Jacques Maritain Center:
Dante and the Blessed Virgin / by Ralph McInernyThe Commedia is divided into three parts, each called a ‘cantica” -- Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise -- and contains a total of one hundred cantos. The second and third parts have precisely thirty-three cantos each; the first has the extra canto. The first canto of the first cantica is a prologue to the entire poem. It begins thus:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritroval per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era samarrita.
(Inf. 1.1-3)
Dorothy Sayers has translated this as well as anyone and better than some (save perhaps for the rendering of smarrita) as:
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.{1}
There is not a line of Dante, indeed scarcely a word of his, that has not been subjected to scholarly analysis and thereby generated some measure of division of opinion.{2} Obviously, if the only way to an understanding of the poem lay through the thicket of that scholarship, we would be in a dark wood indeed, if not wholly lost and gone. Scholarship and criticism are lovely things, so long as they bring us back to what they study and criticize and do not substitute for it. Dante scholarship, to the modest degree that I know it, is remarkably free of the pedantry that is the death of learning.{3} Dantisti, as they are called, have by and large retained some measure of the wonder and excitement of their first encounter with the poem. Needless to say, all of us must first encounter the poem, read the Commedia, before commentaries on it can make sense. Even in that first reading we will be grateful for the notes in the edition with which we happen to begin. Even readers for whom Italian is their mother tongue need such notes.
Who cannot catch the literal sense of that opening tercet? Someone is speaking to us in the first person, telling us he woke up lost in a dark wood. He is recalling his past and presuming our interest. And he has it. It’s a great opening. One gets used to admiring Dante’s skill, but of course one is simply calling attention to his own keen discernment.
It being clear, then, that the opening lines of the Commedia speak immediately to a first reader, we are better prepared to see what scholars can do to enhance our rereading. A rule of thumb for literature, C.S. Lewis suggested, is that it is something we reread.{4} There are stories and poems we read once and that’s that. They have given us all they have. The things we go back to again and again are rich with levels not apparent at first blush. In rereading we notice things we didn’t notice before, and this deepens our appreciation. A critic such as G. K. Chesterton brings us back to Chaucer or Dickens with more sensitive antennae, and this heightens our enjoyment. In his Book of Problems, Aristotle asked, twice, why do we like the old songs best? It is not true that familiarity always breeds contempt: there could be no happy families if it were. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Not on the first date, certainly, or not in the first moment of being smitten. The comparison rides on, depends upon, loving the other person as she or he is. (Though, as W. B. Yeats said of Lady Ann Gregory, “Only God could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair.”) So too, any poem engages us first and then invites reflection. In the case of Dante, that simple truth is not merely instantiated, it is required.
The Bible, Old and New Testaments, is read by or to the faithful and, having been read, is analyzed in the homily. Believers reflect on Holy Writ in the awareness that it is the Word of God speaking to us in our own tongues. In the De doctrina christiana, St. Augustine gives his account of the multiple senses of Scripture, the layers of meaning in the sacred text. In the Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas asks whether Sacred Scripture has senses beyond the literal and replies:
It should be noticed that the author of Sacred Scripture is God in whose power it is not only to make vocal sounds have meanings (even men can bring this about) but also that the things themselves should mean. While it is true that in any science, words have meanings, it is proper to this science that the things signified by the words also signify something. The first meaning, whereby words signify things, is the primary sense, the historical or literal sense, But the meaning whereby the things signified by the words signify other things, is called the spiritual sense, which is grounded in the literal and presupposes it. (ST Ia, q. 1. A. 10)
According to Thomas, this further, spiritual sense has been given various subdivisions. He himself divides the spiritual sense into the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical senses. The allegorical sense is exemplified in the way in which events in the Old Testament are figures of the New Law. The moral sense is exemplified in the way in which Christ’s words and actions, and what is said of Him, are signs of what we ought to do. The anagogical sense points to eternal glory. That the literal sense should be pregnant with these various spiritual senses is attributed to God, who is the author of Sacred Scripture. So what has all this to do with reading Dante?
Literary criticism has been called a secular form of biblical criticism. Whatever truth there may be in this generalization, it is necessarily true of Dante scholarship. In his letter to Can Grande della Scala, dedicating the third cantica to this patron, Dante refers to the Commedia as a whole and gives instructions on how to read it.
