the one who can
administer justice, the authority about the himself as even capable of remembering that which he
has seen and therefore the authority of the poetic voice. This is very extensive and really goes into
all directions, has a counter to it. That's not the only aspect, the only facet of Dante's text. The way I
see that is that he's also capable of taking on a prophetic voice, so that he appears as the one who
has, by a singular grace of God, been chosen to explore the world in the beyond, which is really
caught and understood in the most physical and direct way. So the two voices are simultaneously
present. How does one condition the other?
I think that that is really the tension of this poem. Dante is both a prophet and Dante is the poet who
knows the arbitrariness of this construction. He's the poet theologian and the poet the poetic
allegorist. The two voices are simultaneously present. What is the point of doing this? In many
ways this makes the poem the actual experience of a pilgrimage. That is to say, it's how you connect
yourself, what kind of judgment do you give of what of the realities that Dante's representing,
that is going to reveal to you yourself: who you are and where you are. It's a way of shifting the
point of Dante's the voice of the master who can tell you how things are, to the interpretative
journey, to an allegorical journey where you're going to decipher and all the time involve yourself in
this story.
This can be can turn out I think this is his wish. This story, which is his journey, can turn out
to be your journey. You can tell your own story. Do you see what I'm saying? That's I think the
that's a very good question and I hope I have been clear in answering this. You may agree or not
agree with it; that's another story, but I hope I've been really clear in the answer. Yes?
Student: I have one more question. In terms of the narrow issue of justice, do you think that Dante
doesn't have so much a problem with the system of an eye for an eye as with the idea that only
someone with the intelligence of God could accurately see the correspondences and prescribe the
right punishments for the crime. So it's not that the actual system is bad, it's just that Dante and
humans can't presume to make those judgments.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The other question that follows, the follow up question is: does it
mean that Dante may can one say that Dante actually doesn't have problems with the basic
structure, but only with the human ability to grasp how it works? I would agree with that. However,
I think that what he really has problems with, is the notion, which was a practice at the time, the
notion of revenge; the way of understanding justice as revenge. Now even the Bible will go on and
tell you that the that 'revenge is mine, so says the Lord,' but Dante would say, that's God's voice
and not the human voice. So he clearly has an objection to that. Is there some implication
because that's really what I think you're asking me, I hope that's what you're asking me, otherwise
I'm completely off. Is there some implication that the universe itself, its divine economy, there may
be something unfathomable and I would say yes, that the whole question of justice is something we
cannot quite measure with human instruments.
There is one great metaphor that Dante will give in Canto, I believe, XIX of Paradise where he
goes back again to the question of justice and he talks about justice in terms of the salvation of the
Hindus. Why shouldn't they be here? I mean what he wonders about that and the answer that he
gives is, he says that the question of justice is like the sea. When you are really near the shore you
see the bottom and everything seems to be the waters are clear and transparent and you really
seem to touch bottom and see the bottom. As soon as you go in, then the unfathomable ocean takes
over and the foundation, the ground of it all remains invisible and inaccessible. Do you see what the
argument that's the argument he goes on giving? It's not an issue that he has resolved here once
and for all, he will go back to these questions.
Student: I have a question about the term you were using earlier, when you were talking about the
ineffability, I couldn't make out if you were saying the ineffability trope?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah, I called it because it's really jargon. The question is: I'm
using ineffability trope. It's more a trope is a device I called it topos which is a place where
some they talk about topos is something that keeps, like a type, keeps repeating and can be
used. Dante uses this idea of ineffability. What he's really talking about, the impossible metaphor
that can hold or represent two different realities and I think that that's exactly the way he wants to
think of crime and punishment: the relationship between crime and punishment, which is a
metaphorical one, which is a kind of relationship that tries to equal an equal relationship between
two terms. I called it topos, a Greek word. We call it commonplace, it means place. Okay, we'll see
you next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 9 - Inferno XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV
[October 2, 2008]
Chapter 1. The Mode of the Tragic [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We are going to try to finish with Inferno today and I would like to
look at the last Cantos XXX, XXXI, XXXII maybe a little bit, XXXIII for sure, and there are a
couple of details in XXXIV.
From one point of view, I'll be talking about Dante's tragic mode at the bottom of Hell. This is I
hope to argue with you that I will be arguing exactly, this is a tragic representation. As soon as I
say that, you might wonder, you probably should wonder, about the difficulty of such an enterprise.
And the difficulty of the enterprise has to do, first of all, with the fact that this is a comedy. So that
difficulty should go away in the sense that the tragic is really part not an end, not a final vision, but
part of a larger discourse that Dante will go into, which is a comical idea.
He really has this idea of a comical vision, even of the divinity and certainly of the cosmos.
Comical, in the sense that it's really the feast, the feast in classical times, it would be the feast of
the gods. Here is the redemptive, happy, harmonious sense of the whole. That's one of the
difficulties. The other difficulty that about this mode of the tragic is that the within the
Christian vision that Dante that sort of shapes Dante's poem, it's very difficult to locate the
tragic: there is no such a thing as a Christian tragedy.
Though one might say, and I will say here, just to sort of give you a sense of how nuanced the issue
maybe, is that within that vision, within that Christian vision, we are always told that the only thing
we know of God's presence in history is the Crucifixion. There's the story of the dying god, the
story of the suffering of the divinity itself. It is not, once again, a final vision. So there's a
theological problem that he has to confront and there is also an aesthetic problem, a larger aesthetic
problem.
To really clarify these issues, rather than just telling you that all this comes from I will look at
these cantos from one point view. The point of view of Dante's writing a particular text, a text about
language. So it's really going to be about language and tragedy, in the belief that this is exactly
Dante's insight about what the tragic may be. Let me tell you I have to go a little bit outside of
the text for a while so that when I point out details here that we'll talk about in other texts you
will see what I mean.
You know this is a sort of also a little bit of a recapitulation for you you know that Dante goes
into exile in 1302. By that time, he had written only one book, an autobiographical book that had he
 the Vita nuova, the New Life. Had he written only that book, he would still be known as one of
the great poets of the Middle Ages, but he would not really be known for more than that. It's a little
bit of a self-enclosure, a lyrical poem, self-enclosed: it's about, as you recall, a kind of sense that the
self is absolute, that love is an absolute itself. It does not allow for the intrusion of anything within
its own orbit and its perimeter and Dante finishes it off with a vision, realizing that he has to do
other things in order to go on writing.
He just doesn't write much at that point. He may be writing some songs. He is involved in political
life, in the footsteps of his teacher, Brunetto Latini, and hoping that his life will really be very
different from Brunetto Latini. Ironically, it is not, because actually it's even more tragic than
Brunetto Latini's life, because Brunetto Latini is politically involved in the history of Florence. He
will experience exile, but he will return to Florence enough to even go on teaching Dante. He has
written encyclopedic texts, like the Trsor; he has written allegories, autobiographical allegories
about his life.

Chapter 2. De vulgari eloquentia [00:05:19]

Dante will go into exile in 1302 and the first thing that he writes is a treatise on language which is
called On the Vulgar Tongue. It's a text that written from the perspective of exile, very much like
the Divine Comedy, because, as I repeat, Dante will never go back to Florence. The reasons why he
writes this kind of text it's written in Latin the reasons are very unclear, also because he never
finishes it. I'm going to suggest to you that there are good reasons why he could never finish it, but
he wrote two books. We don't even know how many he had conceived of writing.
What is this text about? Let me give you a little bit of a summary of the text and then you will see
how it will go on reappearing in Dante's poem, the final cantos of Inferno, where in effect, he
rewrites, he writes and gives a whole a sense of the wholeness of this text and the difficulties of
and he will share with us his sense of the difficulties why that tract could never have been
finished. At any rate it starts, it's called the De vulgari eloquentia as it deals with the origin of the
vulgar tongues. He starts very much like medieval treatises start with from a metaphysical
standpoint, from the very high: what does human language do, is language something human and
the answer that he gives is yes and no. It is human because we are the only ones who do speak,
though he makes room for animals, also occasionally speaking in a human voice and being
understood by human beings, making sounds that are and he's not talking about parrots. He's
talking about miraculous biblical scenes.
He starts by saying the angels do not speak. They don't use the language we do. They communicate
Lucifer for instance, he communicates, but he communicates with the other angels or with God
intuitively. There is a kind of so there is a reality that escapes the human language, the language
that we use, there are some things happening that we do not have. Then the language is it's only
human and yet, it's not human because it's actually a gift. We couldn't really make it on our own; it's
really God's gift. This is the metaphysical premise. Who was the first who are the first people to
speak? He goes on: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That's biblical enough; I think it's fairly
clear.
What was the first language that they spoke? Hebrew. Hebrew is acknowledged as the primal
language and he will even go on so far as to say that Hebrew is never really extinguished by, for
instance, either the fall of man, of mankind, or by the building of the Tower of Babel and the whole
question of Nimrod. There's a whole story about who this Nimrod is the famous biblical giant
who built the Tower of Babel, an act which he even he, Dante, but this is very much in the
tradition of the so-called patristic writings we'll see as the counter to the descent of the word, or
the redemptive event of the word made flesh, is really the counter to this human effort; this ascent
in pride of Nimrod to try to bridge the gap between earth and heaven. And the effort to that fails.
He will go on acknowledging Hebrew, but I must say, not only he says that it survives the story of
Nimrod, he says it has never really disappeared. He takes, and I'm only qualifying it, what we
would call an ahistorical viewpoint. It was almost as if Hebrew is accepted from it does not
belong to the flow of history and the reality of the mutations to which all things all sublunary
things are prone and are vulnerable: Hebrew is excepted from it.
I stress this fact because I'm going to come back to this, maybe toward the end of the term, when
we're going to read Paradiso XXVI, where Dante meets Adam, and there blatantly, he changes his
mind. It is as if something has intervened in between the writing of the De vulgari eloquentia and
the encounter with Adam, when Adam says, look, the Hebrew language I spoke completely,
vanished as soon as I ate of the fruit of the forbidden fruit of the tree. Dante goes on and says
there's no trace of the original language. That is to say, in Paradise, Dante's ready to historicize the
question of human language, but not in this treatise of the De vulgari eloquentia. He goes on
describing the descent of the word, so it's a theology of language and then Book I ends and he
moves on to Book II.
In Book II, Dante gives a completely different takes a different direction in this treatise. He starts
talking, not about the grammar of language, what we can call the grammar of language, that is to
say the ordering, how this language was ordered that's what I mean by grammar. Of course it's a
word that explains letters, correct uses of things, but also the ordering of a certain reality. He talks
now about rhetoric and he becomes almost a theorist of poetry and style. He goes on explaining, for
instance, he goes on wondering: what are the three styles of writing poetry? And that you know,
because I have been mentioning some of them.
You may recall the high style, the medium style, the middle style, and the low style; the style of
comedy, the style of tragedy and the style of the elegy, the middle style, the elegiac style. He even
suggests that style should never really be thought of as a pure ornamentation. Some of us maybe we
do whatever we think about that: so and so has style. We all remember the phrase that the style is
the man, the character; but sometimes we say, well that guy writes with style, meaning that he has
brio. He has a particular gift in pulling together words and writing sentences. Dante sort of implies
that style is really a mode of knowledge. In the measure in which he says there's a high style for
high reality and the middle style for the middle reality the mixed world, the elegiac world and
then a low style for the comical world.
He really says that if you really want to understand those who are far below: the fisherman, for
instance, or the clowns, you cannot really give them the treat them with the decorum with which
you treat the kings. Kings speak differently, the sublime kind of language. Do you see what I'm
saying? There is an idea that style becomes an instrument of knowledge. He goes on describing the
theory of the song, which is the greatest poetic lyrical form and it's the song because it's a way of
bringing out the music of the language.
The music Dante's response this is a little historical detail, it's responding to a poetic
revolution that had taken place within in Sicily at the court of Frederick II. Because prior to that
time, the Provenal poets would be writing, composing poetry, and would accompany their songs
with the lute, the famous Provenal poets' instrument. The Sicilians had divided those two modes. It
was possible to write poetry in and of itself, without the accompaniment of music, in the persuasion
that the art of poetry was the effort to bring out the inherent harmony of the language.
He discusses the song; he discusses themes: what are the great themes of poetry and we alluded to
that with Bertran de Born, because Dante says Bertran de Born was the greatest in writing war
poetry. The other themes of course are rectitude the rectitude of the will, that is to say, a sense of
the ethical: what are the ethical directions that one should take? The word direction and rectitude,
they really have the same etymology. Then also love poems.
So this is the way he precedes. He defines poetry, by the way. He ends with a great definition of
poetry: that poetry is that art that combines music the art of music and rhetoric together and
he ends there. It's unfinished. Dante will go on writing other things, for instance, a philosophical
text about ethics, which he also will leave unfinished and then will go on writing the political text
De Monarchia, etc., which he finishes.
This is the preamble to what we are going to talk about today. I think that the best way to begin is to
tell you, since I'll be talking mainly about tragedy and language, I really want to tell you how much
Dante retrieves of the De vulgari eloquentia. For instance, and I'm not going to be really giving
you a lot of details, but some, so that you can be persuaded about this that there's really a
deliberate pattern. This is a deliberate retrospective view that he takes of his past, of a failure of his
own, of a certain way of why does one fail? What is so unaccomplishable about a particular task
that I'm using the words that Nimrod uses for his own Tower of Babel I realize that it was an
unaccomplishable task. And I find myself using those words for Dante's earlier effort in writing on
the vulgar tongue. Some connections between the treatise and these lower the cantos of lower
Hell.
Where are we by the way? We haven't talked about that, we got to talk about these are the cantos of
the lower Hell: we are in the general area of fraud. You remember that, right? We saw violence.
Now we see fraud, but if you recall Canto XI where the map of the ethical map of Inferno had
been given, Dante distinguishes between the sins of fraud and the sins of treachery. Treachery is a
subdivision of fraud because fraud can be rhetoricians, falsifiers in general, flatterers, etc. These are
the but treachery is worse than that. That's where we are now. We're in the realm of treachery.
Treachery the treacherous sinners are those who engage in a deceptive violation of the trust
others place in us. This is not necessarily true for all fraudulent people. There's those who can
perpetrate a fraud on you without even knowing you or without even having anything to do with
you. The question of treachery is different. It implies a violation of what Dante calls the erasure of
the bonds of love, because it implies friends, family, country, hosts. I think, for instance, Macbeth
would belong to this type of the tragedy of Macbeth would belong to this type of ethical
judgment. The erasure of the bonds of love and nature: it is as if the treacherous sinners are really
those who, in betraying, they really betray nature itself. It is as if something is being said about that,
they annihilate all possible ties within a community, within the self and others.
Treachery is the language of nothing. It's a way of saying that nothing matters, there's no bond that I
can that I could feel an attachment too. It's a literally a severing of self in the domain of a
pure arbitrariness. I mean this: I am above everything or I'm below everything; it doesn't matter, but
I certainly have no attachments to anything around me. That's where we are, there is so much to say
where we are in the context, but the connections with the De vulgari eloquentia.
I think that even the story of Ulysses can be read in the light of the De vulgari eloquentia because
it's the story of a tragic style. Dante had been describing the tragic style, and the tragic style and the
failure of the tragic style. Even the canto the successive canto of Guido de Montefeltro can be
it's literally the counterpoint, the rhetorical counterpoint to Ulysses. It's a story of the comical style.
Certainly Bertran de Born is a figure who, for the first time, and now the second time, appears in the
De vulgari eloquentia, and Dante has a great admiration for Bertran de Born's poetic art. He says
the Italians don't have the language of the poetry of war, but the one who has a poetry of war and
modernity is Bertran de Born.
Clearly Dante has changed his opinion here. He may admire Bertran de Born, but the strife, the
divisiveness that his poetry fosters, now sort of has made a victim of him. By the way, Pound writes
a great poem about Ezra Pound about Bertran de Born, but really keeping in mind more that
Bertran de Born of the De vulgari eloquentia than the Bertran de Born, as far as I can tell, of
Inferno.

Chapter 3. Canto XXX: Juno, Myrrha, Sinon [00:19:45]

We come to Canto XXIX, which I already looked at that saw a little bit, but I will come to Canto
XXX, for instance, and Dante enters deliberately now, and on the face of it very little There is
very little here that has to do with the De vulgari eloquentia, but here though, he's talking about two
experiences that define the tragic mode.
One is, look at this: "In the time," beginning from Canto XXX, "In the time when Juno was enraged
because Semele, the mistress of Jupiter against the Theban blood as she showed once and again,
Athamas so insane." He's really talking about the tragic text, the Thebaid, where the gods
themselves within the world the classical world the gods themselves seem to have been
wounded by exactly the same mad passions that drive human beings to destruction. This is Juno.
Juno doesn't really die but she will she suffers the same passions. There's a language here of the
tragic and let's call it the mythopoeic. It's a kind of classical theology being tied to it.
And then the story of the Trojans once again: "But no fury of Thebes or Troy was ever so cruel
against any," etc. Then even further on Canto XXX, line 40, the story of Myrrha, the young woman
who it's a classical story. It's an Ovidian story: the woman who is inflamed by passion,
incestuous passion, and impersonates somebody else in order to be able to sleep with her father.
There is this is part of all this tragic, let me call it, tragic perimeter, but everything focuses on the
story of Sinon, I think.
I like this idea of Sinon who is an impersonator and a falsifier. You don't really have to know a lot
of Italian to know that Dante is really punning on the name Si / non, which means yes and no. The
very representation of the falsification of personality but it's the so the tragic is tied to some
sense of identity, people who do not know exactly and that's impersonation. Human beings who
may not know who they are and who may take on some kind of either figuration or the reality of
somebody else. So it's this idea of an ambiguity already betrayed by the name, so the connection
between madness and tragedy.

Chapter 4. Canto XXXI: The Giants; Theory of Perspective [00:22:47]

Let me move on to Canto XXXI where Dante enters and now meets the giants, clearly a figuration
and an echo of the De vulgari eloquentia. One of them is Nimrod. So this is really a deliberate
reflection. Let me just read a little bit of this on line 60 and following, where Dante hears some
kinds of sounds. And every commentator of yours, mine certainly does, will tell you that Dante's
using just some gibberish. Nobody knows what it means.
These are the words: "Raphl may amch zabi almi' began the savage mouth to cry, for which no
sweeter psalms were fit; and my Leader towards him: 'Stupid soul keep to thy horn and vent thyself
with that when rage or other passion takes thee. Search at thy neck, bewildered soul, and thus shalt
find the strap that holds it tied. See how it lies across thy great chest.' Then he said to me: 'He is his
own accuser. This is Nimrod, through whose wicked device the world is not of one sole speech. Let
us leave him there and not talk in vain, for every language is to him as his to others, which is known
to none. We made our way, therefore, farther on, turning left, and found the next a bowshot off, far
savager and larger," etc. And he meets other a number of other giants.
Why does Dante first of all mention giants? Both the De vulgari eloquentia and here, what is really
the point of the De vulgari eloquentia? There is a way in which the De vulgari eloquentia is written
from the viewpoint of Nimrod, because what Dante wants to do is something exactly like what
Nimrod attempted. Nimrod wanted to combine all the possible languages, that's how Babel, the
confusion of tongues comes about. He wanted to combine to build a tower whereby human
beings can reach Heaven. And I said that it's really the other side of the incarnational word: the
word that joins Heaven and Earth. One is one of descent, the other one is the pride of ascent.
Nimrod wants this is the giantess, this is his is a sin of not a sin. It's a trait, it's a trait of his
of knowing things.
He wants to occupy a kind of superior perspective, that's what his being a giant means. A superior
perspective from which he can really see the whole of the world around him and then be able to
transcend the world of contingency: this is the problem with Nimrod. This is what the Tower of
Babel is about and the theological answer is that you don't do this by pride. You really ought to do it
by humility, not by trying to go up but really by going down. What I'm really also saying and we
could talk about this, that there is a connection between pride and perspective.
The De vulgari eloquentia is also a text of perspectivism. Do you know what I mean by
perspectivism? What we have read so far. Perspectivism simply means the presence of viewpoints,
various viewpoints, which one somehow manages to control, or know, all viewpoints. In Dante, this
is the case the way the whole of Inferno is written. The perspective on styles: Dante uses all
possible styles that I have been exemplifying for you here as we discuss the poem. He wrote he
uses the courtly language and the courtly rhetoric of Francesca, the other court the legal court of
Pier della Vigna, the court of the let's say, the schools, with Brunetto Latini, the language of the
prophets. He uses all perspectives. It's the whole of the Divine Comedy is such a perspective, a
perspectivist story.
Some of you might say, well you really are using a language that doesn't belong to Dante's own
culture. That would be a very legitimate objection because when we talk about perspective, we
usually think about this is really the revolutionary language of fifteenth-century art. You may
some of you may be art historians. You may know that, though I could respond to you that actually
there was a certain knowledge of perspective earlier than Dante. Nonetheless, even if they did not
have a theory of perspective, which I'll explain in a moment, they had the practice of perspective.
In art we usually speak of perspective in art, and we usually link it with, for instance, a figure
such as Alberti. You know who he is, this fifteenth-century theorist of art, who wrote a treatise
called On Painting, in 1436, where he literally theorizes that which other painters from Giotto,
Dante's friend. Dante's they were together in Padua for years when Dante was in exile and Giotto
was painting in the Scrovegni Chapel right there. So you could imagine they would be meeting;
they knew each other. They were contemporaries: one is a year younger than the other. Dante's a
year older than Giotto, actually.
So there was a practice of perspective. What is perspective? For Alberti, it simply means the
discovery that the mode of representation practiced in the Middle Ages really lacked depth. Not
only that, lacked depth, and that somehow the belief that the world of appearance and the world of
reality coincided. Perspective means that the world that I see shifts, changes according to the
position that I, the spectator, occupy in the field of vision. I'm here and I can assure you that I see
things that you sitting there cannot see and vice versa. You see things that I cannot see, so the
perception of reality changes according to the position we occupy. That's perspective.
Not only that, it also implies the possibility of manipulation of the space that we witness we see
as a particular space. We can change it according to distance, according to the laws of the eyes,
the position of the eye, according to the hour of the day. I see things which are always different. So
this is perspective and therefore the language of Renaissance, the so-called Quattrocento, the
fifteenth-century changes the whole medieval idea of representation where things were represented
the way they appeared. They say that's not true. We are never going to give the sense of the reality
of things, but the appearance of things. So that's really the great the difference.
Dante uses this perspectivism, which I repeat, really means a way of assembling various points of
view. In the persuasion that this is what really he has: he's in exile in 1302; he has been traveling all
over Italy; and he thinks that he can go on forging the language, the vernacular language of Italy.
He will go on let me just go back to say other things about the De vulgari eloquentia I didn't say.
He will go on writing about the proximity of the romance languages. He invents this idea of
romance language. And he says that the way in which French, Provenal, Spanish, Italian are
connected together he says it's one particle: the way we use the 'S' When he talks about the
Provenal, he says they actually call it they say 'Oc' when they are to make affirmative
statement. He goes on talking about this 'S,' the language of the 'S,' the way the language of what
they know. This is the way the families of languages are being built together.
Nimrod, to go back to the text, the story of Nimrod and the story of Dante seem to be strangely very
close. There's more. Look at what he does because it's so the link with the De vulgari eloquentia
is just extraordinary. Even this line, that everybody thinks doesn't mean anything: "Raphl may
amch zabi almi." If you look at it carefully I really want to tell you something, it is an imperfect
there's one letter anagram of a Hebrew line from the Psalms, and the reference to 'sweeter
Psalms' next will tell you that Dante's really giving you the source. The line in the Psalm, Psalm 22,
is Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? The fact that there is no exact correspondence only means that the
editors have missed the point: that they should amend the text. So it would be an argument for
textual emendation. That's something that the philologists are very careful about doing but they
always welcome possibilities.
This is really it's an amazing so he's using Hebrew because that's what he had said in the De
vulgari eloquentia, that Hebrew this is an inverted, twisted language by the builder of the Tower
of Babel, we are not supposed to understand it and yet behind all confusion there is still something
intelligible, that's the argument. Behind all twisted appearances of things there is a residue of
intellect, of intelligent, intelligible an intelligible message that is going to be given. What are
these words, by the way? Eli, Eli, lama, sabachthani? I am going right past it very quickly in the
belief that you could that everybody will know it. These are the words, Psalm 22, they are the
words that Jesus on the Cross cites, "Father, Father why have you forsaken me?"
It's really the tragic moment or the moment of the Crucifixion where the Son feels that he is
completely abandoned and that somehow the whole divine play, the whole divine order is no longer
responsive to him. It's really the moment of the theological despair, they call it. Okay. Dante's aware
that if Nimrod that's what he's Dante, I think is telling Nimrod obliquely, had he not been so
stupid he would have known by using this kind of language, the way in which it would have been
reaching Heaven. The way to Heaven is the way to go down into humility and not up through the
building of the Tower of Babel, and the confusion of tongues.
Then there is this whole argument here which I'm not going to go into, but the confusion, the
perceptual confusion, perspective. Dante makes his he is far away and he mistakes the giants for
towers, reference to this famous town that is still if you go on the highway you can still see
Monteriggioni, that's what Dante went by and he thinks that the giants are towers, because you have
no perspective. Because in perspective, you learn that you see according to the distance of the
where you arrive from the object. This is the basic mathematics, the geometry that rules and
sustains the theory of perspective.

Chapter 5. Canto XXXII: More on the Question of Perspective; Tragic

Representation [00:35:10]
Then it will continue with let me just go on to a further case of this question of perspective and I
want to read with some care XXXIII. Let me turn to Canto XXXII with more, pursuing this line of
references to the De vulgari eloquentia. Look at this, "Had I the harsh. . ." It's at the beginning of
the text. Would you like to read? We're reading from Canto XXXII, line 1 to 12.
Student: The version I have is only Italian.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I'm impressed. I didn't mean that you go ahead. From Canto
XXXII, line 1 to 12 in English.
Student: "Had I the harsh and grating rhymes that would be fitting for the dismal hole on which all
the other rocks bear down, I would press out more completely the sap of my conception; but since I
have not, it is not without fear I bring myself to speak, for to describe the bottom of all the universe
is no enterprise to undertake in sport or for a tongue that cries, mamma and babbo. But may those
ladies aid my verse who aided Amphion to wall in Thebes, so that the telling may not be diverse
from the past. O beyond all others misbegotten crowd who are in the place it is hard to speak of,
better had you here been sheep or goats!"
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Thank you. Here, this is the beginning that in many ways rehashes
what last time I called the ineffability topos. You remember at the beginning of Canto XXVIII,
Dante there is talking about the sublime, sort of parodic, a sort of inverted form of the sublime. So
the horror of what he was witnessing was such that he could not know that he could find the
metaphors for it. This is now the deployment of a variant of that conceit. The conceit here is that
Dante's looking for a style, he has perspective. There must be a unique style for this particular
reality and he starts, I cannot go on using the language of familiarity. I have to use the babbo and
mamma, the language of the child because this is just they are the treacherous souls who have
betrayed, first of all, family so there is a sort of tragic resonance even around that little motif.
This cannot be done in the ordinary familiar language of everyday because these sinners have
indeed betrayed all of that. Nor can it probably be done at all, because I'm aware, and how he could
not be, in this area of treachery and fraud, that words and deeds do not necessarily belong to him.
And I'm only paraphrasing the text. A search for style, which he understands as a form of what is
convenient, what is decorous, what is appropriate. That's the metaphor he uses. It's, by the way, an
argument of the De vulgari eloquentia, the principle of convention and convenientia: in Latin the
convenience of a particular language over another when one is dealing with a particular reality.
The further problem of what kind of style do I have? Is it can I get in order to represent this kind
of world? He appeals to Amphion and the building of Thebes. Once again, this is a tragic story of
Thebes, and obliquely, he's also appealing to something that he himself has written. Since Amphion
is the poet who moves stones by the power of his language, a version of Orpheus, who placates,
tames the savage beasts within the heart within us, he wants to be a kind of Amphion.
The fact is that he has written stony rhymes, he has written he is moving. It is a sort of
retrospective view that he takes. He thinks that the only kind of style adequate to this reality is the
style of the crazy poems representing a crazy time of his life for this Lady of stone who would
change him into stone. We an illusion to this appeared in the canto of the Medusa in Canto IX of
Inferno, so that's really it begins with this search for a particular style and Dante will go on
through this kind of this whole world of furthering to the frozen iciness of Hell. There is no fire,
burning fire. And now that's how the canto ends.
And we start with the next canto: "We already left him," line 122, "when I saw two frozen in one
hole, so that the one head was a hood to the other, and, as bread is devoured for hunger" So you
know we're approaching the most, to me, the most unbearable scene of Inferno, the cannibalization:
a human being cannibalizing, literally eating, the other. I know that some of you may have your
sense of your taste can be different. To me, this is really the worst possible representation, tragic
representation here.
"The one above set his teeth in the other at the place where the brain joins the nape; Tydeus gnawed
the temples of Menalippus for rage just as he was doing with the skull and the other parts. 'O thou
who by so bestial a token shows the hatred against him thou eatest, tell me the cause,' I said, 'on this
agreement, that if thou has reason in thy complaint against him I, knowing who you are and what
his sin, shall yet requite thee in the world above, if this tongue I talk with be not withered.'"
We are approaching a moment where literally silence envelops all possible representations. It's
something that nothing not all can be altogether sayable. It is something that can escapes the
sayable and it's that boundary, we are at that boundary that Dante places us. This is you know
where this I have to read this exchange. I will read it and then try to comment on it. I wish you
could have a discussion about this canto.
"That sinner," actually the Italian really begins the sentence structure of the English wouldn't
allow it begins with 'the mouth.' That occupies the primary place in the line. In Italian it's la
bocca, the mouth. The object is primary here. In English: "That sinner lifted his mouth from the
savage meal, wiping it on the hair of the head he had wasted behind, then began: 'Thou wilt have
me renew desperate grief which even to think of already wrings my heart before I speak of it. But if
my words are to be seed that may bear the fruit of infamy to the traitor I gnaw, thou shalt see me
speak and weep together.'"
If we had time and I were to ask you whether these lines remind you of anything in particular, I'm
sure some of you would immediately jump and tell me. These are clearly an echo of Inferno V,
Francesca's language. The language of love has become now a language of hatred, because from the
point of view of Ugolino, and that's part of his tragedy, he can't tell them apart. He does not know
what love is and what hatred is, and he can exchange one for the other. You could even argue that
retrospectively, the language of love of Francesca maybe was also the language of hatred, but you
would be pushing it beyond the limits of believability. I think that Dante's really echoing Francesca
and the love, and the romance with Paolo, in order to explain this hatred and that's the blindness of
Ugolino and I use the word deliberately. What he lacks is any perspective on himself and on the
world around him.
He then continues, "Thou art I know not who thou art, nor by what means thou hast come down
here, but indeed thou seemest to me Florentine when I hear thee." The focus is on language.
Language here, which is a part of one managing to, first of all, know the other and understand the
other. They may know the inflections of the dialects, the Florentine dialect, and they may even think
that indeed, and Dante has a lot to say in the De vulgari eloquentia, about the question of the
dialects and the instances that they can communicate. In effect, there's no possible communication
between the two of them.
If I were to define for you the rhetorical genre that Dante deploys here, it is that of what we call a
dramatic monologue. Ugolino goes on speaking and therefore he expects nor does he get, any
response from his interlocutor, his apparent interlocutor. It's a dramatic monologue when he goes on
telling us the story of his life the way he sees it. You all know nineteenth-century dramatic
monologues in English literature. This is an occurrence of that genre: I can speak; I can tell you. I
can go on fictionalizing myself and I believe that my perspective or the way I fictionalize myself
will become your reality. Dante entices of course Ugolino to do exactly that because this is exactly
this is the way in which you are in Hell: where you go on really believing that whatever you tell,
that you can go on telling stories and deceive yourself that others are going to believe what you are
saying. The reality that you're going on constructing is everybody's accepted reality. This is one of
the issues, clearly, that we are going to confront.
"Thou art to know that I was Count Ugolino and this is the Archbishop Ruggieri." What an
extraordinary line. What makes this extraordinary is, first of all, the occurrence of what we call
attributes, titles, and then the shift in verbal tense. Ugolino will go on attributing time, "I was Count
Ugolino and this is. . . " That is to say the object of his hatred is unalterable, is timeless, and that
object of his hatred is exactly what goes on defining him. I time belongs to me. I know that I
belong; I have a history. There is a history behind me and there is and this one here, the reified
the object of my hatred is unchanging, Archbishop Ruggieri. There is the secular and the sacred, if
you wish: Guelfs and Ghibellines, with the idea that Ugolino had really betrayed the side. A Guelf
became a Ghibelline and a Ghibelline became a Guelf and so on. So it's the recapitulation of all the
Inferno satanic sins we have seen so far.
"How by means of his evil devices. . ." "I shall tell thee now why I am such a neighbor to him"
What another extraordinary line, because it's the idea of what a neighbor is and what the
neighborhood has become. This is the way: the neighbors cannibalizing, one cannibalizing the
other. "How by means of his evil devices, confiding him, I was taken and then killed, there is no
need to tell; but what thou canst not have learnt, that is, how cruel was my death, thou shalt hear
and shalt know if he has done me wrong."
Now he tells the story that he was put as a prisoner in a tower, which we are meant to understand all
the languages of the other towers. A tower which isolates him is a tower in Pisa. By the way it's
really the tower this has nothing to do with, but I find it irresistible If you read the Cantos of
Ezra Pound, some of the most extraordinary poetry of his, I think, comes from when he was
declared a traitor in the aftermath of the Second World War. He was put in a cage not too far from
this tower of Pisa which is really one of the most beautiful part is where the Scuola Normale in Pisa,
and he writes this poetry about the tower that he sees. Clearly his own sense of trying to understand
what treachery really means, and what I'm really saying is these are issues that keep being present
in the consciousness of the leading imaginative figures of our time. He goes into this the tower
of the hunger, as it is called, and was shut up. ". . . had already shown me through its slits several
moons when I had the bad dream which rent for me the veil of the future."
He had dreams that he has a dream and the mistake he makes is to think that the dream is going
to be real. And the dream is this: "This man appeared to me as master and lord hunting the wolf and
the whelps," the word Guelf comes from wolf, Guelf and Ghibellines, "on the mountains for which
the Pisans cannot see Lucca. With hounds lean, trained and eager he sent them the Gualandi. . .that
when I awoke" he has this idea of destruction, the mutual destructions of the wolf, etc.
"When I awoke before morning I heard my children, who were with me crying in their sleep and
asking for bread. Thou art cruel indeed if thou grieve not now, thinking what my heart forboded,
and if thou weep not, at what does thou ever weep? They were now awake and the hour approached
when our food used to be brought to us, and each was afraid because of his dream and I heard
below the door of the horrible tower nailed up; at which I looked in the faces of my sons without a
word. I did not weep, I so turned to stone within. They wept, and my little Anselm said" By the
way, to understand how there is a counter: there is a sort of movement between the horror of this
tragedy and the tenderness, the pathos of it. One of the ways in which Dante suggests this, is the use
of diminutives for Anselmuccio, this little kid that he has, this kid.
"Thou lookest so, father, what ails thee?' At that I shed no tears, nor answered all that day, nor that
night after, till another sun came forth on the world. As soon as a little ray made its way into the
doleful prison and I discerned in four faces my own look, I bit both hands for grief; and they,
thinking I did it from a desire to eat, rose up suddenly and said, 'Father it would be far less pain for
us if thou eat of us. Thou didst clothe us with this wretched flesh and do thou strip us of it.' I calmed
myself then, not to make them more unhappy, that day and the next we stayed all silent. Ah hard
earth, why didst thou not open? When we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw himself
outstretched at my feet saying, 'My father why dost thou not help me?'
I don't think it's far fetched if I were to ask you to overhear behind this question of one of the
children, exactly an echo of the prayer of Jesus on the Cross that we heard, that we read, a few
cantos back. There is a way in which the violence inflicted on Ugolino's children seems to repeat or
re-enact the great drama of the Christian sacrifice. "There he died," also crucified, in fact, "there he
died and, as thou seest me, I saw the three drop one by one during the fifth day and the sixth;
therefore I gave myself, now blind."
That's what it is, the lack of perspective: he sees nothing. He therefore has no distance from
anything, nor can he tell things apart or distinguish things one from the other, ". . . to groping over
each and for two days called on them after they were dead. Then fasting had more power than
grief." An extraordinarily ambiguous line because we really do not know what he's saying.
According to Rodin, for instance, who will go on making a statue of this, it's at the at the
MOMA, you can go and see that. The story is that of that Ugolino ate his own children, "then
fasting had more power than grief." I yielded to the appetites, the urging of hunger more than grief.
Or maybe he's saying just something else. Maybe he's saying then fasting had more power than
grief, I really died of fasting for hunger rather than for the grief.
We don't know, and I think that part of the tragic mode that Dante is trying to convey to us, is that
we are left and this is by the way, is Borges' reading. Borges writes nine lectures on Dante, what
else? Realizing the importance of number nine for Dante, he writes nine lectures on Dante and one
of them is on the story of Ugolino. And he says, he actually wants us to leave he wants to leave
us in suspension, to believe that it's possible that he may have been eating the children, but maybe it
is the sensibility of so many critics have been offended by this suggestion that he actually could go
on cannibalizing his own children. I think that Borges is right, that we are not supposed to be able to
tell apart, that the ambiguity of that line is never going to be quite resolved. It's going to be forever
there.
But, the most important element of this tragic occurrence and Dante before I go on let me just
say, "Ah, Pisa. . ." Dante goes on into an apostrophe against Pisa, again with this language of now
he talks, he breaks the silence. "Ah Pisa, shame of the peoples of the fair land where sounds the
s. . ." Another little touch, another little echo of the De vulgari eloquentia. That is to say, in the
moment where he's dealing with treachery, which I call the most nihilistic of all sins, because you
really declare null and void any bond that you may have with others, he uses, and the irony is, to
me, glaring the affirmative part. As if here, there is a possible affirmation, there is none.
". . . where sounds the s, since thy neighbors are slow to punish thee make Capraia and Gorgona
shift and put a bar on Arno's mouth so that it drown every soul in thee." This is really the kind of
language that Ugolino himself had used when before the consumation of the tragedy, he really begs
the earth for an earthquake, that the earth may open up and swallow all of them. Here Dante is using
exactly the same language. The idea that it is so horrifying, he's a spectacle; that he has been in the
tragic spectacle he has been witnessing, that the whole world here could be an apocalyptic ending to
the world.
To go back to the key issue there may not be time for a discussion today and I apologize but
the real tragic event though, what is the tragic event other than. . . "What if Count Ugolino had the
name of betraying thy strongholds, thou shouldst not have put his children to such torment," So this
has been the crucifixion of innocence. "Their youthful years, thou new Thebes," Pisa is the new
Thebes, a new Thebaid that we have been witnessing now, ". . . made them innocent, Uguccione
and Brigata and the other two named already in my song."
This is really the tragic Dante has been using now the tragic language indeed, that he had been
hoping and theorizing in the De vulgari eloquentia and then they move on. What is the really tragic
occurrence? The tragic occurrence is in the very presence of the Christological language in this
canto, because the sacrifice of the cross means one thing and one thing only: that now that all
violence is finished and because we have found the scapegoat, the voluntary scapegoat, who goes
around saying that we're all innocent and that he is the guilty one, that's how we are declared
that's how we are redeemed, that's why we are made innocent once again, right? The story here, re-
enacting and echoing the story of the cross, seems to say the futility seems to announce the
futility of that sacrifice. Retrospectively, he says that that sacrifice too was just one of the senseless
acts of violence that have happened in history and that punctuate human history. Of course, this is
not the end of the poem, but it's the most desperate part of the poem, because Dante comes to
believe that the law of history, that the law of the world is really a tragic law. And there is
something absolute about it, and not quite escapable.

Chapter 6. Canto XXXIV: Satan [00:59:27]

We shall see how he's going to move through this and I really have to go into Canto XXXIV a little
bit. I will not say too much this time. Canto XXXIV is where Dante meets Satan. So the encounter
with Satan is, first of all, that which gives incredible coherence to the whole movement of Inferno,
because as you remember the story of Inferno began with the neutral angels, those who had been
sitting, watching the spectacle of the disruption of the cosmos. Now the neutral angels at the time of
the Lucifer's rebellion of against God and now it ends with Lucifer, so it's really as a kind of
angelic, cosmic proportion.
The other thing that I have to say is that if you imagine, those of you who are readers of Milton and
Paradise Lost, and you know what a brilliant rhetorician Satan Lucifer is in Paradise Lost,
you'll be disappointed. In fact, T.S. Eliot, who writes a commentary of this, he says, I really
recommend the first time readers of the Divine Comedy to skip Canto XXXIV because it's strange
that Lucifer Satan doesn't speak. And that was exactly the point that, I'm sorry to say, T.S. Eliot,
at this time, really had probably had never read the De vulgari eloquentia. He's not supposed to
speak, because he's one of the angels who really do not use the human language, but more
importantly, because he represents evil defeated.

Chapter 7. Canto XXXIII: Inventing the Poetic Myth of Purgatory [01:01:03]

From this point of view, Canto XXXIV stands in radical sharp contrast to Canto XXXIII. In Canto
XXXIII we saw we have witnessed the sovereignty of evil. It is as if it were all engulfing and
hovering over all of reality. Here now we witness exactly the opposite, how Satan becomes a
reified, dumb object and actually an instrument for the pilgrim's ascent. It's going through the body
of Lucifer that the pilgrim can go on, and the guide and Virgil can turn themselves upside down and
finally re-emerge to the light.
The rest of the canto good. I think that we are going to have a few minutes, but I have to say
something about the rest of the canto. The rest of the canto deals with a cosmological argument and
the cosmological argument is where does Purgatory come from? And Dante gives an extraordinary
invents a poetic myth. And the poetic myth that he invents is that when Lucifer fell at the time
of the grand angelic disruption, the first rebellion against the Deity, the earth retreats out of fear at
the approaching of this fallen angel and re-emerges on the other side of the hemisphere, the
southern hemisphere. That's the beginning of Purgatory. You see the connection from an evil act, the
chances of redemption, how in affecting Dante's cosmos, there is nothing which cannot be utilized,
no evil which cannot be utilized to the ends of the good. Everything the real defeat of evil is
when that itself can become the stepping stone over the threshold of evil itself in order to reach the
purgatorial island.
The last little detail that I will tell you is I ask you to read the last line of Canto XXX. You'll like
this. It's a little detail that you'll like, I hope. The last line of Inferno is: e quindi uscimmo a riveder
le stele and therefore we came out to see once again the stars. Just a little detail to remind you
about the extraordinary love of symmetry in Dante's poem, that each canticle will end with that
same word stele, stars, stars, and stars. That is to say each canticle ends with us looking up,
reminding us of where we are and still longing for the stars.

Chapter 8. Question and Answer [01:03:46]

I have come to in a hurry I have reached the end of the of Inferno. There's Purgatory now and
then see if there are questions. Yes?
Student: Can you say a little bit more about how Dante was trying to construct almost like a total
perspective through his construction of the various languages, from seeing different forms of Italian
and trying to get an all encompassing perspective, can you say how that relates too?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah, the question is, can I say more good question. The
question is can I say more about how Dante's trying to construct how he uses total perspectives and
you mean both in the De vulgari eloquentia and here? Yes, thank you, because in effect, I was
hoping that someone would ask me this question because I really did not tell you how this the
De vulgari eloquentia is completed here and why couldn't Dante complete the De vulgari
eloquentia when he wrote the tract. When he wrote the tract, he wanted to unify he believed that
they are the dialects, fourteen dialects in Italian, he acknowledged, he recognizes fourteen
dialects. He knew some of them very well and he wanted to make a unified language out of that, a
kind of artificial language, a sort of let's call it Italian Esperanto: something that you could bring
together. And what he was lacking, so much so, that there are those scholars who work on who
have been working I don't agree with that, is that almost Dante seemed to have a kind of
seemed to be in agreement with the so-called logicians, those who have a kind of the idea that
language has a sort of, let's say, a Cartesian linguistics. There's a kind of rational structure to it and
that can be really remade.
The point is that when he writes the De vulgari eloquentia, this is true. I don't buy the idea that he's
following the logicians of the Middle Ages, the grammarians, who are really logicians. What he
really lacked was a historical sense and the little detail that Hebrew was still the surviving language
from the creation of man to our own time because and he had a good theological argument for
that, because it would be inconceivable that the Redeemer of the world would use a language other
than the language that had been employed by Adam.
When he comes to Paradise, to the Divine Comedy he completely changes view. In Paradiso
XXVI, as I'm going to tell you, Dante says no, no. Hebrew disappeared with immediately after
Adam fell. With the fall of Adam through the Garden, there was no longer the primal language and
he goes on elaborating the idea that God does not use any language of that is to say, human
beings are the letters and syllables of God's language. It's not Hebrew, it's not Latin, it's not Greek,
it's not whatever, it's not Chinese, that's really the We are the syllables: that's Dante's idea of
Paradiso XXVI. This was the that's the real change.
What does it mean in terms of the Inferno? It's that he had understood that, in order to write about a
unified language, he had to descend. He could not go on the tower and from there watch all the
qualities: aesthetic, what is the sweet what is the well combed language and what is the less well
combed, the harsh language, what are the sounds that he really should be applying and adopt into
Italian. What he really understands that in order to have a unified language you have to descend in
the political realities of these cities? That's the difference between the De vulgari eloquentia and the
lower Inferno, a sense of history, that's really the difference. To see this the sense of history
you can be in a tower as Ugolino is, and be blind, or you can be in a tower like Nimrod is and do
not even know what you are talking about, who can go on completely reversing, messing up, and
confusing the Hebrew that he should have known. Do you understand what I'm saying? That's really
the difference between the two. Good question because it allowed me to focus on a detail that I
probably didn't explain very clearly.
Student: I don't understand how he could have said that Hebrew died at the Fall.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: You don't understand why?
Student: I don't understand how Dante could think
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Make that statement?
Student: Yeah, is that what you're saying he said?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah, that's I don't think that there are any traces of Adam's
language. The question is why it's a sort of predicament and I don't know if it he says he
doesn't quite understand why how Dante could say that Hebrew died with the fall of man. That's
what he Adam will tell him. He meets Adam; he's another poet, because he's the one who names
the world.
Student: Where do the Scriptures come from in Dante's [inaudible]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The Scriptures are not in Hebrew, Scriptures are the language of
Jesus, for instance, is Aramaic. We have to be careful about what kind of the kind of is that
Adam's language or is that the language it's a language that changes in time, that's all, that's all
he's really saying. But the New Testaments are in Aramaic, for instance, which is a dialect. Yes?
Student: So this goes back a little bit to the last lecture, but looking back over the entirety of
Inferno, it seems like Dante expresses different levels, I guess, of sympathy or pity for the people
who are trapped in certain circles of Hell, especially for the sowers of discord, and then later in
other cases, like at the end of Canto XXXIII. He's happy to be with Charles, to someone who's
being tormented
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, Bocca degli Abati.
Student: What's that?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay go on.
Student: Right, and I just it's interesting though the re the different relationships that Dante
has to the different reactions he has to these punishments. Given that he's essentially created all
of the Inferno is supposed to be a representation of divine justice, but it seems like overall Dante
is the judge and executioner here. Given that the whole how sincerely does Dante believe in this
divide? Does he think he's
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: In this
Student: In the divide between himself as this narrator who can feel pity for the different for the
people trapped in different areas of Hell versus Dante as sort of the I mean, in some sense, he's
the creator of all of this.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Absolutely.
Student: He has assigned everyone to each level of Hell I know this is a broad thing but
[inaudible]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: It is.
Student: [Inaudible] I kind of wanted to see some comment on that divide. How sincerely is this a
vision to him?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, since Dante's Dante, the pilgrim, has different
responses to the figures whom he has created, sometimes he's tender and sympathetic, sometimes he
just kicks them, if that's the scene that you are referring to, and they're all his creations, how sincere
is he in his vision? The response is that I would formulate it a little bit differently, but that's fine. We
agree that Dante has is not the indifferent spectator to all of them and I think that what matters to
him most is to show a degree of passionate involvement with whoever they may be. He's not going
to be sentimentalizing about all of them for a number of reasons. He's very sentimental with his
teacher. I think he's really very sarcastic with Pier della Vigna whom, you remember, he mocks at
language of his, the contrived I thought he thought, I thought. . . That's not Dante's language,
that's really Pier della Vigna's own poetry that Dante's picking up. I think that he is very he has a
sense of pathos, and maybe he's also seduced by Francesca. Francesca, you can't put this past her,
that she's trying to seduce him as well as she seduces, or lets Paolo, seduce her.
When he comes further down, the relationship is no longer a relationship of this tenderness, of
forms now there's this anger. Anger at what? At the extraordinary horror of what human beings
can do, and there's nothing Dante calls fraud, the sin peculiar to man, to human beings; the sin
peculiar to human beings because they are they have a reason that becomes part of their
premeditations, part of their machinations of evil. And I find that repulsion he has, I find that very
dramatically speaking, very convincing. It's still part of a judgment that he is making and it's not
an attenuation at all of that judgment. The anger with which he attacks Pisa, that the idea that he
speaks prophetically there, why isn't this whole place, disappearing, this is I think that to me
is you could say it's sincere. I wouldn't be using that language but I think that's it dramatically
very powerful. And I don't know if you would agree that that's probably the best way of referring to
this term to describe this situation. Would you agree?
Student: Yeah.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I find it dramatically very apt. It's because it's a consequence of
the genuine horror can you imagine? I mean you had the earlier even the diviners with a
shape a human shape twisted. The head turned around. Then the alchemists, also represented in a
kind of twisted form. It's this twisting of the human image and this and the reality of what human
beings can do and ongoing and this hatred has taken over. I think that he's approaching them too.
There is a way in which I was saying he echoes Ugolino when Ugolino says, 'oh earth, why didn't
 wasn't there an earthquake and which would swallow everything.' I mean, the language of the
eater, the cannibal, so to speak. And then Dante just says: why isn't there some kind of great
drowning of all this? Why aren't the islands just moving and be a barrier, so that the whole town
will go under?
I think that there is a way in which he's almost doing the same thing. That's it, almost, re-enacting
the kind of sense of nothingness that Ugolino had shown to him. Obviously, he does not agree with
Ugolino. It's not that there is a kind of complete identification with him. And how do we know that
this is not going to be the case? He's writing, Ugolino isn't. The poem is what rescues Dante from
yielding to the temptation of absolute despair and therefore distinguishes him distinguishes his
own temporary impulse for nihilism, with the nihilism that distinguishes, characterizes all the
sinners and above all, the treacherous souls.
Maybe we should stop here; we're going to talk about something so much more serene, Purgatory,
next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 10 - Purgatory I, II [October 7, 2008]
Chapter 1. Purgatory as an Idea and as a Poetic Construction [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Today we will begin Purgatorio which is a word meaning place of
cleansing, purification and is the middle section of the poem, literally a place of transition between
the world of Hell, and all the evil that we have witnessed, and then, the realm of glory which is
going to be Paradise.
Let me say a few things about Purgatory, both as an idea and as a poetic construction, Dante's poetic
construction. As an idea, the way Dante understands it, Purgatory is part of human geography. As
you know, it's located in the southern hemisphere. There are two hemispheres in medieval
geography: the northern hemisphere, which is the one we inhabit, and then there is the southern
hemisphere, and Purgatory is an island. I have tried to explain to you last time the origin of this
place. In Dante's medieval poetic thinking it's an island that emerged from the northern hemisphere
at the time of Lucifer's fall. The earth trembles and retreats, that's the idea, as Lucifer approaches
and thus it creates the void which becomes Hades, the abyss, and the island and the Purgatory
emerges on the other side, in the southern hemisphere. At the top of the Purgatory, there is the island
there is the peak is the Garden of Eden, there where God placed Adam and Eve.
So that from this point of view, Purgatory is part of human geography, but it's historically
inaccessible to human beings. One hero that we already met, Ulysses, in Inferno XXVI, tries to
approach an island and retrospectively, we can understand that that was the island of Purgatory as if
it were a place of immortality that Ulysses wanted to reach and could not. That journey of his ended
in shipwreck and tragically. Inferno XXVI is the text for that kind of concern.
The other trait about Purgatory, a moral trait, since this is now we are going to enter the realm of
reconstruction of the human and this sort of makes of sense that Dante should place it immediately
after Hell. It is as if only by knowing, only by experiencing more or less, as metaphorically as we
can, through the poetry of Dante, the nature of evil and the horror of it, can we begin to have an
appreciation of the good. The good toward which now the pilgrim is going to climb.
The other thing that you should keep in mind about Purgatory, and the difficulties that the poet will
have, is the following. The perception of moral life and political life in Inferno was so satanic, so
narrow, so terrible that Dante's going to have a lot of quite a challenge to try to explain the
usefulness and the possibility of reconstructing a moral world, then the political world. He came
very close to a total rejection of the historical world and the political world, and now he has to find
out how that reconstruction is going to be possible. The way he will do this is, literally, to go back
to the natural world.
Do not expect Dante to imagine a place where there is some kind of redemptive intervention from
the outside that can tell us, this is the way you do it. The natural world must be capable of
producing within itself some at least contain some seeds for a need to reconstruct for a need
for the good. This is going to be part of his strategy and his difficulties.
A further trait of Purgatory which was really completely missing in Inferno, we had never had a
sense of time. Time was the biological clock of the pilgrim who was the only living creature, the
only truly displaced figure, and he is the only displaced figure throughout the poem. In Purgatorio
he will find in Purgatorio, they're all displaced figures. So it's a more human world, but here,
now, they have this sense of time. In fact, the first thing that we come to understand is how what
time is. It's time understood as future oriented, as a projection in some kind of future, and, at the
same time, this idea of time also turns out to be a return to the past. So that as the pilgrim is going
ahead, he really discovers that he's going backwards to the Garden of Eden: exactly there where
Adam and Eve were placed at the top of Purgatory by God at the time in the story that you have
in Genesis, for instance.
This idea of time, this will become truly a leitmotif throughout Purgatory. The idea of what is the
relationship between the past and the future, since the only real time is really the future from that
point of view, which makes you understand that even the past was the future at some point, at least
right? The future is the only thing that Dante is going to be interested in and the future will come in
the possibility of a future, and the way it's related to the past will become the object of his concerns,
the object of his thinking openly as he goes through the various ledges of Purgatory.
Poetically, the Purgatory is divided into two into three parts, I would say actually. The first part
is the so-called anti-Purgatory, made of souls who are waiting. They're not really penitent yet, but
waiting to be assigned a particular place along the ledges. And then, the so-called penitents before
going through the process of cleansing, beginning with pride, and ending up with lechery at just
before the pilgrim gets into the Garden of Eden. The ordering of sins is the exact reversal of the
ordering of sins you had in Inferno. Here you begin with a spiritual sin or intellectual sin, the
question of pride, and end up with the most physical and material of them all, lechery, which as you
recall is the inverted image of what happened in Inferno with Lucifer and the sin of Lucifer being
really a sin of pride at the end of Canto XXIV.

Chapter 2. Canto I: A New Departure [00:07:34]

Well, having said this maybe other things will come to mind as I go on today. Let me begin with
some other a couple of details as I just as I get into plunge into Canto I. What is the
pilgrim now? The poem the journey began on Good Thursday, as it's called. Dante spends the
first night but the journey the real journey begins on Good Friday in a clear imitation of Christ's
harrowing of Hell and emergence into the light on Easter Sunday. That's where we are now, Easter
Sunday morning. If the Inferno begins at dusk therefore, the idea of the approaching night that
stands for the unknowability of whatever he is going to confront. Dante's fascinated with the idea of
the night throughout Inferno. Imagine remember Ulysses who travels following the sun and then
ends up really gazing at the night, the unknowability of his destiny, the unknowability of the place
even where he is.
Now we begin with dawn and therefore Canto I of Purgatorio becomes that which in Provenal
literature is called an aubade, from the word, aube, alba in Italian, aubade. The song the dawn
song, a song that in many ways reverses the grand tradition of the erotic lyrics of Provenal poetry
where the dawn becomes the unhappy time for the parting of lovers and here now its regained as the
great time when, finally, the pilgrim can go on and the poet can go on mapping, literally now
mapping the journey, sailing through or sending as the metaphor that he asks that he adopts can
be.
The poem the second part of the poem, Purgatorio begins, first of all, with an image of water
and therefore it carries further this motif of the cleansing and purification, but really with a better
metaphor from our point of view. "To course over better waters the little bark of my wit now lifts
her sails, leaving behind her so cruel a sea, and I will sing of that second kingdom where the human
spirit is purged and becomes fit to ascend to Heaven. But here let poetry rise again from the dead, O
holy Muses, since I am yours; and here let Calliope rise up for a while and accompany my song
with that strain which smote the ears of the wretched pies so that they despaired of pardon."
It's an extraordinary proem to Purgatorio, for a number of reasons. First of all, Dante picks up the
metaphor of the epic topos, the epic metaphor of the journey with which the poem began, 'in the
middle of the journey of our life,' as you recall. But now this idea of the process as indicated with
first of all, it's sailing, therefore literally recalling the sea voyage of Ulysses. That's an oblique
metaphor.
I want to draw your attention to the use of this adjective a comparative adjective that's what
we call it in grammar, as you recall: "the better waters." It's just Dante's emphasis, exactly on the
process and then the comparatively good. This is not the best of waters; it's not the worst of waters;
this is the better waters. We are really on the way to better things. It's a world of degree that Dante
introduces. Dante really believes in a sort of hierarchy and a hierarchy of values, of states, of
powers, of beauty, of intellect. The world cannot be it's never a dualistic world between what's
bad and what's good. There's a lot of mediations, meditating steps along the way, and now he
already introduces this whole question with the notion of the better waters.
"The little bark" with its this is not only a journey; this is a journey of poetry. It is as if Dante
now wants to highlight a motif which is going to be very crucial throughout the poem and in our
reading of this poem. That the reading of this poem, and I have been addressing this issue to some
of your questions, that there really is no sharp, no drastic discontinuity between the journey of the
pilgrim and the journey of the poet. That the journey of the poet is an extension; it, in itself, is a
journey in of itself is a journey of knowledge and the journey of discovery. Dante makes large
claims for poetry: poetry is a way of knowing. It's just not a re-commemoration of the past.
Now here, he talks about the journey as being the journey of the poet, "the little bark of my wit." It's
a conventional way of thinking about the bark of poetry with which he is there seems to be a way
of saying this is now more at this stage, at least, he wants us to think about the journey of poetry
and not just the journey that he himself will use will undertake the journey of the pilgrim, the
hard, difficult journey filled with fear that he was experiencing in Inferno.
I also want to draw your attention to another little detail of the text. This is the first time now that
Dante will use the future tense. "I will sing." We're in a world open to futurity and, if it's open to
futurity, the only way of thinking about futurity is made possible by a belief in the new. You have to
you cannot really think yes, you can think of the future, but if the future is exactly as it is
today, then you really have no future. Then you really think that all is released into the domain of
sameness. If my day today is exactly what the world that I experienced yesterday, there's no new,
no idea of the new. And Dante: here, uses the future, and clearly implying that there is an
alternative, a difference, a possibility of doing things in ways that have not been done before.
This is going to be a new departure, a new departure for thought, a new departure for the
imagination, and now he says it has to be also a new departure for poetry itself. I emphasize this
idea of the future "will sing." The first time that he he wasn't saying this in Inferno, of course he
couldn't even say that in the Vita nuova. You remember that I pointed out when we were reading
that little autobiographical, great, text called the Vita nuova, at the beginning of the term, I indicated
to you that there is never the future tense used in that text. It was all a book of memory with the
difficulties and the dangers of memory. The dangers of memory being that memory changes, can
draw us into a world of phantasms. That's one of the it's not a rejection of memory, only a way of
highlighting its possible dangers. And the belief that unless you live with some idea of danger,
maybe we're not really thinking hard enough.
Here now it's the the only time that the future was used in the Vita nuova was either in the idea of
death, when Dante has a prophetic dream and he hears a voice that he perceives as a kind of soul.
So truth laden it is in that voice that he thinks of it as a kind of prophecy, as a sort of oracle
speaking to him: you too will die. Beatrice has just died and then the death of Beatrice brings to his
mind the fear and threat of mortality to him. You too will die: that's the way the future is going to be
understood. Then the poem, the whole Vita nuova ends with a statement of hope, and hope to work
and write things whereby I can say things about Beatrice that had never been said about any woman
and so that becomes the two possibilities of the future. The only literally once grammatically the
future tense and the other with through this periphrastic construction, this oblique construction
about the hope, the verb use of the hope in with the idea of the future indicated there.

Chapter 3. The Muses: Tonality and Orientation [00:16:35]

Then, "but here let poetry rise again from the dead," and the prayer to the muses, very much in the
style of the epic tradition and especially of the muses, to want the muse of epic poetry, Calliope.
Then the focus of Calliope will really tell you something about the kind of think retrospectively
really explains, "but let dead poetry rise again from the dead."
The poem presents itself as Calliope, was the mother of whom? Anybody remember? Remember
your mythology? Okay, no you don't now, but it's the mother of Orpheus, so let dead poetry rise
again from the dead it's Dante presents himself as he were an orphic poet. He was not an orphic
poet, but it's really a poet in the tradition of Orpheus who wants to conquer death; that's clearly not
for him, that's what the Orpheus descent into the underworld really is the way of conquering death.
The belief that poetry can do the trick, that through poetry we immortalize ourselves, we conquer
death, he is going to very soon to understand that that's not the way he is going to do that.
Then something in the second paragraph I want to read it a little bit, because it really gives you a
different sense of the tonality of Purgatorio, because not only do you have now morning and time,
you also for the first time have light. Not the sort of spectacular shades of light, the blue, the reds,
the green with which he experiences and dramatizes Paradise according to the lights emanating
from the various planets, the red of Mars, the white of Jupiter, the blue of Saturn and so there is a
kind of polychromic palette that is going to be deployed. Here it's now a more human and natural
world, the natural world, and listen to this and this enables me to say something else about the traits
of Purgatorio.
"The sweet hue of the oriental sapphire which was gathering the serene face of the heavens from the
clear zenith to the first circle, gladdened my eyes again as soon as I passed out of the dead air which
had afflicted my eyes and breast. The fair planet that prompts to," Venus, the morning star, "to love
made all the east laugh, veiling the Fishes which were in her train. I turned to the right."
You remember that I sort of tried to explain to you that, with one exception that I can't explain,
nobody can explain, and very few people have noticed the Dante is now turning to the right,
which is to say that even while going down, spiraling down in the world of Hell he actually was
going to the right. Though he said that he was going to the left, and he was going to the left because
he was upside down. Now he is right side up and so the directions of the human world are going to
be regained.
"I turned to the right," he will never use this image again, "and set my mind on the other pole, and I
saw four stars never seen before but by the first people," Adam and Eve. "The skies seem to rejoice
in their flames. O widowed region of the north, since thou art denied that sight!" The northern
hemisphere is where we are. Dante's in the southern hemisphere. He is connecting with us, telling
us what we are deprived of in by not knowing, by having lost Paradise.
A couple of things that I will not since Dante will go back to these images. The way he literally
orients himself: the metaphor he uses is that of is the oriental light, and the way he's always
orienting or reorienting himself. How do you know where you are, is now in Purgatorio and also in
Paradise, when thinking about characters here on earth and recalling their lives it's always by
looking at the east. It's always by looking in the light of the east, and from this point of view Dante
really retrieves that most incredible metaphor that is available among the mystics, medieval
mystics, and I'm thinking or thinkers. I'm thinking of even Boethius, Cassiodorus I hope
they're not just names for you who think who believe that you can only think, that we in the
west, the western light, can only think by looking toward the east. That the way in which we can be
orienting ourselves is by trying to capture the source of that light. I mean this in the most
metaphorical, and as we shall see, the widest senses possible, but that's all he is saying now.
But at the same time, in the language, it's incredible how it has shifted between the first paragraph
and the second paragraph. That which seems to be the excitement for the light, and now he's
experiencing again; it's Easter Sunday. He understands the Resurrection, this is going to hit him
very strongly now, but it's also an elegiac the tonality is elegiac, the idea of what we have lost,
the widowed region of the northern hemisphere, the sense of general loss, though it's a provisional
privilege for him to see all this, but this indicates and introduces that the extraordinary tension,
poetic tension in Purgatory. The dialectic between excitement for the future and an elegy for the
past. The pilgrim is caught in between and we shall see the consequences between this is still at
the level of tonality I would call it, but we shall see what this really means in a moment.
As Dante approaches now, "When I have withdrawn my gaze," and so on. This is line 25: "When I
have withdrawn my gaze from them," turning to the stars, "turning a little toward the other pole,
where the Wain had already disappeared, I saw beside me an old man alone, worthy by his looks of
so great reverence that no son owes more to a father; his beard was long and streaked with white,
and his hair the same, a double tress falling on his breast," etc.

Chapter 4. Cato [00:23:27]

This is going to be the encounter with Cato and I want to talk about Cato. Let me just give you a
little bit of extra Dantesque information. I mean in a way, this is you probably do not know that
this representation, we call this descriptio of the old man with the beard or white streaked with
white but on two sides really is the paradigm the model that Michelangelo writes
Michelangelo follows in his conception of Moses. Though Dante doesn't lose sight of the fact that
this is Cato. Just a little piece of how Michelangelo read this particular meeting.
Who is this Cato? Dante describes him as an old man, and we also know that he's a Roman. He's a
pagan, and he's not only a pagan, he's a man of laws. The first thing that he wonders and he says,
paragraph, "Who are ye that I have fled," these are just people who have tried to literally escape
from prison, "the eternal prison against the blind stream?' he said. . .'Who has guided you or who
was your lantern in coming forth from profound night that holds in perpetual blackness the valley of
Hell? Are the laws of the abyss thus broken," this is the Roman tradition of the law, "are there laws
of the abyss."
In a way this is a man who is a stranger to the world of Purgatory. He certainly doesn't seem to
understand the heaven may have been some grace that maybe Dante and his guide are here out of
some providential intervention which is not to be explained by laws or by natural, or by the laws of
nature, or by manmade laws.
"Are the laws of the abyss broken or has a new decree," he wonders, "been made in heaven that,
being damned, you come to my cliffs?' My leader," Virgil. The two Romans talk now and I who
myself, "Then answered him: 'Of myself, I came not. A lady," Beatrice, a recapitulation of Inferno I,
"descended from Heaven for whose prayers I succoured this man with my companionship; but since
this is thy will to have it made more plain how in truth it stands with us, it cannot be mine to deny
thee. This man never saw his last hour, but by his folly was so near to it that little time was left to
run. I was sent to him . . . I have shown him all the guilty race and now purpose to show him those
spirits that cleanse themselves under thy charge. How I have led him would be long to tell thee;
there descends from above virtue which aids me in bringing him to see thee and to hear thee. May it
please thee to be gracious to his coming. He goes seeking liberty which is so dear, as he knows who
gives his life for it."
And the reference is clearly to Cato himself who, historically a historical figure actually
committed suicide in the civil war and refusing to take sides between Pompey and Caesar, as is told
in the great epic by Lucan, the Roman Spanish poet, who wrote the so-called Civil War. A text that
is very polemical, in between-among other things with Virgil.
"Thou knowest it, since death for it was no bitter to thee in Utica," in North Africa, "where thou
didst leave the vesture," the body, "which in the great day will be so bright. The eternal edicts are
not broken for us, for this man lives and Minos does not bind me; but I am of the circle," Limbo,
"where are the chased eyes of thy Marcia," his wife, "who in her looks still prays thee, O holy
breast, that thou hold her for thine own. For her love, then, do thou incline to us, allow us to go
through thy seven kingdoms. I will report to her thy kindness if thou deign to be spoken of there
below."
And he responds, "Marcia so pleased my eyes while I was yonder,' he said then, "that whatever
kindness she sought of me I did; now that she dwells beyond the evil stream she cannot move me
more, by the law which was made when I came forth from thence. But if a lady," etc.
This is an amazing from in substantial terms, an amazing beginning in the poem because Dante
meets Cato whom he defines we are being told there that he's an old man, a pagan, and a suicide.
There are traits that Virgil singles out, obliquely referring to his adventures and that clearly
contradict the world of Purgatory, because the Purgatory is a Christian canticle. This is Easter
Sunday, why have it inaugurated by the presence of the pagan who knew nothing of the
incarnation? Why have it it's the Rome of a renewed life, why start it with a suicide? Someone
who we saw what Dante thought of the suicides when in a complicated way throughout
Inferno, there were a number of suicides inhabiting various aspects of various regions of Hell,
but especially among the with the violent against nature Inferno XIII and so, an old man, a
suicide, and a pagan: why does he do this?
A figure that he draws out of the world of Lucan; what we are told about him this is usually
whenever you have representations of the beyond, you always have a young man, for instance a
juvenis, or this is a character, the Latin term meaning the young, in Alain de Lille for example
there's always a young man or a young woman who is welcoming to indicate the renewed life, the
novelty, the freshness of a life. You certainly don't have an old man and you certainly do not have a
suicide.

Chapter 5. Suicide; Purgatory as the Domain of Freedom [00:30:14]

Now the question of the suicide is probably the easiest to determine because Cato's suicide is a
suicide for freedom. Let me say a couple of things about freedom because it's I call Purgatory,
really, the domain of freedom. It's really the place of freedom. He begins here explaining, as it were,
a political, but also moral state. It's political because it's a refusal of the disarray and chaos brought
in by the war between Pompey and Caesar, at the time of the civil war, but it is also a moral state,
because Cato decides to put an end to his life in a sort of sacrificial move; as if to draw attention to
the way in which the state had been killed, had been destroyed by the rivalry between these two
great figures who have not opposed, but have a rivalry about power.
Freedom is to the fundamental problem, it's a Roman issue let me just say. Dante wants us to think
of it at the very beginning of Purgatorio, in pagan intellectual terms, freedom. The whole
Purgatory ends up with the pilgrim regaining and being crowned, as he'll say, with the attainment of
free will, so the whole poem really moves this idea of Cato's search for freedom, press for freedom,
and the pilgrim's attainment of free will.
Now there is an obvious relationship to begin with between freedom, on the one hand, and, I would
say, the future on the other. The poem begins with the future and now we are going to be said what
are they what is the virtue of the future? You cannot conceive of freedom, unless you have an
idea of the future. You cannot you understand the connection between the two? You cannot
conceive of a novelty unless you have an idea of the future and unless you have idea of freedom.
The notion of originality is actually, even poetic originality, is impossible, unless it's tied to a certain
idea of freedom. It presupposes them all, so that the attainment of freedom really means poetic
originality, the idea of the future. The notion that things can be different.
If I am slave to the past, if I am a slave to a political order, if I am slave to my own vices, as
internalized as that quest can be, then I really have no freedom. Cato embodies one who refuses
living if living means living in a state of tyranny to civil war, violence, and therefore to the
impossibility of a moral life. That's easy to determine, that's easy to explain.
I even think that the notion of the old man can be explained. Dante wants to draw our attention, first
of all, that somehow the search for the future, he's it's not an alternative to the past, it grows out
of the past so that we he's rejecting the idea that there may be some sharp distinction between the
two and that the seeds of the future are already contained in the past, in a figure such as an old man,
Cato.
The third problem is the question his being a pagan, and this brings me back to that which is the
project, Dante's project, in Purgatorio. The project is that there is he must make a careful
distinction, which St. Augustine could not make in the City of God. Dante will make it, that's his
that's Dante's target, polemical target. Augustine really distinguishes between the earthly city and
the heavenly city. And the heavenly city may live on earth, but it's really a pilgrim church going on
toward the beatitude and the encounter with God. The earthly city is corrupt and in many ways not
assimilable to the world of the Redemption. This if you are an Augustinian and you have very
supple view of Augustine may strike you as crude, but I don't think that it really violates the
essence of that dual idea between the earthly city and the heavenly city.
Dante is literally talking against the Augustinian dualism. There is in nature, that is within the pagan
secular historical world, there are seeds that can become crucial for the making of the political, for
the making of a new moral life that will be really consonant with, not dissonant with, in accord with
the Redemption, and the Christian Redemption, that he will be actually seeking. Keep this very
much in mind.
A sign of this incredible tension time, the meaning of freedom, the value of the pagan world, the
insistence on the secular as capable of producing some kind of seed for the future emerges really
in the second paragraph, when finally Virgil, to bend to the harshness, to temper the harshness of
Cato, says look, let us go through because I know your wife. Very Italian, I know your wife and I'm
going to go very back, that is to say I know who you are so do me a favor because I'll be doing her a
favor, let me go and Marcia let Marcia I will go there and they will tell her what a great man
you are, what a good man you are.
What he is doing he's appealing to Cato's effective memory and it is an appeal, it's a solicitation that
Cato refuses. She can do nothing for me: he refuses to be determined by the past. You see the
ambiguities that are running through. Dante understands that you have to go through some other
poet and the figuration understands that you cannot really have a sense of the future without being
rooted in the past and then here you have Cato who can only make sharp distinctions, she can do
nothing about me.
I could tell you that this is a very the appeal to Marcia's memory for Cato can become also is
full of ironies and I will only tell you we can't it would take us too far afield, I can tell you
that in effect, in the history of Cato, Marcia had left. She had asked Cato to divorce her because she
wanted to marry somebody else, and at the death of the other husband Marcia asks Cato to take her
and he will. And Dante is Dante recounts this whole story in the Banquet and views it as a sign
of the extraordinary generosity of this man.
There is all of that lore in the background of this reference to Cato, but from our point of view then,
it is a question of the power of memory and the limits of memory. And then finally the he will go
on saying giving some Cato will go on giving some rules that he has to follow in the process
of cleansing: you go and wash yourself from the stain of Inferno, he will tell him, and gird your
loins. They will be there. He will mention and go to the desert shore, therefore go and this is the
last paragraph: "The dawn," here is the dawn song, "was overcoming the morning breeze which fled
before it, so that I descried far off the trembling of the sea. We made our way over the lonely plain,
like one who returns to the road he has lost and, until he finds it, seems to himself to go in vain.
When we were at a part where the dew resists the sun and, being in shade, is little dispersed, my
Master gently laid both hands outspread on the grass. I, therefore, aware of his purpose reached
toward him my tear-stained cheeks." That's the ritual of purification which he, the pilgrim, must
undergo. ". . .and on them he wholly restored the color which Hell had hidden in me. We came then
on the desert shore that never saw men sail its waters, who after had experience of return."
Whom are you suppose to overhear here? What is the reference to? Anybody? Absolutely, he makes
it very clear that Cato and Ulysses are the two pagans. There is a difference: he intrudes he
insinuates a distinction within the body of pagan culture. Ulysses, on the one hand, and his own
transgressive search for knowledge, in the belief that really there is no knowledge without
transgression, which is considerable and would be worth considering, and on the other hand, the
experience of Cato himself. Now we are here with a different pagan. "There he girded me as the
other had bidden." That's a phrase that comes straight out of Inferno XXVI. "O marvel! for as was
the lowly plant he chose such did it spring up again immediately in the place where he had plucked
it."
So Dante has to gird himself the way journeymen would whenever they undertake a journey in
antiquity. Whether it is the biblical journeyman or the Romans the gird they put this girdle
around themselves. They gird their loins. It's a moment of containment of self and that's the ritual he
has to undergo. From my point of view, though, the emphasis falls on the power of the natural
world to restore itself, because immediately and there is an emblem of the Resurrection here
now, but we're still in the natural world. There is no element of grace: the nature of the plant in
an inversion of what had happened in Inferno XIII the plant is rises again, is born again.

Chapter 6. Canto II: Purgatory as the Antipodes of Jerusalem: Exodus

[00:40:42]
And now we come to Canto II. The situation changes somewhat, but let me just begin another point
of it starts with another search for orientation and I mean that in it's an easy pun. The east, the
Orient, and orientation for the pilgrim and now it becomes more clearly Jerusalem, and we'll see the
reason why it's going to be Jerusalem, in a moment. Well, one reason why, let me just say it
immediately because it has nothing to do with the this has to do more with let's say the myth
rather than with the text, is that Hell and that Purgatory is at the antipodes of Jerusalem, against the
feet of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was known as the navel of the earth and now we are in its in
Purgatory at its antipodes.
It starts, "Already the sun had reached the horizon, whose meridian circle covers Jerusalem," so
Jerusalem will become the point of reference, "with its highest point, and night, circling opposite to
it, was issuing from the Ganges with the Scales, which fall from her hand when she exceeds the day.
. ." etc. "I was, white with rosy cheeks of fair Aurora, with her increasing age, were turning orange.
We were still beside the sea, like those that ponder on the road, who go in heart and in body linger."
An extraordinary image of this location of being both being body and mind and aware of a break
between the two, who have expectations and hopes of moving ahead, and yet, they are kept in place
by the heaviness of the body.
"And lo as on the approach of morning Mars grows ruddy through the thick vapors low in the west
over the ocean floor, so appeared to me may I see it again! a light coming so swiftly over the
sea that no flight could match its speed." Here he sees a boat, a fast boat bringing, carrying the souls
of penitents who are reaching the banks of Purgatory. The very opposite of what we saw with
Charon's boat in Hell, the boat of, you remember, of the sinful souls.
And then an angel of God, "Then as the divine bird came towards us more and more, he appeared
brighter, so that my eyes could not bear," line 38, "I cast them down and he came on the shore with
a vessel so swift and light that the water took in nothing of it. On the poop stood the heavenly
steersman such that blessedness seemed written upon him, and more than a thousand spirits sat
within."
And they sing a psalm, "In exitu Israel de Aegypto" Psalm, according to the Vulgate, 113. It's the
psalm in which the Jews are remembering their exodus from the bondage, the slavery in Egypt to
Jerusalem. That's really the story. This book of Exodus, "In exitu Israel de Aegypto." You
understand retrospectively the reference to Jerusalem that gives a kind of unity to this whole canto.
It's a psalm that there are a number of things about this. It's the only text that Dante sites,
textually cites. He might make references to the Bible all the time, but the only text of the Bible that
Dante really cites literally and takes from textually, is always the Book of Psalms. Probably an
acknowledgment that it's poetry and that he responds to that poetry; but especially, he does so, not
only because it's probably the text where for the first time, we have a representation of
subjectivity in Western countries. It's the story of someone who is looking inward and finding out
the diseases of self, the appetites, the passions, etc. That may be one reason, since he's engaged in
that kind of he himself, that pilgrim is engaged in that sort of quest.
But there is another reason, I believe, because the Psalms are basically lyrical recapitulations of the
story of Exodus. Dante's saying that Exodus is the figure, that the Divine Comedy is the lyrical
representation of the story, the biblical story of Exodus, that he too that this human history is
engaged in that search, a search from slavery to liberty.
Let me just pursue this a little bit, from another point of view. In Canto I of Purgatorio we saw that
it was a vision of Roman political, moral liberty. Now we have an idea that the whole of history is
really engaged in this exodus, a journey toward liberty. Two types of liberties: a Roman one and a
Jewish one, to which Dante wants to connect. It is as if he understands that there are two traditions,
both of which are based on a quest for liberty. That there is a sense of, in both of them, though in
different ways, a sense of beginning that he must try to harmonize, he must try to explore and probe
in depth. What do they mean and what are they about? One, a kind of legal idea, moral, political
idea of liberty Cato that comes to the point of self-destruction, and the other one, the question
of spiritual exodus.
By the way, a second thing I can say about this reference to Psalm 113 is that Dante uses it as the
basis for explaining his use of allegory. You remember that I spoke about the allegory of poets and
allegory of theologians? And that the difference was the historical basis of the narrative? The story
of Exodus for Dante is historically true: it's an event. So this gives a kind of biblical, figural aura to
Dante's representation his allegorical representation, at least.
The third thing that I have to say is that the story of Exodus in many ways embodies crystallizes
the real, intellectual issues of Purgatory. What is the story of Exodus about? The leaving behind the
house of bondage, as they call it, the house of bondage, the taking along the gold of the Egyptians
which really means the secular knowledge. That secular knowledge is also part of what we must
carry with us in the journey toward freedom. But it also means that they stay in the desert; the Jews
stay in the desert for forty days. They feel that they're abandoned by Moses who has come up to
receive the tables of the law, and while they're abandoned they engage in idolatry.
This is the story of Exodus, a story of a people caught between idolatry and revelation and
promises, and prophetic promises; prophesy and idolatry. The idolatry shows itself as a statement or
as an experience of nostalgia: that's what the making of the golden calf is. A statement a way of
desperate as they may be, because they are now leaderless and they will be for a while, then they
engage in an act of desire, a longing for at least the safety or what they perceive as the safety of the
dwelling in Egypt, mindless of the fact that they were in bondage. It is as if safety, the safety of
living were preferable to them even in if that is the safety provided, procured, and in the shadow
of tyranny, of bondage. These are the concerns that Dante will have as he comes into Purgatory.
The whole of Purgatorio is literally a journey of a way of looking back and forth between the future
and the past, and the future and the past are rivaling with each other for the control of the mind of
the pilgrim. Let's see how this is going to be developed and I hope I have time to go give you
time for questions because I'm really I realize that I am saying a lot of things and there are a lot
of things I'm not even saying.

Chapter 7. Internalizing the Narrative; The Exilic Condition; Casella [00:49:46]

The poem, the canto, shifts from these grand historical concerns, these reflections on how the pagan
world experiences beginnings and new departures, only with an ideology of freedom, and this idea,
biblical idea of a new beginning which is really a break with slavery, the retrieval of the idea of
freedom in a general one, in a historical way. Now it shifts, the narrative shifts, and it's all
internalized. The pilgrim moves within himself and the first statement is that he does not know
where he is and that's an that is to say a way of alluding to this exilic predicament he has. He
literally has he does not know where to go. He already had indicated that his state of mind as that
of one who with the mind keeps going towards someplace, but with the body he's kept behind.
Remember that line which clearly dramatizes this split with a kind of inner self dislocation for the
pilgrim and now he just is now in meeting these penitent souls, who are as lost as he is, about the
place and they all ask him for directions. Which where they are singing "In exitu. . . " they're in
the desert, the desert to be in the desert. What is the desert? The desert where one is, the desert if
you don't know which way to go, the desert is the unmapped space between Egypt, typologically
speaking, and Jerusalem. It's some space in between. You have no roots; you have no paths. There
are no carvings or markers left for you, and so they ask him. Can you? Lines 6 and following: "If
you know, show us the way to go to the mountain.' And Virgil answered, 'You think, perhaps we are
acquainted with this place, but we are strangers."
That's what it means to be an exile and that's what it means to write this poetry of exile that Dante
will write. This Purgatorio is this place of the desert, there is a spirituality even of the desert, and
certainly the statement of the exilic condition. We really don't belong here. We are always displaced
and going somewhere else and the at the basis of Dante's own religious longing, there is the
sense of displacement. There is the sense of we are somehow out of that our hearts are out of
where they should be.
"We came but now, a little while before you, by another road which was so rough and hard that now
the climb will seem to us as a pastime.' The souls, who had perceived from my breathing that I was
still in life, turned pale with wonder, and as to a messenger who bears an olive branch that people
crowed to hear the news and no one heeds the crush, so every one of these fortunate souls fixed his
eyes on my face as if forgetting to go and make themselves fair."
Now he, Dante, becomes the object of temptation for the penitent souls. They should be going
somewhere, they should be going up the mountain and yet, they stop where they are. So another
way of thinking about forgetfulness and the sense of a name, of a place to reach. Let's see how this
is developed.
"I saw one of them come forward with so many so much affection to embrace me that it moved
me to do the same. O empty shades, except in semblances. Three times I clasped my hands behind
him, and as often brought them back to my breast. Wonder, I think, was painted in my looks, at
which the shade smiled and drew back and I, following him, pressed forward. Gently, he bade me
stand; then I knew who it was, and begged me that he would stay a little and talk with me."
This little detail of the embrace, the failed embrace, is one of the three failed embraces; a way of
acknowledging for the pilgrim an asset knowledge that there really the souls you have no
substantiality that we can grasp. This is the first, and there will be two more that I will talk about as
we proceed. "He answered me, "Even as I loved thee in my mortal flesh, so do I love thee freed;
therefore I stay. But thou, why are thou on this journey? 'My Casella.'"
Dante meets a friend from his youth, a musician, a musician who probably had even set to music
Dante's own poetry. A man from Siena who clearly has died. So it's to relieve the hardship of the
journey. This is apparent: a moment of indulgence, a way of meeting with a friend, a little pastoral
interlude if you wish, to break up the hardness of the desert and the implications of that metaphor.
The world of, not a quest but now a pause, the pause of reflection, the pause of relief, and the
aesthetic relief that this can give him.
"My Casella, to return another time, where I am I take this road; but from thee how has so much
time been taken.' And he said. . . 'No wrong is done me," he explains how he got here. "And I: 'If a
new law does not take from thee memory or practice of the songs of love which used to quiet all my
longings," this clearly is a reflection on the power of aesthetics and on the limits of aesthetics, "may
it please thee to refresh my soul with them for a while, which he so spent coming here with my
body." And so Casella starts singing a song which is a poem that Dante himself wrote and now he
sets it in music as he probably may have done in this life.
"Love that discourses to me in my mind,' he began then, so sweetly, that the sweetness sounds
within me still." Here sweetness is to be understood as the attribute of musical harmony. I know the
sweetness, and I indicated this when talking about the gluttons, it's always the language of the
palate and the savoring, a certain savoring that goes on with the gluttons. Here it's really a musical
attribute: the quality of the sound.
And, "My Master and I and these people who were with him seem as content as if nothing else
touched the mind of any. We were all rapt and attentive to his notes, when lo," Cato, "the venerable
old man, crying: 'What is this, laggard spirits? What negligence, what delay is this? Haste to the
mountain to strip you of the slough that allows not God to be manifest to you."
Okay, so here is an aesthetic enclosure. The poet listens to his own song, with a little touch of
narcissistic temptation, that his Casella is playing up to him, reassuring him, giving him a sense that
this is you and I know who you are. And they're all rapt and they forget about the ascent and then of
course Cato comes, the ethical voice, the voice of the law. So you may have a kind of you may
even want to write about this scene as a sort of conflict between aesthetics and ethics. How are they
working against each other?
One thing is clear here, that Dante is forgetful of the real lesson that he has learned in the encounter
with Cato. It just happened that Cato himself therefore he intervenes and his anger is the anger of
the teacher, because he says, I just explained to you what the problems are. Cato Virgil had
approached Cato, who had hoped that Cato could be swayed by the memory of the past and Cato
had rejected the power of that memory. He the affection even and the pleasure of that memory.
Dante comes in Canto II and he's involved in let's call it even an idolatrous moment, the moment
where he just witnesses something that he has been making, that he has built, he has composed, is
taken in by it but essentially that has the power to distract him from his own ascent. He has
forgotten the reasons why he is here in Purgatory and so the whole of Purgatorio begins with the
explicit statement about the importance of new beginnings, new departures. The recognition that
everything new in the future can only come out of some sense of the past and then the discovery
that the past can interfere, can intrude, and therefore the steady process of a continuous quest, that a
continuous rethinking opens up in front of the pilgrim and in front of us.
The interesting thing, and here I stop, Cato uses one word: what kind of negligence is this? You
know what the word means? Negligence? We are all negligent. What are we when we are
negligent? What does the word contain since they were talking about beginnings with when we
talk about etymology, which is the language of beginnings? Negligence means not to choose: what
Cato is reproaching Dante and his guide, and all the other souls, he's reproaching the power of
poetry to produce this atmosphere of non-choice. And obliquely, that's then what his ethics is, and
we are always engaged in an act of choice. He speaks from the perspective of freedom which
literature, the poetic text that Dante evokes, has the power to tame and somehow, for a moment, at
least here, neutralize. You see the extraordinary degree of self-reflection and self-reflexiveness of
Dante, from all points of view.

