March 21, 2011
Oh my! Blogger in Milano!
I got around to checking my Gmail today (I know, I'm slow) and discovered that Amy Welborn is in Milan with her crew! Great photos! Click and then scroll around.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 PM
December 21, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XXII
Paradiso Canto XXII
The roles for Dante's guides, Virgil and Beatrice, shift around a lot. Sometimes they're stern, sometimes they're professorial, and sometimes, like here, motherly. Dante reacts thus to the great thunderclap of a shout that ends Canto XX:
I turned -- oppressed with wonder, stupefied,
exactly as a little child will run
back to the one he trusts most -- to my guide,
And as a mother comes to help her son,
who, pale and breathless, hears her ready voice
that always seems to make him strong again,
"Didn't you know that you're in Paradise? (Par XXII.1-7)
I think this is the first fear Dante has shown lately, but I'm not certain - I'll have to look next time.
Another element I'm going to be reading for next time is love-vocabulary. The two meet St. Benedict in this canto. Dante thanks him for talking to them, for his love and kindness (XXII.52). The Italian here is affetto, affection. When I get to Rome in January, I'm going to look around for a Dante concordance! Given the amount they teach in the schools, there's got to be a paperback version. I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I think this may be the first use of this word. Love is an overwhelmingly important theme in the Comedy - maybe the most important theme of all - so I should have been watching more carefully.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM
December 18, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XXI
Paradiso Canto XXI
The transitions from sphere to sphere become less and less noticeable. Here in Canto XXI, Dante and Beatrice have moved from Jupiter to Saturn in one line: "Weve risen to the seventh splendor now..." (Par XXI.13). That's all Dante needs - an assertion from Beatrice.
When they look around they see Jacob's ladder, the ladder of contemplation. Some people want to see an influence from a French translation of a Spanish version of a poem about Muhammad's Night Journey here - especially because it has a title like The Book of the Staircase to Heaven. Maybe so, but it's hardly necessary. Ladder imagery is, as the first sentence of this paragraph suggests, Biblical. And the idea of seeing Heaven is Scriptural. Did Dante know something about Islam? Maybe. Me, I insisted on showing a Byzantine version of St. John Climacus's vision, who was a 7th century monk at Mount Sinai (note the coincidence with Muhammad!). Go to his Wikipedia entry - there are a couple of versions. We have an image of the 12 century version in the collection. In fact, there's a greater chance that Muhammad knew the deuterocanonical and legendary Christian materials as there is that Dante knew anything Islamic.
The interlocutor in the sphere of Saturn is Peter Damian, a hermit-monk who, perhaps needless to say, castigates the decline of hermits and the degeneracy of monasteries. Dante can't hear any singing and asks about the silence. Peter Damian explains that the problem is that Dante's hearing is limited by his moral body; Dante is reaching the end of his ability to even see and hear, let alone express what he saw and heard for us!
The canto began with a problem with seeing. Dante was staring at Beatrice again; she explained why she wasn't smiling:
..."If I should smile,"What a funny gender reversal -- Dante becomes Semele, mother of Dionysus, and Beatrice becomes Jove (whose sphere they've just left!). The canto ends with a reminder. After that talk about not-seeing and not-hearing with Peter Damian, al the saints in this sphere gather:
she began, "you'd become like Semele
reduced to ashes by the power of Jove (Par XXI.4-6)
Round him they came and stopped and gave a shout
so deep,no roar on earth I've ever heard
compares: the crack of thunder overcame me
And in the shock I did not hear a word.
So Dante gets his Jovial thunder anyway!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:17 PM
December 14, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XX
Paradiso Canto XX
Early in Canto XX Dante offers us an odd combination of an image from nature and ideas from music to describe the Eagle's voice.
I thought I heard the rushing of a streamThat's one of the longest chunks I've ever transcribed here, and that's because the tercets are rushing on like the water and whooshing like the bagpipe notes. The Eagle tells Dante who the bright lights are in his eye - David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, some Sicilian king, and Ripheus the Trojan. Trajan and a Trojan? Dante is still interested in how the justice of God can be comported with the limit of the spread of the Christian message -- how can that man born on the Ganges bank be held accountable to Christ? The Eagle tells him:
splashing in open sky from stone to stone,
showing the plenty of its spilling spring.
And as the music will assume its tone
at the neck of the lute, and wind will play
as it sings whistling through the bagpipes' stops,
Setting aside all waiting and delay,
the whooshing climbed up through the Eagle's neck
as in a hollow, assumed a voice, And in the form of words rushed through the beak,
stilling the expectation of my heart
wherein I wrote them. It began to speak (Par XX.19-30
O predestination, how remoteIt's a mystery that won't be resolved until the very end, but Dante finds that news "soothing medicine" (XX.139).
your root is from those sights that cannot see
the fulness of the primal cause! And you
Mortals, withhold your judgement: even we
who see the face of God do not yet know
the number chosen from eternity
And it is sweet, such lack in what we know,
because in this good is our good made fine,
that what the Lord may will, we too will so. (Par XX.130-138)
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:56 AM
December 13, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIX
Paradiso Canto XIX
The image of the Eagle-made-of-Rulers which Dante first sees in Canto XVIII continues throughout Canto XIX, and leads to questions about the difference between the real and the symbolic. For instance, Dante notes that the Eagle speaks in the first person rather than the third, thought it is visibly made up of many spirits. My colleague thinks this has to do with the radical community nature of Paradise, especially as contrasted with the terrible individualism of the Inferno. I'm not so sure - I think it is surreal, and more about those who were supreme individuals, rulers, becoming part of something larger, a symbol of Rule.
What's more, I'm not sure why Dante should be asking an Eagle made up of rulers, however just, about the salvation of pagans. Maybe because they were just judges, and a standard accusation against God's justice is that it is unjust, since it judges people who never knew the rules. I'm not at all sure.
Certainly Dante asks the Eagle these questions because - surprise - there are two pagan rulers in the composite Eagle, Trajan and Ripheus the Trojan. But we won't meet them till the next Canto.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 AM
December 9, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVIII
Paradiso Canto XVIII
Dante describes Cacciaguida close to the first of Canto XVIII as il folgór santo, "the saintly thunderbolt" (XVIII.25). How apt! The Thunderbolt goes on to name the warriors of God in another dantean list - Joshua, Judaas Maccabaeus, Roland, Charlemagne -- on to a nice full list of seven or eight. And then they're off to the Sixth Sphere, Jupiter, where just rulers rest.
Dante sees souls spelling out words -- kind of like those old sign made up of individual bulbs, where each letter blings. The texts say DILIGITE IUSTITIAM and QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM, "love justice, you who judge the earth." The blinking souls reconfigure into the shape of an eagle in weird ways.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:47 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVII
Paradiso Canto XVII
Canto XVII, the mid-point of Paradiso, shows us the new Dante, refined by fire in Purgatory he is now not fearful. All along the way people have predicted his exile, but those were damned souls in Hell and souls with clouded vision in Purgatory. Now that he feels "solid as a tetragon" (Par XVII.24), Dante asks Cacciaguida, "Make me content,/tell me the fortune that awaits me now!" (Par XVII.25-26). Cacciaguida tells him that he will be exiled, but he puts it differently. Rather than being expelled, he will flee Florence (48). Cacciaguida also uses a suitably martial metaphor for the sphere of Mars:
You'll leave behind you everything you love
most dearly; this will be the arrow shot
first from the bow of exile. (Par XVII.55-57)
After Cacciaguida predicts some of the trials and comforts to come, Dante asks him a really interesting question about the poem -- should he use the names of the sinners -- repentant and unrepentant -- he's seen? Cacciaguida assures him that there's been a reason behind the meetings; hearing the stories of known folks will teach future readers more, and:
This is the reason why, within these spheres,
upon the mount and in the sorrowing pit,
you've been shown only souls whose names men know... (Par XVII.136-138)
Just think how much inky commentaries the world would have saved without that advice!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XVI
Paradiso Canto XVI
Oh dear - I don't think that I reminded you in blogging about Canto XV that we are still in the Sphere of Mars - so Caccciaguida, crusader and Florentine, is an appropriate resident. I remembered the "ancient temple of Mars" legend, which will come up again here.
Canto XVI is a description - not entirely a complaint - of the rise and fall of Florentine families. Esolen mischaracterizes them as "noble." One of the characteristics of Italy in the middle middle ages (though I'm oversimplifying) is that nobility was rural, and the new towns were something else. They might have striven to become knights under imperial legates, but knighthood itself was not heritable. We tend to read Italy through the hyper-nobilized later Renaissance rather than for itself.
There are a few moments of language interest in this canto. At line 10 and 16 Dante comments on and then uses an unusual pronoun.
With the voi that was offered first at Rome
(usage in which they do not persevere),
my words to him resumed... (Par XVI.10-12)
And:
Io cominciai: "Voi siete il padre mio;
voi mi date a parlar tutta baldeza;
voi mi levate sì, ch'i' son più ch'io.
"You are my father," I began in reply.
"You fill my heart with confidence to speak,
you raise me so, that I am more than I! (Par XVI.16-18)
Esolen tells us that the disquisition on voi, the 2nd person plural pronoun used as a singular, is based on the idea that the Romans first used vos for Julius Caesar (and that it is a bad thing that they, and the Church, have stopped using it, Dante suggests). Pronouns are always fraught in Italy! The now-polite way to say "you" in Rome is Lei, one of those converted 3rd person pronouns, literally "she." The way to make your neighborhood merchants think you're not an American barbarian, just an American, is to return their "grazie" at the end of a transaction with "a Lei." Rather old fashioned, but polite, and seldom heard much north of Rome, I'm told.
Still, Dante is hammering it home -- Cacciaguida deserves a polite pronoun. But then he asks him who their ancestors were, their names, how long they lived (22-24). Cacciaguida doesn't particularly know. This is a sign of the great shift in heredity-mongering that had occurred between Cacciaguida's time and Dante's.
Again at 32-33, Dante refers to Cacciaguida speaking in a dialect of more sweetness, not like we talk today. Dante, of course, was very interested in the vernacular -- but it is interesting that Toscana, usually pretty unmodified by time (remember that Farinata degli Uberti recognized him by his speech) is getting inflected here.
When Cacciaguida talks about all the country folk moved to town of the new Florence he makes a nice usage of the State-as-body metaphor.
As when you bolt two different suppers down
you rouse diseases, so a town grows sick
from populations all confused in one (Par XVI.67-69)
The rest of the canto is, I fear, impenetrably localist. I've said before that I understand, but can't pretend to be interested in, Dante's love of Florence. Gimme an Orsini or a Colonna and I might pay attention, but the distant origin of the Guelph/Ghibelline feuds in a jilted bride (XVI.140) doesn't do much for me.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)
December 3, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XV
Paradiso Canto XV
As Canto XIV ended, Dante saw a massive cross of souls, gleaming like a gemmed cross (oh - go here to see a mosaic of a gemmed cross in Rome that Dante probably knew). Canto XV begins with the cross continuing to gleam, until one of the gems shoots across it, like a shooting star, and then comes to speak to them . . .
With such a loving piety for his son,
if we may trust our greater muse, Anchises
once hailed Aeneas in Elysium.
"O blood of mine, O overbrimming grace
poured out by God! for whom has Heaven's door
been opened twice, as it has been for you?"
So spoke that light . . . . (Par XV.25-31)
Here Dante invokes Virgil, "our greater muse," and contradicts himself. Remember Inferno II.32? I'll admit that I let Esolen give me the line number in the note, but I remembered Dante exclaiming to Virgil: "I'm not Aeneas! I'm not St Paul!" But he is - he has been to Hell, and here he is in Heaven, and he'll bring us reports of both.
But the ancestor of Dante goes on to speak, and Dante doesn't understand him -- "all was in a langauge too profound / Not that he chose to veil his thought from me" (Par XV.39-40). Almost everyone Dante has recognized or who has recognized Dante did it by speech, whether Dante called it italian, Tuscan, or Latin. This speech is too deep because the concepts are beyond mortal minds. Eventually the soul's speech slackens enough that Dante can understand him, and it turns out that this is his great-great grandfather, father of the Alighero who gives Dante his name. His own name, Cacciaguida, will be postponed until line 135, almost the end of the canto.
Meanwhile, Cacciaguida, who died around 1150, has described what Florence was like in his day, when it was all contained in its Roman walls. Cacciaguida praises the simplicity and modesty of 12th C Florence, when the birth of a daughter didn't fill a father in dread for her dowry and when men didn't leave their women to sleep alone while they went off to France for money. Cacciaguida claims to have been baptized in the ancient baptistery, but...oh, well. It certainly wasn't begun until after his death on the Second Crusade (if he's right and he was with Emperor Conrad, he never made it past Anatolia).
Art History commonplace (though I think it's in Villani, it's something that I learned in Art 102 and again in Renaissance Architecture) is that the Florentines believed their (actually 1150s Romanesque) octagonal Baptistery of St John was an ancient Roman temple to Mars converted by the early Christians (and hence a classical building that was admired on those grounds by some early Renaissance Tuscans), in fact it was perhaps built on the foundations of a tower on the city wall.
For Cacciaguida, and Dante, the important part is that Conrad raised him to a knighthood. That puts his family among the early Florentine elite. Though Florence didn't have a hereditary nobility, imperial knighthoods were coveted markers. Cacciaguida didn't live to enjoy his -- but he died a crusader-martyr, and "From martyrdom I came unto this peace" (XIII.148), which is a better trade.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 2, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIV
Paradiso Canto XIV
Canto XIV is a transition canto -- we hear the end of the conversation with Solomon and then Beatrice move on to the sphere of Mars.
Dante's last question for the wise is about the resurrected body -- won't it dim their lights? Solomon replies:
. . . When, blessed and glorified,
the flesh is robed about us once again,
we shall be lovelier for being whole (Par XIV.43-45)
The souls circling round respond:
So prompt and ready was the loud "Amen!"
both choirs responded, it was clear to me
how much they yearned to see their flesh again,
Maybe less for themselves than for their mamas,
their fathers, and the others they held dear
before they had become eternal flames. (Par XIV.61-66)
And thence they pass on to the sphere of Mars.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XIII
Paradiso Canto XIII
If I thought the appearance of Juno's messenger at the start of Canto XII was odd, the mention of Minos early in Canto XIII is downright jarring! This time we're talking about Ariadne, who became a constellation (given how often that happens in world myth I'm amazed I don't know a happy greco-english word for it, like apotheosized). Still, minos surfaces again. But she is only a ghost of that true constellation, the Wise (Par XIII.20).
Thomas begins speaking again (this is his fourth cano - he's becoming the Statius of this canticle) and makes a lovely parallel between biblical types -- Adam and the New Adam.
You're thinking of the breast that gave its rib,
drawn forth to form the woman of fair cheek
whose palate made the whole world pay so dearly,
and of that breast pierced with a lance to make
full recompense forfuture sins and past,
causing the scales of human debt to break.
All this is in service of some mind reading -- Thomas had said in Canto X (line 109) that the fifth light (whoever that was) was the wisest ever. He's accusing Dante of thinking that surely Adam or Christ must have been wiser - but he goes on to identify the fifth light and explain how he was the wisest ever -- Solomon was best in class, rulers.
From what I've spoken you can see he was
a king, and asked for the capacity
to fulfill a king's duties - not to muse
About the angels and the quantity
of movers of the stars; or if a must
and might together make necessity; (Par XIII.94-99)
Solomon wanted to be the wisest king - not the best scholastic. I think this is also another jab at Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, who we saw denounced by his dead brother back in Canto VIII. Dante's theory of kingship is coming clearler - a separation of duties and of intelligences.
Canto XIII ends with Aquinas denouncing misdirected intelligence and inquiry - very Dominican!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM | Comments (0)
November 30, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XII
Paradiso Canto XII
So Thomas Aquinas praised Francis and his chivalric love of Lady Poverty and chastened his own order for wandering astray, a second garland or ring comes wit h Bonaventure. Interestingly, Dante gives the classical comparison first - "When the clouds are fine/and Juno sends her herald to earth" (Par XII.10-11) precedes "Rainbows that make us mortals early wise / by the pact God made Noah" (Par XII.16-17). I sometimes think our students wonder about Dante's devotion to the classics. Is he emulating? Rivaling? Showing off? I tend to think a little of all of those.
So Bonaventure joins them, and praises the mendicant founders together. And where Thomas's talk was full of chivalry, Bonaventure's is full of military and imperial terms - even to calling God "the high Emperor who rains forever" (Par XII.40). Bonaventure describes Dominic's (miraculous) birth and then the military zeal with which he fought heresy:
Then armed with zeal and doctrine and the charge
of apostolic duty, he fell quick
as torrents bursting from a mountain vein
And slammed the thickets of the heretic,
pummeling onward with his surging drive
where the resistance was most harsh and thick (Par XII.97-102).
Dominic must indeed have been some kind of force! And then Bonaventure turns to deprecating his Franciscans and how far they have turned from Francis's path.
Bonaventure's list of those lights who accompany him includes a few names that interest me. A second Hebrew appears - the prophet Nathan. Aelius Donatus the grammarian - I didn't know he was a Christian, but he's certainly late enough (mid 4th C). Rabanus Maurus, Carolingian abbot of Fulda! And finally and weirdest, Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot and apocalypticist. Odd company.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:33 PM | Comments (1)
November 29, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto XI
Paradiso Canto XI
Canti XI and XII run in parallel. Here are Esolen's prose summaries:
XI: Thomas Aquinas recounts for Dante the life of Francis of Assisi, and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Dominicans of the present day.
XII: Out of a second garland of spirits another soul speaks: it is the soul of Bonaventure, who describes the life of Dominic and concludes by decrying the corruption of the Franciscans of the present day.
OK - to get the joke you have to have minimal Mendicant Friar Knowledge -- Aquinas is a Dominican, and praises the founder of the Franciscans. Bonaventure a Franciscan, etc., etc. Dante's Thomas fully adopts the chivalrous Francis -- troubador of Lady Poverty. Remember that nostalgia for the nobler days of the 12th century is pretty thick in the Commedia, and here it gets linked to the Franciscans.