Dantisti differ as to the authenticity of this letter -- the thirteenth and last of Dante’s Latin epistles that we have -- but such disputes could scarcely interest us if we had not read it. Let us imagine ourselves looking over the shoulder of its addressee, the imperial vicar and lord of Verona, and let us take it to be from Dante.{5} It begins with an unctuously laudatory description of Can Grande and the memorable self-description, “Dantes Alagherii, florentinus natione non moribus” (Dante Alighieri, Florentine in nation but not in morals). Praise of Can Grande continues through the first four paragraphs followed by the author’s discussion of his great poem.
He begins with a citation from a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book 2: “sicut res se habet ad esse, sic se habet ad veritatem” (the truth of things follows on the kind of being they have). There are things that are what they are and yet are also related to other things, as one who is a man may also be a father or son. The implication seems to be that since the great poem is related to the author, its truth must be sought in that relationship. This is a rather ponderous way of saying that it is to the author we should go to find out what the poem is about. Dante then invokes a device devised by commentators on classical works, namely, the prologue that precedes the analysis of the text. There are six things that a commentator should do before beginning his chief work; he should tell us what the subject of the work is, who wrote it, its form, its end, its title, and to what part of philosophy it belongs.
A first thing to notice about this is Dante’s unblushing application to his own work of a requirement to be met by commentaries on acknowledged classics. There is a modest foreshadowing of this in the Vita Nuova in the didactic discussions that follow the poems. Dante was probably acquainted with the requirements of a prologue from reading Boethius, or Thomas Aquinas commenting on Aristotle. Dante’s practice in the Vita Nuova might be said to have a precedent in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, that death-row classic which also alternates poetry and prose. But surely to apply to his own work the conventions of the classical commentary is somewhat astonishing. It tells us at least two things. First, Dante had no doubt of the importance of what he had accomplished. Second, he believes that his great poem is as well-thought-out as any classical treatise and can thus sustain, even invite, close scrutiny.
This initial astonishment is soon followed by another greater one. Dante applies to the Commedia the techniques of biblical interpretation:
It should be known that this work has not only a simple sense, indeed it can be called polysemous, that is, of several senses; for the first sense is had in the letter and another is given through what is signified literally. The first sense is called the literal, the second allegorical, or moral, or anagogical. (Ep. 13.7)
Lest we miss the parallel, Dante goes on to illustrate these various senses by analyzing two verses of Scripture: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Juda was made his sanctuary, Israel his kingdom” (Ps. 113 [114]:1-2).
If we take only the literal meaning of this passage, it tells us of the exodus from Egypt of the sons of Israel at the time of Moses. But if we take it allegorically, it refers to our redemption by Christ; its moral sense tells us of the conversion of our souls from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace; and its anagogical sense tells us of the exit of the saintly soul from the slavery of this corrupt world to the freedom of eternal glory. Dante adds that all of these mystical senses can be gathered under the appellation allegorical in that they are another (alleon) sense that differs from the historical or literal sense.
With that in hand, Dante turns to the Commedia and indicates its various senses. Literally, it concerns simply the state of souls after death, for on this topic the whole work turns. However, taken allegorically, its subject is man insofar as by the merit or demerit consequent upon his free actions he is eternally and justly rewarded or punished. The poem will show us souls after death and make clear how their condition, whether of weal or woe, was freely and justly achieved.
This application of the senses of Scripture to the Commedia poses problems, to which Dante refers elsewhere.{6} The obvious difficulty arises from the way St. Thomas spoke of those further senses of Scripture -- the way the things meant by the words can mean yet other things -- as something of which only God, not man, is capable. After all, He is the creator of things. A preliminary resolution of this difficulty for Dante might be sought in the fact that the story of the Commedia is essentially the story of Scripture, that is, the story of salvation or damnation. The characters and episodes put before us may not be biblical, but the allegorical meaning of the poem is. This is clear from the fact that the allegorical sense that chiefly interests Dante is the moral.
Continuing with the classical demands of a prologue, he asks to which part of philosophy the Commedia falls. We will waive for the moment any discussion of the special problem posed by the philosophical or theological poet. Surely poetry is one thing and philosophy another; a fortiori, theology differs from poetry. But it would be premature to consider this difficulty now. The answer Dante gives is that the Commedia falls to moral philosophy. That follows from his announced end or purpose of the work: “The point of the work in whole and in part is to move those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of happiness” (Ep 13.10).