Chapter 8. Question and Answer [01:00:29]

Let me stop and see if there are questions and I hope to be able to answer some of these elements in
the introduction of Purgatorio. Yes?
Student: In the beginning of Canto I when he talks about leaving behind her so cluelessly and he's
talking about the bark of his intellect leaving
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The bark of his wit, it's called in English, yes.
Student: His wit is it also a reference to past poetry and the epic tradition, because I read it as
sort of he's looking behind Inferno, but it is also reference to how he's leaving behind and excelling
a past epic tradition?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, the metaphor, at the beginning of Purgatorio when
the poet says that he's leaving behind such a cruel sea, that cruel sea seems to be and is, actually,
we can agree easily, a reference to Inferno, but then the question is, can it be also a reference to past
epic traditions? It could be, but you would have to be a little more specific about what you mean.
You mean the Odyssey for instance, or the Aeneid, journeys by sea. Dante is the Divine Comedy
is constantly imbricated with these other poems. And in fact, the great poem that he recalls, a past
epic tradition is Lucan and he chooses Lucan, because Lucan is so I'm coming back to your
question and trying to welcome it and say that indeed, it's possible, but I have to explain why I think
it's possible.
Lucan's Pharsalia is a unique text, in the epic tradition, because it deliberately places itself as a
historical work. The polemic of Lucan towards Virgil is that Virgil sure he had been talking
about the foundation of Rome and for the Roman there is nothing more historical than that as
you know, the Romans are the some practical people that will count will calculate history
from the foundation of the city. There's never a scheme about the Garden of Eden, or Bede who
starts writing about unknown events in the past, or whatever. The Roman starts with the foundation
of the city, Livy. So Virgil writes about the origin of Rome and from that point of view, he's a
historical author. He mixes his historical accounts as so much myth making that Lucan rejects that
form of poetry and he writes an epic about the civil war.
Lucan writes about Caesar and Pompey, which clearly is a way of adumbrating another more
pressing civil war, that between Antony and Augustus, and alluding to the one between Sulla and
Marias and the whole sequel of civil wars that had punctuated and given its it's the quality, the
distinctiveness of Roman history. In a way, I would say that Dante is rejecting a certain type of epic
poetry that deals with some kind of generalized metaphorical account. Though for instance, he's
going to be Jason; he's going to be Aeneas. Now we have to keep that in mind. It would be a turn to,
at least in Canto I, a turn toward a historical world, a way of making Purgatory part of history,
because that's really the secret of Purgatory.
Purgatorio began by saying that it's part of human geography, do you remember? But not of human
history: Dante wants to make it part of human history. We really can't go back to the Garden of
Eden, if not directly through some reconstruction and shadowy refiguration, something that looks
like the well being of the Garden of Eden, something like a not really utopia, but something that
can approach the order of the Garden of Eden. I must have confused you with this answer and if so
 good, thank-you, well, of course not. I think that I was going five different directions and I
apologize if I did. Yes?
Student: In the beginning, you were talking about how the journey of poetry is really important,
and so if poetry has the power too you can work your way to [inaudible], and then you were just
talking about how aesthetics can get in the way and how that poetry can have a mutual [inaudible]
effect. Can you just talk a little bit more about the tension what he thinks the proper role of poetry
should be, what was it let you act and the community towards action and then what's [inaudible].
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, great question and the question is, that I was I began by
talking today about the journey of poetry and really ended with the idea of the danger of poetry that
aesthetics have confrontation that the poet Dante has with a poet of his own youth. So what gives
about this tension since I'm talking about a tension between two modes of poetry. I claim on the one
hand that poetry is for Dante a way of knowing and then here seems to get in the way, a scandal in a
sense. It really stumble makes him stumble. What is this the connection between these two
forms? That is really a great question.
I think that Dante understands that, first of all, let me just give him a great deal of credit. By the
time Dante writes, poetry was still by and large a little game that the Provenal poets were playing
in the courts of Provence and northern Italy, were little games about secret love stories, little games
about hunting, etc., or the great poems of the so-called Goliards, the gluttonous ones, the belly
worship.
Dante comes along and says, no, this vernacular poetry can really become the medium for knowing
everything that we can humanly can know about ourselves, about God and about all the things that
we can we believe in and the things that we would like to believe in. All the hopes and defeats
that we have, so that's the great idea what it means. From that point of view, Dante engages poetry
within this circle of knowledge, of what I call the encyclopedic compass of knowledge. So he
involves all the sciences, but at the same time, you ask me to think about that dialectic, one is not
conceivable without the other. In order to really know, the first thing that poetry has to do is show
that it knows itself. Usually the way the reason why poetry is treated as a lowly art, because it's
meretricious, it doesn't it gives itself to everybody.
I'm saying all of this because the scene of Canto II really recalls a great scene. We haven't got time
to go into that. It recalls another great scene and I think that Dante's really rethinking the famous
opening scene of Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, which I don't know if you have read,
but I have mentioned it, but you will. You look like someone who would go to the library now and
pick up the it's really a book no I'm serious. It's really a book where the philosopher is sick in
bed. He is he does not know he's diseased. In order to find comfort he picks up a book of poetry,
the muses go to him. It's a book of poetry which probably is what most people would do if they got
the flu. It's time to read good poetry, right? Then all of a sudden, Lady Philosophy appears and
banishes these muses, get thee hence you harlots, he calls them, of the theatre because you don't
give any real remedy, you just only provide provisional solace. What Dante is doing is the whole
of the Boethius is philosophy is really better than poetry, a way of recasting the old Platonic quarrel
as we know from even the Republic, right, between the debate between poetry and philosophy.
What Dante is doing is no, no, poetry may have these dangerous temptations and possibilities but
that's what makes it part of its own self-knowledge. I want to I cannot guarantee or promise that
poetry will lead you to knowledge, unless I show that the medium that I use, knows itself, it knows
its own temptations. It knows its own meretricious possibilities, you see what I'm saying? It always
accompanies one he says, you want me to highlight the reasons of that dialectic, that tension.
And the only answer that I can give is that one flanks the other constantly, so that the voice of Cato
and the voice of Casella there, at the same time they belong, necessarily belong together in the
unfolding and the articulation of Dante's own voice.
This is you cannot expect to have one say, well then if this is really dangerous, can I have
something else? No it's not either-or, it's both-and. The either-or, the ethical or aesthetic and ethical,
as if there were two opposed forms just will not do. Okay, other questions? I wish you had another
hour here, so that I could really talk about some of these details in the beginning of the poem. Well
since I hear none no other questions, thank you. See you next time.
[end of transcript]

Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 11 - Purgatory V, VI, IX, X [October 9, 2008]
Chapter 1. Tension between the Old and the New: Moral Purification [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time, I was arguing with you about some of the novelties that
Dante introduces within the poem at the start of Purgatory. One there's some formal, what we
would call descriptive novelties: light, time, the question of time. There's a moral innovation, the
focus on the connection, the subtle connection between freedom and new beginnings. The idea of
freedom as, first of all, a political value, and the meeting with Cato, so that though insisting on these
novelties and that the novelty and the new, or the possibility of renewal is exactly what's at stake in
Dante's new poetics.
I was also trying to emphasize, and I think that that came through, hopefully with clarity, the whole
tension between the old and the new, the pull of the past, the sense of nostalgia and whether it's an
existential one or in the biblical Exodus story, the nostalgia for the time of safety, apparent safety in
of the Jews in Egypt, even though within under the slavery that Egypt stands for. These were
some of the issues and then we moved onto Canto II where we specifically, on the encounter of
Dante with a musician, by the name of Casella, where Dante dramatizes, as if unaware, as if
mindless of what had happened in the previous canto and the experience of the previous canto, he
just lapses into exactly the same type of predicament that the previous canto had featured. Namely,
here he is indulging in memories of the past, lapsing into a form of idolatrous self-confrontation.
He's listening to the beauty and lure of the canto of the song that Casella will sing for him and
then, finally, the presence of the eruption of Cato once again who focuses on the ethical demands
of the place.
Purgatory is a place of moral purification and so he urges all the souls that had gathered around the
song of Casella, to move away, and the language that he uses is that of dispersion: like doves, like
pigeons, like doves that go on dispersing throughout the plain. Clearly what in retrospect, what is
apparent, I think, in all of these situations, is Dante's insistence on the power, on the importance of a
communal destiny, a communal fate. Though this communal fate appears as defeated. Let me just
explain what I mean and then we move on with today's readings.
In the case of Cato, Cato has been defeated by the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, to the
point that he had to commit suicide. In the case of Casella's song, that poem had managed to gather
around itself, not only Dante, but all the other souls who had become mindless of what they really
were supposed to do, continue their climbing up the mountain. And Cato intervenes and he also
shatters the as illusory that form of community. What I think that Dante's after is the following:
there may have been defeat and therefore the value of these experiments in communal existence,
that of Cato who commits suicide, and that of the aesthetic gathering around the poetry. They are
both partially defeated, and yet they contain seeds that will be necessary for his rethinking about
how to renew and reconstruct his idea of the common historical destiny. This is really what and I
hope it's fairly clear and we shall see this a little bit on today.

Chapter 2. Canto V: Retrospective Knowledge; Buonconte da Montefeltro; Pia

de' Tolomei [00:04:54]
I turn very briefly now to Canto V, for a couple of reasons because it's Canto V, if I had to give a
general title to the canto, I would say that this deals with Dante's sense of retrospective knowledge.
I have been really focusing on a Dante turned to the future, as you know, a Dante who thinks and
reflects on hope, who thinks and reflects about issues such as the future in general, that this is
freedom is and time as the future is the real time. Nothing else really matters because everything
else can only be understood as part of the future, even when it's past, with the logical underlying
assumption that that which is past was once the future, the only real the only reality of time. He
understands in Purgatorio how time moves in a uni-direction, which is future oriented, so it's really
a time as future, that it turns out to be also a return to the Garden of Eden, but that is kind of second
thought for him.
Here now though, in Canto V, Dante meets souls that the bring to the fore for him the power of
retrospection. These are souls who manage to repent at the last minute. It's almost as if again, it's
time, it's a question of time, but a time that is sort of inexhaustible. It's always possible to fall back,
reflect, and turn one's life around. One figure that he meets, and this is Canto V around line 90, you
shall see in a moment why I select him. He meets a figure who is he'll identify himself
Buonconte da Montefeltro, who is the son by the way, of a man Guido, whom we met in Canto
XXVII of Inferno, and this is why I like to focus on him.
The break between the past and the future, the son being always a sort of statement about a project,
about a future son or the daughter a statement about the future and the father ends up in Hell.
The son ends up in this purgatorial ledge on the way to redemption, so there is no chain of natural
necessity and causality between the past and the present and the future. There is a focus on freedom,
because once you break that bond of necessity, you are really opening up, inaugurating the idea that
we are free, that we are really free to make ourselves regardless of what antecedents we may have
behind us.
There is another little detail, which is a formal it really tells you something about Dante's art, so
here he goes on in line 88 or so: "Then another spoke: 'Pray so may that desire be satisfied with
draws thee to the high mountain. . . " What extraordinary language about desire drawing us. We are
this is Dante's universe of desire. We're impelled by desire, and desire is really what moves us.
It's love that moves us; it's desire that impels us to go one way or the other. ". . . do thou with
gracious pity help mine. I was of Montefeltro; I am Buonconte."
And I hope now that you are sensitive to this temporal, to the tenses, the disjunction in tenses. I
already pointed those out for you in the canto of Ugolino and here too, Buonconte is asserting his
identity in the mode of the present and detaching himself with the view or the use of the past tense
from the family, Montefeltro.
"Neither Giovanna nor any other has care for me, so that I go among these with downcast brow.'
And I said to him, 'What force or what chance," or 'adventure' more than 'chance.' Chance is too
heavy a word and I will come to this a little bit later where Dante reflects on the significance, which
has "took thee so far from Campaldino, that thy burial place was never known."
This is an extraordinary scene, an extraordinary encounter for one very autobiographical reason.
The reason is this, is that Dante fought at the battle of Campaldino. It was the moment his great
maturity, his great entering into the battlefield of life, when he discovers that now, because of the
victory that the Florentines had in Campaldino, that he also can have claims about himself, about
his own family, and political future. But now he meets a victim. And there have been those who go
on claiming with very little evidence, if you are in a battle I don't know how many of you know
the field of Campaldino; it's pretty large, about twenty-five miles east of Florence. The idea is that
so those who go on claiming that maybe this is someone that Dante killed at the battle, and now
sort of retrieves him, brings him back there's no evidence for this but it is a painful
autobiographical moment for him. A moment where he did experience violence and he perpetrated
violence.
And this is the answer: "Ah, he replied, 'at the foot of the Casentino.'" Rather than answering the
question of the battle, he goes on thinking about his death and recounts his death. This is a poem
about births. You remember, I always like to say this about the event of being born, and the
portentous quality that being born implies, the kinds of alterations that we all can bring on the world
around us by the very fact that we were born. Now he talks about death.
"Ah he replied, 'at the foot of Casentino a stream crosses called the Archiano, which rises above the
Hermitage in the Apennines. To the place where its name is lost I came, wounded in the throat,
flying on foot, and bloodying the plain. There I lost sight and speech. I ended on the name of Mary
and there fell and only my flesh remained. I will tell the truth and do thou tell it again among the
living. God's angel took me, and he from Hell cried: 'O thou from Heaven, why dost thou rob me?"
And so on.
The reason why I'm really reading this passage, not only to tell you about this notion of the power
of time and the power of retrospection, looking back at that final moment in one's life, it's the
decisive moment that confers, a coherence, and a meaning to one's life. We were born, and we are
born with certain expectations of what we can do, but death becomes the revelatory event.
This is really the point of this passage, but there's another point. Dante deploys the same rhetorical
genre of the debate which he had used in the encounter with Buonconte's father. So that by the
sameness of the rhetorical genre, you are forced to really couple them together, and yet the point is
that of the distance between father and son, that of the distance in the temporal disjunctions between
the past and the present, and the future.
The canto ends with six lines which are extraordinary lines, where sentimentalists as occasionally I
am, we'll go on even seeing a subtle allusion of Dante to his own wife. It's an encounter with Pia de'
Tolomei, a woman from Siena, and clearly this little passage is meant to refocus remind us of
Francesca in Canto V of Inferno. It's the exact symmetrical canto. These are the lines which I will
read, I will go on reading also in Italian, you read it in English. Professor Margaret Brooks was
asking me to give some evidence of what the Italian language sounds like, and so it's a moment of
nostalgia for you too, I take.
So, "Pray when thou hast returned to the world and art rested from the long way,' the third spirit
followed the second, do thou remember me who am La Pia." It's a sort of an epitaph of La Pia,
who was mistreated here by the husband and yet incredibly forgiving and the word ends and the
passage ends with the word gem which in Italian is gemma, Dante's wife's name. So one wonders if
Pia also doesn't stand the kind of wishful thinking on the part of Dante that his wife whom he had
because of exile had been forced to leave behind may also forgive.
That's the point: is Dante introducing this radical category of forgiveness, which is the true scandal?
If you want to begin again, then forgiveness is exactly what's demanded. Let me read the passage in
Italian and we move on.
"Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
e riposato della lunga via,"
seguit 'l terzo spirito al secondo
"ricorditi di me che lon la Pia;
Siena mi f; disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che 'nnannelllata pria
disposando m'avea con la sua gemma."
Now we move to after this highly I find it a passage of a great pathos as all of them are
great intimacy, where Dante's really involved. And just as he's obliquely involved with Buonconte,
they fought in the same battle on opposite sides, and then this encounter with Pia de' Tolomei.

Chapter 3. Canto VI: The Political Canto [00:15:22]

We turn to a public canto, a political canto. Let me just try to explain a couple of things before we
move on to something that I care about here, in terms of the Canto X and XI. That's how he begins
Canto VI, political canto like Canto VI of Inferno, and like Canto VI of Paradise. You know that
now, it's a principle of symmetry at work. This is not Canto VI of Inferno is about the city of
Florence, Canto VI of Purgatorio is about Italy, and the disarray, the chaos, the disunity of the
country.
Here he starts, "When the game of hazard breaks up the loser is left disconsolate, going over his
throws again, and sadly learns his lesson; with the other all the people go off; one goes in front, one
seizes him from behind, another at his side recalls himself to his memory; he does not stop, but
listens to this one and that one; each to whom he reaches his hand presses on him no longer and so
he saves himself from the throng. Such was I in that dense crowd, turning my face to them this way
and that, and by promising I got free from them. There was the Aretine," and so on.
It's an extraordinary simile. To explain, that's the burden of the simile, that all the penitents are so
surprised at seeing Dante alive in the beyond, that they all go after him. He is there's a throng of
people pressing on him, that's the simile. The simile that he uses is that of the winner in a game of
hazard. That is to say, he is the winner. Dante's the winner and they all go after him, and they all
neglect Virgil. Virgil is the loser.
Therefore, the simile introduces a language which is extraordinary. It is as if Dante were speaking
of his salvation, of the uniqueness of this journey that he is undertaking, in terms of a game of
hazard. We all have been thinking that this is really a providential journey and now he is casting it
as if it were just a game of chance. Here is the word chance that he uses: hazard. It's an interesting
metaphor, first of all, from the point of view of the language of play. This is playful. It's a way of
almost of casting one's salvation as the casting of the dice. It's a lottery here that someone loses and
someone wins, and Dante says, well I was born after the incarnation, so I had the possibility of
saving myself and Virgil did not.
It's also an interesting metaphor because it really introduces the question of play in Dante's
theological perception, and it's an issue that I will talk about much more extensively when we reach
Paradise. But one thing is clear: that Dante understands that the relationship between and that's
all I'm going to say unless you press me a little later but we'll talk more about this metaphor
Dante understands that the relationship between the soul and God is a relationship shaped by risk on
both sides, and that this idea of risk that would seem to be a blind casting of the dice in effect
constitutes the freedom that the human beings can have in the scheme of things. The whole point of
salvation is, by using this language of hazard and chance, is rescued, it's disengaged from my the
idea that God knows it all and we are going to we are determined in what we are doing.
What Dante's saying, by focusing on a time bound metaphor, is that we are engaged in a risky
relationship and as in our relationship between God and the soul, there is this element of danger.
That's it, that's the metaphor. To make it more precise so you don't you know where I'll be going
in the days ahead, whenever in antiquity, they would discuss mainly Boethius is the most
important author the relationship between human freedom and God's foreknowledge, they would
always present the case to say that God is outside of time, always says being outside of time. All
times converge in God, and so that God sees all things in the present so that should really God is
here, it's a point of view which is transcendent and therefore synoptic and we are in a diachronic
world: past, present and future, but everything is at the same time. We think that we live in a world
where we do not know what tomorrow may bring us. Whatever decisions we make now have
already been what kind of consequences, whether they're unpredictable or they have been
determined by things that escape our control, but God knows. And this is the Boethian scheme of
harmonizing God's foreknowledge and human freedom.
It doesn't take too much to realize that this is really a little bit of a delusion, because either I'm free
or am I not free. It may be that God knows it all, but it doesn't mean that He wills that I do what I
do. He knows but He does not will it, and yet, He knows and I'm here and I don't know, so my own
freedom is still a little bit rhetorical.
Dante does it differently: it's a departure from Boethius. The relationship between God's
foreknowledge and the souls being in time is one that introduces the question of chance and hazard,
and that involves both God and the soul. To be very precise, he doesn't say it here, and that's why I
hesitate to get into that. I would like to work with the text to make this very clear. The issue is that
in a love relationship between God and the soul, we are always at risk. If you accept the principle of
a love economy, regulating the universe, which Dante does, certainly does, then you understand this
notion of hazard in not as a principle of just chance in the sense of casual blind randomness, but
in the sense of this risk proposition risk element. Then the canto goes on this particular
metaphor goes on with another meeting between two poets. Yes?
Student: What do you mean by love economy?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The economy of love the question the clarification is what do
I mean by the love economy? Dante's universe, it's a universe of love and that's how creation takes
place, the creation of the universe and the creation of human beings. So we are the involvement
that we every soul has with God is one of love. Just as in the relationship between say, Beatrice
and Dante, there is an element of risk in loving. What is that risk in loving? I can think of several. I
think we are all grown ups to understand that, one loves and one may not be reciprocated in love.
That's a pretty bad risk. Certainly, it's a risk of God who creates and may not be loved, which is the
story of what disobedience is, and certainly is the existential experience of human beings to be
involved with someone. Either we love the wrong person, then we say wisely I was loving the
wrong person? I'm being ironic with that idea of wisdom or discovering that indeed in every
relationship there is time, feelings change, we have so many ways of thinking about it. There is a
Dante's response is look, he likes figures we shall talk about this like Francis who goes to
pray on the cliffs at night because he wants to dramatize the idea that even a prayer puts you at risk
of being hurt or not being hurt, of being disappointed, of discovering that the world does not go the
way you want it to go, and that which is true in prayer is true in love. That's all I was saying. I
wasn't saying anything more than that.
In Canto VI also, the political canto, there is an encounter between two poets. One is Virgil with
Sordello, who is a Mantuan poet. They all share the same birthplace, Mantua, across the centuries.
They meet and the very idea of Mantua, they ask Virgil, Virgil starts saying, "Mantua " clearly
playing with a famous epitaph, I think, the line interrupts. There it says: "Mantua made me," the
famous epitaph written on in Naples where Virgil is buried. "Mantua made me and the south,
Calabria, took me away. I sang the arms," the Aeneid, "the herds," the Georgics, and the story about
the Bucolics, "the fields." It's just in two lines the account of his whole life. So he starts saying,
"Mantua."
I think I'm alluding to this birthplace once again the birth and Sordello and he embrace. This
embrace, this existential encounter, this other little moment which is insubstantial, because they
can't really embrace. They're spirits, another failure after the one that we saw with Casella in Canto
II of Purgatorio. That triggers Dante's political invective against Italy. It's the moment of which I
will read very briefly. I mean I will not read the whole thing but it's an invective the kind of civic
sense of responsibility.
"O Mantuan. . ." This is line 75 of Canto VI: "And the gentle leader began, 'Mantua"; and the shade
who had been all rapt within himself, sprang toward him from the place where he was, saying: "O
Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy city." He's a Provenal poet, but he wrote in Provenal and from
Mantua. ". . .the one embraced the other." Look at this phrase, which is extraordinary because in
Italian, now I feel that I can read thanks to Margaret I can read Italian as freely as I care, e l'un e
l'altro abbracciava. I'll return to this construction in a moment, "the one embraced the other." It's a
phrase of reciprocity one embraced the other the reciprocity of affections across time.
Dante begins his incredible vituperation, his attack against enslaved Italy and look: "Ah, Italy
enslaved, hostel of misery," a number of metaphors, "ship without pilot in great tempest, no princess
among the provinces but a brothel! So eager was that noble soul, only for the dear name of his city,
to give welcome there to its citizen, and now in thee thy living are never free from war and of those
who one wall and mote shut in one gnaws at the other."
Another line that seems to have a sort of grim version of the reciprocity. Earlier one embraced the
other, now one gnaws at the other. If you look at the Italian, it's really slightly different. The English
doesn't give that this translation at least. Line 82, in te non stanno sanza guerra li vivi tuoi, e l'un
l'altro si rode. One has a reflexive form, the other one does not, and the moment of violence Dante
uses the verb "si rode" in the reflexive form in order to imply that the exchange is an exchange that
it always turns on oneself. One knows that the other for oneself, therefore it reverses and denies the
reciprocity, the action of reciprocity indicated by the previous phrase.
I could also emphasize a couple of details here, where Dante says: "to give welcome there to its
citizen, and now in thee thy living are never free from war and of those whom wall and moat shut
in." It's a very you do know that the word for community, which we always use, community
it's a word that etymologically comes from the Latin for wall, moenia. Community meant, and
stems from, a concept from the sharing of walls, houses, piling, and built one on top of the other.
That's the idea of a community. The shared walls of the city, which here is now seen as viewed
as separating one from the other. This will continue with the lack of laws and the families, including
the Montague's and Capulets, for you Shakespeare lovers, who are mentioned here, and then Dante
ends up with on line 125 with a returning to Florence and a little clearly bitter satire.
"My Florence thou mayst well be at ease with this digression," I'll come back to this metaphor in a
moment, "which does not touch thee thanks to thy people who are so resourceful." Dante talks
about Italy but it turns to Inferno VI with the invocation of Florence. He's calling this poem, this
invective, a digression, which literally means that it does not belong in the poem, that Dante is
stepping out of the economy of the poem, and talking in his own voice. It's a digression. That's what
we call a digression, right? You use a particular language that doesn't really belong to the general
plot and theme, but then the meaning of this digression is made really clear, later, when he says,
"which does not touch thee."
How ironic. Of course he's saying literally in this digression, you are so much better than all these
other towns. That's the irony: Florence is no better, therefore this digression doesn't really concern
you.
It can also be understood in another way, in another more tragic and more sinister way. This
digression does not touch you: my language will not affect you. The whole statement in all its
ambiguity becomes one of the reflection on the impotence of the poetic language to affect the
historical the unfolding of history, the ordering of the city. It is as if Dante, were, here, that the
relationship between the voice of the poet and the political order is one of inevitable rupture. Dante
tries to improve and change, that's clearly the thrust of the passage, and the thrust of the invective
also declares the powerlessness in his doing so.
We are doing very well with time, so I have a chance to read a little scene. Dante moves on talking
about the first night of Purgatorio will take place and he takes refuge in the so-called Valley of the
Princes, where a new garden, another garden is going to be described, which in many ways fulfills
the garden of Limbo in Canto IV of Inferno. Dante has these motifs that keep reappearing and here
it's more than a natural beauty of the place it's there are precious stones implying that though
Purgatorio is the world of transition for transient souls, there is something abiding about this place.
Then Dante moves on, I want to read a paragraph here with the meeting with the princes. I want to
read the first passage which is the an evening song. Dante's Dante the pilgrim now is taken
with nostalgia for his hometown. It is the pilgrimage of desire, which is the poem, the poem of
desire, desire for God, desire for Beatrice, now turns into the desire for the comfort and the shelter
of the home he had lost.
Listen to this passage, it's written in many ways in along the lines of Provenal poetry of
nostalgia. Listen to the assonances as you the first six, seven lines of Canto VIII, listen to the
assonances the chiastic structures of the sounds of which I'm not going to point out to you, you can
do that on your own.
Era gi l'ora che volge il disio
ai navicanti e 'ntenerisce il core
lo d c'han detto ai dolci amici addio;

e che lo novo peregrin d'amore

punge, se ode squilla di lontano
che paia il giorno pianger che si more;

quand' io incominciai a render vano

l'udire e a mirare una de l'alme
surta, che l'ascoltar chiedea con mano.

Then here, I'm not going to be able to read it, but to tell you how the poem should be read, then they
go and hear a hymn, a medieval hymn, Te lucis ante terminum, which, if we really had the time, I
would come to class with the whole Latin hymn because we Dante gives only the first three
words but clearly we are supposed to hear the whole thing about the dangers of the night, the sense
that the night is fraught with phantasms and that they will intrude on the powers of judgments of the
various souls, Dante's own included.

Chapter 4. Marking the Rupture in Canto IX [00:35:22]

With Canto IX, Dante moves from as he does in every Canto IX, marks the rupture from a
particular area of the poem to another. Remember Canto IX of Inferno and the encounter with
failed encounter with the Medusa, the passage into the City of Dis. Now with Canto IX, Dante
moves into Purgatory proper, and so we'll go with Canto X, XI, and XII. We're not going to be able
to do all three cantos today, so I will return to some of the things that I will say now about Canto X
and XI that I hope to cover.
How is Purgatorio where is this purification proper going to take place? This is the ordering.
Dante will go these so-called seven deadly sins. I don't know that you know what they are, but the
first one we shall see, the first one is they go from spiritual sins, pride is the root of all sins, to
lust at the end. In every representation of this sin, Dante precedes it with a representation of its
opposite virtue: so that we have humility in Canto X, and then in Canto XI punished pride. First of
all, as if Dante has to learn that which he's going to witness a little later. In a sense, it's the absolute
reversal of the economy of Inferno in Purgatorio.
You may remember that I said last time that the incredible quality of the structure of the poem is
that Dante wants us to see experiences of evil in Inferno first, so that when we get to Purgatorio and
Paradise, we really have the chance to appreciate what the good is and appreciate what the absence
of the good may be, but evil really generates and engenders. Here now, he changes all of this. In
Purgatorio, he starts with the representation of the virtue of humility and then the sin.
The representation of the virtue of humility takes place through the language of art. Dante
approaches the cliff and on the sides of the cliff he sees three sculptures embodying examples of
humility. The word pride, which in Italian is we have the English "superb," in Italian, we call it
superbia. To the word "superb," you add -ia, which is pride. The word humility in Italian is the
same thing as umilt. The word humility means comes from the ground, the sense of being
down, of being the idea that one is really with let's say the feet on the ground. The very
opposite of superbia which implies some kind of immoderate flight away a sense of the view of
the overman, the idea of being a superman. It's the idea that someone who wants to transcend the
limitations of this world and being human.
The word for humility and the word for human have the same etymology, in case you wonder where
it comes from. The homo, which means 'man' in Latin, comes from homos. We are called man,
human beings, because we come from the earth and we are close to the earth, and we return to the
earth. We come from the earth and we're returning to the earth. The idea of humility is the same
notion. There is a kind of implicit connection, etymologically, between the two words, the two
terms.
One more remark to make, this whole idea of having a couple of remarks before I go on with the
text that will serve you for the rest of Purgatory. The idea of having the virtues and the vices, first
one and then the other, seem to cast Purgatorio, but it's not really that way, as a variant of a
medieval poetic form called psychomachia which means "the battle of thoughts." By the way, this is
a Latin poem, one of the early Latin poems by this Latin Spanish poet called Prudentius. It's a kind
of psychomachia, the battle of thoughts, of contradictory thoughts.

Chapter 5. Canto X: The World of Art; The Idea of Measurement [00:40:08]

The second thing that I have to say, is more important for the poetics of Dante. Keep in mind that
the whole poetic mode of Purgatorio, unlike the poetic mode of Inferno, is played out in Purgatorio
through the imagination, art images, memories, phantasms. In other words, we are really in a world
which is in between that of bodies and souls, the world of the middle ground of the imagination, and
now we have the world of art. A world of art, that Dante says, and I read from Canto X, at the very
beginning. I just want to give you this as it's an extraordinary I don't want to go into excessive
detail, but I have to do it this time.
"When we were within the threshold," Canto X, the very beginning, "of the gate which the soul's
perverse love disuses." Purgatory is all a sequence of variations on love. That's the moral law of
Purgatory. All sins in Purgatory are sins either we use the we give love to the wrong object, or
we love too much in terms of what how we are being loved back or we love too little. These are
the three general subdivisions of Purgatory. That's "perverse love disuses, making the crooked way
seem straight, by the resounding I heard it closed again; and if I had turned my eyes to it what
excuse would have served the fault?"
The reflection of what happened before: "We were climbing through a cleft in the rock which kept
bending one way and the other, it goes around the mountain," that's really what the language is,
"like a wave that comes and goes, when my Leader began: 'Here there is need to use some skill in
keeping close to this side or that where it turns away." The cliff is there's an abyss underneath it,
so it's an invitation to prudence along the way. ". . .and this made our steps so scant that the waning
moon had regained its bed to sink to rest before we were forth from that needle's eye. But when we
were free and out in the open above, where the mountain draws back, I weary and both uncertain of
our way," we know now this has become a sort of formulaic expression of the uncertainties of this
exile as he moves up the mountain, "we stopped on a level place more solitary than a desert track.
From its edge bordering on the void to the foot of the lofty bank which rises sheer would measure
three times a man's body, and as far as my eye could make its flight, now on the left hand, now on
the right, the terrace there seemed to me the same."
What is all this about? What I want to point out is that Dante is measuring the whole landscape in
terms of the measure of a human being. He's using the human beings a human being as the
measure. Is man the measure? You have heard that expression, right? Are we the measure? Are we
the measure of what, creation? Are we the measure of what we should do?
This is exactly the point of the canto because pride means an inordinate love and belief in our own
excellence. Pride means that we do not think that we are we can be measured by others, that we
want to become the measure for others, or that we really do not belong where others may think we
belong. That's what pride is. It's a sin, very common. Who do you think you are? Who do don't
you know who I am? This is the language we use and it's pride I always like to say that we are
never really proud when we are dealing with our janitor. They are not proud; we've become so
human, so good. We are always proud with those who endanger our sense of our own measure, who
seem to take their own measure of us. Dante is starting with the idea of measurement and I'll come
back this is the crucial metaphor and I'll come to that.
How do we measure what is human and that is not human? One thing is clear: that pride, superbia,
means an inordinate love of one's own excellence. We are really far superior, we think, than
anybody else would have thought us. Then he goes on looking at images made on the white marble,
"such that not only Polycletus but nature would be put to shame there." Extraordinary metaphor
already talking about measure and about order, these are works of art produced by the hand of God
directly.
God is an artist and God has made these images, but it's such that nature, which as you know, is the
daughter of God and the mother of the arts, and also an artist, the famous Polycletus, a Greek
scholar, a Greek scholar Polycletus, would be put to shame. Already there is this sense of rivalry
within the pattern of generation of arts. That's the first thing, and then the first image that we see, is
the image of the angel Gabriel, the messenger who came to earth, that's humility. He came to earth,
the descent of the high becoming low, while the human beings who are low want to think of
themselves as very high.
"The angel who came to earth with a decree of the many-years-wept-for peace that opened heaven
from its long interdict appeared before us so truly graven there in a gracious attitude that it did not
seem a silent image." That's God's art, but very clear, there's no difficulty in understanding this art.
"One would have sworn, he said: 'Ave,' the first words of the angel Gabriel doing the Annunciation.
The Annunciation is the story of the humility, whereby obliquely, God becomes man. So that's the
descent, another form of, not only the humility of Mary in accepting the mandate, but also the idea
of the descent.
By the way, let me just point out that this 'Ave' is what we call a boustrophedon I have spelled the
word out for you for 'Eva.' It's very conventional in medieval literature: the idea that Mary
becomes the one who reverses the role of Eve. With Eve there is the loss of the Garden and the Fall,
with Ave there is now the turning of the key, as it were, and the Redemption.
"For she was imaged there who turned the key to open the supreme love, and in her bearing she had
this word imprinted this word imprinted: 'Ecce ancilla Dei.'" She acknowledges her Mary
acknowledges her ancillary role. She is a servant and she acknowledges herself as a servant. Now,
along side with this, what we could call an ethical education, Dante has to learn what humility is.
There is an ethical education, learn about what this humility is about. There is also an aesthetic
education going on, simultaneously. After all, Dante's really looking at art.
The question is what is the relationship between the virtue and art? How can the two be together?
To give you an idea of how complicated the problem is, in the next canto Dante goes on meeting all
the painters. You read Canto XI, Giotto and Cimabue, who are emblems of people who invest their
productions with an inordinate sense of its value. Then Dante puts himself puts his friends Guido
Cavalcanti you remember the two Guido's, Guido Guinizelli, one Guido removed the other
Guido from its nest, and now the third person has come, meaning himself who probably will rout
both of them. What a proud statement. It is as if the artist is always prone to this sort of inordinate
idea of who they are and what their value may be.

Chapter 6. Learning How to Look; More on Measurement [00:48:57]

So art and humility and pride, this is the issue. The ethical education and the aesthetic education.
What is the aesthetic education? Virgil is telling Dante how to look, that's really the most
complicated thing. For those of you who are doing art history, that's really what it's about. How do
we look? What do the eyes really reveal to us? "Do not keep thy mind only on one part." That's the
looking the belief that we or the temptation to lose sight of the totality of things and not
and just taking one part for the whole.
"Do not keep thy mind only on one part,' said the kind master who had me on that side of him
where the heart lies," on the left, "so that I turned my face and saw beyond Mary on the same side
as he that prompted me, another story set on the rock."
Dante has to learn how to look and what he's looking at are stories. Story, the word is Greek, for
those of you who know some Greek. It comes from 'I saw and I narrate,' and it's the same
etymology for story and history. This is a little bit of allegory of history, we are saying. As if Dante's
really telling begins with the New Testament, the story of Mary, now we're going to see a picture
from the Old Testament, David dancing in front of the ark and then an episode of Trajan, the
emperor who is an example of humility. You shall see him in a moment.
The point is that the whole of history is an allegory of humility and that's God's art. That's what
Dante has God represent for us. ". . . Mary. . ." etc. ". . .There, carved in the same marble were the
cart and oxen drawing the sacred ark on account of which men fear an office not committed to
them. In front people appeared and the whole company, divided into seven choirs, made two of my
senses say, the one: 'No,' the other: 'Yes, they sing'; in the same way at the smoke of the incense that
was imaged there, eyes and nose were in contradiction with yes and no. There the humble psalmist,"
David, "went before the blessed vessel girt up and dancing, and that time he was both more and less
than king; opposite, figured at the window of a great palace, Michal looked on, like a woman vexed
and scornful."
This is really the story that is told in Samuel, in the Bible, and Dante's really reinterpreting it for us.
So I beg you to really pay a little attention to some of these episodes. First of all, David is humbling
himself. He's dancing. He lifts up his ephod, his dress, and starts dancing out of joy. It's an episode
that is used as one of the many cases of so-called ludic theology, playful theology. Its intrusion is
that in the plan of salvation there is always the presence of this comedy, this comic idea and
David embodies that.
Then there's this little phrase which we you must have noticed that appears so often in this canto.
More often in this canto than ever before in the whole poem, "more and less." It is as if it's
impossible to use or find in a canto where measure is the issue, the position about where we are,
who we are, and what we are doing. One thing is clear; that opposite to David, there is his wife,
Michal, sitting at the window, a different perspective. What she sees, this is art, this is a question of
perspective what she sees. She is so angry at David because he, by his action of dancing in front of
the ark, is humiliating himself. He's losing his state as king. He's losing his stature as king.
The fact is that for Dante, Michal is completely missing the point. It is a stance of someone who
thinks that she's superior, a stance of someone who's sitting at the great at the window of her
great palace, who will not have anything to do with what's below her. We are entering the world of
the the domain of what pride may be, what's wrong with pride, and why pride may really be a
sin. Pride may not be a sin because we want to reach higher than we are. That's probably okay.
What makes pride a sin is that we tend to have contempt for what we think is below us. That's really
the displacement; it blinds us. So I'm introducing here, since this is a world of art, the notion of a
perspective. We've been talking about perspective. Pride is tied to perspective, because it sets by
being proud I think that I have, within myself, I certainly have a view of myself that may be at odds
with the reality of me. Certainly, this is the case of, not David, but it's the case of Michal, his wife.
The third episode is, I think even more interesting, and then we'll see what's going to happen. "I
moved my feet from where I was to examine close at hand another part of this," how do you
examine? What is an aesthetic education? How do you look at the images at hand? "another story
which I saw gleaming white beyond Michal. Depicted there," now the third episode is from secular
history, Roman history.
So you have the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Roman secular history, "there was the
glorious deed of the Roman Prince whose worth moved Gregory to his great victory I mean the
emperor Trajan; and a poor widow was at his bridle in a posture of grief and in tears. The place
about him seemed trampled and thronged with knights and the eagles on the gold above them
moved visibly in the wind. The poor woman among all these seemed to say: 'Lord avenge me for
my son that is dead, for whom I am stricken'; and he to answer her: 'Wait now till I return," he's
going to Romania, Dacia. If you see the column of Trajan in Rome, it's still the monument
document of that expedition.
". . .wait now till I return'; and she: 'My Lord,' like one whose grief is urgent, 'if thou return not?';
and he: 'He that is in my place will do it for thee'; and she: 'What shall another's goodness avail thee
if thou art forgetful of thine own?' . . . 'Now take comfort for I must fulfill my duty before I go;
justice requires it and compassion bids me stay."
It's the story of Trajan who gets off his high horse, levels with the little widow. The diminutives are
Dante. The language is of humility, the little widow, and administers and gives her justice, because
for Dante, the perfect emperor in Trajan certainly is the perfect emperor must be must have the
attributes of mercy and justice and he gives evidence of that: "if for whose sight," etc. Now that's
the drama that now develops. Dante's seen all this, he has understood these images and the meaning
of these images and I'm just going to tell you about this little drama and we stop here.
"While I was taking delight," no problem in taking delight. After all, this is God's art, so having
delight in itself is part of the appreciation of this art ". . .the images of so great humilities," I
think that the oxymoron is deliberate, "so great humilities, dear to sight, too, for their Craftsman's
sake," I love them because they were made by God. Virgil prompts him, "See on this side many
people, the poet murmured, 'but coming with slow steps; they will direct us to the other stairs."
Now here is Dante's drama: "my eyes, which were looking intently, were not slow in turning to him
being eager for new sights." He yields to the temptations of the eye. Have you ever heard about the
three temptations? The pride of life, the pride of the eyes and the curiosity and the pride of the
heart, but I would and the three temptations are present here.
"But I would not have thee, reader," Dante's turning to us in an apostrophe, as he has done before,
"fall away from good resolve for hearing how God wills that the debt be paid; do not dwell on the
form." He's telling us not to care about the images as such "of the torment, think of what follows,
think that at worst it cannot go beyond the great Judgement." He sort of is making a preemptive
strike. Don't worry about the peculiar form of the art, look at the meaning of the art and he can't
but that's what he wants us to do.
He says look at what he says to Virgil: "Master,' I began, 'that which I see coming to us does not
seem to me persons and I know not what they are, so confused is my sight." What an incredible
contrast between what Dante had seen with God's images, all clear to him, but now that he's seeing
some human beings who are doubled under massive boulders because that's the punishment
inflicted on the proud, to put them and press them against the earth he does not recognize them.
It is as if his aesthetic education has been for nothing. It is as if ethical education has been for
nothing. He had no difficulty in deciphering God's art, which is so clear and luminous, but now he
does not want to identify with what he sees. He resembles Michal, who from high up, does not want
to have anything to do with David. This is the exactly the same problem that Dante is facing. He
has he had no problem with Gabriel, the descent of Gabriel, he had no problem with Trajan, but
he himself is unwilling to identify with those that he believes are beneath him.
Then he goes on. Virgil explains, "The grievous nature of their torment doubles them to the ground,
so that my eyes at first were in debate about them, but," he says, they are really human beings like
you. Dante goes into a further apostrophe to all Christians calling himself superbi, in Italian,
cristiani.
The Italian line is actually very interesting for a reason that I'll tell you in a moment. Look at line
121, O superbi cristiani, miseri lassi. . . There is an incredible contrast between the word superbi,
meaning superior, right, a claim of superiority and the word lassi which means lapsed, having
fallen. So within the same line you capture the two this dynamic of how we want to be up and
how we're going to the more the higher up we want to go the quicker we seem to be falling.
"Weary wretches," mistranslation, "who are sick in the mind's vision and put your trust in backward
steps, do you not perceive that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly."
I want to stress this shift in pronouns, 'do you not perceive,' Dante is literally taking the higher
ground. We do not know, he knows, right? Do you he's preaching to us, ''do you not perceive?'
But then he with a subsequent pronoun that we are worms, he literally erases the distance
between himself and the readers, between himself and the other Christians. He places himself on the
same ground where we are. That's the quality of the double voice of Dante, systematically
punctuating this text, as claim of a transcendent superior perspective, because after all, he really has
seen the whole the unfolding of God's cosmos. He really has witnessed it, but at the same time,
he descends and is part of a common plight.
That's really what the line is, "Do you not perceive that we are worms born to form the angelic
butterfly?" It's an allusion that the word for butterfly, not in Italian, but in the Roman sarcophagi, in
antiquity, whether they are in Aix-en-Provence, if you happen to go there, or you go to Fiesole,
where there was a Roman cemetery, you would always see a butterfly imprinted on the sarcophagus
because the Greek word for butterfly is psyche. It's the same word for the soul and the butterfly, and
by putting the emblem of the butterfly that indicated at death the soul finally would be capable of
flying off toward the light and toward the creator. So Dante's clearly using and remembering this
kind of motif that he has seen.
"That soars to judgement without defense? Why does your mind float so high, since you are . .
.imperfect insects, like the worm that is undeveloped." The language of a metamorphosis. We are in
the process of making ourselves both alive and in the penitential world of Purgatory.
And then how he ends with a kind of iconographic motif that recapitulates the whole iconographic
element that make up the poem, Canto X, "As, for corbel to support ceiling or roof, a figure is
sometimes seen joining the knees to the breast, which begets from its unreality real distress in him
that sees it, in such a posture I saw these when I looked carefully. They were indeed bent down
more and less as they had more and less on their back, and he that had most patience in looks
seemed, by his weeping, to say: 'I can no more."
What is this about? What is this story about? Well, the story is first of all about this passage. It's
about the fact that Dante has just warned us not to pay attention to the form and to look at the
meaning of the particular message. Now he returns to us and focuses on the form. What he's
describing are the so-called Caryatides, human forms, that if you go maybe in New York you
may see them, but certainly in European cities these human forms seem to be buttressing edifices
and buildings and they are decorative, but Dante is saying, the form matters. We cannot really go to
the ultimate meaning by bypassing the form. He's literally, by picking up the sculptural motif of the
canto, returning to this idea.
We shall see as I have to leave you hanging on this problem of perspective. Next time, we'll read XI
and XII and continue, and therefore the meaning of art, how art can change a moral perception of
the world. That's the idea in which you are all wondering have been wondering with your
questions. What is Dante's understanding of art? It's so dangerous and it can be, of course, but there
is a role that art can play in altering our perception, our moral perception, in an effect form becomes
a way to go to understand the moral world and the moral terms in which you are. We shall see this
next time.
Let's see if there are questions now? The real I think we are approaching the heart of the matter
in Purgatory. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics and what I really pointed out so far,
then is this idea that Dante is trying to find out what is the measure for human beings, because you
cannot say well, it's pride. What criteria? If I want to reach for what is so far away from me, why
should that be viewed as a sin of pride? What are the criteria? What is the context in which we can
really talk of pride and why is humility any better? We haven't touched any of this yet. One thing
that is clear is that Dante is, for now, on the one hand, giving examples of art and humility, making
mistakes, the confusion of his perception. He says that he cannot quite figure out what are these
shapes that he sees. There's something disfigured. He cannot quite identify with, he cannot
recognize them and then claims that we really should be looking at the meaning, at the ultimate
meaning of things, but then he returns and valorizes the idea of form. We cannot bypass form in art
or in experience. We cannot skip the idea of time, that's really what existentially it amounts to.
That's all I really have said.
Then, maybe, I explained to you a few etymological connections: humility and the human, the
meaning of history, and introduce this principle of perspective that I have been talking about before.
This is really connected with the representation of art. Perspective, what is the what kind of
perspective does art then give us? We all know that in art, we use perspective, especially the modern
language of art, the modern language of painting, ever since the fifteenth century explicitly
discusses the question of perspective. I see the world according to the position that I occupy in it,
and the position that occupy in it reveals things to me which are unique and irreducible.
At the same time it implies it also implies but this is not the case, the possibility of
manipulating space. The fifteenth-century Renaissance discovers that space is not unalterable and
fixed, but it can be manipulated. We're dealing with up to that point, maybe we're dealing with
time and the manipulation of time. You don't have to watch a football game to know what I mean
about the manipulation of time, but then there is such a thing as manipulation of space. I can create
the space. I can make of a small space something appear large. Space is not a fixed entity. That's
what perspective comes to mean in the fifteenth century.
For Dante, perspective is connected to an inner world. What is my perspective of myself? What is
my sense of the measure of things? How do I view the world? Michal gives one answer, and she can
be angry about what David does, misunderstanding the whole point of David. What does she
misunderstand about David? That in humiliating himself, he had really found himself higher by the
idea of humiliation of self, which is exactly that of Mary, and which is exactly that of the story of
Trajan. How do you Michal does not understand the reversibility of positions. That's really the
argument, so far and I think that Dante is making a big deal with pride because pride is seen as the
root, the spiritual root, of all evils.

Chapter 7. Question and Answer [01:10:04]

Let me see if there are some questions that I can we have a few minutes please.
Student: Why does Dante have trouble sympathizing with the sinners in Purgatory, or other people
when he doesn't have trouble doing the same in Inferno?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: In Inferno, why does Dante's trouble sympathizing with the sinners
in Purgatory? Especially here, because in Inferno, he even kicks some of the heads. You can't I
mean he has sympathy, but when it's necessary he just he has had it. And in Canto XXXII, the
guy was frozen and stuck in ice, it wasn't pretty.
But here it's true, especially now he has he declares this his confusion. It may be because I
couldn't I did not know what these forms are. I think they have to do with the whole question of
what did he learn, first of all, from the images that he saw because you know Virgil had just taught
him how to look. Look here; you move around; don't stay in one place; you can look underneath, so
that's one problem. What is a moral and an aesthetic education?
Then he's just also, I think, indicating the whole idea what is it ever possible to look at the
world? More of this next time, as disengaged spectators. Think of ourselves in the theatre, which is
an image that I probably will bring in and discuss. You go to the theatre and you really
sometimes we all feel that we should jump on the stage and rescue the damsel in distress or
whatever, and yet, you may see someone who can do that, but many of us won't. We want to be
unaffected by it, that's what Dante's doing. He would like to be to feel that he is no longer like
any of these sinners. That's the mistake he's making.
It's really that he's it's an indifference coming to him from something akin, though not exactly, to
Michal's sure sense of herself. I have nothing to do with the mob here. What is this? This is the
king? I don't want to even be his wife. That's what Dante's doing in that scene. I do not want to be
with this kind of disfigured lowly forms of life. I am better, I have seen God's art, and I have learned
about God's art. Do you see the moral and spiritual confusion that this kind of drama is going to
generate in him? That's the answer.
The one who reflects beautifully on this, I will bring the passage in, but I would like you to read it if
you can. Book II of the Confessions of St. Augustine, because St. Augustine loves to go every he
doesn't like to go to the spectacles at the Colosseum because they are so vulgar and beneath him,
but he loves to go to the theatre and he has an extraordinary reflection. What does it mean to be
unaffected in the theatre? How do I have to understand my discomfort at the theatre?
It's the very image Dante uses at the end of Canto X. You remember when he says that we see
Caryatides, which we know are phony, and yet they can inspire some kind of distress. I'm
paraphrasing very poorly the last paragraph, the last lines of Purgatorio X, "Is it possible to ever be
indifferent spectators of the turmoil around us?" What's at stake when I say, well these things don't
touch me, have nothing to do with me, and Dante's saying, they always touch us. It takes time for
him to understand it and I think that he is unveiling that. He's showing it to us in Canto X. Please.
Student: You seem to draw a connection between form and time sometimes
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I think that we can draw a connection between form and time, and
continue, you want to make a reflection on that?
Student: Then also if there is some way to draw in the notion of futurity as time at
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The notion of?
Student: Futurity or as time necessary at the beginning.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes.
Student: I'm kind of struggling with the idea of an art form which is sort of like a fixed immutable
thing and I have no idea
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is since I think that was implied, if I didn't say it in
what I was saying, that there is a connection between form and time. The struggle the question
then becomes we are usually think of form as something which is fixed, how can that be part of
the world of time? Well, in a number of ways, I would say. That the form Dante is saying first of
all, witnessing or watching history, therefore it has a kind of unfolding and he discusses art in terms
of a metamorphosis, an ongoing process of change that includes the idea of time.
One way in which Giotto really differs from shades from what we're going to see next canto it's
not an arbitrary relation here that I'm making distinguishes himself from Byzantine mosaics is
that he introduces a history. Painting is a series of elements and you got to keep looking at all of
them. So it's a form for all it's unalterable quality the form indicates; forms change, there's a
history of forms to begin with. I could become generalized in my answer Dante understands it in
a way as a metamorphic sequence. From that point of view form sense of all time, in fact, Dante
says whenever you see a particular scene, avoid what you are seeing and see that what it means,
now that is the occlusion of time. That is an eclipsing of time.
Let me just go to the ideal lesson, the ideal poem, it's like when you are reading a poem. You're
reading a poem, of course the form is unchanging, but unless you know the beginning, and you start
from the beginning and you read through, i.e., time, you, come to the end; you miss the point about
the poem, right? I mean I do. You got to read you got to be in time and the novel, you got to read
Proust, forget it. Pulci, which I'm reading now, that takes forever. So thank you; we'll see you next
time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 12 - Purgatory X, XI, XII, XVI, XVII [October 14,
2008]
Chapter 1. Cantos X, XI and XII: Virtues and Vices [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time then we talked about the cantos of pride. We introduced
the cantos of pride: X, XI, and XII. I was arguing that Dante comes to know and understand the
virtues and vices of pride and its opposite, humility, which he sees featured humility he sees
featured in Canto X and pride he'll see punished in Canto XII. He gets to understand the nature of
this virtue and this vice by looking at the work of art. So that in Canto X, we already have a sort of
representation of what an aesthetic education can turn out to be. How do we look at art and what are
we likely to learn from it? This was the argument.
Dante arrives into Purgatory proper and the first image that uses to give us a sense of the
dimensions of this place is the figure of the human measure. He measures the world around him
through the dimensions of the human figure. Obliquely, it's not quite we are not quite there yet to
that point, but he's warning us that indeed the issue what is the issue about pride and about
humility really is what is the man's measure? We are he says that he's going to that the
place is measured according to the size of human beings, but then the question is what is the
measure of human beings in a moral sense, of course. Since pride, superbia in Italian and in Latin,
is a sin of excessive love of one's own excellence. The sense that one isn't quite reducible to what
perhaps others see about us. The idea that there may be a touch of vanity in the way we judge and
view ourselves, the way in which we measure ourselves.
Humility, on the other hand, is the opposite is the remedy to pride and it is really a virtue in that
it really reduces us to reminds us of the fact that we are earthbound. That's the meaning of the
word, and by the way, that's exactly how humility and the etymology of human are connected.
They're both derived from a common root, a common matrix in humus which is the Latin word for
the earth. We are called humans, homo, because we come out of the earth, because we are made of
the clay of the earth, and we return to the earth. That's the other implication. On the other hand,
humility is the virtue that reminds us that we really should not view ourselves as all that elevated.
So these are the issues.
Dante then confronts some scenes of humility. He begins with the virtues, and the sins of humility
the virtue of humility are all taken from the three histories that interest him. He's always placing
himself at the confluence of these three strains of history. An image from the Old Testament, David,
who dances in front of the ark, therefore he humiliates himself. He tells us that he's more and less
than king. By the way, this phrase "more and less," this lack of precision is really an expression that
pervades Canto X. This "more and less," the grief is "more" than I can take, etc.; it appears in a
variety of forms, at least five times in the context of the canto.
Next to David, and that image of humility from the Old Testament, and above him actually,
watching down from the balcony of a high tower in the royal palace, there is his wife Michal, who
looks down at David. Not only she looks down at David, she obviously has contempt for him,
because in her view he is humiliating, he's offending, violating the principle of decorum of what a
king ought to be. She has a different understanding of what is the measure of a king and the place of
a king, because pride is exactly a question of place. What place do I occupy in the world around
me? Am I where I think I would like to be or am I where somebody else is placing me through
his/her gaze?
The second image is an image of but they're all you'll notice the little detail, they're all placed
above, they're sculptures placed above the normal sight, so that there is obvious reversal now in
what the value of humility can be. There is the story of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel who
descends, literally, and that descent is a story of humiliation of the divine, the divine enters history,
and therefore in that sense the divine is truly omnipotent. There is the idea which is really
something developed, I mention it here, but I will come back to that, the idea that the divine is
detached from the human would make the divine less omniscient. A divine that does not know the
human, does not know death, cannot claim to be omniscient. That's an argument that Dante uses.
So there is the story of the angel Gabriel who comes down and the obedience of Mary, the Virgin
Mary, who says, 'Yes, I am your servant.' So there's a story of and Mary is the one who said to
turn the key between the old alliance and the new alliance. She reverses the story of Eve. It is as if
her obedience is a response to some kind of violation and the promise of being divine in the eating
of the tree.

Chapter 2. Aesthetic Education [00:06:51]

The third example, or story, that the pilgrim sees looks at it's the story of the emperor Trajan,
secular history, who stops his from marching onto his campaign into Dacia, into Romania, in
order to give justice to a little widow, the diminutive is Dante's. A little widow who has been asking
for justice before he departs, justice for the death of her son. This is what he what Dante is
confronted with and what he is confronted with is we do know that he's being asked and directed by
Virgil to look at the whole scene, not to stop at one detail, to even move beyond Virgil himself, in
what would appear to be a transgression of the reverential bond that ties them. He Dante is
always following as a disciple follows the teacher.
So he just even transgresses his place but that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the aesthetic
education of the pilgrim. He's witnessing what he calls visible speech, synesthesia. That's why this
phrase it says, visibile parlare, in Italian, visible speech. It's a synesthesia that combines the sight to
sensory experiences, the eye and the hearing; so speech because this is God's art and God's art has
also a precise meaning. A precise meaning that Dante has no difficulty understanding or finding
delight in, so this is the argument.
At one point, in the drama of the canto, some figures keep appearing and Virgil directs Dante's eyes
toward the people that are appearing. Dante does not recognize them. He says, I don't know what
they are. My sight is so confused. He doesn't want to even know who they are or what they are.
Virgil will explain to him they are human figures crawling on the huge boulders and almost moving
like, on the ground, on the earth like worms on the earth. And Dante is not really capable of
deciphering them or having even sympathy with them. At that point, as you recall, because I had the
feeling that maybe the explanation is a little bit was a little bit too wriggly, but Dante's poem
canto moves in that way with a lot of sinuosities there.
I mentioned to you a particular passage in Chapter II Book III, Chapter II of the Confessions. It's
an extraordinary passage and I brought it in so that you can I want to read a little bit from that.
It's a passage it's a book where Augustine is living in Carthage, you know. At about now, at this
stage he's about 17, 19 has been talking about his attraction for shows, his attractions for the
Manicheans, the distaste for scripture that he has, and how he is going to be has been led astray
by some of his friends with the stealing of gratuitous stealing of the pear tree the pears from
the pear tree, which he doesn't understand why he would ever do that. And now he talks about once
again his experience of the theatre. That is to say, he's discussing his experience of himself as a
spectator, which is exactly what Dante was.
Dante the problem Dante in Canto X of Purgatorio is that he is at first a spectator of works of
art, which he seems to have no difficulty understanding. Then he has to be involved show them
at least some compassion, some self-recognition with the souls who are these shades, penitents, who
are under these huge weights that they carry, and he cannot do it. He still has to learn what grief is
and what is it, and how do you go on connecting to the images that you see.
Let's see how what Augustine says, Augustine is that's what he says: "Stage plays," this is
really Chapter II of Book III, "stage plays carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and a
fuel to my fire. Why is it that man desires to be made sad? Beholding doleful and tragical things
which he himself would by no means suffer."
The real pleasure of his going to the theatre, he claims, we have a great pleasure, is in the images of
grief. They don't really touch us, we are not even expected to jump on the stage to relieve the
characters were involved in this sort of situation. He goes on, and then you'll see what the point is,
"which would himself by no means suffer, yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and
this very sorrow is his pleasure." I was just paraphrasing that.
"What is this, but a miserable madness, for a man is the more affected with his actions. The less free
he is from such affections, however, when he suffers in his own person, it uses to be styled misery.
When he feels compassion for others, then it is mercy. What sort of compassion is this for feigned
and scenic passions? For the auditor is not called on to relieve, but only to grieve, and he applauds
the actor of these fictions the more he grieves. And if the calamities of those persons were of all
times or mere fiction, to be so acted that the spectator is not moved to tears, he goes away disgusted
and criticizing, but if he is to be moved to passion, he stays intent and weeps for joy."
This is an extraordinary passage, I think, in the history of antiquity and the criticism of the theatre,
dramatic theatre. The point is, can we ever be disengaged spectators? Yes, we can be disengaged
spectators and Augustine is criticizing the disengaged spectator, the belief that we can be in front of
the play of the world and that things only touch us, as if in a fiction, and yet we ourselves are not
going to be able to acknowledge it. He's really criticizing the limits of the theatre, the limits of that
kind of aesthetic experience. I think that Dante is picking up exactly from this what Augustine
says in this chapter, and he's showing how unavoidably one has to be involved. There's in the
measure in which we think that we are not touched by somebody else's grief, we're really admitting
the overpowering quality of that experience. That's his argument.
He has learned something then; he has learned that there is no such a thing as a safe perspective.
The way and he has learned what Michal had been doing in from the high window of her
palace, that she was expressing disgust at her husband because that offends her own sense of
superiority. Dante says, I may be no different from Michal in my disclaimer that I do not know and I
do not see any of these penitents who disfigure the human form. In refusing to acknowledge that
they are like me, and refusing to have any self-recognition between me and them. This is really the
aesthetic education.
Let's see now how for Dante it is aesthetic and it's ethical. He goes on understanding that the stakes
are in the idea of perspective, the idea that the world is a projection of my own wishes and that
world is really reformulated. If I think that I can take a safe distance, it's because I do not want to
look within myself. Canto XI and Canto XII, I think, will answer that question.
Chapter 3. Canto XI: Reversal of Perspective [00:15:44]
Let me just go on with Canto XII Canto XI, I'm sorry. First of all if there are questions you
can interrupt me, because I don't think this is a difficult argument, but if there are questions
interrupt me now or keep them for later. Canto XI begins with the penitents, who now change,
reverse perspective. They are so close to the ground, but they are looking up, and they have the
Lord's Prayer, in what is Dante's own recasting of the canonical prayer.
"Our Father, which art in heaven, not circumscribed but by the greater love Thou hast for Thy first
works on high." This is the prayer of the penitents. "Praise be Thy name and power by every
creature as it is meet to give thanks for Thy sweet effluence; May Thy peace of Thy kingdom come
to us, for we cannot reach it of ourselves, if it come not, with all our striving. As Thine angels make
sacrifice to Thee of their will, singing hosannas, so let men make of theirs; Give us this day the
daily manna, without which he goes backward through this harsh wilderness who most labors to
advance; And as we forgive everyone the wrong we have suffered, do Thou also forgive in loving-
kindness and look not on our deserving; Our strengths," and so on. "Thus beseeching good speed
for themselves and for us those shades went beneath their burden," etc.
What about this prayer? First of all, how is this related to what we are talking about? The first thing
is that in the Lord's Prayer, the change Dante makes is to emphasize that God is not in space, not
circumscribed. God is not in space and therefore He is really everywhere, or He is free. That
formula he is using, you may want to know, is a traditional one in medieval thinking whereby God
is said to be an infinite sphere. This is a formula to define what the idea of the infinity of God.
An infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. God is not in a
place; God does not have a perspective. There is indirectly there is a critique of perspective here,
or the inadequacy of a perspective.
God is everywhere, not circumscribed, that's the first change. The second change that he's making,
this is a neo-Platonic element that he adds on to the Lord's Prayer, and then the second one is that he
literally places, "Give us this day the daily manna, without which he goes backwards," he literally
makes the Lord's Prayer the prayer of the exiles in the desert. Like the Jews in the wilderness who
ask and get their manna, so now this is another element that another metaphorical element that
casts Purgatory as a journey through the desert between the bondage of Egypt and Jerusalem.
The other point is that there is a reversal of perspective somehow, and what kind of a perspective is
he gaining now? The perspective, I think, is what I call a Franciscan perspective. Let me just
explain first of all, the line, "Praised be Thy name and power by every living creature."
This is literally an echo of the first poem of the Italian poetic tradition, a poem written by St.
Francis, which is known as the Canticle of Creatures, which is really a sequence a anaphoric
sequence of praises. 'Praised be Thy name, praised be the water, praised' and so on. The point of
that poem is that it begins with the look of human beings up to the highest and then it ends up with
the idea of humility. We are, Francis says, "Not the most important or the center of creation, we are
like everything else valuable in creation." That's the thrust of the poem, and the only way in which
you can really understand the creation is really to look from the bottom up and not from the top
down. This is the true, the kind of perspective that he is describing in the poem.
The rest of the canto really is a connection between art and pride, which we are not going to be
surprised, since the whole of Canto X was a reflection on the premises of that of the two
metaphors, art and pride. So you have the illuminators and then references on lines 90 to the
painters, "O empty glory of human powers, how briefly last the green on its top, unless it's followed
by age of dullness! In painting Cimabue thought to hold the field, and now Giotto has the cry, so
that the other's fame is dim and so. . ."
And then the poets, Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizelli: "So has the one Guido taken from the
other the glory of our tongue, and he, perhaps is born that shall chase the one and the other from the
nest," meaning Dante himself. The idea of fame, which is what the proud souls may be looking for,
is here dismissed as having the inconsistency of the wind, just vanishing like the breath, a breath of
wind, and so this is the sort of moral understanding of pride and humility.

Chapter 4. Canto XII: Punished Pride [00:21:54]

In Canto XII, I just want to show you and describe the reasons why, and try to explain to you the
reasons why Dante deploys a peculiar rhetorical artifice. And I ask you to turn to around lines 25
which is a sequence of new visions Dante has. This time the images are on the ground. So he has to
look down; he doesn't have to look up, and they are images of the proud souls who have been
punished and therefore now they appear now on the ground.
The text starts, "I saw him that I was created nobler than any other creature," now of course you
know who he is, "on the one side; I saw Briareus," one of the giants, "pierced by the heavenly shaft,
lying heavy. . .I saw Thymbraeus, I saw Pallas and. . . I saw Nimrod. . . " All figures you have more
or less seen before. ". . . at the foot of his mighty work, as if bewildered, and he was looking at the
peoples in Shinar that shared his pride." And then four tercets: "O Niobe. . .", "O Saul. . . ", "O mad
Arachne. . . ", "O Rehoboam. . . " And then, once again, the four more tercets: "It showed too, that
hard pavement, how Alcmaeon. . . It showed how his sons fell upon Sennacherib. . . It showed the
destruction and the cruel butchery that the Tomyris wrought. . . . It showed how the Assyrians fled
in rout after Holofernes was slain." And then one final tercet: "I saw Troy in ashes and in heaps; O
Ilion, how abased and vile the design show thee that we saw there!"
These are all the figurations of punished pride: pride that has been now literally humiliated. I did
have to ask you to look, so that you can understand the artifice. This is what we call a visible speech
that Dante himself has been deploying, and to do this I have to ask you to look at the Italian text that
begins with the word every tercet with the letter V, though I'm sure you would like me to read a
little bit of the Italian: Vedea colui che. . . , Vedea Brareo, the next tercet Vedea Timbreo, next
Vedea Nembrt. And then, the four next tercets with the letter O: O Niob, O Sal, O folle Aragne,
O Roboam. And then the next four tercets with M, Mostrava ancor. . ., next Mostrava come i figli si
gettaro. . ., Mostrava la ruina. . . You've got to read down, Mostrava come in rotta. . . and then final
tercet from line 61 to 62, Vedea Troia. . . o Ilion. . mostrava il segno. . . which sort of recapitulates
all of the key elements of this artifice.
We are in the presence of a so-called acrostic that if you read from the top down, it spells the
following V-U-M and then recapitulates. This is the V, but in Italian it's also the U. That is to say,
the fall of man. So he's doing this he's using this artifice that you can only understand if you read
the text. If you have to hear it, you can't quite get to it. In other words, he's doing two things, using
God's own art as a model for himself. This is pride, it would seem to be pride. After all it's excessive
love of one's excellence, but God did that in Canto X, he's going to do the same thing now with the
text.
The second thing that it shows is that the text is not a text to be just heard, it's a text to be read. It's a
text to be looked at. It's what we call visible speech. What is Dante doing in is he lapsing into a
sin of pride? Of course, but what he's telling us is that pride is not a sin. He is, in a sense, redefining
the ethical language of the Middle Ages and the ethical language of his own text. He's saying that in
the measure in which you love what is above you, that is not a sin. The sin it is a sin, pride, in the
measure in which you do have contempt for those that you think are below you.
We have, thanks to the world of art, a re-evaluation of the moral language. That's the first and most
important example of all of this that happens throughout Purgatory in Purgatory itself. Do you see
what is it do you want me to say this again? Dante, by imitating God's form of art as he does
here, with his own text, he's drawing attention to this as an artifice available to us thanks to his text
and it's only possible to view it the way he describes it within the text. He's giving a peculiar status
to his own text. This text has also its stages and artifice that we normally and he has learned
from God directly, which means that the sin of Lucifer, even, is not just the sin that he transgresses
what's above him it's the sin because he has contempt for what is below him. So the humility and
pride really have to go hand in hand and one attenuates and changes the meaning of the other.
This is really something that in many ways a Franciscan canto you might want to write a paper
on that on the song of the so called the Song of All Creatures by St. Francis and this particular
canto. And so you may draw your own conclusions, if you do not agree with what I have said.

Chapter 5. Canto XVI: Marco Lombardo: Political and Legal Arguments

[00:28:11]
Let's move on to the next few cantos. I want to go to, above all, to Canto XVI because here we have
we are approaching now the center of the world of Purgatory. We are in the we skipped envy
altogether and I will get back to that on another occasion in Canto XV, but in XVI and XVII we'll
talk about anger, the sin of anger, the purgation of anger. Here, in XVI, Dante meets a famous
magnanimous figure called Marco Lombardo and he has a discussion about human he has a
discussion with him about the so-called the issue of human degradation, of human degeneracy.
The scene takes place in a kind of the cloud of anger, the biblical cloud of anger, sort of a world
deprived of any light, a kind of madness, if you wish, anger understood as that which violates the
clarity and light of reason that as we refer to it.
"Gloom of Hell or night bereft of every planet under a barren sky overcast everywhere with cloud
never made a veil to my sight so heavy or of a stuff so harsh to the sense as the smoke. . ." And then
the language: "Just as a blind man goes behind his guide that he may not stray or knock against
what might injure or perhaps kill him, so I went through the foul and bitter air listening to my
Leader."
He meets then, within this context, in this background of a cloudiness and near blindness, near
invisibility of the world around him. The kind of invisibility that has been carried over from the sin
of envy, which as you know, is all about being blind. Then he hears a voice and Dante asks one
question. The question is: do we have the "world is. . .wholly barren of every virtue," on line 55, "as
thou declarest to me, and pregnant and overspread with wickedness, but I beg thee to point out to
me the cause that I may see it, and show it to men, for one places it in the heavens and another here
below."
Is there such a thing as free, what we call free will? What is it, what is free will? What is the cause
of all our deeds of our doings? Is it as the astrologers will say, in the planets and therefore a
matter of determination by forces that transcend us and which we have no control? A severe
limitation of the meaning of choices and the possibilities of choices, and therefore of merits and
demerits. If we have no choices, then we can really we cannot be praised or blamed for what we
do, or is it within us, and this is Marco Lombardo. It is a revisit Dante's revisiting the whole
story of and debate, an ancient debate about the relationship between free will and God's
foreknowledge if you wish, that Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, as is well known, had
been confronting.
"He first heaved then a deep sigh," line 63 and following, "which grief forced us to 'Alas!', then
began: 'Brother. . ." I don't have to point out to you, this is the form of salutation in Purgatorio. You
already had "Our Father" in Canto XI, with this idea that there's a human family, therefore a brother
is the appropriate form of interlocution and address among the souls and Dante.
". . .the world is blind and indeed thou comest from it. You that are living refer every cause up to the
heavens alone, just as if they moved all things with them by necessity. If it were so, free choice
would be destroyed." I think the text is very clear. I would have to tell you that there is a distinction
between choice and free will, they are not the same thing: free choice or free will. And this is a very
difficult argument because choice implies that we that it's an intellectual problem, that we choose
thanks to what we know. The will is a difficult argument, because free will implies that the will is
never in bondage, and it's possible to attain the moment where we will freely. In fact, so many
theologians go on asking that free will means that the will finally can be moved by an act of choice
that it is it follows on the prior act of knowledge.
Dante uses the two terms: "if it were so free choice would be destroyed in you and there would be
no justice and happiness for well doing and misery for evil." That's the answer that Marco
Lombardo will give. "The heavens initiate your impulses; I do not say all, but, if I did, light is given
on good and evil, and free will, and if it bear the strain in the first battlings with the heavens, then,
being rightly nurtured it conquers all. To a greater power and to a better nature you, free, are
subject."
Which in Italian it really is, I have to say, more of an oxymoron, line 80: liberi soggiaciete. You are
free subjects exactly, you are and you can you do sense the you understand the
contradiction in the two terms. That is to say, we are free, but at the same time we are subject. I can
only understand it with in terms of what Dante will say a little bit later when he discusses he
shifts the argument to the law, saying that that's really the we are free subjects and the law is
exactly the the metaphor for him that will make us understand what it means to be free and
subject at the same time; where limitations are going to be posited and within those limitations we
can be free. That's the argument.
"And that creates the mind in you which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore. . ." etc.
Then here the first thing that Dante does is give a sense of creation. He posits human freedom in the
act of creation of the soul. This is, "from his hand," lines 85, "from His hand, who regards it fondly,
before it is, comes forth, like a child that sports, tearful and smiling, the little simple soul that knows
nothing." This is the famous poem, for those of you who remember a little bit of Latin, Hadrian
of the emperor Hadrian about the little simple soul that goes wandering around and Dante's
reinterpreting it as not the soul that is lost in the world, but a soul that is playing.
The creation is a playful act. The soul is a like "a child that sports tearful and smiling, the little
simple soul that knows nothing, but, moved by a joyful Maker turns eagerly to what delights it." We
have the idea of creation as a free and playful act. Play in the sense of the innocence of the
experience and play in the sense of being free. Now when one is at play one has all the attributes of
spontaneity and freedom that go with it. It is the basis of what I call the playful theology of Dante.
God creates the world in an act in a moment of freedom and that freedom becomes the
foundation for positing our own human freedom. It's because we were born free that therefore we
can go on believing and that there is such a freedom for us. That it was not an act of necessity
that would be the opposite in the moment of creation and the experience of creation but it's
spontaneous and playful.
Then the canto goes on with these extraordinary political arguments, political and legal arguments.
So we talk about human freedom and Dante moves to political freedom and look at what he says:
"Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns," which is a kind of Baroque image and
I'll explain that too, in a moment, why he uses this image, "which made plain the one way and the
other, that of the world and that of God. The one has quenched the other and the sword is joined to
the crook, and the one together with the other must perforce go ill, since, joined, the one does not
fear the other. If thou dost not believe me consider the ear of corn," etc.
What is he talking about? God has Rome had two suns? The phrase translates the line
mistranslates deliberately mistranslates, a line in Genesis where it is said that God gave mankind
two luminaries, the sun and the moon, but whereby we could really see both in the day and at night.
This little image from Genesis was used by the so-called hierocrats, the Canon lawyers of the
middle ages, to explain it as the emblem for the Empire and the Church. That the Empire the sun
having the larger light the hierocrats would claim, was the light of the Church, and the moon having
a reflected light was the light of the Empire. It was an argument, they would use this gloss as a way
of explaining the superiority of the Empire over the superiority of the Church over the
Empire. The Empire had to take its light and its direction from the Church.
Dante is deliberately violating that idea of the sun and the moon, equating them by saying "the two
suns," in order to convey his conviction, the conviction that the two institutions God provides for
the guidance of human beings, the Church and the Empire, are equal. He's conferring on them an
equality rather than a hierarchical ordering of the two luminaries, the sun and the moon. It's an
argument that really is addressed against the lawyers at the University of Bologna where they are
they were working for the pope, explaining the sense of the superiority, the superior status of one
above the other.
With this whole argument here, now the which is about a kind of legality or the questions of
history's boundaries, that's what I understand by legalities, you have retrospectively also some light
shown on this claim of being free subjects in Canto XVI.

Chapter 6. Canto XVII: Visions of Anger; Approaching the Center [00:40:09]

We turn now to the very center of the Divine Comedy. The center of the Divine Comedy, which is,
clearly, numerically the center, Canto XVII, and we'll see how what is it that Dante discusses
here in Canto XVII. The canto its visions of anger of the the canto begins with an apostrophe
to the reader's memory: "Recall reader, if ever in the mountains mist caught thee for which thou
couldst not see except as moles do through the skin," the difficulty of sight, the difficulty of seeing
is highlighted again, "how, when the moist, dense vapors begin to disperse, the sun's disk passes
feebly through them; and thy imagination will quickly come to see how, at first, I saw the sun again,
now near its setting. So measuring mine with the faithful steps of my master, I came forth from such
a fog to the beams which were already dead on the shores below."
It's a twilight landscape; you have a number of reversals and contrast antithesis actually the mole
blind mole, that burrows underneath the earth and then alpine scenery which makes vision also
impossible. Dante's evoking the heights and the lowest possible point of sight with the mole. The
sun is setting and the night is approaching. It is as if the whole so the solidity of the world
around him is vanishing is disappearing.
What's the experience? At this very moment, he's appealing to the memory of the reader and the
imagination of the reader. It is as if that when the world outside seems to be failing us, we have this
part of this inner light, this inner possibility of recollection of the world or imagining the world.
He's specifying what some of the claims about the inner lights that he says we have within us could
be. He had just said that.
Also he's preparing this extraordinary second apostrophe to the imagination. Dante is we are
approaching the center of the universe, this poetic universe, and Dante reminds us that this is a work
of the imagination. Why does he do this? What is this what does he say about the imagination?
The first thing that he says about the imagination: "O imagination, which so steals us at times from
outward things that we pay no heed though a thousand trumpets sound about us, who moves thee if
the senses offer thee nothing?"
It's the same question he had been asking earlier: where do our choices come from? Why do we
what we do? Is it because a power from the outside moves us, or is there something that is within
us? Now this question is asked in slightly different terms, in terms of the imagination. The
imagination is a power, that's what he the way he describes it that removes us from the
outside world. There's such a power in other words, it's not just the imagination that translates
sensory experiences into images for the benefit of rational judgment: this is the triadic Aristotelian
order; the imagination has the middle ground between the senses, the work of the perception and the
work of reason. This is a triadic pattern that Dante could have found in Aquinas; we, in turn, found
it certainly in Aristotle, that's the way it precedes.
He has another imagination that he's talking about now, an imagination that removes us from the
outside world. It frees us it needs nothing of the world of perception. It is a power that, in many
ways, steals us from it, it's a power that how does he describe it? It comes "from the outward
things that we pay no heed though a thousand trumpets sound about us." It's a faculty that is
completely free from the outside world, a power that we have within us to imagine worlds that don't
even exist. To imagine things that without the solicitations of what lies outside us and continues: "a
light moves thee which takes form in the heavens, either of itself or by a will that directs it
downwards. Of her impious deed. . ." and then he goes on describing three images of anger.
At the point in which Dante is approaching the center of the his world where this where we
are witnessing, we are shown the power of the imagination as a visionary faculty. As a faculty that
is not a transcription of the real world, and one wonders why he has to make this kind of claim. It
encompasses the real world and yet is something that almost prophetic, something that does not
come from the contacts with the world. I'll come back to this in a moment, I hope.
He has three images, then three that come down to him gratuitously. They seem to have been
descending into his mind without anything that around him and then Dante goes on here
describing the law of Purgatory. What is the world of Purgatory? How is it constructed? What's the
architecture of this world? Unsurprisingly, this is a fabric of love, an architecture of love, and it's at
the very center, lines 91, 92, and 93 that this is the actual numerically even, in the center the
poem not surprising, that's what Dante says, "Neither Creator nor creature, my son, was ever
without love, either natural or of the mind."
That's the center. What does he mean natural or of the mind? He's distinguishing here between the
two types of love and in fact he will clarify: ". . .and this thou knowest; the natural is always
without error," whatever impulse we may have," that's the impulse of love, that is never prone to
sinfulness. It's a natural impulse, a natural desire, that which is instead sinful is the one where
choice is involved. "The natural is always without error, but the other may err through a wrong
object or through excess or defect of vigor."
Whenever we make a choice we may either not love the right object or we may love it too much, or
we may love it too little, and so this is the topography of Purgatory. This triadic division in terms of
love. Everything is a problem of love but then there are varieties that organize its subdivisions.
"While it is directed on the primal good and on the secondary keeps right measure, it cannot be the
cause of sinful pleasure; but when it is warped to evil, or with more or with less concern than is due
pursues its good against the Creator works his creature. From this thou canst understand that love
must be the seed in you of every virtue and of every action deserving punishment. Now since love
can never turn its face from the welfare of its subject all things are secure from self hatred. . . " and
so on.
And Dante now responds: "Now I would have thee give thought to the other, which pursues its good
in faulty measure. Everyone confusedly apprehends the good at which the mind may be at rest and
desires it, so that each strives to reach it, and if the love is sluggish that draws you to see or gain it,
this terrace, after due repentance, torments you for that. Other good there is. . ."
The question then will become and I did not ask you to read this canto, but I can give you a sort
of brief preview of it Dante has to ask if what is this love of choice? Does it depend since I
may have a particular perception of the world that makes me see whatever I encounter as beautiful
and desirable, where is my fault? He repeats the same problems that he's been raising in Canto XV.
Dante will try to explain it in terms of love, and yet, we are going to be brought back to the world of
how do we perceive what it is that we love.
The perception of what we love becomes crucial to our very responsibilities for it. So this is at
the center of the poem then Dante seems to be suspended between two ideas. On the one hand, the
notion that there is a real world where you have responsibilities for everything that we do and on the
other hand, a world where there's an imagination which is completely disengaged from the world of
reality, and cannot quite be constrained or held in. So how are you going to suspended between
these two possibilities how is Dante going to bring them together? You see what the issue is?
How do you if the world of the imagination is free and disengaged from reality then how am
I'm going to, on the other hand, going to be held accountable for what I do over the world, and with
the world around me, and with my own deeds.
At the center of the poem Dante's raising this contradiction that's not imagination is made to be
the way to knowledge. I can only know through the imagination. The imagination of that
depends on my perception of the world or an imagination which frees me completely from the
world, and then these two ideas of the imagination are really in contradiction one with the other. So
where is the human responsibility? The poem gets nourished by this duality of the imagination. The
poem moves back and forth between one and the other.