It's important to remember, at least for people who believe that persistence in vocation and communal direction is probable (like all the nice conservatives who whine that the money of rich endowments is being misdirected by left-trending 3rd generation administrators) get a grip! Dante is setting his poem less than 100 years after the foundations (Dominic, 1206 at Prouille; Francis, 1210 at Rome) and things are already almost hopeless perverted from their original purity. So there. Pessimism about human organizations will go a long way towards making you happier.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM
November 27, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto X
Paradiso Canto X
Canto X takes us to the fourth sphere, that of the sun. We're mainly going to talk to theologians here -- and it lasts a long time -- all the way to Canto XIV. Dante begins with an exposition on why an ecliptic -- why that seeming imbalance in the otherwise perfect cosmos? After all, this is a model that depends on spheres because, well, they're SPHERICAL and we all know that spheres are perfect. As are circular orbits. As our physicist friend pointed out to our class, the ancients (and medievals) had enormous amounts of very good observational data, but they occasionally tripped over a dogma like that.
Dante's explanation? We need a skew system to keep each hemisphere habitable. Well, I like seasons, too (which is good, because I woke up to more-than-a-dusting of snow this morning).
Dante tells the reader to sit as he sets the table with a feast of poetry (Par X.25). But this is the level of the Theologians, and what satisfies their appetite is knowledge:
So the fourth family of the Father shone,
who fills their hunger ever, revealing how
He breathes His Spirit and begets His Son.
That is, there are no Mysteries anymore - the Trinity will be revealed. The description of the souls here is one of my favorite passages in the whole Commedia. Dante see them from a little distance:
Those ardent suns that had not ceased to sing,
as stars revolving round the pole nearby,
as stars revolved about us three times in a ring,
Then stopped: as ladies pausing in their glee
hold the reel's places and resume the dance
when they catch the returning melody. (X.76-81)
The first time I ever read that I was reminded of the dance scene in the Franco Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. I'll see if I can scare that up on youtube for my class.
Their interlocutor, the dancer who speaks to them, turns out to be Thomas Aquinas. He names a lot of the others -- Albert the Great, Gratian, Dionysius the Areopagite, Boethius, and (the only Englishman in the Comedy, according to my colleague), Bede.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto IX
Paradiso Canto IX
Dante has mentioned living family members before -- especially in Purgatory, where the souls frequently named them and asked that they be begged for prayers. But Canto IX begins with direct address more like Dante's use of "Reader" than his usual 3rd person method. Dante speaks directly to Charles Martel's daughter (or wife).
I believe we also have our first saved Old Testament figure in this sphere.
Know that within it Rahab finds her peace
The highest of our saints, she seals her light
on every rank of spirits in our choir. (Par.115-117)
Rahab is the prostitute who helped Joshua and later married him. Esolen reminds us that the Fathers saw her as a type of the Church, since Joshua is, of course, the same name as Jesus. So this is a spectacularly reformed Bride of Christ -- but Dante would agree that the Bride needs constant reforming. In fact, he ends this canto with a denunciation of the devotion of the Church of his own day to canon law, not to Christ.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VIII
Paradiso Canto VIII
They have moved in Canto VIII to the Sphere of Venus. Dante compares the souls to the notes of polyphony and the movements of a dance:
And as you'l find the flickerings in a flame
or song in song when one voice holds the note
while the other comes and goes in melody,
I saw a host of lamp glows in that light
more or less swiftly moveing all a-dance
according totheir grace of inner sight. (Par VIII.16-21)
These are souls who were too attached to earthly love. Most of the canto is given up to Charles Martel - not the hero of Poitiers, but a 13th C Angevin prince, titular king of Hungary, and probable acquaintance of Dante (he spent some time in Florence in the 1290s). Charles is an example of one of Dante's crushed hopes -- a political leader who failed or went wrong or died young (in this case, died young), leaving Italy torn and the Empire unrestored.
Dante always likes the ones who die young, and damns the ones that lives. Well, he doesn't damn Robert of Naples, Charles's younger brother, but he has Charles dismiss him in the last lines of the canto -- and everyone else in Italy disagreed.
Charles was the eldest son, Louis the second, and Robert the third, of Charles the Lame, the Angevin king of Hungary. During the Sicilian Vespers uprising in Palermo, the three boys were given as hostages. Eventually freed, Charles went to to die young. Louis renounced all his titles, became a Franciscan, was appointed bishop of Toulouse, and died young. Robert ruled for 30 years and ended up being called Robert the Wise -- and long after Dante's death was praised by Petrarch and Boccaccio as a patron of the arts. Here's what Dante has Charles say:
If all the world down there would set their minds
to follow the foundation nature brings,
the'd have a populace that's good and strong.
But you wrench someone to religious things
who has been born to strap the sheath and sword,
and of the sermon givers you make kings.
And that is why your strides go off the road. (Par VIII.142-148)
Remember, Dante is not dogma. He's often wrong about history. Robert of Anjou may not have been the savior of Italy that Dante was looking for, but he was a good king. And Louis of Toulouse was a saint. And Charles Martel died so young that Dante can project whatever he wants on him. His point about misunderstood vocations is well-taken, but not necessarily correctly applied to this family.
The picture is a Simone Martini altarpiece showing St Louis crowning his brother Robert of Anjou -- it's one of my favorite pieces of dynastic religious art -- talk about claiming your legitimacy from heaven! Robert kneels at his already-sainted brother's throne to receive his crown. It's at the Museo Capodimonte in Naples.
Fun facts to know and tell -- Louis, as in San Luis Obispo, which therefore must've been a Franciscan Mission. I didn't know that until I started to link the Wikipedia entry.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VII
Paradiso Canto VII
Dante's persistent failing in this canto is not fear, but a reverence for Beatrice that gets in the way of communication. Admittedly, she's like a stern or pitying mother, but she does want him to talk - and she keeps encouraging him with smiles.
"Speak, speak to your Lady," I began to exclaim
within myself, but wavering, "Speak to her!
she slakes your thirst with hr sweet drops of truth."
But reverence played the mistress over me
and like an old man nodding off I bowed
when in my mind I heard the name of "Bee."
Beatrice for a little while allowed
my speechlessness, then flashed me such a smile
as would bring gladness to a man in fire. (Par VII.10-18)
Let's hope he improves. As is, he hears another lecture - this time on the Atonement. The only thing particularly novel (man sinned, he can't pay God back, God must become man to pay God back) about her explanation i her insistence that no one understands this doctrine who does not understand it mystically.
More secret than a tomb is this decree,
brother, from anyone whose native wit
hasn't been fostered in the fire of love. (Par VII.58-60).
I admit that the doctrine can seem very legalistic, so perhaps Beatrice is right - we need the inwardness of fire to really get it. Dante, of course, was purified in the refining fire of Purgatorio XXVII, so perhaps he's ready, too.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:51 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto VI
Paradiso Canto VI
Beatrice may go on and on, but Canto VI is delivered in one voice. Justinian, representing those who paid too much attention to worldly duty, describes the career of the Roman eagle from Troy to Dante's present for 142 lines. By putting this speech in the mouth of Justinian, Dante reinforces the importance of the civil law and the primacy of Rome.
Dante uses the speech, of course, to beat up on the Ghibbelines and Guelphs and to execrate the French. Charlemagne comes in for praise, though, for protecting the papacy from the Lombards (not that Dante has shown himself to have any use for modern Lombards, either).
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:50 PM
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto V
Paradiso Canto V
Beatrice is -- umm -- a lecturer. Or a soloist. Where Dante and Virgil conversed, Beatrice sings on:
So then did Beatrice begin this song,
continuing her holy reasoning thus
as one does who does not break his speech in two. (Par V.16-18).
Not break it in two? She doesn't break off for 66 lines -- she sings from 19 to 85. Not that there's not great stuff in there! For instance, she discourses on the creation of humankind in liberty and to be intelligent, and how the high value of vows depends on these two characteristics, which are needed to form consent.
The medieval Church was great on consent; one of the revolutions of medieval Christianity is the reshaping of marriage as something entered into only by mutual consent; families could make arrangements, but those arrangements could be dissolved if there was no consent. Not that that didn't lead to problems, but it was still a considerable step forward for the rights of women (and minor boys).
After that speech Beatrice and Dante once again zip off to the next sphere by looking,
. . . as an arrowhead will hit
the mark before the cord has ceased to hum,
so did we speed into the second realm. (Par 91-93)
The second realm is the sphere of Mercury, where those who cared too much for worldly glory are shadowed, just as Mercury is frequently obscured by the Sun's light. In Canto VI they will hear from Emperor Justinian.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto IV
Canto IV
Dante starts Canto IV with a problem known to us by the name of a slightly later philosopher -- Buridan's paradox.
Between two morsels for the appetite,
just an appealing, just as far away,
before a free man ever took one bite
He'd ide of hunger (Par IV.1-4)
This Canto is being trapped between two goods. - like poor Piccarda. How can we blame her if she had a good intention of keeping her vow and was confronted with violence (19-20)?
We have another Dante coinage in this canto, too - india, "endeitied," to describe the Seraphim, Moses, Samuel, the Johns, and even Mary. [The word is not "india," the place, but "in-dia."] That may be Dante's version of what the Orthodox call theosis, becoming like God, but I'm not enough of a theologian to say.
This is also our introduction to the fact that the lower place in the spheres is not entirely - hmm - the real way to look at it. We won't really understand that until we get to the Empyrean, to the Celestial Rose, where everyone we meet as we pass through the spheres shows up again - or really is. How to understand that mystery?
That is why Holy Scripture condescends
to your minds and attributes to the Lord
a hand or foot, intending something more (Par IV.43-45).
Things are complicated in Heaven - even while they're perfectly simple.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:44 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto III
Canto III
Canto III starts off with a tercet about a sun -- Beatrice -- but then turns to a series of reflections -- a mirror, sunlit water, a reminiscence of Narcissus and the pool. After all, Dante and Beatrice have risen to the sphere of the Moon, where the souls of those who failed to fulfill their vows rest. The Moon in its phases represents inconstancy -- in some models the last sphere of mutability, in others the border between change and changelessness. The souls appear as shadows or appear to be shadowy. The lack of clarity is helpful.
Their interlocutor is Piccarda, sister of Forese Donati, who we met in Purgatory (XXIII, XXIV). That makes her a relative of Dante's by marriage, and the first example we meet of families broken into parts. Some families have representatives in all three canticles -- I don't remember if the Donati had anyone in Hell. If they don't, it might be because Forese and Piccarda's brother wasn't dead yet -- he forced her to leave a convent of the Poor Clares and marry a political ally. So her sin is giving up the vow she made to be a Bride of Christ.
Dante asks if those who dwell in this slowest sphere (II.51 - being closest to the earth it is rotating most slowly) if they want to be further up, to know more, and be more loved by God (II.65-66). Piccarda replies with the keynote of Paradiso:
E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace;
ell'è quel mare al qual tutto si move
ciò ch'ella cria o che natura face.
In His will is our peace:
that is the sea whereto all creatures fare,
fashioned by Nature or the hand of God (Par II.85-87)
I think the departure of Piccarda is incredibly beautiful and expresses the calm of the Moon:
Così parlommi, e poi cominciò Ave
Maria cantando, e cantando vanio
come per acqua cupa cosa grave.
So did she speak, then she began to sing,
"Hail, Mary," and so singing she was gone,
like a smooth heavy object vanishing
Into a shadowy pool.
come per acqua cupa cosa grave. Gorgeous.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:59 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2010
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto II
Canto II
Once again we see Dante using the image of a boat -- though this time he addresses sailors, warning them to stay back: I venture waters never sailed by man! (Par II.7) He is about to sail the stars, and he does it with love and vision.
Beatrice gazed upward, and I gazed at her
and in the instant of an arrow's flight--
sunk in the target, whistling off the nock--
I saw I'd reached a place that turned my sight
toward something to behold in awe... (Par II.22-26).
It's not all that common for Dante to enjamb a sentence across two tercets, but that's in the Italian, too. Thus they go zooming to the sphere of the moon, and Dante asks what causes the dark spots. What we see as the Old Man in the Moon, Italians call Cain. Dante see the marks as marring the lunar body (II.49). There begins a disputatio -- a scholastic debate.
Dante see the spots as caused by thin or denser matter (II.60). Beatrice denies this, and compares it to the variable brightness of the fixed stars (II.64). She says:
If that were caused by various densities,
a single starry power would dwell in all,
portioned in some place, some more, some less. (II.67-69).
She examines his argument and finds it false. Instead, she points out, but their diverse virtues -- not "dense" and "rare," but variety. Ah - so it's a theological explanation, though she has claimed it is all Realism. This is what our physicist friend meant who talked to the students last week. He pointed out how excellent the observed data of ancient and medieval astronomy was, how careful the reasoning and the mathematics, and how crippling the dogma.
He meant dogma in this sense -- why are the spheres spheres? That is, why did it take until Kepler for someone to try elliptical orbits? Well, because the Greeks believed the fixed stars were changeless and perfect, and surely spheres were more appropriate.
Similarly, Beatrice can't believe that the moon is marred -- it must be something else. Despite that, she says:
Experience, if you let it be your guide,
the fount for every stream of human art,
can set you free from this objection too. (Par II.94-96)
If that's not an Aristotelian talking I don't know what it is. But Aristotelians go wrong where their observation gives way to a preconception -- like spheres.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:29 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Paradiso Canto I
Paradiso Canto I
I climb to Paradiso - and none too soon!
Dante begins by invoking God not by name but by pronoun -- colui che tutto muove, "the One who moves everything" (Par I.1), and returns to his theme of the inadequacy of language and mind, but embedded in a claim of his right to speak:
I have been in that heaven He makes most bright,
and seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue
utter, when one descends from such great height (Par I.4-6)
Dante's going to try, though. This time, rather than invoke the aid of the Muses or of Imagination, he calls on Apollo, but in a weird way. He asks for Apollo to inspire him, to "breathe your song, as when you drew the vain/Marsyas from the sheath of his own limbs" (Par I.20-21). That's a gory memory - Apollo flayed Marsyas for challenging him. Dante's relationship to the Classical world is fraught -- and never entirely positive.
Beatrice and Dante stare at the Sun with vision like eagles (who in medieval bestiaries could look directly at the Sun without flinching) they talk about Order, and how flame flies upward. They will soon be on their way from the Terrestrial Paradise to the sphere of the Moon, just as fire rises.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)
November 9, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXIII - the last canto
Canto XXXIII
The seven ladies walk on ahead of Beatrice, Matelda, Statius and Dante. Beatrice addresses Dante again, this time calling him "brother" (23), and asking why he doesn't ask questions. Dante admits that he is tongue tied in the presence of his superior.
She said to me, "I wish that you would now
loose yourself from your fear, be free of shame,
and speak no longer as a dreamer does." (Purg XXXIII.31-33)
Still fear! Even bathing in Lethe didn't cure Dante of that.
Beatrice explains the pageant -- the Church and Empire will be restored, but she gives Dante one explicit instruction for his poem:
And when you write them you must keep in mind
never to hide how you have seen the tree
robbed for the second time in Eden here. (Purg XXXIII.55-57)
In other words, Dante is not to conceal the state of the Church and Empire, not to pretty things up. Goodness knows he accepted that charge! Popes in Hell and a vision of a Whore in the Terrestrial Paradise!
Matelda had already brought Dante through Lethe, which washed away his memory of his sins. Now the party comes to Eunoë, which givees good memories -- memories of Dante's acts of charity. Dante and Statius drink and are made ready to move on. The canticle ends with a wonderful evocation of poetry -- for once Dante's language doesn't fail him, but his space does!
My Reader, if I had a longer space
I would keep singing but the merest part
of that sweet drink I never could drink full--
But because now the pages set upon
this second canticle's loom are all complete,
the rein of art prevents my writing on. From its most holy waters I returned
as remade as a new young plant appears
renewed in every newly springing frond,
Pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars. (Purg XXXIII.136-145)
There - again, a the last canto of a canticle ends with stars; at the end of the Inferno, Dante was seeing them. Now he will go among them!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXII
Canto XXXII
The Griffin's procession passes along, with Dante, Matelda, and Statius following at the wheel, passing through the deep but empty wood / (the fault of her who trusted in the snake) (Purg XXXII.31-32). Interesting to remind us - this wood would be full of people if the Terrestrial Paradise hadn't been removed from us. The Italian of the parenthetical statement is heavy on C-sounds: colpa di quella ch'al serpente crese.
Beatrice descends from the chariot and the whole party circles the dead tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Griffin, who is or symbolizes Christ, addresses the Tree and it re-flowers. Language and knowledge fail Dante:
I've never heard it, nor do we here sing
the hymn those people sang; nor did I last
to hear the ending of their melody. (Purg XXXII.61-63)
Dante sleeps, and when he wakes the Griffin is gone and Beatrice is sitting under the newly green tree. Another sacred drama takes place. This time we see the Chariot, which represents the church, perverted. This time the drama is clearly for Dante - Beatrice warns him to write it all down when he gets home. Dante sees an eagle attack the chariot (imperial persecutions?), a fox jump into the box (heresies), then the Eagle takes it over. A dragon comes, then the chariot sprouts horns like those of the Beast in the Apocalypse, then a whore mounts the chariot, and a giant joins her. When the whore gives Dante the eye, the giant lashes her and drives her away into the dimness of the forest.
Esolen reminds us, apocalypse means "uncovering." This uncovering is a revealing of the constant threat to the Church of power - both its own and political powers. But how strangely conveyed! Surreal!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXXI
Canto XXXI
My colleague is going to have to explain why Dante should love Beatrice in the Terrestrial Paradise. I'm really finding the lady's scolding quite insufferable. What was Dante supposed to do after she died? (a) enter a monastery? (b) pine away? It's not clear, but she succeeds in making him weep in repentance and faint. Matelda washes him in the waters of Lethe, and he's ready to proceed.
Oh well, we have to take it on faith that Beatrice was so beautiful and so good. It's probably the weather that makes it harder for me to accept Dante's testimony about that than about so much else in the Purgatorio. In the long run I'm finding the eros that's supposed to have drawn Dante to the threshold of Heaven an unconvincing motivation.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 1, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXX
The thunder clap at the end of XXIX? It was to announce the person riding in the chariot - Beatrice!