One further question from the letter to Can Grande: Why is the poem called a comedy? Dante’s answer presupposes that tragedy ends in bitter defeat, whereas comedy has a happy ending. “And thus it is clear why the present work is called the Comedy. For if we look to the matter, from a horrible and fetid beginning, which is Hell, it moves in the end to the desirable and gracious Paradise” (Ep 13.10)
At the opening of the Inferno we found Dante lost in a dark wood at midlife. What is midlife? “The sum of our years is seventy, and if we are strong, eighty” (Ps. 89 [90] : 10). The authoritative biblical span being seventy years, the Dante of the poem is at the halfway point of thirty-five.{7} Of course, there is optimism in this; Dante did not live to see his seventieth year. But he is not predicting so much as applying to himself the well-known biblical text. He was born in 1265, his life overlapping that of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure -- both of whom died in 1274 -- for nine years. That makes the year of the poem 1300, the year of the first Jubilee, called by Pope Boniface VIII, when the faithful made a pilgrimage to Rome to visit the great churches and to see such marvels as the Veil of Veronica. (Dante alludes to this veil in the Vita Nuova, and later, in the Comedy, he describes a pilgrim come from afar, perhaps Croatia, whose lifelong hope is realized when he sees the veil on which is imprinted the bloody face of Christ.)
Not only is the poem set in 1300, it begins in Holy Week on Good Friday and proceeds through Easter, until in the Paradiso such temporal references drop away. By some calculations, the activities of the Inferno are covered in a single day. Jubilee signifies a call for repentance and atonement, Holy Week the passion and death of Christ that won our salvation, and Easter the hope of our own resurrection and eternal bliss. It is helpful, though not immediately necessary, to know this in order to grasp the sense of the dark wood in which Dante has awakened.
He is filled with fear by his surroundings and doubts that he has words to describe it; the mere memory of it is bad enough. How did he get there? He cannot say, so weary was he when he wandered from the true path, la verace via. He is in a valley, a forbidding hill looms, but a glimpse of sun causes him to take heart. And then he is suddenly assailed by three beasts. First a leopard comes and stands athwart his path; it is described in pleasing detail. Then comes another beast, a lion, soon to be joined by a wolf.
The obvious sense of this encounter is that Dante, having wandered from the right path, is prevented from finding his way by the appearance of these wild beasts. Even on a first reading we pick up clues that Dante’s plight carries meaning beyond the surface sense. What is the right path (la diritta via), and what is the relevance of being thirty-five to someone lost in the woods? The occurrence of both “our” (nostra) and “me” (mi) in those first lines draw us into the scene, suggesting that Dante’s situation is at once his and very likely ours. Halfway through the journey we all make, he finds himself lost. The suggestion is that we are all on the way, pilgrims, and that life itself is aimed at something. The end is death, certainly, but death is not a destination so much as an ending. St. Thomas in his commentary on verses 5-6 of the Second epistle to the Corinthians, where Paul is speaking of the reward awaiting the faithful after death, provides us with the assumption behind the scene: “In the present life man is as it were on a kind of journey, because he ought to aim at heaven.”{8}
The right path is the one that will take us beyond death to heaven. We are willy-nilly mortal, but our eternal post-mortem condition is up to us. Having read the letter to Can Grande, we know that Dante’s aim in his great poem is to lead us from the misery and sin of our present life into the glory and happiness of eternal life. When Thornton Wilder gave one of his novels the title Heaven’s My Destination, he was plucking a phrase from a little jingle kids wrote in the front of their schoolbooks, an evocation of childlike faith.{9} There was nothing ironic in that choice. Wilder’s readers, not so long ago, would have responded to the title as to a truism.{10} Dante’s contemporary reader would have found the allegorical meaning of the Commedia as familiar as the literal. Of course, the literal meaning of the poem -- heaven or hell -- already invokes religious belief. It is the detail and imagery of the afterlife, not the fact of it, that enriches the allegorical meaning of the poem. That we are all pilgrims, something brought home in a special way during a Jubilee year, would be a commonplace to Dante’s readers. The Dante of the poem is a particular Florentine with his quite definite life story and also, in a way, all of us.