Chapter 7. Question and Answer [00:51:25]

And let me just stop here because I think I may have said a little bit too much about these issues and
I could respond to your questions, I hope, if there are some. Please.
Student: So just as sins of the Inferno were more products of the will, the sins in Purgatory are
more products of love and he's not told where will may or may not have been factored into it, and
because Purgatory is the place that's in between, is it also the place of that uncertainty between will
and love?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well I don't know about that. The question is really a perplexity
about what I have been saying. In Inferno, will is crucial and you are absolutely right. There cannot
be a sin unless there is a will involved. In Purgatorio, the argument here seems to be the way I
have been following it from Cantos XV, XVI, XVII and the way it's going to be developed in XVIII
and actually frankly XIX, where Dante goes on telling a dream Dante makes the word of love
the crucial act of our being in the word, relating us to God, we are related to God, really born
through the way of love, therefore, the way of the heart and not unnecessarily through some abstract
metaphysical issues.
Then the issue becomes how is this love related to the will? Is Dante being uncertain between the
two? What is the moral Dante begins in Canto XV talking about moral responsibilities, this kind
of free subjection that we have, and an inner light that is available to us. Then he Canto XVI
we'll also talk about the in Canto XVI he talks about creation, the creation of the soul, the
freedom with which God creates and that freedom authorizes us. It becomes a sort of ground for the
human freedom. Then in XVII, first of all, he talks about an imagination which is completely free of
any contact with the world and then talks about this theory of love, that rational love that organizes,
the love of knowledge that organizes everything.
I could just have stopped there and shown you, this is really what the text says, and maybe ask you
to connect imagination and love that I read at the two sides of Canto XVII, at the very center of the
poem, almost to imply that we can love only and so far as and we can love as well as our
imagination takes us to loving. That's clearly one of the images.
But clearly there is more in that debate. The debate is that if I love according well, or not enough, or
too much, that has to do with the way I perceive the world. Why does he have to talk about an
imagination which is so unbounded that it needs nothing of reality? I mean to say this that in the
subject and I call it I say well this is a visionary aspect of the imagination. It's a poet who thinks
of himself as being the visionary poet.
You have an idea of Romantic poets, for instance, English Romantic poets who distinguish between
fantasy and the imagination, though Dante does it in terms of this imaginative power that removes
me from the world of reality. It takes me away and opens up new spaces and the mind in itself. I ask
this question though from another point of view, which I think is connected to what we have been
saying here.
Can Dante ever write this kind of poem by being bound to the world of reality and to the way in
which the real world is known? Clearly the answer is no. The only way that Dante can come to God
and the vision of God is by agreeing with this idea, yielding, surrendering to the power of the
imagination that will take him out of the real world. You cannot really write a poem like the Divine
Comedy by following rules and laws, whether they are rhetorical, or whether they are just pure ideas
of style. You try to you have to go on imagining things that don't really are available to our
perceptions. That, to me, is the issue, that's how I have been moving this issue.
I think that the poem, that Dante's voice is suspended between these two possibilities of the
imagination. An imagination that has to accept the world of reality, an ordinary imagination, and yet
there is also another idea of the imagination, which is so much more powerful. But, if we accept this
as being true for the poem, it follows we have to ask the question of, what about the moral life? Is
the moral life then one that where Dante's saying, that in effect, all the language of blame and
praise, which depends on accepting limits and free subjection to rules, is that is he saying that
that is also maybe it's arbitrary? That there may be some other law that he has to discover? I
don't think that there is yet an answer here, but that's the problem that I was trying to convey. Does
that answer your provisionally your perplexities, okay. Yes.
Student: Regarding Canto XVI with the vision of anger served the beginning of anger that
served as a polar opposite condition to love, why does he think anger?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is does the sin of anger in Canto XVI, is that a kind of
polar opposite to love?
Student: And why does he begin with it?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Why does it begin with that? Well I think that anger I would
define it as a form of madness to begin with. It's a kind of eclipse of all rationality and so it explains
why Dante will have to go on retrieving the laws of reason, the laws of rationality to be opposed to
the kind of to that the experience of madness in Canto XVI. We go into Canto XVII and he's
talking about a sort of love which is very rational, but then he is undoing it with something that
stands between madness and love, and that's the imagination. See the connection? Okay.
Student: I'm a little confused about what you just said about how the moral life might present a
power to the imagination I just think if what if an understanding from what you've been
saying about why you use the imagination is because you're approaching mystery so it's hard to use
the real world to approach this. So it seems like and so you need the imagination and I guess if
Dante is going to God, so if he's approaching mysteries, so it's hard for him to talk about this in a
rational language. But isn't that more of like an acknowledgement of his limitations than a
transgression, so doesn't it still fit with humility and fit with the moral life?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: That's an excellent point. You not only asked the question I think
that you are clarifying some of the problems. The question is still about the whole issue of the
imagination that on the one hand the imagination seems to be the way to so large and so such a
force that will take Dante, I'm paraphrasing your point, take Dante all the way to see God. I seem to
be saying that that is a kind of transgression, but you emphasize that that can be an
acknowledgement of human limitations.
I call it maybe that's true, that's really what it is. It's I call that a visionary power within him.
It may be coming to him from the outside. He asks that question, does this visionary power come to
me from the outside, or is it something that is within human beings? That's the question. He doesn't
answer that question at that point. What he does say is, well this is the image that came to me, the
image of a martyr who committed suicide, and he goes on with his three images. He doesn't answer
that directly and I think that he wants to keep you guessing if this is a human transgression or an
acknowledgement of human limits.
He I don't think that he knows yet, at this point, what the unfolding of that dilemma will be. He
wants us to think in terms of that dilemma and that dilemma is at the heart of Purgatory.
The dilemma between what is this power? I have a power within me that without which I can
never really go to God, and is this in any way a transgression? Do I need a transgression in order to
come to God? Ulysses thought that there would be no knowledge without transgression. Maybe
Adam in the Garden also thought that there would be no knowledge without transgression that
the real knowledge is to transgress. Is Dante thinking that way? Or maybe he's thinking that there is
no transgression without, at the same time, a sense of the limitations. That indeed, that the idea of
transgression depends on some sense of limitations. Do you see what I'm saying?
What the argument seems to me could very well be, that in effect pride and humility are really more
connected than what we like to think. We are always proud and Dante would say, it's good. To me
that's what Canto X, XI, and XII were saying. You may not agree with that reading, that pride is
good in the measure in which I can reach out for something really higher. That's not bad. What is
bad is that that blinds me to something else.
I take that to be Franciscan thinking. He is invoking the humblest voice of the whole literary
tradition up to this time, the Canticle of all Creatures. I'm glad that you are giving me the
opportunity to refocus on the fact that that dilemma between pride and humility reappears as a
question of limits and transgressions with the imagination and knowledge and with love.
Of course, Dante would say that there is such a thing of love within with laws and yet love is one
of those experiences where we usually don't like to believe that there are limits, right? You don't
want anybody to come I hope to come to your door and say, I love you in a very reasonable
way and with a lot of limitations. I'm sure you'll give kick him out. Love is one of those
experiences exactly like the imagination, that the powers of which seem always to be transgressing
whatever limitations we want to we wanted to transgress the limitations, rationally, reasonably
we want to impose on it.
This is the question that Dante is raising. You cannot have, I think that you are you are onto the
right track with your in your paraphrasing the whole in your asking the question that maybe
transgression and limitations really have to be seen together. Pride and humility will have to be seen
together; subjection and freedom will have to be seen together. They are not terms which are so far
apart from each other. Each involves the other, that's why I call it a paradox, the knot that joins
these things together, is exactly that. Is this am I did I confuse all of you today here? Oh my,
then I will confuse you next time. Other questions that we have? Yes.
Student: Can you talk about the section in Canto XV where he's talking about how true love and
the love of God is like a mirror? It's around line 70
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Canto XV.
Student: Line 75
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes.
Student: How love of God is like his mirror that the more people that love God, the more love
he gives back and it's like a mirror that keeps reflecting and amplifying love. And I was wondering
I was intrigued by the image of the mirror, so I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about
how the image of the mirrors and the idea of mirrors maybe are part of Dante's way of thinking.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The this is around line 75, right? Let me just read this whole
paragraph. Dante is in the describing the virtue that is opposed to envy, mercy, the idea of the
notion of mercy and because I read from 65 on:
"Because thou still settest thy mind on earthly things, thou gatherest darkness from the very light."
That's part of sort of reversals that we how light induces and generates darkness; it's a certain
kind of light. We seem to believe or to think in terms of the light that is available to us, but that does
not necessarily produce more light, but can dim our understanding about the way things really are.
"That infinite and unspeakable good which is there above speeds to love as a sunbeam comes to a
bright body; so much it gives of itself as it finds ardor, so the more charity extends the more does
the eternal goodness increase upon it, and the more souls that are enamored there above the more
there are to be rightly loved and the more love there is and like a mirror the one returns it to the
other. And if my speech do not relieve thy hunger thou shalt see Beatrice and she will deliver thee
wholly from this and every other craving. Strive only that soon may be erased, as the other two are
already, the five wounds which are healed by being painful."
The question is, you want me to say something about the mirror, the image of the mirror that is
being used here. I think that this is a Platonic image of the notion that all of creation this is The
Celestial Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius. I don't know that I have ever spoken of him, I will
because Dante mentions him in Paradise, but in The Celestial Hierarchy, Dante the Pseudo-
Dionysius thinks of all creation being a kind of occasion being a kind of hall of mirrors where
everything is reflected onto the other, a number of reflections that all give different light in
different ways the light of God, this is so that's where the problem of mercy places us, so this
idea of charity.
Dante is interested in two things, one the generative idea of charity. Charity produces more charity.
It has a kind of power to generate itself and multiply itself, and the way he compares this is he
compares it to what I call what he calls here, obliquely, the hall of mirrors. Let me just say
something else about Pseudo-Dionysius, when Pseudo-Dionysius wants to mystical theology
he wants to talk about the divine, he will think about the divine in terms of light, as you know. Light
that is refracted and reflected throughout the orders and ranks of creation. The highest image of this
light of the divine is the sun. The sun that is generous, in the sense, as I mean generous in a very
peculiar sense, in the sense that it gives itself to all, without any distinction and it depends on us,
whether we are going to be able to appreciate that light or not, but the sun is giving itself freely to
all.
This is the principle of mercy for Dante. Mirrors are reproducing that light endlessly; the whole of
creation is sending back this kind of light, without any loss in itself of the original light. This is the
metaphor and the metaphysics of mirror in Dante. The world is therefore, from the point of view of
mercy, and not from the point of view of envy, where we do not even see the light. Envy means that
we have no knowledge of anything that comes from the outside, but in the world of mercy we have
an we understand this generous giving of the light which comes from God and the heat that goes
with it. That's it, so it's a virtue that completely offsets the notion of envy, the idea of God who
creates without envy, that's another way of thinking about the generosity of God. That is connected
to the light and to the multiplications of the light from mirrors.
Actually this is an image that really reappears in Paradise and we'll come back to this canto, the
whole of Paradise organized through this hall, these infinite reflections of God's light.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 13 - Purgatory XIX, XXI, XXII [October 16, 2008]
Chapter 1. The Issue of Imagination [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We talked the last time I talked a little about this whole issue of
the imagination that Dante places, along with a definition of love, and the and love is the power
that governs, that shapes the moral world of Purgatory. Last time we talked about these two fossae
of Canto XVII, the two fossae of the center; it really makes the center kind of ellipses, as it were,
between imagination and love. Love is attached to the it's joined to a theory of free will, because
it's by choice because of our choices that we can be held accountable for the actions that we
engage in: loving wrong objects, loving too much or loving too little.
Some of the problems, I think, stem from a certain misunderstanding about the imagination. That
Dante should place the imagination at the center of the poem should really not surprise you. He's a
poet and he thinks that imagination is indeed the path that he has to take in order to come to any
form of knowledge. It's only through the imagination it's not that does not exclude rationality,
but that's the discourse of philosophers, the discourse of theologians if you wish, but he places the
imagination as his way. And then from that point of view, he can even challenge some ideas of the
superiority, let's say, of rational argument over the imagination. The imagination is the weapon of
the poet.
How with what kind of attributes does he invest the imagination? It's tied to memory. The Canto
XVII begins with an apostrophe to the reader's memory. It appears as, in the feminine, imaginativa,
the in the Dante's silencing the term vis. It has a sort of force, imagination, it's moved by
something else. Dante does not decide whether it's the heaven or the stars or comes from inside us,
but he has a particular power, a strange power. It comes like a thief in the night, it robs us of any
degree of consciousness about the world outside of us and, just as memory dislodges the
description of memory at the beginning of Canto XVII, it's a memory that has an incredible memory
as a form of the imagination, as you know.
Memory and the imagination are connected. It's a form of the imagination, but it's a memory that
has the power to move up and down, the text evokes the Alpine heights and the depth of the mole. It
talks about a form of blindness and yet it creates vision. Memory is a figure of time and then the
whole passage is described in terms of space, as if imagination had the power to dislocate us from
where we think that we are.
This is the point, and it's not an unusual point for Dante to make, since this is the poetry of exile, the
poetry of a man who thinks that he's a stranger while living on earth. A man, without a sense, a clear
sense of where his home may be, he is this is the poetry rooted in the consciousness of
homelessness, so the imagination is an extension, an internalized version of this sense of
homelessness. It has a power and that power that doesn't seem to be able to be a power that
cannot quite be contained or coerced within definite parameters of conduct.
In fact, this insistence on the imagination, I'm really recapitulating the things that maybe I thought I
said and probably I didn't say last time, between, on the one hand, the sin of wrath, which is a form
of madness. That is to say, a sin that eclipses the powers of reason, that's anger, and on the other
hand, this discourse on love. This is really what I was saying. Dante understands that there is an
imagination which cannot quite be held in check, and yet the whole point of the poem I'm talking
whenever I'm talking about the poem, I point out some seemingly insignificant details like, oh look
this is a symmetry here between Canto VI of Inferno, Canto VI of Purgatorio, or whatever, to
indicate that it is a poem built with a precise principle of order in mind. Not only it has order in its
technical execution, it has order also as a moral problem. It's all about ordering the appetites,
ordering the will. But at the same time along side with it, and this is the complexity and the beauty
of Dante's text, this is another argument that almost questions, makes us forces us into thinking
that there are some elements that seem to be left out of this fabric of order that Dante has woven, or
if you like, the metaphor has built the architecture that he has built.
Let' see how this argument really continues. That's not the end of the story. This is just a stage in his
movement of self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. In fact, Canto XVIII, we're now moving
into a different moral realm, it's a moral realm where we actually know we are moving toward a so-
called, what Dante and medieval theorists of vices call acedia. Acedia is a Latin term, which in
English we can describe we'll describe as a sort of despondency, as a sort of indecisiveness,
sluggishness, sloth. That's it, that's the if you are interested in knowing more about what the
Middle Ages thought about this, this scholar Wenzel wrote a book called, Acedia, exactly about the
both in English medieval literature, Dante and other issues.
What more precisely how can we go on understanding this question of acedia? It's in a sense the
parody or the inversion of contemplation. It's tied to a sense of loss of the outside world. Acedia
describes the condition of the mind that has found itself indifferent to the object of desire. It really
is a crisis of desire. One finds objects that the sloth, the sluggishness, the indecisiveness of the
mind. It is as if the objects of desire were had lost their consistency, their attractiveness, their
luster. You just don't care. It's the problem, the so-called noonday devil, the temptation of the
monks, that's why I call it a parody of contemplation. It's the temptation that the monks experienced
in their cloisters when they sort of find that the whole idea of turning their minds to the divine is no
longer, or provisionally perhaps, is not appealing. It's the loss of appeal of anything outside of
oneself and indicates a kind of both intellectual and dreamy sort of condition and that's really what I
want to talk about now.
Canto XVIII is the most intellectual of cantos in Purgatory. Dante faces a theoretical issue. He's
talking to Virgil, and these theoretical issues of Canto XVIII flow out of the problems that we have
had in discussing Canto XVII. As you know, we are talking about imagination and love, and there is
an imagination that somehow is vagabond. It's a thief, breaks out of any particular confines; it
dislodges us. It takes the ground out of our own certainties about the way we see the world.
Remember that the image with which Canto XVII starts, Dante places us in a world which is at the
twilight. There's no real light. It's all foggy, and then all of a sudden, we do see something, and it's
unclear whether we see something because of the light that comes from within us. Memories, for
instance, that's a light we carry within us, confused, as they may be, or some other kind of
conscious intuition.
That's really the discourse of the imagination and that dislodged some of us here. That made it a
little difficult to try to get a hold of grasp. Dante has the same problem in Canto XVIII. Canto
XVIII begins with a question that he asks of Virgil. You are talking about love, you are talking
about this inclination, the whole theory of love in Canto XVII. He says, "Master, my sight," this is
Canto XVIII the very beginning, "is so quickened in thy light that I discern clearly all that thy
words set forth and explain; and I pray therefore, dear and gentle Father, that thou expound love to
me, to which thou reduce every good action and its opposite."
Whatever you have told me in Canto XVII really is not enough. And Virgil goes on explaining the
theory that it's a very philosophical theory, that we have perceptions. Your perception takes from
outward reality an impression and unfolds it within you, so it makes the mind turn to it. Whatever
the will is bound, that's really what we call pleasure. I'm paraphrasing poorly.
"Thy words and my following. . ." Excuse me, let me just mention another little passage: "Now may
be plain," line 35, "Now may be plain to thee how hidden is the truth for those who maintain that
every love is in itself praiseworthy. . ." He's attacking this is the view of the Epicureans who
believe that every pleasure, without any particular judgment attached to the object of pleasure, is
praiseworthy. Dante says no, we have to exercise some moral judgment. We have to create
distinctions. We have to discriminate between the good and the bad love.
". . . perhaps because its matter always seems good, but not every stamp is good, even if it be good
wax." I would even go so far as to say that he's really thinking now of his friend Cavalcanti
Guido's Epicurean you saw him mention in Canto XII by name Epicurean leanings. The idea
that's the Epicurean ethics, that if pleasure is really the only object really worthy of any pursuit
and that's really what we are doing. When we are in pursuit of knowledge or real experiences, then
they claim that all of pleasure is good. That's the hedonistic ethics that Dante really renounces or
debates.
Then, in fact, Virgil goes on saying: "Thy words and my following wit," this is Dante talking, "have
revealed the nature of love to me, but that has made me more full of perplexity; for if love is offered
to us from without and if the soul moves with no other feet, it has no merit when it goes straight to
crooked."
Now you say that everything is love and the love that I have depends on the experience of images,
well in what how am I going to deserve for choosing well or not choosing well, since at the basis
of the imagination, we have perceptions. What I perceive may be looking good to me and does not
look good to you, so the issue is displaced from the point of the world of imagination to the world
of perception. Virgil will go on explaining a scholastic theory to the point that indeed we incline to
the good, but then actually we have within us the faculty of choice.
He says, "In order that to this will every other may be conformed there is innate in you the faculty
which counsels and which ought to hold the threshold of assent." He's talking about, once again,
free will and he will add, this is what I this is on line 60 and following, this is all I can tell you
from a philosophical point of view. Other issues about the free will will be explained to you by
Beatrice when she first comes to you. And so it would seem to make a distinction between the
knowledge of Virgil and the knowledge of Beatrice. He said, "As far as reason sees here I can tell
thee, beyond that; wait only for Beatrice, for it is a matter of faith," and so on.
There seems to be two ways of understanding this issue. The fact is that Beatrice will never discuss
this problem, but in a sense, Beatrice represents the explanation that Dante is looking for, because
Beatrice is a kind of love, for Dante, that stands for a visionary form of love, and not just a love that
can be reduced to a question of mechanics of physics of perception. That's really what Canto XVIII
seems to be doing then. It responds, enlarges, and at the same time brings us back into the very
predicament that Canto XVII had posed for us. It seems that Dante is moving, and at the same time,
an impasse another impasse has been reached.
Now, with this in mind, we turn to what he unavoidably has to do, try to translate all of these issues
of love, imagination, choice, and from the theoretical into the autobiographical or existential
dimension. This is done in the dream, an erotic dream that Dante relates at the beginning of Canto
XIX. Before I turn to that canto, I just want to tell you about how Dante understand this. He has one
line at the very end of Canto XVIII that I would the last line of Canto XVIII that I really want
to underline for you, the whole paragraph reads: "Then when the shades were so far parted from us
that they could no longer be seen, a new thought arose within me, from which others many and
diverse were born; and I rambled so from one to the other, that in my wandering my eyes closed and
I changed my musing into dream."

Chapter 2. The Dream of Canto XIX; The Two Women [00:16:23]

That introduces the dream of Canto XIX, but the line in Italian is really very interesting because it
presents the connection between thinking and dreaming. He says, in fact the translation: "My
musing," it's correct but it's really I would have said to make it very clear, my thought. Dante
says on line 145, che li occhi per vaghezza ricopersi, e 'l pensamento in sogno trasmutai. There's a
kind of link, a sort of sense of the connection between thinking and dreaming that Dante favors
dreaming at this point over thinking.
You shouldn't be surprised that Dante's doing this. The Romance of the Rose, a grand medieval epic,
is a dream, and tells the story of a dream. The Book of the Duchess Chaucer's The Book of the
Duchess, is the story of a dream. The Vita nuova is full of dreams. Even for those of you who are
interested in contemporary literature, fairly contemporary, I'm thinking of Keats' great poem, "Sleep
and Poetry." I don't know how many of you have had a chance to read that. Poets love sleeping
because sleep introduces the idea of the dream and the possibility of a dream, the possibility of a
knowledge which is not willed. I finally have some revelations within me which is not what I would
normally have if I were awake, so this is the great privilege that they give to dreams.
Are the Middle Ages really conscious of this dimension? Yes, there is a text by an author called
Macrobius, and if you want to know more really, which Macrobius, who writes on The Dream of
Scipio, Cicero's figure in the Republic, it's all about it's an encyclopedia of dreams and based on
Artemidorus, but it's distinctions between oracles, fantasies, insomniac, deliriums, dreams and so
on. They are very conscious of the sort of power and revelations that can come through dreams.
What is this dream about? It's now definitely in the world of acedia. It's a dream let me just read
this initial the beginning of Canto XIX. I emphasize that this is now an autobiographical the
highlighting of the autobiographical dimension of all the problems we have been discussing from
XVII, above all XVI, XVII, and XVIII. Dante has to translate the theories into a personal giving
them a personal shape and that to investigate the kind of importance that they may have for him.
It starts then with, "In the hour when the day's heat, overcome by the earth and sometimes by
Saturn, can no longer temper the cold of the moon, when the geomancers see their Fortuna Major
rise in the east before dawn by a path which does not long stay dark for it, there came to me in
dream a woman stammering, cross-eyed and crooked on her feet with maimed hands and of sallow
hue. I gazed at her, and as the sun revives cold limbs benumbed by the night, so my look gave her a
ready tongue, and then in a little time made her quite erect and colored her wan features as love
desires. When she had her speech thus set free she began to sing so that it would have been hard for
me to turn my mind from her. 'I am,' she sang, 'I am the sweet siren who beguile the sailors in mid-
sea, so great delight it is to hear me. I turned Ulysses, eager on his way, to my song and he who
dwells with me rarely departs, so wholly I content him.'
Her lips were not yet closed again when a lady, holy and alert, appeared beside me to put her to
confusion. 'Oh Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said with anger. And he came with his eyes fixed on
the honorable one; he seized the other and laid her bare in front, tearing her clothes, and showed me
her belly. That awoke me with the stench that came from her. I turned my eyes to the good Master.
'Three times at least I have called thee,' he said, 'rise and come, let us find the opening by which
thou enterest."
That's the end of the dream, the account of the dream, and this is also the journey will continue
that seemed to have come to a halt here at night. As you recall, just to give you a sense of Dante's
ordered poetic mind, this is the second of three dreams. We didn't really read the first one about
in Canto IX, was the dream of Ganymede. Dante's moving from the anti-Purgatory to Purgatory
proper and then it's the the third one will appear in Canto XXVII, so that really Dante is
scanning these three dreams with also a sense of numerical symbolic numerical precision IX,
XVIII, retold in XIX, but takes place during the night and then XXVII. This is the it's a dream,
it's a dream that happens at dawn, just some details, and a dream at dawn has always the value they
believed of it being a kind of prophetic dream. It's a dream that really has a sort of a hue, a color of
the truth.
It says something about so if you understand the dream as an allegory say, because it's about a
veil. It's about tearing clothes. There is something hidden underneath it all, then it may be this
allegory has a truth value. It's not some kind of mere fable or other. Dante starts evoking the planet
Saturn which is we shall see that in you know that Dante mentions planets and joins them to
the various liberal arts. I probably have mentioned this before. So when we will be talking about the
moon, Dante is going to discuss grammar. He'll talk about Mars, the planet of war, and there he'll
talk about music. Jupiter and justice, Saturn is astronomy, also the planet of contemplation. In this
sense, I think that he's hinting that sloth is the obverse side, the parody of contemplation, a different
type of self-absorption nonetheless. Not a way of breaking out, the contemplation means breaking
out of one's self and reach some kind of the gates outside of time. Here it's a dream that seems to
be a movement, an inward movement, so it's Saturn.
Then he continues with this language of astronomy and divination who "no longer temper the cold
of the moon when the geomancers see the Fortuna Major." This is a process of knowledge, as
divination. That's a different type of rational knowledge, divining signs. This is the context in which
the dream is set: "rise in the east before dawn by a path which does not long stay dark for it, there
came to me in a dream." Now the dream starts.
The first thing that I have to point out to you is that in this in the dream, the dreamer is an object.
The dream comes to him. Clearly, it is not willed, it's not something that he decides or he wants.
One is the object of some dreams or apparitions, or signs, images that descend into one's self
without one's own self control or dominion over there. Dante seems to place himself in a condition
of passivity which is the passivity of sloth. The idea that I am awake and therefore vigilant, and
therefore capable of making judgments about what's happening to me, is here, now, for the time
being, bracketed.
What is this dream about though? Well it's a dream of a woman, and the Italian text plays since
this is a dream about two women, two modes of being, two choices. It's almost as if he were he
isn't, but you know this is the mythography of Hercules, as they call him, at the crossing road. He
had to choose between vice and virtue, but Hercules has an easy time because he's always going to
be right: in thinking mythography, if you go to the right then you really have by going toward
virtue, left and right, being dexterous rather than sinister, the idea of the left being bad.
Here we don't have that, here's two women, but the language of the poem distinguishes very
carefully between them. One is a femmina, there is materiality and even a kind of animal sense of
the word, and when the other woman appears, she's called a donna; donna is the Italian word from
domina, the lady is called a holy lady, I guess, "lady holy and alert," etc. She is this woman, she
crystallizes what we would call the aesthetics of the ugly. We're always talking about the beauty and
the idea that beauty brings about a kind of revelation of love and the pleasure that goes with beauty.
In fact, one can say that love no? this is a Platonic way of understanding love has always a
hunger for beauty. The conventional way of thinking about aesthetics is to imagine beautiful
proportionate forms.
Here, Dante is giving exactly the opposite, an aesthetic of the ugly. But an ugly which is not static
and somehow is experiences metamorphosis. In fact, look what happens, she is "stammering,
cross-eyed, and crooked on her feet," she is the anti-Beatrice by obviously, "with maimed hands
and sallow hue."
Now he changes: from the dreamer as an object, the dreamer becomes a subject, "I." You see that,
from ". . .came to me. . ." and then, "I gazed at her, and as the soul revives cold limbs benumbed by
the night, so my look. . ." His desires transform this image, and from the ugly image that it was, it
becomes now instead invested with attributes of attractiveness and "colored her wan features as
love desires," as love prompts.
Then this is what we still don't understand who she is. "When she had her speech thus set free,
she began to sing so that it would have been hard for me to turn my mind from her." The first
temptation that we know that the vehicle of the temptation is the song. This is also, and
primarily, a poetic temptation. A certain way of understanding poetry, a kind of even meretricious
form of poetry.
What does she say? She brings to center stage the myth of Ulysses, which is by now as you know, is
the steady temptation for Dante. It's the point of reference: to what extent is my own journey that I
believe is taking place under the aegis of divine providence, to what extent is it a form of
transgression? A way of going beyond boundaries, of breaking down all limits, because after all
that's what Ulysses did in Canto XXVI. And Dante knows where he has placed him, but he cannot
get him out of his mind because Ulysses stands for something powerful. What he stands for is the
idea that there is no knowledge worth having which is not connected with transgressions, which is
not connected with breaking down all barriers and limitations.
In a way, because Dante doesn't do these things accidentally, when he comes to Canto XXVI of
Paradise, he will see Adam, and there is another who is for him, without a doubt, a poet, because
he's the name giver. He is the name giver of the world. He is the one who brings the world into
being through language. And when Dante meets Adam, there will be some interesting details that
we can talk about there, but I can anticipate this for you: Adam is the one who had understood
transgression and that transgression though, for Adam, appears as a sort of growth. It's not a fall, for
Dante, it's a growth. It's a growth and understanding other types of limitations because we cannot
just say that we tear down all limits; we tear down some limits in our experience.
Adam tears down and eats of the fruit of the tree that had been forbidden for him, like a good son.
The Father says, don't eat it and he goes and eats it, and thence he eats it, he grows into a human
being. He discovers that the world is not for him to be as a child, that he has to have other
experiences of death, of maturity, of work, etc. There are ways in which we have to understand this
idea of breaking limits in a different way from maybe the way I may have conveyed it to you. In
other words, Dante, here, is thinking of Ulysses and anticipates the story of Adam.
The great temptation for Dante is to believe that he too his journey is a journey that reenacts
Ulysses' journey. The siren that's what she's telling him what she's telling him is, 'I made
Ulysses happy.' It's a lie, because we do know that Ulysses never really stopped off the island of
Capri in whose Grotto where the siren, is mythologically said to reside. We do know that he did
listen to the song of the siren; he made sure that his companions would not, and he had himself
bound. Here it is again, bound to the mast of the ship. There is a transgression and a binding going
on at the same time.
As I said at any rate, she lies about, "I turned Ulysses, eager on his way to my song, and he who
dwells with me," so the first the other lie or the extension of the lie is that the siren is making
false promises of happiness to the dreamer. What she's saying is, you stay here with me and I am the
end of all that you desire. I am going to give you all the pleasures that you want, and therefore, your
journey may very well be over. If you are weary of the road, this is the place where you should stop.
We have another figure that emerges. Clearly, the antagonist of the siren, we don't know who she is,
we'll find out very quickly in Canto XXX and XXXI, because the same scene will be re-enacted
with the arrival of Beatrice. We imagine that here too, we have force to imagine, that here too she is
Beatrice. "Her lips were not yet closed again when a lady holy and alert," a woman in the sense of
not femmina, "appeared beside me to put her to confusion. 'O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said
with anger" and he came with her.
What is the difference between them, between these two women? They are two different forms of
poetry. Now we understand why Dante had to be talking about the imagination all along, because
this is really what will introduce him to the stakes in claiming to be a poet. This is what he's been
talking about the actual faculty of himself as a poet, and the cantos that will come, XXI, XXII to
XXVI and XXVII constitute the most important segment about ways of understanding literary
history, literary tradition, or the place of originality within that particular history and so on. We are
going to enter the world of poetry more directly.
So they are two different women; they speak two different voices. One sweet, meretricious and
false, but a sweet song; the other one very harsh, who says the journey is not over. One forecloses
the journey of and the quest of Dante. Be like Ulysses, I know that you want to be like Ulysses,
you can stay here with me, and I am the end of all your journeys and your quests. The other one is
claiming exactly the opposite. The journey has to continue. These two types of songs, the song of
the siren is sweet, which has also the stench of death attached to it. The stench of the decomposition
of her body, and on the other hand, a journey by this austere voice, the voice of maybe the voice
of love, the voice of harshness, just the language of sweetness is that of love as an ongoing quest.
That's what she's saying. Two forms of love, two forms of poetry, two types of women.
The scene, in case you are interested in this as many of you I'm sure have thought about it
literally are stages. The scene at the beginning of The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, which
in turn is thinking about the Book X of the Republic by Plato: the idea of the place of love and the
place of poetry and philosophy. Dante changes that tradition. This is not just poetry versus
philosophy; it's two different types of poetry. Poetry can be also a philosophical poetry. Poetry can
be meretricious and poetry can be also the sort of rigorous, severe form of investigation of oneself
in the world. Two different types of poetry, two different types of loves, two different types of
women.
Which of the two is better? How can we go on deciding that one is better than the other? Is there an
objective pattern, an objective criterion, by which we can say Beatrice, is actually better than the
siren? Does Dante is Dante aware of this idea of yes, and the reason is going to be the
following, very simple: the avoidance of death. The siren is the figure that stands for death.
Underneath the pleasures of her language, there is a stench that emanates from underneath that
allegory. Dante sees the danger of closing and the danger of making the here and now, and the
limitations of the here and now, and the limitations of that song the end of his journey. It's really a
choice between an open-ended quest and the foreclosure of the siren. This is the only way in which
you can objectively believe that there is a hierarchy between these two loves and between these two
women.
We move to Canto XXI and XXII, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't take a few questions here about
this canto, or any other problems, before we move onto something a little bit more a little bit
different, more classical: the encounter between Statius and Virgil. Let me see if there are some
questions now about this phase, these cantos, or would you like to me to go on and then maybe
we can come back to them?
Student: Are we supposed to draw a connection between Casella and anti-Purgatory?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Very good. Say again?
Student: Are we supposed to draw a connection between Casella and the siren?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is excellent. Are we supposed to draw some
connection between this scene and the scene of Casella in Canto II, above all of Purgatory? I call it
excellent, because I agree you are supposed to and it's the reappearance under different guises of
the same temptation. How the aesthetic can become both a way of gathering people around itself.
That's the famous story of Casella, the power of the song just collects, gathers, but at the same time
it induces us all to forgetfulness of whatever purposes those souls are supposed to entertain and
carry out. The difference of course is that it's the same story here now, the difference is not between,
let's say, Casella and others with the language of Cato. Here it's more an autobio directly, we are
moved into the consciousness of the pilgrim. We have entered this as deep as we can into his
unconscious mind. This is the moment of what he comes to an amazing self-revelation.
The story of Casella had the ring of a public discourse: poetry as a public act, gathering a number of
people around it. So this is very good. That's thank you for mentioning that. By the way, I don't
know that I we never probably read it, but if you read the beginning, I think I read it in Italian for
Professor Brooks as I know she likes the Provenal song, but the beginning of Canto XVIII also
that moment of the nostalgia for the safety of home, the weariness of the evening song, etc. That
represents another version of the same kind of dilemma with which the pilgrim is confronted. Okay,
we can come back to some of this.

Chapter 3. Cantos XXI and XXII: Statius's Moral Conversion [00:40:29]

We move into this segment of the poem: XXI, XXII going through XXIII, XXIV, which really has
poetry now as the subject matter. Dante begins with, let's say, the classical tradition. The
relationship between an encounter that takes place, wherein they, in the world of avarice and
prodigality, the encounter between Statius and Virgil. As you know Statius views himself as a
disciple of Virgil, and in many ways he challenges Virgil's ideology, Virgil's thought. Whereas Virgil
can go on writing a poem, the Aeneid and the Eclogues, which are about the pastoral world, or the
Georgics, this world about the cultivation of the earth, where Virgil appears at his most anti-Orphic.
He distinguishes and distances himself from the traditional of Orpheus, the poet of mad love who
descends into the depths of Hades and, of course, is waylaid by the mad love for Eurydices the
way of conquering death through the song. He believes that through by singing he can bend the
laws of death and therefore gain immortality. Virgil opposes the world of work, the world of mature
the responsible world of Aeneas, the hero who is so divided against himself, and yet manages to
always find his way around in this kind of wriggly, erratic path of his epic.
Statius counters Virgil. Statius writes the Thebaid, he writes another which he never finishes
another little epic, called the Achilleid, a story about Achilles, but it's only a fragment. He writes the
Thebaid, which really goes against those claims of Virgil. He retrieves makes a conjunction
between tragedy and the epic, the world of Jocasta and Oedipus, the monstrosity of that world, the
world of Polyneices and the Eteocles, the world of Antigone, cast as a kind of nightmarish world.
It's literally the most psychological of these epics, the wars that happen in the mind, and this idea of
monstrosity of human fate and human desires.
These are the two worlds that Dante now wants to bring together in this little epyllion, I would call
it. "Epyllion" is a Greek word meaning a 'little epic,' that is to say, a transcription of two epic texts
gathered into one, into a lyrical form. He has a tough task because what he wants to show is the
possibility of harmonizing the two of them and he shows how the two of them really talk as friends,
friends across time of course.
Statius lives around the year 70 A.D., Virgil dies in the year 19. And now they are friends because
poetry has managed their poetry has made them the poetry of Virgil has made them friends
and Statius is a sort of classical version of Dante himself. Dante is the disciple of Virgil and so was
Statius, so he has to bring them together.
But it's not a question of making them agree, only because they had two different visions, that in
and of itself may not be all that difficult. Statius is very skeptical about the Empire, Virgil is not all
that skeptical. It's possible to read the Aeneid and see that there is a lot of ambiguity in the way in
which he talks about Augustus and the Empire, but he's basically writing the epic that justifies the
ideology of the Empire. The real difficulty between them is that Dante is the real difficulty and
challenge for Dante is that he has to try to understand how Statius has tried to adjust Statius'
vision of monstrosity to some of idea of the sacred. This is the real challenge. This is the difference
that Dante has from the classical world.
How do we understand the sacred? In what way is it possible to use Statius, Virgil, as he already did
with Cato, who is by the way the hero of Lucan; a third poet of this epic tradition, Virgil, Lucan,
Statius is it possible to see in these texts of Statius the seeds of something good? How can we
build anything good out of this vision of heroes and characters who fornicate with their own
fantasies? Who cannot really get out of their minds, who just are discover their own unchanging
submission to a force that transcends them to fate. It's really absolutely a different world view from
the world of Virgil.
Let me just go on a little bit with XXI, I'll just start talking first of all with Dante begins with an
allusion to this natural thirst, which is this world of the natural thirst for knowledge. It's really
much the world of the Banquet, the world of Aristotle. We have this incredible thirst for knowledge
and then this figure called Statius appears. We are also being told here that nature, the natural world
is mysteriously shaking. There's an earthquake, because every time that a soul gets liberated from
the purgatorial experience of expiation, this purification and expiation, then the mountain trembles
and Statius can go on with them up to the Garden of Eden and then Statius reveals himself and he
will say around line 60, "And I, who have lain in this pain five hundred years and more," Statius
speaking, "felt but now my will free for a better threshold, therefore thou didst feel the earthquake
and hear the devout spirits through the mountain render praises to the Lord soon." The
resurrection has taken place.
This is going to be the resurrection of Statius and Virgil. It's Statius, but also Virgil, and their own
vision. So he goes on describing himself, "In the time when the good Titus, the emperor," he's
evoking the time of the he's recalling the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem at a
time when the good Titus, "by help with the King most high avenged," means justice, divine, the
mysteries of justice, "the wounds from which pour the blood sold by Judas,' replied the spirit, 'I bore
yonder the name that most endures and honors most, famous indeed, but still without faith." Statius
a pagan, really born again, this is the born again pagan that appears in this canto.
"So sweet was my spirit of song that Rome drew me," it's an interesting image. It's really speaking
of Rome having a kind of power that usually will lead with love, with desire, the pull of desire.
Rome brought him to it, to herself, "a Toulousan, to itself and there I was worthy to have my brows
adorned with myrtle. Men yonder still speak my name, which is Statius; and I sang of Thebes and
then of great Achilles, but fell by the way with the second burden." He could never complete the
second text.
Now look at the way he speaks about poetry; he speaks through sparks, as a kind of fire. "The
sparks that kindled the fire in me were from the divine flame, the divine flame from which more
than a thousand have been lit I mean the Aeneid" That's already poetry now is invested
with power. The power to light the fire in the readers and in its followers, "which was in poetry my
mother and my nurse; without it I had not weighed a drachm and to have lived yonder, when Virgil
lived I would have contented to a sun more than I was due before coming forth from banishment."
There are two metaphors to speak of poetry, one is that of the sparks of fire, and the second one is
that of nourishing the inner hunger, mother and nurse. It's nursing the nursing of its readers so a
great acknowledgement of a master, without his knowledge that it is Virgil to whom he is speaking.
And then Canto XXI which is another image that may remind you of the story of Casella. Statius
reveals Dante reveals Statius identity, Virgil's identity to Statius, and they try to the two of
them try to embrace "Already he was bending to embrace," lines 130 and following, "my
Teacher's feet; but he said to him, 'Brother do not so, for thou art a shade and a shade thou seest.'
And he rising: 'Now thou canst understand the measure of the love that burns in me for thee, when I
forget our emptiness and treat shades as solid things."
A mistake that has been made before and a mistake that I think is meant to convey the claims or the
illusions of poets to believe that there is some kind of solidity to them, and not just to their poetry,
to their works, but a solidity to them that this embrace belies. There's no solidity to them. There is a
kind of emptiness. There's a sort of distance between the poets and their works. This is not going to,
I think, interfere very much because it's the works, the works of art that we are going to be talking
about in Canto XXII.
The two poets now are self each in acknowledgement of the other and they go on talking about
line 10 and following, Virgil asks Statius to explain to him why this moral blight existed in him,
why this sin of avarice, and he says this is the passage: "Love," Canto XXII, lines 12 and
following, "Love kindled by virtue always kindles another" That's the sort of vitality and power
of love. It's not self-enclosed; it's one that goes on creating and propagating itself. It has a
generosity of its own. It has a kind of charitableness of it's, "if only its flame appear without" So
fire and love seem to be conjoined by this common element, the common element of the power of
propagation or self-perpetuation.
"From the hour, therefore, when Juvenal descended among us in the LImbo of Hell and made thy
affection known to me my goodwill toward thee was as great as ever held anyone for a person not
seen, so that now these stairs will seem short to me. But tell me, and as a friend, forgive me with too
much assurance I slacken the rein, and as a friend speak with me know how could avarice find a
place in thy breast along with so much wisdom as by thy zeal thou wast filled with?"
This is a passage of some importance. Because, first of all, the claim of friendship between Virgil
he's moved by the show of friendship on the part of Statius. Let's talk now as friends. Friendship
is an ethical virtue as you know, in Aristotle's Ethics and for Cicero, who writes a treatise called On
Friendship, which Dante mentions at the beginning of his philosophical text, in the belief that
friendship is really the other language the other term for philosophy.
It's the friend and the philosopher that are interchangeable because there is a love in friendship,
there is a love of truth that is the idea. There is some exaggeration on the part of Virgil because
there is really a friendship implies some kind some degree of equality. You must have in
order to be friends you must have some idea, because in fact it's usually said that tyrants and slaves
are not capable of love or friendship, because both since one is the inversion of the other both
really have a kind of inequality vis--vis the other. The slave is, by definition inferior, the tyrant
thinks that he's superior so friendship demands that kind if equality.
This is a little bit of exaggeration because there is no equality between Statius. It's a rhetorical
exaggeration of Statius and Virgil. Virgil is acknowledges being superior to Statius. Statius sees
himself as a disciple and therefore views Virgil as superior from a poetic point of view; from a
theological point of view Statius is superior to Virgil. Statius is going on to Paradise and Virgil is
going to go back Limbo. So there is a kind of the push in the direction of wishful thinking maybe on
the part of Virgil.
I must also add that Dante has a kind of some work also to do about he may be aware that
friendship was never really thought of as a Christian virtue. It's a classical and pagan virtue, and
because it really confuses it's the idea a friend is always part of one's soul. It's really earthbound.
It's an earthbound experience, so it was always the thought not Augustine. Augustine who has a
friend Alypius and feels responsible for Alypius, but by and large it was this idea that the
friendship could distract the mind from an ascent to higher and superior ends, paradisiac ecstasies
and pleasures. Dante has to be aware that there were efforts to Christianize this idea.
Nonetheless, it brings the conversation between them back to the earth and they talk as if they were
two friends really meeting in the forum, in the agora, and chatting about their moral failings or their
own poetic crafts and visions. How could you find how could you be so avaricious, when you
are so enlightened in so many other ways? That's the question. Statius responds that he's not
avaricious and I think that that adds a great deal about their understandings the
misunderstandings of each other but also their understandings of poetry.
He goes on talking about the fact that he is prodigal all the time. So that is to say that he you may
remember from Canto VII of Inferno, the difference between the avaricious and the sins of
prodigality. Prodigality was a violation of the economy of goods by devaluing, by getting rid
devaluing them, not holding onto them. The avaricious overvalues the goods and tries to heap
amass larger quantities of goods, so he goes on really thinking Statius wants to make it clear for
at least 40 lines about the fact that he's he was prodigal and we have to understand why he would
say that. Then in fact he goes on acknowledging, once again, Statius, for his moral conversion. So
that's the first thing about what poetry can do.
"Know then that avarice was too far removed from me, and this excess thousands of moons have
punished. And had it not been that I corrected my ways when I understood the lines, where as if
enraged at human nature, thou didst cry: "To what, O cursed hunger for gold, dost thou not drive the
appetite of mortals?' I should be rolling the weights and know the dismal jousts."
What he's saying is that he read a passage in Book III of the Aeneid, the story that we already saw of
Polydorus, who had been killed because of they want to rob him of his gold and Statius reached
a moral conversion. There's a lot we can say about these lines. First of all, I think this exemplifies
how we actually read and we dismember the integrity of the text. We take out of a book, out of a
passage, that which we find relevant to us and he takes some lines, and not only takes some lines
from the Book III of the Aeneid, he also alters their meaning.
The original text of Virgil's is exactly the opposite to what why do you not contain the appetite of
mortals or sacred hunger for gold? Which the text translates as 'cursed' because the word sacred,
which Dante is using here, why do you not contain, "O sacred fame of gold" O sacra fame dell'oro.
The word "sacred," as you probably know, some of you may know, means two things. It's the most
ambiguous term that you semantically speaking because it can describe both that which we
call the holy, and that which we call the profane. It joins them together: there's no clear-cut
distinction between the profanation or blasphemy, on the other hand, or the sense of holiness. I can
understand why my translation, Sinclair, my translator, decides to choose the 'cursed' instead of call
it 'sacred,' for it's the curse. He's dismembering, he is taking one side over there's a much more
complicated version of the meaning of the word.
So that's one thing, but the poetic text of Virgil has a moral power over and against Virgil's own
intentions. We can understand now retrospectively why Dante has to distinguish between poets and
their works. We can read the works regardless of the intentions of the authors and we can select or
take out of those texts whatever we think that we however we think that they speak to us and
then he goes on describing his poetic growth.
"Now," lines 55, "Now, when thou did sing the cruel arms of the double woe of Jocasta," the double
woe is the two children, Eteocles and Polyneices, in the tragic and epic text called the Thebaid,
"said the singer of the Bucolics." That's already the opposition. Virgil now appears as the author of a
pastoral poem, the Bucolics, where rivalries are always going to be placated. The Bucolics of the
pastoral poems of Virgil are always about rivalry. A rivalry between two shepherds: which of us
they ask, is the better singer? Which of us is the better poet? That is always there's never any
tragic outcome. There's some uneasiness, some anxiety between in running through that kind of
debate between the poets, but it's not the rivalry of Polyneices and Eteocles. That's really the
difference that Dante is highlighting between them.
And then it continues, ". . . it does not appear by the notes which Clio touches with thee," the
Bucolics, and on other hand Clio is the muse of history. So Clio is the muse for history, the world of
Statius, "that the faith yet made thee faithful without which well-doing is not enough. If that is so,
what sun or what candles dispelled thy darkness, so that thereafter thou didst lift the sails behind the
fisherman?"
Now we know that what he's really asking, in a general way, is the relationship between poetry and
faith. How could Statius we know how he reached this moral conversion, now we have to be told
somehow, how did he go on finding faith? What is the relationship between the two of them? Can
poetry reveal and lead us onto the world of faith or not?
Statius has already that's really the answer that he will provide: "And the other answered him,
'Thou first directed me to Parnassus," the mountain of poetry. The poetic experience, the poetic
apprenticeship, is the preamble to the experience of faith "to drink in its caves" a metaphor
that picks up the natural thirst of the previous canto, "to drink in its caves and, first, after God
enlightens me. Thou didst like him that goes by night and carries the light behind him and does not
help himself but makes wise those that follow when thou saidst."
In a moment we will see he said, but the metaphor is that of really Virgil is a prophetic voice
who speaks, but that language he uses like the a lamp that he carries on his back for the benefit
of those who follow, and himself clearly remains in the dark. That's what he said. "The age turns
new again; justice comes back and the primal years of men, and a new race descends from heaven."
This is the famous fourth eclogue of Virgil, where Virgil is celebrating the birth of a child, Pollio,
and around this birth of a child, he is also talking about the rejuvenation of the world. It's an
emblem, Pollio's birth is an emblem for this Pythagorean vision that he has, a vision whereby the
world goes through 360,000 years of the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and so on, and then degrades
itself and goes right back to where it started. A Pythagorean vision of metamorphosis and
circulation of the universe. It's the fourth eclogue.
Interestingly, this also crystallizes that which is the fundamental issue of Virgil's vision. The
concern with birth, the concern with the fact of being born, that the fact of being born has within
itself the potential to renew the world, to effect the world and change the direction of the world.
And then we know that he will say, and I will stop here, because we are coming to the end of the
period: "Through thee I was a poet, through thee Christian; but that thou mayst see better what I
outline, I shall set my hand to color it. Already the world was everywhere big," pregnant the Italian
says, "with the true faith sown by the messengers. . . " and so on. He's going to talk how the world
outside, only buttressed and reinforced the message of faith that he had found in the fourth eclogue.
The fourth eclogue is seen as a messianic eclogue, but that line that makes the transition from
poetry to faith, "I was a poet through thee, I was a poet, through thee a Christian," I think really
makes it necessary for us to linger on it for a little bit.
First of all the line has what we call an anaphora, "Through thee I was a poet, I was a poet through
thee Christian." This is the same line that says, per te, the Italian word line 73, per te poeta fui, per
te cristiano. The anaphora gives continuity to the movement of the line from poetry to faith, per
te. . .per te. Nonetheless, if you read this line carefully in Italian you see that there is also a caesura.
You know what I mean by caesura? Falling in the middle, a break, per te, break, per te cristiano.
The lines gives a has a mobility that seems to promise the transition from poetry to faith, but
at the same time technically, it forces you to stop as if there were two discontinuous experiences.
You cannot quite go from one world of poetry to the one world of faith. You can go from one world
of poetry to one world of faith. That ambiguity of poetry is exactly what they are trying to retrieve.
What did I say here today about this issue of Statius and Virgil? Statius is dealing with the tragedy
of birth. Virgil deals with, optimistically, about the history-making quality of the event of birth. That
is, at the same time, a desire to establish a sense of what is the sacred? I will try to discuss with you,
later, how poetry is now invested with the kind of sacredness, the ambiguous sense of the word
about the profane and the holy within it. It's a hybrid, and it's this hybrid that will allow Dante to
assimilate Statius' vision to his own understanding of history and the sacred.

Chapter 4. Question and Answer [01:09:30]

Let me stop here and see if there are questions. Please.
Student: It seems like it's more common for Dante to be the one to ask the people they meet for
their stories. Is this the only place that Virgil is the one who asks the questions or what is the
specific event here?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Virgil is the the question is, it seems that usually it's Dante who
interviews the people he meets and but here in Canto XXI and XXII, it's Virgil and is that the
case, and if it's true why would that be the case? The answer is that that's not really true because in
the canto of Ulysses, it is he who it is Virgil who speaks, you remember, to Ulysses. It's Virgil
so it's Virgil and Ulysses. It really has more to do with the figures of the classical world that seem to
be, in this case, Virgil seems to be best indicated for Statius as he was for Virgil.
Since you are interested in this aspect of the dramatization of the poem, I could mention to you for
instance there are cantos in Inferno, we didn't have a chance to talk about them where the Virgil
would completely abandon Dante says, well you go here, I don't want to be with you, you go and
on your own carry out this introduction without I'll wait for you here. That happens, for instance,
in the canto of fraud and usury. It is as if Dante had something to better understand on his own
without Virgil's presence, but usually that is the way in which the style of the representation takes
place, who is most apt in the case of the classical figures, the classical poet speaking for a classical
character.
Student: I wondered if you could comment a little further on the significance in Canto XIX of what
looks like a kind of re-enactment of the Fall of Adam and Eve. It's almost as if this woman even in
the
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: In the dream.
Student: The siren yes, in the dream, when she brings forth this promise of happiness, it's really
echoing the promise of Lucifer of this, I will make you like God. Why is this sort of why is this
theme of sort of the Adam theme coming up here in XIX and is there some sort of strand that I'm
missing?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The well the question is that it says in Canto XIX, in the
dream of the siren, there is an echo of the Fall of Adam more than Lucifer, I would say, the Fall of
Adam. Why would there be that if that's true why would there be that echo? My answer is, I
didn't catch it. I never caught this echo of Adam there. It's actually the story of the temptation of this
woman fish, that's what she is, right? The siren who wants to induce forgetfulness in the pilgrim; it's
really a classical figure. I would say that I sort of resist the hearing here the figure of in the
figure of Adam because Adam doesn't really talk about falling.
This is a danger for the pilgrim who he's dramatizing his sense of yielding, surrendering his will
to the seduction, the seductive song of the siren. Adam with this is a story of love. With Adam,
the story becomes one of knowledge; it's a little bit different. There may be echoes, I'm not going to
be so firm and say no, there is no echo of that but I didn't catch it. I didn't feel the necessity for that,
actually, for my argument.
Student: Okay, then maybe I'm answering my own question here, but wouldn't you say that the
theme of knowledge and transgression runs through both the dream sequence that Dante has and the
story of Adam's Fall? I mean, is there that theme where Ulysses wanted to sort of gain this
knowledge, this experience of hearing the siren's song, right and to gain that knowledge he had to
sort of transgress. Isn't that what the siren represents? You say he keeps coming back to this theme
of Ulysses
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: He does. He mentions the story of Ulysses. He does mention the
story of Ulysses.
Student: Is that where the Adam connection really comes in? Because Adam's ultimately ate the
fruit for knowledge.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah, well I indicated that the story of Adam in Canto XXVI
retrospectively illuminates what's happening in Canto XXVI of Inferno and that he too experienced
 understands knowledge and transgression, that they go hand in hand, and that it's difficult
impossible to separate them and that's the story of Ulysses. Dante does feel that he's but it's a
dangerous temptation for him to believe that he's like Ulysses. Whereas, he has no problem later in
when he understands what the story of Adam is, in thinking, in acknowledging that Adam is the
arch poet. We are all reinventing the world, etc.
So I would say that there are three figures here: Ulysses, Adam, and Dante and but the relation
between them is never what one of full of identification on the part of Dante with either he
comes here approximates them and somehow also pulls away from both. He's not really Adam. He's
not the arch poet who names the world, and he's not really Ulysses. That fear that he may be like
Ulysses, which is a more dangerous sense that he has, that will continue more openly as he goes on.
The story of Adam is going to be picked up in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden, of course,
that is the idea that we lost a garden but Dante does not want to be in that garden anyway. When he
comes to the Garden of Eden, he identifies it with a lot of things, really nostalgia for the mother. He
doesn't he understands that he has to grow up; he has to get out of that fantasy. I don't know if
this is
Student: What confuses me I guess is that the siren here in the dream sequence seems to be
wanting to halt Dante's quest, his journey forward for knowledge.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, absolutely.
Student: Yet, with respect to Ulysses, the siren seemed to represent the opposite, in the sense that
his interaction with her was something where he was trying to go past the bounds to gain
knowledge or gain experience of hearing her. I'm trying to draw the connections in my mind for
what is really Dante trying to tell us with this sequence? Why does he go back to this reference to
the siren? I mean maybe you could just summarize; I guess maybe it would just help clear it up
what she represents to Dante here in Canto XIX versus what she represents to Ulysses?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Good, what does the siren represent? Very briefly, what does the
siren represent to Dante and to Ulysses? What is the difference? To Dante, the siren represents the
lure of death. He understands that beneath that promises of yield to the here and now and to my
voice there is really there's a nothingness and he's attracted to that nothingness. That's really
what it is. For Ulysses, she also represents the extraordinary enchantment of the song that would
lead him to death because that's what happens to all those who listen to the siren. Ulysses wants to
hear it and bind himself so that does not yield altogether to her call. That's how I can put it. Thank
you. We'll see you.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 14 - Purgatory XXIV, XXV, XXVI [October 23, 2008]
Chapter 1. Additional Remarks about the Relationship between Statius and
Virgil [00:00:00]
Professor David Lummus: All right. I'm Professor David Lummus and Professor Mazzotta asked
me to come in and substitute for him today, since he's traveling and can't be here. So, I guess we'll
get started and I just wanted to since there was a midterm last time, remind you more or less of
what he was talking about wherever he left off.
The last lecture, I suppose, was about the relationship between Statius and Virgil. The specifically
poetic relationship and the ambiguity that arises in the father/son relationship that's staged between
Statius and Virgil. So Statius recognizes the centrality of Virgil for his own poetic career and his
own moral development, by saying, "through you I was a poet and through you I was a Christian,"
but at the same time his poetry challenges that of Virgil. Professor Mazzotta concluded stating that,
Statius' poem is about a tragedy about the tragedy of birth, while Virgil's is about the history-
making quality of the event of birth. That the Thebaid challenged Virgil's account of the foundation
and of history, but he grew as a poet and converted to Christianity by engaging with Virgil's own
ideas of history, specifically with the fourth eclogue. There there's a misreading, so the
generative quality of Virgil's poetry didn't wasn't intrinsic in the poetry itself, but was based on
Statius' particular reading of the text.

Chapter 2. The Relationship between Poetry and Gluttony [00:02:03]

Today, we're going to be talking about Cantos XXIV and XXVI specifically, but I'll be saying a few
words also about Cantos XXIII and XXV, as a kind of frame to those two canti. In these two cantos
XXIV and XXVI they continue the meditation and poetic relationships that were going on in
XXI and XXII with Statius. Now Professor Mazzotta in his book, Dante, Poet of the Desert, has
pointed out that Dante utilizes the figural method of reading history. What about the past pre-
figures, the present and the future in a poetic fashion in order to understand the genealogy of poetry
of poets and in order to place himself in a typological genealogy of poets. In these canti,
Dante is engaged in a kind of in a sustained reflection, Mazzotta says, on literary history and the
powers of literature to engender moral conversion, and in probing the inevitable limits of poetic
fictions. And there I quoted from his book, Dante, Poet of the Desert.
Now it says Canto XXIV, which you read for today, follows directly on Canto XXIII, with a
conversation between Forese Donati and the pilgrim. I want to say a few words about XXIII,
especially regarding the relationship between poetry and gluttony. Now, although a number of
penitents are mentioned at the beginning of this canto, Dante only speaks to two of them. Forese
Donati and Bonagiunta da Lucca, and both of them are poets. The first one is specifically a friend of
Dante. Now Forese Donati was in Dante's youth, like I said, a friend and they exchanged a series of
vituperative sonnets in which they insulted each other back and forth, and it was filled with
language of bodily sensation.
I suppose in this canto, the language of the conversation between Forese and the pilgrim sheds a
new the memory of it causes a bitterness in both Forese and in the pilgrim, and the difference
between the rhetoric of the two texts marks a new moral vision in the pilgrim. Before in these
sonnets, they berated each other's wives and their vices. In this canto, they recognize each other.
They treat each other like brothers. So it's really a reformation of a poetic community that was in
some sense distorted by these six sonnets, three for each poet.
In this canto, the gluttonous are famished and disfigured by hunger and their penitence. Donati's
wife is recalled, and she was treated with obscenity in the sonnets, and she is remembered as a
stilnovistic kind of woman whose prayers, ironically, have helped Forese arrive at the terrace so
quickly. In a way, it converts that kind of gluttonous, bodily poetry into a different kind of
moralizing poetry, I suppose; it corrects it. Now I guess the connection another connection with
gluttony is that Forese along with a number of other Italian poets such as Cecco Angiolieri, he was
probably the most famous, was a burlesque poet, and this was also known as goliardic poetry, so
from gula, Latin for throat, or for gluttony. This oblique connection allows Dante to speak about
poetry in this canto of gluttony. The real connection is that it's a worldly type of poetry that doesn't
look beyond itself, beyond the concerns of the flesh, I suppose.
I would like to point out at the end of this canto, Dante remembers their ribald literary exchange
with bitterness, at lines 115 at the very end, he connects the period of his friendship with Donati
with a dilemma back in the dark forest in Canto I. "If thou bring back to mind what thou wast with
me and I with thee, the present memory will be grievous still." So he's pointing out that he has a
different perspective on that time of his life.
"He that goes before me turned me from that life some days ago. When the sister of him' and I
pointed to the sun 'showed herself round to you. It is he that has led me through the profound
night of the truly dead with this true flesh that follows him; his succours have drawn me up thence,
climbing and circling the mountain, which straightens you whom the world made crooked."
The mode or I guess the change that Dante experiences are both Virgil and Beatrice, so he is
pointing towards what makes him different from what he was a few days ago. Actually, the
exchange with Forese was probably not that long before the composition of the Divine Comedy, or
at least, not that long before the fictional date of the Divine Comedy. This, in reality, is a prelude to
how he dramatizes the differences between his poetry and that of his father's and brother's, the ones
that he meets in XXIV and XXVI.

Chapter 3. Bonagiunta da Lucca [00:08:49]

That's just as a preface, I suppose, to what happens in XXIV where Dante really just juxtaposes his
own style of poetry with that of his predecessors, specifically embodied by Bonagiunta da Lucca.
It's interesting that Bonagiunta who notices that Dante is different because Bonagiunta da Lucca
wrote a poem to Guido Guinizelli, who we will meet in XXVI, criticizing how he had brought the
terminology of the university, the terminology of epistemology, and of metaphysics, and of theology
into the lyric of love. It's that's probably one of the reasons why Bonagiunta da Lucca comes out
here. Not necessarily that he was important for some specific reason to Dante, but probably because
of that the fact that he came out and noticed this in public of Guinizelli this change.
I'd like to have a look at in the text when Bonagiunta da Lucca comes out and addresses Dante.
He says at verses 49 through 51: "But tell me if I see here him that brought forth the new rhymes,
beginning with "Ladies that have intelligence of love." It's Bonagiunta da Lucca who recognizes
Dante and specifically by the first line, the incipit, to the poem that basically makes the center of the
Vita nuova, the turning point in the Vita nuova, as you all remember, because in this poem, it marks
the transition from a self-centered poetry of love where the poet praises himself obliquely by
service to the woman, to the lady whom he loves, and his transition to a poetry of praise that is
mingled with metaphysical claims for the lady's value. It's Dante's transition from a courtly lyric to
a more philosophical lyric.
Now Dante responds to Bonagiunta with a really beautiful phrase, and he says: "And I said to him:
'I am one who, when love breathes in me, take note, and in that manner which he dictates within, go
on to set it forth." Dante is claiming his novelty and at the same time he is saying he's linking his
own writing of poetry to the activity of a scribe. He says, "I take note" when someone when love
dictates. So he's explaining his inspiration. In Italian, the word for 'breath in' is spira, and he
dictates within Dante.
Now this inspiration, I think, it needs to be understood in a theological needs to be understood
theologically. We'll go I'm going to go onto talk about Canto XXV which explains this
retrospectively in a moment. Let me say for now that it that the words noto, 'take note' in Italian,
and detta, 'dictate' in Italian, point towards the inspiration as this breathing in, as the Holy Spirit, as
a movement of love within the Trinity, and that Dante is explaining how poetic inspiration is really
a parallel to the unity of the Trinity. This inspiration comes from within, but it's like someone who
dictates from without. In the Monarchia, Dante's political treatise on empire, he describes God as
the only dictator, the only person who dictates. We have to understand this description of poetic
inspiration as one coming from an internal instantiation of the divine. So there is a connection
between this inspiration and the divine.
Now Bonagiunta follows up on this by professing to understand the knot, the knot that kept him and
he's like, the Guittone da Arezzo, Jacopo da Lentini, who is the notary, from arriving at that style.
The tercet that begins at line 55, he says: "Oh brother," he said, 'now I see the knot that held back
the Notary and Guittone, and me short of the sweet new style that I hear; I see well how your pens
followed closed behind the dictator which assuredly did not happen with ours, and he that sets
himself to examine further sees nothing else between the one style and the other.' And, as if
satisfied, he was silent."
Bonagiunta thinks he has this perspective that Purgatory gives him on his past life and he
understands that knot the nodo is also used to describe the sin of gluttony at the beginning of
Canto XXIII. Here again, we have this lack of moral understanding. It's like a moral perspective in
life being paid for in the after life, in Purgatory. The poetry that Bonagiunta represents was one that
concentrated on worldly beauties and qualities, like I said before. It feigned a service to the lady
only to concentrate on the self of the poet and it never really went beyond itself. It was a self-
reflexive kind of poetry. In that sense, it could be assimilated with gluttony, in that it absorbed and
imitated what came from without offering forth anything, without being generous such as the poetry
of Virgil was.
And it's interesting enough Bonagiunta says, "Him that brought forth the new rhyme," so he brought
the new rhymes forth, he offered them out. Bonagiunta is able to see the difference between the two
styles of poetry at this point, but I think he doesn't recognize the kind of uniqueness that Dante is
claiming for himself here, because he says, "That your pens follow close behind the dictator." So
he's pluralizing what Dante says only about himself. He says in Italian, I' mi son un che and people
have pointed out that this 'I am one who,' is both humble and it's like, 'I am one who among
others who do this,' but it's also it's also pointing out his uniqueness. Others have pointed out that
it echoes, line 314 of Exodus, Ego sum qui sum, this is what God says to Moses, "I am who am,"
that this self-reflexive, mi son un che, is an expression of uniqueness, couched in humble language.
Dante is really pointing out that he is doing something unique with his poetry, that perhaps
Bonagiunta doesn't really recognize the full extent. He's if there is a school of the dolcestilnovo,
if there is this Sweet New Style which composes a school like the Sicilian school that preceded
it, which I'm sure Professor Mazzotta talked about in relation to the Vita nuova then Dante is
creating something new within that school. That's, I think, what's going on here in those lines.
I suppose what Dante is doing in this canto, is marking an extreme contrast between his own poetry
and that of the people who came before him. There is a line that divides these two schools, the
Guittone, who is a Tuscan poet who imitated Sicilian poetry, the Sicilians who imitated a Provenal
poetry, he's detaching himself from them because of their lack of a moral purpose, I suppose, in
their poetry, which Bonagiunta recognizes retrospectively.
Now I just wanted to point out as the as this conversation comes to an end, Dante describes at
tercet 64 through 69, how the penitents depart. He says, "As birds that winter along the Nile
sometimes make a troop in the air, then fly with more speed and go in file, so all the people that
were there, facing round, quickened their steps being light with both leanness and desire; and as one
tired with running lets his companions go on and then walks till the heaving of his chest is so
relieved, so Forese let the holy flock pass and come on with me behind. . ."
I just wanted to point out the contrast here; the image of birds probably reminds us of the image of
birds in Canto V of the Inferno. They were just the sinners were described as cranes who were
being buffeted about by a tempest. They kept returning to the same spot in a circle, like an eternal
return. Here, the same kinds of birds, these love poets, are coming together in a troop and moving
along together, and not only are they moving along together, they're moving forward. So there's a
progress that's that opposes the circularity of the storm of birds in Inferno V, and this will come
up again also in Canto XXVI.
Now I know we didn't read it for today, Canto XXV of Purgatory, but I think it sheds some light.
I'm going to say a few words about it, because I think it sheds some light on what Dante is talking
about in relation to inspiration. We talked about that earlier. Now what happens here is Dante asks
Dante is perplexed about how the sinners can be punished with their bodies if they don't have
bodies, so he asks this of Statius. The whole canto basically he asks this of Virgil I guess and
Virgil says, it's better if Statius explains it to you. The pretext of it all is, how can this happen? What
is the physics of it? What is the biology of the soul basically in the afterlife? What Statius does in
explaining this, explains how God engenders the soul, how he creates the soul. In placing the
discourse of the generation of the soul and the body between two cantos that are basically all about
poetic inspiration, Dante I think is drawing a parallel between divine inspiration, divine creation,
and poetic generation, and poetic creation.
Student: Can you say that again?
Professor David Lummus: Okay, he usually has a parallel he's making a parallel between poetic
generation, inspiration from and poetic inspiration and the divine creation of the soul, the
inspiration of the divine in the creation of the soul. I'm going to go on and explain what I mean. I'm
just trying to does that make sense?
Student: Yes.
Professor David Lummus: Okay, all right. I'll slow down a second. Basically he's staging here the
relationship between predecessors and new poets, so himself and his past basically. He's explaining
how he is born out of the past but is not imitative, and is not can't be merely reducible to that
past. I can read a little bit of this.
It's a bit scholastic I suppose, but it's okay. I can read it all; it might explain it better for you. He
says at lines 38 37, 38: "Perfect blood, which is never drunk by the thirsty veins and is left like
food thou removest from the table, takes in the heart informing power for all the bodily members,
like that which takes its course through the veins to become these. Further digested, it descends
where silence is fitter than speech, and thence drops afterwards on another's blood in the natural
vessel. There the one mingles with the other, and the one fitted to be the passive and the other, on
account of the perfect place from which it springs," that is the heart, "active, and this, so united,
begins to operate; first coagulating, then quickening, that to which, for its material, it has given
consistency."
Here, I think it gets a little bit more interesting, he says: "The active force having become a soul,
like a plant's, but so far different that it is on the way and the other already on the shore, then
operates to the point that now it moves and feels, like a sea fungus, and from that goes onto produce
organs for the faculties of which it is the seed. Now, my son, develops and spreads the force that is
from the heart of the begetter, where nature makes provision for all the members. But how from
animal it becomes a child? Thou seest not yet. . . "
I'm going to skip a little bit more to the top of the next page: "Open thy breast to the truth that
follows and know that as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfected in the embryo, the first
Mover turns to it, rejoicing over such handiwork of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit," he
breathes into it just like the inspiration that Dante claimed for his own poetry before, "a spirit full of
power, which draws into its own substance that which it finds active there and becomes a single
soul that lives and feels, and itself revolves upon itself."
What I think is going on here is that ostensibly basically, Statius describes the creation of the
body the biological creation of the body, which comes from the mingling of bloods, right? Then
after that, how the animal that is created, basically, is given a soul by God but becomes a rational
becomes a human being and the human being the human here is described he translates it as a
'child' but the word that's actually used is a fante. Now fante would be basically it's derived from
the Greek word for speech, so a fante would be one who speaks, so how an animal becomes one
who speaks. So humanity is defined in a sense by the fact that we can speak and reason basically.
So what happens here, I suppose, is that even though the father is the generates the body, the soul
is directly created by God. So that there's two kinds of individualities I suppose. You have the body
and the soul, and the soul is a uniqueness that is directly created and inspired by God.
If you consider this poetically, even though Dante may have been influenced or in a sense created,
by the poets that came before him, nonetheless he has his own kind of direct inspiration that
separates him from the poets that came before him, at least that's how I understand it. I think it's
connected that Dante points out the connection, especially by the word spira, he uses the word
spira or inspiration twice. They imitate each other, they parallel each other. The connection between
fante, the child who speaks is a direct connection to language, the language of poetry. That's, I
think, it explains retrospectively what Dante is claiming in Canto XXIV about his poetic inspiration,
this difference between his own poetry and that of his predecessors.
Now Canto XXVI, he passes into the terrace of the lustful. Here he meets his own staged poetic
father, Guido Guinizelli. He recognizes his father and his debt to his father, and at the same time,
he's recognized as a brother by his father. So his individuality as a poet is recognized the
recognition is staged here. The paternal relationship becomes a fraternal one. What I'm trying to
point out with this the biological embryology is that he can be seen as derivative and different at
the same time. So he's the same and he's distinguishable at the same time.
This canto is in sharp contrast to XXIV I think, because Dante wanted to distance himself from
those poets in XXIV and here he wants to show a similarity. He's trying to assimilate himself with a
certain kind of poetry that was for which metaphysics, epistemology and theology were all
central. So it's a philosophical kind of love poetry. I think he also redeems this love tradition, which
in a certain sense, was condemned in Inferno V with Francesca. So this courtly love tradition that
was that caused in a way I or at least Francesca claimed caused her downfall in saying that
'the Galehault was the book' in Inferno V. Here he redeems it and he purges it and cleanses it.
You can start off by reading the tercet that begins at line 94, whenever Guido Guinizelli identifies
himself to the pilgrim, it says: "Such as in the grief of Lycurgus, the two sons became on seeing
their mother again, I became, but with more restraint, when I heard speak his own name, the father
of me and of others my betters, whoever have used the sweet and graceful rhymes of love, and
without hearing or speech, I went on a long way and thought gazing at him and did not for the fire
go near him." Dante, I guess, he loses his faculty of speech here, because he's in awe almost like a
child before his father. So his behavior imitates his relationship to Guinizelli.
I'll point here as well that one of the main differences, I suppose, between the two poets is
symbolized by the casting of the shadow on the fire. His the reality of his presence there in his
body, is what's really is what the physical aspect that separates him from the others. It stands in
for the aspect of his poetry that separates him from the rest of these poets as well.
Since we're talking about poetic genealogy, it's interesting that Dante is he refers to him as a
father but then Guinizelli respond by saying: "Oh brother, he there whom I point out to thee, was a
better craftsman of the mother tongue, verses of love and tales of romance he has surpassed them
all." In these fifteen, twenty lines Dante is a child before his father and is then equated with his
father, by being a brother. So they're put on the same level and they're assigned another father, so
the grandfather of them all becomes the father, and this father, I guess, who's not named is Arnaut
Daniel. An important poet for Dante in Le Rime Petrose, the 'Stony Rhymes' which Professor
Mazzotta mentioned, Dante imitated him in those rhymes. He was a poet famous for his difficulty in
reading it was very, very hard to understand an example of the trobar clus.
In this same paragraph, these same series of tercets, paragraph in the English, again we have the
differentiation of the kind of school, I suppose, that Dante is associating himself with and the other
school with which he wants to differentiate himself, because he says that like Arnaut is different
from the one from Limoges, so he is different from Guittone Guittone da Arezzo who is named
alongside Bonagiunta da Lucca and Jacopo da Lentini. So he's separating himself from he's
aligning himself with the different kind of poetry. He kind of reinforces the kind of genealogy he
wants to create for himself.
Now this genealogy too, I guess, has its own consequences in the modern age because the words in
Italian for the better craftsmen, il miglior fabbro were the words with which T.S. Eliot dedicated
The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, as you probably know. This conversation here really becomes an
emblem for happy poetic relationships, I suppose, which you can recognize you're better at
recognizing your forefathers, and at the same time, come out with something that you recognize as
new.

Chapter 4. Poetic Identity [00:34:52]

Some scholars have pointed out we didn't I don't think you concentrated much on Inferno
XXIV and XXV, where Dante utilizes a number of metaphors from Ovid and Lucan and he has this
there's this topos called the taciat nunc, be silent now Lucan, be silent now Ovid he says, and he
basically steals from their lines without recognizing them, saying that he is surpassing them but at
the same time as he's surpassing them, he's using their own poetry to surpass them. People have
pointed out that in these canti of the thieves, that Dante is participating in the sin by stealing from
Ovid and Lucan and that this kind of poetic relationship is a negative one, that he's stealing the
identity of the other.
Well here we have a different kind of understanding about poetic identity. We have one that
recognizes the paternity of the father, while at the same time, allows the son to come into his own,
and that's coming into his own is, I think, pointed out by Dante the poet whenever he says at
between lines 130 and 140: "Then perhaps to give place to others who were near him, he
disappeared through the fire as though the water as through the water a fish goes to the bottom."
Here the father moves out of his way so that Dante can go on and I guess he can progress; he
doesn't get in his way. If Dante recognizes these people, these poets as his predecessors how does he
differentiate himself? How, in this canto, does he differentiate himself from them? Then we can
look at it through the lens of Canto XXV where the paternal virtue the generation of the soul
granted the paternal virtue. Its place, while simultaneously claimed a direct creation of the soul by
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I think Dante's poetic individuality grows out of the artifice, the
style that they concentrate on here, the sweet detti d'amore, the sweet sayings of love that he
attributes to Guinizelli, so it grows out of the stylistic artifice that these two poets represent are and
Guido to form something new, a new kind of speech, a new kind of poetic speech that's imbibed
with the divine and guided by theological and moral meaning.
I think we can see this and how these pair of poets are cleansed and how they're represented in this
canto. For example, Guinizelli, when he first calls out to Dante before we know who he is, before
he's even identified himself, I think it's around line 17 and following, he says, "Oh thou that goest
behind the others not from tardiness but perhaps from reverence, answer me who burn with thirst
and with fire." Now the line in Italian is e in foco ardo. Now this is a direct quotation of Guinizelli's
own poetry in a sonnet which he says, in gran pena e foco ardo, "in great pain and fire I burn." So
in foco ardo is basically repeated verbatim. The love poet who's burning for his lady metaphorically
in his sonnet is now burning literally in the penitent fire that's purging his sin. I think this
punishment shows how the perspective of Purgatory is really modifying giving us a moral sense
to the love poetry that Guinizelli school of love poetry that Guinizelli belonged to.
Another thing that differentiates them, like I said before, with Dante's shadow showing that he's
actually there, and that he's in his body, in the flesh, points to something else, and that is that his
lady is actually the beginning started a chain of grace. That there is a connection that his not
just a metaphysical connection or epistemological connection and value to his lady, but a
theological value as well. Like he says at line 58, "I go up hence not to be longer blind; a lady is
above who gains grace for me by which I bring my mortal part through your world."
What these poets couldn't recognize in their own lifetime Dante is able to because of his poetry, this
bringing together that he does, which is actually the newness in the Sweet New Style, I think, which
isn't just metaphysical, but it's theological. To put it in another way, if Guinizelli, Arnaut Daniel,
Guido Cavalcanti, who's not mentioned here again, if for these poets the lady was a philosophical or
intellectual phantasm I suppose, for Dante she is a real woman who enacted a real change in his life
and that caused that chain of grace to descend into his own personal story. His poetry, I think, seeks
to close the gap between the metaphysical, theological reality of God and the historical contingent
reality of history and Dante's own personal story in that history.
Love poetry for Dante takes on an entirely new meaning here, and I think Guinizelli shows that he
understands this difference with a perspective that Purgatory gives him. Towards the end of the
canto when he asks Dante to say a Pater noster for him, to Christ whenever he enters heaven, so it's
really a conversion I think of love poetry, a purgation of the worldliness of love poetry.
Finally, I want to say we're going to end a little bit early because I actually have to run to another
building to teach right after this my own class. I want to conclude by saying a few words about
Arnaut. It's very peculiar that Dante this is the only place I believe in the Divine Comedy where
another modern romance language is quoted that's not Italian basically. I could be mistaken, but I'm
pretty sure it's the only place. Now Arnaut was famous, like I said, for his obscurity, the extreme
difficulty of his poetic expression, and here what does Dante do to him? Even though he quotes him
in the original, he didn't really write these lines, these lines are Dante's, but what he does is he
makes this difficult hidden poet come out in the open.
To quote him, he says, "So much does your courteous question please me that I neither can nor
would conceal myself from you. I am Arnaut who weep and sing as I go. I see with grief past follies
and see rejoicing the day I hoped for before me. Now I beg of you by that goodness which guides
you to the summit of the stairway to take thought and do time for my pain. Then he hid himself
from the fire that refines him."
There's a little bit of a Dante's playing here with Arnaut's own language. If he was a difficult poet
of love, Dante really makes him come out into the open and say what he is saying, so here also
are typical words from the Provenal tradition such as the value valor, cortes and cantant: they
all take on different kinds of meaning. That before the valor, or value of the love poet was not what
it is here; it takes on a completely different meaning in Purgatory. He really stages in Arnaut's own
words the purification, cleansing, and bringing out into openness of what love poetry should really
be, where it should really lead you.
I guess to conclude I wanted to say that in the next canto, you'll see Dante submitting himself to the
same kind of purgation as these poets. If these poets are cleansed by this wall of by this fire that
refines them, he will end up passing through a wall of flame in order to get to where he can enter
into the terrestrial paradise. So that he is in reality cleansing himself of the same kind of issue, I
suppose.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [00:45:51]

I guess now I can take a few questions if you have any. Hopefully, it wasn't too disjointed the
lecture, but I'm happy to answer any questions you might have, or try to.
Student: In Canto XXIV, Dante refers to Statius as his being more slowly than he would
[inaudible], and I know that there's a lot of different critical interpretations of that line, I'm
wondering how we can interpret it as sort of looking later to Canto XXV and the idea of the proper
father/son issues? Statius sort of by slowing his journey towards God to stay with Virgil going
against Dante's idea or does can we reconcile the two?
Professor David Lummus: I think you can reconcile them. I mean whenever Dante whenever
he meets Guinizelli, he's silent. He doesn't automatically make himself he doesn't move his
father out of the way. Statius and Dante both know that Virgil is not going to be able to go the
whole way. They know that he's only going to be able to lead them a certain amount of the trip, of
the journey. So I guess I would interpret it as an act of reverence, just like Dante's silence,
whenever he meets Guinizelli is an act of reverence. He doesn't push them out of the way and he
doesn't trample them. He's not in a hurry, I suppose. Does that make any sense at all? I think it's
the way you could interpret it Statius is if you want to see him interpret that as him as slowing
his way on the way to God basically, then you could interpret it as an act of reverence to the person
who allowed him to actually be there and not in Limbo. That's how I would interpret it, I suppose.
That Dante in this in XXVI, is reverent to his father, so at the same time he is showing how he's
moving beyond him by giving a theological meaning to their questionable worldly love poetry.
Does that answer your question?
Student: When Dante talks about the inspiration which you've identified as the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit, is he making love synonymous with the Holy Spirit? And if so, looking back at the Vita
nuova, when he personifies love in the masculine I've always sort of thought of in literature,
when you read religious poetry and stuff, the Holy Spirit's often sort of a feminized noun, are those
things one and the same to him, love and the Holy Spirit?
Professor David Lummus: I think there that he's thinking of I think at that point he's thinking of
love I think Thomas Aquinas mentions love as the procession of love, as the movement of the
Holy Spirit within the Trinity between the Father and the Son, so that both really are within
participate in the same spirit. So yes I think in that spot, he is really talking about love as the Holy
Spirit, as this kind of or at least as parallel to it. It's ambiguous. He says he doesn't really say
that love is the Holy Spirit does he? He's purposefully ambiguous I think, because love poetry
always has that the possibility of leading you astray, because it's an aesthetic practice. It's dolce;
it's sweet. So I think that the that yes he is talking about love as the Holy Spirit, as this divine
love, but he's also talking about so I guess in reality that there is a connection between the
contingent and historical world and the metaphysical world of God, but that he leaves it ambiguous
because it can always be misinterpreted and the aesthetic can always lead you back down to the
terrestrial realm. Does that make sense?
Student: Why do you think it's or what do you think is the significance of the fact that the
biological discussion of inspiration of God breathing the soul into the infant? The fact that it's
handled by Statius and that Dante really highlights that by saying he has Statius say, if it's
Virgil's will that he explains but can't refuse it what's the significance that says, I want Statius to
handle this at his discretion? Because at other times I think Virgil, even though he's not permitted to
know God or to go to heaven, can still speak about divine workings. So I don't think it's out of I
mean for me it's not out of Virgil's capacity but I just couldn't understand why he has Statius explain
it.
Professor David Lummus: Okay, well I guess if the question really had been about what is the
nature of the soul, what is Aristotle saying in the De Anima about maybe Virgil could have told
him about that, but the actual question is what is the nature how does the soul live in the
afterlife? That is an entirely Christian question, that's based on Christian theology, so I think the fact
that Virgil defers to Statius there is showing is connected with the fact that the question is
actually about the afterlife and the afterlife is specifically a Christian context that Statius is
permitted to know and not Virgil. Does that make sense?
Student: Yeah.
Professor David Lummus: Okay.
Student: Like I said, it is beyond his realm, beyond Virgil's capacity.
Professor David Lummus: Technically, but the fact that he actually asked Virgil first I don't
know, maybe he's saying that it's actually Aristotle, this idea of the immortality of the soul and the
after it's actually there and perhaps Virgil could answer it, but then Virgil defers to Statius
because it's a theological question that he's not privy to. Does that okay. We're going to end a
little bit early; I hope that's okay, so I can go change gears here. All right, thank you for your
attention and for putting up with me. All right, thank you.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 15 - Purgatory XXX, XXXI, XXXIII [October 28,
2008]
Chapter 1. Virgil's Last Words [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: With Canto XXVI, the purgation of the pilgrim is completed. He
has been going through the various stages of Purgatory: from pride, as you remember, to the sin of
lust and in XXVII, he crosses a wall of fire, so that he can be cleansed completely of all the stains
that may be residual on his soul and approach and enter the Garden of Eden.
This is the action that takes place in XXVII and Canto XXVII comes to a close with a passage that I
would like to read to you and comment on. It's at the end of Canto XXVII and these are really the
last words that Virgil will speak. We will not hear from him again. In fact, from now on, the pilgrim
will be entirely on his own. There's no dependency on him. There is a sort of actually very
personal moment now that starts and we'll see the drama that goes with time of this attainment of
self-mastery and Dante goes on dramatizing.
These are the last words that he speaks from lines 130 on, "The temporal fire and the eternal thou
hast seen," meaning Purgatory and Hell which lasts forever, "my son, and art come to a part where
of myself I discern no further." This is the limitation of Virgil's vision. This is from now on he
will be following even the geometry, the arrangement of their journey will be completely
reversed. Up to now, the pilgrim has been a disciple, therefore, one who follows the vestiges of the
teacher. Now the teacher with Statius will be following Virgil. He sees no further. And actually I can
anticipate for you the pathos of Virgil's departure sudden departure when he, the pilgrim,
most wants him and needs him, because Beatrice is approaching and the terror that with a terror
that Beatrice represents for the pilgrim, the pilgrim will turn back and his eyes will never see Virgil
again. Virgil has disappeared an instant before he vanishes, an instant before Beatrice arrives, as if
there's a hiatus. Dante is dramatizing the hiatus between the two guides and the two particular
stages of his own self-knowledge and life.
Let me continue with this, "Take henceforth thy pleasure for guide." What an extraordinary line:
"take then henceforth thy pleasure for guide." This is the poem of desire in the sense that what
pushes the pilgrim to go on and impels him to this journey of discovery and self-discovery is really
desire. Desire is the moving force in him, but now the language changes. Now in a sense a certain
the first part of the journey is over and pleasure can become the guide, the guidance of his own
pleasure, what he likes. That is to say, in a sense, it's an adumbration of free will. We'll talk more
about the relationship between actually pleasure and happiness, the way Dante will go on
dramatizing it and thinking about in Paradise.
"Thou hast come forth from the steep and narrow ways. See the sun that shines on thy brow. See the
grass," near the earthly paradise, "See the grass, the flowers, and trees which the ground here brings
forth of itself alone." It is as, by Dante, by taking his own pleasure as his guidance, he now has
reached an edenic place. Virgil is speaking of the pilgrim as if he were speaking of the ground that
thrives until the ground, the land produces spontaneously. Now he's capable at spontaneous action
and spontaneous decisions.
"Till their fair eyes come rejoicing which weeping may come made me come to thee thou mayst
sit or go among them." Two details are expressed by these lines: one is Virgil is recapitulating in
many ways this first part of the journey, the journey that began in Inferno I and ends here in
Purgatorio, in the Garden of Eden. It began in the wilderness and ends in the Garden. This is the
first step of the first stage of the journey. You can now he remembers, that's how recapitulates
"the fair eyes. . . that made me," that begged me to come to your help when you were lost and
shipwrecked on the wilderness of Inferno I; so now Virgil is going back to that.
The second element is that this is the exercise: "Now thou mayest sit or go among them." Now this
is exactly the major temptation for the pilgrim. Is he going to think that the journey to the Garden of
Eden, which is a journey ahead, forward, but a journey back in time? The Garden of Eden is behind
all of us and yet it lies ahead of us. The past is really the future. He must decide whether he can go
on or sit here. It's a first decision. Is he going to think that the journey is the journey to the
complacencies of the Garden, to the beauty and attraction of the Garden? Or is he going to turn, as
he actually will we can say that because we have Paradise, that he writes into an anti-pastoral
poet. That is to say one, a poet who is always questioning the sense of arrival and is always going
on to new departures that's really what the Virgil is telling him. Now this is up to you; you have
arrived here; you have arrived there where I am, where Virgil is, or you can even go further.
There's a peculiar language that resonates behind this kind of moral dilemma which is placed in
front of the pilgrim's mind. It's called felix culpa, I don't know if you have those of you who are
readers of Milton may know what I'm talking about. Felix culpa, the idea that the fall of man was
actually a happy fall, because it allows human beings to even want to go beyond it. That's exactly
what is resonating behind this. You may sit and therefore turn into an Adam figure, who is going
back to the beauty and innocence which the pilgrim doesn't have really. He has a wisdom now of
the Garden or you can go on even further than that.
Then here is the final moment of a circle which now takes over for the Purgatorio itself: "No longer
expect word or sign from me." That's exactly the teaching of Virgil has been completed and then
he ends with: "Free, upright and whole is thy will, and it were a fault not to act on its bidding;
therefore, over thyself I crown and miter thee."
This is the attainment of the free will so that the whole Purgatorio moves between two poles: the
pole of liberty which was Cato's object, the object of his quest through the wilderness of the Libyan
desert, and now the attainment of the free will which allows the pilgrim to view it as a condition,
not just a point of arrival, but the necessary pre-condition for moral life. You can never really have
an autonomous moral life only in the measure in which you think you can have the free will. Now
the pilgrim is his own responsibility.
Let me say that once he's under the guidance of Beatrice the issues, especially when it comes to
Paradise, there will be moral problems while he is in the Garden of Eden we are going to look at in
a moment, but in Paradise aesthetics takes over. It's no longer an ethical problem. Dante refers, you
may have heard about recent philosophers who think that life is arranged or knowledge is
arranged according to stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and then the theological. Dante reverses
this, the point that seems to be the most mature is that dealing with the aesthetic one, which others
may view as the superficial, the elementary one, the one where we are perceptions are going to
be engaged and then at the time of disengagement even before you can get involved and mature in
ethical experiences. Dante changes; there are no ethical dilemmas in Paradise. Once you are in
Paradise you can only enjoy and get to know the world. All the problems are intellectual problems,
not moral issues.
"So free upright and whole is the will, and it were a fall not to act on its bidding, therefore, over
thyself I crown and miter thee." This is a kind of secular coronation ceremony, the crown the
royal and the episcopal royal and the bishop, which is a way of consecrating. Virgil acts as a kind
of lay priest, consecrating the attainment of self-mastery in this moment which could become a
moment of self-assertion and yet Dante is very careful in how he navigates all of this.