Dante is caught up in love poetry -- he describes the flowers, the season, the sun in luscious terms - and then "stricken in the sight" (40) he runs to Virgil "as a little child will do / wide-eyed and running over to his mama / when he's afraid" (43-45). But Virgil's gone.
But Virgil has deprived us of his light,
Virgil the sweetest father, Virgil, he
in whom I trusted that I might be healed (Purg XXX.49-51)
In the space of three tercets Virgil is mother and father. This has got to be the most intense example of the Anxiety of Influenceever -- and a relationship open to torturous explanation. Virgil is Dante's teacher, guide, master, mama, father, nurse -- all of these get applied to him or his poem at various moments. Dante acknowledges him, and wants to exceed him -- even though when he actually lists classical poets he thinks he exceeds, Virgil is not among them.
The next word after Dante's tears? Dante, spoken by Beatrice in line 55, the only occurrence of the name in the Commedia.
Illustration: Sandro Botticelli, Terrestrial Paradise, c 1500.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:12 PM
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIX
Purgatory Canto XXIX
There is something about Purgatory that makes Dante think of sacred drama. In Canto VIII we watched two angels drive away a menacing serpent -- but there can be no real menace in Purgatory, so it was all for show. I still wonder for whom, since it happens every day. Maybe for the princes?
Here a full-scale pageant lays out the history of divine revelation - but for whom? I don't see any suggestion of regularity, so perhaps it for Dante alone. Certainly Matelda tells him to watch and listen. Dante strains to report what he saw, calling on the Muses again for help with the surreal scene:
Most holy virgins, if I have endured
hunger or cold, or watched the night for you,
good reason spurs me now to claim reward.
Still all the springs of Helicon for me!
Urania, help me with your choir, to set
hardly conceivable things in poetry. (Purg XXIX.37-42)
He exchanges a silent look with Virgil, and begins. What he describes sounds like a didactic allegorical procession -- something the late middle ages loved, complete with a float.
First come 24 Elders, two by two. They are obviously the 24 Elders of the Apocalypse, and more obscurely (though the numbering goes back to St Jerome, at least), the books of the Old Testament.* Then come the Four LIving Things (or the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse), representing the four Gospels, of course. Behind them comes a two-wheeled chairot pulled by a Griffin, half bird and half beast, representing Christ's two natures, fully human and fully divine. The chariot is accompanied by ladies, representing the virtues, theological and classical. Behind them are Luke and Paul (though Luke is mystically also a beast!). Paul, like the Gospel authors, is presented with a traditional iconographical attribute - the sword. Then four men "whose looks were meek and low" (142), representing the minor epistles, and finally "there came a man, alone / an old man, sleeping, with a knitted brow" (143-4), John the Evangelist as visionary of the Apocalypse. I'm not at all sure how he's processing and sleeping, but there you have it. I looked back - they're not ON the chariot, I think.
The procession ends with thunder. Unlike that thunder that struck Dante into a faint in the Inferno, this thunder booms and everyone stops, banners waving -- and we wait in anticipation with them.
*Esolen spells it out:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (the 5 books of Moses), Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings (as one),
Chronicles (same), Ezra (inlcudes Nehemiah), Job, Judith, Esther, Tobit, Maccabees (as one), Psalms, the 5 books of Solomon (as one), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah (including Lamentations and Baruch), and the Minor Prophets as one.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVIII
Purgatory Canto XXVIII
The Inferno began in a dark forest, the selva oscura of Inferno I.2. Purgatory is ending in another dark forest, but one without fear and threats. Dante is wandering into the Earthly Paradise, la selva antica, the ancient forest (Purg XXVIII.23), when he finds a stream.
Dimly and darkly here it rushes by
under the everlasting shade that never
allows a ray of sun or moon within. (Purg XXVIII.31-33)
On the other side of the stream Dante sees a lady whose name will not be revealed until Beatrice names her in Canto XXXIII. She is Matelda, and Esolen assures us that no one has been able to pin her to any historic person. She takes over as guide here. Virgil has fallen silent.
Matelda tells Dante about this place, which is Paradise, lifted up after the expulsion of Adam and Eve. The two streams, though, rather than the Biblical four rivers, are Lethe, the classical river of forgetfulness, and Eunoe, "good memories" (Purg XXVIII.131). That's another burst of inventiveness from Dante - and a pseudo-Greek word at that!
The canto ends with a typical linking of Dante's cosmos with the classical world - Matelda says that insofar as the classical poets sang about Parnassus and a golden age they were talking about this place,
For here the human race was innocent;
forever spring, and fruit upon the vine.
This is the nectar which the poets meant. (Purg XXVIII.142-144)
In a moment of remarkable intimacy, Dante looks back at Statius and Virgil and names them miei poeti, "my poets" (146). The relationship has changed from Virgil as guide, protector, and father and Statius as interlocutor and companion to something different. "My poets."
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVII
Purgatory Canto XXVII
Canto XXVII begins with Dante's greatest personal pain in the Commedia. The angel guardian of the next door says to the pilgrims, "Holy souls, you pass no farther on / unless you're bitten by the fire" (Purg XXVII.10-11). He names Dante a "holy soul!" Talk about progress and healing! But Dante is still afraid, scared to death.
So did he say to us when we drew near,
and I was like a corpse put in the grave,
the words I heard so touched my heart with fear.
I joined my hands and stretched them to the flames,
gazing, seeing too sharply in my mind
bodies I'd seen die burning at the stake. (Purg XXVII.13-18).
At the stake is a little strong for the Italian, which is only "which I had seen burned," già veduti accessi. But maybe that "burned" is to be understood as more actively done to the bodies than people who happen to have been caught in fires. Certainly Dante could have seen people burned.
Virgil reminds Dante of all the troubles they've been through to no effect, until he brings up Beatrice. Then Dante is willing to test the flame. Virgil goes first, Statius brings up the rear.
The blazes there inside did so surpass
all measure, that to feel the cool again
I'd haveflung myself into boiling glass.
But my sweet father spoke of Beatrice
with every step he took, to comfort me:
"I think I can already see her eyes." (Purg XXVII.49-54)
I've played with boiling glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. That's vivid.
The pilgrims pass out of the fre and start up the last flight of stairs just as the sun sets - so they each take a step and go to sleep. Dante has a detailed dream of Leah, who talks about her sister Rebecca -- and Leah is to Rebecca as Martha is to Mary, active and contemplative.
When they wake they finish that final staircase. Standing at the top, Virgil speaks his last words to Dante (though he will accompany Dante and Statius silently for a few more canti). Virgil tells Dante that he has led him by strength of mind (reason) and art (poetry?), but can go no further. He pushes Dante to accept his freedom as priest, prophet, and king -- the baptismal promises.
No longer wait for what I do or say.
Your judgment now is free and whole and true;
to fail to follow its will would be to stray.
Lord of yourself I crown and miter you. (Purg XVII.139-142).
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:10 AM
October 25, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXVI
Purgatory Canto XXVI
So the pilgrims (including Statius) are walking gingerly in single file along the rim, air to the right and a wall of flame to the left. The sun casts his shadow onto the flame, and that stirs the interest of souls again. They put it two ways -- talking among themselves they say "It loks as if his body is not false" (Purg XXVI.12). That fittizio, "fictitious, false," is interesting so soonafter the disquisition in XXV on the airy bodies the souls assemble.
More beautiful comes a little later, when they address Dante directly. "Tell how you're a wall / against the sun" (Purg XXVI.22-3). Wall against the sun! I like that.
Dante notes that the souls come to the edge of the flame to approach him, but never leave it. That's a strong statement of their acceptance of their correction. The canto will end by calling the flame foco che li afina, "refining fire." This fire hurts - but it hurts in a way they accept.
The souls here are being purged of lust. Interesting, though; Dante seems to have disposed of them in the Inferno in separate places. The Circle of the Lustful was the second circle of Hell, Canto V. Only heterosexual lust was mentioned, and Paolo and Francesca were the interlocutors. The sodomites were much further down -- in the Circle of the Violent, Canti XV and XVI, where the interlocutor in one was Brunetto Latini and the other was the gang of fire-slick Florentines.
The souls here are both persuasions, being corrected together -- and their correction has gone so far they can greet each other with a kiss that is the kiss of peace rather than of lust (Purg XXVI.31), and their striving is friendly There is shouting, but it's jocular, claiming their shame (is this the only shouting in Purgatory?).
Dante makes another one of those odd jabs at Caesar here -- Caesar, who Dante puts in Limbo and whose assassins he saw chomped by Satan. Still, Dante remembers Suetonius's report that when Caesar entered Rome as a triumphator, his soldiers hailed him as Queen of Bithynia, because he had supposedly spent his hitch as a legatus in Bithynia having an affair with the king. Dante's attitude toward emperors is no simpler than his attitude toward popes. He loves the idea of empire and would like a more ideal papacy, but he spots human weakness.
Dante's interlocutors here, like Brunetto Latini among the sodomites, are poets and beloved teachers - Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel. We last recalled Dante's debt to Guinizelli in canto XXIV, when he talked with Bonogiunta of Lucca. Bonogiunta, who had dismissed the fancy love poetry of Guinizelli and Dante in life is the one now calls it dolce stil novo (Purg XXIV.57). Arnaut Daniel delivers the longest bit in a language other than Tuscan in the poem -- 8 lines of Provençal.
Clearly these are two love poets who lived out their poetry. Perhaps Dante is suggesting that if Beatrice had been alive he would have tried? Certainly he will have to pass through the flame in the next canto.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:26 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXV
Purgatory Canto XXV
Dante finally asks a question in Canto XXV that may have been bothering some of us -- how can the souls of the Gluttonous get so skinny when they don't need nourishment in Purgatory? Virgil says very briefly that it's all about the link between you and your reflection in a mirror. Statius will explain at great length and with the medieval technical understanding of embryology, complete with refutation of Averroes and an acceptance of Thomist models. Funny, the process Statius describes reminds me of those old ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny diagrams. The generation by blood on blood is a little off, but then we become a plant - or have the vegetative soul. Then we are "like a sea sponge," then we become an animal, and then a child (Purg XXV 52-61).
I still don't quite see why, even given all this, the disembodied soul after death has to create a facsimile body while it waits for the resurrection, but there you go -- I'm kind of theologically impaired.
More interesting is that at the end of the canto as they walk round a corner they see a blast of flame that almost reaches the rim. They are about to enter the place where "the last wound of all," lust, is healed.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:28 PM
October 21, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIV
Purgatory Canto XXIV
Forese continues as Dante's interlocutor (I guess Virgil and Statius are off speaking in Latin with each other?) in Canto XXIV. As Forese names souls among the gluttons, we find out that many of them are clergy -- the kind of hierarchs who always eat well. There is at least one poet beside Forese -- Bonagiunta di Lucca who had dismissed Dante and his circle in life. Here he praises Dante, and names Dante's technique the dolce stil novo, "the sweet new style" (Purg XXIV.57). Esolen admits in the notes that Dante may be cheating here -- it's one thing to put your enemies in Hell, but having your dead rival praise your work over his poetry?
When Bonagiunta first approaches he asks if Dante is the one who wrote the poem 'donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore,' 'Ladies who have intelligence of love.' Dante answers
Said I to him, "I'm the one who takes the pen
when Love breathes wisdom into me, and go
finding the signs for what he speaks within." (Purg XXIV.52-54
That last is an interesting explanation of the poet's working method. Love (or the Muse, or inspiration) speaks within, and the poet has to find a sign to express it.
Another of Dante's Ps is wiped away as they leave this ring and climb away.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:56 PM
Danteblogging Purgatory XXIII
Purgatory Canto XXIII
Canto XXII ended with the sight of an apple tree - it will be awhile before we discover that it sprung from a seed of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Canto XXIII begins with Dante looking up at the tree so fixedly that Virgil has to speak to him to get him to move on. And just as Virgil was protective and mothering in the Inferno (why can't I remember which canto?), here he is più che padre, "more than a father" (Purg XXIII.4).
As they go on into the ring of the Gluttons -- who turn out to have been more gourmands than piggish gluttons -- Dante meets his old friend and poetical comrade Forese Donati (who was also some sort of relative of Dante's wife). Forese and Dante were the kind of friends who exchanged poems of humorous abuse. Esolen includes them in an appendix, where we read Dante alleging that Forese neglected his sickly wife, Nella; however, she gets mentioned here in Purgatorio because she's prayed him up the hill so quickly -- Forese had only been dead five years. Compare that to poor Statius, who had no one to pray for him!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:32 PM
October 20, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XXII
Purgatory Canto XXII
Virgil and Statius chit chat about the sin being purged here -- Statius was a spendthrift, and they are with the avaricious in Purgatory just as they slam rocks against them in Inferno VII -- and then Virgil asks the question that must really interest him: how did you get saved?
"...What candle, then, what sun
scattered the darkness that you might turn sail,
following the Fisherman?"... (Purg XXII.61-63)
The answer is "You."
Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano
A poet you made me, and a Christian too. (Purg XXII.73)
Statius says that Virgil first made him a poet, leading him on to write his own epics, and then in Eclogue IV he set Statius up for the Gospel message.
magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
The great line of the centuries is born again,
now the Virgin returns, now the reign of Saturn
now a newborn babe is sent down from high heaven. (Virgil, Eclogue IV.5-7)
You can see why Christians have often thought that something other than a pagan Muse touched Virgil there? Statius says that God touched him through Virgil, at least, and then he began listening to the itinerant preachers of Christianity. During the persecutions of Domitian he was baptized, but concealed his faith. Therefore he spent centuries in the fourth ring with the late repenters. Virgil passes on news about various classical folk in Limbo and Hell, and they continue to climb.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XXI
Purgatory Canto XXI
The earthquake at the end of Canto XX bewildered the pilgrims -- and silenced the singing of the souls, briefly. In Canto XXI they meet an even older saved soul than Hugh Capet and learn the reason.
What's the line from It's a Wonderful Life - "every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings?" Every time the mountain shakes, a soul is ready for freedom, and passes out of Purgatory (58).
Their interlocutor is the early imperial poet Statius, who lived in the Vespasianic era (69-96). His conversion story will come in the next canto. Here we read his tribute to Virgil, his model. He says this about his influences:
Of the Aeneid I mean: for all I am
of poet, it was my mama and my nurse.
Without it, all my work weighs not a dram. (Purg XXI.97-99)
Talk about a willingness to acknowledge influence!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:50 PM | Comments (0)
Danteblogging Purgatory XX
Purgatory Canto XX
Dante is such a snob! The poor Capetians are STILL a new family to him, from Hugh down, and what Hugh is atoning for is avarice. Hmm - Hugh is certainly the longest-serving patient we've met so far in Purgatory; he died just before the year 1000 (Cato doesn't count - he's not going any further up the mountain). Hugh's diatribe is really a stick to beat the French monarchy with, that institution whose interferences in Italy took things from bad to worse.
Hughe Capet was my name, and every last
Philip and Louis who has governed France
from my day until now has sprung from me. (Purg XX.49-51).
I like that echo of Tom, Dick, and Harry Esolen gets in there - the Italian just has definite articles, "the Philips and the Louises."
Hugh is so disgusted with his family that Dante lets him say something positive about Boniface VIII - who was harried to death by the agents of the King (the slap of Anagni).
The canto ends with another set of those weird voices through the mist - disembodied voices giving historical examples of avarice. I find the auditory events disturbing, for some reason. I'll have to think about that.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:11 AM
October 6, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio XIX
Purgatory Canto XIX
Canto XIX begins with a dream -- remember, Dante fainted occasionally in the Inferno, but in the Purgatorio he rests. Dante's dream is of the Siren, an allegory for the attachments purified in these upper rings, avarice, gluttony and lust (58-60). Virgil explains, and then rousts Dante out of his revery, like a falcon.
An idle falcon, gazing at his feet,
turns at thefalconer's cry in hot desire
to feed, and launches forth upon the wing (Purg XIX.64-66)
And so they scramble on up to see the avaricious, who lie in the dust with their faces to the ground. Dante's interlocutor is Pope Adrian V, pope for a month in 1276. Adrian expresses the frustration of success, his realization that the position he wanted so much:
Was a cheat, for it could not still the heart,
nor from its highest reachdes could one climb.
So for this life I felt the flame of love. (Purg XIX.109-111)
The obvious contrast is to Pope Nicholas III, the simonist of Inferno XIX. Nicholas is unrepentant, and in fact eagerly awaits the arrival of Boniface VIII. The simonists were planted upside down in little holes, only the soles of their feet showing. Esolen speculated that this represented the inversion of the hierarchical positions they sought. Here in Purgatory, the position is brought low to the dust -- but Adrian accepts his correction.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:21 AM
October 5, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory XVIII
Canto XVIII
In Canto XVIII Dante gives Virgil a new title: l'alto dottore, "the Teacher of deep matters," Esolen offers. Or "high," alto being one of those annoying words. Virgil certainly lives up to the name in this canto, with a long disquisition on love. Love is the source "of all good actinos and their opposites" (Purg XVIII.15).
L'animo, ch'è creato ad amar presto
ad ogne cosa è mobile che piace,
tosto che dal piacere in atto è desto.
The soul, which is created quick to love,
once readiness is wakened into act
will move toward anything that pleases it. (Purg XVIII.19-21)
I love that create ad amar presto! That explains a lot, doesn't it? Our souls are, by nature, ready to love, and easily distracted into loving things that aren't good for them. And it's beauty that does it!
For they may see the goodness of the matter,
but they neglect the form. Not every seal
is good, although the wax it stamps may be (Purg XVIII.37-39).
Virgil also presents two other things that are inborn, like the desire for beauty: reason and liberty. Both of those are called innate, "inborn." The Purgatorio is the story of the unclouding of clouded reason and the achieving of true liberty. That really is the big pattern, in much the same way that the great pattern of the Inferno is the correspondence of suffering to the particular rejection of God.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 3:35 PM
October 1, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XVII
Purgatory Canto XVII
Canto XVII is the middle canto of the Purgatorio. Dante begins with both a direct address to the reader and an epic apostrophe. But rather than invoking the Muses here, Dante calls on Imagination, imaginativa, to tell him how she works.
