The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (47 page)

Dante’s quick but unlucky rise was due to his conspicuous talents, his energy in public office, and his good connections. He was born in 1265 into a prosaic commercial family, the Alighieri (Dante, his given name, was a contraction of Durante). His father carried on the family moneylending business and raised Dante comfortably in Florence’s expanding economy. An only son, Dante suffered the death of his mother before he was twelve. When his father remarried, he was raised in his father’s second family. He came to know the Latin classics and Aquinas, but never learned Greek. In Florence’s cosmopolitan literary community, he was lucky in having as his mentor Brunetto Latini (1212?–1294?), a leader in the Guelf (or papal) party, who had brought back from Paris an enthusiasm for literature. Brunetto sponsored the talented boy Dante, who later acknowledged this man who taught him “how man becomes eternal” through the written word.

Dante’s personal disaster arose from the entry into Florence in 1301 of Charles of Valois, brother of the king of France, under the pretext of keeping the peace between the embroiled factions of the Guelf party. Dante himself had gone to Rome to negotiate Pope Boniface VIII’s support for
the city’s independence. When Dante’s mission failed, on his return to Florence he was arrested. His bitter exile was described in the prophecy of his ancestor Cacciaguida whom he meets in the “Paradiso.” “You shall leave everything beloved most dearly; and this is the arrow which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall come to know how salt is the taste of another’s bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount by another man’s stairs … it will be for your fair fame to have made you a party by yourself.” An outcast from his native city, he easily imagined the medieval Christian’s exile into life after death, a place of eternal rewards and punishment. Dante himself would suffer a double exile—from his beloved city and from his beloved lady.

Bizarre to the modern eye, courtly love was a fertile institution of the late Middle Ages, although hardly an inspiration for lovers today. The relation of a courtly lover to his lady resembled that of a feudal vassal to his lord. The sentiment appears first in the troubadours in southern France at the end of the eleventh century. The lover of whom they sang was supinely obedient to his lady, addressing her not as “my lady” but as
midons
(Provençal for “my lord”), and he did his lady’s bidding, however trivial or perilous. Medieval courtly love was always for another man’s wife. It is not surprising that sexual love in those days was an extramarital experience, for marriage in the courtly classes was a cold-blooded transaction, cementing an alliance or securing a dowry.

Medieval authors had exploited their classic inheritance. The popular
Ars Amatoria
of the Roman poet Ovid (43
B.C.
–
A.D
. 17) told how to conquer women of easy virtue and also instructed women on seducing men. It was axiomatic for Ovid that love could not exist between husband and wife. “Ovid Misunderstood” (in C. S. Lewis’s phrase) was concocted with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and spiced with Arabic medical and mystical elements. By Dante’s day, the lore and institutions of courtly love were well established. The lady who would be his “judge,” his Beatrice, was the lady of courtly love.

Courtly love, like the medieval afterlife, put lovers on this earth in another kind of exile. Dante’s poetic combining of courtly love with love of God, neither of which could be consummated in this life, merited Yeats’s praise of him as “the chief imagination of Christendom.” And Dante’s “medieval synthesis” summed up the loves that dominated his times. His
Divine Comedy
would describe the life in death that dramatized the Christian’s hopes and his.
Vita nuova
would depict the new life that came from unfulfilled earthly love.

According to Dante, the experience that gave him a “new life” came when he was only nine, in the spring of 1274. Then, at his first glimpse of the nine-year-old Beatrice, “The glorious lady of my mind first appeared to
mine eyes … clothed in most noble hue, a subdued and modest crimson, cinctured and adorned after the fashion that was becoming to her most tender age.” His pulse quickened and he trembled as he recalled Homer’s words, “She seemed not the daughter of a mortal man but of God.” Nine years passed before he saw her again, when she and he were both eighteen, and he had the good luck to see her among other ladies, “clothed in hue of purest white.” It was at the ninth hour of that day that she “gave me a salutation of such virtue, that methought I beheld the uttermost bounds of blessedness.” From then he never ceased to think and dream of her, but he was careful to keep this love a secret. When he saw her in a group he would fix his gaze on another lady who stood between them, so no one could detect his passion.

This Beatrice probably was a real person, Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a Florentine banker. In 1287 she married Simone de’ Bardi, scion of a more powerful banking family. Dante appears never to have had physical contact with her.

Meanwhile, at the age of twelve, Dante was betrothed by his family to Gemma Donati, a suitable person of Guelf noble stock. After twelve years of engagement, about 1298, his family arranged the marriage. It was said they did this at the time to solace him, still mourning over the death of Beatrice eight years before. And, of course, to provide an Alighieri heir.

