Giuseppe Mazzotta - Dante in Translation
Giuseppe Mazzotta - Dante in Translation
Giuseppe Mazzotta - Dante in Translation
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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]
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