Line 70, the middle line of this middle canto describes sunset, which always brings progress up the mountain to a halt. That gives Dante a chance to ask Virgil about the layout of Purgatory. Below they have seen Pride, Envy, and Wrath corrected - disordered loves. Further up they will see Gluttony, Avarice and Lust realigned from their excessive bents. And:
Here they restore a love of good that fell
short of its duty; here they ply the oar
which once they rowed to slowly -- to their loss (Purg XVII.85-88)
Halfway through the middle canticle!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:40 AM
September 30, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XVI
Purgatory Canto XVI
The Wrathful in Canto XVI, already on their way to correction, sing the sweetest liturgical chant, the Agnus Dei. One of my New Testament study sheets for art history students is all about lambs and shepherds -- and students explore the transformation of the Lamb of God into the Lamb on the Throne in the Apocalypse. It's a good lesson for the angry as they untie what Dante describes as the "knot of anger" (Purg XVI.23).
Vision fails on this ledge, because a thick smoke fills the air. People can still here Dante speaking Tuscan, though, and Dante falls in with a Lombard. The Lombard explains how men confuse astrology with fixed fate, as though the stars destroy free will. Instead,
The heavens give your movements their first nudge--
not alll your movements, but let's grant that too--
still, light is given that you may freely judge
And choose the good or evil , and should free will
grow weary in the first battles with the stars,
foster it well and it will win the day.
You men lie subject to that One who made
you free .... (Purg XVI.73-80)
It's the nature/nurture argument, with Dante saying that fate nudges us, but we don't have to do what fate says, nor do genes always win. The souls in Purgatory are learning to be really free.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:41 AM
Evening in Purgatory, Midnight in Florence -- this is how Dante kept his horizons straight.
A colleague shared that with me - and I'll be sharing it with the Dante class.
I recommend that you click and watch it at YouTube - my blog template is cropping the right margin and you're going to lose some.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:27 AM
September 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio XV
Purgatory Canto XV
The long arc from the dawning of the day
to the third hour's last movements, in that sphere
whose turning's ever like a lad at play,
Would measure out how much of its career
lay for the sun before the evening's close;
evening upon that mountain, midnight here. (Purg XV.1-6)
In the Inferno we saw Dante and Virgil paying close attention to the structure of Hell. Dante was constantly referring to the diagram pinned to his wall to remind the reader how far he'd come.
On that mountain, Dante's concern is time of day, constantly expressed in astronomical terms -- so as the Sun turns it is now evening in Purgatory, midnight in Italy. But the angels, when they appear, are even more dazzling than the Sun, because they reflect the brightness of God.
In some previous canti Dante has seen relief carvings depicting either sins or virtues -- here he has, as is probably appropriate after all the dazzle, a vision. He sees three related scenes of Meekness, the correction of pride, one of them quite odd. No reader can be surprised at the Virgin Mary as an exmplar of meekness, or even of Stephen the First Martyr forgiving his persecutors. But Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens?
Dante knew Pisistratus through Valerius Maximus's Memorabilia (Esolen nods - he gives the date for Pisistratus as late 5th C BCE, when he was 6th). Someone stole a kiss from Pisistratus's daughter, and his wife demanded the man be punished.
And he responded, with his countenance calm:
"What shall we do with those who wish us ill
when even those who love us we condemn?" (Purg XV.103-105).
An excellent example of forgiveness!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:43 AM
September 27, 2010
Ah - autumn in the Finger Lakes
Lovely soft evening - the kind of day when one discovers that one's faithful water-resistant black wing tips have sprung what appears to be an irreparable leak, Zappos has stopped carrying the brand, and that at the Shoe Mart a comparable model not only costs $527 but comes in brown. Only brown. My own little Purgatory.
Except that when I was standing looking at the Lake after a committee meeting I may have heard the sound of someone shooting Canada Geese - and sure enough, they're in season.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:57 PM
September 23, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XIV
Purgatory Canto XIV
Canto XIV is not full of interest for those who are not up on their late Medieval Italian genealogy -- the canto is dominated by lists of courtly families extinguished by failure to produce sons or degenerate in behavior. There's also a very depressing description of the course of the Arno from the mountains to the sea - and everywhere it flows the dirty ditch gets worse; Dante can describe teh natural world charmingingly, but not here. Dante was in a mood
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:18 AM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XIII
Purgatory Canto XIII
Canto XIII has 3 very nice moments. First, Virgil uses the verb temo, "I fear." He admits openly in prayer that Purgatory is new to him and he needs help. We are so used to Dante fearing in Hell that this admission comes as a surprise -- even though we've seen Virgil's confusion and occasional discomfiture already in this canticle.
The souls being corrected here are the Envious, whose eyes are sewn shut. Esolen associates the color of their cloaks with liver (livid, liver), based on medieval medical theory of envy originating in that organ. But the outlet for envy, which was a milder form of the Evil Eye, was the eyes. That's probably why they're stitched up. Dante asks if anyone was a Latin (which Esolen renders as Italian, l 92). In reply a woman (and a Sienese!) wisely replies:
"My brother, each man is a citizen
of one true city .What you meanto say
is, 'who once lived a pilgrim in that land.'" (Purg XIII.94-96)
That's one of the great themes, as Esolen reminds us, of lots of medieval authors, from Augustine (who named the one true city) to Chaucer.
Best of all, though, may be Dante's brief examination of conscience. When the woman notes that he still breathes and asks what he's up to he admits that he will spend little time on this ledge, but can already feel the burden of the rocks the Proud haul around (Purg XIII.133-138). Dante knows himself. He's no longer afraid, and he is confronting his real sins.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:18 AM
September 21, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XII
Purgatory Canto XII
Dante's empathy has never been so evident as in the simile opening of canto XII.
Now neck to neck like oxen at the plow
I walked along beside that burdened soul
all while the sweet instructor would allow,
But when he said, "Come on and leave the man,
for here it's well that each soul speed his boat
with wings and oars as quickly as he can,"
I drew upright, as men are wont to go --
my body drew upright, though my thoughts still
remained all hunched and bowed and humbly low.
But isn't the second comparison an odd juxtaposition! Dante and Oderisi the Illuminator are like oxen, burdened, low, but Virgil sees Oderisi (and all the souls) as boats speeding on! Interesting passage.
This is another place Doré ignores the text. Notice how he shows heroes carved on the wall of the ledge of the proud; Dante is hunching along with Oderisi. But the poem says that the carvings in this area are carved "upon the road from hill's base to the brink" (Purg XII.24), and compares them to floor tombs in a church.
This is a canto with an overwhelming patterned ekphrasis. As Dante describes the subjects of these carvings each tercet begins with a pre-determined word - 4 with Vedea (Mark! or Look!), 4 with O, 4 with Mostrava (Look! or See!), and then one last Vedeva. Lots of other patterning going on inside the description, proud pagans and patriarchs brought low, but no Christians.
Dante refers to Satan in line 25 as "the one," colui; I wonder if that avoidance of naming him in Purgatory is like Dante's avoidance of naming Christ in the Inferno, where he was the One. I'll have to keep my eye out.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:50 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto XI
Purgatory Canto XI
Canto XI continues the correction of the proud, and continues to show Dante's interest in the visual arts. But instead of describing works of art carved for the edification of the saved souls, Dante meets repentant painters and describes other painters -- not that painting is a sin, but like all things humans can do excellently painting can lead to pride.
The canto begins with a long (22 line) paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, sung by the souls, paraphrased to bring out the themes of reliance on God. Their chant ends with
Dear Lord, we do not make this final prayer
for ourselves here, for here there is no need,
but for the ones behind us yet to come. (Purg XI.22-24
These souls are saved - they need no prayers for that, though the prayers of the living can shorten their time there. But they, graciously, are praying for us, too.
I'm a specialist in early Medieval architecture and such, and had never considered the etymology of a remarkably common word in later Medieval art, "illumination" and its variants. Dante made me wonder about why we call manuscripts illuminated with a throwaway line.
"Oh!" diss'io lui, "non se' tu Oderisi,
l'onor d'Agobbio e 'lonor di quell'arte
ch'alluminar chiamata è in Parisi?"
"Say!" I began, aren't you Oderisi,
glory of Gubbio and glory of that art
which they in Paris call illumining?"
Dante thinks of alluminar as a French loan word? Interesting! So I checked up on the word in the OED and found that ILLUMINATE in meaning 8, "To decorate (an initial letter, word, or text, in a manuscript) with gold, silver, and brilliant colours, or with elaborate tracery and miniature designs, executed in colours; to adorn (a manuscript, inscription, text, etc.) with such decorative letters and miniatures," comes with a parenthetical note: "(In this sense it has taken the place of ENLUMINE." Noting that the earliest occurrences of "Illuminate" are 16th Century, I follow the trail to EN'LUMINE (accent on the first syllable, interesting), from Old French enluminer, which shows up as early as 1366 in Chaucer, A.B.C. (what's that text?), "Kalendeeres enlumyned...." The great dictionary throws in a CF to a medieval Latin term I'd never heard, "lumina (lit. 'lights') the paintings in a MS."
Fun morning digressions aside, Oderisi's pride is so tamed that he responds by naming the successor who has outshone him - he is well on his way to being corrected, and expresses his correction in a monetary metaphor - "Here for such pride we pay the fee" (Purg XI.88). He goes on to name Giotto as another successor who has outshone his predecessor - in Giotto's case, Cimabue - and then to relate the pattern to poets and politicians, all of whom could use correction for their pride.
The poem ends with another prediction of Dante's exile, but again the tone is different when those come here in Purgatory. In Hell there was always some gloating on the part of the damned soul who had the news. Here it is more gentle, more corrective.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:02 AM
September 9, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto X
Purgatory Canto X
Dante and Virgil begin the ring where Pride is corrected - and I noticed for the first time (though once I thought about it I realized it's been going on for a little while) Virgil seems less assured. In X.19 they are both uncertain of their way. Towards the end of the canto, Virgil says
. . . these eys of mine,"
said he, "first had to tussle with my thought." (Purg X.116-117)
We are reaching places where Virgil's human senses (even those of a Limbo-dwelling virtuous pagan) are failing.
This confusion of senses also runs through Dante's first use of the visual arts in the Commedia (I think!). There was an inscription on the gate of Hell, but there were no pictures -- just as there was no singing. But now the pilgrims see relief sculpture carved into the rock face of the ledge of Pride.
It was all gleaming marble and adorned
with figures so well carved that not alone
would the great Polycletus* there feel scorned
But Nature too. (Purg X.31-34)
The confusion of the distinction between Art and Nature, or Perception and other senses, continues through the canto. First they see an Annunciation, and Dante confuses the pose with the spoken word:
. . . he did not seem
A silent form. You'd swear you heard him say "Hail!"---for the one who opened Heaven's high love
was there in image, she who turned the key,
And in her pose was stamped the spoken word,
exactly as a seal in molten wax:
"Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord." (Purg X.39-45)
Of course in the slightly later Renaissance it was not at all uncommon to paint the dialog between the Angel and Mary as issuing from their mouths (I'm not certain about c. 1300 - I don't remember any just off hand), but Dante is not visualizing an inscription. The next panels, showing scenes of the Ark of the Covenant and of King David dancing before it confuse both hearing and smelling! Talk about synaesthesia!
[images of people] who made one sense
of mine say, "No," the other, "Yes, they're singing,"
And so too with the smoke of frankincense--
the image set at strife the eyes and nose
with yes and no. (Purg X.59-63)
And here we see, too, the valorization of "it looks just like reality." As an art historian I find that kind of depressing. I spend way too much of my time convincing students that art, even art they think is Realistic (their word) is at best an abstraction from nature.
*Esolen nods. Policleto in Italian looks like Polycletus in English, but we really call him "Polyclitus" or "Polykleitos" in Art History. You know, the sculptor of the Doryphorus.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:19 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatory Canto IX
Purgatory Canto IX
Is this the first time Dante sleeps, as opposed to the fainting fits of the Inferno? At IX.12 he lies down to rest and falls asleep. I remember the pilgrims sitting in Hell, and Dante falls unconscious over and over, but does he sleep? Hmm.
The canto is also an orgy of classical allustion. We have a swallow singing - and a reference to the story of why she sings a sad song (IX.15), Ganymeded (IX.23), Achilles (IX.34), his mother (IX.37), Chiron (IX.38), and the Trojan War. It seems a dense occurrence.
In the middle of the canto - tercet 24 out of 48 - Dante speaks directly to us:
Lettor, tu vedi ben com'io innalzo
la mia matera, e però con più arte
non ti maravigliar s'io la rincalzo.
Reader, you may well see how I exalt
the matter of my song, so never wonder
ifnow I prop it up with greater art.
This is like the invocation of the Muses in Purg. I, but without the pagan help. Dante is relying on his greater art. I wonder if he will rely less now on classical commonplaces?
Dante finally reaches the Gate of Purgatory. He went through a number of gates in Hell. The first was the open, broad gate of the inscription ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE in Canto III. The second was the locked gate to the City of Dis, defended by the Gorgons (IX.88-90); an angel opened that one, too. That one opened with the touch of a wand. This needs two keys, one of silver and one of gold. The door groans, but opens, and the angel inscribes the letter P (for peccato, "sin") on Dante's forehead. He is ready to proceed, and hears yet another liturgical hymn, the Te Deum, as he walks on.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:21 AM
September 5, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio VIII
Purgatory Canto VIII
One pattern of Hell reversed in Purgatory is sound. Where Hell was full of horrible noises people keep singing in Purgatory. We began with Dante's invocation of the Muses in Canto I, where he promises to sing. In Canto II the pilgrims heard the souls singing the psalm In exitu Israel. Cato scolded Casella for singing one of Dante's love songs in Canto III, but the souls were enjoying the sound! The Miserere occurs in Canto V, Salve Regina in VII, and the evening hymn Te lucis ante terminum here in VIII. We have a combination of the canonical hours (this last is a hymn for Compline) and free song -- but it is all registered as pleasant. The only exclamations from the souls are excited noises when they see that Dante is alive (remember that Ooooo?) and sighs. But the sighs here are not sighs of despair, but hope. Everyone in Purgatory has already made it into Heaven -- they just need to be rectified and made acceptable for entrance.
One of the stranger episodes in the entire Comedia plays out in this canto. Dante and Virgil see two angels appear - come from Mary's bosom in Heaven. Sordello tells the pilgrims the angels have come to guard the valley / against that serpent whose approach is near. (Purg VIII.38-29)
Eventually (c. line 100) the serpent slithers in, maybe the same who gave the bitter food / To Eve (Purg VIII.99). The angels, "celestial falcons," stoop on the serpent, which flees at the sound of their wings beating the air.
But what was it about? It is like a sacred drama acted out for an audience -- but is the audience the neglectful princes? Or Dante? Why would God in His grace allow a serpent to approach Purgatory at all? Very mysterious! Definitely an allegorical drama to unpack.
The canto begins with sailors and pilgrims -- voluntary travelers -- and ends with exile.
That hour had fallen when the sailor bends
his yearning and his softened heart toward home,
the day he's bid farewell to his sweet friends;
The hour that wrings the pilgrim just away
should he hear home's beloved bells afar,
that seem to mourn the dying of the day -- (Purg VIII.1-6)
At the end of the canto Dante is talking to Currado Malaspina and praises his families liberality and gallantry. Malaspina tells the Dante of 1300 that 7 years won't pass:
Before upon the front of your own head
you'll find this courteous opinion nailed
with surer nails that what the rest have said --
If judgment has not stopped its course and failed. (Purg VIII.136-139)
That is, Dante will find out for himself how liberal and gallant the Malaspina are when, in 1306, they take him in as an exile from Florence. Any number of souls in Hell foretold his exile, but Malaspina is the first to offer comfort (though hard comfort, an opinion nailed to his forehead!). So, we've moved from those gentle sailors and pilgrims headed home to Dante in Exile - a good way to balance a canto.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:30 PM
September 2, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto VII
Purgatory Canto VII
My lack of real interest in Canto VII is certainly my own fault - the holding room for late medieval princes who neglected their souls to rule their domains involves a cast of characters I find as uninteresting as, say, all those Florentines in Hell.
The obvious parallel to the kings who sit around doing not much of anything is the Limbo of Virtuous Pagans in Inferno IV, where a lot of listing goes on. I am more interested in the culture heroes of the Classical world than I am in late 13th Century politics, so there you have it.
Unlike the pagans in Limbo, who everyone in 14th Century Italy would have agreed were interesting and probably virtuous, the list of rulers was probably considerably more controversial in its own time, relying as it does on Dante's judgment.
But there you have it - too topical for my taste, which runs more to Charlemagne. He'll turn up in Paradiso XVIII -- I guess he'd been dead long enough to move on!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:09 AM
August 31, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio VI
Purgatory Canto VI
In the University of California Lectura Dantis, Purgatorio ( a canto-by-canto commentary, and one I should read more thorougly), Maria Picchio Simonelli points out that the 6th canton in all three cantiche is political. Canto VI in the Inferno, the circle of the Gluttons, was mainly about partisan politics, Guelphs and Ghibbelines. This canto is the introduction to the negligent princes, with Sordello as guide.
Before we get in Canto VII to the princes who neglected their souls to be about their business we read here some of Dante's most famous denunciations of Italy - and he even calls her Italia (VI.76), rather than the land of the Latins (see Inferno XIX) or some such.
Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello
nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,
non donna di provincie, ma bordello!
Ah Italy, you slave, you inn of grief,
you ship without a pilot in the storm,
no lady of the shire, you house for whores! (VI.76-78
Dante plays again and again the contrast between localism and nationalism - the love for non-existant Italy and the love of City. Here in Purgatorio VI, Sordello, a man who lived in France, wrote poetry in Provencal, and retired to the Abruzzi, goes all gushy over his fellow Mantuan, Virgil. Dante is not portraying that as an entirely positive reaction.