Most of us have seen enough MGM movies to be acquainted with the phrase ars gratis artis -- art for art’s sake -- and whatever we think of its use as a motto for the run-of-the-mill film, we have probably some sense of its meaning. “A poem should not mean / But be,” we might remember, waiving the inanity of this phrase from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars poetica.” Isn’t Dante’s stated intention in writing the Commedia a culpable confusion of genera? Edifying discourses are one thing, but surely poetry is something else. Whoever thought that the poetry, the music, the drama, and the novels we enjoy have anything to do with the moral, let alone the religious, life? The answer is, just about everybody until a short time ago and many writers and readers still.
Flannery O’Connor, calling herself a hillbilly Thomist who read a little bit of the Summa theologiae every day, said that all literature is anagogical. All! Perhaps she had in mind that passage from the Summa which explains the senses of Scripture. Did she mean that all literature is ethical or religious?
Well, what is a story? Any story begins with a protagonist confronting a dilemma that must be resolved, a problem, a crossroads. And he or she must act. This protagonist will have a name, sometimes the name of an historical character, but we will ask for more from a story than we would from history. The protagonist’s efforts to resolve the dilemma, to solve the problem, to take one road rather than another, will encounter difficulties that he must overcome. They may overcome him, or a first attempt may simply worsen his situation. But he goes on. A story might give us a hero whose efforts take him more and more deeply into trouble until a dark moment is reached when it looks as if all is lost. Then, by his own efforts, and plausibly, he sees a way out, takes it, and the problem with which he began is solved. End of story.
This is more or less what we find in the Poetics of Aristotle. Why are we interested in the activities of imaginary characters or the imaginary activities of historical characters -- of Hamlet, David Copperfield, Becky Sharpe, the warden in Trollope, Jay Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Caesar and Cleopatra. Richard II, and so on and on, to invoke stories we read again and again? Imaginary frogs in real gardens or real frogs in imaginary gardens? In real life we rarely find the economy of action that characterizes fiction. A story concentrates the mind and imagination, the events have a beginning, a middle, and an end, which confers a meaning on them. The end could be death or marriage or finding El Dorado or nailing Al Capone for income tax evasion or any number of things, but it is a solution that focuses the account of someone addressing a problem.
We become involved in stories because their characters are in some way ourselves. They are our better or worse selves, but not too much the one or the other. We follow an imagined version of the choices that make up any human life, choices that matter. We are what we do, and characters in a story reveal who they are by their actions and choices. In real life, bounders succeed and the innocent suffer; they do in fiction, too, but the story makes sense of that in a way real life seldom does. Any story worth reading again will tell us something about the human condition we realize as true. There is something of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth in each of us, something of Lord Jim, and something of Dante.
It matters what we read and enjoy. If we did not think the young are better for reading Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald or J.D. Salinger, why have millions of students been assigned Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, or Catcher in the Rye? But better in what way? Cardinal Newman, in “The Tamworth Reading Room,” made gentle fun of those who thought that providing books for the masses would have some kind of automatic effect in changing their lives for the better. We could substitute the aim of the Carnegie Public Libraries or the silly assumption of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 that anything printed is sacred. Surely it would be excessive to think that being able to appreciate Lord Jim would make the reader brave. And we mustn’t forget Don Quixote, the character not the book.
If literature has a moral effect, it is more subtle than that. But, as Delmore Schwartz put it. “In dreams begin responsibilities.” The ideals and the models of action with which our reading furnishes the mind and imagination provide a deep background for who we want to be or want not to be. Of course it is silly to think that literature will make us what we ought to be. Does it differ from moral philosophy in that? Aristotle said that no one becomes good by studying moral philosophy. Yet the only reason for studying it is that we might become better. Aristotle’s point was that knowing what to do is not tantamount to doing it. Moral philosophy, however, is less efficacious than literature, not the other way around. Becoming the Archbishop of Sante Fe as we read Will Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop engages us more completely than reading about states of life in the Summa theologiae.
When Dante tells us that the Commedia is meant to lead us from the misery of sin to the happiness of heaven, we can be sure that he has at least as keen a sense as do we of the distance between his poem and any conversion of ours. But distance does not mean irrelevance.