Chapter 2. Cantos XXVIII to XXXIII: Pastoral Oasis Segment [00:11:03]

Now from Canto XXVIII to Canto XXXIII, which is the end of the poem, we come to an area
which is another fragment. You already read a kind of segment which I will call the literary segment
that with Professor Lummus whom I'm very grateful to covered and explained to you and did
with you last time. That's a literary segment that goes from XXI to XXVI. Now from XXVIII to
XXXIII we have a different segment which is let's call it a pastoral oasis. It's also the
representation of what in classical literature is called locus amoenus. You may have seen
adumbrations of this even in Limbo. That's one of them, this lovely spot outside of the world of
history where something of relaxation can take place and it's also which Dante combines actually
with a biblical hortus, enclosed garden, the Song of Songs, for instance, or the Garden of Eden
hortus conclusus.
The interesting thing about Dante's representation of the locus amoenus is it's never really outside of
history; it becomes. That's the assumption: you have the garden and you have the city. This is the
dual imagination whenever life becomes unbearable in the city you take off and go into a villa in the
garden somewhere and find a relief, aesthetic relief from the hustle the time of hustle and
bustle of the city. Dante combines the two. There's no easy position between them, in the sense that
the Garden of Eden where he finds himself, is going to be the place of a very problematical
place, a place where the pilgrim is engaged in a self-confrontation. He experiences some actually
terrifying moments in the encounter with Beatrice, so the Garden of Eden is represented in Canto
XXVIII and I want to read a few passages.
This is you see how this representation is carried out, "Eager now to search," I'm reading from
XXVIII, lines 1 and following, and I'll go pretty slowly over this: "Eager now to search within and
about the divine forest green and dense, which tempered to my eyes the new day, I left the slope
without waiting longer, taking the level very slowly over the ground which gave fragrance on every
side."
It's the classical this is the warehouse of the pastoral tradition is found here, a fragrance;
there's a running brook, deep shades, the birds seem to be rivaling human beings, introducing songs;
plentitude of the natural order and even the innocence of the natural order, with the exception that
Dante comes and though he has been cleansed and gone through the wall of fire to further purify
him, he is not the kind of new Adam. He carries with him the stains of experience and the stains of
history, so there is desire that acts in him, but let me continue.
"A sweet air that was without change was striking on my brow with the force only of a gentle
breeze, by which the fluttering bows all bent freely to the part where the holy mountain throws its
first shadow, yet were not so much swayed from their erectness that the little birds in the tops did
not still practice all their arts, but, singing, they greeted the morning hours with full gladness among
the leaves, which kept such undertone to their rhymes as gathers from branch to branch in the pine
wood of the Chiassi shore when Aeolus looses the Sirocco."
The interesting thing which is some kind of the poignancy of the autobiography and is that
Dante is imagining the Garden of Eden as the pine wood near Ravenna, which has completely
disappeared since then, but you can imagine how he would take the morning walks in the pine trees
around the city and on the way to the sea. And that, to him, was the garden: this mixture of the
ordinary and the great sublime imagination. That's what I'm I think he wants to convey to us.
And now he continues, and I will ask you a question. I want you to think about what I'm going to
ask you, because you're expected to have a shock of recognition in the next three lines, and these
are the lines in English. I'll read them in Italian, another little homage to my friend, Professor
Brooks:
Gi m'avean trasportato i lenti passi
dentro alla selva antica tanto, ch'io
non potea rivedere ond'io mi 'ntrassi
ed ecco pi andar mi tolse un rio,
che 'nver sinistra con sue picciole onde
piegava l'erba che 'n sua ripa usco.

And in English is: "Already my small steps had brought me so far within the ancient wood that I
could not see the place where I had entered, and lo, my going farther was prevented by stream with
which its little waves bent leftwards the grass that sprang on its bank."
This is my question, what is this what do these lines remind you of? They are meant to remind
you of something. The very beginning of Inferno. Very good which means that this is now really
a new departure for him, which means that the Garden of Eden is exactly the wilderness that we
saw that we left behind, seen from a different perspective, which means that the supernatural
world is the natural world with a different to a different lens and different perspective.
This is and is now re-enacting exactly the drama of Inferno I; it's no shipwreck. The mountain
has been climbed. Remember that he tried to climb the mountain? The mountain has been climbed.
A new departure is going to take place. Here we go then with this idea of the that's what I mean
the anti-pastoral Dante: the poet who dismisses and refuses, and repudiates all the temptations of
gardens, all the temptations of premature halting, premature self-enclosure into the fiction of
gardens. So this is really the strongest element that I would have to point out about what's
happening in Canto XXVIII.
Now what does he see? "All the waters that are purest here would seem to have some defilement in
them beside that, which conceals nothing, though it flows quite dark under the perpetual shade,
which never lets sun or moon shine there. With feet I stopped and with eyes passed over beyond the
streamlet to look at the great variety of fresh flowering boughs, and there appeared to me," and the
word, now, is really with a power and force of an apparition, another epiphany of beauty and love to
him, "as appears of a sudden a thing that for wonder drives away every other thought, a lady all
alone, who went singing and culling flower from flower from which all her way was painted."
This is Matelda, as you have read, the woman who goes dancing, singing, and gathering flowers. A
true picture a fascination, aesthetic fascination for him. To give you the sense of how some
resonance and in case you're stilling for a term that the final paper topic you might want to
read there is a poem there is a traditional poetry which is really Provenal called pastourelle.
The pastourelle was a big practitioner is Dante here. That's what he's writing. It's the idea of the
knight who goes to the woods or the meadow and meets a young shepherdess gets off it's very
sensual, and woos off the horse and woos this young woman and usually ends with a kind of pun
on the promises of the ecstasies of paradise. So it's an erotic kind of song. The other practitioner of
this genre was Dante's own friend, Guido Cavalcanti.
Dante is using the mode and really definitely taking his distance from him. There is this is a love
scene. There's nothing of the overtones of violence an erotic violence that Guido Cavalcanti
had celebrated in his own version of the pastourelle, a genre which is common to them.
This instead is what he says: "Pray, fair lady, who warmest thyself in love's beam." Now Dante has
just come out of the circle of lust. He has been cleansing himself and yet, this is the lingering trace
of his history, the lingering trace of his body, and his humanity. Here he goes through the Garden of
Eden as a fallen man who is redeemed and not quite redeemed, certainly not in the restored or
reinstated into the innocence of the pre-lapsarian garden.
"If I am to believe the looks which are wont to be testimony of the heart,' I said to her, 'may it
please thee to come forward to this stream so near that I may hear what thou singest. Thou makest
me recall where and what was Proserpina, at the time her mother," Ceres, "lost her and she is
praying." That's the first there is a series of three mythological images, this is the first. I think of
you as Proserpina, but it's also a story of Proserpina, as you know. Well it's stated in the text: the
story of the young woman who is walking picking flowers on the plains of Enna in Sicily and
then death comes and takes her away. It's a kind of death itself, loving human beings and taking
them, that's one myth.
The second one is "a lady turns in the dance with feet close together" and so on, and I skip a few
lines: "And I do not believe such light shone from beneath the lids of Venus when, through strange
mischance, she was pierced by her son." The second image, I think, it's more telling. It's the story of
Venus wounded by the arrows of Cupid and falling in love with Cupid. I think it's more telling
because it's Dante's way of casting, without going into psychoanalysis a psychoanalytical
explanation that Dante is casting the Garden of Eden as also a desire to return to the state of
infancy of the child with the mother, only to understand that this is really a fantasy that would lead
him nowhere.
And in fact, the third image is that of an erotic image again, but one of distance. "Three paces the
river kept us apart; the Hellespont where Xerxes passed, a bridle still on all men's boasts, did bear
more hatred from Leander for its swelling waters between Sestos and Abydos, than that from me
because it did not open then."
So, this barrier between Matelda and the pilgrim. Between Dante and the fantasy of what the
Garden of Eden may be, the mother here is kept. And Dante has to continue. He goes on explain
she goes on explaining what this how the mechanics, so to say, about the Garden of Eden and
then the canto ends in and I'll look at this from lines 140 and following.
"Those," line 140 and following, "Those who in old times sang of the age of gold and of its happy
state, perhaps dreamed on Parnassus of this place; here the human root was innocent, here was
lasting spring and every fruit, this is the nectar of which each tells. I turned then right round to my
poets and saw that they had heard the last sentence with a smile. Then I brought my eyes back to the
fair lady."
From Dante's point of view, the perplexity that he feels, is the perplexity of Virgil and the perplexity
of Statius. They know no more than he does; he knows no more than they do. What is the other
the burden of this passage is that the clearly Dante is alluding to the bucolic quality of this place,
but it also suggests that in passing that the ancient actually, he says that the ancient poets
prefigured the Garden of Eden in the fabulous visions of the golden age and the Parnassus. He's
establishing a link between the poetic visions and this encounter that he has in the Garden of Eden,
both projections of the poetic imagination. So it also means that the Garden of Eden can be like the
bucolic fantasy of the poets and Parnassus.

Chapter 3. Canto XXX: Beatrice Arrives [00:25:52]

We skip XXIX which is the story of really the world history here from it's an allegory that
pageant of revelation and I will move to Canto XXX which will take us a little bit of time. This is
the canto predictably where since Beatrice is the one who is linked to the number three, this is
the canto where Beatrice will arrive. And surprisingly, for those of you who are lovers of this open
or hidden symmetry in the poem, Canto XXX of Paradise is also the canto where Beatrice will
disappear. Her residence in the poem lasts for exactly XXXIII cantos. Clearly it's sort of an
accident: her name is three times the good; she's in the Vita nuova as linked with three. It's this kind
of way of the arcane significance of her presence in the pilgrim's in the lover's life.
A canto that describes a double drama, the drama of Virgil's disappearance and the arrival of
Beatrice, a change of the guard as it were, in many ways, but you have two different moods. One of
elegy for the loss of Virgil and the other one of sacred terror at the arrival of Beatrice. So it begins,
he hears singing, line 70: Veni, sponsa de Libano, which, of course, is an echo from the Song of
Songs. So the erotics of the previous canto continues now here. The Song of Songs is notoriously
one of a sublime love poem. It continues here in Canto XXX in anticipation of the arrival of
Beatrice.
"As the blessed shall rise at the last trump, each eager for his tomb, the reclad voice singing
Hallelujah, there rose up on the divine chariot at the voice of so great an elder, a hundred ministers
and messengers of eternal life, who all cried: 'Benedictus qui venis.'"
This is now an allusion, as maybe your notes will tell you should tell you to the greetings of
Jesus in the garden when he comes I'm sorry to Jerusalem and he says, 'Benedictus qui venit,'
which means that Beatrice it means a number of things. First of all, a typological connection
between garden and city which we have already been seeing here. The garden is not opposed to the
political, let's say, to the city, it is the history and the garden come together in Dante's imagination.
But there is a further typology that Beatrice comes the way Jesus came into history. Beatrice will
come into the soul of the lover. So that she is surrounded, she is wrapped in a kind of aura of
Christological language and she will become, let's say, grace; the way one can experience grace in
the world through this kind of direct love onto oneself, so Latin again.
Then, a third image, and throwing flowers up around, "Manibus o date lilia plenis," another three
phrases in Latin. He will go on translating a fourth one. This is a more interesting image because it's
taken straight out of the Aeneid of Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid so it's already an homage to
Virgil who is about to disappear.
Do you see how the dramas here are sort of interwoven? The idea of what the garden is and how is
the garden related to oneself and to one's history. The idea of the arrival and the meaning of
Beatrice into the life of the pilgrim and then also the loss of Virgil as a poet and whatever his vision
may be. Whatever his vision may be is indicated by these fragments, the fragments refer to the
premature death that Virgil celebrates in a very elegiac way in Book VI of the Aeneid where Aeneas
has gone down into Hades in order to see the whole of history. This is the descent into the oracles'
father and to see Anchises, that it is the future that is going to derive and stem from him. And
Anchises will point out to him the shade of a young man who sits on the side, his name is
Marcellus, who will die too young and then he will add, "all throw lilies with open hands," the lily
being a funereal symbol like the chrysanthemums, for instance, or some such things in some
cultures.
It's an image of a premature death which clearly is linked also to Beatrice, but who died in a
premature death, but also to Virgil, because it's the anticipation of the loss of Virgil. It's an elegiac
way. It is as if Virgil's vision was under the aegis of mortality and finitude, as if Virgil could never
really be thought of as saved because his song is a song limited to the world of death.
Let's see how this continues, "I once saw at the beginning of the day the eastern parts all rosy and
the rest of the sky clear and beautiful and the sun's face come forth shaded. . . " etc. ". . . a lady
appeared to me," this is Beatrice, "girt with olive over a white veil." Look at her elegance. Listen to
how he describes the colors, the fashions. "Girt with olive over a white veil, clothed under a green
mantle with the color of a living flame. And my spirit," I call that the Italian flag by the way, the
way she seems to be the red, white and green, "and my spirit, which now so long had not been
overcome with awe, trembling in her presence, without having more knowledge by the eyes,
through hidden virtue that came from her, felt old love's great power."
This is a rewriting of the poem of the autobiography of Dante that you remember, reading the Vita
nuova. He's experiencing the presence of Beatrice through exactly the kind of effects that she has
over him: the courtly love, the sweet new style, the trembling, the inability to speak.
"As soon as the lofty virtue smote on my sight which already had pierced me before I was out of my
boyhood, I turned to the left with the confidence of a little child that runs to his mother when he's
afraid or in distress, to say to Virgil: 'Not a drop of blood is left in me that does not tremble. I know
the marks of the ancient flame."
He's scared and turns to Virgil and is about to say, and will say the famous lines, "I know the marks
of the ancient flame," which is a translation of the words Dido will speak when she meets Aeneas in
Hades: "I know the marks of the ancient flame," another image of death and mortality taken from
the Aeneid. Dante's linking Virgil with that kind of metaphor and that sort of limitation of passion.
"But Virgil had left us bereft of him, Virgil sweetest father, Virgil to whom I gave myself for my
salvation, nor did all the ancient mother lost avail my cheeks washed with dew that they should not
be stained again with tears."
These are Beatrice's first words: "Dante, because Virgil leaves thee weep not, weep not yet, for thou
must weep for another sword.' Like an admiral who goes to poop and prow to see the men that serve
on the other ships and to hearten them in their work, so on the left side of the car when I turned
at the sound of my name, which is noted here of necessity I saw the lady who first appeared to
me veiled under the angelic festival direct her eyes on me beyond the stream. Already the veil that
fell from her head, and circled with Minerva's leaves, did not let her be plainly seen, royally, still
stern in her bearing, she continued like one who while he speaks holds back his hottest words:
'Look at me well; I am, I am indeed Beatrice. How durst thou approach the mountain? Didst thou
not know that here man is happy?"
Well a number of things here Virgil has disappeared. Dante now is alone, so that's what I call the
self-confrontation with his past. Who is Beatrice? How am I going to account for my failings to
Beatrice? What is she going to expect of me? She's harsh, the harsh language of love, to the point if
I may be a little bit too without really lessening the intensity of this passage, this passage is
pretty intense, but I feel that I have to tell you a little to distract you a little bit for ten seconds.
Borges has written about this passage, a beautiful essay on this scene and he says, this is the only
time that Dante really made a mistake. Because if Beatrice spoke to me the way he spoke she
spoke to Virgil to Dante I'm sorry I would have said to her, look if that's the way you feel
I'm going to go right back and but Dante won't say that. This is a contemporary visionary like
Borges, not Dante.
What we are told is that this is the first, and only, time in the poem that Dante's name is heard.
Dante. She will never call him Dante again and he has never been called Dante before. In other
words, this the point where the poem, from the epic that it has been, the epic of desire, the epic of
hope, the pilgrim, lost the longing and memory, between hope and memory, the poem of justice,
now it becomes an autobiography. Now it is his own story. There is a shift in genre: from an epic
story: from the loss of Virgil, the epic poet, to an autobiographical focus. Dante, this is you, the
specificity and irreducibility of his own experience. Dante, she says, and he will add that his name
is here registered out of necessity. And what is the necessity that he has?
What's the necessity about speaking of oneself? Why would one go on speaking of oneself? One
speaks of oneself because one wants to be exemplary to others. One believes that what one has
experienced is crucial for somebody else's self knowledge, somebody else's experience or one wants
to exempt vituperation from his own name. It's I'm paraphrasing Dante's words, and the way he
registers them in this philosophical text that he writes called, the Banquet, where he speaks of
about himself. And he says, there are two people who have spoken about themselves in exemplary
ways. One is Augustine in the Confessions, a book that I have asked you repeatedly to read and I
have read from, and the other one is Boethius that I have alluded to in The Consolation of
Philosophy. The philosopher, who is in jail, seeks to find comfort to the imputations of criminal
conduct laid on him, by thinking about philosophy and talking about himself, and whereas,
Augustine, of course, is discussing his own conversion. The idea of the necessity is both Dante is
alluding to two autobiographical texts, both of which make it the talking about oneself indeed, as
he calls it, a necessity.

Chapter 4. Canto XXXI: The Confession [00:38:43]

So this now will continue with Canto XXX. The first thing that she will do Beatrice will do
and we turn to Canto XXXI. There's an account and Canto XXX continues with the story of his
failures when she died as told in the Vita nuova, he went on looking for someone who could replace
Beatrice. And now Dante goes on asking actually indulging in a confession, literally an
Augustinian moment, another part of the autobiographical moment and a confessional form and this
is let me just read a few lines here, before we move on.
"Oh thou that art on that side of the sacred river,' she began again, turning against me the point of
her speech which even with the edge that seemed sharp to me and continuing without pause, 'say,
say if this is true; to such an accusation thy confession must needs be joined.' My faculties were so
confounded that my voice began and was spent before it was released from its organs. She forebore
a little, then said, 'What thinkest thou?" A phrase that should remind you I know that it's too
little and I will not too demanding, but it should remind you of the fact that this is Francesca's, this
is what Dante was asking Francesca in Canto 5. And now it's Beatrice the roles are inverted
who is asking Dante to resume as if it were that confession of a failing that Francesca had
undergone in Canto V of Inferno.
"What thinkest thou? Answer me, for the sad memories are not yet destroyed in thee by the water.'
Confusion and fear mingled together drove forth from my mouth a Yes such that to hear it there was
need of sight. As a crossbow shot with too great strain breaks the cord," let me just go on. "After,"
with line 36, "After heaving a bitter sigh, I had I had hardly the voice to answer and the lips
shaped it with difficulty; weeping, I said: 'Present things with their false pleasure turned my steps as
soon as your face was hid."
The he's alluding, exactly as he did in the Vita nuova, to his change of heart as soon as Beatrice
died, and now she continues. "And she: 'Hadst thou kept silence or denied what thou confessest, thy
fault would be not less plain, by such a judge as it known, but when from a man's own cheek breaks
forth condemnation of his sin, in our court the wheel turns back against the edge. Nevertheless, in
order that thou mayst now bear the shame of thy wandering, and another time hearing the Sirens, be
stronger, lay aside the sowing of tears, and hearken; so shalt thou hear how my buried flesh should
have directed thee the other way. Never did nature or art set before thee beauty so great as the fair
members," etc.
The passage is extraordinary because it helps us to gloss retrospectively what was a fairly
mysterious allegory in Purgatory. You remember, where Dante meets the siren, or dreams of the
siren and then a lady appeared? The siren was an allegory of a temptation, an erotic temptation.
Someone who wants to lure the pilgrim and promises happiness. Remember? I'm going to make you
happy, you need to go nowhere else and now and then there was also the appearance of a
mysterious woman, an equally mysterious woman who manages to send away the siren. She wakes
up the pilgrim and the journey there can continue. As you recall, we are saying, well we don't know
who this mysterious woman is, though there are a number of hints. I had read this part of the poem
before you had, probably, and it's Beatrice.
Beatrice was a kind of an allegory of the confrontation of two women, the siren on the one hand,
and on the other hand, this unknown, mysterious Beatrice. Now this scene just makes it clear,
because what Beatrice says, you have to make a confession in case shame, "Now bear the shame of
thy wanderings and another time, hearing the Sirens, be stronger, lay aside the sowing of tears and
hearken; so shalt thou hear how my buried flesh," and so on.
She is now glossing the scene of the siren that appeared in Canto XIX, but there is more to it. There
is a little phrase that Dante's using, or Beatrice is using for him: "another time," when you hear the
siren, which means that the siren is not just the encounter with the siren. It's not just an event that
happened in the past. It can happen all over again. "Another time." In other words, it can still
happen in the future, which means that Dante's conversion, which is really what this poem has been
telling us especially now that it has reached this kind of autobiographical quality is not over
and done with, that it is a conversion. It has to be understood as an ongoing journey and that the
future itself is fraught with temptations, just as much as it was fraught with temptations in the past.
What Dante is changing is the Augustinian idea of a conversion that takes place once and for all and
is making it is replacing that paradigm with a different paradigm, a paradigm of a conversion in
its openness to time, with the idea that it is an ongoing process. You have look what the poetic
technique as Dante is remembering a scene of the past and glossing that, the encounter, the
temptation of the siren moved away, dispelled by the arrival of Beatrice. Now Beatrice is talking
once again about the siren, "another time," meaning, I know who she was in Canto XIX of in the
dream of Canto XIX she may come back again.
In other words, once again, this is the anti-pastoral imagination of the poet. Do not believe that you
can ever stop on the way. Do not ever believe that there are truths that are going to be unchallenged
or untested in time. I think that this is a way of truly casting Dante for what he is; the poet of
open to the power of the future and drawn to the idea that the future is still part of his experience.
By the way, he goes on, which would really takes us but that's the essential point, "Truly that
thou," this is line 55, "thou oughtest, at the first shaft of deceptive things, to have risen up after me
who was such no longer. No young girl or other vanity of such brief worth should have bent thy
wings downward to await more shots. A young chick waits for two or three, but in vain is the net
spread," and so on. This is another, literally, the allusion to the poems that Dante wrote for what he
called the pargoletta, the little the young woman that Beatrice seems to be remind him of.

Chapter 5. Canto XXXIII: The End of Purgatory [00:46:47]

Now we come to Canto XXXIII, the end of Purgatory the end of Purgatory, where I really want
to focus on one image and one image in particular, which is the image of a prophecy that Beatrice
will make. Beatrice we are at the end of time Purgatory, and he goes on I'm sorry, she goes
on promising a deliverer who will come. The argument now is no longer about Dante himself; it's
an argument about history. Is there a deliverance for history? Is it possible for the whole human
family to go back to a condition that, at least if not the Garden of Eden as such, from the point of
view which we can see, at least the towers of the true city, that's the way Dante calls it in the
political tract Monarchia. He's talking about a figure that may enter history that will enter history
at the end of time, that's why I stress that dramatically the poem is literally poised at the outer edge
of time.
There's not time, when we are going to Paradise once again, so let me tell you what this and
we'll try to explain it for you, lines 30 and following: "And she said to me: 'From fear and shame I
would have thee free thyself henceforth, that thou mayst no longer speak like one that dreams.
Know that the vessel," she is tough. The way she is attacking him, she will be the teacher from now
on, "Know that the vessel the serpent broke was and is not, but let him that has the blame be assured
that God's vengeance fears no sop. Not for all the time shall the eagle," probably the eagle of the
empire, "be without heir that left its feathers on the car so that it became monster, and then prey; for
I see assuredly, and therefore tell of it, stars already near, to give us the time, secure from all check
and hindrance, when a five hundred, ten and five, one sent from God, shall slay the thievish woman
and the giant who sins with her. And perhaps my dark tale, like Themis and the Sphinx, persuades
thee less because, in their fashion, it clouds thy mind; but soon the facts shall be the Naiads that will
solve this hard enigma without loss of flocks and corn."
She delivers an enigma an enigmatic prophecy. Enigma is a word that obviously means mystery,
but it's also linked to allegory. You talk about irony, allegory; they're all tropes that grammarians
place under the same general subdivision. It's an enigma. It's mysterious. It's not quite clear, and the
lack of clarity only adds, I think, to the fear and the speculations of course about what this is. It's a
numerical symbol, which he says, it's a five hundred, ten and five. That's the way it's written, five
hundred, ten and five: DXV. And you do know that numbers we have been talking a little bit
about this, numbers viewed as containing medieval numerical symbolism views numbers as
containing the essence of the secret actually of creation. They would go writing this is Isidore of
Seville, goes on writing, take the number away from things and things will perish, will fall apart.
It's a Pythagorean idea, what keeps all things together is just a sense of call it musical rhythmic
numerical ordering. Of course, there are a great other number that maybe everybody knows is
666, which is the number of anti-Christ. Dante's writing a five hundred, one, and five what on
earth could it be? Oh the speculations I could they're hilarious, some of the spec what they
could mean. There are those who believe, well it really refers to the year 1315. We have no reason
to believe that is the case, because it's 800, the year of Charlemagne's declaring the Holy Roman
Empire and 515 gives you 1315. So Dante's really thinking about an imminent event in his own
time. There's nothing in the text that would allow us to see this and allow us to make it credible.
So what is it? Actually, it was found that the way the best way to describe it is really in
written in DXV in five hundred, ten, and five that this is the best way to try to make any sense of
this prophecy and of course, another hilarious interpretation that I just regale to you for your own
temporary relaxation this was immediately became the D V X. Between 1923 and 1943, this was
a prophecy of Mussolini, of all people, who would come and deliver the world. Another ridiculous
of course interpretation.
But it was found by some very good by two, simultaneously, it's amazing by two historians,
one actually a historian and one a literary historian, and therefore they took two different views, that
in the medieval illustrations, there is a moment By the way, let me just preamble this, they found
it in medieval illustrations of the mass. There's a moment in the mass, where there's a so-called
antiphonal prayer, the idea that Christ is coming sacramentally and they have 'it is truly right and
just' and in Latin veridignum et justus est, and it's always written like this and they explain V and X,
a cross that joins the human and the divine. So that really the prayer, or the enigma of Beatrice, is
for the apocalyptic end of time. The time when Christ will return to the earth, the first time he came,
first of all, as a human being five, ten and five hundred. The second time he will come first in his
divinity so five hundred, ten and five: the divinity and the humanity second, the second element.
The two, humanity and divinity join together by the X of the cross. A great discovery, a number of
infinite problems that I have. I hope I have let me bear with me for a couple of minutes so
that I can tell you more about this.
If this is an apocalyptic symbol, that is to say, you understand what we mean by an apocalyptic
symbol, apocalyptic prophecy, that for prophecy apocalypse means for visionary coming from the
Apocalypse of St. John, and implying that Dante believes in some kind of imminent end of time.
History is coming to an end. If he believed in this, and this is to be understood as an apocalyptic
symbol of an imminent end of time, this would make Dante what is called a Joachist, and I have to
explain to you who this man is.
There's a man by the name of Joachim of Flora who was and we'll see him in Paradise, Joachim
of Flora, who had a theory of history in a kind of tripartite structure, Joachim of Flora. The idea is
that history is patterned on the Trinity, so there is an age of the father which roughly goes from
creation to the time of the biblical patriarchs. Then there is the age of the son that goes from the
time of the incarnation to roughly 1260, his own time. This is Joachim of Flora and then there's in
the age of the spirit, that goes from the time of 1260 with thanks to the fraternal orders, all
structures and all institutions will disappear and mankind will experience a time of brotherhood and
chastity. There will be no marriages, there will be no state, there will be nothing, and I say
California is already anticipated and seen by this great figure of Joachim of Flora.
If Dante were a Joachist that would create a number of problems, because what I have just been
describing to you was viewed as a most heretical theory of history. Why was it heretical? Because,
in effect, Joachim of Flora was, with this theory of an age of the father, the age of the son, and the
age of the spirit was in effect undoing the unity of the Trinity. That is to say, the Trinity is no
longer simultaneously together. He's dividing the Trinity into three distinct parts, and no less a great
theologian of Dante's own time, and whom Dante will encounter very soon in Paradise, and they
are going to discuss Joachim of Flora together, Bonaventure, will go really writing a piece in order
to declare Joachim of Flora heretical. So if this a very powerful explanation that Dante's really
alluding to the second coming at the end of time, the DXV, when Christ will return to earth to
restore the Messianic advent, to restore justice to the world, and it will come first of all in glory of
the divinity first and the humanity second, both joined by the cross, the humanity and the divinity
together. Then and if there's not enough is he an apocalyptic writer?
I doubt that he is an apocalyptic writer, because there's no poet I know, and I think we have given
plenty of evidence of this over the last two months, who cares more about the institutions, who
believes that the institutions are history. And of course he attacks them in the measuring in which he
thinks that they have to be revitalized, refreshed, and improved. You cannot go on attacking the
institutions from without really believing in their vital importance in history. He talks about the
Empire, he talks about the Church, he talks about law, he talks about family, etc. They're all
institutions that preserve their enduring importance.
If he's not an apocalyptic writer, what is he then? I think that this is an allusion to the coming of
the second coming, but without removing all of the Joachist paraphernalia that accompanied that
prophecy. This is indeed the time. It doesn't refer to the now of history, it refers to a time that
nobody can really fathom and nobody can really know. So I'm giving I have given you a reading
of this passage and given you a glimpse of the logical complications that usually accompany what it
would seem to be such a neat discovery or a neat glossing of an image.
Of course with this prophecy the poem will come to an end, and the poem comes to an end with
Dante, who goes and I will talk about this image again who has to be ritually immersed. He
will be immersed into two rivers. The river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and the river Eunoe, the
river of good memories. It's a ritual this is toward the end of Canto XXXIII that reminds you
of the ritual actions at the beginning of Canto I, where Dante washes his face and has to gird his
loins with you remember with the reed that was growing spontaneously on the shore of the sea.
What Dante goes on saying is the two rivers, Lethe and Eunoe, derive flow out of the same
source. And then he says, like two lazy friends, friends who are fond of each other, they go on
departing lazily. That's the image that he uses. What is interesting is that he's thinking of memory
and forgetfulness, the Lethe and Eunoe, as entailing each other, so that there's no erasure which is
not at the same time a memory, that each contains the other and Dante will go has a lot to say
about forgetful memory, especially in the way the poem will be written.
Finally, with a line, the whole poem ends with the whole of Purgatorio ends with a line that
obviously reminds you of the very end Inferno, "From the most holy waters," this is Canto XXXIII,
"I came forth again remade, even as new plants," the very language of the beginning of Purgatorio,
"renewed with new leaves, pure and ready to mount to the stars." Dante once again now is at the top
of Purgatory and he will fly next, like lightening, onto the Moon and we shall see him in this kind of
planetary epic, cosmological epic that we'll start on next time.

Chapter 6. Question and Answer [01:01:05]

Now I'm sure you have questions and we are doing okay with timing, so please shoot. Yes.
Student: You mentioned a transition from the ethical in Purgatory to the aesthetic in Paradise.
Could you just expand [inaudible]?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Very good question. The question is that I spoke about in Canto
XXX of Purgatorio, I spoke about the transition, formal transition from the structure of the epic
with Virgil, the poet of the epic, and then moving onto in effect I spoke of the autobiographical,
first of all where Beatrice refers to calls Dante by name. So it's his story, Dante, don't cry
because Virgil has disappeared, I'm going to give you a chance to cry for other reasons and then
goes on into a confession, which is an Augustinian poem.
But also it's true, I mentioned there is a transition to I mean, I did say that in Paradise is the
world of aesthetics where the ethical ordering is liquidated in a certain sense. So the question is,
how does this respond to the whole arc of the poem? What kind of what am I really saying about
the whole experience of the poem to make the aesthetic essential for knowledge, if that's the
argument? That is true. I really welcome this question because that's the way I'm reading poetry, as
if poetry were a way of knowing. I keep saying this, that it's really a way of knowing from that
point of view, a philosophical kind of poetry, realizing and keeping in mind that there are always
distinctions and ongoing quarrels between poetry and philosophy.
Paradiso is like any true ethics, this is a general pronouncement, Dante doesn't make it, but it's a
kind of premise to what I'll be saying later. Any true ethics can only be successful in the measure in
which it stops operating. That's when the ethics is really you can say that it has done its job as it
were. So we enter a world where now is the world of Paradise and Dante goes on representing this
world. He'll never forget the earth. I have to qualify that, even in Paradise, he's going to look at the
earth. He celebrates the greatest aspects of human life: work, love, things that join joy the
community together. He will see also the distortions that are going on where they are the in
the Empire, in the political life or in the life of the Church. Every time that there is a retrospective
look, there is a kind of dismay that he will feel.
So there is all of that, but the emphasis is on the world of Paradise: it's about dance, it's about
songs, it's about love, it's about stars wooing each other, it's about spectacular mise en scne, the
pyrotechnics of it's about different forms of light. What is this about? Exactly what I call the
aesthetic experience; these are all poetic artistic experiences. The first thing we are to keep in mind
is Dante really thinks of a theology that is really like poetry: a theology that is like poetry, in the
sense that both are part of or if you wish an even won't even call it theology. Let me call it
finish that sentence theology which is like poetry in the sense that it's a playful theology, a way
of understanding that the essence of God now can be seen in his comical figuration. A God who is
the artist, a God who thinks that this the way in which human beings were supposed were first
created in the Garden of Eden, where we are really in a garden, meant to play, and that's where we
are going back too. It's a way of casting the divinity in the most as beauty, a beauty that also
encompasses the good.
Beyond that, beyond this playful or ludic theology, this idea of an aesthetic theology, there is
something else that Dante is saying about the proximity between the poetic and the religious. It's not
a connection that is usually made because we tend to believe that the poetic is just the world of
deceptions, make believe. In fact, it's both, the poetic and the religious, and we can say that even
about the philosophical if you wish, they respond to profound impulses within us. They are
emotions that we have. You see beauty and you tremble in the presence of beauty, whether it's a
human beauty, it's natural beauty, or artistic beauty. Whatever it is that we're encountering there is
something that responds in us and the same thing about the idea of awe, and the idea of discovery of
sense of the sublime, whenever you have what we call a religious experience. The two are not
neatly separated; this is what drives the poet in the journey of Paradise. This is where the actual
source of his inspiration, that's the novelty that Dante represents and which probably some
Romantic poets much later I'm talking about the nineteenth century have been trying to restore
or grasp, or understand. You do have that in Dante.
Do you have it for instance in the Bible? I dare say you do, because whenever we think about
there are so many courses at Yale that used to be taught, I don't look at the offerings anymore
because I think I know them by heart, not for any other reason but "the Bible as literature." It is
great, but the idea, the underlying idea is always that the Bible can only has to be read novels
that's all right, that's very good but that's not all. To say that, as I did, that the Song of Songs is a
fantastic I said it ten minutes ago, that the Song of Songs is a fantastic love poem. What I'm
really saying is that the poetic is already in itself proximate to the religious, so that when we think
about the Bible and literature we are already rephrasing another version of this problem which is
that of that Dante presents as the religious and the poetic in Paradise. I hope I've answered your
question. Thank you.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 16 - Paradise I, II [October 30, 2008]
Chapter 1. An Introduction to Paradise [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We begin with Paradise, which clearly is different from the earthly
paradise, two paradises. We went through the earthly paradise, this is anyway, we begin the third
canticle which is called Paradise.
As you read, you'll find that Dante uses a Ptolemaic structure of the cosmos. A Ptolemaic structure
means that for him, as for Ptolemy, the earth is at the center of the universe, unmoved, immobile,
and there are a number of seven planets that circle around it. The Moon is thought of as a planet,
Mercury, then Sun, and then there will be Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Beyond that there is this the
Heaven of a so-called Fixed Stars and beyond that the Primum the Empyrean, the heaven of fire,
from which all motion begins, from which time starts. That's really where the roots of time are
found and they stretch out into the finite world; so that we really are in the shadows of the leaves of
time, which means that they are always falling and being replaced.
Another thing we have to keep in mind as you go into Paradise is that Dante links the each of the
planets with I have said this before, I know, but it bears repeating, with one of the liberal arts.
And they're respectively, the liberal arts are the seven liberal arts and then there are two more, since
there are nine heavens. It begins with grammar in the planet of the Moon and so you have to expect
that you will find the language of grammarians, grammar the Moon and grammar the a very
wide definition of what grammar can be. It includes poetry; it includes history, it even includes
some rhetorical tropes.
And then the Heaven of Mercury with dialectics and so you're expecting to find the language of
dialectics deployed and it's going to be the deployed throughout the canto. The Heaven of Venus
and rhetoric, that probably is the least surprising, eros and rhetoric. They have an old kinship; they
seem to entail each other. Then the Heaven of Mars, the god of war, which here Dante couples with
music in the persuasion that music is a harmony made of discordant parts. So that there is this kind
of simultaneously a pull and a strife within the Heaven of Mars, so that when music.
Then beyond it there's geometry linked with the temperateness of Jupiter and beyond it astronomy
of Saturn. The Heaven of the Fixed Stars is tied is linked to ethics. Whereas, the Heaven of the
Empyrean is really the heaven of metaphysics as Dante will call it and you will see the kind of
interesting arguments that Dante will have, because in effect he has changed his mind when writing
the philosophical text known as the Banquet, as you know now Il Convivio, he writes it in Italian.
He had really claimed that ethics is the first of and the most important of the arts. It's really the
discipline toward which all the art, to which all the other arts are subordinated and toward which
they all point. When Dante writes the Paradiso he has changed his mind about that, though he also
knows that in many ways you cannot quite separate ethics, whatever he means by ethics, with some
theory about how the world is. They really are inseparable and Dante will go on back and forth in
re-configuring the relation of those two disciplines.
The other thing that I should mention before we go on, is that much of the Paradiso really is going
to come through as a way of as a teaching. It's already implied that this should be the thrust of
Paradiso, by the very idea that there is the disposition of the arts and sciences in through
Paradiso, which means that the journey that Dante will have this cosmological journey. It's an
interplanetary journey. He goes from planet to planet is already an educational journey, that's
how he goes through grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, etc., etc., until he reaches metaphysics or beyond
that there will be theology. It's literally an educational journey. This is already understood, also it's
already carried out by the focus on the teaching that Beatrice will deliver.
I have to say a couple of things, that Dante's teacher in Paradiso, and this is an innovative, very
imaginative and highly unusual move on the part of a poet, is not some kind of abstract matron
called Dame Philosophy. It's not some kind of allegory of nature. You do have this kind of
allegorical didactic allegories where nature appears as larger than disheveled woman, wounded,
because nature has fallen, teaching the pilgrim of the traveler about the secrets of nature and the
wealth of nature. Here is a personal his girlfriend to be sure, and it's someone who really who
also replaces all the other likely candidates for this teaching which is would be Aquinas,
Boethius, Bonaventure, all figures that he's going to meet.
It's a mistake to believe, however, that, as some great scholars of Dante have said in the past, that
Paradiso is really a journey to be Beatrice. That's what they had said. That's not the case because
Beatrice will disappear from she will still be within view up to a point in Paradise her role ends
with Canto XXX of Paradiso and from that point on, a mystic by the name of Bernard, a historical
figure, Bernard of Clairvaux, will take place.
So this leads me now to a further clarification. There may be the tendency in some of you to view
the Paradiso as some kind of account of a mystical experience. You know what I'm saying, that
Dante sort of goes beyond his own self, beyond any idea of rational understanding of the world, the
surrendering of his own subjectivity to some insight into the whole. This, I don't think that this is
what's happening here. Dante will preserve his rationality and his sense of distinction and separation
from some kind of cosmological and cosmical hall the very end. There is a way in which Dante will
deploy the language of the mystics and I want to give you some evidence of that, because I think it
opens up an interesting chapter for your further readings, but it's not this is not to be read as a
kind of transcription of a mystical experience where the text then goes on in some kind of random
approximation or random copying of what the mystic saw and becomes ineffable.
Dante uses, occasionally, toward the end the language of ineffability but this is remains a poetic
construction, an imaginative projection into what is a journey into the absolute unknown into a
space no other imagination had really traveled and it's those and have been those who have
traveled there but they never really took came back to tell us. Dante will play with that. His is, to
use that language, a kind of a way of getting into that which had been left inarticulate and silent.
It's really largely a battle against the for a poet, threatening boundaries of silence. Something that
threatens him with defeat, he will not be able to speak. And from one point of view that defeat for
the Christian would also be of course a victory but Dante is suspended between the two poles.
If I had to define, and I have already given a kind of general definition, what kind of aegis, under
which rubric should we try to go on reading this part of the poem, I really think this is really a poem
about beauty, in the sense that Dante will try to understand what the beauty is. The beauty is the
visibility of Plotinus says this, it's the visibility of being, he calls it, being life, the whole of life
becomes visible only because we have perceptions and images of it so it's I think that Dante's
trying to see that, to explore what is it that lies beyond that which we see. What is this beauty skin
deep, as it were, because that's really one of the dangers of focusing on beauty that it's really the
surface of things, the appearance of things. And he will go between appearances, images, and the
idea that they are essences lying beyond them.

Chapter 2. Canto I: The Glory; Light and Motion; Principle of Hierarchy

[00:11:06]
I really have said more or less all I had to say in the mode of an introduction. I immediately get into
Canto I. Let me just read Canto I a little bit with in some detail, "The glory," that's the way it
starts, "The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more
and in another less." That's the first tercet, famous first tercet and I will read this in Italian so that
you sense how even the rhythm of the poem completely changes.
The rhythm and even the syntactical structure of the poem, because you may recall and I say this
knowing that you have already noticed that, that if you read Canto I of Inferno or Canto I of
Purgatorio, the two exordiums of the other canticles, you know that the poet is immediately casting
himself into the role of the agent. "In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself," that's
really the very start of Inferno I, and in Purgatorio too, "To course over a better waters the ship
the boat of my genius now goes and I will sing," you remember? Not so in Paradise.
There is a way in which, immediately, the first tercet, which has a sort of proemial value, seeks to
bracket the idea of the self and the idea of the subjectivity. It emphasizes the question of God
becomes the agent here, to say it in a very direct as directly as he says, "The glory," it's a
circumlocution once again, but let me read it in Italian, so that I can give you a sense, as I said, of
the new music that he has found. The new sense of the inner harmony that toward which language
has to strive.
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l'universo penetra e risplende
in una parte pi e meno altrove.

It's rendered very faithfully by Sinclair. I don't know the other translations but probably it can't
deviate from it very much, and I read it in Italian because also and this is understandable to the
eye, if not just to the ear for you, how he's playing with in line one, "The glory of him who all
moves." So God the mover I'll talk about it in later on, the one who moves all and that all then
becomes one in the next line, universe. The all becomes that which is turned into one, that's what
etymologically the universe. It goes on, "Penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and
in another less."
Well the tercet casts God this is about God, as a circumlocution, it is not it's really a God who
is visible through God's effects, as God appears as kind of cause. Now then, if you really understand
the effects, it means there is a causality. I don't want to get into too much into that but you know
what I mean, that simple, you only know the effects, you know the glory, we see the glory which
is the light. Glory, it's a semantic the first thing we have to say, this is a shift, a change in the
history of the word. That's what poets do, that poets invent, reinvent language; that's largely what
they do. They change the meaning of words. Glory, in the classical time and all the way down to the
Renaissance and the Romantic age, glory means fame. It means, it's the child of Clio. It means, it's
the power we have to survive, not to have a posthumous life because of whatever noble deeds,
heroes may have achieved. That's not what it means here.
Glory means light, of course. It's the light who wants fame, if you wish, but this is the light. Why do
we know that? Because light now is linked to two verbs of the "glory of Him who. . . all things,"
who moves all things, penetrates the universe, and shines. You see there is a metaphor of light that
is conveyed here. So the first tercet presents God in a cosmological role which is double: one of
motion and one of light, two things. Dante is combining an Aristotelian idea of God as the prime
mover, one who imparts motion to all things. And in the second image is that God as the principle
of light, a neo-Platonic idea.
He's fusing together two contradictory, apparently contradictory, traditions: light and motion. One is
talking in terms of causality and the other one really I'm not going to go much further than this,
the other one in terms of because light does that, penetrates, shines all over, according to a
principle of hierarchy: more and less. There is no uniformity in with light, and I'll come back to
this notion in a moment. One idea casts God as the prime mover, according to the tradition of
Aristotelian philosophy, the other one thinks of God as in the mode of light or participation. They
are two different theological modes. God participates, is part of creation, the natural world is part of
the supernatural world. There is not just a causality that begins all things and then somehow retreats
in some sort of invisible and unknown non-space of its soul.
The other item in this first tercet is that of the that I want to emphasize is the principle of
hierarchy. Light shines more and less. I have been hinting at this, that this is really a great problem
for Dante in other parts of the poem. You remember "to course over better waters," Dante says in
Purgatorio I, and that implies of course that there are bad, good, better, best that we are in the
principle of hierarchy. Differences are very crucial for Dante because they allow us to know things,
only through differences, and also the because these differences and that's the value of
hierarchy. They are still combined in some kind of unified structure. Hierarchy is a structure that
unifies all differences according to the principle of degree. More of this a little bit later, as we go on.

Chapter 3. Subjectivity; Desire [00:18:28]

Then Dante now, as I said, that he's not a mystic. Subjectivity is not erased. Mystics tend though
they all claim a unique vision, they all end up resembling each other when they talk about the
ineffable. And Dante introduces now the subject and he says, "I was in the heaven that most
receives His light." That is to say passed in the Empyrean, which is sort of spiritual, he as close to
God as he could be, which will also be as far from God as it can be. "I was in the heaven that most
receives His light and I saw things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge nor the
power to tell again."
No sooner does Dante introduce his subjectivity and his way of knowing out of this intimacy of
and closeness to the beatific vision, then he has also to cast himself as a visionary, has "the
knowledge or the power to tell. I saw things," and you will see how Dante goes on refining his
eyesight, a little detail that you might really enjoy is that we do know that Dante would use lenses
glasses toward the end of the had just been invented. There are books written about when
were glasses invented, were they invented in Pisa? Were they invented in Padua? There have been
wars going on about this claim, but Dante uses glasses, so he really had difficulty that's the point
in seeing.
All of Paradiso is about the refinement of sight and the refinement of vision. How you are going to
be able to attune as it were your eyes to the objects around you. Anyway he casts himself now as a
visionary with an internal vision. I'm not casting him as a Homer who is blind, and therefore he sees
everything with the inner eye, but he wants to be a visionary poet, and "I saw things which," that is
to say one who sees things as a whole. That's the difference between ear, there are great debates
between the ear and the eye is that the ear you hear, and you hear always only from one in a
linear way. Things can come from all sides but you can only catch a thing at a time. With the eye
you have the eye is the organ that gives you the chance to the organ of the contemplatives; it
gives you a chance to see totalities.
"I saw things which he that has the sense from it has now the knowledge or the power to tell again
and then he explains why. He explains the status of his poetic language. "I saw what is the
relationship between language and vision? That's the if you want to put it in a very abstract way,
how are the two related? "For our intellect, drawing near to its desire. . ." The intellect yearns, longs
for the objects that it desires. So there is a desire of the mind, a desire it's not just a desire for the
intellectual, "desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it." Very simple, forgetfulness
intervenes so that the he may have intuition, and insight into things, he cannot quite go on
recalling.
"Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom, as I was able to treasure in my mind shall now be
matter of my song." Whatever he's going to tell us is literally a shadow of things he manages to
remember. It makes sense that he should not remember because part one of the paradoxes of this
poetic construction is the following, he has a beatific vision. How can he retain in his mind this
sight, which is finite, that which is infinite? If not through vestiges and if not through shadows?
How can you how can my memory which is a metaphor of time, by definition, he remembers
certain things, but how can I go on remembering and holding that which is without time, which is
infinite? So the first paradox of in the representation of Paradise.

Chapter 4. Apollo, God of Poets [00:22:56]

Let me go on with the next one, next paragraph now, Dante turns to god of poets, to Apollo. "O
good Apollo, for the last labor make me such a vessel of thy power." He casts himself into a passive
mode, a vessel, one who receives. It's the language of restraint. It's a language of holding back. It's
in a sense it's really the classical commonplace of asking the muse to breathe through us. "Sing to
me o muse," remember? The Iliad, and a variant of the same thing a variation of the same thing
happens in the Odyssey.
"For the last labor make me such a vessel of thy power as thou requirest for the gift of thy loved
laurel." What an extraordinary image. He was remembering the story of the god who chases
Daphne, the object of his desire, which he cannot really obtain. That's the story you all know the
story in the Metamorphosis. He can only obtain Daphne, which means laurel in Greek, but he only
can obtain this young maiden Daphne in the form of a metaphor for the laurel crown. So it's a sort
of journey which somehow the object of which becomes the possession of the object becomes
dislocated, not quite what the god himself wanted, but this introduces something else about the
Paradiso.
"Thus far, the one peak of Parnassus has sufficed." You may remember this is a recall of the dream
of Parnassus in Purgatorio that we saw when Statius and Virgil were flattered into believing that
what they had dreamt is actually the simulacrum of the earthly paradise. Thus far, the one peak of
Parnassus has sufficed me, but now I have need of both," a language of humility, "entering on the
arena that remains."
There's a struggle now. First of all, he had introduced this image of himself as a vessel receptive to
the inspiration of Apollo, now the language of even violence "on the arena" where there is sports,
where battles are fought, enter into the arena now entering "on the arena that remains" and now
look at this, "Come into my breast and breathe there as when thou drewest Marsyas from the
scabbard of his limbs," an echo of the struggle between the poet and the god. He does not want to
be like Marsyas because Marsyas, out of presumption now you understand the language of
restraint and withholding out of presumption, Marsyas had tried to outdo Apollo, and, of course,
was defeated by Apollo and flayed by Apollo. Dante does not want to what this is about the fear
in the battle for the description of Paradise, the fear that he may be usurping God's role. The fear
that he may be transgressing and violating that which is the sovereign claim of the gods.
So he continues now: "O power divine," so that's one of the images of fear of blasphemy, fear of
transgression, and this will continue. Remember the possibility of hubris, in other words. And then
it continues, "O power divine, if thou grant me so much of thy self that I may show forth the
shadow of the blessed kingdom imprinted in my brain, thou shalt see me come to thy chosen tree,"
of laurel, "and crown myself then with those leaves of which the theme and thou will make me
worthy. So seldom, father, are they gathered for triumph of Caesar or of poet fault and shame of
human wills that Peneian bow must beget gladness in the glad Delphic god when it makes any
long for it. A great flame follows a little spark," etc.
And then, "The lamp of the world" I'll just give you this Dante is approaching, he's moving.
He thinks he's on earth and he discovers I will not go on into details he's in the Heaven of
the Moon. So he describes here, this is the image at the bottom of page 21, line 65 and following:
"Beatrice stood with her eyes fixed only on the eternal wheels, and on her I fixed mine withdrawn
from above. At her aspect, I was changed within as was Glaucus when he tasted of the herb that
made him one among the other gods in the sea."
It's a story of clearly the pilgrim is moving into another level of experience and a level of being,
and he remarks on the transformation that he is undergoing. The emphasis falls and the distance
between the Ovidian account of Glaucus who believes that he's immortal and jumps into the
water of the tasting of some herbs, and Dante himself has indicated by that little preposition 'within.'
The transformation occurs in Dante from within himself not in some literal way outside on the
outside.
Then he continues, "The passing beyond the humanity cannot be set forth in words; let the examples
suffice, therefore, for him to whom grace reserves the experience." The experience the pilgrim is
having is unique and irreducible, and the poem can only be read as an example, as an account of
what has happened to him.
Then he continues, "If I was only that part of me which Thou createdst last, Thou knowest, Love
that rules the heavens, who with Thy light didst raise me." Your notes, your footnotes will tell you
that this is a reference to the Second Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter XII, by Paul, by St. Paul,
where he also tells the story of his being rapt to the third heaven. We have then two accounts in
Canto I of experiences one is that of encounters with the divine. One is that of the profanation
by Marsyas and the other one is by St. Paul, who as you recall, Dante casts as one of the possible
models for him. He says, when at the beginning he has to set out on a journey, he says, "I'm not
Aeneas, I'm not Paul." Now we see how Paul comes into play. Who am I then? That was the whole
thrust of the poem.
What happens to Paul? Paul goes to the third heaven and people have a way of had a way in the
Middle Ages especially, so how many heavens are there? The third heaven what is meant by the
third heaven was the third mode of vision. There are levels of vision that they emphasize. There is a
literal level, the carnal worldly level. There's an imaginative vision, and then there is the ecstatic
vision that Paul had. The thing is, in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, is that Paul went to the
third heaven, had the vision of God, the beatific vision, he returned and could not speak about it,
because what he saw had to be kept wrapped in silence.
This is now Dante is between, on the one hand Marsyas and that fear of profanation, and now
Paul. It is as if he also is transgressing the teaching of Paul. The whole of Paradise is about limits
and the impossibility of establishing clear limits. He will do what Paul himself could not do. Paul
kept quiet in the belief that the silence was the proper language of his sublime experience. Dante
will go on speaking until it's possible for him to do so until finally he really has forgotten
everything that he has seen. You see how he is casting himself? His own poetic powers, his own
subjectivity between two different modalities. He doesn't want to go as presumptuously far as
Marsyas did. He does not want to retreat as Paul did.

Chapter 5. Dante's Introductory Letter to Paradise [00:32:16]

I really think that I should let you know ;it's a little digression, before we go into the second part
of the canto. In Cantos I and II where Dante is really going to face a peculiar issue, the universe I'm
in. Is it a material universe? That's the thrust of Canto II. Is this a natural part of the natural
world or not? Of course, he goes on talking about the spots on the Moon, etc., we'll come to that.
Here in Canto I, we shall see that he's going to discuss the arrangement of the cosmos. You have to
know, I want you to I want to share with you a couple of paragraphs of a letter that Dante writes
to introduce Paradise.
This is what had happened. He lives in Ravenna when he is writing. He's probably in Ravenna by
the time he writes the earthly paradise. As you know, he makes references to the Garden of Eden in
terms of the park, the pinewood, the wood of pine trees around the city, and we do know that he
would live and die in Ravenna. He decides to send the first ten cantos of Paradise to the so-called
Cangrande, the great dog of Verona, who had been his patron for a number of years and he
introduces those ten cantos that he sends with the letter called, The Letter to Cangrande in Italian.
It's the Dante writes you know that, this is the tenth letter of a number of letters that he writes.
This is the let me just read this it's a kind of glossing. It explains the genre of the poem
explains what his models have been, and how it has to be read. Look what he says about this
circumlocution here about Paul the Apostle. This is from Paragraph 27. It's not a really long letter
but I couldn't read the whole thing without putting you all to sleep.
"The philosopher presents an argument consonant with the above in the first book On Heaven," the
philosopher meaning Aristotle, "where he says that a heaven has material more honorable than that
of other heavens, beneath it to the extent that it has this more distant than they from the earth." The
nobility in the hierarchical structure. The nobility of matter will depend on its proximity to the
source of light and life. "To this might be added what the Apostle told the Ephesians concerning
Christ, who ascended above all the heavens that he might feel all things. This is the heaven of the
Lord's pleasures to which pleasures Ezekiel refers, in accusing Lucifer, 'thou wast the seal of
resemblance full of wisdom and perfect and beauty. Thou wast in the pleasure of the Paradise of
God.' After having said, in this circumlocution, that he was in the part of Paradise, he continues,"
meaning, meaning I, himself, "by stating that he saw things which he in this sense cannot relate.
And he gives the cause of this saying that the intellect goes so deeply into its desire itself, which is
God that the memory cannot follow.
To understand what this means it should be noted that in this life, the human intellect, because of
the affinity it has, for the separated intellectual substance with which it shares its nature, reaches
such a height of its exaltation, when it is exalted, that upon its return to itself, having transcended
the ordinary capacity of men, memory fails. This idea is implied to us by the Apostle addressing the
Corinthians," the passage I just read, "where he writes, "I knew a man, whether in the body or out of
the body I know not, God knoweth, who was caught up to the third heaven and who heard secret
words who it is not granted to man which it is not granted to man to author. See, when the
intellect had passed beyond the bounds of human capacity, in its exhaltation, it could not remember
what happened outside these bounds and the same idea is implied to us in Matthew where the three
disciples fell down on their faces and told nothing about it afterwards as if they had forgotten.
And it is written in Ezekiel, "I saw and I felt upon my face." But if these passages don't satisfy the
skeptical, let them read Richard of St. Victor and his book on contemplation, or Bernard of
Clairvaux, in his book on consideration, or Augustine, in his book on the capacity of the soul, and
they will be no longer skeptical. Or if they should bark out against the possibility of such exaltation,
because the sinfulness of the speaker, they should read Daniel where they would find that even
Nebuchadnezzar, by divine permission, saw something which was a warning to sinners and then
forgot it. For he who make the Sun to rise upon the good and bad, and reign it upon the just and
the unjust manifests His Glory to all the living, no matter how evil they are, sometimes
mercifully, for the sake of the conversion, sometimes harshly as a punishment and to a greater or
less degree according to his will."
The reason why I want to share this passage with you is that it really places with some clarity it
casts, it projects a light of that makes things clear about the status of the poem. The poem
invokes a number of models which are all in the contemplative philosophical tradition. Or again,
Dante is not a student of the prophetic tradition, but he makes them agree with the same mode of the
visionary. You see, that's what the prophets do, they see in order to speak. If you are readers of the
Bible, you probably have heard and you may be right, and if you were to believe, that there really is
no necessary link in the Bible between vision between the mystics, those who have visions and
those who are prophets. They are different experiences of two different states, not so for Dante. It
may be true in the Bible that they are two Dante thinks that the two will go together. You have to
have vision in order to speak and that's really what the it helps us understand the sense of poetry
with which Dante invokes here at the beginning of Paradiso.

Chapter 6. Traveling at the Speed of Light; Refining the Picture of the Universe
[00:39:20]
Let me go now, Dante has to go on tries to find out on lines 90 or so how, asks the question
about what has been happening to him. How has he been moving he thought he was on Earth and
the earthly paradise, now he seems to be on another planet. Line 95: "If I was freed from my
perplexity," Beatrice dismisses some fancies of his, "thou makest thyself dull with false fancies, so
that thou canst not see as thou wouldst if thou hadst cast them off. You are no longer on earth as you
think, but lightening flying from its own place, never ran so fast as thou returnest to thine."
The journey Dante is traveling so fast, the speed of light, to go from the earthly paradise to the
Moon. "If I was freed from my perplexity, by the brief words she smiled to me, I was more
entangled in a new one and I said: 'I was content already, resting from a great wonder, but now I
wonder how I should be rising above these light substances."
Two or three things, one that I should mention to you and I will never mention them again, but
Paradiso is all unfolds the whole the narrative economy with the pilgrim experiencing
perplexities and doubts, which Beatrice will clarify and in turn those responses go on triggering new
doubts. It's really a question of doubts and answers in an unending process of the mind enlarging
itself and always filled with wonder, and that's really the language that I want to start emphasizing
for you here. How Dante is using this figure of admiration, he calls it, line 97: "I was content. . .
resting from a great wonder, now I wonder."
And this you will see, it continues throughout the beginning of Paradise. What is this wonder? It
is, first of all, a definition of the aesthetics of Paradise. Wonder translates the Latin, admiratio,
that's the Italian word, in English, 'admiration,' which actually is to be understood, admiratio, the
Latin; English, admiration, but for the Middle Ages, it's nothing less than the sublime. If you
wanted to translate, the medieval admiratio, or admiration, into an equivalent English an
aesthetic English term would be the 'sublime.' The Pseudo-Dyonisius idea of the sublime, it's not a
romantic idea, it's probably you are led to believe it's an old idea. It's a Greek notion of
indicating the mind that is overwhelmed with the spectacle of things that dwarf the mind. Things
that the mind cannot quite comprehend, that's the sublime. They can be the sublime in nature, they
can be the sublime in art, they can be other forms of the sublime.
Dante's mode of Paradise is indeed this is the oscillation of a mind that is opening up, full of
doubts, which really now that's where he becomes subjective, critical, and then the experience of
the sublime overwhelming him. This idea of the sublime now introduces a picture of the universe
the way Beatrice will deliver it.
"She, therefore, after a sigh of pity," I love her I must say, the way she's going to treat Dante like a
child at this point, "bent her eyes on me with a look of a mother, a look a mother casts on her
delirious child." Delirious in the etymological sense. I don't think that he's really actually crazy
delirious, or the word English, the word we use delirium seems to me simply means 'getting off
the furrow.' Lirum, in Latin, means the furrow. Whatever you go off rut, as it were, of some the
furrow that you are tracing then you are delirious, you are going off on your own, in some kind of
silly direction.
"And she began. . ." That's the first picture of the universe. We are going to find that this picture is
going to be refined in a number of ways, but this is what he can understand now. "All things,
whatsoever, have order among themselves that's the premise in Dante's cosmos. I will just add
for you, and she continues, "And this is the form that makes the universe resemble God." This is
so that the universe has a likeness to the divinity. Two things to be said immediately: the word
order, in case you don't know, is ordo means beauty. It's the idea that it's the symmetrical
arrangement of proportionate, full of light and clarity, structure of all of the whole: ordo. Even
the word forma, one of it means form, means that there's a shape to things but it translates the Latin
pulchritudo, another synonym for beauty.
The picture of the universe that Dante that Beatrice evokes for Dante is one of beauty, which in
turn, implies vision, because beauty is defined as that which is seen gives me pleasure. This is the
famous definition of Aquinas that which is seen gives pleasure, that's beauty. It's a sort of subjective
idea of beauty. Here of course, Beatrice thinks of an objective order of the world. It's not the fact
that I like it only, though Aquinas also gives that explanation of beauty, that which seen, pleases,
that implies a self, a taste, a personal taste, a very rich medieval understanding of the aesthetic
experience, but there is also an objective idea of the whole universe laid out in order, shape, clarity.
These are the number, proportion, clarity; these are the attributes of beauty and this cosmological
beauty.
Let me just continue because this line, that the universe resembles God, seems to be such a nice way
of thinking about the universe, but if you really think about it, it's really heretical proposition. The
universe is like God? What about the evil that there is in the universe? Is it the idea that there is a
continuity between God's transcendence and God's imminence, what's he saying? I know that he
used to be a little bit like Marsyas and he just doesn't like he just likes to be a little better than
Paul, at least he's going to talk. But now this is really a strange statement and therefore has to be
clarified and I think she will.
I talk like this because I have to explain that I just was looking at an old, a great text of in view
of my class today. Last night, I was reading a great text by A.O. Lovejoy, some of you may know
him, he was a great one of the truly great an inventor, if one can speak this, of the whole idea
of the history of ideas in the United States, he used to be a great professor in the 40s, 50s, and early
60s at Johns Hopkins and he wrote a great book, which I still advise people to read, The Great
Chain of Being, because that's really the idea. The Great Chain of Being, it's this what is this
great chain of being? It's this virtual metaphor of the continuity between the world of unity and the
world of multiplicity and plurality. It implies that we are only that the universe is this
arrangement, the chain, an invisible chain. It's the idea that reappears in the eighteenth-century
English literature Pope, for instance, he uses I read this in Lovejoy.
The but it also implies it's a strange idea as it implies that the value of things, the values of
every entity depends on the position one occupies in the various rings of the chain. So that if you
are an angel then you're really above human beings who are made of both who are beastly and
angelic at the same time. We have this kind of paradoxical quality of being spiritual and animal at
the same time. Then we, according to that idea, though some of you may doubt it, we are better than
dogs and dogs are better than stones, and so on. It's in a kind of hierarchy, a system of degrees, and
he, Lovejoy, goes on saying, well this is really the moment when Dante has is adopting the idea
of the great chain of being, and this great chain of being makes him really unorthodox. I want to tell
you that that's not true because I think we should read more carefully this passage.
This is the beginning here, talking about this resemblance, how the universe resemble God. "Here,"
Beatrice continues, "the higher creatures see the impress of the Eternal Excellence which is the end
for which that system itself is made. In the order I speak of all natures have their bent," we all have
our own specific gravity. We're all drawn, we all are drawn by our desires. We go where our desire
takes us, our desires, and so there's a kind of natural instinct, the natural movement in this way in
which a stone, if you drop it, falls always to the ground naturally, because of its specific gravity and
the fire, if you light a candle, the fire will always go up, instinctively. All things move according to
their weight, according to their specific weight. It's a spiritual gravity.
Are we like that? Is that really what Dante's saying? He seems that's what he seems to be saying,
"according to their different lots, nearer to the source and farther from it; they move, therefore, to
different ports over the great sea of being, each with an instinct given to it to bear it on: this bears
fire up towards the Moon," by the way, this is really the passage Dante's rewriting a passage
from Augustine's Confessions, "this is the motive force in mortal creatures, this binds the earth
together and makes it one. Not only the creatures that are without intelligence does this bow shoot,
but those also who have intellect and love," meaning us. We have intellect and love. Remember the
famous great poem from about "women who have intellect and love"? Now we all have it, she
says, "The providence that regulates all this makes forever quiet with its light, the heaven within
which turns that of the greatest speed," on top, the Primo Mobile, "and thither now as to a place
appointed the power of that bowstring is bearing us which aims at a joyous mark."
"It is true," now, that's the correction to Lovejoy's interpretation, "it is true that, as a shape often
does not accord with the art's intention because the material is deaf and unresponsive, so sometimes
the creature, having the power, thus impelled, to turn aside another way, deviates from this course,
and, as fire may be seen to fall from a cloud," lightening for instance, light does not go always up,
light can go also down, "and as fire may be seen to fall from a cloud, so the primal impulse,
diverted by false pleasure, is turned to the earth."
In other words, within the description of the order of the cosmos, Beatrice goes on to say that
human beings are the odd figures, that we, somehow, have the power to deviate from this pattern of
order. That we can undo. We have this paradoxical freedom that makes us either stay within a
particular idea of what God may have meant or really for us, or really breach that particular order.
Human beings are the absurd elements in this ordered portrait of the universe. That is the whole
statement of freedom; so that Dante is removing from a deterministic, that's what would make it
into a heretical text, a deterministic idea of what the cosmos then.
"Then she turned her face again to the sky." Let me go I'll go a little bit quickly on Canto II and
so but I will need a few minutes. Canto II, Dante now is on this fear of the Moon, if you know
that, and there will be a discussion on the spots. There's this whole medieval legend: if you look at
the Moon, a full Moon you see the dark spots and the legend was that Cain the medieval legend
that Cain riding away from the knowledge of the murder of his brother had actually, with the
help of God, God had removed him from the earth and had taken refuge there, and whatever we see
there is just the imprint of Cain.
Dante dismisses this legend and goes on talking about science. She, Beatrice, will have a scientific
discourse, and the question is: is this a natural cosmos or not? Do we see shades on the Moon
simply because there's a density or not a rarity of matter? Or is it because, therefore, light has a way
of going through this matter of the Moon? According to the principle, more or less, the rarity and
density? Or is it because there's a different way in which light is distributed? The solution Dante
gives, or Beatrice will give, is the second one. We see the shadows on the Moon simply because
there is a different source of light.
In other words, the natural cosmos has to be understood in terms of its metaphysics. The physics
has only that can only be understood in terms of metaphysics, but what I want to stress to you is
that the natural and the supernatural are always seen by Dante as holding hands together. They are
not two separate worlds. They are not two separate dimensions. They are two different ways of
looking at the same thing.

Chapter 7. Canto II: An Invitation to Stay Close; Jason [00:55:36]

But, let's see how he introduces the canto, which I think is important for a number of reasons. Canto
II: "O you who in a little bark," the language of humility is suspect at this point, because we know
that the sublime is the mode, is the trope that he will use, "O you who in a little bark, you," he's
addressing us; he's beginning to address readers, "eager to listen, have followed behind my ship,
that singing makes her way, turn back to see your shores again; do not put forth on the deep, for,
perhaps losing me, you would be left bewildered. The waters I take were never sailed before."
That's it gives poignancy to the little bark. It's a little bark that is doing something, so mighty;
I'm doing such a magnificent, extraordinary adventure. "The waters I take were never sailed before.
Minerva breathes, Apollo pilots me, and the nine Muses show me the Bears."
And then, a restriction of the agents that he has been addressing: "You other few," a kind of
reductive apostrophe, the very few here. It's the crme de la crme, he would say of you guys. A
very few who really know and are interested in the mysteries in the most esoteric, arcane sciences
that he's going to put out here. "You are the few that reached out early," the language actually says,
"turn your neck." This is really a poor translation. I don't know what other translators say. "You are
the few who turn your neck," because it's the whole idea, another form of presumption.
You may have heard, you may recall, in the Bible about the stiff neck. Of course, the neck is always
the emblem of conversion when you want to for Plato, you reach a conversion you really turn the
neck, that's all you do. Not for Dante, Dante you can turn upside down, but in Plato, you turn the
neck and you know where the source of light is. The biblical counter to that is there may be the stiff
neck, those who do not who lack humility. Behind this metaphor, there is the whole idea that
what makes a human being that what confers dignity to a human being, is the power that we,
among all animals have, to look up at the sky and see and look at the stars and therefore wonder. All
other animals are always looking down. We are alone.
Of course, there are other people who believe that what makes human beings particular dignity
to human beings is something else. Of all of them, as those who said, that we speak of course,
but of all of them, the one I really like is that we are capable of laughing. That's the explanation: it's
an Aristotelian idea, but it's explanation of comedy. Here, that's the allusion though, you are the
few who could be also implying, like me, do not be too arrogant about this. ". . .who reached out
early for angels' bread," knowledge, for knowledge, "by which man here lived but never come from
it satisfied, you may indeed put forth your vessel on the salt depths, holding my furrow before the
water returns smooth again. Those glorious ones who cross the sea to Colchis were not amazed,"
once again the language of admiration, the language is sublime; I'll come to this in a moment, "as
you shall be when they saw Jason turned ploughman."
Well, the metaphor of the journey by water, to describe now an aerial journey, so an anti Dante is
clearly thinking of that metaphoric compression that we saw in Ulysses. You remember the sailing
that became a mad flight, now here it's the flight that becomes a sailing. The notion that he is
guiding us, so the sense of his responsibility is turning us back, unlike Ulysses; we dispose of that
mythic resonance very quickly. What he's really saying is that the journey we're undertaking, which
is the reading of this book, can become extraordinarily dangerous. The reason it's dangerous is
because he is traveling over water that leaves no wake behind it. This is the what I would call the
danger of the seafaring. In seafaring, you have no pre-established routes. There is no way, no road,
no path that can be there fixed and you can find, so he's inviting us to keep very close to him, but
we might be losing him at the same time. The journey by water is not exactly like the journey by
land, because there are no pre-established directions marked for us.
Then finally, this allusion to Jason; so he's not like Ulysses is like the hero of the Argonauts, who
has gone looking for the golden fleece. And it's an image that he appears at the end of Paradiso
XXXIII, where Dante has the god Neptune from the depth wondering at the extraordinary power of
the human imagination, the human will. They wonder at the heroics of Jason. Neptune is without
he can't quite believe what he sees. It's clearly an allusion for what Dante himself is going to do, in
seeing God face to face, and then returning to the earth.
What I want to emphasize, and here really I will stop and give you a chance to ask me some
questions, the is that we probably never read I think we skipped Canto XVIII of Inferno. I
think we did, I don't think that I asked you to read it, and I don't presume that you would go and
read what I don't ask you to read. You never really did, but in Canto XVIII, Dante if you go and
read Canto XVIII of Inferno, you will find Jason punished among the flatters and the seducers,
because he is famous for seducing Hypsiphyle and abandoning her. It's a version of what happened
to Theseus and Medea, it's one of the great fixations of Greek one of the great situations of
repeated situations of a Greek tragedy.
An interesting thing is that Dante now is distinguishing between the ethical judgment of Jason, who
is behind in Inferno XVIII, and the imaginative aesthetic value of the adventure itself. Now, is he
saying therefore, that the good and the beautiful are really two distinct things? He's warning us
about that and that's where I want to pick up the conversation next time when we are going to be
talking about the value of images and the ethics of images.

Chapter 8. Question and Answer [01:03:21]

Let me finish here now and see if there are some questions which I will try to answer. Please.
Student: Dante has turning their minds to a bread of angels and then he talks about the image of
water and all images and symbols that come in. It seems a little shaky to me in talking about
[inaudible], is that you're turning your mind to bread, it's very strange thinking. I was just
wondering if you could talk about that symbolism or significance of that, of turning your mind to
bread.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is about explaining the image of bread in the
beginning of Canto II of Paradise, where Dante says, addressing the readers, that they are turning
their neck too early to the bread of angels." I have a question for you; in what way do you find it
strange?
Student: I just mean well I have "eyes" instead of "turning your neck, but just talking about the
intellect with the bread
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, all right. The well the bread of angels, so I would see the
bread of angels, and the bread of angels is knowledge, so I think that the implied the
transference, the metaphorical reading by Mandelbaum is accurate. I wish it were more literal, but
just as I think that my own translation of course Sinclair also, it's one of the few times that he
deviates from the literal burden, because the literal burden of the metaphor has a number of
resonances which I think are valuable, like exactly the stiff neck, the turning of the neck.
In the context like Paradise, where Dante starts out by clearly locating himself within some
contradictory possibilities: the possibility of a transgression or the possibility of trespassing, in the
case of Paul. So where exactly is he? That image is his by the image of the turning of the neck
early for the bread of angels is also reverberates with anxieties that he has about his own
adventure and his own enterprise. That's I don't know if this answers your perplexity but
Student: So the bread of angels is really knowledge and then
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Knowledge, the bread of angels is knowledge. Yeah, that which
the idea it's the idea that you find in the Banquet, that why do philosophers well I'm sure that
it's literally true that there is nothing better for a great philosophical conversation than a glass of
wine, and you sit around and you talk, but it clearly is it's the food of the mind, the food of
knowledge, the taste of knowledge, etc., all those metaphors.
Student: Also can you just kind of [inaudible]?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes. Since that's very good, that's very good, because I think
can that be also grace? Yes, that's very good, because we are here in the world of Paradise and I
know that I'm giving a sort of philosophical emphasis, but there is also the with Paul, there is
also the theological we are dealing with the poetic, more than the philosophical the poetic and
the theological to that. Absolutely, very good, thank you. Other questions? Please.
Student: In the beginning of Canto I when he describes how God sheds more or less pi e meno
light on different parts, the phrase pi e meno is also used in Purgatory to describe different
aesthetic perspectives, is Dante trying to bring that in here or is he just talking about the hierarchy
of who God chooses to shed light on?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well good the question is in line 3 of Paradiso I, Dante uses a
phrase, "more and less," talk about the light that shines on creation according to the principle of
more or less. Then the concern is that Dante uses this phrase quite often in Canto X of Purgatory,
where, in the context of art, there is that phrase about I call it, approximation. Is Dante joining
the two? Does he want us to put the two things together?
Let me answer that. Far be it for me ever to say, no Dante, does not want us to do that. The whole
reading, if there is a principle to the way I read, is that the more echoes you can find the better, I
think, that we serve the better we understand the poem and we reserve I take it to be the
intention of the poet. I had never really conjoined the two in my own mind for one simple reason,
because here I think it's Dante's asserting the principle of hierarchy.
I think that in Purgatorio Dante is doing something completely different since the context there is
pride, he's really reversing all forms of what is the measure of the human beings? How do we
measure human beings? I could say that this is actually a problem that was here. Every time you
have a hierarchy I'm really placing myself in between an order, a rank of different values, and so I
can say that that is also happening in Canto I. Frankly, the context will not allow me to go too much
beyond this. Yeah, there is a way in which every time I talk of hierarchy I'm talking about a rank
ordering, and therefore, the sense of my place it's a little bit removed from the concerns here of
it's there but not the most compelling argument for me.
You may prove me wrong, of course, then I would say this issue appears. We join things together;
let's try to keep also each entity in its own specificity, so that we really understand that the how
far his thinking can go with the representation of a scene then another. I like that, good. I like the
fact that you joined, you combined. Yes?
Student: I had a question, who is this audience? Homer, Virgil and later Shakespeare, we know that
they are writing or speaking with a wide range of people [inaudible]. But now when we read him in
Paradise, I'm so aware of how much one would need to know about philosophy and theology and
poetics before you appreciate what he did.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: That's the question is who on earth could Dante's audience be?
We know who the audience of Homer, Virgil can be or is, but what about the audience, whether
someone has to know philosophy, theology, and so on.
My answer is you're right, that we do know roughly about Homer, because after all, there are
there is always the Modicus in the Odyssey who is singing to the audience at court until Ulysses
appears and rhapsodes and Homer is one of the rhapsodes, or maybe the one who stitches together
the voices of the rhapsodes. That gives us a miniature account of an audience. With Dante it's a little
bit more difficult to understand. It's, I think, I can tell you now contemporary poets think that
Dante's poem, especially Inferno, ought to be read in the streets like raps odes going on the ancient
Greece, they would go from one fair, one marketplace, and the day of the market to another, and
gather people together, the feast days of the community, but I can be a little bit more romantic.
I think it's true, but that Dante probably did read some of his cantos when he was in Ravenna or
Verona to the in the evening gathering, the circles of courtiers, but I don't think of Dante as a
courtier. He doesn't seem to have the values. He has aristocratic values of the mind of course, but he
doesn't seem to share the social problems of the court. I can think of some aspects of Shakespeare
being the poet of the court. The poet who would be read by the queen and he wants he wants the
queen to read his text, or the theatre, we know about the theatre.
A part of Paradiso was not known at all to some people the first ten cantos were sent to the
patron who probably gave what today we would call a grant, you apply for a grant. He would give
him a gift for the great, extraordinary dedication, and that's what patrons would the role they
would play. I think that Dante and this is going to be very romantic la Benjamin now I
think that Dante writes this kind of poetry at the end for God. I don't think that he could care. I don't
think he has an empirical audience in mind. He really means the few. I don't think it's a rhetorical
strategy at the end: you few who are going to read that.
And it's too much written it's written too much in the mode of a quest for God. A prayer, actually
it's a moment at one point where language bends into a prayer and with a language of a longing
that goes with prayer, that I really think it's meant for God. I mean it in a very serious way, and it
ends with a prayer: the great Canto XXXIII is an extraordinary prayer. That's my answer.
I'm sure that the I have a dear friend who wants to make a movie about reading Dante in the
streets. That's fine, but I'm not sure that that's what Dante thought. I mean I'm really not sure about
that. Great question, thank you, we'll see you next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 17 - Paradise IV, VI, X [November 4, 2008]
Chapter 1. Canto IV of Paradise: The Nature of the Will and the Souls in the
Stars [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: With Canto IV of Paradise, we are now in the Heaven of the
Moon, which as you know by now is also the heaven of grammar, and I will show you in what way
this is the heaven of grammar.
In Paradiso III, Dante meets two women, the empress Constance, and the irony of the name is a
little bit obvious among the inconstant spirits, and Piccarda. Piccarda who also had joined the
cloister had taken the name of sister Constance; she too was forced to leave the cloister on account
of her brothers, Corso Donati's political maneuvers. He wanted her married to an ally of his. With
Canto IV, Dante returns on this issue, which is the issue really of the will. What is the will? How
can somebody else's force on me, compel me to do things that I am accountable for? In what way
am I accountable for somebody else's imposition of, in this case, his will on me, Dante wants to
know what is the will here?
There is another question that forces him to another problem forces him to raise a question in
Canto IV, and the question is Dante's wonder about the souls in the various stars. They are disposed
and arranged in the various planets; he sees some souls here on the Moon, so he wonders are we in
Plato's paradise? Is this is Plato right in believing that the souls at death return to the stars, to the
place of origin? These are the two questions that he has to raise.
The canto begins with a statement that is an extraordinary I will try to explain how the two
questions are related, in what way they are related, they are not just absolutely arbitrary. There is a
sort of link between them. Canto IV begins in a very with a rather strange formulation about the
nature of the will and the freedom of the will. Since that is what Piccarda's situation had forced
Dante to raise, what is the will? It's somebody else's will forcing me to do something? Am I still
responsible for it? Dante has to clarify what the will is, so he starts with a statement that seems to
suggest that the will is inert. This is a poem that the will cannot really make decisions, first of all.
The will, given the opportunity to choose between two contradictory objects of desire, can't quite
move one way or the other.
You need the intellect, that's the argument that makes the will take make a decision, will force
the will to make a decision. And this is the way he starts, "Between two foods at equal distance and
equally tempting a free man would die of hunger before he brought either to his lips so a lamb
would stand between the cravings of two fierce wolves, in equal fear of both." There seems to be a
kind of will that joins human beings and animals, such that paralyzes us, the choices paralyze the
will, so that maybe when we speak about freedom of the will we are not speaking really about
freedom of the will, we're speaking about the freedom of the will in the intellect. It's the intellect
that has to be free so that's really the argument.
"So would a hound stand between two does; therefore," this are three images that introduce Dante's
own doubts and perplexities. He has two questions; each of them seems more compelling than the
other and does not know what to ask first. "So would a hound stand between two does; therefore, if
I kept silence, urged equally by my doubts, I neither blame nor commend myself, since it was of
necessity. I was silent, but my desire was painted on my face and with it my question, far more
warmly than in plain words." Dante is indeed talking about the limitations of the will not that the
will is this is an Averroist position. It's a position of a radical interpretation of Aristotle. That the
will is inert, that you always need some kind of the power of the intellect to make you decide.
The intellect cannot move but the intellect can make the will move so that the statement has to be
understood as one of the hierarchy between intellect and will.
The argument now continues. "Beatrice did as did Daniel when he appeased the wrath of
Nebuchadnezzar that made him cruelly unjust, and she said: 'I see well how one desire and another
draw thee, so that thy eagerness itself binds itself and does not get breath. Thou reasonest: 'If the
right will endures, on what ground does another's violence lessen the measure of my desert?'" How
can it be that Piccarda, who was forced by somebody else's will, seems to appear in the lowest birth
of beatitude? She is on the Moon. Why should she be so undeserving of a closer intimacy to God?
That's actually his question. "Also, it gives thee perplexity that the souls seem to return to the stars,
in agreement with Plato's teaching. These are the questions that press equally on thy will. First,
then, I shall deal with that which has more poison in it."
It's very interesting; first of all, the language of poison that this idea of what is dangerous of the two
questions is not the question about the will. The question which is more dangerous is the question
that deals with representation. What is the mode of appearance of the souls in heaven and why
should representation do the souls inhabit the stars? Are they showing themselves forth here? It
is a make believe that they are here, it's a fiction, it's pyrotechnics if you wish, and once the night is
over then the souls return to the proper abode, which or may not be visible to the pilgrim. Is this a
theatrical performance, and why if this is a theatrical, and it is, why should that be a question that
has more poison in it? What's so dangerous about representation? That's really the argument, as
Dante puts it forth, here at the beginning at least. She goes on first of all let's discuss it and then
we'll as we discuss it we try to understand the question why this is representation such a hard
issue.
She says, "Not he of the Seraphim," this is lines Paradiso IV, lines 28, "that is most made one
with God," in the choir of angels, those who are closest to God, "not Moses, Samuel, or whichever
John thou wilt ;none," the apostle of the visionary, the seer, "not Mary herself, have their seat
another heaven from these spirits that have now appeared to thee." This is the poetics of Paradise,
by the way, that we are really confronted with. How do the souls show themselves forth to the
pilgrim? What is the mode of Dante's representation in Paradise? "From these spirits that have now
appeared nor for their being have more years or fewer, but all make fair the first circle and hold
sweet life in different measure as they feel more and less the eternal breath. These," what you are
seeing here on the Moon, "have shown themselves here, not that this sphere is allotted to them, but
in sign of the heavenly rank that is least exalted." They have they enjoy a lower degree of
beatitude than the other souls so they just appear here for your benefit.