Now here's something about which I'm sure I could find more discussion. Dante and Virgil consider (VI.25-VI.48) the inefficacy of prayer to the Olympian deities (based on a quotation from the Aeneid about the uselessness of praying for Palinurus). Esolen talks about that as a misalignment of ends -- the prayer is directed to the wrong deities, but when it seemed to be answered it was because it happened to correspond to God's will. Virgil evades the question (a little) by saying that Beatrice will clear all this up, and Dante rises to the bait of Beatrice.
Then 100 lines later, in what is at least an ironic usage and at best a weird classicism, Dante prays:
And if you will allow me, highest Jove,
you who on earth were crucified for us,
have your just eyes turned elsewhere? Or is this
The preface to some benefit you've planned
in the abyss of providence, cut off
from our capacity to understand? (VI.118-123)
Because if those 2 tercets aren't about the mystery of unanswered prayer and the inscrutability of theodicy I'm not sure what they're about -- and they're addressed to Giove. Neither Esolen nor Simonelli help at all. Oh - the mystery Dante's talking about is still why Italy is such a bordello.
So much to learn!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:19 PM
August 29, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto V
Purgatory Canto V
Some people have a better excuse for being late-repenters -- and so they're further up the slope: the people who repented at the last moment because they died by violence. They're engaged in the 2nd example of psalm-singing, the Miserere (Psalm 51, Vulgate 50), "Have mercy on me, O God, according to they mercy; according to the multitude of thy kindnesses blot out my iniquity," but the chant changes when they see that Dante casts a shadow.
mutar lor canto in un "oh!" lungo e roco;
they changed their song to one long speechless "Oh!" (V.27)
Listen to all the Os in the Italian! They may have delayed their earlier repentence, but they rush over to the pilgrims with three similes!
. . . No shooting stars
have I seen slash the calm and starlit eve,
nor shafts of sunset split the August clouds,
As quickly as I saw those spirits run
and with the others turn their eyes our way--
like horsemen charging on without the rein. (V.37-42)
Their re-formation is well underway.
One of the three who speak is the son of someone in Hell - Bonconte da Montefeltro, son of Guido da Montefeltro (Inferno XXVII). Where Guido made an outward conversion, even becoming a Franciscan, Bonconte died on the field of battle, and fighting against Florence. Once again, Dante rises above his own loyalties.
Here's an even stronger example of speaking to the 14th Century audience than I wondered about in Canto III -- and took some nerve on Dante's part. Bonconte says that his wife and other relatives aren't bothering to pray for him (V.89). Bonconte is about Dante's age -- Esolen suggests that Dante was present at the battle when Bonconte died -- we might suppose that the widow was still alive when Dante was writing. Did he know something about her life? Had she happily remarried? Had she failed to have masses said - and was this public knowledge? It's really a pretty stiff charge!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:19 PM
August 27, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatorio Canto IV
Purgatory Canto IV
I guess Canto IV is the kind of passage that makes people say "Purgatorio is dull."
Dante and Virgil have a couple of long conversations about the location of Purgatory (directly opposite Jerusalem) and astronomy (the sun rises to the moves from NORTHeast to northwest in the Southern Hemisphere) Dante is demonstrating his mastery of medieval science - and doing it all in poetry.
Dante doesn't notice the latter until the pilgrims sit down for a rest, having scaled the steep slope from the beach towards (but not to, yet) the Gate. While they're sitting down and speculating about the sun rising over the left shoulder they notice some souls resting in the shade - the laggards, those who put off their repentance until the end. Again, like the excommunicate, Dante has them wait as many years as they delayed; these two are good examples of what scholars see as the rising habit of numeration in the Middle Ages.
I can't say the canto gripped me, either!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:02 AM
August 26, 2010
Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto III
Purgatory Canto III
The first tercet of Canto III ends with an excellent 4-word statement of the method of Purgatory: it is the place ove ragion ne fruga, "where reason winnows us" (III.3). If Hell is a place where the souls have rejected and still reject Divine Reason, Purgatory is the place where the souls learn to increasingly conform themselves to that pattern. Dante has just compared the scattering souls at the end of Canto II to pigeons scattered from a wheat field, so the verb frugare, "winnow," is especially pointed.
The souls the pilgrims first met in Hell were the indecisive, who were condemned to perpetually chasing a flag as fast as they could fly. The first established group of souls Dante meets here are moving slowly, deliberately. They are "a happy flock" (III.86), the excommunicate.
Dante meets Manfred, King of Sicily. His father Frederick was in the circle of the heretics and his aunt Constance will show up in Paradise -- our first example of this sort of family division. Manfred explains the technical effect of excommunication. Excommunication doesn't damn a soul to Hell -- popes can't do that, souls damn themselves or not -- but for every year he lived excommunicate he has to wait here on this beach before starting to climb the mountain.
However, that time can be shortened by the prayers of the living -- and we see here for the first time a shift in Dante's relation to the dead souls. While in the Inferno he or Virgil offered fame in exchange for conversation or help (e.g., Antaeus), here the souls will ask or Dante will offer to carry word to their survivors. Manfred asks:
See now if you can bring me happiness,
revealing to my daughter the good Constance
the law that binds me here. For we can gain
Much profit from what prayers on earth obtain.
I wonder about the 14th Century! How many early readers of Dante came across the name of a relative or friend in Purgatory and offered up a prayer? Surely some!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 11:35 AM
August 25, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatory Canto II
Purgatory Canto II
Canto II begins with much astronomy, situating Mount Purgatory for the informed medieval reader -- all of whom believed, of course, in a spherical world hanging at the center of the cosmos. Jerusalem was at the center of the inhabitable land mass and directly antipodeal to Mount Purgatory. The Pillars of Hercules were 90 degrees west of Jerusalem and the mouth of the Ganges 90 degrees east (neat, if inaccurate). No one who survives this course will ever believe in the Flat Earth Theory, concocted in the 19th century.
Across the waters of Ocean Dante sees the angelic opposite of Charon bringing souls to Mount Purgatory. Esolen has a graceful little note: The details of this scene echo and, as it were, correct those of the crossing of Acheron Inf 3.82-120)--boat, waters, pilot, speed, instruments, attitude of passengers." I like that "correct" - a good word for Purgatory.
Most importantly for readers and interpreters of Dante, the souls are singing the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, "When from the land of Egypt Israel came." This is the very verse Dante explicated for Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona, in the letter dedicating the Paradiso to him. Dante lays out four levels of polysemous meaning for the Big Dog: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
So in the first 50 lines of the Canto we're going to get to discuss medieval cosmology and medieval hermeneutics. Does it get better than that?
Here's the letter, in Latin and English.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:09 AM
August 24, 2010
Danteblogging - Purgatory Canto I
Purgatory Canto I
I rush on with the pilgrims to the mountain of Purgatory.
My little ship of ingenuity
now hoists her sails to speed through better waters,
leaving behind so pitiless a sea
The commonplace is that everyone finds Hell more interesting than the other two realms. We'll see how Romantic our students are.
Dante begins the canticle with an invocation of the Muses, but the strangest, most backhanded invocation of classical precedent I can think of -- he calls on Calliope to sing this canticle of pardon while reminding her that she is merciless.
Here rise to life again, dead poetry!
Let it, O holy Muses, for I am yours,
and here, Calliope, strike a higher key,
Accompanying my song with that sweet air
which made the wretched Magpies feel a blow
that turned all hope of pardon to despair.
(Purg 1.7-12)
Esolen's note reminds us that Virgil addressed Calliope and that Ovid told us the story (Metamorphoses 6.294-340, 662-78). Some foolish humans engaged in a singing match with the muse. She won, of course, and to remind them of their presumption turned them into magpies. No one ever came out ahead in those challenges to the Olympian gods - Arachne, Marsyas, these girls - and no mercy was shown, no chance of forgiveness. Dante is subtle here, reminding us that however much he loved those old poets, he did not love their gods.
The first soul they meet, the guardian of the beach of Mt Purgatory, is a puzzler - Marcus Porcius Cato - pagan, anti-Caesarian, and suicide. At best you'd think we was with the virtuous pagans in Limbo, at worst getting chewed by Satan, and most logically in the wood of the suicides. But here he is!
Esolen's note helps a lot.
The explanation lies in Cato's motive and in the meaning of Purgatory. Dante insisted (De monarchia 2.5) that Cato's death was an act of devotion to freedom, a self-sacrifiing witness to its pricelessness. It was an act, althought Cato himself was not aware of it at the time, in imitation of Chrsti, who died that all men might be free. Dante could claim impressive precedent from the poet Lucan, whose Cato, after decrying the injustice of the Roman gods in leading the nation into civil war, seems to wish to do what those gods would not exclaiming: "Would it were possible for me to lay my head down, condemned by the gods of Heaven and Hell, and take upon myself all punishments!" (Pharsalia 2.306-7). "Let my blood redeem the nations" (2.312), he cries, longing not to enjoy freedom himself but to restore freedom to others. And freedom--the liberation of will from sin--is the aim of Purgatory. ( (Purgatory, 412)
There were some astronomical moments in the Inferno, but they become more frequent in Purgatory -- here we see the the Southern Cross in the sky. I've got to look up how much of that was fancy and how much based on reports from sailors.
In Hell Dante and Virgil sometimes bargained with the damned - they wanted information and they offered fame through Dante's poetry in return. In Purgatory they will offer or the souls will request that news be taken to their loved ones so that prayers can be said for them. The first attempt to carry news falls flat, though -- Virgil offers to carry news to Martia, Cato's wife, who is in the Limbo of Virtuous Pagans. Cato refuses the favor. He remembers their love, but tells the pilgrims that now they are divided by the river Acheron, "più muover non mi può," "she can no longer move me, now nor ever" (Purg 1.90).
Hard divisions.
One of the first moments where I will be telling students to flip back to the Inferno to compare and contrast is the reed-pulling scene. Cato tells Virgil to wash Dante's face and belt him with a reed from the shore. They do so, and just at the end of canto 1 Dante sees:
Oh wonder to behold! Where he had torn
the lowly reed he'd chosen, suddenly
A reed exactly like it was reborn
Contrast that with the gruesome twig-plucking in the forest of the Suicides in Inferno XIII. When Dante breaks off a twig it begins to gush blood and talk. There's lots of violence and no rebirth in that canto. Things will be different in Purgatory.
I'm going to note again I think it was an odd editorial decision (not one I think Esolen made) to call the first canticle Interno, but to call the next two Purgatory and Paradise. Perhaps market research proves that "Dante's Inferno" is a recognizeable English phrase? I would prefer all three in English or all three in Italian, but that's me.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:33 AM
August 23, 2010
Danteblogging - Inferno Canto XXXIV
Inferno Canto XXXIV - the last canto
The pilgrimage takes 100 cantos -- and thus the Inferno is one canto longer than the other two canticles. The structure doesn't fall as neatly as 1 introductory canto and 33 in Hell - Dante and Virgil get to the gates of Hell at the start of Canto III.
Here in XXXIV we have the end of the descent into Hell and the beginning of the climb to Paradise - the pilgrims pass the center of the cosmos. But first they must past Satan's faces. What Dante sees from a distance are the turning arms of a giant windmill - the sails that are eventually revealed to be the fruitlessly beating wings of Satan, imprisoned in the ice. Again, language fails Dante when he neither dies nor lives as he see "The emperor of the reign of misery" (34.28). But he goes on - and language ceases to fail. Begins to work? And he describes the ludicrous parody of the Trinity that Satan has become - a three-headed monster chewing three of the worst sinners, traitors against their benefactors.
Once again I'm left a little puzzled -- Judas, sure. Brutus, sure, given the way Dante feels about Caesar and the Roman Empire. Cassius, fine, ditto.
But couldn't Dante have thought of a third traitor that belongs in the mouth of Satan? Imagination is failing me at the moment, but perhaps it is part of the relentlessly Mediterranean world-view that Dante can't think of anyone better than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar.
After all this long journey the end comes remarkably quickly. Virgil says
But night is rising, and it's time to leave,
for Hell has nothing more for us to see. (34.68-9)
Then Dante climbs on Virgil's back and Virgil begins to mountaineer down Satan's hairy flanks into a crevasse. At a certain point they reverse and begin to climb up the legs. It was the center of the spherical cosmos -- Satan had fallen from heaven and stuck like a dart in the center of the world, "...the point/toward which all weight from every side is drawn" (34.110-1). The heart of the material universe, of matter, is Satan's selfishness.
The Inferno began with a middle aged man lost in a dark forest; it ends on another note.
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And we came out to see, once more, the stars. (34.139)
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:34 PM
Danteblogging - Inferno Canto XXXIII
Inferno Canto XXXIII
I first tried to read the Divine Comedy all the way through when I was in 11th grade - I think in the John Ciardi translation, which my high school library had just bought in hardback. I can't say I did a very good job, but at least I'd already read big chunks of the Aeneid in Latin, so I was better prepared than some people. I still remember the creeps Canto XXXIII gave me - the story of the cannibalistic Count Ugolino.
Ugolino betrayed his city, Pisa, but was in turn betrayed by his bishop. They're locked together in the ice of Antenora, Ugolino chewing on the bishop's brain in a very Dawn of the Dead image. Except that Ugolino raises his gorey chops and tells Dante why he's chewing the bishop's skull - he and his offspring were nailed into a tower in Pisa (I've seen what purports to be the tower!). The boys died one by one of hunger. Dante leaves the conclusion a little ambiguous, but I assumed at 17 that Ugolino ate them - as he is now eating the bishop. Ugh! Dantesque, and in the bad way.
Ugolino perceives that Dante is a Florentine by the sound of speech, and by the failure of speech in the tower he is turned into a monster, a stone. Dante damns the Pisans with a linguistic touch, too:
Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti
del bel paese là dove 'l sì suona,
Ah Pisa, vile disgrace of all the folk
in the sweet land where sì is uttered (33, 79-80)
The land of Sì - not a polity, but a shared vernacular.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:04 PM
August 13, 2010
Dante blogging Canto XXXII
Canto XXXII
Antaeus lowered Dante and Virgil to the frozen river of Cocytus and the region of the traitors. They move in tis canto through Caina, where those who betrayed family are punished (Cain, first fratricide), to Antenora, where traitors to their country suffer (Antenor, a bad Trojan prince).
The damned souls are mainly topical Tuscans and not of much interest to me -- but the poetry and the poet's increasing recognition of his power are.
The canto starts and ends with sound effects that remind us that this is not only a poem on the page -- oral performance is very important. I'm doing this on the iPad so my formatting may not be as nice as usual, but I'll try.
S'io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,
Come si converrebe al tristo buco
Sovra 'l qual
Oh I'll go back and put in the Italian in a bit...word completion is driving me nuts!
Dante starts by talking about his inability as a poet to make the "bitter and crack-throated rhymes" he would need for this lowest part of Hell--not with the tongue that says mama and daddy in Tuscan! The canto ends with his promise to Ugolino to tell his story: "I will/ make you a good trade in the world above,/unless my tongue should wither to the root."
That's a canto about tongues -- inadequacy of language, mother dialect, and the poet's art as currency! Things are getting thick here at the end of Hell. In between we have lots of vile activity, with Ugolino the vilest. But I will pass over that for now because his story is really told in XXXIII.
The idea that Dante has something to offer the Damned has come up before, but it shows up repeatedly in this canto. Here at the end of the canticle Dante is feeling his power as a poet, even if he's denying his ability to write that kind of rhyme. He will make the same off in Purgatory, but there he thinks his poem will stimulate prayers for the souls. The Damned have no such motive, only reknown -- that very pagan form if the afterlife. Even that doesn't interest one if his interlocutors, Bocca (c. Lines 76-115). If. Dante revealed that he's in Hell everyone will finally be sure that he WAS guilty of the betrayal of the Guelphs for which he was exiled from Florence. Dante doesn't oblige and we all still know.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:37 PM
August 9, 2010
Danteblogging - Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI
Canto XXXI is a transition canto between the last of the Malebolge and the bottom of Hell, where the traitors are punished. The mechanism here is again the cooperation of a monster. In Canto XVII the pilgrims rode flying Geryon. Here Virgil talks Antaeus, giant opponent of Hercules, into lifting them down the cliffs between the last of the Malebolge and frozen Cocytus. He does it with an interesting offer - Dante, who is living, can offer Antaeus a morsel more of recognition:
Don't make us seek Typhon or Tityus.
This man can give you what you long for here,
so bend and do not turn your face askew,
For in the world he can still bring you fame.
The sin of the giants is to have tried to replace the gods - or to have rivaled God, in the case of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, builder of the Tower of Babel. Antaeus complies, silently.
Dante compares the giants to city towers - most specifically to the Garisenda tower in Bologna (one of Bologna's twin towers) and to the watch towers circling a fortress at Montereggioni (near Siena). The 16th C illustration I uploaded certainly picks up on the latter.
Image from Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary - I think I found it at Wikimedia, though I've downloaded a number of versions this summer to turn into presentations in the fall.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:16 AM
July 28, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXX
Canto XXX
The thirtieth canto begins with 20 lines of epic simile - Dante showing off his myth - wrapping up with:
But none so fury-ridden in Thebes or Troy
had ever lunged with such ferocity
to bite at beasts or even rip men's limbs
As I saw two souls, naked, pale as death,
tearing away and snapping as they ran,
like the tusked swine who's set loose from the sty.
You see, those classical examples of despair were at least still human - these souls are like swine - and one of them WAS at the Trojan War - Sinon, who lied to the Trojans about the Greeks having left.
I'm not sure why Esolen thinks Master Adam the counterfeiter was English (note, 480), but I'm going to have to check. My colleague is under the impression that the only English person in the Commedia is Bede, who shows up in Paradiso (of course!). I'll have to check the commentary tradition, because the text gives no help.