The beasts that menace Dante in the first canto of the Commedia stand for something. What? A good and common guess is Lust, Pride, and Avarice. Since the first canto is a prologue to the entire poem, we will meet these beasts again, the beasts within us: “all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (I John 2:16). “I am a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and an Angelike spright,” wrote John Donne,{11} but the earliest reflections on human life take into account this division within ourselves. The good that we would, we do not; the evil that we would not do, that we do . We find the thought in Ovid as well as in St. Paul. Plato told a story in the Republic of the soul’s being incarcerated in the body and ourselves prisoners in a cave, mistaking shadows and images for their real counterparts. Liberation from the cave may seem to be simply a matter of gaining knowledge, but Plato knows that we have become affectively attached to shadows and images. The task of philosophy is to alter our affections as well as to change our minds, and to do the one in order that the other might be brought about. In the words chosen by Cardinal Newman for his tomb, Ex umbris et imaginibus ad veritatem: Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth.
Why do we sin against the light of reason and fail to do what we know is the good and fulfilling thing? Well, for one thing, we have appetites other than will, or the rational appetite, and those lower appetites can cloud the mind when we act. The immediate pleasurable good to which we have become attached trumps the good recognized by mind as our true good.
Dante, like Aristotle, did not think that evil was some thing that attracts us. Only the good attracts; that is what we mean by good. Evil as such repels, just as, on the level of sense, pain repels whereas pleasure attracts. It is because there are goods and goods that we can act defectively. A pleasure of the senses is a good, and we do not decide to be drawn to it; it is natural that we should be so drawn. No more do we decide to shrink from the prospect of pain. These affective responses, these natural appetites, do not of themselves propel us to one course of action rather than another. All of us feel fear at the prospect of bodily harm and death, but the brave person behaves one way and the coward another. Kierkegaard’s aesthete, in his Either/Or, as well as all of us in certain moods, imagines a mindless pursuit of pleasure, self-contained and untrammeled by an antecedent warning or subsequent remorse. This could only come about if we had natural appetites and nothing more -- that is, if we were mere animals. But we have minds as well. “Are passions then the pagans of the soul, reason alone baptized?” This is the question, taken from the English poet Edward Young, that is the motto of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.
Only the good can attract us, but some goods are merely the satisfaction of hunger or thirst or the sexual drive. If these desires were all we were, there would be no moral task. The moral task is to integrate the pursuit of these goods into the overall good of the acting person. The beasts in the first canto can be taken to stand for our natural appetites. If the pursuit of these is not subordinate to the judgment of reason, it is disordered. That is what moral evil is, the disordered pursuit of a good. That is what has taken Dante from the true path and brought him into a dark wood, into the misery of sin. And we all know what that’s like.
The precise correlation of the three beasts with particular natural appetites in Dante is not easy. Sometimes the leopard is interpreted as lust, sometimes avarice. Efforts have been made to employ the Aristotelian division of incontinence, malice, and bestiality to identify the beasts as providing the rationale for the three main circles of hell. There are political interpretations as well -- the leopard is Florence, the lion the king of France, and the wolf the Roman curia. That wider possible significance underscores an important fact. Although Dante finds himself alone in the dark wood, he is not the autonomous individual of recent moral theory. For one thing, he is a Florentine, citizen of a particular city and member of a definite family. One doesn’t get into moral trouble in isolation; one cannot get out of it alone. We are by nature social and political animals.
A figure appears, and Dante appeals to him for help. “Have mercy on me.” Dante cries, “be ye man or a shade of man.” The figure answers. “I am no man, though man I was, my parents were from Lombardy and both from the country of Mantua.” Mantua me genuit. Born during the reign of Caesar, he flourished under Augustus in a time of false and lying gods.
Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto
figliuol d’Anchise che venne da Troia,
poi che ‘l superbo Ilïón fu combusto.
(Inf. I.73-75)
“I was a poet, and sang of that upright son of Anchises who came from Troy after the burning of that pride of Ilion.” The figure is Virgil, the poet of the Aeneid, the great epic that tells of the founding of Rome. Dante is overwhelmed.
Tu se’ lo mio maestro et ‘l mio autore,
tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi
lo bello stilo che m’ha farro onore.
(Inf. I.85-87)
“But you are my master, my author,” Dante cries, “the one source of that style for which I am so honored.” That said, Dante calls attention to the beasts that menace him, to which Virgil replies that he must undertake another route if he wishes to escape this savage place. As for the beasts, here some scholars find the basis for a political interpretation, since Virgil predicts that a greyhound will come, defeat the beasts, and restore Italy.{12}
Vergil offers himself as guide and gives a preview of the journey before them. He will take Dante down through a realm where he will hear the howls of desperation of those who lament their “second death.” On they will travel to another realm, where there are souls who can accept their pain because it is temporary and a prelude to their joining the blessed. As for the blessed, Virgil tells Dante, he will need another guide to go among them. At that point a soul more worthy than Virgil will become Dante’s guide. “I’ll leave you in her care when I depart.”