Chapter 2. The Need for Allegorical Representation [00:09:31]

In other words, the whole of Paradise, the representation of Paradise if fictional and once the
pilgrim disappears so will the souls vanish. They will return into the bosom of Abraham according
to biblical accounts. "It is necessary," now Dante explains why the need for this allegorization, this
allegorical language, allegorical representation. "It is necessary to speak thus to your faculty, since
only from sense perception does it grasp, that which it then makes fit for the intellect." The whole of
Paradise is literally an accommodation of varieties, of realities that far exceed the powers of our
mind and now its condescension. The souls condescend to show themselves down to us, so Dante
first of all, has been talking about the limitations of the will, now he's talking about the limitations
of the intellect, so these are the two issues that join intellectually speaking in Canto IV, and each
seems to need the other and be made stronger in the light of the other.
Dante goes on explaining this mode of representation, which he says is not only true for Paradise,
but it's true for Scripture, it's true for all the iconography of the churches, and that's what he says,
it's necessary to speak, "For this reason Scripture condescends," in the literal sense of the word, the
etymological sense, it comes down to us. It accommodates itself to our limited faculties,
"condescends to your capacity and attributes hands and feet to God, having another meaning," that's
the definition of an allegory. The Bible indeed speaks of the hand of God; it's an anthropomorphic
trope, God has no feet and has no hand, but it means it's something else. It means that power of God
or the majesty of God, the feet of God, etc. In other words, there is a language of representation
even in the Bible that in many ways authorizes Dante's own juice of the presentation. Is this clear so
far? Good, there's no real difficulty of this issue.
And then it continues, "For this reason," it says that, "and Holy Church," that's what happens in the
Bible when we talk about the feet of God, we read about the feet of God, "Holy Church represents
to you with human aspect," angels that have no human form, "Gabriel and Michael and the other
who made Tobit whole again." Now the distinction between the metaphor, the platonic metaphor,
and the biblical allegory. "What Timaeus argues about the souls is not like that which we see here;
for what he says, he seems to hold for truth," that's already one basic difference. It seems that what
for the Bible is a metaphor becomes true in the context of Timaeus. "He says," Plato says, "the soul
returns to its own star, from which he believes it to have been separated when nature gave it for a
form." He literalizes the idea of the souls returning returned to the stars, "but perhaps his view is
other than his words express and may have a meaning not to be despised. If he means to return to
these wheels of the honour and the blame of their influence," if by returning to the stars he seems to
imply that at the fall of the souls, the souls go through the various stains of the planets and then they
return to the planets from which they originated, "his bow perhaps strikes on a certain truth. This
principle, ill-understood, once he misled almost the whole world, so that it went astray, naming
them Jupiter, and Mercury, and Mars," etc.
Dante's then Beatrice says let me just continue, "'The other doubt," this is the language of
doubts; intellectual doubts which are always part of truth for Dante. It's the truth that generates
doubt because the mind is exactly the way he described the will; both are restless, both need
nourishment, constant nourishment, so these are intellectual doubts. "The other doubt that troubles
thee has less poison," he repeats this idea, less danger. He hasn't said yet why the world of
representation is dangerous. And actually, he leaves it at this; "because its mischief could not lead
thee away from me. That our justice appears unjust in the eyes of mortals is evidence of faith." We'll
go back and we'll go in a moment.
But let me stay with the first question that Beatrice has resolved for the pilgrim and for us. She's
distinguishing between the theology, the biblical theology and let's call it the philosophical allegory;
biblical allegory and philosophical allegory. The language of metaphor in the Bible and the
language of metaphor, truth in Plato. Dante himself clearly is here legitimizing his own use of
metaphor. The whole poem is indeed a metaphorical journey whereby Dante is both simultaneously
biblical and also philosophical. He's finding and trying to decide on the common ground, the
metaphorical language that the Bible and Plato will use, and therefore himself.
Why is representation so dangerous? That it has so much poison in it and Beatrice twice goes back
to that image, and I think that the answer is this. That representation has the power to cancel or
erase the world of references which it represents. Representation has the power to make
appearances the only reality, simulacra, the only reality that we manage to see. It literally covers, it
eclipses all references; that's what makes representation so dangerous. It has a we are by virtue
of the representation, we end up in a kind of quandary in the predicament of believing that that's all
that there is. That which is visible is the only real thing, and invest the appearance invest that
simulacrum with the sort of value that it normally does not have, because it actually it points
normally that doesn't have because it points for Dante to essences behind it. We have seen here
the souls, the souls are all this is not the real home for the spirits, the real home is somewhere
else.
We may make the mistake Dante made of believing that these souls actually live on the Moon, and
therefore, that we are in a platonic other world, in another world where the souls go back to it. The
journey of Dante is the journey between images and testing of what these images may mean,
finding out whether behind these images there is some kind of substance, some kind of reality.
Dante literally moves between the two worlds and things, images, or representations and in
appearances and the world of essences, and tries to join the two of them. So you understand why
representation is the key issue here.
Let me also add that this discourse of allegory justifies and gives you an idea why Dante has been
that this is the heaven of grammar, since the allegorical discourse is a grammatical issue.
Remember that I have been talking about each planet seems to deploy well, one of the liberal
arts, but this is the reason why we can connect grammar and the Moon.
The other problem that Dante raises in Canto IV is the question of the will and he that's an easier
issue because he just goes on distinguishing between what we call a conditional will: the will
what we will whenever we are beset by circumstances that force on us some resolutions and then
absolute will: the absolute will of the martyrs of those who are, for instance, who are unwavering,
unfaltering in the confrontation with particular experiences. The souls of this of Piccarda and
Costanza, they were really exercising their own conditional will, not their absolute will, so it's an
interesting distinction and we leave it at that.

Chapter 3. Canto VI: The Heaven of Dialectics; Emperor Justinian [00:19:01]

We move now instead to the heaven of Canto VI, the heaven of dialectics, of Mercury. Why
Mercury is the why should he be the god, this is the planet Mercury but the god tied with
dialectics or logic, which are really not exactly the same thing, but Dante does use them
interchangeably. Hermes is of course, the god known as the psychopomp, the one who brings do
you know that part of mythology? The god who brings messages to the realm of shades, the realm
of the dead that carries the souls to Hades, that's one of the ideas of the resonances of Mercury. Now
there is also others, the Mercury is the god who the bearer of laws, the bearer of messages of the
gods to human beings, the bearer of laws, the god of the marketplace though it doesn't seem to have
much impact, a particular resonance of the myth to this canto.
This is the logic what is the dialectics? What are we to understand by dialectics? It's one of the
arts of the trivium and it is the art of by which by means of which, which provides really a
method, that's the way it's defined. It provides a method to distinguish between truth and
falsehoods, so it's let's see how this is going to be present. Interestingly enough, Dante is really
talking about laws here, and actually here he meets the great theorist, the Emperor Justinian who is
responsible and who is usually acknowledged as the one who favored the real organization of
Roman law in Byzantium, which is where he lived. Dante not only meets Justinian but he also tells
the story of Rome, so it's a canto about history. The idea is what's the rationality of Roman history,
is there a rationality to it? If dialectics is also the science of the power to distinguish between
falsehood and truths, it's also a rational discipline, the discipline that follows the rule of reason by
means of which one can go on making those distinctions.
So the question becomes, what is the rationality of the Roman Empire? What kind of justice was
there in it so laws, and the same word logos, seems to be ruling the unfolding of this canto. It begins
with the story of Constantine who we have met before for the famous as accountable for the
donation of Constantine that you may know. It's the famous alienation of imperial property to the
Church for Constantine's token of gratitude to the Pope, Sylvester, who had cured him of leprosy
and this gave rise to a famous, much debated donation, which Dante dismisses, Dante views as
nothing less transgressive, nothing less tragic and disruptive of the order of the world then for
instance Adam's sin. It's really the same cosmic proportion because it mixes together the sacred and
the profane. It makes the Pope a temporal ruler and that is the ultimate degradation of the moral
authority, the exercise of moral authority from Dante's viewpoint.
So, this is the illusion to the donation, but the illusion to the donation here is taken into the
reference to Constantine has a slightly different sense. "After Constantine," he says, "turned back
the eagle against the course of heaven where it had followed behind him of old that took Lavinia to
wife, for two hundred years or more the bird of God," the eagle, the emblem of the Empire,
"remained on the bounds of Europe, near the mountains from which it first came forth; and there
ruled the world under the shadow of the sacred wings, passing from hand to hand, and, so changing,
came into mine. I was Caesar," the imperial title, the imperial persona has disappeared and now he
appears as "I am Justinian." Here, once again, the use of that shift of verbs from the past to the
present, "And now, I am in the eternal life, I am myself a Justinian, "who, by will of the Primal
Love which moves me, removed from the laws what was superfluous and" and then made the
distinction." This is really a definition of dialectics. Made the distinction between what was
"superfluous and vain" and what was essential.
Let me give a gloss on this first paragraph, the allusion is to Constantine's moving, that's the other
sense, not only the donation, but moving the seat of the empire from Rome to the east, Byzantium.
This is seen as the violation of a metaphor of history, a paradigm of history, which was called
translatio imperii. What is this? What does it mean? It's the idea of, you know in the Middle Ages
they speak of translation, all the time the translation of studies, translation of the empire. The idea
that the whole of history follows a pattern, a movement from east to west, and therefore, the
duration of history is patterned on the movement of the Sun from east to west and with the idea that
when the empire reaches the most western point, the western most point of the map that's going to
be also the end of history. It's the end of the day, the sunset, and the end of history.
Constantine, by turning back this translation, this movement, that's what it means, a transport, a
transfer of the Empire actually delays the apocalyptic denuma, the end of time and the end of the
day, and for Dante this is a major violation of the economy of history. It begins with this idea of a
violation, a tragic violation of history brought about by Constantine. The allusion of course is the
other illusion is to Aeneas with whom the Empire had started after the fall of Troy had started to go
westward and then Constantine reverses all of this. You understand, by the way, this is I mean,
this as on Election Day; I really should mention this, that the whole idea of manifest destiny is
really based on this principle of the translatio imperii, because the Empire moves westward all the
time. We are now, therefore, in the proper compass of history, so to speak. So, Constantine, with the
Lavinia who went backwards, Lavinia wife of Aeneas.
I must also indicate to you, and this would become if case you are still looking for a topic, this is
one of the first times that Dante starts using this geographical coordinates, the geographical
description of Europe. He has really not done that neither in Inferno nor in Purgatorio, but now
Europe becomes an increased concern of his. Whatever historical information they have of it and it's
this is the Europe at the east and Dante will be talking about the borders of Europe in the west.
There is a kind of idea of a Europe that has he's asking what kind of messages can come from
Europe which is still valid, legitimate today. These are the sort of incredible questions that he will
ask and distinguishes between Rome and Europe, in the sense that Rome, he will say, in a political
tract that he writes, that the history of Rome is different from the history of Europe, 1320 he writes
this kind of thing; 1318 maybe he writes this tract.
The emblem for Europe's for Rome's distinctiveness is to be found in Aeneas' experience of
marrying three wives. He marries Creusa, as we'll hear from the Aeneid; he marries Dido, though
it's a marriage of convenience so to speak but it's a marriage, and then he marries Lavinia. Dante
goes on to explain the three wives he marries are one from Asia, one from Africa, and one from
Europe, so that Aeneas' whole experience, whole history encompasses what at the time was thought
of as universality, the three known continents in a way of which only Europe, Europe is only a part,
so keep that in mind. I will talk more about this metaphor as it appears. Now this is the context of
Europe, so Justinian and the reference to his reorganization of the Roman code known as the
Justinian Code and then now we have a history of the Empire. From the emperor we have what
seems to be a celebration of the Roman Empire, this is Canto VI, therefore like Canto VI of Inferno
and Canto VI of Purgatorio, the focus is political; it's not just the city or Italy now, it's the whole
Empire.
But what begins as a celebration of the empire in effect turns out to be a critique of the ideology of
the Empire, the mythological reading that we can find in Augustine's Confessions. Dante follows
two models here and they are two models that are contradictory with each other and in this
representation of Canto VI we have the Virgilian model of the Roman Empire, which is really a
celebration of its origins with Aeneas, with Pallas, the whole account told in the Aeneid and with the
vision of what is to come. But then there is, around the fifth century, A.D. Augustine writes in The
City of God, a fierce critique of the Empire. The Empire has fallen, the claims by the time
Augustine writes, the claims of the eternity of the Empire turn out to be Apollo, and to Augustine
the Empire is nothing less than another one of another episode in a long history of predatory
politics of imperial possessions and violence. The Roman Empire as an empire is no better than all
the other empires that have long been have long vanished and vanquished so this is the these
are the two models that Dante's evoking.
In fact, the very language, just to give you an idea, at one point Dante will say, "Thou knowest,"
lines 35 and following, "that it made its stay," the eagle, the story is told through the vicissitudes of
this emblem, of the symbolic emblem, the eagle, "for three hundred years or more, til at the last,
still for its sake, the three," the razi, you may know a little bit of Roman History, the Curiazi, who
fight it out with a duel between the three brothers and the other three brothers. "The three fought
with the three, and thou knowest what it did under seven kings," the story of the seven kings, "from
the wrongs of the Sabine women to the woe of Lucrece, conquering the neighbour peoples round
about." These are all phrases that come straight out of Augustine's City of God. They are used as
cases of exemplifying the libido of power of Rome. There are erotic stories, stories of erotic
violence; Lucretia, who has been raped, and the story of the Sabine women who have been
kidnapped by the bands of Romulus and Remus, and they are the outlaws. There is this idea that the
Empire was born in the condition of outlaws.
Dante is using the perspective of Augustine because Augustine had used these examples to them,
the Empire, and its own aberrant policies. At the same time, all the rest is really Virgilian; this is the
moment when Virgil and Augustine really disagree from each other. Why does Dante do this? What
is this what is the reason for bringing together two contradictory sources of historical thought?
What's the idea of poetic mythology of Rome? Is he in favor of the Empire or is he against the
Empire? Is he with Augustine or is he with actually with Virgil? One thing is clear, that
Augustine who loves Virgil, of course, decides that this is that the Empire is an aberrant reality
in his own history. It's already falling apart and he has no use for this. In his theological vision, the
question that he raises is, what do I care who governs me, provided this is he that they do not make
me sin. The reality is an internalized reality. The reality is the one which is in the interior life of all
of us and what are empires, if not great thefts? He will go on dismissing all of this, he a Roman
citizen at the end, at the twilight of the Empire, sixth century or so.
What is where does Dante stand in between them? He continues. I have an answer I hope. He
continues for now; he doesn't tell us yet, "Thou knowest what it did when borne by the illustrious
Romans against Brennus It brought low the pride of the Arabs, who behind Hannibal passed the
Alpine crags from which, Po, thou fallest. Under it, as youths Scipio and Pompey triumphed
Then near the time," etc., this will continue into the violation of the Rubicon by Caesar and it
then it goes on with Charlemagne, line 95 and following and now let me just read the passage, the
last passage. "Now thou canst judge of such men as I accused before, and of their offenses, which
are the cause of all your ills; the one opposes to the public standard the yellow lilies and the other
claims," lilies of France, "and the other claims it for a party, so that it is hard to see which offends
the more. Let the Ghibellines," the canto all of a sudden becomes evocative; seems to turn into a
replica of Inferno VI of the Civil War between Guelfs and Ghibellines. It starts as a celebration, an
encomium of the Empire and its role in history, in this westward movement toward an apocalyptic
conclusion.
Now all of a sudden it goes back to, "Let the Ghibellines carry on their arts under another standard,
for of this he's always a bad follower who serves it from justice; and let not this new Charles strike
at it with his Guelfs, but let him fear its claws which have torn the hide from a greater lion. Many a
time ere now have the children wept for the father's fault, and let him not think God will change
arms for his lilies." What is this? It starts with the Empire, ends up with the civil war, and the civil
war is really the perspective from which Dante can take this double view on the history of the
Empire, where Dante can really stand up to the stance of Augustine and the stance of Virgil. What
he really seems to be saying I think is this, yes Augustine you are right, that the Empire is really a
negative force has been a negative force in history and that the reality is, as you say, an
internalized reality of our own peace and the kind of internal will that we can we manage to
placate.
At the same time, he says to Virgil but you're also right in your valorization of the Empire because
the Empire has brought about some order and laws into the world. That's the argument, and yet,
against Augustine he says, if there were no laws and there were no laws of the Empire, then there
would be no way of sheltering each and every unrest in case of a civil war. What makes the
argument for the necessity of the Empire is the reality of the civil war which really demands the
presence of a transcendent institution that will manage to contain the violence of human beings. You
can see he agrees with Augustine and disagrees with Augustine. He agrees with Virgil and disagrees
with Virgil. Virgil leaves no room for the internal, the inner experiences of Christians. On the other
hand, Augustine leaves no room for the necessity of an outside structure that could order the
appetites of human beings.
The canto though comes to an end with a little bit of an autobiographical poetry, an
autobiographical picture. This is now the emperor who praises a counselor, a counselor who has
fallen into disgrace. "'Within the same pearl shines too the light of Romeo," Romeo Villeneuve, a
Provencal courtier, who had the role of exactly being a counselor for the prince, "whose great and
noble work was ill rewarded; but the Provencals who wrought against him do not have the laugh,
and indeed he takes an ill road who makes of another's well-doing a wrong to himself. Raymond
Berenger had four daughters, each of them a queen, and Romeo, a man of low birth and a stranger,
did this for him. And when crafty tongues moved him to call to account this just man, who rendered
him seven and five for ten, Romeo left there poor and old; and if the world knew the heart he had,
begging his bread by morsels, much as it praises him would praise him more.'"
It is an oblique representation of Dante himself, who has to end up begging in poverty for a morsel,
as he says, out of the selfishness of the political powers. The other final question that I think
underlies this whole canto that has to be raised is, what is the relationship between dialectics and
this representation of history? Why should Dante connect the two? Why in the heaven of logic, let's
say, does he have to talk about history? I think that the idea is that history itself, I think that he's
this is an encomium that ends up being not quite a mitigated encomium. It's also a critique of the
Empire, that there is a reason within the Empire and yet this reason doesn't quite justify all that the
Empire perpetrated in history.
I think from this perspective Dante is also forcing on us some perplexities about the nature of logic
as an instrument of power, as one that could justify all possible powers. So there is also a critique of
dialectics as much as there is a critique of history. We skip altogether, because I think it's a little bit
more evident, and you can, if you read on your own, you can see Canto VIII and IX, the canto of
rhetoric and the rhetoric and love they are very, IX especially, very clear.
Chapter 4. Canto X: Solar Theology [00:41:39]
We move instead to the Heaven of the Sun, she's a little bit X, XI and XII are I don't know
that I'll be able to finish all of Canto X but I want to start the discussion. We are in the Heaven of
the Sun, which is the heaven of arithmetic, numbers and here Dante goes on talking about one
model of the Trinity that I will describe to you in a moment. Dante encounters the wise spirits, the
spirits of in fact we are going to see very soon there are two wheels of saints, two garlands,
represented as two garlands of old men who hold themselves by the hand, dancing around the Sun.
It is the dance of wisdom, if you wish.
You can call it you can also refer to it as a kind of reorganization of the encyclopedia. You may
remember that I used this metaphor at the beginning of the course, this idea that the Divine Comedy
tries to re-propose a new circle of knowledge, a way in which things can really be known and the
encyclopedia means the journey, education, as in a circle because the mind moves around through
the various arts and sciences, that's how you learn. You return to what you already knew from a
different viewpoint and you see things, things are new. But it's the Heaven of the Sun.
Let me just go on a little bit with the canto and then we'll try to bring out some of the issues of
Canto X. "Looking on His Son with the Love, which the One and the Other eternally breathe forth,
the primal and ineffable Power made with such order all that revolves in mind or space, that he who
contemplates it cannot but taste of Him." He begins with a Trinitarian representation, the Father, the
Son, joined together by the breath of love. That was the idea of the Trinity, which is a unity; that's
the paradoxes of arithmetic, of this theological arithmetic, as an image of fecundity. God is being an
image of love, is generative of itself, within His own unity. Then Dante turns to us, and that's the
last time I believe that he turns to us readers, and he tells us to be stargazers. That's all. That's all
he's saying.
"Lift up thine eyes with me then, reader, to the lofty wheels, directing them on that part where the
one motion strikes the other, and from that point take thy pleasure in the art of the Master, who so
loves it in His heart that His eye never leaves it. See how from there the circle branches obliquely
that bears the planets to satisfy the world which calls for them." He directs our eyes to an
intersection of the ecliptic, the cosmic equator, and the ecliptic, the ecliptic being a term that
describes the diurnal and annual movement of the Sun. Where they meet, that crossing, that directs
our eyes there, "if their track were not aslant," etc. "Stay now, reader, on thy bench, thinking over
this of which thou hast the foretaste, and thou shalt have much delight before thou art weary; I have
set before thee, now feed thyself, for the theme of which I am made the scribes bends to itself all
my care."
Why does Dante think of the Trinity in the Heaven of the Sun? This is the simple question that we
should ask; I have a passage that I want to read to you. It's taken from I think this is the it's
taken from the pseudo Dionysius, you may have heard of whom Dante will mention, he's a
mystic. He writes on the divine names, he writes about how the mystical hierarchy and this will be
explained to you a little bit of the what is Dante's, at this point, semi-mystical theology, semi-
mystical idea of the Trinity, this idea that knowledge has to be love. He begins with an idea of the
Trinity bound by love and that knowledge has to be love. Let me read this passage and maybe we
can go from there. I call it a solar theology. That is to say, a theology of the Sun, not about the Sun
but solar; the theology has to be understood as the life of the Sun itself.
Let me read this passage, "Think," this is from 693B of the divine names and following, "Think of
how it is with our sun. It exercises no rational process, no act of choice, and yet by the very fact of
its existence it gives light to whatever is able to partake of its light in its own way. So it is with the
Dood," a classical comparison here of course of the Sun with the good in the republic of Protinus in
the Aeneid and so on. "So it is with the Good. Existing far above the sun, an archetype far superior
to its dull image, it sends the rays of its undivided goodness to everything with the capacity, such as
this may be, to receive it Such beings owe the presence and their uneclipsed and undiminished
lives to these rays They abide in the goodness of God and draw from it the foundation of what
they are, their coherence, their vigilance, their home. Their longing for the Good makes them what
they are and confers on them their well-being. Shaped by what they yearn for, they exemplify
goodness, and as the Law of God requires of them, they share with those below them the good gifts
which have come their way."
I call it a solar theology in the sense that Dante is the I think, thinking of theology as or God,
or the Trinity as a given, as a fountain, not the Aristotelian or mystic or Augustinian idea of
causality. We think of God as the one who imparts a cause or a motion to things, or a beginning and
then you have a teliology, you have effect. The idea of the Trinity here is one of an inexhaustible
source that keeps giving and it gives to all and we're all part of this gift. This is the idea. I think that
Dante is getting this, what I call the solar theology, from a mystical text called the pseudo
Dionysius, again not that he is a mystic, but he indeed appears as one who behind is the rationalist
faade of his thinking, he's aware of depths and other ways of thinking which are not those of the
rational route.

Chapter 5. St. Thomas and Others in Canto X [00:49:36]

Let me just go from and describe even more here what happens with this Canto X. Now Dante goes
on seeing these two garlands of saints and this is let me read; he meets Aquinas and let me read
from this passage where he, Aquinas, will go on giving and naming the first encyclopedic, this
movement of sages, lines 100 and following where he says, "I was of the lambs of the holy flock
that Dominic leads on the path where there is good fattening if they do not stray; he that is next
beside me on the right was my brother and master, Albert of Cologne, and I am Thomas Aquinas. If
thou wouldst be thus informed of all the rest, fall after my words with thine eyes, going round the
blessed wreath. That next flame comes from the smile of Gratian, who served," canon law and civil
law, "the one and the other court so well that it gives pleasure in Paradise; the other who next
adorns our choire was that Peter, who like the poor widow, offered his treasure to Holy Church. The
fifth light, which is the most beautiful among us, breathes from such a love that all the world below
hungers for news of it; within it is the lofty mind to which was given wisdom so deep that, if truth
be true, there never arose a second of such vision."
It's Solomon described through a circumlocution as the fifth light, and the fifth light because in
numerical symbolism five stands for the natural number, which is to say, that Dante casts very
difficult proposition, Solomon as being naturally perfect, having a kind of perfection of intellect. It's
a dangerous proposition. In fact, Dante will go on Aquinas will go on in Canto XIV, look let me
just explain what I said before because it's not quite true because the virtue of the intellectual
virtue of Solomon consists in the fact that he knew what to ask for when he had to govern his
people. He was the perfect king because he knew what to ask. You understand why this would be a
dangerous idea? If you believe that there is a perfection of the intellect within the natural
imminence, fear, order, where we live then it means that there's no need for Revelation. There is no
need for intermediaries, no need for Redemption. If nature, the natural intellect, is capable of
ascending as it has claimed here for Solomon, then the whole apparatus will collapse.
Dante will not believe it and Aquinas will go back as dramatically, actually in Canto XIII saying, let
me just explain myself, "Beside it is the light of the candle which below in the flesh was farthest,"
this is Augustine and then, "the body from which he was driven lies below in Cieldauro," this is
Boethius, "and he came from martyrdom and exile to this peace. See, flaming beyond, the glowing
breath of Isidore, of Bede, and of Richard [of St. Victor] who in contemplation was more than
man," line 132, then read this line because I think it's a little bit more interesting in the Italian than it
is in English, "in contemplation was more than man," "d'Isidoro, di Beda e di Riccardo, che a
considerar fu pi che vero." The word Dante uses is not contemplation, it's consideration, and it's a
key word for Dante whose consideration means the etymologies that of moving with the stars. That
is if the mind is at its most perfect when it imitates the circulation and circularity of the stars;
consider, it's also like desire by the way. "This one from whom thy look returns to me is the light of
a spirit to whom, in his grave thoughts, dealt seemed slow in coming; it is the eternal light of Siger,
who, lecturing in the Street of Straw, demonstrated invidious truths."
The last one that Aquinas points out in this circulation of wise spirits is one of a so-called heretic by
the name of Siger of Brabant, who was an Averroist and was condemned for his Averroism.
Whatever knowledge and whatever canonized knowledge we may have, for Dante it includes
figures who have been judged unworthy of knowledge or heretical or wrong and now they are
retrieved. The idea of knowledge is one that keeps changing. The idea of the canor of knowledge
keeps always expanding and including voices that had been rejected.
Let me tell you more about this representation of Siger of Brabant. You understand he's an Averroist
and we do know, how does Dante go about just saying he's here, how does he go about justifying
his salvation? Canto X, from this point of view, is retrospectively one that sheds light on Canto X of
Inferno, where we also saw, you remember, the Averroists and the Epicureans, Guido Cavalcanti,
those who believed that the mind, that love and knowledge never interact with each other, that the
mind goes rationality is darkened and dimmed by the infusions of passions, remember, and that
the mind is one that receives ideas from the outside, or that notion of both the inertia of the will and
the divisions within the mind itself. Dante now is correcting some of those views.

Chapter 6. Metaphors in Canto X [00:56:02]

So let's look a little bit at these metaphors in Canto X. "This one from whom thy look returns to me
is the light of a spirit to whom, in his grave thoughts, death seemed slow in coming." He was killed,
by the way, by a madman and Dante writes a sonnet about him in around 1281 or so. "It is the
eternal life of Siger," so we know that he's saved, "who lecturing in the Street of Straw,
demonstrated invidious truths." Dante gives the address of this man. He lectured, a word that has a
certain value in the university language, a university lexicon of the time. Lecturing is an activity
that implies glossing, just as is the glosseta of Aristotle, but he tells us where he lived, in the Street
of Straw in Paris, a street that now is called by the way, the Rue de Voir, but is now called the Rue
Dante, knowing that clearly the Parisians are mindful of this passage. Dante is placing Siger on the
road, on the way, he's giving us his address but he is telling us that his thinking takes place while he
is on the road.
You all know that philosophy is always understanding itself as a journey, a method, an exodus,
Parmenides, or a quietness of things about the five ways to reach the ultimate truths about God.
Dante is a philosopher, is on the way to theological certainty, theological truth and theological
knowledge and he "demonstrated invidious truths." The Italian is sillogizz, made syllogisms out of,
demonstrated, rationally demonstrated invidious truths. What are these invidious truths? Invidious
truths, I'm not sure that all the translators would agree. Invidious truths have to be understood
etymologically. This is the canto where Isidore of Seville is presently Isidore of Seville being the
arch etymologist of the Middle Ages and Dante is showing how he too we can play with
etymologies.
Isidore of Seville is the one who believed that whole of knowledge, all we know, the compass of all
knowledge can really be arrived at through etymologizing language. Language, the etymon of
language, the origin of words will give us an access to the nature of reality, so language becomes a
way of knowing the world. Dante indulges in the same activity calling the truth that Siger pursued
"invidious," which etymologically means those things, those truths that cannot be demonstrated,
those truths that cannot be seen. Philosophy appears as an art of speculation that takes us on the way
to a truth that it cannot quite have access to.
What are these truths that Siger of Brabant sought access to? The immortality of the soul, there is
no way he would have known or even discovered that. Aristotle is very doubtful about the
individual immortality of the soul and the treatise of the soul. He tried to consider to view to
decide about the origin of the world. Siger believed that the universe is another one of those
indemonstrable believes, that the universe is eternal and this is an argument that saw medieval
thinkers and theologians engaged in, Averroism on the one side and Aquinas who maintains that
philosophically you really can believe and show that the universe is really, is eternal. But out of
faith you can go on believing in creation, that things have a beginning, but if you don't think that
things have a beginning, then there's never a possibility of allowing for giving some ground and
rooting the idea of your freedom, your innovations, the possibilities things can be different from
you from what they were before and so on.
The reason why Dante rescues Siger of Brabant is a way for him to be ultimately thinking and
making a statement that whatever we believe that is knowledge, it's never definite and it's always
we are literally on the way and rethinking it and making it all the time an object of our own self-
critique. This is not the only place where Dante is rethinking himself. Very soon around the notion
of the Trinity, Bonaventure will have to change his mind about a man, a figure that I have
mentioned before, Joachim Flora, in the next canto. The idea with a Joachistic interpretation of
history, so he will we are going to have to have Canto XI balancing off Canto X. Then it ends,
the canto ends, "Then, like a clock," what an extraordinary image, an image of time now, but what I
have to say is that you probably do not know that clocks, mechanical clocks, the way we still see
them were a recent technological invention in the late thirteenth century which Dante is absorbing
here.
"Then, like a clock that calls us at the hour when the bride of God rises to sing matins to the
Bridegroom that he may love her, when one part draws or drives another, sounding the chime with
notes so sweet that the well-ordered spirit swells with love, so I saw the glorious wheel move and
render voice to voice with harmony and sweetness that cannot be known but there where joy
becomes eternal." Dante is describing these songs of the eternal of the blessed souls in erotic
terms, so that what seems to be a canto of pure knowledge ultimately becomes a love song too and
this is the whole trajectory of Canto X.

Chapter 7. Themes in Cantos IV, VI and X [01:02:49]

Let me stop here and see if there some questions about these three cantos which I'll be glad to
answer. They are a little bit abstract but I think that they respond to genuinely interesting and
historical problems at least.
The question of allegory at the beginning let me just give you a kind of quick resume of what we
said. In Canto IV you have two issues, you have the issue of allegory and the issue of the will where
Dante goes on explaining the mode of representation in Paradise as a mode of accommodation to
our limited faculty and he thinks that this is really the mode of representation throughout the Bible,
the iconography of the Church, the poem, etc., which is a way therefore of talking about allegory in
a slightly different form from the way he spoke of it in, as you remember what I spoke of it, but he
was allowing us to do that in Canto IX of Inferno where we had been talking about the allegory of
poets, allegory of theologians. Now there is no question that I think that there is no intrinsic
difference between the two modes. Remember that I used to talk about the allegory of theologians
as being an allegory where the literal level is true and the allegory of poets as one in which the
literal level is a fiction. Now I'm saying that both of them for Dante have a kind of metaphorical
basis and the relationship between the metaphor and truth is, of course, it's certainly the language of
a very similitude, if not absolutely the truth.
Then the two the other issue about the will, the limitations of the will, the conditional and
absolute will. When we come to Canto VI of Paradise Dante shifts gears altogether and talks about
history, and the framework of the Empire. Is it providential, I call it what is the rationality of the
Empire, but the real issue is, is there such a thing as a providentality of the Empire, which he had
maintained in elsewhere in the poem and certainly in the text of Monarchia. Dante concludes
now, seems to have to explain, give an apology for his belief in the Empire by agreeing with and
siding with Virgil, but at the same time giving a critique of the Empire and acknowledging
Augustine, but manages to criticize both. Both Augustine and for different reasons and Virgil had
not seen the whole truth; Virgil can go on into unabashed loudatio, laudatory statements about the
Empire. Augustine can go on damning the Empire but Augustine does not understand that if within
the context of the civil war where the realities where Corso can turn against his sister Piccarda,
where the Guelfs can go against the Ghibellines, where your own brother can be your enemy, that's
really what it's about.
Then you do need some kind of law. You read an outside world, an outside institution that can
guarantee and protect yourself. The claim that salvation is only in the interiority of the soul, which
is Augustine's claim, is not really sufficient for someone who is as Dante was involved in the
public's fear and the public life. I think that these are the two most important moments. In Canto X
Dante is moving beyond the it's a poetic break that takes place. He literally moves us beyond the
sunlight, the daylight of the ordinary natural daylight moving into a world now which is his own
and Dante starts raising the issue of knowledge, as if to say that a new knowledge, a new way of
thinking now is necessary.
Once you move beyond the ordinary boundaries of the universe you got to have you start asking
yourself what kind of knowledge do I need here. He's rethinking therefore the whole relationship
between truth or knowledge and error, heresies and knowledge, the canonical certainties that
Aquinas would have who now makes significantly enough a mistake about the fate of Solomon and
Siger of Brabant, so that seems to be the argument that is running in these cantos. He is forcing on
us a different way of thinking and that different way of thinking begins with a redefinition of
nothing less than the Trinity. The idea of causality, not the idea of efficiency, causa efficiens, that's
the way God is defined by Aquinas, that's the way that Augustine defines he writes a treatise on
the Trinity with the idea of God as causality.
Dante adds doesn't exclude the others; it would be inconceivable that something as imponderable
as the Trinity could just have one formula to account for it, but he adds onto it that first definition of
the Trinity as a unity of love and a unity of fecundity which I think is a mystical definition. The idea
of God, the idea of creation is one of participation of the creatures, the idea of God as being the
source, the inexhaustible source of light and not just efficiency and not just etiology, movement,
etc., and we shall see the implications of this. Yes.

Chapter 8. Question and Answer [01:09:27]

Student: I was just wondering why is it such a problem for Dante to imagine like a perfect natural
intellect in Solomon, because isn't it sort of Inferno and Purgatorio sort of a perfection of the will
through Virgil's intellect and Virgil's reason, and so why is it a dangerous proposition to say that a
man could have a perfect intellect?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question, a very good question, is why does Dante find it so
difficult to acknowledge the perfection of Solomon's intellect, when after all, in Inferno and
Purgatorio, we have had some accounts of how the will is moved by the intellect and perfected by
the intellect. Am I paraphrasing your actually repeating what you said I think, but accurately? It's
a very good question; it's really a complicated problem.
In fact, I think that what you have to keep in mind how Dante talks about Solomon as a people on
Earth are so anxious this was one of the most incredibly debated is he saved? Is Solomon
saved? Because he's the wisest, that's what the Bible tells us, he's the wisest, and we believe the
Bible the Middle Ages argument. We believe in the Bible so he's the wisest, but he was also
known as being the most lecherous of kings, so big solution for Dante, forget about that, he's really
the wisest so he's saved, so that solves that particular issue of the relationship between love and
knowledge and I think that's a crucial point in for the way you are stating the issue because you
are stating how in Inferno and Purgatorio you have the will directed and reorganized by the
intellect, so you see there must be some kind of relationship between will and intellect. Dante here
says, the will was really was a little bit was chaotic, was disordered will, so we have only to
judge him in terms of this majestic intellect that he has. In fact, he was the most perfect of figures
since Adam was created in the Garden. That's the first thing.
But now let me come to the crux of the matter here. If you believe that he had intellect which was
absolutely perfect, perfect intellect, then what you're really saying and this is the context of
knowledge, a mathesis as the Greek's call it, the mathesis, the word mathematics it comes from that.
If you believe that then you're really saying that philosophy is the way to come to the truth. You see
what I'm saying? If philosophy is the way to come to the truth, you don't really need theology or
you really have to start thinking of theology as some kind of vulgar poet or some vulgar
philosophizing, as some kind of the poetry for the masses, for instance, a kind of elitarian, elite-like,
view that keeps creeping up into in the ways of thinking about theology and philosophy and if
you believe that, that philosophy is the mode.
In fact, now we have a correction of the philosophers immediately after with the presence of Siger
because of course see the ambivalence Siger is justified and saved because his mind was a
searching mind. He's on the road, he's a true philosopher he it's the method. I was describing
logic as a method that the Greek word that means "way." It's the root, the philosopher of the root,
philosophy is on the way out of their odyssey, the odyssey of the soul, that's really we call it
Dante says exodus, it's an exodus clearly countering the idea of the philosophical root.
There's another story, another way of looking at journeys, he's certainly involved in a journey, a
journey of the heart and a journey of the mind at the same time. Once you go on, Siger is on
there is there was no perfection. He tried to demonstrate and look at the paradox invidious, that
is to say, truths that cannot be seen. I appear to the etymology of invidious. Many translations and
they say unwelcome truths. I don't know what kind of translations, actually I like my Sinclair who
says "invidious truths," but many others translate that word invidious as unwelcome or the truths
that made him be scorned and hated by others because the jealousy of philosophers is a little bit in
the background. He lost his life, he was killed because of that, but instead he is in pursuit of truths
which is the aim of philosophy of all investigations, but philosophical investigations, but cannot be
demonstrated, that cannot be seen so there is a limitation of the philosophical road of the road of
philosophy.
Indirectly, the limitation of Solomon's perfect claim of he never claimed that he had a perfect
intellect. In fact, Aquinas who realizes what he has said, he says no, no, no the wisdom of Solomon
has to be viewed in his prudence for asking God that he be given the absolute knowledge in the
government of his people, so it's a limited form of knowledge but that was perfect. It's maybe it
strikes you as sophistry but I enjoy that. Thank you so much.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 18 - Paradise XI, XII [November 6, 2008]
Chapter 1. Additional Remarks on Canto X [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time we got into Canto X and I began with the Heaven of the
Sun, and I began with the description of Dante begins, we went over the phases of the canto. On
the one hand the description of the Trinity of the inner life of the Trinity as a life of love, the breath
and the father love, the sun, the father bound by the breath of love as it were. Then Dante moves
onto a description of the spectacle of the whole this heaven and of this fragment of the cosmos
by turning to us readers twice, asking us to look up. It is that by looking up we can see the
givenness of creation, the fact that this has been given; it's a gift to us. It's also a way of if it's a
gift, if there's an economy, a feel economy in the cosmos, it's a divine economy, it also means that
somehow we cannot really claim to own it. That seems to be a natural consequence of something
being a gift does not imply, does not entail necessarily ownership of this gift; it has been given and
therefore we are invited to have an aesthetic admiration of it.
This kind of this scene of the divine, even a kind of feel drama, a divine drama, a spectacle that
unfolds ends folds throughout the cosmos, ends with a description of the encyclopedia as I was
describing it to you. That is to say with Aquinas who recounts the names and mentions one after the
other, the twelve representatives of various disciplines. We talked a little bit about Solomon and the
scandal that his inclusion here caused in Dante's own time, since Dante is responding to a real crisis
about unknowledge of the ultimate fate of Solomon, the wisest of all men. Was he saved or not on
account of his weaknesses in terms of his, well his lechery?
Then the canto focuses on ends really with Siger of Brabant who was a logician, a philosopher
and Dante describes him really on the way to knowledge. He was a heretic, he was viewed of as a
heretic. Dante dismisses that whole charge, and in many ways he represents therefore knowledge as
or the circle of knowledge as one made of contradictory voices, where those who had been
blaming Siger of Brabant, such as Aquinas himself, now retract their positions; so the whole process
of getting to know the world is one of errors and it's one of retractions.
There are some interesting details that I could even I think that I should even mention to you as
we approach XI and XII. Siger is described as he's absorbed in his grave thoughts. In Italian it is
gravi pensieri, the word pensiero is, in English, is pensive. I think that that is such a remarkable
word because it really means "to think" in Latin, and they always exploit this resonance of the verb
means to be at an impasse, to be suspended literally, so he's suspended in thoughts as if the
thoughts could not quite make him reach the threshold of the knowledge he wanted. At any rate,
that's the way Canto X that's the economy of Canto X.

Chapter 2. Franciscan and Dominican Saints [00:04:53]

I want to since there are three cantos that go together to really I ask you to turn to the end of
Canto XII where Bonaventure, who is a Franciscan, you probably know what is meant by that. The
Franciscan is one of the orders of Francis, just as Aquinas is Dominican. The Franciscans are those
who believe in the priority of will and love in the act of knowledge. The Dominicans or neo-
Aristotelians like Aquinas believe in the priority of the intellect in the apprehension of the world.
The Dominicans were founded with the explicit mandate to teach in the universities where heresies
they thought abounded and therefore they had to extirpate, block off the routes of heresies. The
Franciscans were going to be witnessing in the world, and both orders are shaped by a belief in
poverty that we have to examine a little bit. We have to understand what it means.
At any rate, Bonaventure is a Franciscan and by the end of Canto XII, after he has been chronicling
the life of Dominic. This is sort of another case of extraordinary openness of, in Dante's view, of
these characters in the sense that the Franciscans and Dominicans were really at odds with each
other, both in terms of their theologies and their premises, intellectual premises above all. Here,
Dante has a Franciscan tell the life of Dominic just as earlier in Canto XI a Dominican, Aquinas,
tells the life of Francis. The two cantos are controlled by what we call a chiasmus that's this is a
chiasmus from the Greek word "chi," a chiasmus, right? You have an intersection of voices, a sort
of a sense of the interdependence of the two perspectives.
I will say a little bit more about Bonaventure after I read this paragraph. This paragraph here, the
last paragraph in Canto XII, lines 130 and following, sort of functions as a counterweight to the
description of the encyclopedia that Aquinas had given at the end of Canto X and ending with Siger
of Brabant so let me just see who the people are here. "I am the living soul of Bonaventura of
Bagnorea, who in great offices ever put last the left-hand care. Here are Illuminato and Augustine,
who were among the first barefoot Poor Brothers that in the cord made themselves God's friends."
Then a theorist of medieval encyclopedias, Hugh of St. Victor, a Parisian friar who really wrote the
so called Didascalicon, which is a text about what is what are the stages of education? How does
the mind come to the knowledge of God starting from the small elements in the outside life, the
material world, then the interior lights, etc., before reaching the God's supreme light?
Then is here with them Peter the bookworm, Peter the Spaniard, another theorist of medieval logic
who shines below in twelve books, then Nathan the prophet I'll come back to this name, the
prophet Nathan. He is known, to those who know, as being David's bad conscience, or good
conscience, the one who is pricking him to think about himself. Nathan, the prophet sensor
counselor of the King, a little bit more about him in a while and Chrysostom, the Metropolitan,
meaning that guy with the golden mouth. Language here is the flower of eloquence is what he
possesses. And Anselm, another theologian who writes about the reasons for the incarnations,
famous texts about why did God become a man and then Donatus "who deigned to set his hand to
the first art; grammar. So you see you have the whole array, the whole wide spectrum of what we
call the encyclopedia. Logic, eloquence, grammar, Donatus is a Roman grammarian, and then
Rabanus a historian, "and beside me shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, who was endowed with a
spirit of prophecy. The glowing courtesy and well-judged language of Brother Thomas have moved
me to celebrate so great a paladin, and with me have moved this company." Bonaventure ends with
the tip of the hat in the direction of Aquinas whose example he has followed. An example, once
again, of a dialogue and openness between the two orders and the two members of different orders
and yet and somehow interdependent with each other.
Now the presence of Abbot Joachim is another counterweight to Siger of Brabant in Canto X. He
too, Joachim, whom you have met because I sort of mentioned his name to you in discussing the
prophecy glossing the prophecy of the DXV in Purgatorio XXXIII. You remember where I tried
to explain it; there seems to be a kind of apocalyptic meaning to that prophecy, the numerical
enigma, an enigmatic prophecy about the coming of Christ at the end of time, who will come and
therefore the prophecy of the consummation of history, and the consummation of time, the DXV,
the 500, 10, and 5 as that is called. And I said that the joachistic interpretation of that emblem, of
that symbol seemed to me to be accurate. I really meant, it really sort of introduces the idea of the
end of time, however, I rejected I asked you to also reject the implications of that prophecy.
The joachistic prophecy it was viewed as heretical for a number of important reasons. It
expresses a sort of impatience about history. That is to say it really believes, first of all, in the
imminent and closure of history, the end is close at hand, and this is a kind of the end of history
implies the coming into being of a utopia, a utopia of the spirit, the third age of the spirit, when
finally all institutions, all barriers are shattered and torn down. This is a kind of this is really
what from Dante's point of view would be wrong with a joachistic utopian impulse. The idea that
it always begs for a closure of what we can never really fathom, which is the world of historical
occurrences, but another reason why he was viewed as heretical by exactly Bonaventure, it was
Bonaventure who asked that his views be damned and now he is sort of writing a palinode. Dante
allows him to make amends for the previous condemnation.
Bonaventure found objectionable the ideas of Joachim of Flora because Joachim de facto is
dissolving the whole notion of the unity of the Trinitarian life. He theorizes an idea of history, a
tripartite idea of history according to the three persons of the Trinity: the age of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit. He believes there was once, in biblical times, there was the age of the Father,
God was understood as the Father. Then we enter the age of the Son, brotherhoods of all, and now
the spiritual age of the Holy Spirit. De facto really means that the three ways the three
manifestations, this kind of complex way of understanding a unity from different viewpoints is
actually dissolved.
It becomes separate, each person of the Trinity becomes a separate entity, and that view from for
Bonaventure was heretical, he condemns it, now he acknowledges that he actually was Abbot
Joachim who was endowed with a spiritual prophecy. It is something only prophetic, in other words,
what seemed to here heresy, an intellectual question of thoughts and opinions now appears as some
divination about things to come, not specified any further. Retrospectively, it's Dante himself who is
legitimizing Joachim and therefore also legitimizing his own position in Canto XXXIII of
Purgatorio. Dante shares the view of the apocalyptic denuma of history, however, he refuses, he
rejects the idea that it's possible to establish a date for such an occurrence. Joachim appears now as
a visionary among them.
The other figure that I would like to say something about is Nathan the prophet for a very simple
reason, because Nathan as you probably know because it's very strange, why would Dante
include Nathan a prophet among there's Joachim of Flora who is prophetic, but why include
Nathan among these wise spirits? I mean, he could have chosen so many others. He could have
chosen those who actually have written and whose works are canonical in the Bible. He doesn't. He
chooses Nathan and the idea is, I think, a little bit of an autobiographical, a pun about Dante
himself, because Nathan, the word Nathan means "he who gives." In other words, Dante saw in the
name of Nathan his own name, and it pleases him, that's what Dante means, he who gives. Nathan
becomes a kind of mask for Dante himself. It is as if he were saying, had I another life or a
posthumous life in the heavenly apotheosis that's where I probably would like that's where I
probably will end up, certainly that's what I would like to be, so in Nathan there is a mask for
himself.
Now why what is this so peculiar about this encyclopedic ordering of the arts and the sciences?
It doesn't really differ very much from Aquinas, but it's interesting that it's Bonaventure who
articulates, who voices this kind of who celebrates all these names and all these arts because
Bonaventure is himself a theorist of the encyclopedia very much as Hugh of St. Victor, but he has
one crucial reflection at the beginning of his encyclopedia. He says that the activity of knowing and
learning is like going up and down a ladder. You might say, if you read that metaphor, you might
say well that's an extraordinary metaphor but it's the metaphor of the ladder of Jacob in the Bible,
which is where he probably found it. The ladder of Plato, that's where this idea that we ascend, the
mind ascends when we learn something, when we get educated the mind goes up and it actually can
go down.
The interesting thing about Bonaventure is that he goes on saying that as in a ladder the lowest rung
are always more important than the higher ones, because without those no one of us would be
capable to climb up the ladder, so the lowest, the lowly forms of knowledge, grammar the
external lights of the senses you see distinguishes his is a theory of knowledge as a proliferation
of lights, as a universe of lights, internal, external lights, internal lights, the lights of the senses, the
lights that come to us from books and the light of God and so on. So we are always going to be
enlightened in our process, but as we are enlightened the lowest lights are, first of all, self-
sufficient. There are those who may not be capable of ascending much higher in the along the
ladder than the first few rungs. There is already a self-sufficient knowledge that they can acquire.
The arts of to him the arts of poetry that's the lowest rung and yet that is its own self sufficiency
and then you can go up the ladder and really learn more but the interesting thing about the ladder
is that there is no sense, though it establishes a hierarchy, in that hierarchy the lower elements are as
crucial as the higher elements, because without the lower rungs you never really can go up to the
end.
So this is another image then of the finally let me just say with the Joachim, the inclusion of
Joachim, here we are getting into the erasure of strict barriers, strict boundaries between what is
heretical and what is canonical. I think this is the sort of openness, Dante's openness that somehow
reverberates with the lesson of Francis and Dominic, and therefore now, let me turn to those two
cantos. Keep in mind then as we read Canto XI, we are again I repeat in the Heaven of the Sun
and I don't know that the passage that I read to you from the pseudo Dionysus last time about the
divine names where the pseudo Dionysus goes on talking about why is the metaphor of the sun such
a fundamental image for the divine generosity.
This is as an image of the sun that always gives of itself without ever asking anything back so it's an
activity of purely pure generosity and I think that's a Franciscan image of also of poverty to
which I will talk about in a moment. The Canto XI, I repeat, ends with the extraordinary encomium
of Siger of Brabant; by a counterpoint Canto XI has an apostrophe against logical, legal forms of
knowledge. The kind of knowledge that tries to define the world in formulas and so Dante begins
this is Dante speaking on his own in his own voice, "Oh insensate care of mortals, how vain are
the reasonings that make thee beat thy wings in downward flight! One was going after law, another
after the Aphorisms, one following the priesthood and another seeking to rule by force or craft, one
set on robbery and another on affairs of state, one labouring in the toils of fleshly delights, and
another given up to idleness; while I, set free from all these things, was high in heaven with
Beatrice, received thus gloriously."

Chapter 3. Canto XI: Counterpoints; Orientation [00:21:40]

I think it's an interesting counterpoint between these icons of power that derive from the study of
low and logic, and then on the other hand, this Dante's own self reference to himself as free from
all of these concerns. I think this idea of freedom will be the dominant theme of Canto XI. Who
it continues then, "When each had come back to the point of the circle where it was before," the two
wheels of dancing old men, holding their hands around the sun, which is a metaphorical sun so
that the universe is not even is not heliocentric. Dante's universe they're going to move now
beyond the sun, "is stopped like a candle on its stand." And then there is a little prayer here and the
introduction of the two, Dominic and Francis, lines 30 and following: "The Providence that rules
the world with that counsel in which every created site is vanquished before it reaches the bottom-
in order that the bride of Him who, with loud cries, wedded her with His sacred blood should go to
her Beloved secure in herself and faithfuller to Him- ordained for her behoof two princes to be her
guides on this side and that. The one was all seraphic in ardour," and that's Francis, "the other, for
wisdom, was on earth a splendour of cherubic light. I shall tell of the one, since to praise one,
whichever we take, is to speak of both; for the labours where to one end."
That's really the formula that seals the sense of the interdependence of intellect and will of love and
knowledge and of the two voices. Now this is the what we call a hagiography or a legend, the
life of a saint, a saint's life of Francis, which is told by Aquinas, by the Dominican Aquinas. What
we are told is, first of all "Between the Topino and the water that falls from the hill chosen by the
blessed Ubaldo hangs a fertile slope of the lofty mountain from which Perugia feels cold and heat at
Porta Sole, and behind it Nocera and Gualdo grieve under a heavy yoke." It's an extraordinarily
localized representation of Francis' origin. It's a topography, he was born as you know in Assisi, but
it's almost as if he were just placing him in a specific place, near the gate that leads on the road
to Perugia; very precise and it's called Porta Sole, more about this in a moment.
"From this slope, where it most breaks its steepness, a sun," now we go from the toponymic, the
name of a place, the gate of the sun -to a metaphor for Francis as the sun. He is the sun, so we
are in the Heaven of the Sun and now Dante invests Francis with all the attributes of this solarity,
this continuous, steady giving of oneself as the sun does in the Neo-platonic imagery, the mystical
neo-Platonic imagery of the pseudo Dionysus. A sun rose on the world as this does sometimes from
the Ganges. As soon as we Dante has mentioned the specific place for Francis' birth, then the
coordinates of the geographic coordinates completely change. We go from the specific and local
to literally the global, the world of the Ganges, the Orient, something a little vaster. As if the sun,
Francis really acts between the concrete and local, and the widest possible reference.
"Therefore let him who makes mention of that place not say Ascesi," which means I rise, but it's
punning with Assisi, "for he would say too little, but Orient, if he would name it rightly." It's an
extraordinary image and two astronomical terms, the sun and the Orient for Francis. Francis appears
as not just as the sun does, as one who can and I'm playing with the text here a little bit but
not much one who orients us, one who is supposed to orient and re-orient us is born in Assisi and
yet disappears as if it were the East. What were his What Dante is implying, I think, is that for
those who go on the face of the earth and lose their ways then Francis becomes one who can tell
them how to find their way back wherever they are going. For those who do not know their way at
all, have never known the way, they are capable of discovering it.
He is providing this light, so what is this light that he provides? What kind of light does he bring
out? "He was not yet far from his rising," the metaphorics of the sun continues, "when he began to
make the earth feel some strengthening from his mighty influence; for," and now he gives the story
of Francis' life. Before I go there I just want to tell you that Dante and I brought a translation of a
poem that Dante knew that Francis is an extraordinary is a great poet. He's actually we
consider him the first poet in Italian, in the Italian language. I Just want to read a few stanzas from
the so called Canticle of Brother Sun so that you can see how Dante's own metaphorics derive
straight out of this Franciscan vision, Franciscan spirituality.
He begins, "Most high," it's a prayer, a Canticle of Brother Sun, "all powerful good Lord! Yours are
the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessing. To you alone most high do they belong, and no
man is worthy to mention your name. Praise be you my Lord with all your creatures, especially
Brother Sun who is the day and through whom you give us light, and it's beautiful and radiant with
great splendor and bears a likeness of you most High One. Praise be you my Lord through Sister
Moon and the stars. In heaven you formed them clear and precious and beautiful, praised be you my
Lord through Brother Wind."
He goes through all the four elements and part of the suggestiveness of this poem is that it's a song
of praise to God, clearly enough, but it is also we never know if Francis is thinking of these
elements: the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, death itself as the medium through whom he
can praise, or the cause on account of which he should praise, or the other agents; the Italian is very
ambiguous. "Por," for those of you who may know a little French or a little Spanish, for, by,
through, this is so there's a kind of extraordinarily choir and orchestration. The other thing that I
should mention is that finally we can understand the rhetoric of praise that is running through this
poem, but we also saw as describing the rhetoric of praise in Dante's Vita nuova when he finds out
that the best way of writing about Beatrice is really to write praise poems, not actually which he
distinguishes from flattery but praise poems, the poems of praise means in many ways rejecting all
sense of ownership.
Realizing that not the fact that one may know, the world doesn't mean that one owns it and also it
means that not knowing Beatrice is not just a cover to wish to own her, so the praise is as
disinterested and as free a mode of acknowledgement of Beatrice herself. Let's see how this
continues, this whole poetic vision of Francis continues with Canto XI.

Chapter 4. The Life of Francis [00:30:39]

Dante goes on giving us the life of Francis and he catches Francis in what is in what I would call
using the language of anthropology really, a liminal stage. You know what I mean by the liminal
stage? The world liminal comes from it's the Latin threshold or comes from the Latin for limit,
there are two words, in many ways very contradictory, but it has the power liman is one thing
meaning threshold, but also the word might also be limit, so the threshold may be a limit and the
threshold may also be an opportunity to cross, a way of going over. I call it Dante doesn't use
here; he does use the word limit several times, not in this context. Dante places Francis in a liminal
position that is to say, between and betweest two different orders.
On the one hand the world, and on the other hand, some kind of utopian idea that we never
which would be the order that he goes on to institute or some general vision about what the world
ought to be. He places Francis in between neither part of the world, nor part of this final utopia and
let's see what he does in this liminal position. That's where he catches him and look at these lines
here, "Still a youth," this is the biography of Francis modeled on a number of biographies that
existed at the time. "For still a youth he ran into strife with his father, for a lady to whom as to death
not willingly unlocks the door," which is an extraordinarily difficult line to translate. The Italian
really could be read to say unlocks the door of pleasure. "And before his spiritual court," and now
he uses a Latin phrase, which is a legal formula and has the value of a legal formula, coram patre,
that is to say he marries this woman, we don't know who she is yet, in the presence of his own
father, thus giving legitimacy to his act, the act of marriage.
"Coram patre he was joined to her and thenceforth loved her better every day. She, bereft of her
first husband," Christ, "despised and obscure eleven hundred years and more, remained without a
suitor till he came; nor did it avail when men heard that he who put all the world in fear found her
unmoved, with Amyclas, at the sound of his voice; nor did it avail her to have such courage and
constancy that, where Mary stayed below, she mounted on the cross with Christ. But, lest I proceed
too darkly, take now Francis and Poverty for these lovers in all I have said. Their harmony and
happy looks moved men to love and wonder and sweet contemplation and led them to holy
thoughts, so that the venerable Bernard first went barefoot and ran after that great peace and,
running, thought himself too slow. Oh wealth unknown and fruitful good!"
There is clearly a reversal, Francis marries poverty, and yet to have that marriage of Poverty we
have to understand what in a moment what that is. A lot of wealth, a lot of riches can be
produced, a clear turning of whatever intentions he may have had and the consequences of that act
of his. What is this representation of Francis? It's, I think, in this liminal position, Francis is shown
as he is turning upside down all the values that the world holds dear. He wants to marry nothing.
Poverty, to marry Poverty is to marry nothing. You marry to be you want to you yoked
yourself, you embrace owning nothing, but that marriage or that union appears as a sacramental act
so he is making fun, he is parodying marriage. Just let me be a bit more because I don't want to
imply at all any blasphemy here, but he's parodying even the sacrament of marriage, he is marrying
nothing.
It's not a legal person, some age in Poverty, it's just an idealization or an allegory for nothing, but
that is conducted, that ceremony, is conducted as if it were a sacramental act. Not only a
sacramental act, he's parodying the law, because he's marrying Poverty in the presence of his own
father. He undress he divests himself of all the clothes, which in the Middle Ages, as much as
now, always stands for some form of symbolic status. The way you dress according to the job you
want, they usually say, right? That is to say what I mean to say is that dresses, clothes are part of
a social set of values which Francis is flouting and parodying. We have we are in the presence of
the parody of legal language, sacramental language, even the language of love. At one point, the
language of sexuality, the idea of marrying Poverty to does not I changed the translation of
the phrase the way Sinclair, because it's a little bit torturous even in Italian, the way Sinclair has it
he says "none willingly unlocks the door," that unwillingly is the door of pleasure. Even
sexuality, which is certainly a value of the world, Francis will turn around.
This is a radical critique of the value system of the world. Call it a prophetic mode of abandoning
the idols of the world in favor of some kind of utopia or unexpected or really not clarified, not very
well described vision of how the world ought to be, but this is he rejects all of this so "She,
bereft of her first husband" "coram patre he was joined to her, and thenceforth loved her better
every day. She, bereft of her first husband, despised and obscure eleven hundred years and more,
remained without a suitor till he came; nor did it avail when men heard that he who put all the world
in fear found her unmoved, with Amyclas, at the sound of his voice; nor did it avail her to have such
courage and constancy that, where Mary stayed below, she," Poverty, "mounted on the cross with
Christ." She does something even better than what Mary does, "But lest I proceed too darkly, take
now Francis and Poverty for these lovers in all I have said."
"Their harmony and happy looks," this is another parody of the language of the amorous discourse
of medieval love poetry. They go on he just it's a dalliance with nothing, so they have now
finally an inclusion of an extraordinary non-value because that's what poverty is, something that
questions all values and it's a Franciscan idea of poverty. What do they mean by that? What did
Francis mean by this, by this idea of poverty, what is this poverty?
First of all, you know that this subject became part of an extensive iconographic representation. One
can think of the Giotto frescos, the cycles of, Franciscan cycles in Assisi, but all over Tuscany and
Umbria. It's not only unique to Dante's understanding, and Dante's insight, it's a sort of
representation and fascination with Francis. Another little detail that I should tell you is that Francis,
in Italian, is Franciscos, meaning that he is French, and there was the like Francesca, the other
Francesca, the other one who also understood a lot about love, but lost her way in Canto V. It really
means free, the word in English, you have the word "frank" which in many ways carries over the
resonance of the Latin word Franciscos.
Francis, true to his name, is now as being poor is absolutely free, there's no bondage to anything.
There's nothing that holds him to anything in the world, so this is one important, let's call it ethical
extension of poverty. What did they mean? What did the other Franciscans, like Bonaventure, who
was there listening to what Aquinas may say about the founder of his order, what did they
understand by that? Remember we talked about Dante certainly seems to have stressed the idea
of poverty being poverty in a very material bodily way, corporeal, physical. In this sense, I call it
prophetic in the sense that, as you know, what distinguishes the biblical prophets from other
prophets is that they usually choose to bear on their flesh the signs that they utter against the world.
If they want to speak about this infidelity of Israel they would marry a prostitute. If they want to
denounce the dissidence, heresies, and lacerations within the body politic of Israel they would even
go on cutting off an arm of theirs to dramatize on the flesh this idea of these prophetic
pronouncements that we're making.
This is part of what Francis then is doing here, and this idea that he's living Poverty it's not just
an allegory as an allegorical representation, it is something lived in the flesh; the literal and the
allegorical are now compressed, but there's more, what did what does, for instance, Bonaventure
think of what poverty is? Dante, I repeat, thinks about the material idea of poverty, so a way of
opposing avarice, a way of opposing prodigality, attachment or contempt for the values. We have
seen all of that before, but poverty to them also means poverty of language. Francis, the first one to
I've articulated, even that poem of his; repetitive, the same simple formulaic expressions, praise
be omnipotent it said, Oh Lord it said, repeated, it's a poverty of language, the poverty of our
thoughts, that which Dante at the beginning of Canto XI has been calling the "defective."
Remember that is the word that I did not stress when we were, "insensate care of mortals, how vain
are the reasonings." How "defective" the Italian original says how "defective," I hope some
translators pick up "defective" and make it and say that it's "defective" in the idea that they are
lacking, that they have nothing of their own, so that retrospectively you can understand what I'm
talking about that we cannot own the world, that this the world is a world of gifts that the
economies an economy of giving, constant giving, because the more you give and the less you
have of yourself, the more you are free and the more productive your own acts can become as were
the case of Francis.
This is not all that Dante will do with Francis this is now there is one little reference that I want
to mention. This is around lines 102 or so, Francis will go on trying to have this to receive a seal
of approval from the popes about the fraternity, the order, the confraternity, whatever that he
organized "When the company of Poor Brothers increased behind him whose wondrous life were
better sung in heaven's glory, the holy purpose of this chief shepherd was encircled with a second
crown by the Eternal Spirit through Honorius." Honorius agrees the Pope Honorius agrees to
recognize this new order. Now listen to this, that's really the point that I want to stop on for a while.
"And when in thirst for martyrdom, he had preached Christ and them that followed Him in the
proud presence of the Sultan, and, finding the people unripe for conversion and not being willing to
remain for no purpose, he had returned to the harvest of the Italian fields, then, on the rough crag
between Tiber and Arno, he received from Christ the last seal, which his members bore for two
years."
He's alluding to the famous story of the stigmata that Francis received; the body becomes a sign.
What I was trying to explain with the reference to the Hebrew prophets who dramatize their and
legitimize the validity of the message by an inscription of that message on the literal the
physicality of their own flesh and it's let's leave at that. The point though, that Dante is making,
this is the story of the stigmata, but it's also the story of Francis who tries to go and preach to the
Sultan. He fails on having the theological argument and the two the Sultan and Francis depart,
each along his way on his way and that's it. It's a story of that can be understood apparently as
a failure of Francis' message. At the same time, it is an extraordinary hermeneutical term that has
taken place in Dante's thinking. We have had, and we will have, celebrations of the crusades.
Now we have a story of an encounter between Christians and Muslims in terms of peaceful
language, peaceful speech, where the two exponents, or two of the exponents of the particular
beliefs can come together and encounter, and they can discuss. The Sultan says no, for him we are
not ripe, and for the Sultan probably says, well I don't think you know what you are talking
about and they leave. This is an extraordinary change in the dissemination of violence that had been
at the center of so much theological discourse and here Dante seems to be opting and following
Francis on a different route. This is, I think, an important change in the consciousness, the historic
understanding of the relationship between Christians and Muslims and their interpretations of the
crusade.
There is a further detail that I want to mention here. The detail is this detail about two geographic
coordinates in this canto. Now we have just read about Francis' trip to Egypt and the Sultan. A little
earlier Dante gives the refers to the birthplace of Francis by talking about the Ganges. In other
words Dante has is aware that there is a European world that we talked about last time, but there
are two other coordinates. One, a Hindu world of the Ganges and we shall see what the means for
him, and the other one is the Muslim world of the Sultan. He's acknowledging in many ways that
which is we probably may not be entirely familiar with this problem. He's acknowledging that
which the someone like Bonaventure had been discussing.
In 1273, Bonaventure, the man that we shall see in the next canto, traveled to Paris to give a number
of lectures at the University of Paris, he will die a year later in 1274, and they are called
Conferences. A number of conferences in which he just debates the question of the relationship
between what he calls these three cultures: Hindu, the Christian, and the Muslim, and tries to see in
what way they can be harmonized. He connects, it's Bonaventure, connects the Hindu religion with
joachism, in the sense that the Joachim of the third age, not complicated at all, you remember that
Joachim has this paradigm of history according to a tripartite structure: the age of the Father, the
Son, and the Spirit. The third age, which is his own age, the age when Bonaventure lives, when
Dante lives, is the age of the Spirit implies the elimination of all institutions.
The idea that the Spirit now is everywhere and there is no need for any hierarchy or any order.
Bonaventure says this is exactly the world of the Hindus who believe that God is everywhere, and
then he goes on talking about he, Bonaventure, talks about the Muslims for whose theologies are a
theology of an impassable distance between God a transcendence that nothing can really bridge
between a God who remains invisible and the world of every man here. Of course for him, the
mediation between the two is given by Christianity because with the idea of there is a
transcendence and at the same time an imminence of God in the transcendence of God. Dante is, I
think, echoing this text and these problems in the canto of Francis, so he places Francis between the
Ganges and Egypt, and places him as the one who is carving a new space, the space that he calls
that of poverty meaning freedom, meaning the will, meaning the way of love as a way of coming to
the knowledge of God.

Chapter 5. Canto XII: Life of Dominic [00:50:17]

Then I would like to move on to, very briefly, to Canto XII. Briefly, not because I am not I'm
insensitive to what Dante will do with Dominic in Canto XII, we really haven't got time, but I want
to mention to you a number of things. How the encounter with Bonaventure I'm sorry the
encounter with the description of Dominic told by Bonaventure really rewrites the previous canto.
There, in the previous canto of Francis where the marriage, parodic, kind of anarchic idea of the
valuelessness of all the worldly values. Here now, we have a different wedding, a different marriage
between Dominic and faith; between knowledge and theology if you want to put it at a very generic
and general level. Here too, there is the let me just go over with lines 45, "In that part," that's the
description of the legend of Dominic, the life of Dominic, "In that part where sweet Zephyr rises to
open the new leaves in which Europe," once again see how Dante's there is a kind of continental
imagination here, the Asia, Africa, and Europe, the three continents "in which Europe sees herself
reclad, not far from the beating of the waves behind which the sun, after his long flight, sometimes
hides himself from all men, lies favoured Calahorra."
You'll love this detail; I know that I can tell by the way the eyes of some of you smile when I
point this thing. Dante is talking about the birthplace of Dominic and places that which is where
it was, in the western part of Spain, there were the sun sets. Dominic becomes the counter to
Francis; he was born where the sun rises and now Dominic is within where the sun sets. So between
the two of them the whole movement of the sun, the translatio, the translation of faith, not the
translation of empires, not the translation of culture, the translation of faith seems to be
encompassed between the two of them. That which will make you smile is that Dante mentions, and
you can check, Francis' birth in the East where the sun rises at line 50 of Canto XI, and he mentions
the setting sun of Dominic in line 52 of Canto XII, as if there is a kind of this is a kind of little
touch, I think it's I find it a very amusing touch between them. To account for the difference in
proximity between the two, as if this movement also has a kind of the movement of the sun from
east to west on account of them has its own quickness, its own rhythm.
"In it was born the loving liegeman of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, gracious to his own and
pitiless to enemies; and his mind, as soon as it was created, was so full of living power that in his
mother's womb it made her prophetic. When the espousals between him and the faith were
completed at the holy font," here there is another marriage ceremony that counters the previous
marriage ceremony of Canto XI. I want to draw your attention to the use of these playful images,
the athletes of faith, the liegemen. In the previous canto, we had Francis, who I said, parodies all the
values of the world. He is called and that has really become a formula to describe both Francis
unless Dominic though, they are the so-called I'll give it to you in Latin and translate it. In
English we would call them the "clowns of the lord," lociulatories; they are the clowns,
lociulatories domini. The "clowns of the Lord," that is to say they are playing, they are playing at
the world; they play with the world. They bring in what we would call a perspective of play in the
world. They are making fun of the world, they are challenging the values of the world and in this
sense they bring out that which becomes the most impressive aspect of their theology, which is that
of a playful theology. We'll talk more about this.
The notion that God plays, that creation itself is a spectacle, I call it a "theodrama," the idea that
God is not it doesn't deprive the Divinity of its seriousness but makes that seriousness part of the
world of joy. That's the whole the aesthetics, the new aesthetics that Francis manages to release,
and Dominic manages also to release, this kind of playful idea of the world, a comedy. I tried to
explain to you from the very first day when we got together how complicated it was for me, at the
time, to explain why Dante calls his text a comedy because this is so sublime. It seems to be he's
talking about how the ordinary and plain man of the year, around the year 1300, manages to have
the most sublime of experiences. And this idea of course this is about the happy ending because
comedies are always the genre of happy endings. It is about the low level of experiences, about the
vulgar language that Dante uses, but the real and substantial reason for Dante calling his poem a
comedy, and for the readers using the attribute of divine, was exactly is exactly that; a way of
responding to this sense of the joyful quality of creation, that's the point.
For all the seriousness for all the horror that we have been witnessing through Hell and
Purgatory, joy seems to be, that we're told which Dante is moving. Not a tragic vision because once
you play of once you think of play you can no longer have the tragic vision because you
understand that the tragic vision is part of something larger. It is part it is vicissitudes, comedies,
and tragedies, elegies are all linked to the wheel of fortune in medieval iconography, so you keep
going around but they're all part of something really larger, which is this playful theology, this
theologia ludic that he has been encompassing, that he has been preparing for us. Let me just go on
with a few more details here, a couple of minutes and then this relationship now of the other
issue that really and retrospectively, the other issue that Dante is raising, let me just talk about this.
In the canto of Dominic, much more than he did in the canto of Francis, this is really a unique
moment. It is a representation in terms of language. It is as if whatever orthodoxy Dominic stands
for, because that's why the Dominicans the Dominicans were the intellectual arm of the Church;
they were, as I said, founded with a specific purpose of entering the universities and debating the
various points of view. They were the Aristotelians, they were the poets, they were traditionally the
troublemakers of they were the figures, the philosophers and so on; especially in Paris, that's the
university. There was a there is an idea of orthodoxy with Dominic and yet, here the whole
representation takes place in terms of language. Let me give you a couple of examples around lines
80, "Many a time his nurse found him silent and awake on the ground," this is part of this lodatio,
this encomium now of Dominic, "as if he said 'For this am I come'. O father of him, Felice," Felix,
"indeed! O mother of him, Giovanna indeed, if, interpreted, it means what they say!"
Dante is playing with etymologies here, the father is really happy; there is a relationship between
the name and his state of mind. And the mother is, meaning the one who is full of grace Giovanna,
the one who comes before is also, if you interpret it properly. That is to say, orthodoxy or heresy,
being its flip side, right? Heresy and orthodoxy; we could have been talking about Siger of
Brabant's heresy, we've been talking about Joachim's heresy, here appears as a question of language,
as a question of an order that is above all a grammatical order, and therefore, it means a kind of
correction or has a kind of ambiguity that you always assume, and you always presume, to be
present within the order of language.
Anything, in fact retrospectively I can say to you, that even the schisms of Inferno, where we saw
the poet Bertrand de Born, you remember that horrifying picture of the poet who holds in his own
hand like a lamp his own head and goes on talking to Virgil and Dante. Or, in that same canto, there
was the presence of Mohammed whose body seemed to be completely lacerated. Even the schisms
are questions of language, are questions Dante understands them as issues of language. Which
does not which only means this, to talk about language, I repeat, they are part of the
imponderable quality of language, the ambiguities of language, the force of language, and the
power of language.