This canto gives one of those regular hints that Dante sat at his desk with a diagram of cosmos pinned to the wall - one of the damned souls reports the dimensions of the 10th Malebolge: "...it's eleven miles around the ditch / and not less than half a mile across" (30.86-87). The tradition of making plans of Hell goes back to the maker, in other words. One of the reasons I chose the Esolen translation is that he doesn't include maps. The students will have to make their own!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXIX
Canto XXIX
Before the Pilgrims move on to the Tenth Whatever of the Malebolge (Pocket? Pouch? Ditch? Translations differ.) there is a brief glimpse of Italian family life inside the city - Dante has spotted one of his relatives among the schismatics and feels a pang of regret. As Esolen puts it in his note: "The spirit here is Geri del Bello, Dante's cousin, about whose discord-sowing and death we know little except that he provided occasion for decades of strife between the Alighieri family and the Sacchetti" (478). Dante is not immune to the code of violence.
We then pass to the Ditch of the Fraudulent - every kind of con man, including alchemists.
I spotted an oddity of the translation here - when Vergil addresses the souls looking for someone to talk to, he asks
dinne s'aclun Latine è tra costoro
che son quinc' entro...
And Esolen gives us
Tell us if an Italian in this ditch
is to be found ... (29, 88-89)
I flipped back into Canto XXVIII and found the same thing at line 71. I hadn't noticed that before. Hmm. Talk about making Italy into a locution rather than a location - even Dante uses something else.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:19 AM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXVIII
Canto XXVIII
Dante has a broad vision of schism - the schismatics have divided religion, cities, and families - but all are punished by being divided, split into parts. As they pass around their track they heal, only to be split again.
The pilgrims' first interlocutor is Muhammad. Some medieval versions of the history of Islam counted Muhammad as a disappointed bishop or cardinal who went off and started his own religion - and, in fact, historians of early Islam still argue to what extent Muhammad did know Christians and Jews first hand in Mecca. It's clear he had some contact, but accounts differ. Dante has him split almost in half, gruesomely.
There was a long tradition of depicting Muhammad in Hell - there is a particularly fine version in San Petronio in Bolgna which was threatened by al-Qaida in 2002. Here's a link to an archive of images of Muhammad - you have to scroll a long way down to find it, but it's worthwhile.
Some scholars like to see the Night Journey of Muhammad, in which he saw the torments of the damned and the pleasures of heaven, as a source for Dante's journey. That's possible, but unnecessary - there is a tradition that goes back to patristic times of narratives of just such journeys, including Purgatory. I'll have to figure this out though before Fall, because the colleague with whom I will be team-teaching loves any sort of Islamic source. That comes from having lived in Spain too long, I think. I wonder if the Miraj, the legend of the Night Journey, had been translated, and if not how Dante is supposed to have known about it.
There's a connection in this Canto to The Name of the Rose - Muhammad sends a message to Fra Dolcino that he should get in supplies. The fallout from the Dolcinists, a radical poverty movement that turned into a civil war at the turn of the 14th century in Italy, is a motivating factor behind a lot of the plot and a number of the characters in Eco's novel.
Then after a number of relatively obscure civil-dividers the last interlocutor is the man who provided Doré with the subject for the illustration here - Bertran de Born, Provencal poet and encourager to civil war.
Clearly I saw, and the sight still comes back,
a trunk without a head come walking on
just like the others of that sullen pack,
That held the chopped-off head by the long hanks,
hanging like a lantern from his hand,
and the head gaped at us and said, Ah, me!"
He made himself a lamp unto himself
and they were two in one and one in two.
How that can be, He nows Who steers the helm.
Dante, who has mentioned lots of poets' work, never mentions that Bertran de Born is a poet - even though Dante was very interested in the methods of the Provencal poets. Odd, that.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 12:05 PM
July 23, 2010
Dante Blogging - Canto XXVII
Yes, it's been awhile. But I''m back to it!
Canto XXVII
The last canto began with an apostrophe to Florence - XXVII lists the cities of the Romagna, which "is not and has never been / free of war within her tyrants' hearts..." (37-38). True to his naming the Romagna a region of tyrants, Dante gives a long list of heraldic symbols.
The sinner Dante talks with in this canto is Guido da Montefeltro, a famous leader of the Ghibbelines who, in his old age, became a Franciscan and an occasional advisor to Pope Boniface VIII. Dante sees the last as a sign of a false renunciation of the world - anyone who was a friend of Caetani could not have been a true friar.
Boniface would reign as pope until 1303, so in the cosmos of the Commedia he is still alive. Dante can damn him only through the words of others, like Guido - who wishes him in Hell. Guido says that Boniface asked him for advice on how to destroy the Colonna family - and that when he hesitated offered him absolution in advance for the sin.
When Guido came to die - and he managed to do that in Assisi itself - St Francis came for him, but was beaten out by a logic-chopping devil. The devil says:
One who does not repent can't be absolved,
nor can a man repent and will at once
the law of contradiction rules it out.'
Ah sorrow! when I woke to my position
and heard him say as he grabbed hold, "Perhaps
you hadn't thought that I was a logician.'
Of course Hell observes the Law of Noncontradiction.
This death-bed scene is a great medieval topos - I've written about it before here, and provided a link to Bosch's Death and the Miser.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:07 AM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2010
Vacation Bible School - the Apocalypse!
PassiveAgressiveNotes.com has the story. Given my last couple of weeks I think the lad has the right idea -- Dooooooooom!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:20 PM
March 13, 2010
Italy agrees to digitize a bunch of books
via Cronaca.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM
November 13, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI
Canto XXVI begins with an apostrophe to decadent Florence and ends with the punishment of evil counsellors - so Florence's woes are place between the thieves and those who give bad advice, which seems fitting. The first tercet is splendidly horrible, with a reversal in the last line from fame to infamy:
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali
e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!
Florence, rejoice! You fame's so great to tell you beat your wings over the land and seas
and spread your name throughout the deeps of Hell! (26.1-3)
Poor Florence! Poor Dante! For me, who am no Florentiaphile,* the Tuscan politics gets tiresome sometimes. Who cares what stereotype Dante had (or assigns) to Pistoia, and whether it was fair or not? But the man's love of his place, his city, is clear - and I can respect a particularist even if I find his particular love annoying.
The pilgrims move on to the 8th pouch, where evil counselors are tormented in flame. Dante sees them first from the hill above, and compares the moment to a peasant seeing fireflies filling a valley below in summertime.
When they draw closer Dante communicates with only one soul - Ulysses. Virgil speaks for him - telling Dante that Ulysses might scorn his (Tuscan) tongue, because he is a Greek (yet another annoying particularity). Virgil asks Ulysses where he died - and why he is here.
Ulysses tells a tale of searching for knowledge and experience unbounded by God's will. After returning home to Ithaca, he took a boat-load of men and sailed out of the Mediterranean and south in search of the Antipodes, where finally his ship wrecked and all were lost.
The sin? Trying to reach Mount Purgatory without dying - this, from a man who went to the Underworld and back in the Odyssey and narrated by a man who will visit Heaven itself. The difference is that Dante is doing his journeying at God's will, and Ulysses wanted to find out for himself.
What is really amazing, though, is that this story is Dante's - it does not depend on the body of mythology. Dante made it up. That is poetic boldness, the poet's mastery of his subject, when he can rival Homer and make up a new end for Odysseus!
*One of the many things that makes me happy about these Colleges is that our Italian program is based in Rome rather than Florence. Here's this year's program.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:37 AM
November 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXV
Canto XXV
In Canto XXV Dante stretches his powers of surreal description to rival Lucan and Ovid - and he challenges the two classical poets quite specifically. We are still in the Malebolgia of the Thieves, where snakes torment sinners. Dante sees three souls transformed, transmuted, metamorphosized from their human - if naked and degraded - appearance - into something other.
Be silent, Lucan, where you touch upon
wretched Sabellus and Nasidius,
and listen to the arrow I shoot now.
Be silent, Ovid, with your Arethusa
and Cadmus, where your poem turns
this to a serpent, that one to a spring;
I hold no grudge, for never front to front
did you transmute two natures so their forms
were ready to change matter with each other. (25.94-102)
Dante's damned souls are bitten, and through the bite merge and transform into something other in a terrifying way. Esolen speculates that this transmutation is appropriate "for sinners who never respected what is proper to (what is the property of) the indivdiual or family. Now their own boundaries blur in a hideous defacing of the body: a false union, an "improperty," so to speak" (468).
The direct challenge to the auctoritates Lucan and Ovid strikes me as Dante here, three-quarters of his way through Hell, feeling his mastery over his tools. He can deploy language, description, and allusion with the best of them now. Well, with the best save Virgil. Is the anxiety of influence is full-blown, though, when he names them? I'm not certain about that.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
October 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIV
Canto XXIV
Again, this canto starts with contrast - the last pocket was full of the deadly tired hypocrites, laboring under their lead cloaks. Dante himself is tired, and Virgil tells him:
..."You must
shake off your sluggisness," the Teacher said,
"for no one comes to fame who sits in soft
pillows of down, or lies easily in bed,
And when his life is wasted utterly
he leaves such traces of himself behind
as smoke in air or foam upon the sea. (24.46-51)
Virgil is preparing Dante not only to get through the Malebolge, but also "to climb a longer stair" (24.56), the mountain of Purgatory.
Dante gets busy and they climb out of the region of the hypocrites into the region of the thieves - a giant clutch of snakes. Ugh. Snakes. It really does sound like a moment in an Indiana Jones movie - snakes knotted around sinners in horrific detail. Certainly one of the punishments I'd rather not picture.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXIII
Canto XXIII
After all the noise of squabbling devils in Canti XXI and XXII, XXIII begins with silence.
Taciti, soli, sanza compagnia
n'andavam l'un dinanzi e l'altro dopo
come frati minor vanno per via.
Silent, alone, no escort at our side,
we set out, one before and one behind
as Friars Minor walk in single file. (23.1-3)
The silence doesn't last long, and the pilgrims end up fleeing devils coming back for more. Virgil grabs Dante and runs with him - and they tumble into the 6th ditch. There they find the hypocrites, walking slowly, wearing beautiful golden cloaks whose inside is all lead.
Dante runs into two Bolognese friars who recognize his Tuscan dialect. Tedious Guelphage and Ghibellinage passes. Esolen seems more tolerant - "Note how severely Dante condemns those who meddled in political affairs, even when the meddling benefited Dante's own party" (464). Maybe it's because my coffee hasn't set in yet, but I figure Dante's faction inside the Guelphs didn't come out so well in the 1266 settlement of the 36 Good Men. Nevertheless, as Esolen points out in another note, all the named occupants of the Ditch of the Hypocrites are clergy in one way or another.
Just as Dante is about to abuse the friars he catches sight of a man crucified to the path where all the lead-weighed souls pass over him - and one of the two friars reveal that his father-in-law and the whole council of which they were a part suffer the same punishment.
"That soul you wonder at, who lies transfixed,
advised the Pharisees that it was fit
to martyr one man for the people's sake. (23.115-117)
This is Caiphas, who Esolen points out did not call directly for the death of Jesus, since that is not how hypocrites operate. "Yet thought hypocrites usually intend more than they will say, in this case Caiphas spoke more than he intended, and was the victim of his own irony. For Jesus was slain for the people, but not as the priest supposed..." (464).
Dante, as a medieval Christian, has no doubt about Jewish blood guilt for the crucifixion. He identifies that guilt as sown by these men - but he does not pardon it. One of the sad truths of the world is that great art does not heal. It can help, but Dante, the poet of individual responsibility, who finds people in Hell who no one else thought might be there and will find folks in Purgatory who repented great wickedness still believes in inherited group guilt for the Jews.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXII
Canto XXII
Dante continues his devil-farce in Canto XXII. I'll certainly have to come back to this and compare it to some of the devil-play in French farces, which I've spent some time thinking about in public. Certainly, Dante is closer in these two canti, with their sinners bobbing in boiling pitch, poked by demons, to modern popular conceptions of Hell.
The humor here is pretty broad - but the conclusion is actually funny - the devils begin fighting among themselves and fall in - and get stuck together with the tar. We could take this as a serious lesson about how there is no honor among thieves or mutual respect among devils, and that's true, but it misses the point, I think.
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(oh - sorry for the gap - it's midterm and I've been grading)
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM
October 9, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XXI
Canto XXI
Dante begins this Canto with a lovely set of sound effects - read it out loud and see!
Così di ponte in ponte, altro parlando
che la mia comedìa cantar non cura,
venimmo; e tenavamo 'l colmo, quando
restammo per veder laltra fessura
di Malebolge e li altri pianti vani; e vidila mirabilimente oscura
And so from one bridge to the next we came,
talking of things I do not care to sing
within my Comedy, and reached the top,
And rested there to see the other crack of Evil Pouches, and their useless cries; and what we looked upon was wondrous black. (21.1-6)
Those first four lines with their P, C, and O are really something - and he's using them to describe things he will not sing to us.
The Canto ends with the opposite - a vulgar sound all done with T, C, and D.
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno;
ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
coi denti, verso lor duca, per cenno;
ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta. (21.136-139)
Then the platoon turned sharp left on the bank,
but first they'd stuck their tongues between their teeth
and blown it at their sergeant for a sign,
and he had made a bugle of his arse.
As Esolen points out, "one musical note in Hell, as it were" (461). The sergeant generating the note is a devil - one of Dante's first band of dedicated demon tormenters. This ditch is full of boiling pitch and bribe-takers; the demons circle the bubbling goo poking any grafter who sticks a body part above the surface. Their names are, as Esolen points out, very Screwtapey: Calcabrina works out to Tramplefrost, Cagnazzo becomes Larddog, Rubicante becomes Redfroth (460). I'd never thought, though, that these crazy compounds should remind us of the brigands and politicians of Dante's time. Remember that one of his great patrons (though perhaps not this early?) was Bigdog of the della Scala family, Cangrande.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:32 AM
October 5, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XX
Canto XX
The next pocket of the Malebolge contains those who predicted the future. Their punishment fits their crime very visibly - as Vergil says about one of them:
See how he's made a breast out of his back.
because he wished to see too far ahead,
now he looks back and walks a backward path.
(20.37-39)
That is, their heads are screwed around to face their backs, and they back through hell at a slow walk, weeping down their backs.
Vergil seems a little more hostile to these than even to the average damned souls. Esolen suggests that his extremely hostile narration of the founding of his own city of Mantua by Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, may be an implicit self-defense against charges of magic (458). In the Middle Ages the Aeneid, like the Bible, was used for fortune telling - in the sortes Virgilianae one picked up a copy of Vergil's poem, flipped to a random page, stabbed a line with your finger, and found your fortune. The sortes Biblicae was the same thing, but with a Bible.
The only memorable medieval person in this circle is Michael Scot, court alchemist and astrologer to Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Astrology is one of those pagan practices the Church was never able to stamp out. Yes, pagan - though there may be Christian's who have a very high mark for predestination, we have to leave room for the free will. If stars control things, there's no free will. And there astrology columns still are in newspapers.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:46 AM
October 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIX
Canto XIX
Dante begins with an epic apostrophe - but not of the muses:
O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci
che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
deon essere spose, e voi rapaci
per oro e per argento avolterate
or convien che per voi suoni la tromba,
però che ne la terza bolgia* state.
Simon Magus, O you wretched crew
of his disciples! The things of God should be
espoused to righteiousness and love, and you
Rapacious wolves, you pander them for gold,
foul them for silver! Sound the trumpet now
for you -- for this third pocket is your place.
The simonists, those who like Simon Magus want to reduce sacred authority to a cash transaction, are planted upside down in holes, with fire burning the souls of their feet. The red-hottests pair of feet turn out to be those of a recent pope, Nicholas V. Esolen cleverly points out that Nicholas had inverted the purpose of the hierarchy of which he was head, so this makes an example of Hell fitting the sin.
Nicholas mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII - he wonders if the prediction was off by a few years and Boniface is already dead and waiting to be plunge Nicholas deeper into the hot hole. Dante then leaps forward to Boniface's even worse successor, Clement V.
It is clear from all this that Dante is generally troubled by the temporal power of the Church - he takes it all the way back to the Donation of Constatine. Dante's problem is that the sources of temporal authority he wanted to like were the Empire and the Kingdom of France - neither of them very likeable, either.
Still a problem today, and no more liable to a solution other than the individual holiness of clerics and just uprightness of rulers. It could happen.
*When I was proofreading I noticed this little moment of structural orientation I had slid past before. Handy!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM
September 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVIII
Canto XVIII
Here we are right in the middle of Hell - or at least in the middle of the Inferno - the jump from XVII to XVIII is the mid-point of the 34 canti - and Dante kicks off with structure again. The first word in the canto is Luogo, "place." We can't quite capture that in English - for Luogo è in inferno we can't say "Place there is in Hell," but that's our problem. Dante is reminding us to check the chart, mental or posted on the wall. Once again, I'm a little amazed that the Esolen's translation in the Modern Library doesn't have one!
Here's a nice one, in case you're getting lost.
Dante explains the region they're starting to cross, the Malebolge, "Pouches of Evil," Esolen gives us as ringing the deep pit in the center of Hell (18.2). They will cross the trenches on little stone bridges that run like spokes.
Here we get an image of Hell right out of the popular imagination - horned devils with whips driving naked sinners. Dante compares the streams - some going in one direction, some the other - to pilgrims during the Jubilee crossing the Ponte San Angelo in Rome, half headed to St Peter's on the south bank of the Tiber and half leaving.
Dante, of course, disapproved of the great Jubilee of 1300 because he hated the pope who called it, Boniface VIII. If you want to get a really good idea of what Boniface was up to without half the sarcasm of Dante, you ought to read Kessler and Zacharias'
Dante loathed Boniface, and is going to prepare a place for him in the next Pouch.
This Pouch, though, is for pimps, seducers, and flatterers - with a whore as the archetypical flatterer. I'm amused that his example of a serial seducer is Jason, as in the Argonauts. No offense to any Jasons out there, but I always wonder what parents are thinking who name their child after such an unpleasant classical figure as that one.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:14 AM
September 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVII
Canto XVII
Virgil threw Dante's belt over the edge in Canto XVI to summon a beast to ride down the cliffs. When Geryon arrives he is horrifying - a "likeness of deceit" (17.7). He is, after all, their ride from the circles of the violent to the circles of the fraudulent.