The schema of the Commedia is all here. To escape the dark wood, Dante must descend into hell, the realm of despair, go on to purgatory, where hope consoles the souls encountered there, and then on to the realm of the blessed, guided by an unnamed woman.
Why Virgil? There is a plethora of reasons for Dante’s choice. The first is the one first given. Dante is a poet who learned from the master Virgil the pleasing style that has brought him fame. Who could better guide a poet than another poet? Moreover, when they visit Limbo, the first circle of hell and Virgil’s permanent home, from which he has come to aid Dante, our author will be admitted into the company of the greatest poets as their peer. All this is presented as more or less matter of fact -- another indication of Dante’s estimate of his achievement as a poet. There is no false modesty here, sometimes none at all. Another reason is that in the sixth book of the Aeneid Virgil had taken Aeneas into the underworld to see once more his late beloved father, Anchises. Scholars note the parallels and discrepancies between the underworld of the Aeneid and that into which we are about to descend. In any case, Virgil is a knowledgeable guide.
Yet what an odd choice to guide Dante to heaven -- though only to it, not into it, as Virgil himself remarks. As a pagan, unredeemed by the grace of Christ, paradise is closed to him, and that means human happiness in its fullness cannot be his. Virgil will lead Dante to Limbo, which is his eternal place, and there they will meet other good pagans, Plato and Aristotle and poets such as Horace and Homer. Limbo is the place reserved for those who had only the light of natural reason to guide them through life. The Jews had revelation, of course, a covenant with God, and will find half the celestial rose in the Paradiso allotted to them. The difference between the sons of Abraham and pagans is that the Israelites lived in the expectation of the Messiah. Thus, when Christ came the Jews could be saved by his sacrifice; they had anticipated the grace won by Christ.
Note that there are no alternative paths to ultimate happiness. There is but one path, the one on which we follow Christ and by participating in his grace can merit salvation. Nothing like the longing for the Messiah can be expected among the pagans. But if Limbo is where the highest natural happiness is enjoyed, the place does not seem joyful. Indeed, there is a melancholy air about it. This is due, as Virgil himself makes clear, to the fact that its inhabitants have become aware that, through no fault of their own, they have missed out on supernatural happiness.
We may think that there is something unjust about this. Why were the chosen people chosen and the pagans left to their own devices? Isn’t it unfair of God not to admit pagans into heaven? This difficulty only makes sense if we think that paradise, that is, supernatural happiness, the sharing in God’s very life and the sight of God even as we are seen by Him, is naturally owed to anyone. But paradise is wholly gratuitous. Things are owed to us because of our nature, but supernatural happiness, as the adjective suggests, is not among them. A pagan in Limbo might lament that he was born where and when he was, but of course he has no assurance that, born later and elsewhere, he would have availed himself of the opportunity for salvation.
Limbo is the acknowledgment that many pagans lived good lives simply in the light of natural reason. There is less talk of Limbo in Catholic circles now, and Vatican II’s dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, seems to open up extraordinary ways in which non-Catholic Christians, Jews, Muslims, and even atheists might win through to paradise. If they live by their best lights, Lumen Gentium suggests, this can enable them to participate, even unbeknownst, in the grace of Christ. Whether or not this is a development of doctrine, the essential point remains true. There is no salvation except through the grace of Christ. Other medievals did not hesitate to canonize the good pagans; Peter Abelard was particularly prodigal in this regard, and Virgil appears in the stained glass windows of Chartres. But however the matter is approached, a great mystery still lurks here. Why are some given special opportunities and help, and others are not? The mystery of predestination accompanies us through Dante’s pilgrim voyage and is one of the last topics dealt with in the poem.
In any case, one of Virgil’s roles -- or one aspect of his role -- is to represent reason, that is, the natural order. Plato and Aristotle had lasting things to say about our overall aim in life and how it can be attained, given our nature. They lay out the virtue and character required of us if we are to do the right deed for the right reason in the fluctuating circumstances of life. But what relevance can Plato’s Politics or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have if we are called to an end undreamt of by the philosophers? “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the Good News, and not to preach that in terms of philosophy in which the crucifixion of Christ cannot be expressed: (1Cor. 1:17).