Chapter 6. Question and Answer [01:01:24]

That's what I can tell you about these cantos; and let me stop here and see if there are questions that
I would most gladly hear, if not answer but please.
Student: Would Dante have faced any threat from the Church for placing Joachim in Paradise as
someone who
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is would Dante have faced some censorship,
probably, from the Church authorities for placing Joachim in Paradise? Actually no, not at all,
because the formula he uses here comes the Calabrian Abbot Joachim endowed with the gift of
prophecy more or less, that's the translation. It translates a Latin formula, the spiritu prophetico
totato, which was already used. He had been Joachim had already been exempted of the censure
of his thoughts that Bonaventure had voiced, and in the mass, in honor of Joachim they would use
that formula. So he's actually using a canonical formula, a church formula for his own, for
Joachim's own never happened, he's not a saint, never was a saint, but what Dante probably
that's what he did is he should be canonized. No, but the answer is ;and that's the reason why he
could not have faced any reprimands. Yes.
Student: You were talking about with St. Francis and sort of how Poverty and St. Francis as a
form of freedom. When he weds freedom he's or sorry, when he weds Poverty he becomes more
free, can we link that to or how can we link that, is my question, to Dante's his own poverty
and exile; is that meant to be linked? Are we supposed to be thinking about Dante having to depend
on, I guess, the charity of others?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Good question, the question is, I was talking about Poverty as
being a state of freedom in the canto of Francis. Are we supposed to also associate Dante's own fate
of poor, exile, beggar that he was during his exile in that description. That's the question. I would
say yes, of course, the Poverty I hope I explained means several things for Dante. Bonaventure
will go on thinking about poverty of language, poverty of philosophy, etc., but all of them
understand poverty in a very literal way, but all of them understand one thing that this kind of
poverty is really a description of the human condition to begin with. We are all poor, that's the
primary sense. We are all born defective and in need, whatever needs were, some of us go on being
needy, and we are, all our lives, so this is a general understanding of the idea of poverty.
Then there is a sort of the other side of this, and the other side is that it's actually a blessing
because it's the state of freedom. If this is really very much like what you expect to the
philosophical freedom, you know, without any cares. Even Horace I don't want to have wealth
and it's not worrying about having the cares about how the stock market is doing today or not doing,
so I want to be completely free of that and it's a state of freedom. Is Dante also thinking about
himself? Does it have a consolatory note for him to believe that after all I'm not alone? Yes, I would
say that that's the case. In his own life Dante, unlike Petrarch who really died a poet who follows
a few years after Dante, he really died one of the wealthiest men of his time by virtue of being a
poet, a writer, and so on, Dante never got to that point.
Student: I mean, I'm wondering if we should take it literally as sort of feelings about Poverty or is
it more like an idea like a sort of poetic escape into a perspective I guess that he had gotten in the
perspective of Poverty.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Should we take it literally or just as a poetic way of speaking? I
think that I answered that by saying but I think you're asking something else maybe, and then I'll
get to that since you are. I think I'm saying that this was really the reality of his life. A stand such as
that is bound to appear maybe, well, you know, you need a little bit of comfort and consolation, and
so you say it's a poverty but it really has the chrism of Francis' spirituality. I'm not trying to
diminish Dante's convictions. What I think you're really asking is, I don't know you're really asking,
I don't know, but I know what you are asking but there is another side to your question. Are you
asking me whether or not he was a Franciscan, for instance, is that what you're asking?
Because if you are that would be a very good question in the sense that there were a lot of ideas. We
don't have any evidence, but a lot of ideas that he became a member of the third order of the
Franciscans, a lay order of the Franciscans, so that he practiced therefore, truly, literally in his own
life, that which Francis himself had practiced and preached so maybe that's what probably if you
weren't asking that maybe you should have been asking that and I would have been I would have
said that. Other questions or we have a few minutes so yes.
Student: Is the story of the Sultan supposed to revise our view of Dante's relation Dante's
view of Islam that we took away from the Inferno, from the encounter with Mohammad.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: That's a very good question. Is the view of Francis going to the
Sultan supposed is it meant to revise the view that we may have formed of Dante's attitude
toward Islam reading Inferno XXVIII? I think so. My answer is that I that's why I was stressing
this, that there is a sort of a radical turning that takes place in Francis, operates a change in the way
that Christians and the Muslims can go on thinking of their encounter. It's no longer through armies,
if it's through peaceful discourse. From this point of view, Francis carries on a tradition that started
with Peter the Venerable, there were a few other theologians who had a kind of view that was not
through wars that this kind of dialogue could take place, if war is a form of dialogue, I'm not sure of
course.
Dante acknowledges that in Francis, and I think that he dramatizes it, just as he is dramatizing the
sense of the awareness, which was very central to Bonaventure, of the relationship of the three, to
him, the three religions: the Hindus, the Christians, and the Muslims. And retrospectively, it forced
me to now say things about schism that I did not say when we were reading Canto XXVIII, that
schism we have a presence there of, you remember, all forms of schism; the religious schism
with a friar who decides who is really a joachist, by the way, Dolcino. There was the poet who, by
the power of his words, Bertrand de Born, the Provencal poet divides father from son, the king from
the son, and therefore breaks the unity of the body politic, the idea that the king's two bodies and the
famous formula of the book of the great historian [inaudible] so that he broke that kind of unity.
There is then an allusion to a story from Lucan, one of the soldiers Curio, who broke away from
Pompeii and he had, from Caesar, and he had his own tongue cut off. It's clear that schism is to be
understood linguistically.
I am not revising my view but now I can tell you what I always thought was underlying the
representation of even Islam, which means that even the interpretation of Mohammed in XXVIII,
horrifying though as it is, it really appears as if Mohammed was the one who was doubling the
existing unity that's it, through the power of speech, that's the view. It's a horrifying
representation, that does not take anything away from that, but clearly you see that the Dante's
understanding of these issues is a little bit more nuanced than it may at first sight appear. When we
come later in the Heaven of Justice, and before we get to Heaven of Justice, Dante goes on talking
about the warriors and he begins with Joshua, the hero who brings about the destruction of Jericho
etc. By the end he also mentions the crusaders, so there is a kind of ambiguity that I would say that
he still values what he thinks is the heroic life.
Nonetheless, after I say this, let me just state another point about Dante. That's true, that clearly he's
talking from a Christina standpoint, there's no question about this. But the underlying spirituality of
Dante is what I call the "spirituality of the desert." Dante's truly the "poet of the desert" in the sense
that in the desert you have modes of a quest that where everyone is really going, because wherever
we are going, we are always going to the absolute. Whatever journey we may take it's always the
same journey and so the spirituality of the quest is sort of I won't say overhauls, but at least
tempers this idea of Dante being so strict and firm in this universe of degrees and distinctions that
he sets up. I don't know if I clarified this for you, okay. Thank you so much.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 19 - Paradise XV, XVI, XVII [November 11, 2008]
Chapter 1. Canto XV, XVI and XVII: Self and History [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Last time we looked at the cantos of the sun, which is the canto of
arithmetic and so and we discussed actually the variety of philosophical strengths, theological
and philosophical ideas that compose Dante's circle of knowledge, this encyclopedic compass or
what's worth knowing.
Today, we move into the Heaven of Mars, which is as you know, the god of war, the name of the
planet, and it's the heaven of music. Dante links Mars and music because harmony, out of the belief
that harmony is the meeting point or the result of discordant elements, a kind of concordia, a
concord, an attuning of hearts reached through discordant elements. The discordant elements can be
different sounds; it can be the passions within us that need tempering and so on. This canto is
can be read prophetably and you can do some of this on your own in conjunction I will allude to
it in passing in conjunction with canto, for instance, XV of Hell; within XV, XVI, and XVII of
Paradise. You could read it; XV was the encounter with Dante's own ancestor Cacciaguida, and so
inevitably the reference to Brunetto Lantini literally imposes itself on us, it compels us, we are
compelled to draw parallels and see differences between the two ancestors who claim, make
different claims on this descendant intellectual and dynastic descendant who is Dante himself.
You could also look at it from other, many other points of view. The point of view, for instance, of
the other references to war and the kind of the clashing sounds throughout Inferno that Dante
produces. If I were to give a title to my remarks today, which I really don't because I think it's the
variety of suggestions coming from a canto takes over the desire to be too schematic and thematic,
but if I were to give a title today I think it's really very encompassing, I would call it "Self and
History." These seem to the most the strongest questions that Dante raises. They're not the
terms, the question self and history the relationship between the two may be new to us here, but
we certainly have been talking about history before. The last time we did was in the discussion of
Canto VI of Paradise, where Dante gives in the Heaven of Mercury Dante gives this overall
history of Rome, its humble beginnings and then the deconstruction of the empire and the crisis of
the empire. So that's really one thing that you know.
The issue of self in itself is something we have been discussing ever since we started the Vita
nuova, with the idea of a lyrical self, of a self who removes himself, as you recall. That's what we
mean by a lyrical self, removes oneself from the world of history, the contingencies of time, the
viscous realities of the city, and takes shelter in the chamber of his imagination in the world of his
ideas, his dreams, and memories, and there he constructs his own self. That was the point of the Vita
nuova.
When we began reading the Divine Comedy I insisted on the autobiographical focus with which at
least the Divine Comedy begins. This is his story, this is his unique experience, the pilgrim's own
Dante's own unique experience and that seems to have come to an end with Purgatorio XXX when
finally the novel of the self is sealed. As you remember, with the mentioning of the name Dante,
then a new phase begins in Dante's construction, which is more educational, more speculative,
which is really the world of Paradise.
But so, we talk about self and history in a way that maybe Dante's never quite coupled the two
terms before; he does so in Canto XV, XVI, and XVII of Paradise. This is really the double focus
around which everything moves. Let me give you I will give you a reading of the various details,
but let me give you an idea of what I have in mind first of all and the way of thinking about this
issue. I want to draw your attention to the presence of some mythic, mythological figures that Dante
whom Dante is evoking and they are very different among themselves, but they're all it's a
way of reflecting on Dante's own idea of selfhood, Dante's own relationship to an ancestor, his own
private history, who in turn has had a very complex and for Dante nobling relationship to history.
He is a crusader; he fought in the Second Crusade of 1149 under the Emperor Conrad; he is proud
of this belonging to the crusader, to fight as a crusader. A version of the relationship one has or
thinks one has with history, both Cacciaguida's and Dante's own relationship to his grandfather.
Let me tell you first of all these mythic figures and then we'll talk about them. Dante is
beginning with Canto XV I will just remark in passing, I will not I will leave it to you do more
diligently than we could do it here. The presence of musical metaphors, which is not surprising, in
the Heaven of the Music, "Gracious will, into which " this is the beginning of Canto XV,
"Rightly-breathing love, always resolves itself, as does cupidity into an ill-will, imposed silence on
that sweet lyre." This is the The soul becomes a kind of musical instrument, the sweet lyre and
stilled the sacred strings which the right hand of heaven tightens and relaxes and so on." Then this,
"And the gem," at one point, this is line 20, "And the gem did not leave its ribbon, but ran across by
the radial strip and seemed fire behind alabaster. With such affection did Anchises' shade reached
out, if we may trust our greatest muse, when in Elysium he knew his son," and then in Latin, a
quotation, "O sanguis meus, o superinfusa gratia Dei, sicut tibi cui bis unquam coeli janua reclusa?"
To whom has this privilege ever been given of having the gates of heaven open to him twice, "the
light spoke thus." So this is the first mythical reference.

Chapter 2. Mythic Figures and the Exilic Self [00:07:39]

We are really we could just say, well Dante of course at the very beginning of Inferno makes a
reference to Paul and Aeneas disavowing any strict connection with them. You remember when he
resists the call to this huge risky enterprise of going through hell that comes to him from Virgil. He
says, I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul, why should I do what you are calling me to perform and Aeneas
is the one who had visited Hades to meet the shade of his father, Anchises, now recalled here, and
of course Paul is the who had been taken wrapped to the third heaven, meaning a third mode of
vision that allowed him to and kept quiet about it, to see God face to face. Anchises, the
encounter between Anchises and Aeneas here, stands for a sort of relationship of Aeneas that
Aeneas has with history. Aeneas goes to Hades in order to find out what the purposes are for his
journeying from Troy toward an unknown land and he discovers it's a way of Anchises discovers
that he from his own father the presage, the prophetic if you wish announcement of what it is for
him to be part of history.
Somehow a definition of self, that's what you find with Anchises and the Aeneid, can be understood
as that. The sense that one how does one belong in history? One belongs in history as part of a
providential pattern as the idea that this was a destined empire that he, Anchises, has to found, and a
new history would start, so that he confirms his attachment to the dead father and yet he starts now
as the point of beginning for a new history. This is one way of understanding an epic, the epic
account, a myth of one's own self belonging in the world of history. This is mythical. We move on,
and it's really a big sort of a reversal of this. I will come back into Canto XVI; Dante gives a
chronicle of the City of Florence. That is to say, first of all, he's making problematical to us the idea
of where are we to understand this as self? This is it's not clear what we are to understand as a
self. In the Vita nuova the self is this nexus of memories, fantasies, and a will to write poetry. In that
sense the text constitutes oneself, into a self. I am myself; I'm the author of this text. This becomes a
point of reference and this is what I am. The image and poetry that I give of myself gives you an
idea of who I am. It doubles me, it perpetuates me, it's a poetic version of self, but we don't know
yet what are we to take as a self.
Anchises has a different understanding of himself. I am who I am only because I belong to a larger
pattern of history. This larger pattern of history is going to be me as a founder, a founder of a new
way of looking at the world, the founder of Rome and he gets the message from his own father. In
Canto XVI, and I will not go into this as I'm pursuing the theme of the mythic references, Dante
goes on really thinking about writing a chronicle as I will say in the City of Florence. One, Florence
is famous for its chroniclers, the beginning of the Middle Ages, and so is history then the other
problematical notion to be understood as the loco, events, or is to be understood the way Anchises
understands it, as a myth that somehow has a sort of paradigmatic value and which can regulate and
also arrange. We can go on arranging our lives according to the demands of that myth. Dante will
not answer this question directly here, but he does talk about all the Florentine families and talks
about them in an elegiac manner. That is to say they're all decayed, they're all finished and extinct,
so whatever value this history may have it's an elegiac commemoration of the past. Cacciaguida, by
the way, is very elated at the idea that the son, the grandson, the descendant wants to find out about
the past.
We move then into Canto XVII, where I think we find something about this whole issue about
history and the self. It begins in a peculiar manner, look at the beginning of Canto XVII, the
reference is really it's a long periphrastic construction, a long turn of phrase to for the pilgrim
to describe himself in terms of Phaeton, the famous figure as you know, from the classical myth
who challenges Apollo. We saw him in the corresponding Canto XVII of Inferno. There was an
illusion there to Phaeton so a little touch of the symmetry of cantos but that's really secondary at
this point. Look at what the scripture is, "Like him who came to Clemente, to be reassured about
that which he had against himself." The Disowning, first of all, is the story of the uncertainty of
Phaeton's descendents, that his father was Apollo, so he reassured himself, "Him who still makes
fathers weary with their sons." This is in the Canto of Cacciaguida. What is the real relationship?
That's what that is asking. That I have to this noble heroic figure of whom I'm proud, but what is the
actual relationship that joins me to them?
"Such was I and such I was perceived to be both by Beatrice and by the holy lamb that had changed
its place for me before." He's happy that he seems to reaffirm this genealogical line so history
now becomes no longer a chronicle, becomes now a genealogy. Can we establish some certainties
that we belong into a genealogical line? Can that really account for us and for who we are? This is
the issue that Dante's raising. The figure of Phaeton is a tragic figure because it introduces the
possibility of, and Dante says this, that's what makes fathers weary of their sons all the time. The
idea that the son wants to outdo the father, wants to go beyond the father, and the idea of tragic
transgression that it can exist and therefore breach that line of continuity between inter
generations, across the generations. That's one of the myths.
The other one is much more tragic than before. Canto XVII, as you know, goes on discussing
among other things the let me read the passage. I think Dante says it much more sparingly, that is
to say without to my despair he says it much better than anybody else can, "Contingency,"
this is line 36, "Contingency, which does not extend beyond the volume of your material world is all
depicted in Eternal Vision." This is another way, still another way of understanding history. That
there is a contingency that the world of contingency can be subsumed within a larger transcendent
paradigm, that seems to be the order of necessity. The contingent world is linked to the volume
where all things are present in the eternal vision. Yet, that's not man's derive necessity anymore than
does a ship that dropped is there some autonomy to contingency or things determined by the
order of necessity downstream from the icing which is mirrored. "From thence as sweet harmony,"
last time I mentioned it musical language, musical lexicon abounds here, "comes from an organ to
the ear, comes to my sight the time that is in store for thee."
I enjoy very much the implicit connection between time and music. Music becoming the metaphor
that makes audible time itself. Time is constitutive of music of course but it really makes it it's an
acoustic translation of the silent arrow of time and now this is the other, the third mythological
reference, Anchises, the tragic of Anchises who recognizes himself in the history and in the break,
in the continuity with his father and in the break with Troy from his father, from Troy and the
beginning of a new, let's say, history. Phaeton, who turns against his father and burns the heavens in
doing so, that is the famous metamorphosis of the origin of the Milky Way. As you know, the Milky
Way was understood as the scorched heavens, a cosmological disaster that was happening on
account of the rivalry between father and son, and now the third is Hippolytus, Hippolytus, the
Ephedra, the story of Ephedra and I have to tell you. "As Hippolytus was driven from Athens on
account of his cruel and perfidious stepmother, so must thou be driven from Florence."
This is Cacciaguida who announces the exile as the fatality that is hovering over Dante and for
which he has to prepare himself and exile you see what it implies also a sort of necessary
detachment from one's family, one's country, one's whole all the possible lines that tend to join us
and limit us too. Dante is not quite Anchises, he's not out to establish an empire, he's not like the
Phaeton, he does not want to overdo, at least literally the father, and now let's see who is
Hippolytus, "As Hippolytus was driven from Athens on account of his cruel and perfidious
stepmother," Phaedra, "so must thou be driven from Florence. This is determined, nay is already
contrived," look at the difference between determine and contrived, and the conjunction between
the order of eternal, the eternal destinies and the contrivance, the order of contingency, the
maneuvers, infernal maneuvers against the pilgrim, "and will soon be accomplished by him who
meditates it in the place where Christ is bought and sold all day. The blame, in the common cry,
shall follow the injured side, as always, but the vengeance shall be testimony to the truth that
dispenses it. Thou," that's the announcement of the exile, "Thou shalt leave everything loved most
dearly, and this is the shaft which the bow of exile shoots first. Thou shalt prove how salt is the taste
of another man's bread and how hard is the way up and down another man's salary another man's
stairs."
Excuse me. Here there is a terrible mistake that Sinclair makes because Dante is very careful, line
60 he writes, lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale, which means going down and up and your
translator my translator here has it the other way around because he's following a logic which is
we'll call it naturalistic logic. You go to the palace of the duke, you go up, you climb the stairs,
and then you come down after you have been begging for some charity and then you have taken
your morsel of bread, then you can go down. But that's not what Dante says. He says you first go
down and then you go up, and I hesitate to gloss it for you because I think it's a little bit clear the
kind of thing he means that for him to go up is really a descent, was lowering himself. It's a little bit
of it would seem to be a descent into pride into humility but at the same time because he's
reversing the natural order, the ordinary order of the action; it's really an ascent into pride. For me to
go up here is it's like going down and I'm really degrading myself. It's a very interesting line,
acknowledgement of a sense of gratitude, a sense of the spiritual ascent being inevitably at first a
descent into the self, and then becoming an ascent. It's really turns the whole thing around, was
up and down, another man's stairs and "that which shall weigh heaviest on thy shoulder is the
wicked and senseless company with which thou shall fall into that valley, which shall become
wholly ungrateful, quite mad and furious against thee."
The story of Hippolytus is the story of the stepmother, to go back to this idea of self, is the story of
a stepmother who is trying to seduce Hippolytus; she's married to Theseus, and he runs away. The
family becoming the destructive the form of the destructive desires within that family forces him
to go away, run away and dies. You wonder why Dante is taking on and thinking of this tragic figure
to compare himself too as an exile, he had this potentially destructive and tragic consequences that
are happening to Hippolytus, and at any rate, we have three great images by which Dante is
thinking about what is the self and how is the self to be determined. How does the self enter the
world of history? What examples did he give? Can we talk about any of the examples in the past?
I think that this is really the extraordinary the burden actually of a text that I have been talking
about in the past and it's the Confessions of St. Augustine. That text is about the question of how the
self is related to history and Dante disagrees with Augustine. For Augustine, the self is one that
takes refuge in the interiority of oneself and goes on. At the time of the conversion he can now
rejoin history and that is thought to Dante clearly, a way of entering history.
The other motif that you can have is the motif of the the other model you have is the model of
Cacciaguida who goes onto a self-sacrifice of himself for the benefit of a larger cause. The cause of
the Christian crusade in Jerusalem; then there is the Aeneid that represents the idea of how the self
enters the world of history, its political activity and Dante really sort of rejects all of them. This
prophesy of exile with which Canto XVII ends gives an entirely different twist to the self's
relationship to history. I inevitably I will belong in history. There is no other way, Dante says, for
the self to exist if not by measuring oneself with the historical, the pressures of historical realities,
but my own relationship to it is not that or that of belonging as Aeneas does into the world of
history with feeling that I am the political world is going to be my way out of this maze. It's not
going to be the one like Phaeton and it's not going to be the one represented by Hippolytus. It's the
exilic self; an idea of a self is an art of dislocation from the world of history.

Chapter 3. Different Mode of Historiography [00:25:14]

But then how are we to understand this dislocation? Is dislocation a way of actually removing
oneself altogether? Or just saying that I'm out of place, just saying that I'm out of time and
somehow I have a relationship to history which is maybe polemical, maybe arguably constructive
and if so what is the way? I think that we have to reread now the three cantos in some detail and we
come up with an answer. You see then what this what the issues here are. Let me start with Canto
XV and see what Dante is specifically doing above and beyond this overall pattern that he's putting
forth in canto in the various cantos. You will see how in Canto XV the let's go back to Canto
XV and you will see that the relationship to Cacciaguida is also played etymologically. How often
Dante's punning with the metaphor of wings; in Italian it's ali, Alighieri, Aligher, that was the name,
the bearers of wings so the for instance line 52, "I speak of thee, thanks to her who clad thee with
wings for the lofty flight," or a little later on line 70, "I turned to Beatrice, and she heard before I
spoke and smiled to me, a sign that made the wings grow on my will," and later line 80 many, many
times. He stops after the third time. "For the reason that is plain to you, are not equally feathered in
their wings," etc.
The first thing that they do though with the exchange in the encounter with Cacciaguida is focus
on the City of Florence of old, an invocation of the golden age, a certain golden age where a kind of
utopian construction. These are the lines, "Florence," page line Canto XV lines 94-97 and
following, "Florence, within her ancient circle, from which she still takes tierce and nones," these
are the times of the day rung by the bells of the nearby church, "abode in peace, sober and chased.
She had no bracelet, no tiara, no embroidered gowns, no girdle that should be seen more than the
wearer. Nor yet did the daughter at her birth put the father in fear, for age and dowry did not part
from the due measure on the one side and the other. She had no houses empty of family, nor had
Sardanapalus yet come there to show what could be done in the chamber." This is a kind of inferno
evocations, so these are you are really thinking of Cleopatra in Canto V, you are thinking of
Semiramis, all these figures of the chaos of the appetites and they are being recalled now in this
context "Not yet did your Uccellatoio" and so on, and goes on talking about Cacciaguida's own
birth.
Let me focus a little bit on this the metaphors of the of Florence. First of all, Florence is
evoked within a closed circle of self sufficiency called "within her ancient circle." The circularity of
the city also implies a kind of plentitude and a sort of boundary. Dante does not have an idea of an
expanding city, just he enjoys the projects this idea of a city held within its own perimeter, "from
which she still takes tierce and nones," the language of space and the language of time follows, as if
everything could be measured and everything could be interrelated. One is interrelated with the
other. Then this language of Florence is a woman, sober, chaste, abode in peace, sober and
chaste, implying that here at least he believes and it's lingering in him the memory of the famous
idea of the so called body politic that you have heard. The idea of the organic structure of the city as
made of interdependent parts just as space and time indicate the interdependent coordinates within
which the life of the city can be recalled.
Now this is followed in turn by a sequence of Anaphorus, all in the negatives, "she had no
bracelet, no tiara," this is the city, dressed like a woman." Dante you know that one way of
thinking about cosmetics is also to think of it they used to think of cosmetics as bad rhetoric,
perverse forms of seduction by means of which one could disfigure the natural continents and
beauty of the human form. So Dante goes on in a sense by repeating these negatives, literally
dispossessing, literally stripping the woman of all the superfluities, all these complications and
bring the city back to its own simplicity, its original chastity and simplicity let me just see this
passage, "She had no tiara, no embroidered gowns, no girdle, not yet did the daughter at her birth
put the father in fear, as she had no houses empty," etc. This is the golden age.
Does Dante really believe though in this myth of the golden age? This is what we call there is a
rhetorical phrase for this sort of move. Praising the bygone times, it's the so-called laudatio, that
means praise of the past, which is more of a rhetorical strategy to denounce the imperfections of
today. In effect, Dante has a radically polemical view of the utopian spirit. This idea of a perfection
that or the claim of a perfection that we push back into the past because it's no longer with us,
but we want to fantasize about and nonetheless he is still he preserves it because utopia can
become a kind of normative idea by means of which we can alter the configuration of our own
contingencies, our own history. It may utopias don't exist, they may even be dangerous some
people can claim. A lot of interesting figures in the history of ideas claim that utopias are dangerous
constructions because they ferment illusions about who we are, and yet they become for Dante
necessary because we in the light of those ideas we can go on altering what we perceive as the
degradations of our own times.
Of course this myth of the golden age of Florence of the past literally disintegrates when seen in
contrast with the reality of Dante's life as an exile which is going to await him in the future. That is
going to be so it's exile as the realistic perspective of his being in history. He makes a virtue of it.
It's not a suffering as we are going to see, I'm just let me just continue with my thought. He
doesn't see that as a punishment, it induces suffering, but it becomes a virtue and we shall see why it
becomes a virtue. In effect, it will become a paradigm in which we can all recognize ourselves.
In Canto XVI this myth of there's also this golden age of Florence, there's this illusion that it
abode in peace, they lived in peace, whenever I hear the language of peace I do hear, I do overhear
the echo of Jerusalem, the city of peace, and that's what makes it interesting, so it's a typology of
another city, a golden the great time, the golden age of the past is a kind of what the prophets
would always recall as the peace time of Jerusalem that they had that the Jews themselves had
lost and kept on commemorating in the history. What makes this conjunction very strong is that
to me is that in Canto XVI Dante goes on, first of all, talking about this at the chronicles. What is a
chronicle? How does the chronicle change history? The chronicle reduces it's a mode of
historiography, a different mode of historiography.
The place where you can find these modalities of history is really Boethius, who writes the
Consolation of Philosophy, at the center of which he figures the Wheel of Fortune. You remember
the Wheel of Fortune; there's this blindfolded woman who revolves, who rotates this wheel, and
which means that we who are always on the shifting curve of the wheel will be up and down, so that
a kind of historiography that derives from this Boethian insight is that of writing the lives of
families that ascend and descend. Note, the other mode of historiography, should be the
historiography of the fall of empires, for instance, Augustine. So there are two historiographic
models. The one that you available in the City of God, we are really told about the fall of the
Persian Empire, the fall of the Roman Empire in a few pages, kind of given sort of in a much more
detailed way, but this is really the idea.
On the other hand, Dante goes to another historiographic model which is that of chronicle. The idea
that history is reducible to the events, the local events and circumstances of one's own life. He
recalls all the families to the joy of the grandfather who is you can understand the pleasure of
memory. He shuttles back and forth between, in memory, between one item and the other, recalling
everything and Dante soon discovers that he does not quite belong, that that kind of history does not
really account for who he is and who he wants to be above all, and that somehow his definition of
self will depend on a certain idea of the future and not of the past. I am trying to go back to this idea
of who the self is and what is history, and how are we to understand history.

Chapter 4. Language [00:37:08]

Here, to continue with the notion of Jerusalem, which I have not which I bracketed a little bit
and gave you a little digression on history, Dante goes on talking about a language, turn to Canto
XVI line 50 please where he again talks about it's all about Florence. "All who were there at the
time between Mars and the Baptist," the mythology of Florence, cities, not only you recount stories
of families, you have to recount stories of the predominant, the sovereignty of mythologies that
control our own self understanding. We tend to understand ourselves in the light of presiding myths,
of imaginative myths above us, so there's Mars who's the god of Florence before the Baptist, John
the Baptist replaced him. This is the account about the shifting mythology of the city, "Mars the
Baptist able to bear arms was a fifth of the number now living," this is really an accounting, a
chronicler's precision and accounting of Florentine local history. "But the citizenship, which is now
mixed with Campi and Certaldo and Figline," and so on.
That language of mixture which later becomes confusion and Dante will call it a confusion when he
has to give a diagnosis at the top of page line 67. Dante has to give a goes into a diagnosis of
the crisis of the city, "The mixture of peoples was ever the beginning of the city's ills, as food in
excess is of the body's." Once again the connection between he's talking about the malaise of the
city by the connection between body and cities. Cities grow and decay and get sick because of what
he calls the confusion. First of all he called the mixture, en confusio, is the other name for Babylon.
When you have to etymologize Babylon into the romance languages and in English, it's confusion,
so that the two myths of the city that Dante has in mind is Jerusalem for Florence and then Babylon
for Florence of today. The two myths of the cities are not antithetical; they are both possible within
the same body politic. Florence can look like Jerusalem or it can look like Babylon according to the
way the moral life of the city is lived out.
This is something that Dante will preserve, but it really implies that the city, the political world is
one which one has to shape all the time, that you cannot there is no definite metaphor or emblem
to define a particular city. A city can change its very identity, it can become like it can be like a
Jerusalem as it was in the old or it can be like Babylon now. The city involves us, we are involved
in the city's history in the way of making it according to our own aspirations, our own ideas; we
share in the shaping and construction of the city. This is no longer the perspective of the chronicler,
it's the perspective of Dante as the poet; so it's a critique of the inadequacy of the chronicle's view
of what history could be.
Now we go back to Canto XVII where once again and I'm going to I will not go up to our you
remember it comes to Phaeton and a rivalry with the father. Dante's saying if I don't belong to the
city and I and city and families go on decaying and disappearing what is the true relationship that
I have to this man who is actually directing me, and unveiling for me that which the future that
which I have to expect from the future. These are the kind of questions that he's very carefully
raising, so we go back to the famous description of Dante's exile where we describe here, "Thou
shalt leave everything loved most dearly," lines 55, "loved most dearly, and this is the shaft which
the bow, the bow of exile shoots first." The condition, the harshness of exile could not be
crystallized in sharpest terms. The severance, the separation of self from family as apparently as a
punishment at this point. "Thou shalt prove how salt is the taste of another man's bread."
Those who think that here Dante is finding a little bit mildly comical relief in remembering the fact
that in Florence they do not use salt in their bread, but anywhere else around we have a frequent
flyer to Italy who knows very well this little history, but I don't think that it's all that comical. I think
it's the bread, it's the most sacramental of foods that he's talking about and then we shall see how he
picks up the idea of bread in a moment. It's just not a metaphor there, "Thou shall and how hard
is the way up and down another man's stairs. And that which shall weigh heaviest on thy shoulder is
the wicked and senseless company." The word picks up the metaphor of the bread because company
means, and that which it simply means the sharing of bread with others, so bread is truly
sacramental in the sense that it adjoins and brings about the unity of the body of the body politic.
What Dante's saying is that it's a reflection on his own life, a literal reflection of his own life. He
went into exile as you know in the year 1302, and for a number of years he went on at least two or
three years, plotting along the side of his other fellow exiles the return to Florence and the
destruction of the enemies who had banished them. Really a plot of revenge in order to restore what
they saw as justice. Dante very quickly understood that this was the way to absolute destruction, so
he just from then on moves like a shabby derelict. He represents himself limping at the beginning of
Inferno and that is really the way we can we are asked by him to imagine him as he goes when
he's talking about exile. We are not talking about living in some kind of isolated splendor in some
court or other. It literally means going from place to place begging, so this is punishment for him,
and yet, let's see what happens, "With which thou shalt fall into that valley which shall become
wholly ungrateful, quite mad and furious against thee."
He is an exile to the exiles. Both the Guelfs and Ghibellines distrust him and take their distance
from him, "but before long they, not thou shall have the brows red for this. Of their brutish folly
their doings shall give proof, so that it shall be to thine honour to have made a party by thyself."
What an extraordinary line to be absolutely on your own, "a party to thyself." This should make you
should give you some perplexity, to say the least, because you may remember that the Divine
Comedy begins with the representation of the so called neutral angels, and those neutral angels were
angels who wanted to be neither with God nor against God, but they want to be by themselves. You
remember how I pointed that out to you, that for Dante this was the most despicable of conditions
and choices, though it seems to be non-choice. One is really choosing anyway, even when we are
not choosing we are choosing and he is; he was separating that to him it's despicable not to take
sides, to sit on the fence, and now he seems to attribute that very condition to himself.
But to you it will be to your honor to be a party to thyself, and not only we did not read it, but
those of you who were so taken with the poem, you can go and read Canto VIII of Paradise, where
Dante will ask one question he to the soul that he meets he says, is it right for a man in the city to
be a citizen? Yes, he says, and I don't even want to ask why; it's so clear that has it needs no
justification, no explanation, you have to be part of the belong to the world where you are, and
yet now he takes the other side. He has to be by himself. What does it mean to be by himself? Is that
a kind of neutrality he's imagining? Is that it's really the condition of exile I think that he's really
describing the destitution, the loneliness, the severance of the self from others, but even that can
become a condition that triggers a new form of relationship.
The exile is still part of the community and let's see how he is thinking of this. I don't want to
this is his this is now the specific prophecy of what's in store for the exiled. I think it retrieves, in
this sense I mean that Dante's bringing about a transformation of the idea of exile from what seemed
to be a punishment into a virtue. There is such a thing as a virtue of exile. The language with which
Dante presents the world to come for him, the future, this is his future, it's not the past, history then
is understood as above all futurity. We are here oriented to the future, the only real time that we
have, we don't have it yet, but we can it's the time of one's projects, it's the time in which one can
really define oneself. I'm not really my past so there is I have some contact with the past, my
memories and my memories can tell you me where I'm going but then a catastrophe occurs.
The need to sever yourself from anything that you know, and you love most dearly family, city,
loyalties, your habits, your bread all of these details here are given and this is what he finds.
"Thy first refuge, and inn," the inn as those of you who read, it's an interesting metaphor in the
medieval literature. Those of you who read Chaucer, is there anybody here who reads Chaucer? The
Canterbury Tales, of course, it's the story of pilgrims and the inn becomes the station the
temporary dwelling of people who are on the road and always moving. It's really one of the most
welcome images in the medieval imagination, the inn, the provisional comforts for the night that the
inn offers.
Anyway, "'Thy first refuge and inn thou shalt find in the courtesy of the great Lombard," this is the
gentleman of Verona, the one gentleman of Verona who houses him and hosted him for a while,
"who bears on the ladder the sacred bird, and he will hold thee in so gracious regard that, of doing
and asking between you two, that shall be first which with others come after. With him thou shalt
see one who at his birth so took the impress of this mighty star that his deeds will be renowned. The
people have not yet taken note of him, because of his youth, for these wheels have circled about him
only nine years; but before the Gascon deceives the noble Henry sparks of his heroism shall appear
in his disregard both of wealth and toil, and his munificence shall yet be known so that his enemies
cannot keep silence about it. Look to him and to his benefits. Through him there shall be altered
fortune for many, rich changing state with beggars. And thou shalt bear this written in thy mind
about him and shalt not tell it,' and he told things which shall be incredible to those that witness
them. Then he added: 'Son, these are the glosses on what was told thee," in Inferno XV of course.
Remember when Brunetto says, "This is the prophecy of your future exile but it will be glossed for
you by somebody else." He doesn't even mention who, Dante goes on thinking that it's going to be
Beatrice; it turns out to be his father, his ancestor. "These are the snares that are hid behind a few
revolving years; yet I would not have thee envious of thy fellow-citizens, for thy life shall far
outlast the punishment of the perfidies.'"
The exile can turn into a virtue and the language here that accompanies this prediction is the
language of the ethics of exile. That the exile brings about and needs in order to be bearable and
tolerable, the hospitality. These are the great, the courtesy, the hospitality, the language of gratitude,
the giving, so it's a new ethics is going to be described in from the perspective of this exilic
experience of Dante. Then Dante concludes, which I think it seals what I have been saying, "'I see
well my father," this is line 113 and following, 110 and following, "'I see well, my father, how time
spurs towards me to deal me such a blow as falls most heavily on him that is most heedless; it is
well, therefore, that I arm me with foresight,'" that's another virtue of exile. The word translates, of
course, prudence.
Prudence is the human counterpart of providence. It's the same etymology, a seeing in advance,
trying to not predict but forestall the arrows and flings that come our way, "so that if the dearest
place is taken from me, I may not lose the others by my songs. Down through the world of endless
bitterness, and on the mountain from whose fair summit the eyes of my Lady lifted me, and after,
through the heavens from light to light, I have learned that which, if I tell again, will taste for many
of bitter herbs; and if I am a timid friend to truth I fear to lose my life among those who will call
these times ancient. ' The light within which was smiling the treasure," and then of the reference to
Brunetto who wrote the Treasure of course. "I had found there first became ablaze like a golden
mirror in the sun, then replied: 'Conscience dark with its own or another's shame will indeed feel
thy words to be harsh; but none the less put away every falsehood and make plain all thy vision
and then let them scratch where is the itch. For if thy voice is grievous at first taste, it will
afterwards leave vital nourishment when it is digested. This cry of thine shall do as does the wind,
which strikes most on the highest summits; and that is no small ground of honour. For that reason
have been shown to thee, in these wheels, on the mountain, and in the woeful valley, only souls that
are known to fame; because the mind of one who hears will not pause or fix its faith for an example
that has its roots unknown or hidden or for other proof that it not manifest.'"
What he hears, and the decision that Dante will take as a palliative at least, or a remedy to his exile
is writing. The writing of the poem becomes the act by which he is an exilic as an exile can go
on in his dislocation, his utter dislocation from the city, from family, from his habits, can go on
actually relating himself to a more writing. The work is the way in which the self enters history and
can shape history. It's not Aeneas, it's not Phaeton, it's not going to be the Hippolytus, it's not even
Cacciaguida's own account of his own grandiloquent connection with the world of history, a way in
which Dante's self enters history is through this idea of poetry of a writing that is now also
described in terms of food, as you can see here first of all, with the bitter herbs and now the voices
gives us the first taste that will afterwards leave vital nourishment when it is digested, etc. Words
first of all, let me just clear the air here.
No one of you has these misconceptions about poetic language that somehow it's some sort of faint
symbol divorced from reality. Dante goes beyond this idea of the relationship of language to
representation. That was the problem of the chronicles and they gave fairly faithful accounts and he
can give fairly faithful accounts. That's the mode of a certain historiography. What Dante's saying is
that words are things in themselves, that words are food that change, and being things they have a
kind of solidity and have a sort of truth value in and of themselves. This is really the biblical
language that resurfaces, son of man, eat the book, you remember these lines from Ezekiel? This is
exactly the kind of language that is returning here, and which Dante bends, the sort of language to
define himself in a relationship to his future project of writing the poem and that project of writing
the poem is his way of establishing his place literally in which is a utopian place in history.
I say utopian because it doesn't have to be understood in any local sense. I do not belong to the city
only because I occupy a particular place in the city. It is the act of writing poetry, that's really what
matters. What I'm referring to is also, and here I am, a sort of correction, very mild correction of the
classical idea which is also a medieval survives in medieval times the idea that the self is
decided, the value of the self is decided by the place one occupies within the economy of the city.
Dante says that's not the way it works. I am the project of writing my poetry and through poetry,
which is written in exile, and therefore it's a poetry of exile I can re-enter the world of history. The
world of history accusing history and talking as a man who has been touched by the vision of what
justice ought to be, so this is really the remarks that I think I can make about these Cantos XV, XVI,
and XVII and I welcome questions if you have any. I'm sure you do. Yes.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [00:57:58]

Student: Would I be right in seeing some biblical references within the lines between 70 and 100,
the mention of the star, the birth, the inn. Is that some sort of a Savior?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: This is line 17, the question is would she be right in seeing biblical
antecedents, context for the lines with that go from line 70 you say, the first refuge and inn. No,
and I "shalt find in the courtesy of the great Lombard." That may be a christological or a christal
mimetic language behind these sort of references. That would be even more it would be truer
even would be made more compelling in light of Cacciaguida's own self representation in
christological terms, both in Canto XV and in Canto XVI actually he talks to himself as if he
were a Boethian philosopher. Dante uses the same phrase about the death of Cacciaguida that he
had used for Boethius in Paradiso XV, venni dal martiro a questa pace, that he had used for
Boethius. But the language is a christological language.
The only difference is that if there is any christological resonance here it very quickly fades because
Dante's really discussing himself as an exile with this and he understands exile as the real
condition of himself but also of human beings. I will go on so far as to say, in order to connect your
theological perspective and what I have been saying about the self in history is that exile is also the
root of one's religious consciousness. We have those of us who have a religious conscious, and I
think we all do, just as we have an aesthetic sense we all do, that religious conscious comes always
out of the sense or the feeling even better, better than the sense, the feeling that we are not where we
should be. That we are somehow not where we should both in terms of time and in terms of space,
that we are dislocated. And this exile, this exilic imagination then shapes also the theological
language of Dante and accounts for his persuasion that exile defines the human condition. It's not
just an empirical it is his empirical experience. That is to say, it relates to him but he understands
that it's really we're all engaged in this kind of I'll talk about this later.
By the way, I'm forcing my hand because the text does not really allow me to do that, but when he
discusses hope, the most extraordinary of all virtues, the most deceptive maybe of all virtues, there
healing's hope and exile in a very clear way and I'll reserve that as a surprise for whatever next
week or yeah next week. Please.
Student: You mentioned Augustine's confessions earlier, and talking about the different conceptions
of how the self relates to the city, and you said Dante didn't agree with Augustine. I didn't catch
everything you were saying about Augustine's view of the self. Can you just review?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is about I was discussing modalities of this
relationship between the self and history at the beginning of my remarks. One of them obviously
was I mentioned let me just give a little resume of this. I mentioned Cacciaguida himself who
has a kind of special understanding of history and that defines him, his taking part in the crusades.
The other one is with which Dante begins is Aeneas who is a model for Augustine, as you know. I'm
answering your question now. The Confessions of Augustine are constructed as nothing less than
what we call what I call the Aeneid of the heart. That is to say, he goes from Carthage, he has his
Didos; you remember when he leaves Carthage to go to Rome, and the Dido doesn't he doesn't
just abandon them but he describes as they hold on to his garment, etc. Then he goes to Rome, so
it's really a pattern on an epic, on the Virgilian epic of the Aeneid.
But Augustine is very different from Aeneas. He doesn't go to Rome to found an empire. He's a
professor of rhetoric, he teaches, he's a teacher, a professor of rhetoric and he comes to understand
himself. Actually the great moment, the great revelation for him, there are two moments of great
revelation to him, which we really never talked about. One, which he's in Ostia, a little town on the
by the sea outside of Rome and he said, he saw this mother at the window and they share in a
kind of mystical vision. He describes this ecstasy that they have while they look outside, and then
she's about to die. That is a decisive moment in clearly in his life and his understanding of
himself. The other one comes in the Garden in Milan when he hears voices that tell him to that
he understands in his own way. It's an idea of a self which is which understands the self as a
death of the old man and the birth of a new man. This is the old Adam and the new Adam. The
Christian idea of conversion, St. Paul's command, you have to let the old man die so that the new
man can come into being. That's the understanding of the self.
Now Dante of course, when I say he doesn't agree with it, of course he's not Aeneas, he did say that.
He's not Paul; he did say that; there are those who say well he's ironic. I don't see where the irony is.
He's not Aeneas and he's not Paul; he uses them to relate, to coordinate himself to them and now
he's using a number of other mythical figures. What is one's own relationship to genealogy? What is
one's own relationship to the chronicles? What is one's own relationship to mythical empires? You
understand what I'm saying? The idea of self that he is going to have is not really Augustine's; it's
that of the man first of all who can belong to the history of the world by writing the poem. He lives
and he understands the fundamental quality of the exilic experience of human beings, that's not
Augustine, that's really what I meant. No disrespect for Augustine only different a different
experience. Yes.
Student: I'm still thinking about the brief reference to the crusades that Cacciaguida makes at the
end of the Canto XV and the presence of sectarian violence, and I wonder if that if Dante has
some idea about that that connects to his idea of the empire as staving off the political violence of
civil war or what would Dante suggest as a [inaudible] because we saw St. Francis last week who
spoke peacefully with the Sultan of faith.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: This is an extraordinary question. The question is by the way the
how do I explain Cacciaguida's reference to the crusade, very brief reference to the crusade, and
how does that connect with what we have been talking about sectarian violence in the Canto of
Dominic for instance in Canto XII and whether Dante is using this as a ploy to explain, just the way
he does with the violence within the city to justify the necessity of the Empire, which he does or is
this or does he really have an idea of the peaceful language of Francis?
Accurate you asked a lot of questions and really, really, really impressive. After all she's an
Italian major, what do you expect? She has she better impress me you did, you did. We'll talk
more about Dante's preparing Canto XVIII, XIX, and XX is really about it starts with what is a
heroic life and how are we to understand the heroic life. There's a reference there also to crusades,
and the question of the crusades, the relationship of justice and Christian ideas of justice to Muslims
and Hindus will come to the forefront there. So I really ask you to wait for that for next time
because
However, I can answer one question immediately, which is really implied by what you are saying
more than asked directly. Yes, Dante is a peace poet. I would say that with full confidence, though
we know Dante was so polemical, kicks shades, is angry, fights, and there's always competing
visions in relation to the tradition and others, but he's Fundamentally, you have to establish, you
would say, differences; not really renounce your differences, but actually make those differences the
orchestration, the musical orchestration that is going on in Cantos XV, XVI, and XVII. This is the
heaven of music. This discordance, discourses, are part of a sovereign and transcendent order, but
he is a peace poet which is truly scandalous because most poets, except for Isaia, for instance who is
a peace poet prophet, a prophet of peace, with a vision of peace; Dante really has an irenic
vision.
Most poets write about victories, about wars, about armistices, truces, epic; the epics in England or
in Italy, it's all about the clashes of armies, etc. Not Dante, so that's really the direct answer I can
give to your question. Then you raise another issue which I find a little bit I would not want to
go there but I owe it to you to give an answer. Well, what about the peaceful language of Francis?
That seems to be such a great idea because heresy and schisms and the question the relationship
between Christians and Muslims has always been one of wars, so heresy and war, schism and war,
so we can say that Dante seems to be so radical in renouncing war and says, look it's possible to
harmonize relationship or at least confront our differences with using a peace language.
However, things are not as simple as that and that's why I only mention it but I will not go into that.
We haven't got time for that. It's really a thought I am a little developing, I must admit. The heresy
is a question of language. It's not just a question of wars. So, there are wars that go on in language
and therefore they re-propose the very differences and stubborn divisions of understanding that
qualify and describe both the schisms and the heresies. So, to say "peaceful language," it sounds
also like another way of another route into potential descent and tragedy, you see. But I am not
going to go anymore than give you as a kind of suspicion that I have about my own claim that
Dante is a peace poet. We'll talk though about the crusades next time. And may be I have time for
another question may be and a very short answer. Anybody? See you next time.
[end of transcript]

Top
 Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 20 - Paradise XVIII, XIX, XXI, XXI [November 13,
2008]
Chapter 1. Continuity and Thematic Expansion in the Cantos [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I realize that as we read from assignment to assignment, and partly
because we read in a very selective way, I know there are a lot of gaps in our readings. I never
really have tried to share with you the idea that there is a line, a narrative line, a conceptual line
running through the poem. The cantos are not discrete units, poetic units, without much relationship
where the links are to be found symmetrically maybe with cantos far apart from the cantos that we
are reading. I think that there is a continuity going through many of them. There is no doubt, for
instance, between Cantos XV, XVI, and XVII of Paradise we read last time and Cantos XVII,
XVIII, and XIX there is actually a thematic expansion of some of the issues that Dante raises in the
Heaven of Mars.
To begin with, Dante in Canto XVIII is still in the Heaven of Mars and he meets and he lists I
know that I did not the number does not appear in your syllabus, but just bear with me so that I
can go on with these ideas. He just lists the number of warriors, souls who are figures, heroic
figures, the heroic life very much like Cacciaguida himself who appears as one of the blessed, from
lines 40 and following of Canto XVIII. He mentions, he sees and he mentions Joshua, biblical
figures Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus and then he goes on mentioning medieval figures.
Charlemagne was clearly he's justifying retrospectively the whole issue of the crusades to which
Cacciaguida took part, and which can really be brought back to Charlemagne's experience in France
and in Spain against the Muslims. He mentions and lists Charlemagne and of course his paladin the
great, the so called, the Achilles-like invulnerable Roland, who however, dies at Roncevaux which
is the site of the war between Muslims and Christians and he dies because of the hubris that
characterizes his life, the hubris of not wanting to blow the bugle, that it would be heard by
Charlemagne and Charlemagne could have come to his rescue. As I have probably said before, that
became in the Western imagination a most traumatic experience. A traumatic experience because it
showed that the myth of invincibility of the Christian of Christian Europe was simply that, an
illusion to be turned into rubble by the invading and victorious Christian armies.
Then he goes on mentioning the figures of the second crusade, 1109 the Godfrey of Bouillon and a
figure a Normand who defeated actually the Muslims in Sicily, the Guiscard, Robert Guiscard,
and brought about in the early ninth century in the late ninth century; after about 75 years the
Muslims were there the expulsion of the Muslims from Sicily. A clear, thematic thread between the
previous cantos and this canto is the question of what is a heroic life. The heroic life can even
involve a defeat, as in the case of Roland. It implies, however, a heroic life clearly, though there is a
typology that runs from Joshua's defeat of and seizure of Jericho. This is the great epic biblical story
to Guiscard, contemporary history, almost contemporary history. For Dante it implies really a
division, it implies a heroic life which is it implies the power to establish and live for a cause
which is going to be for Dante it's a just cause but it's a cause that brings about divisions so it's
not a heroic figure is not necessarily a figure that would unify and cut across barriers and
divisions. On the contrary, Dante is indicating that there's a possible heroic life onto a giving of
oneself to a cause much larger than oneself. We could just leave it at that and we will come back to
this issue in a moment. What I would stress in a few minutes.
What I would stress though about this particular scene is that Dante is really aware of divisions,
aware of the need even to separate what is mine from what is not mine, what is ours from what is
not ours so it would seem he seems to be perpetuating a myth that's or an idea that some
might find even objectionable that indeed this separation is dangerous and it's in itself caused by
war and a cause of wars. This is the objection to this problem. It's not the only time that Dante is
establishing divisions, when I have been talking over the past few weeks about, for instance,
divisions and boundaries that Dante establishes even when talking about continents. You remember
in Canto VI of Paradise when there's the story of the eagle of the Roman Empire Dante goes on
talking about the periphery of Europe where the Justinian and the bird of the empire had nestled; the
eastern part of the empire. That was the periphery of Europe and we have been talking about the
whole how in Canto XII of Paradise meeting Dominic, St. Dominic, Dante talks about the western
part of Europe. He goes out of the way to mention this idea so there are always divisions that
always buries.
He seems to believe that Rome and the history of Rome really escapes this logic of separation. In
effect, this I know that I mentioned to you, in Monarchia, the political track that he writes, he does
stress the fact that Aeneas is really a Roman and not; for instance, he cannot really be thought of as
an Asian, which he was, nor can he be thought of as a European, and he stresses the fact that he has
a kind of some there is a sort of universalizing history in him, a universalizing impulse in the
measure in which he married three women from three different continents, Creusa from Asia, Dido
from Africa, and Lavinia from Europe. He does distinguish between a kind a sort of the
history that transcends barriers but also an idea which is really heroic here of a history that manages
what keeps barriers, that these are people who fought at the crusades. These are the many of
them such as Joshua and Judah Maccabaeus, but Charlemagne, not of the crusades but against a
Muslim named Roland, but Godfrey of Bouillon and so on. We'll see what the consequences of this
may be.
Now another conceptual thread, I'm really going around two or three I think I'm keeping two or
three themes in my head now. Another conceptual thread between XVII and the remaining part of
XVIII, XIX and XX which is the Heaven of Jupiter, is the question of a very abstract question that
Dante asks. What is a place? That was the underlying problem in XV, XVI, and XVII. In XV Dante
tries to determine whether his history could be reduced to the boundaries of his own native town
and decides that that was no longer possible for him to conceive.
The famous chronicles, he tries to figure out where exactly he can be in the history of in the
midst of Florence itself and decides that he is an exile. That was the final prophecy of Cacciaguida.
Exiled is a word that means it's a Latin word, in Italian or in English, it comes "being out of
one's own soil." That's what the meaning is so that in the Middle Ages they never really thought of
exile as just a spiritual condition. That is to say I feel dislocated, I am my personal existential
predicament is that of feeling that I'm out of it, that I don't belong, or that kind of that was not
the conventional understanding. Dante changes this meaning of exile in making it into a spiritual
condition. It's the condition of it's the pre-condition for his writing poetry to begin with, so that
poetry and exile seem to be going together.
Chapter 2. Space, Place and Justice [00:10:35]
In XVIII, the real issue that he raises is what is a place? I am an exile, I do not belong anywhere,
what is how do we understand here and how do we understand there? What does it mean? What
are these terms? At any rate, he starts and enters now into canto with the remaining part of Canto
XVIII, he enters into the Heaven of Jupiter. A heaven of white light which he links with geometry.
You know what geometry is? A science, very complex science, it encompasses what it means is
the measurement of the Earth, it's the whole Earth that anyone can measure with medieval
geometry. It means it implies the presence of perspective within it, with the idea that geometry is
what regulates the idea of space and the arrangement of space it implies altimetry, it implies the
measurement of the depths and so on.
It is, as you know, traditionally linked to ethics. It has a profound intimate linkage with ethics for
the simple reason well, when Dante discusses justice; for instance, in cantos in Inferno he
distinguishes between distributive justice. Remember Inferno VII, the god is fortuna who manages
to distribute with some idea of impenetrable occult, equity a cold justice the goods of the Earth,
though she's blindfolded and moves the wheel around so there can be some kind of uniform If
you are up you are not going to be up all the time, you may be down, etc., and if you are down you
eventually if you are on the shifty curve of fortune you are going to be up. It's a sort of
arithmetical notion of equity. If you have sometimes you have five then you lose three and you
get to have two, whoever have one will get two, etc.
The other form of justice was also geometric justice which Dante describes in the so called rule of
the counterpart, counter passion, in the contrapasso in Inferno XXVIII when he has to establish the
relationship between crime and punishment. It could not be an even one, one and one; you cannot
pluck someone's eye because someone has plucked your eye, that's not necessarily justice. You
cannot cut someone's arm off because you have perpetrated that crime or kill because you just have
been killed, there should be some kind of proportionality, is the argument. The idea is that geometry
is always part, geometry in fact is related to ethics simply because its extension always implies a
point which is the beginning of a geometric reflection, always implies the existence of other points;
it establishes relations therefore. That's the language.
In this canto Dante discusses primarily justice. What is justice? That's the idea that runs through
this. The other thing that you have to be as you read these cantos, and I hope you read them with
care, and I will not say much about it, is that he deploys Dante deploys the language of
geometry. Now you know that this is a technique of his. If he were dealing with arithmetic he would
do music, he would do that, but I just want to give you a few examples of these issues.
For instance, just let me open here and the notion of God, the geometer, he will go on talking for
instance, this is in Canto XIX, anywhere really, line 90. Look at this, "The Primal Will, which in
itself is good, from itself, the Supreme Good, never was moved; whatever accords with it is in that
measure just;" the language of measure, "no created good draws it to itself, but it, raying forth";
"ray," which in Italian is both radius, it's the ray of the sunlight but also the radius of a circle,
"creates that good. As the stork circles," there it goes, even the very shapes, "circles over the nest,"
and then a little bit further down, "Wheeling, it sang, then spoke," wheeling again a circular motion
and this continues literally continues throughout.
I want to find for you the image of the compass that I thought was in Canto XIX. It's not, we'll get
to that, we'll find it. There are a number of these geometrical terms. However, the most important
thing here in Canto XIX is that as soon as he enters the heaven of geometry now we encounter in
Canto XVIII, we come across a plane, a divine spectacle, it's a sort of the heavens are a sacred
theatre where God will go on speaking to human beings by using to us on Earth by using the
souls of the blessed. This is the passage, "I saw," Canto XVIII line 70 and following, "I saw in that
torch of Jove the sparkling of the love that was there, trace out our speech to my eyes; and as birds
risen from a river-bank, as if rejoicing together over their pasture, make of themselves, now a round
flock," that's a geometric image for you, "now another shape, so within the lights holy creatures
were singing as they flew and made themselves, in the figures they formed, now D, now I, now L.
First, singing, they moved to their own notes; then, becoming one of these shapes, they paused for a
little and were silent."
Within the heaven of geometry, even the letters of the alphabet draw geometrical lines, the semi-
circle of D, the two the perpendicular line of the L, and the perpendicular line of the I, we are
we really discover that the beauty of geometry underlies the rigor of the alphabet so to speak, but
more importantly, we discover that these souls that dispose themselves in letters are really God's
way of speaking to us. The language that Dante that God uses is the language of human beings.
We are the syllables, we are the letters disposed in order to convey this whatever God's message
may be. "They showed themselves, then, in five times seven vowels and consonants, and I noted
them severally, and what they seemed to me to mean. DILIGITE IUSTITIAM." They spell out a line
taken from the book a verse from the Book of Wisdom; love, justice, diligite iustitiam, you who
judge the Earth. That's another reference to the actual ultimate measurement of geometry, the Earth.
That's the meaning of geometry, the measuring of the Earth, so geography in a certain way is part of
the world of geometry.
Then Dante goes on describing a metamorphosis, how "in the M of the fifth word they kept their
order, so that Jupiter seemed there silver pricked out with gold; and I saw other lights descend on
the very summit of the M and settle there, singing, I think, of the good that draws them to itself.
Then, as when burning logs are struck rise innumerable sparks, from which the foolish are
accustomed to make auguries, so more than a thousand lights appeared to rise again from there and
to mount, some much, some little, as the Sun that kindles them appointed; and when each had
settled in its place," etc.
I know that some of you are working on the aesthetics of colors; I would point out this scene to you
and the complications of color. The white of Jupiter, the gold of the letters, the red of the flames,
there is a kind of chromatic a deployment of chromatic elements within this grand spectacle.
Dante is indicating directly and indirectly this chromatic symbolism, so this is what we the way
the heavens speak to us on Earth and to the and the rulers of the Earth and then Dante goes on in
the next Canto XIX, wondering what is this idea of justice. What does it mean?
He'll ask, Canto XIX, line 28, "I know well that though the Divine Justice is mirrored in another
realm of heaven yours apprehends it without a veil. You know with what intentness I am prepared to
listen, you know what is that doubt which is old a fast in me." He's hungry; Dante's hungry to know
what Divine Justice is. What we hear is the bird, the eagle goes on saying, "He that turned His
compass," that's God, that's the geometer, an image that clearly echoes two biblical texts. One is of
Job 38, a famous passage, some of you may know. Dante returns to it repeatedly. "Where were you
when I drew the boundaries of the Earth," that's the geometrical, the matrix so to speak, of this
metaphor of God the geometer. And the other one is in the Book of Wisdom that goes on talking
about, "I was there with him and I was His delight when He was drawing the circle around the
deep." Those are two biblical passages that insist on this both the geometric and then aesthetic. A
theatre, the idea that through the shapes of the world are really the representations of this perfection
of God's geometry.
They are two metaphors that Dante goes on deploying but let's see what the substance of the
argument now is. "He that turned his compass," we understand why he uses the word compass and
the image of the compass, that's clear. "Not remain in infinite excess," that's to me another
geometrical language though the two words are slightly redundant because excess means something
which is measure or less. The language of measure, the language of accounting, and the language of
limits is set against this idea of something not finite, something that escapes the logic of geometry,
the logic of measurement, an infinite and excess. In fact, I find the phrase deliberately redundant,
it's not only infinite but it's also excessive idea of the infinite to drive the point home; "and
manifest, could not make His Power to be so impressed on that whole universe."
Even the word universe is as much as a poetic term we speak of verse in poetry and I wonder
how many of you have ever wondered whether that stuff that word comes from? It comes from
geometry because it implies a turning. You come to the end of the line and you turn, and you draw a
geometrical figure, and so does the universe. It's one turning, it's the sphere, you can have
hemispheres but the two hemispheres make the universe. These are all, as you see I hope you
enjoy them as I enjoy them telling you about this. "And, in proof of this, the first proud spirit,"
Lucifer, now that's geometry of the soul, the first proud spirit who was as you know Dante
connects pride and geometry or perspective, as we said before. "The first proud spirit, who was in
the highest of all creatures, fair and ripe," what a great adjective. Lucifer falls unripe because grace
implies ripeness. The idea that you are ripe when you have been touched by grace, ripeness is all
one could say using another referring to another text, not by Dante.
"Through not waiting for light," that's Lucifer, "from which it is plain that every lesser nature is too
scant a vessel for that good which has no limit and measures," I'm not going indicate that anymore,
"itself by itself. Thus our vision, which must needs be one of the rays of the Mind of which all
things are full, cannot by its nature be of such power that it should not perceive its origin to be far
beyond all that appears to it. Therefore," and that seems to be the essence, the brunt of the
argument, "the sight that is granted to your world penetrates within the Eternal Justice as the eye
into the sea; for though from the shore it sees the bottom, in the open sea it does not, and yet the
bottom is there but the depth conceals it."
The idea that we can see justice only when we have a very superficial, we see just as we see the
bottom of the sea when we are near the shore, only when we have a superficial understanding of
do we see the bottom otherwise we don't. God's justice is as imponderable and unfathomable as the
sea floor can be out in away from the shore. "There is no light there but that which comes from
the clear," and so on and the changes then Dante complicates the issue a little bit and he really
asks where is the justice. Is justice limited to a place, to a continent, to the economy of Christian
Europe, and how is it related to other places?

Chapter 3. A Conversation between Philosophy and Theology [00:26:49]

We have a notion of what nowadays we call alterity; you must have heard that term, "the other," the
idea of the other. In the Middle Ages, by the way, it was not alien to this thought of the other. I can
give you a few titles of Aquinas writing a track against the errors of the Greeks; that's a sense of
idleness. Establishing, that is to say differences, or Aquinas writing a suma against the Gentiles, the
pagans who usually who actually were the philosophers of the time. Those who do not have
excess or exceed or want to exceed to Revelations. They have an idea of otherness and the idea of
otherness is always that of acknowledging that particular difference.
I do not see, at this point yet, any substantial deviation on the part of Dante from the myth and the
examples of the heroic life. The examples of the heroic life are those who literally establish
boundaries, who within those boundaries manage to live according to the fullness of their virtues.
That's the heroic life and that's really the boundary that he establishes. Now Dante asks what is that
boundary. I understand that Divine Justice is impenetrable but then he asks this extraordinary
question, what is a place? This was a a man is born at the bank of the Indus, line 72, I think this
is the most complex and the most extraordinary question in the whole of the Divine Comedy from
the point of the awareness of let's say alterity.
"A man is born on the bank of Indus," Asia, "and none is there to speak, or read, or write of Christ,
and all his desires and doings are good so far as human reason sees, without sin in life or speech. He
dies unbaptized and without faith. Where is this justice that condemns him? Where is his fault if he
does not believe? Now, who art thou that wouldst sit upon the bench and judge a thousand miles
away," more geometry here, more space, more distance comes to be not only one of depth, now one
of huge distances in space "with a site short of a span." The span, by the way, it's a great it's a
measurement, a geometric term too. That's the span, the distance that goes from the tip of the thumb
to the tip of the little finger. This is technically Italian, spanna and the English is span, it comes
from it.
"Assuredly, for him that would reason it out with me, if the Scriptures were not set over you there
would be abundant room for question," and then he goes on talking and as the storks circle, and
Dante's clearly circling of himself over these issues and we have a return to Europe, the whole of
Europe now appears. The whole of canto's [line] 100 until the end; let me just read this passage
where, the eagle, the Roman symbol, Dante goes out of the way to say, "When these shining fires of
the Holy Ghost had paused, still in the sign that made the Romans reverend to the world, it began
again," with allusions therefore to the Romans as if to as a kind of idea, Rome to Dante has
become an idea, an idea of universality. "To this kingdom none ever rose who did not believe in
Christ, either before or after He was nailed to the tree. But note, many cry Christ, Christ ! who shall
be far less near to Him at the Judgment than such as know not Christ, and such Christians."
The Ethiopians, Africa is being mentioned, "shall condemn when the two companies are parted
What can the Persians," Asia once again, the three continents are going to be there are divisions
of belief now and these divisions of belief seem to lose all consistency because you may be a
European and there is a moral alterity within Europe. Alterity is not just a question of geographic
disposition. It's not part of the economy; someone who is a Persian is other me; it is, but there is in
terms of the moral life, clearly there is an alterity within Europe.
In fact Dante does not he starts with a Kingdom of Prague, lines 118, "Albert by which the
Kingdom [of Prague] shall be made desolate," and then to France, then shall be the seen the misery
brought on this." Count all the countries; by the way, he seems to know the history of, "on the Seine
from the debasement of the currency by him that shall die from the charge of a boar. There shall be
seen the pride that makes men thirst and so maddens the Scot, and the Englishman that neither can
keep within his bounds." There is a history of violence that transgresses also boundaries, and that
can be violence, and I will give you a little story about that. "It will show the wantonness and soft
living of him of Spain, and of him of Bohemia who never knew worth nor sought it. It will show for
the Cripple of Jerusalem his goodness marked with an I, while an M will mark the opposite. It will
show the avarice and cowardice of him that holds the island of the fire," Sicily, "where Anchises
ended his long life; and to make plain his insignificance his records shall be in contractions that will
note much in little space; and manifest to all shall be the foul deeds of his uncle and his brother, by
whom a lineage so illustrious and two crowns have been dishonoured; and he of Portugal and he of
Norway shall be known there, and he of Russia," meaning literally Russia, "who to his own hurt has
been the coin of Venice. 'Oh happy Hungary," the irony is heavy, "if she no longer let herself be
wronged! And happy Navarre, if she arm herself with the mountains that surround her! And, for
earnest of this, all men shall know that Nicosia and Famagosta lament and complain of their own
beast, which keeps its place beside the rest.'"
The whole of Europe, this is now the history of Europe, in a way that Dante has given the history of
the empire, Roman Empire, but this is the history of Europe and a history of desolation and moral
dereliction. These are the terms of what is here and what is there? What is within an economy of
redemption? What is not out of the economy of redemption? This is exactly the question that Dante
asks and the answer is that we do not know. We do not know how this salvation is going to work
out. No one can claim, therefore, to decide what exact moral boundaries can exist between a place
and another. That seems to be the idea that he tempers therefore the notion, on the one hand, the
idea of boundaries and on the other hand, there is also this notion that boundaries are political but
they are not nor can they be thought of as being moral boundaries; so he distinguishes the two
issues. What is his answer? What is he trying to say?
Before I try to tell you about this, let me tell you about a little text that has nothing to do with the
Middle Ages, but I'm sure you know the text. It's that little story that Herodotus, who is a great
Greek historian, tells this story in the Histories, in the year before the Greeks are getting ready to
invade Egypt, going to Egypt. He really writes the story to warn them about what the dangers that
they might be surprised by or the dangers wherever you go across boundaries that and violate
boundaries. It's really an argument in favor of boundaries.
And he tells the story of a king, the King of Egypt, Calloderus, I think his name is who was, who
not a very sharp man, a very bright man, not only was he not a very bright man, he also had a very
beautiful wife and he was so taken with the beauty of his wife that he wanted everybody to know
about it but he can't tell everybody; but he tells his advisor and his advisor was a very prudent man,
says, "sire, your majesty I don't want to know, I believe you, don't tell me more about this." "But
you've got to know, you've got to hear me, because you know not only you got hear me I want you
to see the naked beauty of my wife. It's beyond belief and I want you to see it because human
beings tend to trust their eyes more than what they hear, more than their ears." We don't really
believe what we hear, but what we see is direct and we want to have access to it.
The counselor very prudently says, "no sire, this is really too much trouble, I cannot disobey you
but you are forcing me to really insist that I believe you completely, you can go on telling me
about her beauty, I don't want to see it." "No, I'm arranging this" and he contrives a little plot. The
wife has to go bathing in a room next to the bedroom. He, the King, leaves the door ajar, open for
her to come in the bedroom door, and so while she's away he allows the counselor to hide in the
shadows of the room, in a little corner.
The queen comes in, undresses, the counselor sees her naked and very quickly walks out, hoping
silently and hoping not to have been seen. The morning after the queen was a sharp queen calls him
into her office and says, "I saw you, tell me what you were doing there." The counselor has no
choice but saying, "your majesty the king, your husband, asked me to come in there." The queen
says, "I imagined that that's really what happened but at this point one of you two is one too much
too many. One of you either you kill the king or you kill yourself. The idea that I have been
ashamed and been seen naked by two men is unbearable to me." And the counselor does what I'm
sure all of you would do, he became the king.
By the way, Herodotus goes on even saying, that he lived a very undistinguished life; it was not a
big deal, but he's warning, Herodotus is really warning us to understand that there is always a limit
to that we have to set up and protect between what we say me, or mine, I, and what I say you,
this is the language that Dante uses at the beginning of Canto XX. They say "I and mine" when they
mean "we and our"; this is a very thin line that has to be observed.
The king, of course, just to finish that little story, the king was a fool, he had no prudence, he had no
sense of the difference between the private life and the public needs. He had no idea that there are
things that you keep to yourself and you don't share with others. One can go on complicating the
problem but the issue is that he understood limits. You are going on into another man's country you
have to act as if you don't have to go too deep into it, and you don't have to try to violate its a
country's a woman's nakedness meaning the essential the private sense of oneself.
I do not know that Dante would really agree with Herodotus in these cantos, but what he has been
doing is literally setting up a needed cultural difference. Somehow there is a they exist, cultural
differences, and at the same time allow for a kind of moral circulation of ideas. Let me put in
general medieval terms to tell you what I think he has been doing because the argument when he
makes this argument a man is born on the river of the Indus, he does not know anything about
Christian faith and baptism, dies, why should he be condemned, etc. He has been living decorously
and rationally, why should he be not saved? That's the question he asks.
What he is taking on there would seem to be what we call, in medieval terms, a Pelagian, a Pelagian
stance. You know now, I think I have said before, but let me just repeat this, Pelagian is an adjective
that comes from the name of a British monk of the roughly the time of St. Augustine, the fifth
century Pelagius, who really maintained that by the exercise of through works, through good
works human beings, living according to principles of nature, human beings can be saved. It would
seem almost that Dante's taking that position to a position by the way which he probably even
held in the philosophical text called the Banquet. That was one of it's one of either I don't
agree with that but it's there seems to be such an emphasis on the ability of human beings to live
rationally that the demands of grace and the demands of faith are somewhat bracketed and a little
dim. Nonetheless, I think that they are there, only that he is talking as a philosopher.
The issue is this that Dante here is asking for a conversation between philosophy and theology,
within reason and faith. In the sense that, he really understands that philosophy without theology
ends up in a sort of labyrinth of its own constructions and may lose the way. In theology, without
philosophy, may end up in mere opinion which has no validity at all on for people who believe in
the power of reason. Now, to connect it with the previous cantos, I think that Dante has been
literally extending this whole problem about what exile is. An exile, which does not mean the
random movement, but always a kind of a sense of the problematical qualities of a place in the
world and the relationship that we have with ourselves and our own ideas.

Chapter 4. The Contemplatives [00:42:49]

I know that this is starting to get that I it has taken me away from the other cantos but let me
just read XXI and the cantos and I just want to turn very briefly I don't think that XXI and XXII
which are cantos where Dante meets. It's the Sphere of Saturn, which as you know, is the heaven of
contemplation. The word Saturn the myth of Saturn is the myth of time devouring everything
that it engenders that's what remember that time is the first cannibal of history, eating up what it
produces. This is the minutes that are just taken in. It's the name seems to come from the
saturation of time. Dante is coming to this is the last planet and it's also the heaven of astronomy,
so he's forcing on us the idea of contemplation. Here he finds the contemplatives and among them
there is the soul of a founder by the name of Benedict. The first from the contemplative order.
The word contemplation really implies two things if you ask "what is a contemplation" because
there is always a debate as to whether Dante is a mystic, or he's not a mystic, I think that if there is
anything that he has it's he's a contemplative in the true sense of the word. The word
contemplation translates the Greek theory which is really the turning of the mind toward the
essentials; theory, a contemplation. The word comes from templum, contemplation which is, as you
know, the Latin word for temple, but also from the Latin word for tempus, they are the same word.
The word for temple and the word for time have the same origin, and they both come from the
Greek word called temno, the Greek work is temno, which means "to cut." Saturn, time, with a side
cuts; the contemplatives are those who cut a space of time and privilege it, or a space in place, and
cut it off from the flow of history and the flow of profane place and make it the sort of ground for
turning the minds to the consideration of higher things.
This is the point that Dante is driving. He is going to discuss the degeneracy of the order but I want
to really end with you and I really meant to talk about this final image at the end of Canto XXII
where Dante now has really reached the periphery of the planetary system; now he will go into
the stars, the heaven of the fixed stars. We have a little bit of time so I can go slow here. Lines
Canto XXII, lines, let's say 126; this is Beatrice speaking, "'Thou art so near to the final
blessedness,' Beatrice began, 'that thou must have thine eyes clear and keen." That's Dante's
he will deploy this language of visionariness, and the language of visionariness will start with the
emphasis on purifying one's and refining one's own eyes and one's physical eyesight.
"Therefore, before you go farther into it, look down." Beatrice, it's one of the two invitations by
Beatrice now to turn back to turn the eyes back and have a contemplation, and Dante will
contemplate so to speak the Earth, not up where the heavens turn. "Therefore, before you go farther
into it to look down and see how much of the universe I've already put beneath thy feet, so that with
all fulness of joy thy heart may present itself to the triumphal host that comes rejoicing through this
rounded ether.' With my sight," Dante now is engaged in this retrospective glance down to the
Earth, "I returned through every one of the seven spheres, and I saw this globe such that I smiled,"
our Earth, "at its paltry semblance."
The perspective is that of space. I wouldn't call it infinite space but a vast distance of space. I don't
call it infinite space because Dante's notion of the universe is not that it's infinite. Dante has the
notion of the universe as a bounded but vast connect vast enclave. It's really like a book, that's
the image that he uses. "And that judgment which holds it for least, I approve as best, and he whose
thought is on the other things may rightly be called just. I saw Latonia's daughter," the Moon,
"growing, without that shadow for which I once believed her to be rare or dense; thy son's aspect,
Hyperion, I endured there, and I saw how Maia and Dione move in their circles," meaning Mercury,
"near him; from thence appeared to me the tempering of Jove, between his father and his son, and
from thence the changes were clear to me which they make in their positions; and all seven showed
me what is their magnitude and what their speed, and at what distance their stations."
We have an astronomy here, the heaven of astronomy, but we have an astronomy which is indicated
mythically, and not only mythically but also through a process of affiliation; it's the daughter of
Latonia, the son of Hyperion, a process of affiliation, it's really as if the universe itself has followed
the logic of generation of production as being producing and reproducing itself and then he
continues, Dante goes back to looking at the Earth. "All seven showed to me what is the magnitude
and what their speed, and at what distances their stations. The little threshing-floor that makes us so
fierce all appeared to me from hills to river-mouths, while I was wheeling with the eternal Twins.
Then to the fair eyes I turned my eyes again."
I want to draw your attention to line 151, where Dante says, "The little threshing-floor that makes
us so fierce all appeared to me, l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci." "Ci fa," look at that line, look at it,
"to me from little hills, to little mountains while I was wheeling with the eternal Twins." Dante, in
many ways has now that's part of his view of astronomy. He's giving his horoscope indirectly
here. This idea of the Twins being the sign under which he was born, it doesn't really imply any
astrological lapse on his part, it's now that he can be free and he has determined the limitations of
astrological determinations he can go on alluding to his birth sign. I want to draw I just want
to draw the attention to this whole point about the "ci" where Dante says "the little threshing-floor
that makes us so fierce," because for all its distance, Dante says, distance as it can be for all the
distance which is implied by this poetic fiction, he's distant from the Earth as he ever was. This
pronoun, ci, us, the pronoun strains to have it both ways; on the one hand Dante asserts distance, the
claim of a perspective of eternity on the world and but he does not, that's the other way, he does
not want to surrender his place in time and in history.
He is part of us so at the end of all this great gyration through the universe, Dante again claims and
reclaims for himself a place with us in the world of history and the world of time. The synthesis of
the two, the claim of eternity and the sense of contingency of the self in time is the ultimate goal of
the poem, and the ultimate goal of the journey. That for Dante will be, as we shall see maybe next
week, the very vision of the incarnation. The two the idea where these two, this structure, the
immutable structure of history and the process of time will come together.
Let me stop here and see if there are questions that I would about some of these issues that I
raised that I would welcome them, please.
The passage, by the way, may be we should even the passage about where Dante talks about his
own horoscope was given a little bit earlier, line 112 of Canto XXII, where Dante says, "O glorious
stars, O light pregnant with mighty power, from which I acknowledge all my genius, whatever it be,
with you was born and with you hidden, he that is the father of each mortal life when I first tasted
the Tuscan air; and after, when grace was granted me to enter into the high wheel that bears you
round, your region was assigned to me. To you my soul now sighs devoutly that it may gain
strength for the hard task that draws it to itself."
This is the Dante abolishes the differences between astronomy and astrology. From this point of
view he belongs fully to his time where there is no intrinsic we think of them as astrologists, of
superstition, and astronomy is the science that was not the case for Dante. Another little detail since
I'm introducing the question of visionariness now in cantos with the contemplation. Let me just
mention this initial image to give you an idea of how Dante proceeds. The initial image at Canto
XXI of the very beginning of Canto XXI, Dante is in the sphere of Saturn where the
contemplatives are and he sees the ladder, the ladder of ascent but before we get there this is the
passage, "Already my eyes were fixed on the face of my Lady, and within my mind, which was
withdrawn from every other thought; and she did not smile, but 'Were I to smile' she began to me,
'thou wouldst become like Semele when she was turned to ashes; for my beauty, which thou hast
seen kindle more the higher we climb by the stairs of the eternal palace, is so shining that if it were
not tempered thy mortal powers in its blaze would be as a branch split by a thunderbolt. We have
risen to the seventh splendour, which beneath the breast of the burning Lion rays down now
mingled with its power. Set thy mind behind thine eyes and make of them mirrors to the shape
which in this mirror will appear to thee.'"
This is an extraordinary image, the image of the myth of Semele, the young woman who fell in love
with God. That would seem to be, of course, an extraordinary spiritual story. Ovid tells it as a very
carnal story, she wants to love Jupiter, and Jupiter will agree to love Semele back on one condition,
that she never ask the god to show himself forth for what he is. She has to accept his the god's
disguises. A variant, if you wish, of what later will appear with Apuleius, the idea of Eros and
Psyche, you remember the love of the relationship with the mind and love. Love does not want
to be seen for what it is, and always Simulacra and deceptive figures to cover its essence. This is the
same thing that he's asking, that Dante's recalling, and of course what happens in Ovid is that
Semele, in love, and because of love, love impels curiosity, she wants Jupiter to show himself forth
for what he is, mindless of the danger that Jupiter had predicted this would befall and the danger
of the death that would befall her. In fact, he shows himself and she cannot bear the extraordinary
beauty of the god and gets destroyed and turned into ashes.
That's the myth that Dante is recalling, so that the inevitable question for us is, why would Dante
recall this story here at the beginning of the cantos on contemplation. The answer that I could give
you is that Dante does so because he's aware of the dangers of visionary claims. This is if you
read the Bible, for instance, you do know that there is a tradition in the Bible among the Jews to
turn their back, for instance, to even the passing of what is viewed as holy, to be the Holy Arc, or
they cover themselves in because of the wisdom or the tradition of not seeing, or never trying to
have mixed the profane and the sacred, that of the sense of the danger that would befall the those
who are in the space of the profane space, they were outside of the sanctuary.
Dante is making this or Beatrice is telling him that he has to endure the limitations of his human
nature, and that his human nature, the trait of his mortality which is that of seeing through images
and through ubiquitous cannot yet be given up. He does this as he enters the heaven of the
contemplatives, who they themselves were longing and desiring to see God, but accepted this
longing as the sign of God's presence and gift to them. This is an extraordinary passage in terms of
what Dante thinks of contemplation and clearly the danger of thinking of contemplation as the
condition that would allow and bring about the vision of God. Such a vision, Dante is saying, is not
going to be possible while we are here on Earth.
This is the a number of ambiguities about this problem and then we could also mention why
Benedict why is Benedict here? The figure that appears in Canto XXII as the example of first
of all he is the founder, as I said, of the life of contemplation, but a life of contemplation that
appears as the danger of contemplation; of course, Dante goes on talking about the decadence of the
contemplative order, which is by the way, quite true and what that which occasions historically
the foundation of the mendicant orders. Those Franciscans and Dominicans whom we already have
encountered who want to be part of the world and roam around in the world, but the danger of the
contemplation though is that they can bypass and drive a wedge between the contemplative life and
the active life.
The ideal of Benedict has been betrayed because what he wants is an action and a life of action, the
life of contemplative prayer, so that's one of the causes of the degeneracy that Dante pursues. With
that we enter the world of now where Dante returns and this is what we are going to do next time
to what I call basic words. Somehow the whole compass of knowledge, the whole idea of
geography and spiritual geography, the whole idea of how of what triggers the writing of a
poem, that has been taken care of, or at least Dante seems to have been phasing and delivering to us
his particular understanding of these problems.
Now the question is, with all of this in mind, what is the meaning of the basic words we use, and the
basic words we use, and that's what we are going to talk about next time, are going to be love, hope,
and faith, what we call the three theological virtues. They are basic words because there is no such a
thing as a life without trust, or the difficulties of the life without trust. There is no possibility of a
life without hope and certainly that which for Dante remains the biggest mystery of all; there is
never the possibility of thinking about a life or without love. It becomes a mystery because he can
define the other two words; he never he escapes the responsibly of defining love. It is as if that
were really the biggest mystery throughout the Divine Comedy and in his experience.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [01:02:30]

Let me see if there are some questions now that I have thrown a lot put a lot of chestnuts on the
fire as we say so let's yes.
Student: In one of your earlier lectures you were talking about the whole comedy that it was a
physical journey and in hell we could see that was he emphasized his weight and the Earth and
smells of things and so forth, and now that we're in Paradise it's more vision and light, and color,
and is he trying to characterize God or God's relation to Earth somehow by contrasting them that
way?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is that in the previous lectures I discussed would
talk of hell as the place where the smells, the concrete particulars of the Earth would be mentioned
and it would be part of Dante's warehouse in the representation of hell. Now that we are talking
we are entering the world of Paradise, we have been discussing Paradise, Dante seems to separate
himself from the aesthetics, the sensual aspects of hell and talk more which is still sensual
though, colors, light, colors and visionariness. Then the question becomes does this mean that Dante
is clearly finding a distinction between Earth and Heaven that this is really the am I rephrasing it
accurately?
Student: Yes. Is he trying to I mean, because clearly it's not that he's trying to separate God from
physical reality because what we see and colors are still very physical descriptions so what is the
distinction between them?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah well I the answer would be this, that in Paradise you do
have a lot of what we call earthly experiences, that's the only way he can really understand anything
about Paradise. There are dances, there are songs, you do have there are games that they play.
You do have the language of playfulness in the forms of simulations. Simulation is very it's a
form of game, it's a reduction of the world to unseriousness, the game, the play, and in the form of
the degradation of, the noble idea of play because play is see these things are all very
ambivalent.
We are dealing with the same reality only seen from different perspective, and I mention play
because Paradise is all about play, it's about playing, about the dance of the stars, about the
spectacle, the theatre which he just Dante has just seen a little performance put out for him. Can
you imagine the dance of the stars that go on? It's like seeing the spectacle of the Olympics in
China; they go on with distribution of shapes and forms, that is play, it's aesthetics so I don't
there is no difference there between the two. I don't see a difference there.
Of course that has nothing to do, whatever he is seeing in Paradise, has really nothing to do with
the understanding of the divinity. I am not even I haven't decided yet, not for any reason but
because there may not really be time and I could I wouldn't be doing justice to the difficulty of
the problem. I haven't decided whether to discuss the whole the cosmology of Paradise, of the
universe that appears in Canto XXIX of Paradise where Dante goes on talking about two universes,
for instance, so there is the physical universe that somehow he has traversed only to understand that
when he goes there, there is another universe which is completely spiritual and it's not the platonic
idea of an inverted you know Plato has this idea of an inverted cosmos, but we are in the world
which is really the projection, a projection, an unreal projection, projection meaning a shadow of
the real cosmos.
It's not really that there are two adjacent cosmos, both very real and that's the where we live and
where we don't live; beyond that as really a speck of sand he says. There is a light that clearly is the
light from which whole or creation emanates, so God remains forever a transcendent. What Dante
does see at the end is he sees this image in his own image in the plural, our image, which to me
implies the idea that as Christians read the whole notion of Genesis is that in since we are shaped
in God's image there is our image in God. There is a human component in God, so that's all he sees;
he sees maybe the incarnation but it's all of that is all wrapped in a kind of extraordinary and
deliberate fogginess of representation.
The paradise that he describes is not the paradise of sensual delights, of the Qu'ran for instance, but
there's a lot of game and play and the stars, the amorous discourse of paradise engages and
involves even the stars. They go on wooing each other, it's as if literally the whole cosmos is
involved in this extraordinary dance of love that keeps it together, makes it cohere as opposed to say
Lucretius' idea of an anarchic universe forever on the verge of falling apart. These are the real
models of the cosmos. Let's call it Lucretius and Virgil, Epicurus and Plato, this is Dante and heavy,
the heavy traditionalist, it's very heavy the tradition of materialism. The spiritual tradition is very
small in comparison to the heaviness of the physical, of the scholars of physics who want to see the
cosmos in physical terms. But Dante opposes it and somehow he finds a kind of that's what the
universe that's what keeps the universe together is really love and that's what we're going to find
out. That I will read, the rest I don't know. Other questions? Please.
Student: When Beatrice is wanting Dante not to look directly at her face because he might become
like Semele and just turn to ashes, do you think Dante is trying to elude back to Medusa and the
danger of just looking directly into the face of something so powerful and being reduced to
something that isn't human? I was reading that and she said, "Set thy mind behind thine eyes and
make of them mirrors to the shape which in this mirror will appear to thee," as if like the mirror, so
the mirror is like the eyes like the intermediary just like the shield that is the intermediary for maybe
Medusa.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Very good. The question let me just recall the question. The
image of Beatrice as Semele, whose smile could potentially destroy the lover, the pilgrim who were
to look at her face; the question is, is that supposed to be a sort of, let's call it palinodic variant, a
version of the scene of Medusa in Inferno IX, who threatened also, in that case the pilgrim, with
petrification, with a turning into stone, the intellect would petrify, that's really the allegory and there
of course in the canto of Medusa there was always the shield, the shield of poetry, the shield of
Perseus, and the answer is yes absolutely, this is exactly what is happening. I think that this is if
you are thinking as I think you are of writing about are you thinking of writing no. About
Medusa? No.
Student: I was just [inaudible].
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, well if you're thinking about writing about Medusa I think
that you are absolutely you would the two scenes you would be absolutely correct. The story
of Medusa is what is interesting the story of Medusa is the story of we could view it we
viewed it, as you remember, the temptation of looking at the past, a way of Orpheus, a turning
Dante who casts himself as Orpheus, Orpheus, you know, who is told not to look back and yet
Orpheus stands for a sort of impatience, a kind of skepticism about the injunction, the fear that
Eurydice may not really be following him, he turns and loses her, some modern mythographers
even see that look. I'm thinking about a man by the name of Blanchaux, he really wanted to lose
Eurydice because he saw because this way he could write poetry, so that poetry can become the
perpetual voice of absence.
Dante does not go that far but it's clear that it's time to a poetic experience of his own. The
interesting thing about what you are saying and we could go into that maybe in a conversation later
because it's it would take me too far, is that this enigmatic the double face of Beatrice comes
to the fore here that she has she was confronting the siren and threatens against the siren and
now she also appears as the sorcery and danger of beauty. Beauty that is that which was the
language here is beauty, beauty which can which we hunger after and yet it's that which can
destroy us and this seems to me to be I put that in the consciousness of Dante's of the
contemplatives that Dante represents, this doubleness that you're wrong to see and yet you may not
have to you are better off in not seeing, but it's true that it appears also with the ambiguity of
beauty and the beauty of Beatrice that it would be true. Yes.
Student: So if the mirror is sort of like the intermediary just like the shield, what role does vision
and the eyes play in mediating between what you see in the world and the mind that it protects?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well Dante will is now slowly preparing for this final vision and
it's going to have intermediate stages. When he will see, at the end he will see not God; he will see
his own image within the beatific vision. This is how far he will go, not only that, he will go also
there is an eclipse of the inner eye of memory. Memory is thought of as being the inner eye of the
imagination, that's the classical definition of memory. That too will be completely eclipsed, he will
forget, so that at the end of all of these experiences we are ending up with forgetfulness with a fall
from that vision. I don't know that I'm answering exactly your question but I don't know that I I
haven't understood what you really want to know, what you're really asking so
Student: I guess I'm just asking more about the role of vision like it makes more sense
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Vision okay.
Student: Yeah, just like I'm is the eye supposed to be an intermediary or a protection of the mind
to let you think or
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The eye what is the eye, is it the intermediary or an extension of
the mind? That's really what the eye is, but the vision that he will have is not going to be a physical
vision. It cannot be a physical vision; it has to be a spiritual vision and so there are the limitations of
the eye. Let me leave it at that. Okay, thank you, see you next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 21 - Paradise XXIV, XXV, XXVI [November 18, 2008]
Chapter 1. An Introduction to the Three Theoretical Virtues [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Today we are going to look at the three cantos in the eighth sphere
of Dante's cosmos; we are beyond the planets, beyond all this so called eighth sphere, or the Heaven
of the Fixed Stars. Before we get to, which will be next week next time, the Empyrean, the
heaven of light and fire but now we are in the heaven of the fixed stars and Dante discusses the
three theological virtues. The three theological virtues, unlike they are so called to distinguish
them from the cardinal virtues that Christians share with the classical tradition, namely the fortitude,
prudence, and justice, etc.
These are the virtues that deal with the understanding of the divine; they open up this horizon of
speculations about the language of God, the way God speaks to us, theology in this sense, the way
in which we speak about God, theology, the logos. In theology there's the word logos and the way
God speaks to us, so it's the place in paradise where Dante will focus on the meaning of what I call
it's not my phrase, "basic words," the words which are foundations of the way in which we come
out to discover who we are; they are words that we use, the words that we many not even know
exactly what they mean and yet Dante will try to define them, they are, I repeat faith, hope and
charity.
The three virtues that Dante will in this, using Paul's letter to the Hebrews where he accounts or
gives a definition at least of faith and hope, but they are words they are terms that always
implicate each other. You cannot go explaining faith without really talking about hope. You cannot
go on talking about hope without explaining faith, and both of them are recapitulated and come
together, gather within the question of within the virtue of charity and the virtue of love. They
are words that they are very mysterious in many ways but there are degrees of understanding all
of them.
The three examiners, because Dante will go through the equivalent of a university examination, a
medieval Bachelor's degree, that's the term comes to us from the universities, medieval universities,
the Bachelor. Dante is a bachelor who presents himself to the teacher, the teacher is testing him, and
he will give an answer according to textbooks. Authentic where the authentic the departed of
one's own beliefs, one's own hopes, and one's own charity are gathered.
The three teachers are going to be three Apostles who are known as Peter for faith, St. Peter for
faith and that makes sense because Peter himself, the name stands for the cornerstone on which the
edifice of Christian belief is built; the second one is going to be for the virtue of hope is going to be
James, known as the Galician because why him; it would seem to be less obvious than the other
two because he among of all the Apostles is the one whose death was recorded in the Acts of the
Apostles and so he lived in a certain expectation of a life to come, so he would seem to be the real
figure of hopefulness of some idea of some way of expecting a future and the life of eternity. The
virtue of charity instead, is examined by John, the Apostle, to distinguish him from the seer, the
writer of the Apocalypse. So it's the three Apostles Peter, James, and John.
Are there ways in which we could I could give you some summary ways of trying to understand
some of these virtues. One thing that I would ask you to look through when you have time to go
into detail of these texts, it seems to me that all the three cantos deal, or have as a kind of what I
would call under text, the subtext of them, something running through but sometimes even visible
but not all the time visible, is the question of exile. Dante is retrieving the language of exile as if
these virtues are clearly virtues that don't concern at all the blessed in heaven; they can only concern
us here in time. The blessed in heaven certainly do not need faith, or hope, or they don't really need
to know about what love may be; either they have it or they wouldn't be there so this is but it's
the language of exile is running through these three issues just as the language of time, so the
connection between time and exile probably needs not much explanation, much glossing. We are in
time, we are fallen, and it's only in the language of the fall that it's possible to think about exile.
The other element running through this is really the question of, very visible, especially in Canto
XXVI, the actual question of language itself. What is the language of God? What are the names of
God? Dante asks that question. Are we talking about an entity with a name, and if so, you know the
whole debate about the so-called tetragrammaton, the four letters that are supposedly that name
God. That's what the word means, the four letters. Are they known or is God just an effable? Is there
some Is He some kind of reality we can never even hope to name or are we going to be related
and connected to this idea, this knowledge of God by analogical discourse. These are positions, the
mystical position that denies even our knowledge of the name of God, the analogical position put
forth by Aquinas, for instance, that we really talk about God analogically and know the qualities we
attribute to God only they're not real by what we may know in our own lives. Dante asks this
question about what is the language of God? What are the names of God and how do we get to
know God?