The mythological Geryon that Hercules killed had 3 bodies. Dante's version is a composite - kindly old man's face on a serpent's body with a lion's legs and a scorpion's sting - and he smells. But that's who they are going to ride.
Virgil sends Dante to look at the last of the 3 categories of the Violent against God, the Usurers, while he explains to Geryon that one of the passengers will have human weight. Dante wanders over to where the usurers squat, brushing fire-flakes off their skin. Dante can make nothing of their features, but they each wear a money bag around their necks with their coats of arms (Esolen points out they were not driven to usury by poverty, but by greed).
Though Dante recognizes two Florentine coats of arms, the damned soul that speaks is a Scrovegni of Padua. Esolen doesn't tell us, but every art historian can, that this is Reginaldo degli Scrovegni, whose son Enrico commissioned Giotto to paint the Arena or Scrovegni Chapel, partly in expiation for his father's sins and partly for his own.
The picture here is the Last Judgement from the chapel's west wall. Giotto may have heralded the Renaissance, but there's nothing not right out of Medieval Last Judgements here - Christ is enthroned above, surrounded by a rainbow. He is flanked by the 12 Apostles and choirs of angels. Below to His right are the saved, queuing up in orderly fashion to approach the Throne. Fire pours out of the left side of Christ's mandorla and streams down to Hell, where sinners are tormented.
At the foot of the cross a kneeling man presents a model of the chapel, carried by a kneeling Dominican friar, to a group of saints who will convey it to Christ. That's Enrico Scrovegni.
Dante could perhaps have seen the chapel, even - it was completed around 1305 in Padua, a city he seems to have visited. Think I'll be showing it in class? You bet!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:08 AM
September 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XVI
Canto XVI
Dante shows the same reticence in Canto XVI about the sin and the same courteous interest in the sinners - three Florentines run up and find a different way to evade the 'no stopping' rule - they form a circle around the 2 pilgrims and keep moving - "as naked champions, muscles slicked with oil" (16.22). Again, I think we should remember the crowd at this level and wonder about the simile.
The four Florentines leave Virgil out of the conversation as they discuss the decline of their city. Ser Brunetto had blamed it on rustics moving in from Fiesole. Here, Dante blames the new-rich.
There is some odd by-play with Dante's belt - Virgil takes it and throws it over the edge of a cliff to summon the monster Geryon, on whom they will ride down to the 8th Circle. Esolen reminds us that though the belt is ambiguous, Dante won't have another one until Virgil makes him a new belt from a rush at the foot of Mount Purgatory. Belts obviously have something to do with restraint or constraint, but it's not clear quite what.
Most noticeable in the canto is Dante's naming the work! We're almost halfway through the 34 canti of Hell, and here Dante addresses the reader:
ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note
di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro,
s'elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte
. . . but I cannot
keep silent here, and, Reader, by the notes
of this my Comedy, I swear - and may
They keep in favor long(16.127-130)
So - a comedy. Remember, comedy is what ends happily and is probably low and vulgar (or so Aristotle). Dante is certainly going to end happily, and he's writing in the volgare. That's enough for the name. The attribute divina shows up quite soon after his death - and the favor has lasted more than 700 years.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:52 AM | Comments (1)
September 15, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XV
Canto XV
Canto XV begins on the same structural note with which XIV ended - Dante observes the diking system of Hell - ingeniously made, like those which the Flemings make. It interests me that he uses such a foreign example first, then mentions the Paduans. He certainly would have been to Padua sometime - it would have been easy to get to Ravenna that way - but he never traveled in the North. I suppose Dutch dikes were already a byword. Lots of Florentines would have been to Bruges, of course.
The dike system provides a setting - Dante and Virgil are walking along the top at a higher level than the sinners racing below (remember, the blasphemers lie supine, the usurers squat, and the sodomites run).
When following the dike we met a band
of spirits coming toward us, and each one
stared at us hard as one is wont to stare
As someone in the dark of the new moon,
knitting their brows to keep us keen in sight
as an old tailor threads the needle's eye. (15.16-21)
Esolen notes this simile a little oddly: "The images in this tercet derive from common experience in town life and thus prepare us to meet one of Dante's townsmen and to hear from him a harsh appraisal of that town" (445). I certainly get the everyday life aspect, but why would that make us think of Florence rather than everyday life?
Oh well - more pertinently, I think these two tercets are doing something else - and stand in contrast to Dante's action just below, when "even the charred features could not keep / My intellect from recognizing them" (27-8). Dante's use of vision corresponds to something we've seen over and over again - the reference to Aristotelian science and the Thomist appreciation of what goes wrong in sin - that sinners have failed in their intellect as well as in their flesh.
Contrariwise, the hard stare of the sinners is not the intellect-laden gaze, but cruising. Remember, the sinners in Dante's Hell have never given up their sin - that's why they're there. People who gave up their sins are elsewhere - Purgatory and Heaven. Sinners who chose lust first and then chose God show up in Purgatory XXVI - sodomites explicitly among them.*
So it should be no surprise that a band of souls suffering for having spent time cruising under the new moon are still at it.
Dante greets the soul whose charred features he sees through with the polite pronoun and a title - only the second time in Hell Dante uses voi. Dante makes clear his respect for ser Brunetto as a mentor, "la cara e buona imagine paterna" (15.83).
The actual sin doesn't get discussed in this canto - and Brunetto doesn't even want to name many of his fellow sinners, and only describes the sin as "the same fall."
Know, in a word, that they were scholars all,
great men of letters, clerks of wide renown,
made filthy in the world by the same fall.
In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci
e litterati grandi e di gran fama
d'n peccato medesmo al mondo lerci.
Listen to those sharp, bright clicks in the Italian! -pi, -ti, -ci, -di
So, without ever going into detail, ser Brunetto runs away - and Dante favors him with a last simile. He runs like someone in a race, "and of those he seemed / The one who wins, and not the one who loses" (15.123-4).
*Yes, yes, I know that some modern commentators on Scripture suggest, for good reasons involving things like references to Sodom in other parts of the Old Testament, other sins for the condemnation of Sodom, like violating host/guest relations or uncharitableness - but Dante had no question what counted as sodomy, and its his poem.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIV
Canto XIV
Canto XIV brings us to the 3rd round of the 7th circle, the worst of the violent, the Violent against God. Dante divides them into three groups. This Canto concentrates on blasphemers, while the other two groups, sodomites and usurers, take up the next 3 canti.
Nevertheless, the schema for punishment across all 4 canti occurs here:
Some lay flat on their backs upon the ground,
and some were sitting huddled at the knees,
and others roved about continually
The greatest number were of those who ran;
the least, who took their tortures lying down--
but their tongues were the freest in their cries.
Esolen points out that the ones who are the worst are treated first - the blasphemers against God (and the gods?). Their punishment is to lie flat on their backs, where all they can do is writhe under the falling fire. The usurers squat, able at least to brush off new-fallen embers. The sodomites are able to run around, dodging the fire - which falls in an especially lovely metaphor.
Sovra tutto 'l sabbion, d'un cader lento,
piovean di foco dilatate falde,
come di neve in alpe sanza vento.
Over the desert, in a gentle fall,
there rained broad flakes of fire, as in the Alps
the snow comes falling on a windless day.
(14.28-30)
Gorgeous - but painful - and the damned spend all their time brushing the "fresh flakes from their skin" (14.42).
Dante meets here one of the few classical souls tormented for sin instead of serving as a trusty under the demonic administration. (Rather few demons, per se, seem to show up in Hell.) The interlocutor in Canto XIV is Capaneus, one of the Seven Against Thebes, struck dead by Zeus with a thunderbolt forged by Vulcan, Dante parading what he's learned from Statius, not Aeschylus (thanks, Prof. Esolen! I wondered briefly if it was Ovid and then looked in the back). Statius has got to be one of the lesser-read classics; I have an undergraduate degree in the field and never picked him up. He's going to come up again later - he's a lot more important to Dante (both the poet and the narrator) than anyone but Beatrice and Virgil.
Capaneus is a good example of the impenitent - the roaring sinner who doesn't even pretend he doesn't deserve his hellfire. He is still damning Zeus - though it is God's Justice doing the punishing. His blasphemy seems to be declaring his own manhood to be his god as much of his specific denunciation of the Olympian, though.
The Canto ends with one of those odd structural moments where I wonder what Dante is up to - and realize that I have more reading to do. Dante is wondering about the source for the four rivers of Hell (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus - analogues of the four rivers of Eden). Virgil's explanation goes off to the tears of the Old Man of Ida, a giant statue on the island of Crete who seems analogous to the giant idol in the Book of Daniel - in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. I see the parallel but I don't know that I understand why it shows up here - and I wonder where it comes from. Did Dante make this up? Esolen doesn't help with the last question.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 4, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIII
I just noticed something odd about the Esolen Inferno from the Modern Library - no map! I don't think I've ever had a translation of Dante that didn't have a diagram of each place in each volume (the rings of Hell for the Inferno, the Mountain for Purgatorio, etc).
This sprang to mind because of this bit:
"Before you enter farther, you should know
that you are now within the second round,"
said my good Teacher..."
E 'l buon maestro "Prima che più entre,
sappi che se' nel secondo girone",
mi cominciò a dire...
I find it impossible to believe that Dante himself didn't have a sheet of something pinned to the wall with a diagram on it. What wouldn't we give for that! I'll have to look into the tradition of mapping Hell and figure out who did the earliest known version after Dante.
There's also a fine touch in the first two lines quoted that doesn't really come through in the translation -- the word Esolen renders as "Before," which is going to go with an "until" further down, is prima. In the next line comes secondo. Even though one of these is a time marker and the other is an ordinal, they're still "first" and "second," "before" and "after."
So in answer to a question my father asked last weekend, I'm trying to get through this once well in English, but I am looking at the Italian when something catches my eye.
Canto XIII is about the most self-absorbed of all the damned, the Suicides. Let's not indulge them by talking about them any more.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM
September 2, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XII
Canto XII
A few quick notes about thoughts Canto XII threw up -
Dante and Virgil have to climb down a rock-slide to get to the next ring. I wonder where Dante got the idea that the Harrowing of Hell - Christ's Descent into Hell Virgil described in Limbo was so violently ruinous to the physical structure of Hell? Is it an ancient topos, or something new to Dante? I really should ask my acquaintance Georgia Frank over at Colgate, who has studied early descent into Hell and purgatory. Maybe we can get her to come do a guest turn in the spring of '11 when we teach this!
Remember that fraud is something that beasts can't do? The Minotaur, of course, is the offspring of a fraudulent cow - Daedalus made a cow for Pasiphaë to crawl into so she could be impregnated by Poseidon's bull (oh, those Greeks!). The Minotaur, though, is guarding the violent, along with the centaurs. Hmm.
About the Centaurs, who are racing around the river of fire, shooting arrows at any violent man (mainly famous rulers) who rises too far out of the stream, again, half-beasts to guard the bestially violent - specifically those who were violent against others. Also on my coffee table is Machiavelli's The Prince, which will come up in November in European Studies 101, and Machiavelli makes a rather different use of centaurs in his chapter 18 - "In What Mode Faith Should be Kept by Princes."
Thus, you must know that there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. This role was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting. (The Prince, Mansfield translation, p 69)
Machiavelli and Dante both link the centaurs with rulers, one for training and one for punishment. Hm. Since one of the ways I amuse myself when I read Machiavelli is thinking of him as writing a manual for getting Lorenzo de Medici to Hell even faster than the average member of that family, noticing this helps.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:47 AM
September 1, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XI
Canto XI
Is it worth talking about Dante as a fair judge?
Dante is even-handed only in the sense that he damns a certain number of Guelphs - otherwise he's not to be trusted. I was thinking about this because I had a talk this weekend with a friend of a scene in Purgatory where someone Dante thinks was pretty bad in life scraped in because of a moment-of-death conversion (I can't find it now - it'll wait). Some of the folks in Hell don't seem to have been given a chance for repentance, even when they had the leisure for it - like Pope Celestine in Canto III - who, after all, lived for 10 months in imprisonment after making what Dante calls "il gran rifiuto." Think he might have repented?
Similarly, Dante sometimes works with poor historical information, like here in Canto XI, when he damns Pope Anastasius as a Monophysite (one of the last of the Christological heresies of early Christianity). But then Dante was no historian - there's a reason most of his characters are, more or less, current events. By the way, I'm not at all offended by the idea of a pope in hell (I like John Chrysostom's quip, that hell is paved with priest's skulls), but given the rules Dante sets up it seems unlikely - they have too many chances for sacramental confession. I have no particular doubt that Teddy Kennedy made a good end, for instance. He had a lot to confess, but so do I.
Dante's got a job, though - he has to populate the rings of Hell.
Oh - a quick aside - I wonder why the Modern Library and Anthony Esolen titled the three books Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. He may well have explained that in some front matter I missed, but it seems a little odd to stick to the Italian in one but not the other two. Maybe a pure marketing decision - name recognition for the first may really be that high?
OK - back to the rings of Hell. Now is a time to draw on the board again - Hell has order inside which chaos is confined. Look at the bottom right (Christ's left) of the mosaic from the west wall of the cathedral at Torcello (one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon). Those boxes each contain a variety of the damned - I'd click to enlarge. Similarly, Virgil offers in Canto XI a quick explanation of the layout of the rings of Hell.
All the remaining sins have some element of force or fraud - we're past the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and into something more offensive to God. The violent are neatly divided into those who have committed violence against their neighbors, against themselves, or against God. The lowest rings, though, are crimes of fraud. Or,
Since fraud's a sin peculiar to mankind
God hates it more; and so the fraudulent
sink farther down, assailed by greater pain.
(11.25-27)
The Torcello mosaic and Dante go a long way to reminding us that the Middle Ages exulted in order. Whether they achieved it or not is another question - but any explanation of the history of ideas or the history of culture that presents some kind of change from disorder and darkness to balance and brightness because of some self-styled Renaissance is up against it - what can be more neurotically balanced than Aquinas? What vision of the Cosmos is more orderly than Ptolemy's as elaborated by Muslims and medieval Christians? The philosophical movement that goes along with imitation natural landscapes is the Enlightenment, not the Scholastics - who preferred their horti to be conclusi.
Oh well - professors are always fighting yesterday's battles. In fact, most of my students don't seem to have a lot of cultural baggage about the Middle Ages. They haven't really ingested any periodization at all. I should probably shut up and move on.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2009
Thinking of people in big, hot containers in the ground
You know, like in Canto X.
While thousands have fled, two people who tried to ride out the firestorm in a backyard hot tub were critically burned. The pair in Big Tujunga Canyon, on the southwestern edge of the fire, "completely underestimated the fire" and the hot tub provided "no protection whatsoever," Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Sunday.The two individuals made their way to firefighters and were airlifted out by a sheriff's rescue helicopter. They received adequate notification to evacuate from deputies but decided to stay, Whitmore said.
One of the two was treated and released and the other remained hospitalized in stable condition. A third person was burned Saturday in an evacuation area along Highway 2 near Mount Wilson, officials said. Details of that injury were not immediately known.
"There were people that did not listen, and there were three people that got burned and got critically injured because they did not listen," Schwarzenegger said at a news conference at the fire command post.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:41 PM | Comments (1)
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto X
Canto X
Canto IX was a Canto of waiting - Canto X gives Dante more to think about than he likes. He see great figures from both sides of the Florentine political schism damned in the tomb of the Epicureans - and this leads him to some thinking about poets. Dante is, perhaps, always about poets and poetry.
Remember the photo of les Alyscamps from my contact Nick? Look at this Gustave Doré version (the resolution is too poor to bother taking it from Wikipedia and reloading it here). Dore has a great picture, but he has the historical phenomenon wrong. Oh, well - what can you do with the Romantics? Still, the Modern Library Esolen translation is printing them, so they're going to come up.
As Dante says, "The lids have all been raised" (10.8), but you can see that in Nick's picture as well. Indeed, Roman sarcophagi seldom have their original lids; they were usually taken and recycled into later buildings or art works. In fact, lots of the Alyscamps might have ended up in the facade of St. Gilles du Gard and the cathedral of St Trophime in Arles - Romanesque carvers were never ones to overlook a good supply of pre-quarried marble. And Arles had nothing particularly good local. We call that Green Architecture nowadays.
Of course, the Epicureans in the red-hot tomb wouldn't have objected in life, because then they believed that death meant the extinction of the soul. Now that they have found out otherwise they might appreciate more permanent monuments on Earth.
Dante first talks with Farinata degli Uberti, an unpleasant Ghibelline; he thinks Dante a bounder, which he probably was. Then Dante talks to another resident of the tomb, Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, a Guelph and father of one of Dante's poet friends. Cavalcante is worried about his son, who died only months after the action is set. Indeed, the foresight of the dead is confusing - though Dante tries to clear it up. How did Ciacco prophesy? How is it that Cavalcante doesn't know about his son?
Farinata rather graciously explains that the closer the event the less clear it is.
"As a man with bad vision," he replied
"we dimly see things far away. So much
splendor the sovereign Lord still shines on us.
When things draw near, or happen, emptiness
is all we see. If no one brings us news,
we can know nothing of your human state. (10.100-105)
I'll have to think about the optics of that. What are the implications for vision if the splendor (splende) is descending from God?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 5:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2009
I'm thinking these dog-groomers belong in the circle of the sodomites
Really. Go look. Are these cuts sins against nature, or what?
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 10:25 PM
Was the model who undressed in the Met naked, or nude?
Hyman asked, "Why is this wrong? There were thousands of people in the Met today looking at nudes as art, but as soon as there is a real nude, it's a big problem."Neill had the same question, which she posed to the security guard who detained her.
"She told me there were naked statues everywhere," the guard said. "I said, 'Those statues are 400 years old. You're from the 21st century.'
I vote, with Robert Graves, for nude. This is sly. It's rhetorical.
The Naked and the Nude
Robert Graves
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!
Sorry - Canto X is taking me longer than usual - but take the Gorgons pursuing the nude as a reminder of IX.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:15 AM
August 27, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IX
Canto IX
Canto IX is a Canto of anticipation - Virgil and Dante wait outside the gate of the City of Dis for someone to open the door. I noticed three things - two of them go together and the third bewildered me for a bit - Esolen's note helped a lot, though I'm going to have to see what the Lectura Dantis commentary* makes of it, too.