In commenting on this passage, St. Thomas remarks that the happiness presented and discussed by Aristotle is no longer the ultimate end of human existence. Thomas who was a great admirer of Aristotle and wrote commentaries on a dozen of his treatises, did not regard the philosophy of the ancients as having merely historical interest -- that is, he did not think of it merely what people used to think who had not heard the Good News. For him, the relationship between natural and supernatural happiness is very similar to the more general relationship between nature and “supernature,” or divine grace. In the familiar phrase, grace builds on nature and does not destroy it. Grace presupposes nature.
If we ask ourselves what man’s ultimate end is, we can mean either of two questions. First, what is meant by the phrase “ultimate end”? And second, given that meaning, what could serve as or play the role of ultimate end for us? If by our ultimate end we mean happiness -- that which when obtained is sufficient, requires nothing else, is stable, and so forth -- we can then go on to ask whether pleasure or power or wealth or fame and the like could fulfill the requirements of an ultimate end. Both Plato and Aristotle provide conclusive reasons why none of these can be the be-all and end-all of human life. Can anything?
Since rational activity is peculiar to man, Aristotle observed, man’s fulfillment or happiness will lie in performing this function well. “Virtue” is the substantive name for this adverbial modification of our distinctive activity. A good physician is one who performs the work of the physician well: a good novelist is a writer who produces excellent novels; and so on. Once we know the function, we know that the virtue or perfect accomplishment of that function is what makes the one performing it good.
The fly in the ointment here is that “rational activity” seems to have a plurality of meanings, not just one. Thus, if the virtue or excellence of rational activity is the key to happiness, a plurality of virtues must be required for human happiness, unless perhaps we want to say that only one of the many meanings of “rational activity” counts.{13}
My point in recalling such debates is, first, to suggest another reason for the choice of Virgil as Dante’s guide, and second, to underscore the layered approach that Dante takes to human life and its destiny. Only the union with God that is promised us as a reward for faith fulfills the notion of an ultimate end perfectly. What the ancient philosophers sketched as fulfilling the notion is true up to a point, but it is inadequate. It is true to the degree that it is a correct account of human nature and of what would fulfill it. It is inadequate because we see that such a virtuous life only imperfectly realizes the notion of the ultimate end. Thomas thought he had found in Aristotle the admission that his account of what constitutes our happiness does not meet the requirements of an ultimate end. That is, the happiness we can naturally achieve is imperfect.
Like Thomas Aquinas, Dante views the natural as presupposed by the supernatural and as entering into the richer Christian vision of human destiny, as a constituent of it. The sometimes puzzling intermingling by Dante of pagan mythology and Christian doctrine underscores this view. Thomas sought to create a synthesis of all that could be known by natural reason together with the truths learned only by way of revelation. Dante undertakes a similar task in the Commedia.
Dante and Virgil, as we have seen, will travel first through the realm of despair, where dwell those who have died “a second death,” having lost not only mortal but also (a happy) immortal life; and then on to a realm where they will find, despite the fire, souls content in the hope that they will eventually move on to the third realm, that of the blessed. In the realm of the blessed Dante will need another guide. Virgil adds (in a puzzling statement) that the ruler of that realm does not wish Virgil to enter it, “because I rebelled against his law” (Inf. 1.125). {14}
Now we have two guides, Virgil and the as yet unnamed woman who will take over after the first two realms. Why both? (As we shall see, there is yet a third guide in the last three cantos of the poem, and lesser guides and mentors along the way.) Virgil gives his answer in the second canto.
The canto begins with an invocation of the Muses, indicating, as does the presence of Virgil, Dante’s blending of the classical and the Christian. The fact that Virgil told the story of the founding of Rome -- the destiny of Aeneas chosen for him in the celestial empyrean, that is, in heaven -- and the fact that the Roman empire was providentially the setting for Christianity, must explain Dante’s choice of Virgil. That is, Virgil celebrated Rome, the city “u’ siede il successor del maggior Piero”: “where the successor of the great Peter sits” (Inf. 2.24), and to which Paul came as missionary.