Chapter 2. The Virtue of Faith [00:07:59]

The first virtue then is the virtue of faith. There are many ways literally I call it a basic word
because it's really a basic word because it founds us. It's a stone, Peter asks for the foundation of all
this poetic edifice of the Divine Comedy. I would like you to think about this the actual when
we get into the text, there is actual apostrophe at the beginning of Canto XXIV of, "'O fellowship
elect to the great supper of the blessed Lamb, who feeds you so that your desire is ever satisfied,
since by God's grace this man has foretaste of that which falls from your table, before death
appoints his time, give heed to his measureless craving and bedew him with some drops; you drink
always from the fountain whence comes that on which his mind is set.'" He wants to know what
I do what I would like to stress is the presence of this actual metaphor of a banquet. It is as if
Dante is clearly we're dealing with two metaphors here; one which is exilic, the manna in the
desert, the falling of this dew on the exiles, the wanderers, the Jewish wanderers in the desert, and
the other one is the eschatological banquet.
It is as if any debate about faith has to be placed within a communal context. This is not going to be
the professional faith the way you may have it, let's say in 1550 roughly. I'm really alluding to, as a
contrast, just to make you understand the case, the great debate between two figures of the
Renaissance called Erasmus and Luther. They debated, at length, about the question of whether or
not how a text written about a century earlier, around 1440, a text by Valla, a great humanist who
wrote about the free will in the defense of the free will on free will. He they were it was
unclear to them what Valla really meant so they go on debating; the text in called On Free Will.
Erasmus maintains that Valla really had defended the existence of free will. Free will, which is a
gift of God, it's something that has been given to us and therefore we really have to come to know
God through the acknowledgement of his authority because the freedom that we are talking that
he is talking about, he thinks Valla is talking about, actually comes from him, and so by the free will
we come to know and come to choose also the existence of the divinity.
Luther had very radical ideas about the question of freedom. There was not such a thing he would
argue as free will, and actually the world, the universe is a universe of absolute faith, and faith is
freedom and it's given to us by freedom because it releases us from all obligations, it frees us from
all constraints, it just makes us understand that our own relationship to the Creator is without any
other intermediary forces of the world. It's a radical, theological claim of freedom, and faith
together. It's very possible; many people, just to extend this argument, there are many poets and
thinkers who go on changing his scenario and believe that, for instance, freedom is actually the
source of not faith but faithlessness. That the idea of one's own faithlessness may come, as a
denial of God, may come from the assertion of one's self and the assertion of one's own total
freedom. But this is I'm giving you this to exemplify the nature of the debates and the force of
the debates.
Dante insists so removes the question of faith from one of radical subjectivity or radical faith,
aware that there may be some kind some flip side to it, that faith and lack of faith really both
depend, if you reduce them to subjectivity, one can go on sliding into one of the two options very
easily. Dante focuses on, with this first image, on the question of the communal experience, the
banquet. That to me is part of the shared world, this eschatological banquet, where they're all the
the vision where, at the end of time, but the allusion is also to the manna where these various
figures are the community comes together and then Dante goes on really focusing on the
individuality, on the private professional faith, it's really about him.
The interesting thing that I want to point out is Beatrice's words to Peter, around lines 30, she goes
on appealing to him to go on to examining, but she does so in a peculiar way. Let me read this
passage, "And she," lines 32, "'O eternal light of the great soul with whom our Lord left the keys,"
this is very canonical, it's part of the hagiography, the account of the iconographic representation of
Peter with the two keys, "which He brought down of this wondrous joy, test this man on points light
and grave as thou seest good regarding the faith by which thou walkedst on the sea." This is an
allusion recorded in the Gospel of Peter walking out of an act of faith, walking on water, because
Jesus asks him and tells him so.
The strange thing about this reference is that Peter did not want to walk on water. It is the moment
of, let me call it the crisis of faith, the moment where Peter had no faith and in fact Jesus calls him,
"Oh man of little faith why don't you walk," and then I guess feeling that he's teetering on the brink
of the abyss you can imagine, really see soaring over the waves, finally does manage to go on. This
is a poignant moment because clearly Dante's emphasizing that there are degrees of faith and that
the so-called crisis of faith must not be seen as denials of faith. On the contrary, that somehow there
is a sort of dialectical movement between a profession of faith and doubts about owning and that's
the owning this gift, of having this gift of faith. This is one of the strange moments and it's in the
light of this strange fluctuation between faith and experience of not faith that I think that what
happens later has to the wait has to be understood, and then whether he loves rightly and rightly
hopes, and believes, here are the three three of the language the three theological virtues all
come together.
"Is not hid from thee, since thou hast seen it there," and so on and then Dante uses both the
language of the university, academic life, as if this were really an academic test. We'll come back to
this issue in a moment. Just as the bachelor that's the the Bachelor of Arts, the
baccalaureatus, as we call it arms himself so there are two. There is the weapon of knowledge, the
academic, knowledge as a force, knowledge as a weapon, "just as the bachelor arms himself and
does not speak to the master," magister, "submits the question for argument, not for settlement."
These issues are issues that always need the open-endedness of argumentation and not that of a
settling of the point. "I armed myself with all my reasons while she was speaking, to be ready for
such a questioner and for such a profession. 'Speak, good Christian, declare thyself.'"
This is a knowledge that makes him visible, "declare thyself," but a knowledge that does not keep
him hidden, sort of brings him into existence, makes him visible to us. What is faith and that's the
question that he that Peter asks. And the answer is, "'May the grace which grants it to me to
make my confession to the Chief Centurion,' I began, 'give me right utterance for my thoughts.' And
I went on: 'As the truthful pen,'" an allusionist to Paul, a questioning an authority, and the word
authority, as you know, is that which is what do we mean by authentic and authorities are key
words, the word is auctoritas. It means that comes which is worthy of faith. The teacher is not
necessarily worthy of faith. You can question the opinions of the teacher and reject the question of
the there's a distinction between the master and the author. The one or the authority, the one
who is an author is one who is worthy of belief, worthy of faith, so he quotes Paul, so this is a
canonical answer, "'As the truthful pen of thy dear brother," Paul, "wrote of it with thee, father, put
Rome on the good path, faith is the substance," literally the foundation, that which lies under all the
things.
The ground of all things, substance of things hoped for, so faith if you want to understand faith
we ought to probably go and read about hope, things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.
This I take to be its quiddity, quiddity and medieval part of the medieval lexicon meaning its
constitutive essence, its specificity. Now if you thought that in the Middle Ages that we'll go on
talking about faith, the famous formulation of faith comes from Tertullian who says, "I believe
because it is absurd," so that faith becomes the consequence of, the extension of, the absurdity of all
things. Because the claim made on what one believes has in itself the idea of going being beyond
reason, absurd in that sense would be beyond reason. That's one of the ways in which faith is
defined. It really means that faith exceeds the law of reason; it means that faith can never really
quite be an object of knowledge. Dante does not pursue that line. He tries to make faith a reason co-
extensive. This is the sense of the I've got to qualify the term co-extensive, and I will in a
moment, because obviously they are not, but they are they belong together.
This is the sense of the whole metaphorical pattern of the university context. That is to say, you can
know something about belief, knowledge and faith really belong together, they implicate each other.
They are not the same thing because if you really could know everything of what you belief then
there is no reason why you should belief, that which faith becomes necessary a necessity only
because they are it's a way of acknowledging limitations of what one knows. But linking
knowledge and faith is not just simply a way of saying that reason can know some of the content of
what Dante believes, that there is a reasonableness to what one believes, that's all true. To say that
reason and faith go together, there are certain claims about the reasonableness of what one believes.
It really means, I think, at a deeper level, that faith itself is a mode of knowledge. That it is a mode
of knowledge exactly the way you have the knowledge of philosophy though its modalities are
going to be different, because philosophy submits to the rules of the rationality, but faith opens your
eyes and it's a way of showing you something about the world that the reason alone cannot do.
The binding of the two metaphors, that's what I meant co-extensive but not identical. I didn't mean
they're identical; the joining of philosophy and theology, reason and faith, makes and projects faith
as a way of knowing. It makes you see the world in different ways then if you were trying to look at
the world in the light of natural reason and from the point of view of rationality. So this seems to be
the argument and I set the terms against, let's say, a modern subjective idea of freedom, freedom of
faith as freedom, that frees you from all, and you are only accountable to the Creator, or faith as a
mode of responding to the absurdity around oneself, which is really the language of Tertullian and
this scholastic argument that Aquinas, of knowledge and faith really needing to be together.
Then the examination goes on and I want to talk about 70, "'Thou thinkest right," this is the
beginning, the top of the page Canto XXIV, line 68, "Then I heard: 'Thou thinkest rightly if thou
understandest well why he placed it among the substances and after among the evidences.' And I
then: 'The deep things that so richly manifest themselves to me here are so hidden from men's eyes
below that there their existence lies in belief alone." Now, it's the distinction, this is a cesura
between belief and what we are the evidence of things not seen, the paradox remains, so there
are things visible here in the heaven of the fixed stars and not available to those of us who are in
time and in the fallen world. "On which is based the lofty hope; and therefore it takes the character
of substance. And from this belief we must reason, without seeing more; therefore it holds the
character of evidence." This is a gloss on the medieval theological lexicon that Dante has been
deploying.
"Then I heard: 'If all that is acquired below for doctrine were thus understood, there would be no
room left for sophist's wit.' This breathed from the kindled love; and it continued," I want you to
pay attention to this metaphor, for I wish you had we're really sitting around the table where I
could ask you to speculate about the presence of the coming metaphor. "If all that is acquired below
for doctrine," I am sorry. "'Now the alloy and the weight of this money have been well examined;
but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse.'" All of a sudden the question of money and the question of
faith faith is literally given as said to be money. Do you have this coin in your purse? "I
therefore: 'I have indeed, so bright and round that of its mintage I am in no doubt.' Then there came
from the depth of the light that was shining there: 'This precious jewel,'" that's one reason why the
metaphor of money is used for clearly for faith. It's a precious jewel on which every virtue rests,
"whence did it come to thee?"
And the language is going to be it's from the plenteous reign of the Holy Spirit and the new
parchments and so on, but that metaphor of money as faith really sort of has a way of lingering on
in our minds. What is the connection? One connection, I repeat, is to indicate the preciousness of
the faith one holds. It is really as rare maybe and it's valuable as rare, beautiful jewels can be. That's
one thing, but clearly there is more, because the word money which Dante uses in Italian, moneta, is
the same word becomes a character in an English epic, moneta comes from the Latin form meneo,
the word money as you know comes from meaning a warning, it's an advice, it's a warning, a
warning about its mintage, it's part of the language of we have the word admonishment that
comes from it. It admonishes that it's not a counterfeit, that it is really pure, so that's another way of
referring to the purity of this faith, the preciousness before, now the purity of this faith, the
authenticity of it so to speak.
Another trait of money is that money has it's that which establishes the value it circulates first
of all, has the power of circulating, that's not said by the text but it's implied by the metaphor. It is
as if faith has that power, has that virtue that puts everything into motion, and therefore questions
and establishes, that's what makes it a basic word. It establishes, it's the substance that establishes
the values of all the things that are around us. Fourth, I cannot really get past my mind that Dante
wants us to think about this kind of the resonance of prophenation that is in the language of money
and link it with really this purity of faith. It is as if there is the distinction is really never quite
between prophenation and the purity of faith and that somehow the world of faith comes out of the
world of prophenation. That it belongs to the world of time, it can be profane and yet it still
manages to put things into circulation. It's really the ambiguity of money, the ambiguity of the
metaphor of money; I think sheds a lot of light on this virtue that Dante has been examining. He has
been examined about it but he has been he is examining it for us.

Chapter 3. The Virtue of Hope [00:28:22]

Let me go and see how whether we can see more about this virtue by looking at the question of
hope that comes immediately after with the examination by St. James. I begin to tell you here just a
little story that it's not really an unusual story, but as you probably know, the Greeks never
thought of hope as a virtue. There's a reference to hope in as being one of Pandora's being one
of the entities available in Pandora's Box. You know about Pandora's Box, which was opened and
all the evils of the world came out of Pandora's Box, save for one, hope. It's a statement, it's a view
that all is that really casts hope as clearly, some kind of evil or a delusion, and in fact, for the
Greeks the idea of hope is always a term that implies the delusion of exiles. It's really what befalls
an exile, someone who loses one's land and what is left for him to do nothing but hope. It's the
radical illusion; it's a kind of hope against hope. I have nothing more to do; it's a self-deception,
that's really what it is.
Dante does not follow that route for hope, and in effect, I think that he finds in the Bible the idea
that or a kind of a new a different horizon for the rethinking, the way in which hope can be
viewed. Hope, first of all, is literally a virtue of time. More so faith the language of the clock,
you must have noticed in Canto XXIV introducing the world of hope. I did not want to talk about it
because I know that I'll be talking about it now. Hope is as much of faith a virtue of time, because
it's a virtue not only of time; it's a virtue specifically of the future. It tells me whenever if I have
hope I can't really hope about the past, it would be it would fly against all sense, against all
logic. I hope yesterday it didn't rain; it doesn't make sense does it? I mean it's but I can hope that
tomorrow it won't snow. I can have that hope which would be a silly hope, but it's a hope
nonetheless because it's a virtue of time in the future. It's a way of experiencing time in the future,
that's one thing that Dante is doing, linking therefore hope and temporality.
But it's not only a virtue of time; it's the most realistic of virtues. Normally, we think, and the
Greeks would sort of give us a cause to pause, that if you really hope it's because you are really
desperate. You hope because they have no rational reason, no realistic reason to believe that things
are going to go the way you wish they went for you, so you go on hoping. Dante says no, hope is
the most realistic of virtues because it tells me that nothing is really ever over. That's what makes it
realistic. The negation of hope, the opposite of hope would be despair. Dante, you remember, is the
scene for Dante, is the scene that we find in canto we never read it, and now retrospectively I can
tell you that you should go and read it, Canto VIII of Inferno, and even in Canto IX, the encounter
with the Medusa is that fear of despair, that idea of being petrified. The Medusa can turn you into a
stone; that is to say, that you are imprisoned and you remain caught either in your standpoint or in
that particular reality that you have or the idea of yourself as you like to as you think you have
been, and the idea of the past. Dante says, no hope is a virtue of the future; it's a virtue that can even
change the past.
In that sense, it's effective on the past, though it's because it tells us that the past may not be what
we thought it was. Whatever disaster you may have had, whatever disappointment you may have
had in the past, that disappointment may contain seeds that really will reappear in the future, and
maybe a preparing a future that will surprise you. This is a different understanding of time that
Dante presents. It's an understanding of time that once again Dante links with two moments of his
which is in that sense it's really not different from faith, it fulfills faith, it unveils the element of
faith. You cannot really go on hoping about something like that unless you have some an act of
faith. Dante goes on explaining it in existential terms and tying it to his own hope of returning to his
homeland, his own native city, and the larger pattern of exile. I want to examine that with you.
The poem begins with a subjunctive; Canto XXV begins with an optative, what we call, "I wish"
that things were going that way. "If it ever come to pass," contingency, the word is contingency in
Italian, it uses the Latinism because we don't really use that in that sense, but I'll read in Italian even
if Margaret I wish she were here se mai contingua, that's a Latinism, if ever I were to
contingent, if it ever happened in that sense, "that the sacred poem," "poema sacro," "if it ever come
to pass the sacred poem," and the sacred means remember that Dante uses the word "sacred"
always in a double sense. A sacred, he's not investigate with some kind of magic, idolatress power
because for Dante the sacred is never reducible or localizable, that's a verb, in one object or in one
particular place. He means it ambiguously as that which contains the profane and the sacred within
it, hell and heaven, the scriptures of heaven and hell.
"The sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have set their hand," it's an incredible moment of
prophetic self-awareness. I am writing but I know that without God I would not be able to be
writing this poem, "that it has made me lean for many years," writing now. I'm sorry that I'm giving
you this kind of simple paraphrase of it, but the ascesis of writing, writing is a do you understand
what I mean? Writing is an ascetic labor of the soul, it makes me lean as if he were undergoing
fasting, the rituals of the commitment to a particular labor, so I call it the ascetic labor of the soul;
"should overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair sheepfold." If I could ever go back home,
but he called back home Florence, in the canto of hope where he's an exile, and the city is described
in passive terms.
The metaphor of the city as a sheepfold, the Passover language, the language you expect to have in
the Eclogues of Virgil, the pastoral tradition. The idyllic world, that's what we mean by the pastoral
tradition. If there ever were some peace, some idyllic circumstances in that city, and you can
continue, "where I slept as a lamb," here he continues with the pastoral language, "an enemy to the
wolves that make war on it, with another voice now, and other fleece I shall return a poet, and to the
font of my baptism take the laurel crown; for there I entered into the faith that makes souls known
to God, and after, because of it, Peter thus encircled my brow." Dante is still in the circle of hope
and the heaven of hope, and yet now he's really thinking about the last ceremony of Peter on him
who blesses him three times. It is as if literally faith, and hope are now converging, the two virtues
come together.
What is Dante saying though here in this proem, at the beginning of this canto? He's casting his
hometown Florence in the pastoral language, as a sheepfold, and they know he's alluding to a
Messianic time where when if it were just when the peace were restored, when the factions,
the wolves, the Guelfs, the pun of wolves and Guelfs, that's very clear that's what etymologically
the word Guelfs comes from, from wolves and the lambs will lie together, almost a kind of
impossible time, a Messianic time, when finally peace will be restored. He goes on adding that he
would be acknowledged, that's part of his hope, he will be acknowledged, there will be at that
time he would acknowledged as a poet on the font of his baptism, which as you know he refers to
the Baptistery of St. John, where we do have records that he actually was christened.
That's simple language, but you have to ask yourselves, why would Dante talk? Why would he use
this particular metaphor? The baptism is clearly the place where a community is constituted, then
the baptismal font has that value. Not only has that value, it's actually the same baptismal font that
Dante had you remember there had been a prophenation of it in canto described in Canto XIX
of Hell where Dante says that he broke one of those Guelfs, which we try to understand in
figurative terms since it would be inconceivable that Dante would be capable of breaking it. He says
he began to rescue someone who was dying.
What is a baptismal font? For those of you who have no inkling of what this is it's the what we
call the sacramental, the typological, if you really more textual and historical about that
sacrament, that ceremony, re-enactment of Exodus. When a child is baptized, he is literally said
he's told actually that he is once again re-enacting the crossing of Exodus. To me this is
extraordinary, that Dante says that he would be now acknowledged and be given the laurel of the
poet on the baptismal font. The question you have to ask yourselves is, no doubt, is, Dante's asking
how does a poet come home? He imagines a triumph at the baptismal font, is there a home what
is the homecoming of poets? That's the hope, hope for a homecoming where everybody will be at
peace and there will be a feast, a festive mood and he was going to be welcomed back and he would
hailed and acknowledged as a poet, a great fantasy of every of the winner's return. That's literally
what he is saying.
Yet, he's using this language of a baptismal font which is the language of Exodus. It is as if he were
saying that the poet can only come home in order to tell his community that I have to get out again.
That all of them will have to do exactly what's happening to him, that the exile that has been
with which he has been punished, and which has befallen him, is really the message that his poetry
can only give to the community from which he has been exiled. He is convoking the whole
community around the baptismal font, which is the figure of exile, to tell them this is really where
we belong in exile, in the language of spiritual exile, a language in which clearly implies some
kind of re-making of oneself, re-thinking of oneself.
Now, with this in mind, Dante goes on seeing the barren for whom below they visit Galicia, an
allusion to Santiago, and then she herself will go on. I want to before we read the passage I want
to give you this, "And that compassionate one," line 50 that Beatrice's presentation of Dante to St.
James. "And that compassionate one who directed the feathers of my wings," a flight of the soul,
the name of the family Alighieri, "to so high a flight anticipated my reply: 'The Church Militant,'"
this is Beatrice, "'has not a child more full of hope, as is written in the Sun that irradiates all our
host; therefore is it granted him to come from Egypt to Jerusalem, that he may see it before his
warfare is accomplished. The other two points about which thou didst ask not for enlightenment,
but for him to report how dear this virtue is to thee I leave to himself; for they will not be hard
for him, nor occasion for boasting," and then like a pupil once again taking this language of school,
the school child.
The main thing about this self this presentation by Beatrice is that Dante's journey is glossed
through one figure, one figure that I have been telling you ever since we started this course, these
classes in September through the figure of Exodus. Dante's journey here is literally described as a
journey from Egypt to Jerusalem, which is the master plot of the Hebrews' exile from the bondage
to the story of freedom and exile becomes really the that of exile is the figure of the master
figure of the poem. Dante then therefore is linking now exile and hope, and I think I already have
indicated to you that this idea of writing as writing in the mode of exile is also the it's not to be
seen in a subjective way only relating to him, or the pre-condition to his own poetry but involves
the whole of history.
History has to be seen from the standpoint of exile, so there's at the top of page 363, line 69, "'Hope'
I said," again, "is a sure expectation of future glory," as is the openness to time as futurity, "and it
springs from divine grace and precedent merit. This light comes to me from many stars, but he first
distilled it in my heart who was the sovereign singer of the Sovereign Lord," David, who to Dante is
the greatest of poets.

Chapter 4. The Virtue of Love [00:44:40]

Now we move on from here now to the last virtue, the last virtue of love. It is there is a
progression faith, hope, and charity, it is as if only you have to know these virtues before the
beatific vision can even be possible to you. You have to understand what it is that they do to you
and they produce in you. We come to love, however, we are we would be looking for a definition
of it as at least in a formula, in a kind of a citational formula given and available in Canto XXIV
and XXV, we would be looking for it in vain. There's no definition of love, and it's clear to me, it's
clear to you, I take that Dante really thinks that this is "the word."
Love is the key word that seems to escape all possible definitions, which we know around us, in a
variety of ways, we understand it and yet we cannot quite confine it and define it, and that to define
it would really literally be a way of reducing its impact and reducing its value. It's such a basic word
that Dante says that the only word that is really left, imaginary, etymologizing in this treatise on
language that he writes, this treatises on the De vulgari eloquentia, he says that the word love is the
only residual term from the past that means that language is a way of like food, the banquet, the
beginning of Canto XXIV, is a way of gathering us and bringing us together, so love and food, food
is given as a metaphor at the beginning, now love that escapes any particular definition and yet it's
the culmination of all these theological virtues.
What Dante does see and he has I really want to turn to this scene at the end of Canto XXVI,
Dante meets Adam. It's the confrontation with the beginning, it's the confrontation with the arch
poet, because Adam is the one who names the world, and therefore brings it into existence; that's
really what we mean by poet and that's what we're expecting of poets to do, since this is the
meeting, the encounter with him, lines 90 and following, Dante addresses him, "O fruit," though the
word really is apple, "O fruit that alone wast brought forth ripe." What on earth does he mean?
That's a strange way of addressing someone, "oh fruit alone wast brought forth ripe."
There were a lot of theological debates as to ripeness is an element of grace, a description of grace
for Dante. If you're not ripe, when you are ripe when you have received and been touched by grace.
The argument was, Adam created in a natural state, or was he already created in a state of grace?
How long was he in the earthly paradise before he fell? If he was in a state of grace why could he
why did he fall? If he was in a state of grace why could he commit this sin of transgression? Is it
a transgression that he commits by eating of the fruit of the tree? Dante implies that he was in a
state of grace, ripe, refers to him as ripeness, the idea of "fruit that alone was brought forth ripe." "O
ancient father of whom every bride is daughter, and daughter-in-law," this is the very language that
Dante will deploy in Paradiso XXXIII for the prayer to the Virgin and being the daughter of her son
the question of the divinity and humanity of Christ. "As humbly as I may I besiege thee to speak
with me. Thou seest my wish, and to hear thee sooner I do not tell it."
Let me just skip a few lines and see the answer that Adam will give, line 115 and following, "Know
then, my son, that not the tasting of the tree in itself was the cause of so long exile," so even Adam,
the fall was in a state of exile, exile from the garden, falling into the wilderness where he had to
transform the wilderness into a garden, so that the work would be the way in which he could regain
that which he had lost, the garden, "but solely the trespass beyond the mark." I'll come back to this.
"In the place from which thy Lady sent Virgil," in Limbo, "I longed for this assembly during four
thousand, three hundred and two revolutions of the sun." He's clearly thinking about the harrowing
of hell by Christ so that added now years to the four thousand he counts. "I saw it return to all the
lights on its track nine hundred and thirty times while I lived on earth. The tongue I spoke was all
extinct before Nimrod," we saw him as the founder, the giant, it's a residue of gigantomachy, the
classical idea of the giants fighting the gods, Nimrod who builds the Tower of Babel, so the debate
between them hinges on language.
Language is the key now and retrospectively we really come to understand the language of
theology, the question of what is the what are the properties of theological language and what are
the properties beyond that of all words? That's the argument. "I spoke with Nimrod's race gave
their mind to the unaccomplishable task," the building of the Tower of Babel that would not be
finished, "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." "I" in Italian,
not "I" in the sense of the subject; I don't think that that's what Dante meant. "And later he was
called El;" Dante's using two Hebrew words, what he takes them to be Hebrew words for the name
of God. God was called "I" first and then he was called "El." In fact, this is one of my students
suggested to me that if you read them backwards they really spell out the word Eli which would be
a word that we would acknowledge maybe nowadays as being the word for an appeal to God, I and
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. On the mountain that rises highest from the sea I lived, pure, then guilty from
the first hour to that following the sixth, where the sun changes quadrant," and that's the end of this
encounter.
Let me focus on this question of the language that Dante's really with encounter with Nimrod
explicitly highlights. Adam changes Dante through Adam is changing the account he had given
in the De vulgari eloquentia, which is a story about the origin of words, of language, and where he
had claimed that Hebrew persists; Adam's language unchanged through history because it was
inconceivable, he adds there, that Jesus would be using a language other than the primal language
and not the corrupt language of human beings. Now the story changes, actually Adam's language
has suffered alterations already in the Garden, where the names of God keep changing. This, I think,
is the key.
This is the whole question of theology then, the names of God, the way we speak about God. God
was called "I," and then he was called "El," there is no proper name for God. We only have words
or languages that keep changing according to our own historical circumstances, and Dante goes on
changing his own paradigmatic account about the status of the sacred language. He says there is no
such a thing as a persistent sacred language in history. What comes out is that language is the mark
of our own distance from the divine, that we are and the language that we use is a part of our
own exilic circumstances and exilic predicament, and therefore all the language of theology that
Dante has been describing is part of this exilic longing of human beings.
This is the story from XXIV, XXV, and XXVI. Dante uses theology and examination of theology
only to place us back on the world on this world where we go on hoping, believing, and loving,
realizing that these are all mysterious terms, without which, however, that's another meaning of the
word for the resonance of money, without which we where we know faith is a form of trust
without which you cannot really be functioning together. Where we have hope as the realization of
faith, and where we have love as that which is we are always longing for and somehow the
meaning of which is mysteriously escaping us.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [00:56:08]

These are, I think, the three fundamental issues that Dante is discussing and let me take some
questions.
Student: You passed over briefly this statement of Adam that his transgression was not in the act of
testamentary but in crossing a boundary. I wonder if you could unpack that a little more because it
seems to me not it seems to me a bit of a controversial statement first of all because the
command was "do not eat from the tree," so for Dante to say this, it seems like he's there's
something very specific that he wants to get across in this idea of boundary, maybe if you could
elucidate that for me a little further.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The question is, a question that I really welcome, and I was hoping
someone would ask. The question is that I did not I read from, I did not really explain the Adam
statement when he says that his sin was not in the tasting of the tree but in the trespassing of the
limit, the mark, and therefore it seems that there is some issue of boundaries here and would I care
to reply try to give a response to that.
Yeah, I could give a response on a number of levels. First of all, I would remind you that this is
Canto XXVI of Paradise, and Canto XXVI of Paradise is symmetrically connected with the other
two Cantos XXVI, the canto of Ulysses who also trespasses the boundaries, who is a metaphysician
of sorts, who is dealing with space and who himself there is really nowhere on earth he is really
going; he doesn't know; he's trying to go somewhere but doesn't really know that. They are
connected and then Canto XXVI of Purgatory dealing with love in its perverted form of
Guinizelli, of the poets and Caesar, so that's one of the connections.
Another connection is that these are three cantos where Dante is using foreign languages. There's a
deliberate connection there in the Canto of XXVI of Inferno. You may remember that Virgil goes
out of the way to speak be the one who is the interlocutor of Ulysses and supposedly to speak
Greek, in Canto XXVI of Purgatory, Dante uses the Provencal language of Arnault Daniel who now
starts speaking in Provencal, and then now we are using Dante's using the foreign language,
Hebrew, the names of God, so it's that's one connection, so there are a lot of other, of these
connections.
In the case of Adam, who makes that distinction, to come specifically to your point, who makes the
distinction between the tasting of the fruit and it was not that he tasted the fruit, but that he
trespassed the mark. That seems to be you're right, that was a very controversial subject, because
indeed that was the command given to Adam, "Thou shall not taste of the fruit of this tree," and
Dante presents Adam who instead goes out to do that. It's clear that he thinks that the tasting of the
tree was not he's saying that that was not his sin. That's Dante's take on it. It's not the tasting of
the tree that was the sin; the sin was that he abolished all boundaries. I read that I'm restating the
changing slightly so I'm giving a paraphrase of what has been what seems to be the issue
here. It's clear that Dante thinks that Adam's act of eating of the tree was good, and Adam's act of
the eating of the tree was actually the discovery of a knowledge that had that managed to elevate
him and that was good.
From this point of view this is there seems to be a contrast between Ulysses' form of knowledge
and Adam's form of knowledge. Ulysses' form of knowledge is that he literally is does not go,
doesn't even know where he is going, that's part of the problem, in purely metaphysical terms. He
had no directions, it was a gratuitous quest. In the case of Adam, getting to know of the fruit of the
tree was not an issue. In fact, Dante says, that maybe real knowledge is always going to be tied to
an act of making discoveries, making even transgressions. What was the problem is that there had
been a loss of boundaries that he lost. How are we to understand the loss of boundary? It was the
kind of knowledge that made Adam realize that he could be divine; that was his problem. As soon
as you the imposition of the boundary, God's imposition of or establishment of the boundary
between the human and the divine was also a way of letting Adam know I'm not going to read
this as if it were a kind of atheistical statement at all, it's letting Adam know that he had to be aware
that he was not divine, that he was a human being. What he, Adam, wanted to do was grow in
knowledge and discover that he could also be divine. Do you understand what I'm saying? That is
the issue.
For him to fall then would be a way of re-establishing that boundary and realize that he is a human
being and not divine. It's a growth in self-knowledge. If you really know that you if you really
know who you are, you are really you have grown. Do you see what I'm saying? Dante's
changing the sense of what the fall of man is, and the fall of man is not the fall in the growth of
knowledge but that growth of knowledge that leads you to erasing the boundary, to believe that you
are by virtue of that knowledge that you have gained, that you are now divine. This is really the
whole poem is trying to convey to us is that this is a steady temptation that human beings seem to
have and we can't we need to be reminded, and when we hear it from God himself we don't quite
believe it, and then we have to grow into that recognition of boundaries between ourselves and
something that we aspire to but we are not it yet.
Good question, but I had anticipated this answer, I must say, in a number of ways talking about
Adam in the past. I hope that you don't remember because more or less I said the same thing I
don't know that I mentioned before. One might wonder, just to go back to that issue, one might
wonder, does Dante really make it clear that he's really not Adam but he still thinks that he is
Ulysses at this point? One thing that he understands that he is the canto before he acknowledges
King David as the supreme and he did earlier, the supreme poet, he's really placing himself in
David's Psalms are the lyrical recapitulations of and glossing of Exodus. That's really where he now
I think is trying to move that he's more he cannot be like Ulysses, he knows he's not he does
not want to be, he cannot be Adam, that's the kind of model he's trying to regain for himself. Okay,
maybe you see the connection with where we said a little earlier with what I the response I gave
to your question. Yes.
Student: I'm just going off of Dante's theological beliefs. In Canto XXIV he talks about his belief
in the Trinity and I was wondering if you could just explain that further, because he seems to be
saying both that the Trinity are three separate entities and the unity. I know there was controversy
and different factions of different different factions in Christianity believe different things about
the Trinity and so I was wondering what Dante believed.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well, Dante has a number of references throughout Paradise to the
Trinity. One of them actually, a very significant one, that we never talked about was in Canto XXV
of Purgatory where Dante thinks that the way we human beings understand can understand it
one of the ways which we can understand the Trinity is to think about the structure of the mind:
memory, intelligence, and will because there are three but part of one thing, and three functions. Or,
in Canto XXIV, of Purgatorio that Professor Lummus, I'm sure explained to you, is that the if
you want to understand Dante there seems to imply when he talks about, I am one when he declares
his own poetic practice and one who when loved and dictates inside me, I go on using my language
and so on.
One way, in which the Trinity was explained, they would say, think about speaking to make it
existentially compelling and concrete. When you speak, you have an idea in your mind, otherwise
it's babble. You have an idea in your mind, you emit a sound, but to emit the sound you need the
breath, and you cannot have the sound without the breath, and you cannot have the sound without
the idea, so that speaking encompasses this three-fold components of one. The Trinity is always
connected to one. Then in Canto X of Paradise, you remember, we spent some time there, having
this idea of the love of the Father, and the Son, and the breath of love that joins them, they go on
gazing together, this idea of the fecundity or this idea of the Trinity as source, or Dante who thinks
about God in the form of the Mover, but he does go into that and yet he understands that that's not
the effective theology he wants to think of God as the Prime Mover, to think as the efficient cause,
it makes God as such a mechanic or a clockmaker or something, one of these images of God who
imparts order and recedes from creation. That's really not Dante's idea. He wants to think of a
divinity that is partaking of creation's love.
Dante's idea of the Trinity so he has many, many he tests all of these paradigms. I don't think
that he ever excludes one. He does not really agree with the reading of Joachim of Flora who
thought that the Trinity was the unity of that Trinity could be dissolved into three separate
beings, so that's no longer a unity. To have a unity you got to have all three clearly present, that's
what Dante believes. A unity with a kind of is it a prismatic unity let me call it, that's why. Dante
would say, we all have some recognition of the Trinity, whether it's God and the Word of God being
the Qu'ran from eternally or God and the Word of God being the Christ, etc. We all have the word
made flesh, we all have some kind of idea of the Trinity, where one acknowledges God as a Father,
or as a Spirit, ways in which we can understand this thing we call, I don't mean irreverently, we call
God. That's the response to what you asked. Please.
Student: From what you said in answer to the other question, it seems like you were saying that if
Dante takes the fall it's good enough because it leads to self-knowledge. Dante thinks the fall is
good because it leads to more self-knowledge. I understand how it's different from Adam is
different from Ulysses in that he is trying to go somewhere, like he's trying to become more like
God and that's good because it's a definite end, but it still seems that if the means of trying to
achieve that end is wrong. If he's trying to become more like God by, like grasping instead of
like we've been talking a lot about how the and that's real essential and if he's choosing the
wrong way to get to his end, if that changes the end itself so that he's not even really Adam's not
even like having the proper end in his search for knowledge either. If it changes because he's going
about it in the wrong way and just how that kind of reflects on whether the fall whether Dante
thinks the fall itself feels like it's good and is actually leading to something else, if that's clear.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: No, it's very clear. The question is the earlier question, of
course, was about what Dante thinks about the Trinity. Now the question is going back to the point
of Adam, and my suggestion that the fall is good, and because ultimately Adam seems to be really
wanting to reach God and I made a contrast to Ulysses and the limitation of Ulysses' quest is that he
really does not know he's driven by curiosity. That's what I meant which we will talk about, this
evil curiosity. But if the movement toward the good is bad, because after all, Adam does choose to
trespass the boundaries, why should that really be thought as good? Is that that was the question
really?
Well, let me just restate this issue. The problem with Adam I'm sorry, first of all, with Ulysses I
call it now the curiosity, which as you know, eventually will become good in the Renaissance,
scientific curiosity, that's the good thing. In fact, I have a young colleague who is writing a thesis
about curiosity a book about curiosity. She has written a thesis about curiosity linking it with
women's curiosity, it's a very interesting thesis to say that women are really smarter than men
because they are they have been attacked for being curious, so she has found Renaissance texts
were some written by women who go on making that kind of claim. I think it's a great idea.
How did Dante understand curiosity? How do the Fathers of the Church understand curiosity? Why
is it bad? Because that is the trait of Adam, because curiosity has a particular quality about it, it's
something that continues this whole understanding, and especially with curiosity I'm going to give
you, well in to the eighteenth century. The curiosity is bad because it uses up; curiosity has a sort of
restlessness within it. I am curious of a particular object, I observe it and I move onto something
else. I literally consume, I use up a particular object and devalue it in that process, that's really what
made it so bad.
Ulysses, who goes from one thing to another and is always open, fascinating figure of the
Renaissance spirit of discovery, but that's really what undoes this element almost of desire, a kind of
a figure of I don't want to make I'm using this to badmouth Ulysses, but a figure of this
way of thinking of the curiosity of Ulysses is really the don Juan who goes from one woman to
another in an endless movement of curiosity and knowledge, that he's driven by knowledge to get to
know certain particular situations and people.
Adam, to go back to the question of Adam, I'm only giving you Dante's reading. Dante's reading
he distinguishes very carefully between the testing, the tasting of the fruit and the trespassing of the
mark. The trespassing of the mark meant you cannot really violate the boundaries that I want to
place between you and myself, because once you get to know yourself for what you are you may
get to know me, that's what the part of the violation of boundaries. You may get to know me for
what I am, so it's a wall that protects both the essence of the divinity and the specific quality of the
human that is at stake. Adam eats, which means that he wants to grow in knowledge, and Dante
says, that's not the issue. That was not a problem that I want to grow in knowledge.
The consequence of that growth in knowledge was the trespassing actually very well be the
cause, the trespassing of the boundary. Had he really grown, that's really an acceptable aim; you
have to grow in knowledge. I'm willing to say about Adam exactly the things that you may recall I
said about the scene of pride when we discussed Canto X, XI and XII. It's good that you have this
love of excellence and love of the growth of your own mind. The consequence of it or the flip side
of this quest for more knowledge is the violation of boundaries and that has to be re-established.
The fall of man is only a re-establishment of the boundaries; it's not a way of mortifying the quest
for knowledge. I'm restating what I different terms slightly different terms what I said before,
but I think that's really a crucial distinction and I would ask you to try to think I see a difference
between the two situations. I hope you I have time for another no we don't. See you next time.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 22 - Paradise XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX [November 20,
2008]
Chapter 1. Canto XXVII: St. Peter and the Boundary of the Material Universe
[00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: We're going to look at XXVII, XXVIII and XXIX today of
Paradise, three cantos that, really, I think, Dante constructs together and where Dante puts forth this
theory of creation and cosmology which are not quite the same thing. A theory of Beatrice that's
explaining the shape of the cosmos, it's very difficult in these three cantos. It's done in such a way
that they are two different things, it would seem, creation and a physical description of the cosmos
which we call cosmology and they are because Dante's dealing with two forms of the universe, a
spiritual one and a physical one. Now we're going to show all of this as we go over the three cantos.
I would like to argue that in effect they are not quite the same thing but not really all that distinct.
There is a very tedious line separating the two of them.
Where are we first of all in space? We are somewhere in space, Dante has gone past now, the
heaven of the fixed stars, with the examination of the three words, the three terms, the foundations
of things that we experience as trust, or we experience as existential hope, or a love that if you
combine it is always implies always not in Canto XXVI but in possibilities of betrayal,
uncertainty, so it combines both faith and hope in a very problematical way. Canto XXVII Dante
continues with in the afterglow of the fixed stars, and the canto just to give you an idea about
what formally is happening here, the first part of the canto really looks back formerly at Canto
XXVII of Inferno. There is clearly a parallel between the two cantos. Here Dante you remember
what he does, he meets St. Peter actually who has been examining him but now after the
examination of the three theological virtues he goes on in a prophetic denunciation, he denounces
the collusion between his place, he says "my place," it's the papacy, the place instituted by
because of him he's the Peter, he's the stone, and his successors.
That's the way it says, so the canto literally looks backwards and a parallel with you may have a
number of parallels with Inferno XIX where Dante meets, you remember, the popes who are turned
upside down and the flames the kind of the parody of the Pentecostal fires out on the plants of
their feet, but this is more clearly a reference to Canto XXVII of Inferno, where this is the very
beginning, this is there is a hymn Canto XXVII, "Glory be to the Father, the Son, etc.," and then
lines 40 and following we have this great attack, "It was not our meaning," line 45, "that on the right
hand of our successors should sit one part of Christ's people and the other on the left; nor that the
keys which were committed to me should become the device on a standard for warfare on the
baptized; nor that I should be the figure on a seal for sold and lying favours, for which I often
redden and flash with fire." This is the fire of prophecy without a doubt, but it's also,
retrospectively, a reference to the attack against Boniface, who in Canto XXVII of Inferno, is shown
as he is in colluding with the Guido da Montefeltro. You remember, so there is a clear it's a clear
symmetry between the two cantos.
I will hasten to add that Canto XXVII is also has a kind of chiastic structure because at one
point, just to give you this is a formal description of what's happening here, a little later after this
outburst by Peter, Beatrice and the pilgrim move onto the next heaven, which is around line 75 and
following. The next heaven is the so-called crystalline heaven which is still material. He's at the
boundary of the material universe. It's still material but it's very, exactly crystal-like; it's a very thin
materiality, almost but not quite spiritual. It's also called the primum mobile because it's here; this is
the technical term that they give. It's here, in this heaven, that we have problems of origins, the
origin of time, the origin of space. Dante goes on giving this Beatrice goes on giving this
cosmological description of the universe in material terms.
Here, to continue with the formal, the issue of form now, at one point Beatrice says, "wait look
behind you so that you can have an idea, you can measure the enormous distance you have traveled
from the Earth." He's at the boundary of the material cosmos. You might say, well he's at the edge of
the cosmos; he's going to fall off. That was always one of the objections about the idea of the
finiteness of the cosmos. Believe it or not in the seventeenth century they would never really fall off
because the universe is a sphere, so the only place he has to go to is back, there's no literally edge,
every point is the edge and every point is in a continuous spherical curve. Anyway, from the point
of view, he's arriving there so she says, look back and what does he see, and this is the line, "From
the time when I had," this is XXVII, line 75, "From the time when I had looked before I saw that I
had moved through the whole arc," that's the language of this sphere, an arc, circle, an arc just gives
you an idea of sphericity, "from the middle to the end of the first clime, so that I saw on the one
hand, beyond Cadiz, the mad track of Ulysses."
He pinpoints that little place where Ulysses trespassed the boundaries of the world of the
Euclidian space he had for which he has been damned in Canto XXVI of Inferno. This is what
we call a chiasmus, in other words XXVI and XXVII we do see that XXVI that are an allusion to
Ulysses and Adam. We talked about these figures and here in XXVII of Hell, there is Boniface and
then in Paradise XXVII there is this, and there is also a kind of this is Ulysses so there's a sort of
chiastic structure; XXVII of Paradise refers to really VI of Paradise and refers also to XXVII of
Inferno and XXVI of Inferno. The question is, why does Dante pinpoint once again Ulysses? He
sees at the west the point which Ulysses had trespassed and he calls it the mad track, "the mad track
of Ulysses." Clearly, Ulysses is still part of this fascination that it exerts an incredible fascination
on the imagination of the poet and the pilgrim. Am I like Ulysses or am I going to be lost now like
Ulysses, but at the same time, it's a way of hinting at how much he has exceeded Ulysses'
adventure. Ulysses only went past the Pillars of Hercules; he, Dante, is now at the outer most
boundary of the visible physical universe, so there's a way in which there is a little bit of
detachment and yet a constant fascination.
We tried to explain why he is so fascinated with Ulysses. At the other end he also sees, "and on the
other nearly to the shore where Europa made herself a sweet burden," this is really the eastern part
of the known world, Europe, the rape of Europe by Jupiter so that we really have an erotic
transgression and an intellectual transgression, as if the two are now once again are involved in this
in Dante's vision as if he's now coming to the point where knowledge and desire really have to
coincide. He's coming to the point where the beautiful and the good are one, at the point where all
of the great countries and distinctions that we have been pursuing all along nearly have to go on
converging.
Let me continue with this idea. This is before I go on with what happens in the canto. Dante then
moves into the primum mobile, which is the place where I continue with this. He goes on line 100,
they go into "the swiftest part of heaven," that's the primum mobile. All motion begins from here.
Dante is moving from what would seem to be an ethical the ethical scene, the denunciation,
Peter's denunciation of the abuses within the Church. That's done in a prophetic tone but also from a
tone of ethical, the ethical language. He goes into the so-called primum mobile which actually is the
heaven of metaphysics. I have been telling you about the grammar, rhetoric, music, geometry, this is
what we call the heaven of metaphysics and you know what that is, right? You understand what
metaphysics means? Dante refers to it as they did refer to it, Aristotle refers to as the first
philosophy. They called it first because it reigns it rules supreme among all the arts and all the
sciences. It's the most important of the sciences. It's the point of arrival of all the sciences and it's
called first philosophy because it explains also questions of origins, and you see the language of
origins here, the origin of time, the origin of space, creation itself, the beginning of the world,
causes, foundations, these are the this is the great Rome that metaphysics discusses.
Dante, the interesting thing is that in the Middle Ages, and Dante has to connect it with physics.
Physics is as metaphysics really go hand in hand, one tries to give the explanation of the physical
world, and metaphysics the theoretical, general rules. In fact, and this you probably I should
mention this. There are people who believe that metaphysics was not a term that really indicated
anything really different, completely different from the knowledge that physics provides. They
would say that was metaphysics was called metaphysics because it the book was placed on
the shelf a little bit after the book on physics. You see what I mean? It was really more a way of
defining the place of the book on the library so to speak, probably, but it was known as that, but it's
probably more of a fiction than anything else. The fact is that there is such a science for Dante that
deals with causes, origins, beginnings, time, etc.
One of the things that here we have it's that Dante that Beatrice starts describing line 100, "'The
nature of the universe," here she placed the cosmologies, "which holds the center still and moves all
else around it, begins here,'" so this is already the beginning, literally the language of beginnings.
Here begins motion. Dante stands at the boundary of the physical universe and now she gives and
explanation of this. She just said he's at the boundary, "And this heaven has no other where," place,
"but the Divine Mind." The real beginning, the real universe is in God's mind, so he distinguishes
two worlds, the physical world we see and the spiritual world, which is in God's mind. In a way, and
just to make it very simple, Dante is journeying into the mind of God.
There is one man who had written a text, Bonaventure, whom you have seen whom you have
met before and he wrote this book called The Itinerary of The Mind into God. This is a way of
trying to explore, to enter, mystically enter, the mind of God. Dante doesn't do it in a mystical way.
He tries to understand what's beyond the physical world. To give a description of this universe this
is the term that keeps reappearing in the next three cantos. "Light and love enclose it in a circle, as it
does the others, and of the girding He that girds it is the soul Intelligence." This primum mobile, it
really is a kind of curve that wraps up all the other heavens. We have seen this is the ninth
heaven, all the other heavens have been are enwrapped within it, but it's not only a boundary;
Dante views it as also the beginning, the threshold for the spiritual universe. It's both the boundary
of the physical world and it's always also the so it goes like this, this is the Earth, and growing,
and then we come to the ninth this becomes at the same time a kind of convex and concave semi
circle. I have, believe it or not, a shape of what I think is Dante's cosmos and here it is. This is
I'm going to pass it around.
This is a shell but it's actually really made and found. This would be the pass it around here and
then I'll explain they're all spirals really like the since Dante thinks of the cosmos as a book
and we would call it a cosmobook, that's a neology that I coin here, a kind of cosmobook. The book
in the shape of a cosmos, it's really a parchment rolled up within itself. You know what parchments
are in medieval and classical ideas of the production, the material production of books? We have the
ancient parchments which are all rolled up like the term is around a stick and then held together
by a ring, that's really the shape.
It's a sort of a production of books that in the history of the book is later replaced around the fourth
century A.D. by the so called codex which we have for instance even in the Beinecke. A codex has
it's made of quartos, it's made of folios and divided like a book today made of it would have
quartos or folios. If you go and see the Shakespeare's the folios of Shakespeare in the
Elizabethan Club, for instance, if they let you go in or you belong there, take a look and see what
the codex really is. Dante seems to be combining the two forms. Anyway, you have an idea here of
what the shape that I'm trying to describe to you is. They are a kind of, if you wish, they are spirals,
one following the other, and next to it there is going to be a spiritual universe, another universe
which we'll come to in a moment.
This is the first description that she's giving. The idea of the sphericity of space, that's one thing, the
space is spherical and has as the primum mobile as a boundary and now we have Beatrice goes
on explaining, "Its motion is not determined by another's," this is line 112, "but from it the rest have
their measures." Everything begins here. This is the physical beginning of the universe which we
inhabit, "even as ten from the half and the fifth." In other words, it's as sure as it is that two plus five
make ten and "how time should have its roots in that vessel and in the others its leaves, may not be
plain to thee." Even time begins here; time is understood then by Dante.
Do you see what the there is a kind of a tree growing from a part, the part of eternity. He does
not understand time in a linear way, there was a beginning and an end, and it's not the wheel of time
or the wheel of becoming. You may have heard this, have you heard this description about the wheel
of becoming in which this is a platonic idea of time, where all things are contained? Dante thinks of
the tree, of time as a tree, the roots of which are in the pot of eternity and the foliages are in
reach us reach into our own world. We are in the shadow of the tree of time. We only see leaves
that will fall because this idea of the dispersion and the falling of time, the passing of time, so this is
the definition of what happens in XXVII. She continues after a while with this about once again
the language of covetousness and moral language about what happens in the world and we move on
to Canto XXVIII. Let me tell you I have not forgotten that we ought to talk about Ulysses in a little
while.

Chapter 2. Canto XXVIII: The Order of Angels [00:20:12]

Now it continues with, XXVIII deals with the angelic hierarchy. We are now still in the primum
mobile but Dante starts seeing into the other universe, the spiritual universe. He sees a universe
which is adjacent to the physical universe with inhabited by angels. The corresponding part that
you have the nine planets, the seven planets plus the fixed stars and the crystalline heaven, and now
you have the nine orders of angels, and Beatrice will go on describing the three triads of angels;
angels, archangels, thrones, this is the language that comes from the Bible, the Old Testament
comes from Babylonian, apparently in Persian sources, apocalyptic sources and would not seem to
be really terribly different from that tradition. Here, we have also another; this whole description of
the angelic order continues, line 12 let me just focus on this a bit, "And when I turned again and
mine were met by what appears in that revolving sphere to one that looks intently on its circling, I
saw a point," distance, so we are at the boundary of the universe; another universe emerges into
view and Dante only sees "a point which radiated a light so keen that the eye in which it burns must
close for its piercing power."
Once again, a series of revolving spheres, this universe is not the projection of the other universe;
they are separate and adjacent. They are two hemispheres and this is what happens in Canto XXVIII
and we go to Canto XXIX, and I ask you to see how the whole argument continues. Beatrice has
been explaining breathlessly the whole question of angelic hierarchy, and by the end of Canto
XXVIII he sees she even mentions that the order actually it's Dante here who mentions that
the order his ordering of angels, the hierarchy, is very different from the one of the pseudo
Dionysius, line 130 where he says, "These orders all gaze above and so prevail below that all are
drawn and all draw to God. And Dionysius set himself with such zeal to contemplate," this is the
pseudo Dionysius who had written about the angelic hierarchy, and Dante goes on to say that he
differs from him, that he just his idea of angels is a little different from his and Pope Gregory's.
A statement of his own intellectual independence, both in terms of the theologian and in terms of an
ecclesiastical authority.
And then Beatrice finishes the description of this hierarchy, meaning the sacred order, that's what
the Greek word means, the sacred order of angelic intelligences. Their function is to impart motion
to the spheres; their function is to move between the divinity and human beings, they are the
messengers, they keep the spiritual entities and they keep moving between God and human beings
and then we go to Canto XXIX where now the language of cosmology, about the order of the
cosmos becomes creation, and I want to show this to you.

Chapter 3. Shift to the Order of Creation in Canto XXIX [00:24:04]

However, this shift to the language of creation is conducted in an extraordinarily interesting way.
Dante wants to say that Beatrice has been talking nonstop about with probably a touch of
playfulness about the angelic orders, and then she moves almost like, without catching her breath,
talking about creation, Canto XXIX. But look how this shift from the order of angels to the order of
creation is described. This is the beginning of Canto XXIX, "When the two children of Latona,
covered by the Ram and by the Scales, both at once make a belt of the horizon, as long as from the
moment when the zenith holds them balanced till the one and the other, changing hemispheres, are
unbalanced from that girdle, for so long, have face illumined with a smile, Beatrice kept silence,
looking fixedly at the point that had overcome me." What an extraordinary image. Let's read it
again so we make sure that we understand it because I'm not sure that it's very clear, though I think
it's I can make it clear but let's look at this again. "When the two children of Latona," meaning
the Sun and the Moon, that's really what he's saying. He has to describe the fact that Beatrice seems
not to have kept quiet that she went endlessly from one thing to another, that's what I call the
playfulness of Dante's thinking.
He's saying that there was, this is the image that he uses, is when the children of Latona, Apollo and
Diana, you know that, the Sun and the Moon. We're in the universe of though Dante is using
mythical language, look at the language first of all. The two children of Latona, myth; "Covered by
the Ram and the Scales," science, "Both at once make a belt of the horizon," an Arabic word
meaning the boundary of the heavens, so science, scientific language. "As long as from that
moment when the zenith," scientific language. The mixture and balancing of science and myth, but
also a way of talking about the a balance that is as vanishing and as fleeting as it could ever be,
that's the point. That there was silence but he could almost not even tell that there was a break in
Beatrice's speech. This is what he is saying, when the two children of Latona, the Sun or Apollo and
the Moon, Diana, along the horizon, they seem to be aligned together and they are held together by
the zenith. This is the zenith, the highest point as opposed to the nadir, right?
This is the balance that he's describing. They are kept in a balance here, in a rare equilibrium, when
they appear, seemed to be aligned together and that balance and equilibrium is quickly
disappearing. What is he saying? He's saying that she almost didn't stop speaking and then she
began, then she goes on with the theory of creation. "I tell, not ask, what you wouldst hear; for I
have seen it there where every ubi and every quando is centred," place, I have seen at a point where
place, space, and time coincide. "Not to gain any good for Himself, which cannot be, but that His
splendour, shining back, might say," I stay, "Subsisto in His eternity, beyond time, beyond every
other bound, as it pleased Him, the Eternal Love revealed Himself in new loves." I have to correct
my good friend, dear old friend Sinclair, because actually Dante does not say that. He says that love,
the eternal love, actually the language which he uses I don't know I hope your other translations
those of you who use other translations are luckier, "opened itself in new loves," opened itself. I
take this to be a sexual language as it can be found, a new love engendered, opened itself into new
loves.
Then it in fact continues, "Nor, before, did He lie as it were inert; for until God's moving upon these
waters there was no 'before' or 'after.'" Before God's creation the language is biblical, from Genesis,
there was no before or nor after. In the physics, this is an allusion to Aristotle's physics, where
Aristotle has to define time; he says it's the measure, we speak of time when there is a before and an
after, because this is really what time is. The measure of motion in regard to a before and an after;
Dante says that before this time of creation there was no such thing. It could not be distinguished
before in terms of time, there was no such a thing as before and after, and then he goes on just to
continue with this sexual metaphor, "Form and matter, united and separate, came into being that had
no defect, like three arrows from a three-stringed bow."
The question of creation as a coming together of form and matter is here described as a conjunction.
It's the language of creation takes place as an act of love, that's the first thing Beatrice's saying.
Creation comes through as passion, a love passion, it's an opening up in love opening up in new
loves. It's as physical, the language of creation, as it could ever be in terms of the natural, the
language of natural production and reproduction. This is the context of what she is saying, before
and after. It is as if to have a creation, creation is that which introduces the possibility of
distinguishing between a before and an after, introduces a difference, that's what the language of
Beatrice is.
Let me go back to the image with which we started. Dante is wondering whether or not there was
any break in Beatrice's speech. He says if there was a break, it was so fleeting as happens with
whenever the Sun and the Moon along the line of the horizon are going to be are aligned
together and this is if they are balanced and are held together by the zenith above.
That is such a fleeting moment in the alignment of the stars. Why this metaphor? Not only he's
saying that but I think there is also an allusion to Francesca here in Canto V. Did you catch it?
Where he says, "for so long her face illumined with a smile, Beatrice kept silence," she just kept on
talking, "looking fixedly at the point that had overcome me." The point that had overcome me is
clearly an allusion to not only a point was that that overcame us, Francesca says in Canto V.
That's all, so there's an illusion to Francesca. The question that I have to answer that I raised with
you is why is Dante mentioning these two infernal figures and framing his discussion on cosmology
of creation, first of all by talking about Ulysses and now talking about, or alluding to, not even
mentioning, but alluding to Francesca. Why this one who wants to transgress and trespass the
boundaries of the world in order to know, the other one who transgresses the norms of what is
allowed because of love.
Knowledge and love somehow come into play but they are in the Inferno version. What is he saying
though with this image? Why has he talked about Francesca, the Sun and the Moon align briefly,
what do you think he's saying? It's not a rhetorical question; let me just why do you think he
would use this kind of language? Immediately, after Beatrice goes on explaining the creation of the
world and the distinction between a before and an after. Why this metaphor? Why this long
paragraph? This image here, anybody? I think that Dante's asking right here, is it possible to
localize a break and he's saying it is as when we speak that things seem to be continuous and just as
in every syllable between a sound and another there is always an interval so there was in the
language of Beatrice, and that's what to him is the idea of creation.
It seems to be there is the opposite of creation would be the eternity of the world, something
which would be the universe is eternal; it has no beginning and no identifiable break. How can you
tell? If the universe is eternal you have no differences inside it. Dante wants to say it seems to be a
continuous the universe seems to have a continuous extension. Without time a kind of eternity, it
goes on and on, and yet it's as when we speak that you can identify the break, there was however
minute there was a break between Beatrice's exposition about the angelic orders and now the
exposition that she goes into about the about creation. Why then, the other two metaphors, now
it's time to answer that question, why talking through Ulysses and Francesca? Why evoke those two
images?
I wish we could I have to keep that hanging awhile so it can become a little bit more compelling
what I'm going to tell you. With it order, "And as a ray shines," Beatrice is continuing with form
and matter, united and separate, this is conjoined and pure, pure and conjoined. She says, "as a ray
shines into glass or amber or crystal so that from its coming to its completeness there is no interval,
so the threefold creation flashed into being from its Lord all at once without distinction in its
beginning. With it, order was created and ordained for the spirits, and these were the summit of the
universe in whom was produced pure act; pure potency," and so on." The idea is that there is a
universe of creation, the universe of creation which seems to be very much like the physical world,
it's described in physical terms, the terms of the Moon and sexuality, the cosmological language and
scientific terms, and yet there is some kind of difference that is introduced. Without creation we
would not have differences, we would not even have origins that is the language. Now, why those
two figures? Why Ulysses and Francesca?
Ulysses, I think that what Dante is doing, finally is allowing us to see what the world of Inferno has
to be seen as. The world of Inferno that we only saw as a world of rejected, as a world of evil and
horror, all of a sudden is now retrieved as the best exemplar of what we may come to know of the
spiritual world. It is almost an imaginative redemption that Dante goes into about the actual idea of
hell. He's implying, and that could become in many ways heretical, but I hope to show you that it is
not, that the universe as it goes back as one goes back to the beginnings, clearly the journey to
the beginnings has to be seen as redemption of order has been falling away. Let me just say it in a
slightly less tortuous way. There can be no redemption unless it implies that the whole of evil is
overcome and destroyed, so that even the world of hell now appears all of a sudden as part of what
we get to know about the ultimate structure of the universe. This seems to me to be the real lesson,
the underlying and powerful message that Dante is sending through these three cantos in the heaven
of metaphysics.

Chapter 4. Question and Answer on Creation, Incarnation [00:37:43]

Let me stop here before I move into the next canto, Canto XXX and see if there are let me take
the questions now before we go on to the next canto. I could go back maybe and try to redo what I
have been saying because it's but let me see if there are some questions and then we can do that,
please.
Student: Are you suggesting [inaudible] of the entire world creation is redeemable including those
[inaudible]?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: He never says that. Let me be very, very clear. He never says it
anywhere. There is never an indication thematically, there is everything else that I have said I could
find counterparts in a thematic, thematized, in the sense that it becomes part of a conscious
articulation on the part of her; he knows and he thematizes, he makes it a theme clear, he never says
that. But there are two implications though that I'm drawing on in order to be able to make that kind
of statement. The first is the very idea of the cosmos as a sphere, and the idea of the cosmos as a
sphere, it really means that wherever you are going and you are going toward God, then you are
going back to the beginning, everything else can go back to the beginning because that's the form,
the shape of the cosmos. I'm drawing out the implication about this understanding of the universe.
The other reason is that there is such a thing as a redemption and Dante's we didn't read the
canto, Canto VII of Paradise is focused on redemption, a new beginning, that's what redemption
means. Redemption means that the cosmos can go back to its beginning and be restored in its
original form. If this is true, it could very well be that from the point of view of the poem, Lucifer is
always going to be stuck in his ice forever. There's no hint that he can move even. Francesca is
always moving around in vicious circles, remembering and then lost in the labyrinth of time. To her,
she literally moves in time; memory cannot think about the past without being moved by it and
must move constantly around it. Ulysses gets lost who knows where, there is nowhere for him, he
has no sense of a place, even from this point of view I can go on understanding that in a canto
where a place matters, Ulysses never had a sense of belonging anywhere, that's the utter dislocation
and a kind of he doesn't have a family that holds him back, the children, the kingdom, Ithaca,
anything, he just goes on moving.
That is the overt sense of the poem, but there is this theology of redemption, and I'm wondering
whether theology of redemption does not entail necessarily that there is a return to the beginning.
Before I go on though with restatements of this I want to ask you to because I think it's one of
the a technique that Dante uses which is really extraordinary, can you go to the beginning of
canto the famous image of Latona when the two children of Latona beginning of Canto
XXIX, I really would like to ask you to look at the Italian a little bit. I'm not going to read it, I'm not
going to ask you to read, I'm only going to ask you to look, I won't read it though. At the first word,
quando right? You all see that, and look at line that's really the proem, what we call rhetorically
the prosthesis of the canto, the beginning of the canto, the introduction of the canto.
Go to line 12, the last word, quando. Go to the first back to the first line, the last word in that
line, Latona. He says, "of Latona." The first two letters "la" go back to canto to line 12, the first
two letters "la," draw this that's a chiasmus, draw the lines together, and they will meet exactly at
the word hemisphere, emisfero, that's the center. That's the hemisphere means that they are it's
half hemi the Greek is the two half spheres, the universe is two half spheres composing one. I
think Dante's placing us at a cosmic crossroads. He is locating us, he's telling us where we are first
of all, but he's also telling us that this universe has a kind of very occult and very secret laws. The
poem has these secret laws that regulate it.
I'm really arguing then that there is this subtext that is if a radical redemptive theology would only
entail the absolute purification of evil, so that the universe will have to really go back to this kind of
Pythagorean purity, but without the phases and descents. These are you know what I mean all of
you, this Pythagorean idea that the life of the universe stretches for 360,000 years. Did you ever
hear about that? 360,000 years which are really like the days of the year, the 365 I think we have;
360,000 years. Every 360, 000 years the universe rotates and goes back to its point of origin and
then it decadence starts again, the age of gold, the age of silver, the age of iron, the age of paper
we would call it now. It goes back to its origin, that's not the way Dante understands the movement
of the cosmos, but he does understand the he does present this redemptive event that makes the
universe return to its pristine purity, that's why I made that statement. Any other points before I go
back because I really think I should say all of what I said before. Any other questions so I can help
clarify these various points? Yes.
Student: What is the redemptive event?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: I'm sorry.
Student: What is the redemptive event?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: The incarnation. The incarnation is the redemptive event that
allows it means what is the redemptive event? The incarnation, I call it redemptive event that
would make the a new creation, a new Adam has come into the world and that new Adam,
through the sacrifice, his sacrifice through the gift God gave allowed the incarnation because
human beings on their own would not be capable. That's the theology of redemption. Human beings
on their own would not be able to save and redeem themselves so that an intervention from God,
through his son, was made inevitable in order to reconstruct and in order to bring out and produce
that original order of the cosmos. If that is true, and it is true, and you only have to look at
everywhere in the poem, but Canto VII of Paradise, that's really where it is an annunciation of this
whole theory in the terms of for those of you who are, Anselm, etc., then that implies that there
must be some kind of general remaking of the world.
That's what I think the idea but nonetheless this should not obscure the fact that there is a kind of
a paired juxtaposition between the physical description of the world and the spiritual description of
the world. There are two hemispheres and yet they are connected; the spiritual, the creation, the
experience of creation is really the way of positing a distinctionary difference into the universe
into the theory that the world is eternal. They are two conceptions that, operative in the Middle
Ages, and they are really represented by one is by Aquinas who is a theologian but he is also a
philosopher, and in fact, he could be called as the writer who wants to make a philosophical
theology. He argues, he's known for the famous Suma; he wrote a track called Suma Against the
Gentiles, not the Suma of Theology but Summa Contra Gentiles where he argues that the eternity of
the world, the theory of the eternity of the world, that is to say there is no creation, he says could be
philosophically demonstrated. It could also be philosophically repudiated.
Philosophy can argue one side of it, and he goes on arguing that there is no way of thinking of
the usual questions, who created the Creator? That kind of the oldest, these objections. However,
there is a view of creation which is allowed and it's possible on account of faith, but it also allows
for the thought of freedom, origins, beginnings, etc. Bonaventure picks up some of these ideas, the
ideas debated in Paris in the thirteenth century around 1270 in Paris. Both of them are teachers at
the university. Bonaventure says no, this is untenable, the idea of the eternity of the world. It is
absolutely untenable, because if the world were eternal then we really would have no way of no
real succession of generations, there would be endless people who have been living before us,
there's no evidence for this, it would be endless forms of he holds, and he upholds the idea of
creation.
Dante intervenes into this debate and says, that it is effectively the physical world and the spiritual
world are really one continuous, they're one complimentary to the other, and yet there is a
difference between them, and the difference between them is the difference that he can find in
Beatrice's speech, that little point of time, that little intrusion of time that distinguishes between one
sound and another sound. The spiritual universe originates in the world of nature as a natural
production and reproduction, all of God's love and the physical world in exactly the same way.
There is a kind of symmetry. This is not Plato's inverted universe. The physical world is not Plato's
inverted world, it's adjacent to it. It is as if Dante discovers that there are more dimensions to the
world that we see than what medieval cosmologists, or classical cosmologists had imagined.
Interestingly enough, and I don't say this is a proof for any of what I have said at all, but there's a
famous nineteenth-century mathematician by the name of Riemann, a German mathematician. I
don't know how many of you studied history of science, he was he's known among other things
for having been the mathematics professor of Einstein. Well he went on with a team of his students
studying these cantos of the Divine Comedy to find evidence that in fact Dante had already a theory
of fourth dimension, that there is the universe that we see and then there is another universe. It is
almost as if the folds of books, the folds of the parchments are exactly giving an idea that's
Riemann's, not me, an idea about what the actual structure of the universe may be. Having said this,
don't forget to turn back to me my shell, the emblem of what I take very good thank you. Let me
see if there are some questions because I we can go on now talking about some of these issues.
Please.
Student: I'm still not quite clear as to how in reference to Ulysses and Francesca in these cantos
relate Beatrice's description of the universe and redemption back to Inferno and how the redemption
of the universe necessarily implicates including Inferno as well as
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Excellent question and I really welcome your skepticism. The
question is about how exactly do the figures of Ulysses and Francesca shed light on what's
happening here? Is it really tenable that Dante's implying that those that the sinners are going to
be redeemed, saved? More or less that's
Student: Yeah and why? Why they're brought up how they fit into that explanation?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Good, I figure that's a crucial issue. It's interesting that Dante
should look at Ulysses and bring up the image of Ulysses in Canto XXVII. I find it interesting in
that and Dante, one can say, Dante is really unlike Ulysses. Now he probably realizes how
different he is from Ulysses because Ulysses went to he's implying how risky his own enterprise
may be which we have seen before. Ulysses was brought up in this journey in canto with the
meeting with the dream of a siren was happened even before indirectly many of the in some
other cases XXVI, in Canto I of Inferno even, and maybe we could just stop there and say well,
Dante's still that's a kind of retrospective fascination. He's looking back and pinpointing that
tragic moment because he calls it the mad track of Ulysses, the madness implies that he this
man had violated the limits, own limits, including the limits of reason in his rational pursuit,
philosophical investigation of the world, the scientific he wants to go into the unpeopled
world to have experience, that's the key word for him and yet that madness implies that he had been
delirious, had been going off the track. Dante maybe that too, but maybe not, maybe I'm really a
little safer now, I'm in the hands of Beatrice, she's guiding me, a way of trusting Beatrice so we
could say that that is all true and therefore I could even see an element of relief on the part of Dante,
we would even catch that. The relief is that his own adventure diminishes the epic, the Greek epic
hero, he really did very little, he just went beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
That's all, we could stop there. It happens though, retrospectively, we can see the story of Ulysses as
also the story of a metaphysician. Dante is in the heaven of metaphysics, in what way is he in the
place of what does metaphysics deal with? It deals with place, deals with time, and then we can
understand why Ulysses in Canto XXVI, he seems to be going from place to place is the metaphor
that distinguishes Ulysses. Then Dante says, he's a failed metaphysician, but we understand that he
really was going to the absolute, he really was trying to go where I'm going and there is nothing
else. We stop there. We go to Beatrice, Dante meets is talking to is listening to Beatrice in
Canto XXIX and he's trying to figure out if it's possible to think of a beginning. How do things
you have the eternity of forms and you have the eternity of matter, it's very difficult to know how
you could really distinguish anything that was before from what goes after, there is no such a thing
as a before and an after.
He tries to localize time, that's really the problem. To localize time he says that he really Beatrice
looked and reminded him of the point there was a point of joy that overcame him. Maybe he's
alluding, because the language is that of Francesca, so why Francesca? Let me just explain it at one
point, maybe he's alluding to a kiss the two of them that he remembers. It's sort of very
spiritualized the context; Dante's never vulgar, maybe he's just alluding to a kiss they had been
exchanging, or maybe the will, the desire, the longing to have a kiss now, exchange a kiss with her.
One thing is clear, that he's thinking of Francesca as also a kind of metaphysician because that's
what we are. What is the metaphysics of Francesca? Metaphysics of desire, first of all, a desire that
what does it mean the metaphysics of desire? Desire by its own definition is metaphysical in the
sense that it's always moving beyond the objects it gains because it burns up the various objects.
Today I want this book, then I want another book, and then I want the car, and then I want the
library, etc., that's the infinite movement of desire which is what we call metaphysics of desire, so
she's a metaphysician.
Not only she's as metaphysician, she lives in time, so she's a complimentary figure to Ulysses.
Ulysses is, you remember, is [inaudible] Cauta, I left behind me Seville and then I, etc., etc. Now,
Francesca instead says how difficult it is to remember the joys of the past. I remember I was
reading, that day I began reading, that day I stopped reading, only a point was that that overcame at
that point of time, a point of the book, etc. Maybe Dante's really saying she too is another failed
metaphysician. They would like to be where I am now, both Francesca and Ulysses, so we are
bringing them to the place where Dante is. Now, they are looking for the same thing he is having
now, a conjunction of time and eternity, space and time, ubi and quando, to see the point where all
things cohere. That's exactly where he is looking. How do I make things cohere?
Of course it's possible to think one way of thinking of Paradise and the joy of the blessed is to
go on thinking that my joy suppose that I were saved, a very unlikely proposition. My joy, it's
possible to argue, is increased by it's sadistic, the view of those who are suffering, mercifully, I
am saying that to me it's the most improbable form of beatitude but it's likely that seeing someone
downtrodden and punished right like that, could be that Dante is saying, how lucky I am that I'm
neither like Ulysses nor like really Francesca. I don't think that that's Dante though. He's talking
about cosmology and creation, the order of everything, how this order is an order of love and now
he's coming to know this order of love, because now knowledge is love and love is knowledge. I
think that by the allusion to them he's also saying that here on earth you can grant me that, that's
what I said before, and I think that I'm not pushing it to the point of unbelievability.
The whole argument becomes unbelievable, I can stay here and say, well now what he's really
saying is that I am here and I see how things go here, but I know that sinful people on Earth, those
of us who live in the shadows of time, this tree and we're under the leaves of time, then I know that
in a sinful way they were trying to do and know what I now have come to do and know. I could stop
here and say well we're all happy, there's no argument, I think that that makes logical sense. I can
push it to the point of absurdity, to say look maybe if this is true, he's also saying not only that they
in a shadowy way, in a dim way, were anticipating the real happiness in the sinful modes, the
sinners, but that maybe they too if you move out of this text as you know this is not said in the
text that they too will be are going to be taken and placed into the bosom of Abraham where all
the blessed dwell. Maybe too this is is it my wishful thinking? I grant you, it's probably wishful
thinking but I do have the theology of redemption behind me that stands as uttered by Dante in
Canto VII of Paradise. I restated the whole thing in two minutes, that's not bad. Thank you.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer on Sexual Language, Theological Risk

[01:00:56]
Other questions before we go back to please.
Student: Can you comment on the presence of Francesca, also in light of this sexual language that
comes out?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, can I comment about Francesca in the fact that there is the
creation is given in sexual terms. That this is love that opens itself opens itself to new loves and
so on. I cannot help but play a little bit of an etymological game too, by the way, because this is the
world of origins and I don't want to lose you. I know there is only one class but I don't want to lose
you. Of course the only the way in which Dante's conveying all these senses is by playing with
the etymologies, because etymology is the science of the origin of words, so let me give you only
one. I corrected my good friend Sinclair, inseparable from me, I mean, I'm never going to betray
him, but I have to correct him because he says "revealed," that's what he means. The eternal love
revealed itself a new love. He is missing the whole sexual language which is exactly the reason,
thank you. That's exactly the reason why I think that Francesca too can arguably be saved, that's
exactly the reason.
The term he uses is aperse, from the Italian, in Italian we call it aprire, very close to in English we
have the word April, by the way, as an opening of spring. Just to give you a sense of etymology, it
comes from aperire Latin which really means to generate, to bring to light, as a woman brings a
birth to light and life. That's really the word, that's the meaning of the word, so it's as sexual and as
productive as it can be. Before I go back though to your question about how is Dante going to
what Dante is saying is that creation is the sexual process, the sexual experience, which is exactly
what Francesca also did, breaking the law undoubtedly. She is in hell, is she going to be in hell? Are
we going to understand that there is a possible continuity between what she did in a physical sense
and what Dante is doing in a spiritual sense?
This is the whole point of the discussion on cosmology and creation. That there is some kind of
continuity between the two modes; not quite the same thing; of course, creation is a different order
of experience. There is a very thin line, it's like a little breath of breath that Francesca can release
at sea or Beatrice who goes on talking endlessly. She too, that's the difference between the two,
so between the language of sexuality, of physicality in Inferno, and the language of spirituality here
in Paradise, the line that is continuing between them and there is a little difference but there is also
a possibility of a continuity, that's really exactly the argument that I would make about that.
Let me though tell you more, in a historical way, so that if you don't agree with what I said so be it,
don't worry. I don't agree with it completely on my own but I think that this that's a radical
reading of the notion of cosmology and creation in Dante. Let me tell you something else
historically. Where is Dante taking these ideas from? Whenever you read commentaries on Dante,
and I hope that some of you will go on reading and reading also scholars, thank you, critics I see
that nodding is just my heart it just gladdens when I see that. They all tell you and I indicated
that too that Dante is some kind of an Aristotelian and I was talking about metaphysics, how
Aristotle calls it first philosophy, Aristotelian terms. They never tell you where the actual sources of
Dante are. The sources of Dante about cosmology and cosmography are really neo-platonic. The
idea of creation, especially one text that I have to mention, this guy who writes the Cosmographia
called a twelfth-century man Bernard Sylvester, a Frenchman, Bernard Sylvester who writes
Cosmographia, twelfth century known as the author of School of Chartres.
By the way this text were available to Dante, we have a text of this man, Cosmographia, one copy
only because a Florentine, later he had it in Florence, by the name of Boccaccio, some of you
know very well, he copied it down and transmitted to us. We know his handwriting because we
have his texts so we know, this is 1340, Dante of course wrote about 1302, but clearly that text was
available then. In this text, Bernard gives an idea of creation and cosmological ideas, physical ideas.
They had been reading the Timaeus in France and they were always surprised and wondering what
is the difference, how can we go on having Plato say one thing about creation and Genesis saying
something else? How are we going to connect these two forms, these two sources of tradition and
authority? They argue, he goes on talking about the idea of a pre-existing world of matter. The
natural world and a malignant materiality and how this malignant materiality is subdued into shape,
and the subduing into shape is always sexual language.
Matura is that which produces, generates, this is the text that I believe stands behind Dante's
physical explanation of a universe which is physical, but at the same time it is not just physical. It is
also a theory of creation and it's the theory of creation that has unpredictable possibilities. This tells
you that things can be renewed. If you stay within the bound you see how he criticizes the
physical conception of the world. If you stay within those boundaries you can't expect anything
other than what you already have. You cannot expect anymore evil or any less evil than what you
already experience. The only idea, the way in which human beings can think about renewal, can
think about change or freedom, or origins is only within the context of creation.
That's exactly Dante's argument and that's the profound justification for the distinction between one
order of experience and a different order of experience. But if this is true, and it is true for Dante,
then I have to take also seriously this idea of this central event of redemption, which now we
understand what he takes that to mean: the moment, the experience of the incarnation. This is
exactly it follows if he has to if he believes that there is such a thing as and he does
creation then he has to believe that there is also the idea of recreation, a second creation because the
first creation clearly didn't work out all that well so there is this other possibility. Please.
Student: I have the sense that in these lines at the beginning of XXIX that we've been talking
about, that Dante is very aware of being on theological thin ice or skating close to the danger line,
but the idea is the divine love spills over out into a created world so that it can be reflected back,
endured, and loved in return in the way that Paolo and Francesca loved each other. That's not far
from the thought that before creation God has everything but is still a little lonely and that suggests
a kind of imperfection, or at least incompleteness, but how can God be incomplete? Dante begins
this passage by saying, not to acquire new goodness for himself; this is the [inaudible] translation,
which cannot be.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: That's perfect.
Student: That he wants to announce before he offers his neo-platonic vision of the relationship of
that God had to creation. He wants to signal his orthodoxy to doubters who might hear in this
something which is less than perfectly Christian because it comes close to the idea of a needy God
or a God who in the way that every lover needs something, and other to love in return, is in a
predicament and creation is the solution to the predicament that God is in before the world was
made.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, the question is that well, the question is more of a
comment by the maestro here. The comment is that Dante at the beginning of Canto XXIX seems to
be on a theologically risky, on thin ice, I am quoting, because the notion of a God who that
Dante is really trying to save his skin, as it were, by claiming a kind of theological orthodoxy when
he actually knows that the very notion of creation whereby God opens up into new loves, it seems
to imply that before creation God was a lonely guy looking for a partner, some kind of Adam, Adam
in the garden replaces all that. That's really the question.
I think that's a very interesting idea, of course, but I have to I will respond not entirely in a funny
way, but I hope it will come out as funny. It's really the question that St. Augustine asks in the
Confessions. There are always those people who wonder, because that's really what the question is,
what did God do before creation? St. Augustine responds: he was busy preparing hell to people like
you who ask these kinds of questions, and think that's it. The more seriously idea is that indeed
creation implies, I mean that's a response that I would offer, creation implies a beginning but this
creation has been going on forever and that the idea of the Trinitarian God is really a response to
this problem you have. You obviously are, I think, it's not obvious but you to me it's not obvious
I think that you are appealing to a different theological paradigm of where the unity of God can be
the loneliness of God. The Christian reading of that unity is that there is always a productive, an
internal life of love that always goes on producing itself. On that note of theological grandeur, I
thank you and I say thank you, we'll see you. Have a good Thanksgiving.
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 23 - Paradise XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII
[December 2, 2008]
Chapter 1. Into the Empyrean [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: You may recall that last time we went over the shape of Dante's
cosmos, remember. And the point there, one of the points was to show that the context of Dante's
experience, the way he moves, the tale he's telling about this extraordinary experience he has, is
really the whole cosmos. It's not just one's own town, one's own place and so on, it really takes
place within the cosmos and we saw how Dante describes that cosmos. He describes it in terms of a
physical and a metaphysical principle. That is to say, all the materiality and the spirituality of two
hemispheres all placed in one. The Empyrean is the threshold and the limit of the physical cosmos
and the way of entering into the spiritual cosmos.
The challenge he has as a poet is that to show the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the
way that they are really disjointed and at the same time they are not. The finite universe can only be
part of the infinite universe and so he describes how the infinite enters the finite and the finite enters
the infinite. This is heart of the cantos of metaphysics which we all call which we can call the
cantos of physics and metaphysics at the same time.
Now, Dante moves straight into the Empyrean, he was in the you remember into the primo
mobile or the crystalline heaven, before that he was in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars XXV, XXVI,
XXVII then he moved into the crystalline; now he is into the Empyrean. This is the end of the race
for him; it's the end of the journey. The question will be how he is going to say farewell to Beatrice.
There will be a change of the guard. Beatrice the role of Beatrice as a guide will stop, will end
with Canto XXX of Paradise, quite appropriately; it's suitable; she is the woman tied with the
number 30. She appeared in Canto XXX of Purgatorio, stays on the stage of the poem for thirty
three cantos and now she's going to actually disappear. He'll realize that she has disappeared in
Canto XXXI.
But there's a change of the guard because Dante moves from Beatrice to a contemplative, a
historical figure all the time, almost all the time with Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, who was a
famous monk of French monk who stands for he has written treatises on contemplation and
mystical visions. So appropriately, he's the one who will usher and pray the Virgin Mary that she
may in turn pray her son, it's a chain of mediations so that the beatific vision may be granted to
Dante. That's going to happen with Canto XXX and we are going to find out the difficulties that
Dante has in both seeing, but above all, in recalling and recollecting. The poem will end up with
being a sort of registering the defeat, the unavoidable defeat of memory and importance of
forgetfulness.
We are going to find in Canto XXXIII a sort of further twist to the metaphor of you remember in
Canto XXXIII of Purgatorio that I mentioned to you what has happening. Dante will go on being
immersed ritually into the River Lethe and then into River Eunoe. There are two rivers, one the
river of forgetfulness, the one the river of memory, of good memory and Dante goes on saying that
they really came he was at the point where the two streams were really originating from the same
source. It as if memory and forgetfulness first of all, I equate it with water there in Canto
XXXIII of Purgatorio implying the lability, the water has that quality of flowing, the fluidity, the
ability of both memory and forgetfulness.
The most important thing is that they originated from the same place. It is as if Dante were already
preparing what will move now front stage in Paradiso XXXIII, namely the notion of a forgetful
memory, and the importance of forgetful memory, you have to forget and you have to remember and
somehow the two are going to be brought together. It's not a mystical proposition that he advances;
it's actually the way of justifying his poem and we'll come to that in some detail in when we
come to Canto XXXIII.