The miseries of this match are described by Dante’s admirer Boccaccio. “Dante formerly had been used to spend his time over his precious studies whenever he was inclined, and would converse with kings and princes, dispute with philosophers, and frequent the company of poets, the burden of whose griefs he would share, and thus solace his own. Now, whenever it pleased his new mistress, he must at her bidding quit this distinguished company, and bear with the talk of women, and to avoid a worse vexation must not only assent to their opinions, but against his inclination must even approve them.… He who had been used to laugh or to weep, to sing or to sigh, according as pleasing or painful thoughts prompted him, now must not dare, or, should he venture, must account to his mistress for every emotion, nay, even for every little sigh. Oh! what unspeakable weariness to have to live day by day, and at last to grow old and die, in the company of such a suspicious being!” They had four children, but Dante does not even mention his wife in his writings. At his exile from Florence Dante would leave Gemma behind and never see her again.

The death of his ethereal Beatrice, a mere glimpse of whom had given him a new life, had left him disconsolate. He sought the consolations of philosophy in Boethius, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and immersed himself for thirty months in “the schools of the religious and the disputations of the philosophers.” The public declaration
of his sacred love of Beatrice in
La vita nuova
about 1293 came only after she was safely in another world. This book, which has about the same length and form as Boethius’s, might have been called “The Consolation of Love.” But what attenuated love!

Alternating passages of thirty-one poems in the new
dolce stil nuovo
with prose commentary carry Dante’s recollections from the first words written in his book of memory—at the age of nine his glimpse of “the glorious lady of my mind” (
la gloriosa donna della mia mente
)—to the death of Beatrice “the gentle lady, who for her worth was placed by the most high Lord in the heaven of peace, where Mary is.” In between, the prose commentary describes Dante’s struggle to express and repress signs of his love. He writes his poems in Italian and not in Latin, he explains, “because he desired to make his words intelligible to a lady who had difficulty in understanding Latin verses.” To keep his sacred love secret, he feigned love for other women, his “screens of love,” though the insincere “trifles in verse” that he wrote for them some thought “beyond the bounds of courtesy.” He designs his sonnet to Beatrice as if it were for someone else. Finally,

So even before his exile Dante prophesied the grand sequel to the “Legend of Beatrice Sanctified.”

Fifteen years later he fulfilled his promise with the
Divine Comedy
. This, like
La vita nuova
, would be autobiographical, following the progress of Dante’s soul. But it was broader, more dramatic, more didactic. Dante explained why he called it a “comedy,” in his letter to Can Grande della Scala of Verona (1291–1329), patron of the arts and his protector, dedicating to him the
Paradiso:

The adjective “divine” was no part of Dante’s original title, and the word perhaps was first used by others to describe the “divine” Dante himself. The Venice printed edition of 1555 christened it the “Divine Comedy.”

Dante summed up his universal theme, “The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is ‘the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed’.… But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically [which he urges], its subject is: ‘Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice.’ ” And so the work recounts adventures in death.

Begun when Dante was about forty-three, the
Comedy
was written in exile. And the theme of exile remains in the foreground. With Virgil for his guide, Dante boasts of his parallel to the
Aeneid
, which also was a tale of exile. Just as Virgil himself had adopted the wandering theme from Homer’s
Odyssey
, the
Comedy
is an odyssey of Dante’s soul. In the grand tradition of epic and allegory Dante becomes the peer-companion of Virgil. In his chaotic time of warring cities, he seeks to fulfill Virgil’s promise of a single Italian nation—in the Italian language and with the world-unifying mission of Rome.

The
Divine Comedy
is not a mere cosmology of the Middle Ages but the story of a man confronted with its consequences. It is the journey of a person, not a survey of theology. From the familiar first line—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”—Dante puts himself in the story. It is “halfway” in the journey, because Dante is now midpoint in man’s appointed span of years. And the fear and sufferings of all the figures remain vivid. The ancient greats—Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucas—are excluded from Heaven only because they could not know Jesus Christ. As Virgil explains (in John Ciardi’s translation):

When we compare Aeneas’s brief hectic voyage to the underworld (
Aeneid
, Book VI) with Dante’s odyssey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and
Paradiso, we see how Christian theology had refined, vivified, and elaborated thinking about good and evil, rewards and punishments. Virgil’s netherworld was a realm of confusion and disorder, of miscellaneous retribution. But Dante’s afterlife is beautifully and subtly symmetrical, rich in numerical and symbolic significance. Dante, someone has said, is “Saint Thomas Aquinas set to music.” The whole
Comedy
is dominated by the symbolic trinity—from the three books, or
cantiche
(Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), to the terza rima (three lines rhyming, aba, bcb, etc.). Each
cantica
has thirty-three cantos, so the three parts together come to ninety-nine cantos, which, with the introductory canto total one hundred. While three was the number of the Holy Trinity, one hundred was ten times ten, the numerical symbol of perfection. After the Limbo of the virtuous unbaptized, the Inferno was divided into nine lowering circles where the damned were grouped under the three capital vices (incontinence, violence, and fraud). Francesca suffering in the second circle of the Inferno recounts the occasion of her sinful love with Paolo:

Of course Satan was at the bottom.