First the bewildering bit:
O voi ch'avete li'ntelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto 'l velame de li versi strani. (9.61-63)
O you whose intellects see clear and whole,
gaze on the doctrine that is hidden here
beneath the unfamiliar verses' veil
The literal sense is easy enough - Dante is addressing (ideal) living readers, asking them to interpret - to read verses for doctrine hidden behind the veil. But what? This occurs as Virgil turns Dante away from Medusa and covers his eyes to save him from petrification. Is it to tell us to look when Dante can't? But then what are we to see?
Actually I think that's pretty close - we, readers who Dante kindly addresses as persons whose intellects see clear and whole, are to look at Medusa. He can't.
Esolen helps here. "Dante, we must understand, is in real danger. When Virgil covers his charge's faace with his hands lest he see the Gorgon and be turned to stone, we must not think it idle....Whatever the danger is (despair?), we are to remember that its approach to Dante might well cause the loss of his eternal soul" (428). Esolen also refers to Dante's explanation of the 4 ways of interpreting (from the Letter to Can Grande). Since we can read this literally as turning to stone or (the moral sense) the loss of his soul by staying stuck in Hell we are reading beyond the veil. How does that sound? It satisfied me over coffee, at least.
The picture on the right, from the photo stream of my Flickr friend Nick in Exsilio, brings us to the 2 related points. There are two great moments of classical recall and reuse in Canto IX - one of which Dante may have gotten in the folkloric sense.
First, Dante asks Virgil for some reassurance - Dante is once again on the verge of the despair Esolen mentions. Dante asks "has anyone from Limbo ever been this far in Hell?" (tercet 6). Virgil replies that he himself has been all the way to the circle of Judas, when sent by the witch Erichtho to drag a soul up to the land of the living to speak a prophesy. That's a reference to Lucan's Pharasalia, book 6, where just like in Virgil's Aeneid, book 6, we read about the Underworld. We last saw Lucan in the Castle of Limbo in the company of Homer, Horace, and Ovid. Ah, intertextuality!
So, yes, Virgil has walked this path before - yet another reason for Dante to stop whining.
But once the angel from Heaven opens the gates of Dis and our pilgrims walk through, they see a vast field of jumbled tombs, which Dante compares to the Alyscamps at Arles (thanks, Nick!) and a sarcophagus field at Pola - across the Adriatic from Ravenna. You may also remember the Alyscamps from some very orange and yellow van Gogh paintings, which show a rather prettified park version. In Dante's day it was more of a mess, probably - an area outside the city walls filled with tombs. Alyscamps is the Occitan for what northern French calls "Champs Elysees." In medieval legend, which may have some relevance for Dante, these were the tombs of the army of Roland, slain by Saracens. Vivid visual image for a field of tombs, though.
*So far only the first two volumes are out. Each Canto gets a good essay in commentary, but each essay's author is free to focus very narrowly. So far it's always been interesting but never immediately useful. I'm sure the 2nd time through I will mine lots more to talk about with students.
---
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 26, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VIII
Canto VIII
It occurred to me that I ought to dig up some creative commons licensed art occasionally - so here is Delacroix's "The Bark of Dante" - Dante in red and grey; Virgil in brown; and Phlegyas, a damned son of Mars, nude and wrapped in blue. Delacrois really does capture the energy of Phlegyas, who rows the fasting moving transport in Hell. The city of Dis glows red-hot in the background. Esolen compares it to the New Jerusalem (428), but it's also a counterpart to the quiet castle of the virtuous pagans in Limbo.
Dante recognizes the soul gnawing on the boat - one of his rivals in Florence, a man who profited from Dante's exile. Dante lets go of his anger, and wishes to see him suffer.
"Teacher, I've got a hankering," said I,
to see them dunk that spirit in this swill
before we leave the lake and disembark."
And he replied, "You will enjoy your fill
before the farther beach comes into sight.
Such a desire is good to satisfy." (8.52-57)
None of this namby pamby nil nisi bonum de mortuis here, which is, after all, a sentiment based more on a pagan fear of the restless dead than on theology. Dante's anger is just - and Justice is the key to Hell. Mercy is the key to Purgatory, but we're not there yet. Somewhere Thomas Aquinas teaches that contemplating the smoke rising from Hell will be one of the just delights of Heaven (I don't know, I'm half remembering it and have no chance of finding the citation while sitting at the kitchen table - anyone have an idea?). We'll see. Certainly the damned soul of Filippo Argenti does nothing to ask for mercy from Dante's. The damned do not apologize. That's why they're damned.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:48 AM | Comments (1)
August 25, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VII
Canto VII
After the punishment of the gluttonous we next see the shared punishment of the avaricious and the spendthrift - mirror images of each others' sins. Dante sets them up as the extremes from the Aristotelian golden mean of possession - and then asks Virgil to explain Fortune. This will be another good opportunity to talk about cosmology, because Virgil explains Fortune as the angel of our earthly sphere, who shares out power and wealth between peoples, taking from one and giving to another.
Fortune's Wheel is one of the major images of the later Middle Ages - and until this reading I'd never noticed how Dante shifts the familiar Wheel to a Sphere - Fortune rotates our sphere, not a wheel for him (7.95). Interesting! I wonder if that ever made it into the illustrations?
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto VI
Canto VI
The damned of the third circle are the gluttons, wallowing in a mire and beaten by a hard winter rain:
...de la piova
etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve;
regola e qualità mai no l'è nova. 6.7-9
...where the rain falls
eernally, accursed, ponderous, cold --
changeless in rhythm, changeless in quality.
Even with little or no Italian you ought to be able to read that out loud and hear the sound effect Dante wants. Brrr.
Canto VI also brings us our first Florentine (Paolo and Francesca were from the Adriatic coast - Ravenna and Rimini), and provides us with a good example of Dante's topicality. The soul identifies himself only by his nickname, Hog, and we don't know any more about him. Dante asks him what will happen in Florence in the next few years (there's no speculation in this canto on how the damned know the future - we'll get that later) and the Hog predicts.
Esolen valiantly notes:
Naturally, few readers now will care deeply about the fortunes of Blacks or Whites, Guelphs or Ghibellines. We should remember, however, that Dante's visition -- the incarnational vision of Christianity -- was never, and could never be, a vision that ignored the goodness of this very world that Christ entered to save. Florence is part of that world; then even Florence plays a part in the divine plan.
I think that sounds like a man bored by years of having to explain the Blacks and Whites, Guelphs and Ghibellines (Dante was a White Guelph, by the way, which was why he was exiled in 1302). Esolen is right, but Florence in 1300 still isn't very interesting.
I think we can use the tedious topical references to remind ourselves what a great poem this is - the Comedia overcomes its topicality. Otherwise we would have stopped reading it long ago.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:26 AM | Comments (1)
August 23, 2009
Ok - I'm a bad medievalist
But I want to start the day for Canto V with this on the big screen.
And isn't the "Ladies -- all the ladies..." part MUCH better here than in the Salt'n'Peppa version? And there's Glockenspiel! Too hell with more cowbell! More glockenspiel!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 9:43 PM
August 22, 2009
Given my current blogging hobby . . .
. . . I'm wondering to which circle Dante would send this man:
Posted by CrankyProfessor at 4:36 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto V
Canto V
Canto IV ended with the pair of pilgrims heading "out of the quiet, into the trembling air--/Into a place where nothing ever shines" (4.150-151). In Canto V we are assaulted by the shouting and grunting of Minos -- who is very rude for a king and judge. I suppose that Minos also presents the first horrible body of Hell, as he whips his tail around his torso, with the number of loops representing the circle of Hell to which the soul is sent. I've never quite understood the monstrous conflation of Minos and the Minotaur - I wonder where Dante would have learned Greek myths other than Ovid? He certainly knew the Metamorphoses, but would he have known the Heroides? I'm not at all sure. It's been so long since i've read the Ariadne and Theseus section of the Heroides that I don't remember how much topical detail about Minos it carries. I've always wondered if Dante was running together Minos and Midas - specifically the Midas-judging-Apollo-and-Pan story.
Canto V begins with a quick explanation of the structural principle of Hell, narrowing from the top as one descends:
So I descended from the outer ring down to the next, which belts less space about but stings the souls to greater agony. (5.1-3)
and Minos's body provides a weird echo:
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him: belts himself with his tail as many times as there are grades the sinner must descend. (5.10-12)
The hardest Canto for big-R and little-r Romantics to deal with is probably Canto V, where Courtly Love comes in for some hard knocks. I'm not in the mood to blog about Paolo and Francesca except to say that luckily I will be team teaching with a friend who regularly teaches troubador material and has no illusions about chaste ladies and ideal knights, even if she does want to believe that Arthur existed.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:58 AM
August 20, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto IV
Canto IV
Canto III ends with Dante falling into unconsciousness, and IV begins with a boom that shakes him awake. Not every pair of Cantos carries action across the break so smoothly (or jarringly, as in this case), but the transitions are always worth checking. Dante was a thorough craftsman. There is certainly lots of debate about the making of the poem - he started it in exile, probably in 1304, he seems to have published Inferno in 1314. That gives a lot of time for polishing.
I think the urge to see Dante as a poet who begins uncertainly is an example of the (Romantic?) failure to separate maker from creation - to assume that Dante (in this example) is speaking authentically as Dante, that he is afraid, that he does not know where he is, that he is learning from Virgil as he goes along. I'm calling the Pilgrim "Dante" out of laziness and convention more than anything. I don't believe this is Dante Alighieri speaking to us from the heart - this is a finely constructed object of art. It certainly has stress fractures and may even have some bad lines (I'm not enough of a judge of the Italian to say - though this effort will surely help that), but the Commedia makes much more sense as a unity. If there's ever a poem that repays formalist analysis it's this one.
In Canto IV we enter Limbo - and Dante asks Virgil one of those hard questions - did no one leave here before the Resurrection? What about those unbaptized infants?Is this fair??
Well, if 'fair' means playing by the rules, this is fair. It's also hard lines on the virtuous pagans. Dante suggests, though he lists only big name Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, that virtuous Jews from before the Incarnation were saved at the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended. What happens to later Jews we will consider later.
Dante is more interested at this point in showing us that there is a hierarchy in Limbo, a hierarchy not of happiness or contentment but honor. There is honor in limbo for the greatest souls.
I've always thought that the appearance of the first epic list of names here is hardly an accident. Dante is not only giving us a long list of virtuous unbelievers - among whom he includes 2 or 3 Muslims - because he's in a castle full of them but also because, in Virgil's company, he has just met Homer, Ovid, and Lucan. I think because he is accepted into their circle as a poet, he demonstrates his mastery of the genre. If we don't believe that we have to take refuge in believing the narrative and think that a person, Dante, is walking all around the only castle in Hell with decent lighting looking at nametags.
The Canto ends with the pair leaving this Castle with clear light, headed into darkness. Dante does it with a LOT of words ending in -a.
La sesta compagnia in due si scema:
per altra via mi mena il savio duca
fuor de la queta, ne l'aura che trema.
E vegno in parte ove non è che luca.
Esolen gives us:
The company of six is cut by two,
and my wise guide leads me another way,
out of the quiet, into the trembling air --
Into a place where nothing ever shines
"Trembling air" sounds lovely, but when we turn the page we will find out what makes it tremble.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:27 AM
August 19, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto III
Canto III
The inscription over the Gate of Hell:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE,
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
I AM THE WAY TO GO AMONG THE LOST.JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.BEFORE ME THERE WERE NO CREATED THINGS
BUT THOSE THAT LAST FOREVER -- AS DO I.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
The hard thing is not to show students that Hell is hopeless, but that Love created it. Virgil gives us a help in the 6th tercet:
We have come to the place I spoke about,
where you would see the souls who dwell in pain,
for they have lost the good of intellect. (16-19)
Esolen's Appendix C will also be a help - a big dose of Aquinas. The people in Hell have gotten what they sought - separation from God, the Trinity described as Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. If Love is to give someone, finally, what he wants then Love has to create a place like Hell. Hard lines, but it makes an intellectual sense. It won't satisfy them - I know I was one of two people out of about 18 who got it the first time when I took Dante as an undergraduate - but there we go. Maybe one of the course outcomes should be "Students will realize the way they want the world to be has consequences."
I, too, prefer the idea that Hell is not eternal - that it's really just a harder version of Purgatory, but so far as I've heard the only major 20th Century Catholic theologian to think about that possibility seriously was Hans Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?), but I'm not really interested in reading theology much. I'll wager with Aquinas and try to scrape in to Heaven.*
By the way, the line immediately before "We have come to the place I spoke about" reminds us of Canto II. Virgil tells Dante, "here you must put all cowardice to death" (15). Dante is going to have trouble doing that. Like us his feelings are going to get in the way of understanding again and again.
Indeed, the first time he hears the wails of damned souls he weeps - and these are the souls who, like Dante in Canto II, unwilled what they willed, changed every plan with every thought. Angels who were neither rebels nor faithful, people who never lived well or badly. Dante, and Justice, respect more those who sin boldly. This is also the first example of a punishment to fit the crime: these souls are damned to follow a banner moving fast - to finally follow, not hang back and consider what they might or might not do.
In this Canto, too, we get the first example of Dante putting people in Hell because he doesn't like their politics. Most of those are tedious factional problems of Florence, but one soul Dante recognizes "che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto," "the craven one, who made the great denial" (61). He almost certainly means Pope Celestine V, who abdicated the papacy in 1294 and left the way open for Dante's least favorite pope, Boniface VIII. Dante's hatred of Celestine is based on hearsay, and much of his hatred of Boniface is based on narrow Florentine patriotism (though Benedetto Caetani was hardly a pleasant man). Remember, Dante is not dogma!
*That is, I will be leaving money for Masses for my miserable soul in Purgatory.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 8:18 AM
August 18, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto II
Canto II
Dante is one self-absorbed poet who has to learn to be a little less so. Canto II - and the whole of The Inferno - is about* fear, one of Dante's besetting faults, and getting past fear. Dante starts the Canto well, invoking the Muses, genius, and memory - and I'm wondering to what extent ingegno has connotations of "skill" as well as "genius" or "ingenuity" here. He addresses Virgil at great length about previous trips to Hell and Heaven, but by the end of his address he is afraid he is not up to it. "I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Saint Paul!" Dante sums up his own problem in 6 lines:
And as a man who unwills what he wills,
changing his plan for every little thought,
till he withdraws from any kind of start,
So did I turn my mind on that dark verge,
for thinking ate away the enterprise
so prompt in the beginning to set forth. (2.37-42)
Ah - cowardice. Virgil names the vice and explains how he himself came here, his call by Beatrice. Virgil himself had wondered that Beatrice came to him from Heaven with no fear or worry; Beatrice gave him the answer, which he offers as one reason for Dante not to fear:
The only things that justly cause us fear
are those that have the power to do us harm; (2.88-89)
That's going to come up again.
More important though is this - Virgil puts it for Dante in the terms of courtly love and the Court of Heaven - why are you afraid:
Seeing that three such ladies blessed in Heave
care for your healing from their court above,
and what I tell you holds forth so much good? (2.124-126)
Esolen says about another moment in the Canto "He is saved not because he loves but because he is loved" (413).
Dante's response is a lovely piece of courtly contrast - his courage is like little flowers, fioretti and virtude -
As little flowers shut small and bowed beneath
the frost of night, when the sun brightens them,
rise open-petaled on their stems upright,
So did my weary courage surge again (2.127-130)
Talk about plenty to discuss - and that's even without delving into the placement of the invocation of the Muses (yes, we started in medias res as well as nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) or one of my own little hobbyhorses, Dante's avoidance of names. In Canto II we get a good example of his refusal in the Inferno to name the Virgin Mary, and the first time Aeneas is called something other than the father of Silvius is in a negation - "I'm not Aeneas!" Typical - and worth talking about.
*disclaimer - when I say something "Is about" or "is all about" I am engaging in the exaggeration of the spoken voice or the written blog post - everything in the Middle Ages is about lots of things. Univocality may be a sign that something is not medieval.
Further: It occurred to me when rereading - while I was getting the HTML to format the tercet indentations correctly - that I hadn't said that virtude has its root in Latin vir, "man." Then I realized that this is not a commentary on the Commedia but only a first pass at teaching notes. When I do this sort of thing for books I'm preparing to teach I just circle word parts that are going to go up on the blackboard - I know what vir means, what virtù means in Renaissance Italian, and I'm going to go on about it in class.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto I
Dante Blogging
My dear friend and colleague Laurence Erussard and I are planning to teach Dante together as one of our Medieval Art and Literature courses. She was up for next fall - Fall 2010 - but I insisted that starting Dante in August and ending in December was wrongheaded, especially in the Frozen North. So we will teach Dante in Spring '11 - starting in Hell in January and ending in Paradise in May - which is closer to right. June would be better.
To prepare for this, since I've only ever taught Dante in a casual, half-credit style, I decided to read my way through again. My resolution is to blog a Canto a day. The new(ish) Anthony Esolen translation comes highly recommended by Prof. Bob Benson at Sewanee, who has taught Dante every year for a long time. I bought a set. I got through 3 canti before I realized that I ought to be blogging my progress. Here we go.
Canto I
Dante's hard for us. Long poetry is hard for everyone. The Medieval World View makes life more difficult.
We're going to have to do a good job setting the students up in how to read allegory - not to slave at it, but to let themselves dance with the polysemy. Is the Wolf Greed? Malice? The World? A wolf? Why not all four? You might think, in this age of irony, that ambiguity would be something students get instinctively; my experience is that my students want certainty -- they'd like an answer. Unsettling that desire will be one of Dante's contributions to their education.
The first astronomical moment shows up in line 17. raggi del pianeta/che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle, which Esolen translates: "the rays of that wandering light of Heaven/that leads all men aright on every road." That's handy - we get to start with the idea the Sun is a Planet in the Ptolemaic Cosmos, and that planets are wanderers. What a good start!
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at 6:48 AM | Comments (2)