Chapter 2. Canto XXX: Heavenly Jerusalem; Theatre and Imagination; Simon

Magus [00:05:21]
What I would emphasize, though, to move now to Canto XXX, Dante's entering into the Heavenly
Jerusalem which is a garden and it's a city. It will be described as such, you will see in well, let's
turn right now to these images this is really Canto XXX line a sequence of images lines 32
I'm sorry 110 and following, page 437, "I saw," line 112, "I saw, rising above the light all around in
more than a thousand tiers, as many of us as have returned there above." The Heavenly Jerusalem is
first of all described as a theatre and we ought to really think about it for a moment, a theatre. "And
if the lowest rank," that's the image of theatre where you have in an auditorium today, tiers,
"encloses within it so great a light, what is the expense of this rose in its farthest petals?"
The second image is that it's described to describe this the Heavenly Jerusalem is the rose, a
white rose, a mystical rose. I can tell you immediately that Dante is using the image that this is it
derives straight out of thirteenth-century French poem called, The Romance of the Rose, which
Dante had translated as a young man into a sequence of sonnets, part of his experimenting with
poetic forms. But it's also it's deeply altered because The Romance of the Rose, which is an
extraordinary satirical poem, it's a compendium of all knowledge, it really has it deals with
it's a story of about nature and about reason. The connections between reason and nature but it's
also a story with a sexual theme.
Dante is clearly taking that language of The Romance of the Rose and literally spiritualizing,
reversing it. The resonances of the original poem are still there so that you are forced to think of the
Heavenly Jerusalem as also having some kind of materiality within it, so you cannot just say, well
I'm taking that image, placing it in a different context, and hope that the original, the residues, the
traces of that original image are going to be completely faced. It's part of the strategy of, once again
hinting, intimating that spirituality and materiality now are still going to be converging here. That's
the archaeology, let's say, of this image of the rose.
This continues, next paragraph, "Into the yellow of the eternal rose, which expends and rises in
ranks, and exhales odours of praise to the Sun that makes perpetual spring, Beatrice drew me, as
one who is silent and fain would speak, and she said: 'Behold how great is the assembly of the white
robes!'" This is a procession, a theatrical performance of sorts, the whole of paradise is a theatrical
performance, and whenever we think of theatre now, let me just reflect a little bit on this image.
Whenever we think of a theatre, we understand that it implies the reduction of the world to a
spectacle, that's what a theatre is. The world is something to be seen, it's also an optical
phenomenon, or a case, to put it in another way, which really does not do any violence on the text, a
question of the representation. The world is a representation implying that I become the spectator. I
am it's their representation for me, I can really watch this world, and see it in its whole totality
just as Dante is seeing the whole of the universe, now he can see the whole totality of the blessed.
This is the whole of the Heavenly Jerusalem where all the blessed will be sitting, enjoying, acting,
and spectating at the same time.
Two or three things that I want to say here; on the one hand, the theatre is an image of multiple
perspectives, that's what a theatre implies. You are sitting there, I'm standing here, multiple
perspectives but Dante wants to say that he's enjoying an overall perspective, what we call a
perspective of the whole. He can see the whole of reality. He sees the whole expanse of the horizon
of the world. In other words, whatever he's saying about himself, it partakes of and it belongs to the
totality of the world. He's not seeing something isolated or disconnected with the rest of the world.
This is, to him, what legitimizes a claim to be a visionary poet. To be truly a visionary poet, you
have to be able to see the whole of a reality, not just like Narcissus your own image, not like
someone who is bound to one's own perspective, one's own self. He sees the whole of the world and
that's really what I think is the claim or the implications of the image of the theatre.
The text, I think need some glossing, "Behold how great is the assembly of the white robes." A
sense of the magnitude of the spectacle; then, "See our city, how great it is, its circuit." It has been
described a littler earlier as in terms of a rose and a garden, and now it's a city, that's an
interesting shift in Dante's poem. It's an interesting shift for a number of reasons because the whole
poem now appears as literally a journey from the wilderness, not to the garden, but to a city or to a
garden which is a city. It is a way of encompassing the whole movement of the poem within these
two figures. This is it is as if the whole impulse behind this experience of Dante is a reintegration
into what is it he implies. The place where many other people are as if I not only seeing the
world as a whole, I want to be part of this whole, and the way of being part of this whole is this
political poem. This city, heavenly city to be sure, but it has the idea of city always implies some
human contact, some human idea of what we call usually the polis, the political reality.
Let me just add something else which is interesting in terms of Dante's imagination. We have a
compression of images from the pastoral tradition. The garden and the idea of city, and we do know
that when you read pastoral literature you really have, usually have this juxtaposition, it's called,
between the urbs which you know is the term's for the urban now for the city from the rus, the
rustic, a division between gardens and cities. This is the economy on which pastoral literature,
eclogues, bucolic, ideals, idyllic literature is usually based on, on this divergence between the two
modes of the imagination. I live in the city and then I want to go down into the villa. I want to go
down to the country; it's as if there were two a kind of almost a hint of a schizophrenic
existence that you have with Roman and Greek poetry.
What Dante's doing is literally shattering that distance between the two modes. In an eschatological
perspective, in a perspective which is at the end, city and garden come together. It is literally a
change, both in the idea of the city and in the idea of the garden. They are not two divergent modes
of the imaginatio; they really cohere within one. You see what the point is. The point is that no
matter what Dante is touching with his imagination, all the oppositions, all systems of contrarieties,
of contrary forms, he tries to always bring them together in a kind of concordance, discordant made
concordant again, which is the idea of music. A kind of a harmonization of all these oppositions and
everything that he has we so far have been seeing.
But now there is a further image which sort of complicates the problem. "'See our seats so filled that
few souls are now wanting there.'" This is a kind of line which is really strange because it's
implying that for all of us late comers there is no room, there is not even standing room there for us
the places have all been taken, almost all been taken. Very few, the implication is, are going to be
saved. Then one can make this claim, it follows, because he really believes that this is a kind of
that he has what we can an apocalyptic vision. That the end of the world is near, therefore, he can
say only a few seats are available, or which is really the way I think, because I don't think that
Dante really has an apocalyptic vision. That is to say, what I mean by an apocalyptic vision,
apocalypse means visionary, he is a visionary, apocalyptic means, implies the imminence of the
ending of history.
I don't think that he has that idea at all. A man who keeps thinking as he does about the renewal or
the corruption of institutions, the hope that some intervention will come from other human beings or
from of history, a king for instance, or an intervention from the world of grace, cannot really
have a sense of the imminent consummation of history. You see what I mean? You wouldn't be
worried so much about renewing the institutions. This line is to can be taken to mean, and I think
has to be taken to mean, is that scene from the perspective of eternity as he is really there are a few
seats. You see what I'm saying? If you see it in terms of the totality of time then they are not a lot
of time has been has already passed by.
Then he will continue a haunting image I think that sort of gives all this talk of this my
reflections on city, whether Dante has an apocalyptic imagination or not an apocalyptic imagination,
look at how this absence, "And in that great chair on which thy eyes are held by the crown that is
already set over it," an empty seat, it's taken, a crown is on it, a king is going to be sitting, that's
what I call a haunting image of royal absence and royal presence because you'll see in a moment
what it is. "Before thou shalt sup at these nuptials shall rest the soul, which shall be imperial below,
of lofty Henry." This is the emperor who actually died in 1313 whom Dante was hoping would
come down to Italy from the Holy Roman Empire; come down to Italy to set Italy straight. That is
to say, to placate the violence between the cities, the whole history of Italian communes, but he had
died prematurely and he's expected in heaven.
You see there is a way in which the king, the emperor is beatified, his seat in heaven is going to be
assured, and yet implying that somehow the violence in history is going to be, for the time being,
continued and prolonged, so a political interest, a political the keeping, the holding on to Dante's
own fantasies of political renewals that gives therefore the sort of that tempers all views that
Dante may have, an apocalyptic imagination. "The blind greed that bewitches you has made you
like the infant," etc., and then Dante goes on, the other great problem.
The canto ends with a final denunciation about Simon Magus and the reference to Inferno XIX.
Dante's at the height of the universe, he can't forget Simon Magus, Inferno XIX, and Boniface
XVIII, "gets his dues, and shall make him of Anagni go," Boniface XVIII, "deeper still." Remember
how they were punished being upside down in the ditches, and the flames of fire, Pentecostal flames
of fire, on the soles of their feet, this is the way they have been twisting around, turning around the
gift of prophecy.

Chapter 3. Canto XXXI: Farewell to Beatrice [00:19:06]

Let me just go onto Canto XXXI; it's really a farewell to Beatrice, and I thought that we expected so
much her arrival in Canto XXX of Purgatorio; we should see how the farewell takes place. Canto
XXXI, lines 40 and following, page 449, "I who had come to the divine from the human," this is
Dante speaking for himself, "to the eternal from time, and from Florence to a people just and sane,
with what amazement must I have been filled! Truly between that and the joy I was content to hear
nothing and to remain silent. And like a pilgrim who is refreshed in the temple of his vow as he
looks around and hopes sometime to tell of it again, so, taking my way up through the living light, I
carried my eyes through the ranks, now up, now down," he looks around to see whom he sees and
he actually will go on listing the number of blessed, the women and men that he sees. "I carried my
eyes through the ranks, now up, now down and now looking round again. I saw faces, persuasive to
charity," used to charity, "adorned with Another's light, and with their own smiles."
These blessed are blessed because they are there's some other in them. They are themselves and
there is another in them too, "and with their own smiles, and every movement graced with dignity.
Already my glance had taken in the whole general form of Paradise," what I called earlier, the
vision of the whole, the totality that he manages to gazes at. "But had not yet dwelt on any part
of it, and I turned with new-kindled eagerness to question my Lady of things in which my mind was
in suspense."
We have now a revision, a rehashing, if you wish, of the scene of Virgil's disappearance when
Beatrice is just about to come. Dante saw all stricken by and seized by tremor at the approaching of
Beatrice that he turns around to try to see and get comfort from Virgil and Virgil had vanished. We
have now a kind of variant of that same vanishing act. "One thing I intended, and another
encountered me: I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an old man," Bernard of Clairvaux, the great
enemy of the so-called of the philosophers, but I don't want to get into that. "clothed like that
glorious company. His eyes and his cheeks were suffused with a gracious gladness, and his aspect
was of such kindness as befits a tender father. And 'Where is she?' I said in haste; and he replied: 'To
end thy longing Beatrice sent me from my place; and if thou look up to the third circle from the
highest tier thou shall see her again, in the throne her merits have assigned to her.' Without
answering, I lifted up my eyes and saw her where she made for herself a crown, reflecting from her
the eternal beams. From the highest region where it thunders no mortal eye is so far, were it lost in
the depth of the sea, was my sight there from Beatrice; but to me it made no difference, for her
image came down to me undimmed by aught between. 'O Lady," here he goes on now, "in whom
my hope has its strength and who didst bear for my salvation to leave thy footprints in Hell, of all
the things that I have seen I acknowledge the grace and the virtue to be from that power and from
thy goodness. It is thou who hast drawn me from bondage into liberty." The great theme of liberty
that we have been discussing, especially in Purgatory found also it's sealed here in the presence
of Beatrice, etc.
This is now he turns to the faithful Bernard. You may remember that Canto XXIX ended with
Beatrice very worried that Dante has been expounding. Remember Canto XXVIII, XXIX there had
been the exposition about angels, the exposition about creation, creation as an act of God's love, the
ordering and the new ranks of angelic the angelic choir. Then Beatrice gets very upset because
the whole issue seemed to be to her a way of thinking more about the appearance of things rather
than the truth of things. You remember that she attacks the human beings on Earth; they do nothing
else than go after false appearances. We are swayed by false appearances so that the question was,
what does she mean that the truth is? She was saying let's get back to some let's bring some kind
of sense of the real back into play in all of this, some sense of the truth value what we are saying
back into this representation. That was the way Canto XXIX stopped, with Beatrice suspicious of
appearances.
Dante now gets into Canto XXX and XXXI and goes back to the question of appearances, and says
to Beatrice that the appearance is exactly what the image is exactly what he has preserved, that
he is going to preserve of her. Two things, therefore, have to be followed from this. Are you with me
in all of these issues? Dante's saying here, in the encounter with Beatrice, "Without answering, I
lifted my eyes and saw her where she made herself a crown, reflecting from her the eternal beams."
This is the language of image and the language of reflections.
What Dante's saying to Beatrice is that we are always in a world of images, and that somehow the
image is the locus of the sacredness, but the image is also has its own fleeting quality. The journey
of Dante is to go between the images and the essences. Now he's preparing for the final leap. This is
to say that Dante's journey was not a journey to Beatrice; it's going to be a journey to God. Beatrice
is the stepping stone for the pilgrim's entering the experience of the beatific vision.
This is what I want to emphasize, and in fact, Canto XXXI, ends with, "Like one that comes," line
113, "Like one that comes, perhaps, from Croatia, to see our Veronica," Veronica is an allusion to
one of the pious women, who during the Calvary ascent of Jesus, is said to have wiped his face and
the face of Jesus remained imprinted on her veil and so that Veronica became it's the name of the
woman Veronica, but it was also understood in the whole of Middle Ages as vera icona, this was the
kind of phony, to be sure etymology given to the Veronica. It was Dante's evoking now the
pilgrims who come to who go to Rome from Croatia to see the true image left imprinted on the
veil of the Veronica. This is where Dante himself is. He is like one of those pilgrims who is still
seeing the image but wants to move beyond images, wants to go and see what lies behind it.
The journey of the Divine Comedy is the journey within that in tercets, between images and
essences so to speak. This is Veronica, "and whose old hunger is never satisfied, but he says within
himself, as long as it is shown: 'My Lord Jesus Christ, very God, was this then your true
semblance?', such was I, gazing on the living charity of him who in this world tasted by
contemplation of the peace." That's how we can we are ready to get into Canto XXXIII which is
the final canto and the final vision.

Chapter 4. Canto XXXIII: The Final Vision; The Journey and Its Telling
[00:28:16]
Let's see how Dante carries that off and let me begin with saying a couple of things. There are a
number of dramas that will go are going to be unfolding in Canto XXXIII. The first drama is that
of the pilgrim who wants to see the face of God, wants to see the face of God, wants to preserve the
wit so that he can be able to come back and retell the story, tell the story, write the poem as a
witnessing to the vision he has had. So it's a way of thinking about the relationship between vision
and language, if you want to say it in a very general way. How are the two related to each other?
The real the other drama is how is he going to remember? Can he remember? Number four, what
does he really see? These are the number of problems that he faces.
The poem begins with Canto XXXIII begins with a prayer, a prayer to the Virgin Mary, or the
Virgin Mother, and it's going to be constructed through a series of paradoxes as you can see, Virgin
Mother, daughter of your son, paradox is about time, paradox is about all sorts of reversals of the
natural order, "lowly and exalted more than any creature," a way of using paradoxes that challenge
the rational understanding of the world. This is not going to be a rational representation of what
Dante will see, "fixed goal of the eternal council, thou art she who didst so ennoble human nature,
that its Maker did not disdain to be made its making. In thy womb," Dante goes on now to that
motif of birth with which we began talking from Inferno I, when we discussed Virgil.
This idea of the beginning, the idea of a beginning of birth as an image of beginning, and an image
of nature becoming an event; the idea of nature becoming a historical event, a possibility of a
historical event. "In thy womb was rekindled the love by whose warmth this flower," this flower
really means the whole of the mystical rose that he has just seen, so the mystical rose begins in
it's contained in the womb of Mary, "has bloomed thus in the eternal peace." It's another way of
making this idea of I could gloss this image of the womb as in terms of this is the immense
sphere of the mystic, within which the immense sphere within which the finite and the infinite
come together and meet. The immense sphere, it's a circle; the immense sphere whose center is
nowhere, or whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. That's the way that he is
understanding, he's explaining this motif of the incarnation.
What is crucial about this image, I believe, is first of all, the humanization of the divine. This is
clearly the divine that becomes divine because it enters history and experiences all that the human
beings experience. The other element that, I think, that Dante is pushing forth is the feminization of
the divine in the sense that here the divine has become the child of a woman, and the woman is
therefore part, they subsume this part of this divine. A kind of feminine I don't call it feminist
because I don't really know what that is but the feminine and I don't mean it as in it's a true
statement I don't know, but it's a feminine, a theology of a feminine element in God. "Here thou art
for us the noonday torch of charity, and below among mortals thou art living spring of hope."
And then the second stylistic theme here is the repetition, the iterative mode, "Thou, Lady," skip a
few lines, and "Thy loving-kindness in thee is mercy, in thee pity, in thee great bounty, in thee is
joined all goodness there in any creature." What is the point of this iterativeness of the style of
repetitions of anaphoric style? I think one of the reasons, you may think of others, but one of the
reasons is a language that is falling upon itself as a way of giving consistency to itself. The poem at
this point is really dealing with vanishing traces, things that cannot quite be pinpointed or placed
within logical propositions, and therefore, the language becomes incantatory as if it were an effort
to create a kind of a mood, a sort of creating a reality through this mood induced through
these iterations.
Then the prayer of Bernard continues, "This man," and in the pilgrim line 30, 20, "This man, who
from the nethermost pit of the universe to here has seen one by one the lives of the spirits, now begs
of thee by thy grace for such power that with his eyes he may rise still higher towards the last
salvation; and I," this is extraordinary. We are in Paradise, so far, Dante strays so far from the
temptations of mystical writing, which ends up always evoking identities, representable identities;
Dante distinguishes very carefully until the end between I and he. There are individualities in this
Paradise of Dante's imagination, "And I," this is Bernard, "who never burned from my own vision
more than I do for his." See the differences, I and him, "offer to thee all my prayers, and pray that
they come not short, that by thy prayers thy wilt disperse for him every cloud of his mortality so
that the supreme joy may be disclosed to him."
That's the first prayer to the Virgin. "This too I pray to thee, Queen, who canst what thou wilt, that
thou keep his affections pure after so great a vision." The first danger to the pilgrim is that he may
be losing literally his mind. The vision of God may a face may obliterate his powers of this
vision may obliterate the powers and the affections. "Let thy guardianship control his human
impulses. See Beatrice and so many of the blessed who clasp their hands for my prayers." This is an
extraordinary vision. The whole of the cosmos is praying for Dante the pilgrim's beatific visions.
"The eyes by God beloved and reverenced and I, who was drawing near to the end of all desires."
I want to emphasize this, even this language of desire, up to know the poem has been can be
called literally we've been calling it so many things, a poem of hope, a poem of peace, it's a
poem of exile, and poem of desire and the poem of longing. The prayer is the mode of this longing.
Prayer, you address someone you don't see hoping that you can be heard and that your prayer can be
answered is a desire for a response. This is really the mode of Dante's theology. At the heart of his
theological universe, there is a sense of constant longing and a sense of being not quite where he
wants to be. "I who was drawing near to the end of all desires," I emphasize and I prepare you in
case I would not make a point about that. Very soon the language of Dante will change from desire
to enjoyment.
He starts getting the sense of this sweetness and this idea of the fullness of his pleasures. A desire
will shift into joy very soon, "ended perforce the ardour of my craving. Bernard signed to me with a
smile to look upward, but already of myself I was doing what he wished; for my sight, becoming
pure, was entering more and more through the beam of the lofty light which in itself is true." Now
the first defeat; Dante starts recording the forgetfulness of this experience. "From that moment,"
first of all, "my vision was greater than our speech, which fails at such a sight." How are you going
to make a failure become a success? How from the fact that he is not going to be able to see will
become somehow a mode of his own, not just a humility because it would be a success in terms of
the pilgrim's own humility, but in terms of the writing of the poem. Now the poem will be a
different way of understanding the poem, not just going to be a representation of plentitude of
vision, but until the end the statement of a longing for a vision that may come.
The memory too fails to such excess. Excess in Italian is really the language I don't know,
probably English is best, etymologically it's the same thing, but in Italian it's outrage. Outrage in the
sense in which with resonance that there is something too bold and over a kind of hyperbolic, an
overreaching because that's really what it is. An excess is an overreaching, "Like him that sees in a
dream and after the dream the passion wrought by it remains and the rest returns not to his mind,
such am I; for my vision almost wholly fades, and still there drops within my heart the sweetness
that was born from it." That's all he's going to be left with. This sweetness that gathers in the
chamber of the heart. This has been a journey of the heart, because as I have been saying to you in a
number of ways in the past few weeks, is that the journey to God is a journey of the mind, but it's a
journey of the heart. You have to you will come to know God through this idea of the heart.
But also, you know, that Dante's clearly punning on the notion of what memory is, because to him
memory is connecting to those with a heart. What can I remember? What can I recall within me?
What is this the only thing that memory can retrieve is this sweetness of the heart. Such a
then he continues, "Thus the snow loses its imprint in the sun." The image of the liquefaction of
shapes, the loss of shapes, water that had been crystallized just dissolves, and then an image which
brings us back to the Aeneid, the third book of the Aeneid, "thus in the wind on the light leaves the
Sybil's oracle was lost." This is the idea when Aeneas goes to the Sybil's cave to find out about the
future, his future, and as the Sybil opens the gates the wind comes and will go on scattering all the
leaves kept within it. It's the impossibility of reading, the impossibility of deciphering the actual
leaves, like sort of messiness and confusion, that's exactly the state of mind in which he seems to
find himself.
"O Light Supreme," Dante now shifts to another mode on his own, and now in a sequence of
prayers. "O Light Supreme that art so far exalted above mortal conceiving, grant to my mind again a
little of what thou appearedst, and give my tongue," this is the kind of the prayer of this is the
prayer of that language may, I am missing a page here this is the prayer that somehow, language
now may triumph over him, over the threats of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness threatens him. Why am
I insisting so much? "That it may leave but a gleam of thy glory to the people yet to come." What
Dante is saying is that his poem is meant for the future, that in effect, he's envisioning a future. This
is not a poem written for him, it's not a poem written for his contemporaries, it's a positing of a
future. That is to say, the opening up to, and that's what work will do, a work of art invents and
prepares a future, so more than an act of remembrance, and the commemoration, the poem will be
what we call it, a prolepsis, a proleptic move, a movement forward into the future.
Why do I talk so much about memory? Dante seems to be becoming now utopian, lend me some of
your glory, let me see your glory so that a spark of it may be left in my text, so that the future will
understand it and will see, and some fire can come from that spark. Now why does then language
his insistence on memory? Because that's the answer, he talks about retrieving the memory of what
he has seen because the actual constitution of his poem, he can only his write his poem, he can only
have some authority for his voice if he remembers what he has seen. In order to ground the poem in
the notion into the vision of God, that therefore, will authorize him to say all of the things he has
been saying about the living and the dead, the powerful and the not so powerful, the historical
figures and the cultural figures of the past, it's crucial for him to remember so that memory becomes
the actual foundation of his representation. He has to bring it back, give it a presence to what has
gone on in his experience. Do you see what I mean?
He's forced to go on remembering and yet he cannot. How is he going to where does his
authority come from then? If he can't remember, and he says that he can remember very little, only
the sweetness that has been gathering in his heart, where does it come from? This is the third
fourth challenge of the poem. "I think," he continues, "from the keenness I endured of the living ray,
that I should have been dazzled if my eyes had been turned from it; and I remember that for this
cause I was the bolder to sustain it until I reached with my gaze the Infinite Goodness."
Once again, breaking the narrative and turning into the meditative, a prayer, sort of begging that the
divine may reveal itself and remain with him. "O abounding grace, by which I dared to fix my look
on the Eternal Light so long that I spent all my sight upon it. In its depth." That's what he sees. "I
saw that it contained," the cosmos as a book. That's it, the whole world I called it last time, a
cosmos book, the cosmos as a book. That is to say, as a parchment maybe, but he uses also the
image of a book which is different from a volume, the volume is rolled up. The book is the one
which we have a kind of square structure. The two together, as a kind of allegory wrapped up. "I
think I saw in its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume," now that was the
word Dante had used for Virgil at the beginning of the poem. A way to give continuity to his quest
and his questions begins with the volume of Virgil's book and that Virgil's book becomes a pre-
figuration of the book of the cosmos that he sees bound together.
"That which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations
as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of it is a simple light. I think I saw the
universal form of this complex," of this compound, "because in telling of it I feel my joy expand."
Now is the retrieval of or rather the recovery of this state of mind, which is one of joy, which
excludes absence. Desire has to be replaced by joy because desire always entails an absence. We
long for what we do not have, at least at that moment. Desire is always tied to an experience of
lacking. Joy is tied to an experience of plentitude of a procession somehow at this point, and now
another mythological figure that I want to focus on. "A single moment makes for me deeper
oblivion," you see now the dialectics between memory that fails and oblivion does its memory, and
efforts at remembering and the reality of forgetfulness.
This was the dialectic between the two metaphors together, "A single moment makes for me deeper
oblivion than five and twenty centuries upon the enterprise that made Neptune wonder at the
shadow of the Argo." What an extraordinary image. Single moment, it's clearly an image to say that
I forgot more in one second, so time doesn't exist here. It exists in Dante, Dante is still being
human, he stills has time, time is at least he can only his life can only be measured by time,
but he's in the presence of the eternal instant, but a single instant he says literally, I'm just glossing
this, a single instance made me forget more than what we have forgotten in twenty-five centuries
from the experience of the Argo, allusion to the Argonauts, another mythological counter to Dante's
own journey. They went for the Jason went for the golden fleece, Dante's going for the beatific
vision, another little connection to Canto I of Paradiso starts with a reference to the story of the
Argonauts, the daring of the Argonauts, and now Dante is closing the circle here once again.
There's a further something else that in the story of the Argonauts as Dante retrieves it, is that the
guard is now below, Neptune is in the depth, and Dante is now thinking of the divine as being also
caught in its own unreachable, unfathomable depth, which is a height, but you see there are two
different perspectives. More importantly, here Dante sees Neptune wondering at the daring of man,
just as Neptune is wondering at the daring of the Argonauts; the implication is that he too has had
this kind of daring that the divine, that God may be wondering at his own achievement. What is
crucial is the change of perspective from the depth of underneath the sea to the depth up in the sky,
up in the heavens for Dante's God.
Then he continues, "Thus my mind," Dante's so careful I wish we had time about this to show
you. I mean I know that there are some graduate students who may want to think about this whole
issue of how Dante's lexicon about mind, intellect, reason, he's so carefully calibrated and
differentiated; mind is the faculty of visionariness. It's also the root word of measure, as you know;
Latin etymology is the medieval minds are always taken with the discovery of the root words.
The word measure comes from the immense, for instance, comes from the word for mind. It is as if
he's still keeping a sense of the measure for himself. He's still aware of his own particular city. He's
not lost in the immensity of what's around him, "Thus my mind, all rapt, was gazing, fixed still and
intent, and ever enkindled with gazing. At that light one becomes such that it is impossible for him
ever to consent that he should turn from it to another sight; for the good which is the object of the
will is all gathered in it, and apart from it that is defective which there is perfect."
Now language fails, memory fails; the second failure is that of speech. "Now my speech will come
more short even or what I remember than an infant's." You know that the word infant, which usually
we take that to be a child, it literally means the child who cannot speak. You refer; you use the word
infant for someone who is pre-, as it were babbling even, that's the infant really. "Fari," in Latin
means to speak, "And infant's who yet bathes his tongue at the breast. Not that the living light at
which I gazed had more than a single aspect for it is ever the same as it was before but that
my sight gaining strength as I looked, the one sole appearance, I myself changing was, for me,
transformed. In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me," that's the vision
that he has, "three circles of three colours and the same extent, and the one seemed reflected by the
other as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the
other. O how scant is speech and how feeble to my conception!"
It ends with an unavoidable statement of failure, a failure of memory so that the memory can be
forgetful memory, and the failure of speech unable to contain the plentitude of what he sees. Vision
exceeds language, exceeds speech, there is more to the text Dante is saying, there's more to my
experience of the world than what I can say in words. There is not everything is reducible or
containable within the syllables of our language. "This, to what I saw, is such that it is enough to
call it little. O Light Eternal." Once again, "that alone abidest us in Thyself," a divine that is now
caught within itself and is self contained. Look at this, "In Thyself alone and knowest Thyself, and,
known to Thyself, and knowing lovest and smiles on Thyself."
This is the kind of inner and closure or circularity of the divine. In Italian, I have to read to you in
Italian so you see line 123 line 125 maybe, O luce etterna che sola in te sidi. "Sola," only you
understand yourself, t'intendi, e da te intelletta e intendente te ami e arridi! You see how the words
keep repeating and falling on themselves to convey the idea of the self-enclosed nature, now there is
something that always escapes, a grasp and escapes Dante's. There's some for all of the
diffusiveness of God in the creation there is an element of the divine that literally is absolutely self-
transcendent, just transcends itself completely. "That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in
Thee as reflected light when my eyes dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me, within it and in its own
colour, painted with our likeness."
He sees our own, as he calls it, our effigy line 131, "nostra affige," our likeness. He doesn't say "my
likeness," it's a poem therefore that at the end seems to want to retrieve the commonality of the
common likeness that we have. What he sees is the incarnation, the human image within God,
because in God there is also the human since we are if you agree with the principle that we are
creations of God and the way we were created in His image, so therefore there's something human
also within the divine, and then he continues, "Like the geometer who sets all his mind to the
squaring of the circle," a famous mathematical surd in the Middle Ages, meaning one of the
impossible paradoxes of how do you square the circle, and the geometers will go on reflecting on it
and that's what Dante where Dante places himself. The science of measurement stumbles against
this paradox that the geometer and fails.
"Like the geometer who sets all his mind to the squaring of the circle and for all his thinking does
not discover the principle he needs, such was I at a strange sight. I wished to see how the image was
fitted to the circle and how it has its place there; but my own wings," the flight of the soul, the
wings of the soul, the platonic idea that we go on developing wings, of the two Eros allows us to
unfold our wings for the sight. It's also a pun, I think, on Dante's own name. We have been talking
about, "were not sufficient for that, had not my mind been smitten by a flash wherein came its wish.
Here power failed the high phantasy."
How many fantasies are there? There are three, the highest form of the imagination, that's what he
means that the a pretty romantic distinction, I mean, coloriage between imagination and fantasy.
Dante follows Dante belongs in that same line of thinking, "But now my desire and will, like a
wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other
stars." That's the end of the poem which ends exactly the way with Dante doing two things. One
seeing the Prime Mover and understanding the Prime Mover, not the way he did at the beginning of
Paradiso I, but love. The definition of God as the Prime Mover, you remember, seemed to have a
limitation for Dante as the Prime Mover moves the universe, and somehow then detaches,
disengages himself from it.
Now Dante sees that primal, the motion as a motion of love, the universe as a universe of love, but
calls the world together and prevents it from falling apart is exactly this power. Prevents it from
chaos, it's this power called love so the whole universe is in motion. Love that moves the sun and
the other stars, and the only thing stable, the only thing that makes it cohere is this love. By using
this same language here of love that moves the sun and the other stars, it's a universe of love, we
understand that. Dante uses, symmetrically, the same phrase, the stars of the sun and the other stars
in Inferno at the end of Inferno and at the end of Purgatorio. Fair, remember that, and then now I
was cleansed enough to come back and look at the stars, the end of Purgatorio. Then now Virgil
and I finally managed to come back and see the stars.
Now Dante says, the love that moves the sun and the other stars, what he's really doing is placing
himself immediately with this line right back on earth. He's here with us looking up at the stars. It's
the line that shifts, allows him to shift from the moment of this vision that he has, a vision that is the
vision of the incarnation at the end. That is to say his own our own likeness, that's all he sees,
that's all he remembers, and then comes back to earth. But it also means that this line places Dante
exactly in Inferno I and this is the story of the poem.
The story of the poem we have been reading the poem as an account of an experience of a
pilgrim who goes from the dark wood in Inferno I to the beatific vision, whatever he remembers of
it, and then comes back to tell us about it. But in effect we are also discovering in this reading of the
poem, is that by the end of the poem Dante says, now my journey starts, the real journey was this
poem here. We are in a sense, by that last line, caught in the circle of Dante's telling, in the drama of
Dante's story. We read the poem which is a kind of journey for us, then we read because we want to
tell our own story, and then we want to go on re-reading it once again. Do you see what I mean? It's
a sort of, if you wish, witty even, way for Dante to say this poem will hold you, and it's meant to
hold you, and I wish it holds you. You can see the poem as both a journey and the telling of the
journey endlessly like the movement of the sun and the other stars. This is the end of the poem.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer [01:00:31]

Let me see, I'm sure that there are questions. I raised some issues and we have a minute a few
minutes and I'll tell you then later what we're going to do next time. Please.
Student: Can you talk about this line where he's at line 52 [Canto XXXIII], "Bernard signed to
me with a smile to look upwardthe lofty light which in itself is true. There are few things going
on here about light and truth and I'm wondering the light seems to be pure all and what's
happening is that Dante's vision becomes that the faculty improves enough to appreciate this and
that his sight somehow fails and then he has failure of memory. I don't know, light is the truth, it no
longer illuminates but isn't very obvious to the truth at this point. I'm not sure it seemed like there
was a lot going on and I'm not quite
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Okay, the question is in reference to lines line 52 of Paradiso
XXXIII where Dante says, "And I who was drawing near to the end of all desires," that we
understand, " ended perforce the ardour of my craving. Bernard signed to me with a smile to look
upward, but already of myself I was doing what he wished;" that's fairly, at least literally clear, "for
my sight, becoming pure," that's also clear, Dante's experience in the final poems can be reduced to
a refinement of the faculty of vision, physical but also clearly spiritual. "Becoming pure was
entering more and more through the beam of the lofty light which in itself is true" meaning that I
think this means, and this is also a footnote of yours, it's the footnote is too the famous phrase, "In
thy light we see the light." The idea that you are quite right that it's not a light that reveals an
object being a true object; that's really what you the point that you are making. That's absolutely
true, I would agree with that, but it's really a statement about the light which in itself is contains
a light. It's this kind of that's the meaning of the biblical phrase, "In thy light we see the light,"
it's not because of your light I see the world, I see myself or whatever, in thy light I see the light.
The light is the light of truth, that's what he's saying. It's the light of truth in and of itself, the light of
truth. Yes, it's a light in itself. That was your point or not?
Student: Kind of, I'm just a little confused what the function of light is.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: What the function of light here? Well, the I can give you a little
bit of the idea of what we call the metaphysics of light in Paradiso. Dante begins with the idea that
what we know of the divine is light, a light that the power of which and the limitation of which is
exactly like the dark in the sense that the light reveals to us the divine, but at the same time hides
the origin of the light. You cannot see through the light. That's really the understanding of Dante in
Paradiso I saying, "The glory of Him who moves all things," the glory is an image really means
light. The light of Him, who moves all things, is what I really saw.
Now Dante's seeing the origin of that light, that which has remained forever invisible, exactly the
way the dark has. You may say that some of our imagination is that we are in the dark. We don't
know the origins of anything; we don't know the causes that lie beyond our perceptions. We don't
know the origin of the dark, we may even go like mystics believing that the dark is the image, is the
cover for light. If there is a dark there must be a light somewhere else, in fact that dark may
occasionally be removed. The worst thing about the mystical language of the divine in terms of
light is that the light itself, which makes all things visible, remains in and of itself impenetrable in
its origin to the human eye. Now Dante sees it, that's the idea of the true light, "In thy light we see
the light." Is that a little
Student: The beatific vision then is not exactly
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: This is not a beatific vision. He has seen a moment of light and the
origin of the light, that's still not God. The beatific the only thing that he remembers of the
beatific vision is some he doesn't say. Some sweetness that has gathered in his heart, and what he
then sees beyond the general form, he sees a number of things. The general form of the cosmos,
which is this conjunction of circle and square, book and volume, if you want to visualize it in terms
of I like that image because it really implies the Word. It's the theology of the Word that seems to
come out of that.
Then the other things that he sees is our likeness, i.e., he sends us back to Genesis 1, or the creation
of man as told in Genesis. "Let me us make man in our image and likeness," so here's our likeness.
You are talking now about the light and the meaning about this light is that the light what does it
mean to say that the light is true? Not because he reveals and dissipates the shadows that would be
one way, one function of the light, the like the light, the light of the mind, the light of the sun,
whatever. Because of that, the artificial light, but there is a way in which Dante is now thinking
about what is called metaphysics of light.
What is the light in and of itself? The light Dante by the way, if you really want to know this,
Dante distinguishes between the word for light and the word for lamp, lume, luce, and so on light,
lamp and so on and a number of scientific distinctions. Here he is talking about the vision of the
origin of light, "In thy light we see the light," that's the meaning of the phrase.
[end of transcript]

Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.
Print

ital-310: Dante in Translation

Lecture 24 - General Review [December 4, 2008]
Chapter 1. Distinctive Theological Concerns in the Divine Comedy [00:00:00]
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Here we are, talking about recapitulating the work done on
in reading part of the poem, selections of this poem. It's a little difficult; of course, I'm not going to
tell you exactly what we have been talking about. We have been reading from the work outside of
the Divine Comedy; we started there with the Vita nuova, which we read as you recall, as a
visionary text, as a story of an education, as an autobiography and we tried to explore what those
terms mean and how they interact with each other. How does one term shed light on the other?
What does it mean to write an autobiography and at the same time having an education? The two
converge, of course, in Dante's imagination.
You can only write an education a story of your education if you have a sense of what your
whole life is about. If you have some pattern of coherence and intelligibility that you can impose
on, and extract from, respectively, the sense of your life. But above all, I was interested in that
partial, because it's sort of it's truncated at the end as a sort of interruption deliberate
interruption, because what kind of preparation it gives us. To what extent is it repeated that
adventure Dante narrates in the Vita nuova is kind of an adumbration of the Divine Comedy? In
many ways the two texts really are implicating each other in the sense that Dante finishes the Vita
nuova stops writing the Vita nuova, that's the inconclusive, the unfinished quality of the text so
that he can go on writing the Divine Comedy, if you see what I'm saying. The Vita nuova ends with
the statement of a project, of a project to come, which therefore will be in a certain way the
fulfillment of what is only hinted at in the Vita nuova.
The two texts are literally one is preparing for the other, the other one then the Divine Comedy
turns out the way we were reading the Divine Comedy last time. The Divine Comedy itself has a sort
of inconclusive quality about it. Dante reaches and experiences the beatific vision, and yet his text
succumbs to the enormity of the task of describing it, and there were a number of reasons why we
said Dante does that. What seems to be, and is, a defeat at the level of the imagination turns out to
be a great triumph for Dante's own theology, right? The measure in which that the poem ends in a
kind of defeat, in sort of the with the admission of the impossibility for Dante the poet's
language to contain and therefore reify, circumscribe that which he has seen, right?
He's sort of ending with this question mark, this vision of effigy as he says, our own image. That's
all that is left for him to recall, which really means that in the refusal to pinpoint, describe, and
define the so called beatific vision, some people could be very disappointed; why doesn't he tell us
what he really saw? Because that would be the statement valid for him; he wants us, at the end of
the poem to adventure, to take our own journey and make our own discoveries about that which
remains the essential point of the Divine Comedy, as is the essential point of all great texts about
tradition: the encounter between the human and the Divine. That is the point of all the great epics.
Whether it is in the form the Aeneid where the hero is always uncertain about what the gods are
telling him, uncertain as how to decipher it, and yet he nonetheless pursues what he takes to be
and makes mistakes Aeneas, along the way but what he takes to be God's will. This is the way
he can live out his own sense of ethical imperative to himself, to his people, the refugees that are
coming from Asia Minor and going toward an unknown land, and the Divine imperative, or whether
it's going to be the renaissance text from Spencer's Fairy Queen to Tasso's, to Milton, to Lucretius,
who writes in a theological epic. The idea he wants to cure his readers, he has one reader in mind:
the young epicurean, and this is Lucretius, whom Dante had never read he read in parts and was
very fascinated by what he read, who wants to educate one young man, Manaus, a young epicurean
to the real and bitter truth of what the epicurean philosophy may be and that bitter truth, the harsh
truth Lucretius thinks that there is no such thing.
That ours the Roman world is a desecrated world, that the gods have fled, that's the but that is
still in the mode of an atheist, it is still a theological concern because the implication of what I'm
saying is that atheism itself may be a way of addressing, of course, it's a way of addressing the
question of God, the un-knowability of God, the distance of God, maybe the non-existence of the
gods. The Divine Comedy from this point of view partakes of this extraordinary tradition. But he
does it in a way which is remarkably different; Dante does his theology in a way which is
remarkably different from anything else that has gone on before him and, in many ways, after him. I
think there is a mode of recapitulation, this is what I have to I will have to briefly illustrate and
give you the chance to ask more questions specifically about the poem.
Some of these things that I have said to you the whole poem moves towards this kind of
theology. Condensed in Canto XXXIII of Paradise, recapitulated right there. Of course Inferno goes
on talking about issues of politics, which is not that they are easy, they are very complicated, but in
some ways they are rooted in Dante's own theology. That is, it's too easy to believe that, you know,
this is politics, this is theology; they are always implicated with one another. In fact, sometimes the
best way to understand the theology is to talk about the politics, and the best way to understand the
politics is to really talk about the theology. They are completely, always implicating each other.
Inferno talks about the ethics and the politics, Purgatorio talks about aesthetics and ethics above all.
The possibility of reconstructing the human beings; so flawed they seem to be, so incredibly sunk
into the ditches of their own perversions, of our perversions. How do you so radical, Dante's
condemnation of the political realities, of civil war, people cannibalizing each other, and not in a
metaphor that man is a wolf to man, but literally they are doing this. How do you get out of it?
It's very difficult to be so to ostracize politics from the possibility of the human imagination and
then at one point saying, well I still need this. How are you going to make a persuasive case for
your readers? This was the great challenge of Purgatorio. We saw the question of time, the great
problem of freedom, that all of a sudden seemed to surface in Purgatorio with Cato's suicide, you
remember, with the debate about the soul, and created freedom, and by an act of freedom, God's
freedom to the attainment of the free will. Around this extraordinary concern of freedom, and
therefore the possibilities of the moral life, we came to the conclusion of Purgatorio with a garden,
the Garden of Eden, the place of pleasures, the place where pleasures are not damned in and of
themselves. The question becomes now, because that is the Sabbath, that is the moment where you
pleasure can be seen as the crown of work that which crowns, the correlation of one's own labors
and so on. That is also rooted in theology.
Then we ended up in Paradise where we really talked directly, because I think that's really the
substance of Paradise, the possibility of thinking of an aesthetic theology. How art and theology go
hand in hand, because what joins them is the question of not just the question of the art being the
temptation, ethical temptation, but now the question of beauty as the mode of revelation of the
Divine. Therefore, the implication was, and let's hope I have said that very clearly, that art
becomes a way to know God, a way to know the Divine, so we are moving away from traditional
assumptions about what is the path to go and encounter God. What is really the discovery of the
Sacred; is the Sacred going to be found, some texts in Dante seems to have believed that at some
point in a particular in the animation of nature, is it going to be found in the love that you have
for your Beatrice, or you, or Beatrice's for your Dante, or whatever. He goes on thinking about these
concerns and how everything that belongs to the world of art is the part of the path to the Divine.
Theology and aesthetics not just as well, aesthetics as a way of making beautiful the reality, the
theological content of Dante's faith. Not just that, but that's no longer the question of an
ornamentation. That was the problem, by the way, of Lucretius who at one point says, I wanted to
write poetry because I want to make pleasant the bitter medicine that Epicurus goes on
administering to you. The way he says it, that the gods have fled, that there is no such a thing as
sacredness in the cosmos, that's too bitter to bear. I'm going to say it nicely, now that's really not
so for Dante. How the actual exercise of art, it's an ascetic exercise. You move through art, you
refine, you think, and you question all the things. It's not just an ornamentation ornamentation of
being the word for cosmetics, for beautifying that which one has that which he will say.
These were the concerns and we came to Canto XXXIII of Paradise, and I maintain to you and as
way of recapitulation, I think I have said to you, I hope that I have said it all to you, but I will gladly
go over it and I hope that if you see more or not quite, haven't seen what I think I've been saying,
say it, that's really your last chance as far as I go in this public mode here.

Chapter 2. Three Elements of Dante's Theology [00:12:05]

The first thing that we understand about Dante's theology is the extraordinary rootedness of this
theology in the human reality. Canto XXXIII is the canto of prayer, and we'll talk more about the
prayer as a mode of theologizing. Why is it a special mode of theologizing? The first thing is that it
is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, that is to say a way of thinking about how the Divine has entered the
world of history and the human flesh.
There's no such thing as an extraordinary and I think even talking about the cosmology of
Dante I tried to hint, tried to say look the physical world and the metaphysical world are all part
of one universe. They are two separate hemispheres and yet there is always a cross, there is a
chiasmus that will connect them, but will make them because that's the irony of every chiasmus.
You know what I mean by chiasmus? It comes from the Greek letter chi in Greek, that's a chiasmus,
an X, and wherever a chiasmus you have a point of intersection of the two arms, but that becomes
also a point of flight. Things come together and can be seen to come together, but things also seem
to be divergent, seem to be going away from each other, okay. This is the cosmos of Dante; it's an
extension of what he will say in the prayer to the Virgin.
The human rootedness of the Divine, not dualities, okay, that's really a primary item. This will
conclude, with the idea that with the and makes it persuasive that what Dante sees and
remembers at the end is our effigy, which is clearly a throwback to Genesis. Let us make man in our
image and likeness, that's what Dante will see, but this also means that we are in the world of
images, that Dante's own journey ends in the world of images, but not in images as deceptive
appearances, only that which we saw the whole of Purgatorio is full of, now somehow the image
probably because of our, the shared quality of that image becomes the locus of the Sacred itself. It
becomes, not something that just hides, but also reveals the Divine.
The second thing that I think that we have learned to understand about this theology of Dante is
freedom. That the foundation of Dante's own the foundation of his beliefs, the foundation of his
theological beliefs, is in freedom. We talked about the theological virtues, as you recall, the
theological virtues faith, hope, and charity: XXIV, XXV, and XXVI with the various examinations
that Dante goes on. If you recall, we were talking about the fact that Dante thinks of faith as an act
of freedom. That's not unusual for those who have any theological interest to even find traces and
implications of this kind of statement. Faith is, for Dante, a way of knowing; he connects it with
knowledge, which is not just a way of saying that faith intervenes when knowledge stops because
someone who is interested in his curiosity of knowing now I don't know I'll try hard, maybe
tomorrow I will know, I don't need any faith, right?
If you really think about the relationship between knowledge and faith, you can't say faith emerges
at the boundary line of knowledge because that boundary line is always shifting, and that would
imply the progressive reduction of a kind of receding, and diminishing fragment of the dimension of
faith. Dante's saying by connecting a university examination and the problem of faith is that faith
itself is a way of knowing I have faith, and that means that I see the world in an entirely different
way; I can see myself disengaged from everything around me. I can see that nothing really matters;
that all the patterns and parameters of reasons are going to be found wanting. That's really so it's
tied with freedom. Hope introduces the question of the future, and you cannot have freedom without
the future. We talked about these temporal issues. You can only think about the possibility of a
future if you believe that it is a novelty, if there is a freedom if you are in bondage you cannot
really think of that.
Theologically, because I don't want to confuse you at all, you remember that all three cantos were
literally woven with references to Exodus. All three cantos and the story of Exodus, which is crucial
to Dante's poetic figuration, is the story of the freedom from a state of bondage. This is the way we
understand him, but Dante also knows that freedom can you only have to shift this is Luther
of course; freedom and faith are one in the same thing. In his attack you remember that? I
mentioned this to you, it doesn't concern Dante but concerns the issue and so we'll mention for
clarity. They debated, the two of them, Luther and Erasmus over the idea of what freedom of the
will means, and they are really debating a text written a century earlier by one humanist by the
name of Valla and they disagree about what that text means.
Luther says to Erasmus, you really are interested in faith as a form of order. I'm interested in faith as
a form of freedom because that frees me from all loyalties. It's madness by the sublime quality of
the statement, but you only have to shift the ground a little bit and realize that freedom, can really
become, and is the source of atheism. Atheism, all of a sudden, becomes important because human
beings don't want to be subjected to anybody. It's part of the project to say I am my own man, I am
my own woman, I want to do exactly what I want. I don't want to have any loyalties or accept
anything that I don't even see. We can bear with the master that we see and maybe has a knife at us,
but someone as distant and remote we Dante then says that's the peculiarity of this religious
belief of mine, which is really all about freedom, including the freedom to deny the divinity. This is
extraordinary, never heard of in the history of as far as I know and I have a very limited
knowledge believe me, it's no rhetoric; very limited knowledge but I have never seen anything like
this.
The third element about this theology is really the great element of love, to discover that the way to
God, yes it's hard; there are many ways first of all to God. There is the philosophical of going
through knowing, there is the linguistic way through the language, and I'll come to this issue in a
moment. There is poetry, there is the world of beauty, then there's the language of the heart, but
primarily it is the path to the Divine is love. Dante understands, I wasn't saying that love is so
mysterious because I know that deep down you are all young people, many of you are, a couple
here are younger, much younger than I am but not really that young, so they are not surprised by
any this. But I know that deep down, I remember being young, how I think about the mystery of
love, ah that really speaks to everybody's heart. I wasn't meaning it that way. It is really a thought
point that the principle of election, which is so crucial to love, it really cannot be quite explained. I
really was meaning it in this theological way as possible. I was already thinking about the
statements that I was going to make today about Dante's theology. These are some of the issues that
Dante has.
The other day, yesterday, the day before I was asked the question about one line in Dante and I was
very it was a very good question about the fact that Dante's allowed to see the truth, that the light
he saw was the truth. That was a very good question. What does it mean? To me it was so clear, and
I apologize, because I said well this is really the biblical idea in your light, which your notes will
tell you. In your light I see the light, we see the light, and what does it mean? In your light we see
the light. What it is that it's part of this mystery that if you are a mystic and you think that the
Divine is wrapped in a kind of transcendent darkness, that's the language, or that it is really all
wrapped in impenetrable light, it's both the same because neither light has the peculiarity never
letting you see the origin of the light, and darkness has the peculiarity of never letting you see the
origin of the darkness. When Dante reaches Paradiso XXXIII, and that's the meaning your light, we
see the light, Dante sees finally the origin of light. That's the point. There are moments where his
sight can become so incredibly sharp and so penetrating, so look at all these ways. The ways
there are many ways in which we can take available to us and it seems that we are always stumbling
against something that in the long run you have to stop, and yet if you love, if you think that beauty
is part which is part of love, beauty is part of love is the hunger for beauty the neo-Platonist
will say. In the Florentine neo-Platonist Lorenzo I don't know where he found it probably in
Plotinus; love is the hunger for beauty.

Chapter 3. The Question of Language [00:22:12]

All of these are ways that Dante keeps opening for us in our journey to the Divine, and then there is
the prayer which is the question of language. That has also become one of the ways in which I
indicate that there is a theological root to the question of language. Not only that we speak out of
speaking and language is an allegory, a parable of our desires, a parable of what we lack, we speak
because we don't have. That's the specific and we speak because we the seat mate and we are
pointing maybe without really knowing to what we need. It's always a question of need. Dante has
always had a way of connecting language and desire, we talked about that, that's one the themes we
discussed. Then all of a sudden in Paradiso XXXIII, though I said to you, look the language now
changes.
First of all, the prayer to the Virgin is all about longing, this state of longing but not languishing.
There is an etymological connection there somewhere which is not I'm not going to get into but
there's a longing for the Divine to show itself to Bernard of Clairvaux, the great mystic. He who is
the great fierce opponent of Abelard, appears on the scene and therefore they you can overhear
the polemics which we haven't got time for, the polemics between Abelard and Bernard that are
clearly behind his apparition in Paradiso XXXIII. They all are waiting for the Divine to show itself
forth, right, and this language and yet this desire all of a sudden becomes the language of joy, of
enjoyment. That's such an extraordinary shift. Why? Because Dante understands the problem with
desire; of course, we like to we're always talking about how much how permanent we like to
be, in a state of permanent desires because that's what makes us feel alive, young, to desire, you
want something. It's true, it's part of the great power of desire, and the language of desire, but if
desire were without an object ever then desire becomes of the greatest absurdity and futility. If we
go around thinking that we are in a labyrinth of desires then really that is it's a joke, desire
becomes a joke. Dante places this idea of enjoyment, the possibility of this sweetness that instills in
his heart. These are the issues.
Then finally, this idea of prayer, and I want to stop there. Let me stop with the question of prayer
and then get your questions. The whole poem, I think, from the perspective of Paradiso XXXIII,
taking retrospectively the view, not only the fact that there are references to the first words Dante
uses in Inferno I is a prayer. "Miserere di me," "Have mercy on me," he doesn't even know whether
you are a shade or a man, he sees something, a shape indistinct, turns out to be Virgil, turns out to
be poetry. This is the poetry that lends itself, offers itself completely freely. You can go to the library
and pick up a book, a free act of someone's generosity. There it is. He turns to it and begins with a
prayer, and the poem ends with a prayer, and ends with it begins with a prayer the whole
poem, the real quality and nature of language is to be a prayer. A prayer implying the tension that
we have all the time told what, for Dante, told what necessarily transcends us. There's always a
reality that is touched directly by the hand of God, but escapes the world of the human plans, and
the human projects. This is what I think the whole poem is about, and it's above all a poem
addressed to the future, addressed to us. That is to say, it's not a poem about the past, Dante is the
least nostalgic of poets, it's so easy, if you really go wherever and you tell your grandchildren you
read Dante. I thought that Dante is a nice little story about the Middle Ages; we are all nostalgic
about the Middle Ages. Maybe some of you are here how were these guys, how were they
living? In a world of absolute certainties, right?
Dante is the poet of openness, the poet who understands reason, and understands the risk. Now,
that's really what this poem is about, a poem about the future, the poem addressed with a number of
apostrophes to readers, and whenever you read apostrophe to readers from beginning of Inferno to
roughly Paradiso X, every so often Dante addresses us. You remember I said, at one point he stops,
he made this point, what are these addresses to readers? We can read it whenever you have a
kind of up to the eighteenth century you always read novels, now my dear reader, now my gentle
reader, they are coaxing you, pretending they're coaxing you, they couldn't care whether you read it
or not I don't think ultimately. Dante doesn't really care whether we are reading him or not. Now
you're following the little shape of poetry, the few of you, and I think he means it, who are not
afraid of how rough the seas are. You could shipwreck and all of that of course you could read
those apostrophes as a way of saying, look I need you readers because if I have readers I'm
constituting myself into an author.
The measure in which there are readers, then I am the author, I am an author because I have
because the poem has made me into an author. Of course there is that, but what I think this is about
is you are going to use my poem as the boat with which you can start your own journey. That's the
understanding of the future. The poet, Dante, is a poet of the future, which is a way of saying there
is a little bit of irony as I say this, that Dante's not a poet of the past, he is the poet toward which we
are going. The Middle Ages may not be a time of the past, it may be the Middle Ages in a different
form or certainly will come back, will probably come back in the future. This is what Dante clearly
thinks.

Chapter 4. Question and Answer on Desire, the Papacy [00:29:01]

So let's go now with your questions. I hope you have many and not many, a few so that we can
talk a bit about this. Yes, whoever wants to you came in late so I must say must repeat this
you have to sign and there is that beautiful young woman right there, Maria Derlipanska, that
adjective, you forgive me but it's true but also the other thing is you have to talk very closely to
the microphone.
Student: Well, I wanted to talk a little bit more about desire and I'm glad you brought that up
because it's been on my mind for the last couple of days. I was just reading Shakespeare's 147th
sonnet yesterday in which he says, "desire is death," and it struck me how different Dante's
inception of desire is and it's something that he seems to want to stay in and relish and it's almost
life to him. We started this course with the Vita nuova and I got so frustrated reading it because I
part of me was saying if you love this woman so much why don't you do something about it? But
it's like Dante no, he wants to stay in this place of longing; longing is life for him in some way. That
seems to me something vitally important to understanding what the Divine Comedy means and I
wonder if you could just go back and talk a little bit about the courtly love tradition, how that might
have influenced Dante's thinking about desire, and more specifically, in a spiritual sense as to
Dante's theology, how desire played a role in Dante's conception of his relationship to God?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes, okay. Well good question. I like the fact that you bring in, I
will take the points as I remember them, but also following at my own inner logic. I like the way
you bring in Shakespeare's understanding of desire and that desire it's not that it's really death
but ends in death, that the desire leads you to death. That this is a kind of that is in many ways
also a view largely shared by Dante in this sense, but it's not only that, Dante does not stop there. In
this sense that you have to understand that there's such a thing as a metaphysics of desire. I don't
know if the term is new to you or not. What could that phrase possibly mean? Why do we talk
what does it mean? Metaphysics of desire, to some of you, it may be a little bit unusual, it really
means this, that desire there is a dialectics to desire, a movement to desire that necessarily I want
this today then I want that, the desire is inexhaustible, that's what it means. From that point of view
it's very important for all those like Augustine, it's part of this restlessness of the heart as St.
Augustine mentions. That's the a theological understanding of desire.
We call it metaphysical because it really wants the absolutes. Desire, by definition, I want now this,
the smoking of a cigarette for a great novelist, an Italian novelist at the beginning of the last century
was the true emblem of desire, ending in ashes but always like a phoenix you can start over again. It
really means that it always it will come to an end either in death, in nothingness; finally you
renounce all desire which is the death of desire or some idea of the absolute of God. That's really
that's what we mean by the absolute this absolute tension that desire entails. Now then you asked
me to talk about the Vita nuova and the uneasiness you had. I mean, you expressed the uneasiness
and I respect your uneasiness. I know a man of action like you, a student of philosophy as you are,
then you obviously have that kind I think that you're supposed to have that.
There is such a thing as a passivity of the state of dejection, the sense of the mastery of love that
throws the lover poet into who doesn't really understand what love is at this point, that's what
part of the education is. He wants to the story of the Vita nuova is the story of a poet who knows
he doesn't know Beatrice, he calls her Beatrice only because in the nearness of her he would feel
beatitudes; that's what he says, so there's a kind of arbitrariness to names. We don't care about that
now, we go on with there is this idea that he is the power of love dejects him. It's not yet a
virtue, it's a passion, and the word passion really implies that. We think that a passion is what makes
us go but Dante makes a careful distinction of the will that becomes paralyzed, the desire to be
discovered by the woman he loves. It's very important for him that she says "hi" when they meet in
the streets and he she won't say "hi" and so he goes home and he's dejected and says I'm
worthless, etc. That is he's explaining the kind of that sort of state of dejection that love can
bring in or the passion of love can bring into the mind.
The mind is clouded, unable to think straight but that for him also sheds light on the way he
understands poetry because he waits for poetry. He's a sort of poet, very romantic poet, who doesn't
think that poetry entails discipline. It's almost like somebody else says, it's almost like going to the
office at 7:00 a.m., you sit down at the desk, and keep at it, and then maybe you'll manage to come
up with a great line. He hopes for romantically for poetry to come to him, for inspiration to come
to him, and then he realizes that his understanding of love was as wrong as his of the love
passion was as wrong as his understanding of poetry, that you've got to really get down and do
something about it. When he understands it, it's too late for him, because Beatrice has died, so now
the poem the project of the Divine Comedy she may be he has a vision, he sees her at the
foot of God's majesty and says I want to go there an meet with her, that's action. You agree that that
really is quite has completely changed.
How does this understanding of love connect with the courtly love tradition? That is really not a
difficult question. In fact I would give you a little bit of a bibliography that C.S. Lewis has written a
very good book on The Allegory of Love, a book written probably in the late 50s, but last time I read
it which was recently some twenty years ago, it was still very good, very powerful. The idea is this
that and I'm really paraphrasing C.S. Lewis more or less, I mean with a lot of gaps in my mind
about the richness of the text. That clearly what we think of love today as a romantic understanding,
it's really a discovery of the Middle Ages. I have been talking about the fact that, you may all recall,
the Greeks did not have this romantic understanding. The Romans didn't have this understanding of
love. When you read Catullus, the passion for a woman is something that he's always a little uneasy
about. That's not what a virtuous man should be doing. It's a weakness of the will. The weakness of
the will, it's a vice, what can you do, we are fallible we are Romans but we are also occasionally
a little fallible.
The idea of romantic love comes with Provencal poets in the south of France, what you call courtly
love. I would distinguish that, that's all, the only thing I would say about it. You don't read the C.S.
Lewis who ends up with love and the history of love in the how it changes, that is to say, in the
Renaissance. I would distinguish between the two; I would not use indiscriminately courtly love
and medieval ideas of love. Courtly love implies a formalization of love and it goes back some
of you I know are writing a paper on this, on Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, which is
a way of setting rules for loves, in the perception that love is a potentially disruptive experience and
so let us make it into a joke, that's the idea. Let us establish protocols, a code by means of which the
woman and the man can really interact and tell each other what this is about. Don't hope marriage
because that's a serious business concerning property, and wealth, and status so within the fairly
close boundaries of the courtly love tradition, then you go on making such assumptions about
yourself about you can play about the greatness of women, the secret of love, there's a certain
code. In the other forms of courtly love, or the sweet new style, and the way it develops. Another
book I could mention to you is Valency which is love something I can't even remember the title,
Maurice Valency, he also discusses the shifts between Provencal understanding of love and the
sweet new style articulated by Dante and his coterie of poets. That makes it I hope.
Student: Thank you for an extraordinary series of lectures. I was curious about the ending and I
wondered if you could comment on Dante's views about the papacy? I thought his choice of
Bernard of Clairvaux was very curious and throughout the Divine Comedy he previously was
grumbling about papal intervention over temporal powers, so I wondered if you could comment on
that conclusion.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yeah, very good question. Of course I didn't talk about it, and I
think that what you're really referring to, I don't know, but I think what you're referring to is the fact
that Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a great book called, On Consideration, which seems to be about
contemplative life. He's the great reformer of the Benedictine movement, monastic movement in
France, and the so called Cistercian monasteries which became the centers of culture where they
would copy they would do poetry, they would write music, they would sing. I mean the arts, the
way we know them, really originated with him. He wrote this text On Consideration which actually,
in spite of the title, because you know what consideration is a step before you come to
contemplation. There are a number reflection, consideration, and then contemplation. He
chooses to write on consideration. He dedicates the book to this treatise to Pope Eugene IV who
had been his disciple, he had been a a Frenchman who had been a Benedictine monk with him
and it's and this is probably one reason why Dante chooses Bernard.
Bernard, the contemplative monk, the reformer, all of Paradise is populated with founders and great
reformers, founders of orders or Justinian and the law, etc. France is Benedict, Dominic, Bernard
and so in spite of the fact that he's a contemplative, Bernard did not hesitate to write a text for the
spiritual edification of his ex-disciple, Eugene the IV, who is now a Pope and he's aware how the
office of the shepherd of the church can distract him from the loftier spiritual aims and the longings,
so it's really a sequence of arguments about what you should how should you administer your
time so that you are never really going to lose sight of what your true aim is, Heaven. Dante
mentions this text, by the way, in a letter that so many not I, go on challenging the authority of,
the letter to Cangrande that maybe I have no not with you, with my graduate students we have
gone over, but to me that is actually the indication, the fact that he refers to the treatise by Bernard
that the authority of he is the author of that letter.
Now, you see it clearly another way in which I can understand your question is that you see some
kind of divergence, some sort of break. On the one hand this kind of invective, the mode of the
invective in Dante when talking about Peter, St. Peter in Paradiso XXVII. I mean, he doesn't he
looks back after the examination on faith, he looks back and he starts attacking what he takes to be
the use of patience, my place; remember that, an incredibly moral voice that rises right at the very
end. You seem to be worried about the fact that Dante seems to be so moral and when it comes
about the popes and then becomes mystical all of a sudden, is that really one of your concerns? It
could be, it could become one of your concerns in asking this question about at the end of
Paradise XXXIII he talks about Bernard such a mystic and yet all over he has been talking about
the papacy.
If you were interested in that I would say there is no divergence in Dante between the prophetic
voice and the mystical voice. That is something even those who read the Bible would go on
saying, well, the prophets were visionaries. In a way it's true but in a way it's not true, the prophets
were not visionaries, the prophets were readers of history. They don't need to have Daniel give an
interpretation; Ezekiel has visions, but Isaiah doesn't have visions so it's you see what I'm
saying? There is no clear-cut distinction between the prophetic and the mystical, certainly not in
Dante. The two belong together so that's I don't know that I'm answering your concerns but I
overheard a number of let's say rumblings in your question. I'm trying to take care of them.
Student: Is it a reconciliation with the papacy?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: No, not in the sense no. To talk about even Bernard is
someone who understands how waylaying the office can be and he was obviously writing because
he must be aware of what has been happening and what was likely to happen. You don't have to
become a chronicler or an historian to do that; you can imagine this can happen. No, there is not
that. I think that's Dante's judgment about history is always very clear until the very end. History
needs a reform and of course he would say, because he's one who believes in the sacramentality and
presence of the self, how the self is crucial before I start talking about how the world needs
reforming let me just begin here. That would be an obvious way to say it, so I call it the language of
presence in him, a sense of, I am present to my own self and therefore I have responsibilities toward
my own self before I became I started using the megaphones and let's reform the world. That
probably if there were ever to come and Dante's not a utopian thinker, it would come only
because so many people of good will, men and women of good will, his saints, his blessed the
blessed souls that he meets are willing to do something about that. No, no reconciliation, not a sense
of finally things will be becoming together, I don't think. Actually I hold onto that.

Chapter 5. Question and Answer on Hermeneutics, Other Religions, Violence

[00:46:54]
Student: Just thinking more about desire and wealth and the fact that the will is what loves and the
will always contains some element of lack, or desire it seems, so even if it can attain plentitude it
still seems that Dante in talking so much about the will and the will as loving, Dante says that love
always has some element of lack. It's not just lack, there is plentitude, but still there's always this
restlessness and so the love at the end where there is plentitude it seems to be a completely
transformed understanding of love, that it's not possible to go to return from in the beatific
vision. If you have this plentitude, is it possible to go back because it does seem like it's a
completely transformed understanding of love when you have just the plentitude and not lack
anymore so with that mind does is Dante ever able to attain this love because this love that does
have plentitude seems like it should end in silence with no language and Dante does go back and
speak, and he does he is still he is a pilgrim and a poet and so does he really ever move from
the images to the essences and is the uncertainty at the end not just because we have to go on the
journey our self but because he is still on the journey?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well, you are really voicing a very delicate issue in the poem. It's a
very controversial issue because that also implies the status of the poem. Do you understand what
I'm saying? In other words, if you really think that Dante has seen has had a beatific vision and
he has, and now he's writing the poem to tell us about it, then you're really saying that the poem
itself belongs to a higher level of experience because it's written by someone who is in full
possession of grace. That's your point, right?
That's a very delicate point because I have not been teaching Dante that way, right, I have not. We
are right to say this, at the moment of recapitulation, I probably would I have wasted your time
all along. One little detail that I want to bring to your attention and then I will go to the more
general problem; when Dante meets Beatrice in Purgatorio XXXI, this is getting really to be a
recapitulation, we're talking about everything in the poem now, he meets Beatrice in Purgatorio
XXX and then in XXXI. In Purgatorio XXXI Beatrice forces Dante to go into a confession. You
have to go into an admission of who you are, and has to be public; cannot say I know you know, but
you have to be duly ashamed because only that way you can transcend whatever it is that you have
within you. Dante reluctantly will agree to do that and then Beatrice will say, I want you to go
through this so that another time, the future tense, when you will see, will meet the siren I want you
to be stronger.
This to me implies, that's one of the many Dante sees Casella, another aesthetic temptation. One
doesn't have to have the temptation to kill someone, to really feel that what is out has fallen out
of grace but this is he meets Casella and he remembers how sweet was that song he heard from
Casella and that sweetness still resounds within me. Now Dante is writing is talking as a poet
he meets Ulysses, I grieve then and I grieve now. There is a way in which states within the pilgrim
do not really go on changing; they are the same, implying that there is some kind of continuity
between pilgrimage and poetry writing. To me, the writing of poetry is an extension of the
pilgrimage. Dante though goes on saying; I have had the beatific vision. I am now I know what
enjoyment means, not just desire, but I'm coming back to the Earth and therefore I cannot come
back to the Earth as anything less than a human being with one project, the project to write a poem,
because I want to retrieve that joy and because I want to share that joy.
So I have set down two things in my answer to you. One talking about the question of the pilgrim's
experience and the relationship of the pilgrim's experience to the writing of a poem, but I have also
said that the poem stands as a sign for us. A hermeneutical moment; Dante means it for us so that
we can his journey continues. That's my answer. You don't have to agree with it because there are
I know there is there are other people, I have been fighting those people for a long time in my
life, I don't want to go back to those fights, but I think that that this my way of looking at it, okay. I
can give you more bibliography; I would rather not actually, to tell you the truth. I don't want to tell
you about those people who are writing the other way. I have written about them in my books.
Student: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how Dante views other religions.
In particular, Judaism and if it sort of falls underneath his idea of religion as freedom, and that if
you have the freedom to become an atheist you also have the freedom to choose a different religion
and if he views Judaism and Christianity as sort of a continuity both deriving from the same basis or
if he ascribes the idea of secessionism that Christianity has succeeded Judaism and invalidates it,
and for that reason we don't find, from what I can remember, and Jews in Paradise.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Oh yes you do.
Student: You do? Okay then that's my fault.
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well, now I have to correct you immediately because then maybe
you rephrase it stay there because you probably will rephrase the question. When Dante goes
on listing, in the mystical rose, we even are told that Beatrice sits next to Rachel. She has a way of
elevating her and then he goes on describing all the other we talked at length about Solomon
who is a Jew, I think right? He was a Jew in the Bible. We went on talking about Nathan, I tried to
make light of it because I wanted to tell you that Dante saw his own name but it's Nathan, a prophet
of David, and also in the harrowing of hell which is Inferno IV, where Dante describes what
happens to Jesus after his death, what does he do? He harrows hell. He goes into hell. What is he
doing in hell? He goes there to take the patriarchs and the women of Israel and take them to heaven.
That's these are facts you want to change your question or I can go on telling you more and
answering the real questions that you are raising, that is to say the relationship between Christianity
and Judaism and the other religions. You want me to talk about that?
Student: That's definitely the issue that I have. Whether Dante I guess like I said before, I guess
by having Jews in Paradise and having the figure of Christ come in and collect the patriarchs, if
he's trying to integrate Judaism within Christianity or somehow to find a way between the two?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Yes. That is so you're interested especially about Dante's sense
of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism? Do you want me to also address the other
issue of the way he looks at the Hindus and the Muslims? We talked about Dante and the other
religions. In fact, when I when we talked about Dante's relationship with a sense of Christianity
to the other religions, I never mentioned the Jews and probably that to you may have been a kind of
glaring omission. This guy is talking about the big religions, what about the matriarchs of the
religions? The Judaism it's likely I occasionally thought maybe I should say something, and
then I said no because Dante doesn't talk about it and so I wouldn't.
Dante does talk when he has and he is not the only one, centuries before him they were talking
a man like a great theologian by the name of Bonaventure, a professor of theology at the
University of Paris. I mentioned that text I'm sure, and the year 1274 which is also the year of his
death, he was invited to Paris, he was teaching there, because he was invited to deliver a number of
lectures and he gives these lectures, and then he goes on talking about the other religions, the
religions he knows: Hindu and the Muslim religion.
It's an argument I mention that because it seems to me that Dante follows Bonaventure fairly
closely when in the canto of St. Francis, Canto X, the description of the that legend of St.
Francis, Francis is said to have gone to the sultan to try to convert him and fails, and then Dante
also talks of the Hindus, with the reference to the Ganges. When talking about justice, Dante is
talking about Europe, but in between he alludes to the he talks about the Persians and the Hindu,
the guy from the Hin who is born on the river Hindus, he says you are of the Hindus.
What is the conception there? The critique, they are talking as Christians and they are talking from
the point of view of Christianity. The position that Bonaventure will have, and Dante I think follows
him, is the following. How does it how it can be can they be distinguished? What do they
share? They talk about what they share. What do they have in common? They have in common,
especially with the case of the Muslims, the biblical the Jewish tradition. Let me just not mince
words here, the Jewish tradition, that's really the common matrix for him.
He also notices differences, that for instance, the theology of the Hindus is one that presumes the
diffusiveness of God into all things. That's not I don't think that's something that unusual. What
does it imply? Because they become critical of it, it then implies the difficulty of making judgments
about what's good and evil. If God is everywhere you have to the sacrality of all things, which is
a great idea, and yet there are some aspects of reality where you don't like to think that they are all
alike. There is a way in which this is pantheism and can become therefore can become can
be critiqued as the lack of distinctions and hierarchies, and ordering. When they come to the
Muslims, since the Muslim religion is one that talks about the absolute impenetrability of the human
mind cannot ever hope to understand the Divine. We are here at the mercy of God and we live only
by the mercy of God. We cannot go on and say, but I live by reason and I die by reason, and I can
get to know God. There is a great distance between the human and the Divine. That's the critique.
If this is true then we have nothing to there is an absolute transcendence and he sees Christianity
as that which literally mediates between the two because there is that transcendence and absolute
transcendence of God, the way the Muslims understand it, but there is also a possibility of a
mediation. Not total mediation the way the Hindus understand it, but the mediation of the cross, the
mediation of the incarnation. This is the way Dante takes the other religions. When it comes to the
pagan religions, not because they are the pagan religions for instance, and Dante there follows very
much the pagan religion, the religion of the Greeks, the religion of the Romans. Dante follows very
much St. Augustine, who is the one who talks at length about these issues. That's the ambiguity;
there are adumbrations of the Divine, but at the same time, they can become also blasphemous idols
of the infernal powers. There is this way of really the smashing, if you wish, of the idols.
When it comes to Judaism, which is really the question that with which you started actually. I
think that Dante is I talked about that. I shouldn't say that I didn't talk about it. You may recall
that I made a point in at the beginning of the readings of the poem, maybe I was not it didn't
seem to be very important, it was important to me; I sort of went on talking a little bit at length
about the question of birth. You remember how there are some characters, representations, all
characters? Dante continues, I could have said the same thing in the prayer to the Virgin; Virgin,
mother, daughter of your son; two birds in one stone, in half a line as it were. Daughter of your son,
Dante focuses on birth. I did say, I went on talking since Dante talks like this about Virgil, then
talks about the birth of Francesca, Giacco in Canto VI, Farinata in Canto X, endlessly talks about
this whole issue.
Then I went on talking, this concern with birth is specifically Roman, I said. This is really a Roman
insight into the importance it's really what distinguishes the Greek tragic understanding of birth.
Children can really become a curse in when you read the Thebaid, for instance, where you read
the story of Oedipus, with Statius being half Greek, sort of incorporates. Then I added, after saying
that this a Roman concern, because it's the whole it's tied to the notion of foundation. The
Roman idea that you can start things over and over again with the foundations of cities and the birth
being the way in which nature becomes historical, and therefore, I potentially like all of you
potentially can change everything around you. It's not true, as someone at a round table the other
night in my department, was saying that you have no experience, there are no events. Of course
there are experiences and events, every birth is an event, that's Dante's understanding because he
can change history, he can change the future.
After making these statements that that's a Roman idea, and or Dante that's crucial because he's a
Roman, and he thinks of himself as a Roman; Florence is the daughter of Rome. Then I added that
this is also a Jewish idea of creation. That that's really what we have, mainly the great invention that
we have in the Bible, that the world was created and that Dante is connecting two ideas, a Roman
and a Jewish idea, which are miraculously convergent. Is this an act of useful patience because
that's really the what I read in your question. Is that an appropriation? It's culture. I think that
that's really what you do, but you can say that about the Bible. You read, the Bible is a reading of
history, over 800 years of its composition. It's a reading of events around them and the culture, and
that's exactly what Dante does. How does he look at he thinks that the Jews I guess he's really
saying they are not Christians but they believe in a Christ to come and that will save them. This
really means that there is an acknowledgement of the dignity and certainly originality of that vision.
I answered clearly; you may agree, you may not agree, but it's clear. We agree about that.

Chapter 6. Question and Answer on Violence, Dante as Saint and Poet [01:04:33]
Student: I was wondering if you could just brief I was wondering if you could discuss the
presence of violence in all of these texts that we've been reading. I'm thinking particularly about the
Vita nuova and the depiction of violence in these dreams filled with passion and very strange
representations of the color red and all as both a lustful color, the fear of death in these
depictions of love which reminds me of courtly love and this idea that our passions are sort of
transcendental violent dreams, and images that come to us. That's one question, one part, but the
other is the presence of violence and violent imagery in Paradiso, I'm thinking particularly about
marshes at the beginning in Canto I? Also, the implied moral violation of Piccarda and these
continuous images that remind us of human violence and passion as violence, and I wonder how
they fit in with the final vision of beatitude and human love?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: That brings us right back to the relationship between the historical
and the sacred. Violence is a parody almost of the sacred, and in many ways, the alibi for the sacred
because the sacred has to be understood as that which tries to redeem the violence. And Dante,
you're absolutely right, never flinches from the understanding that the world of history is an
economy of this ongoing violence. It's true. He even addresses you, right. The human beings, the
Cato who kills himself hoping that with his death he can bring an end to the civil war in Rome
between Caesar and Pompeii, but then the violence that someone like Piccarda.
How love engenders violence, it's an incredibly thing, because then they have perversions. It's not
just that I killed because I want to steal someone's shoes, but then there is a way in which I think I'm
engaged a more tragic understanding of violence because a sort it it's so mediated and so
disguised as love. I can love, from Paolo and Francesca, and yet that engenders a lot of violence.
Dante has gone through all the phases for this sort of thinking. That of thinking that maybe that's
really what history is about; it's all about violence and that any effort at redemption, Christ's
redemption of violence, that's really what the whole story of Christian salvation is about.
Dante mentions that, this is not a kind of an opinion, Dante will mention it in Inferno XXXIII.
Remember, with the story of Ugolino, in the background of that scene, of that famous cannibalizing,
that is the story of the children have been killed, two of his children, and that's always the death of
the innocent is really the beginning what happens to the children? We can go on arguing but
what about these kids? We have no response of what is innocent as Dante says, and then you
overhear in the background, and I think that Dante wants us to overhear the experience of the cross
that was meant to redeem of violence but didn't seem to work, so there is a way in which he thinks
violence has to the notion and to the god of violence, even the redemption succumbs to that
vision. The idea of redemption loses in connection with and in relation to violence. That would
be the way we can come to understand it.
There are a number of other extensions, even when we read Dante will say, when we read, it seems
to be such an innocuous bland operation that we're engaged in, in the quiet of our studies, etc., then
we are still violating the integrity of the text. We still extract, we still break up that unity, we isolate
the passage, we make part of what we want, what we want it to signify, hermeneutics is linked,
interpretation is linked to an experience of violence. What gives? We agree there, that was your
question, how does Dante get beyond that and somehow manage to arrive to a beatific vision?
I think that what Dante is doing is denouncing all forms of violence, confessing to them, admitting
them, dramatizing them. It doesn't mean that he's espousing them or he shares them, the whole point
of the Divine Comedy is to acknowledge that it lodges it, violence lodges even in him and
within him, but he wants to move beyond it and that's the ascetic aspect of his text, ascetic in the
sense that he's literally climbing up the ladder of transcending that which is holding him back. I
don't think that if you are looking for way that does he get away from it? That's really the
other question, does he ever get away? Not in the measure in which he's human and wants to remain
human, open to these temptations all the time. Please.
Student: As a pilgrim who has become a senior citizen I have had a question throughout the entire
course, and having read Auerbach and Thomas Bergen and Mary Reynolds and others, the question
has not been answered for me and I'm not sure you can either. The question is who is Dante? As
we've been responding to these you've been responding to these questions here, I've jotted down
human, man, citizen, exile, lover, poet, pilgrim, visionary, theologian, saint, Paul, Teresa of Avila,
John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux had their visions and they became saints. Is this man a
saint?
Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta: Well, I'm taking a little bit of time to answer because you must
know; I think you know that actually there are people who think that he should be canonized. You
probably do not know that. Who think that he should be canonized. Actually, I was actually
interviewed once about soliciting my ideas. I said I hope not because I want to teach him for what I
think he is a poet, a man of extraordinary imagination who divinies our time. That's what I think he
is, the power of the imagination, and who understands that the greatest call on him and on us is
really the possibility of the encounter with the Divine. I don't know I hate the idea if I were to
make a movie about Dante I have been sometimes when people have been I have been
mentioning it to people actually I would make him into a rebellious type who seems to understand
everything that he touches, but he also has a way and takes, as he should from everything, and
transforms it, so he has a vision from that point of view. The vision of how the world is and he
invents the world, his world, the world of the Divine Comedy, it's an extraordinary invention. But a
saint? I don't know what these other guys have done exactly to make them deserving of sainthood
but maybe I'll leave it there, I don't know. Thank you. I think it's time. Thank you so much for your
great questions, thanks.
[applause]
[end of transcript]
Top

Yale University 2014. Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless
explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered
under the Creative Commons license. Please consult the Open Yale Courses Terms of Use for
limitations and further explanations on the application of the Creative Commons license.