The mention of Paul provides Dante with a way of expressing his fear at the prospect Virgil has put before him. “Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono”: “I’m not Paul” (Inf. 2.32). To allay that fear, Virgil tells why he has come to rescue Dante.
Io era tra color che son sospesi
e donna mi chiamò beata e bella,
tal che di comandare io la richiesi.
Lucevan li occhi suoi più che la stella;
e cominciommi a dir soave e piana,
con angelica voce, in sua favela.
(Inf. 2.52-57)
I was among those who are suspended (in Limbo), where a lady
came to see me so blessed and beautiful that I begged to obey her
command. Her eyes were brighter than the stars and she began to
speak to me with a sweet angelic voice.
Virgil thus presents himself as a volunteer as well; how could he not wish to serve so fair and beautiful a woman who speaks in such angelic tones? She begins with equal courtesy, telling the Mantuan poet that his fame will endure as long as the world itself, and then gives Virgil his commission.
L’amico mio, e non della ventura,
nella diserta piaggia è impedito
si nel cammin, che volt’ è per paura;
e temo che non sia già si smarrito,
ch’io mi sia tardi al soccorso levata,
per quel ch’i’ ho di lui nel cielo udito.
(Inf. 2.61-66)
My friend not by chance is hindered on his way on a deserted
hillside and because of fear has been turned away; I fear that he
has already become so lost that I may be too late to help him,
or so I have heard of him in heaven.
The speaker identifies herself as Beatrice, and we have no trouble identifying who her friend is from the opening of the previous canto. If it had not occurred to us before, we now see the nature of Dante’s perilous condition at the outset of the Commedia. The physical dangers, the menacing beasts, point to a greater evil: that he has gone so far astray that her help will come too late. All this she has heard of him in heaven, she says, and then, in partial explanation of the choice of Virgil, adds that poet can speak to poet persuasively. This will console her, and she adds that only her love has led her to Limbo from the place to which she longs to return. When she returns, she promises Virgil to sing his praises to the Lord.
Is Beatrice, then, the principal cause of the journey that lies ahead, the journey that has as its aim to rescue Dante from impending perdition and recall him to the right path? Beatrice tells Virgil that there is another gentle lady who, although in heaven, weeps from distress at Dante’s condition. That gentle lady turned to St. Lucy and told her that her “faithful one” had need of her, whereupon Lucy came to Beatrice and wondered why she had not gone to Dante’s aid. This visit from Lucy motivates Beatrice, of whom Lucy says that no one in the world is more concerned for Dante’s welfare. Now here she is, braving hell itself, in order to enlist Virgil’s help.
Thus, a hierarchy of three women stands behind the choice of Virgil. Beatrice has been alerted -- or reminded -- by Lucy of the perilous condition into which the man who loves her has fallen. But Lucy, too, has been prompted by another, who weeps because of the conditions into which Dante and so many others have fallen.
[Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange
di questo ‘mpedimento …
(Inf. 2.94-95)
There is a gentle lady in heaven who weeps at this distress.
With this woman we come to the end of the chain. She, who is forever nameless in hell (as is Christ), is of course the Blessed Virgin Mary, introduced in terms of the compassion that she feels for poor sinners.
It is noteworthy that Mary is first introduced in the Comedy as the compassionate one, as she who weeps at our distress. Celle qui pleure -- she who weeps -- is the way Our Lady of La Salette is described. Mary is the Mother of Mercy who longs for all to share in the great happiness that has been won for them by her Son. It is also important to note that she is not our sole mediator. She is only the first among created mediators. There are also the saints, such as St. Lucy, and Beatrice, whose invocation on our behalf is so important in the economy of salvation. Mary describes Dante to Lucy as “your faithful one,” indicating the devotion that Dante had to this martyr of Syracuse who had become the patron of those with eye trouble (one of Dante’s afflictions). But the heavenly scene put before us makes clear that it is Mary, first and above all, who is moved by Dante’s dangerous condition. The dark wood is clearly a metaphor for his sinful condition, and Mary, moved to pity by his state, speaks to Lucy who in turn speaks to Beatrice. And Beatrice descends into hell and speaks to Virgil. Mary, however, is at the beginning of Dante’s pilgrim journey and the principal explanation for it.
Mary’s appearance may seem merely a cameo, a device to get the action started, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mary’s distress is communicated to Lucy and Beatrice, and in each case a gentle chiding is involved. How could Lucy fail to notice the plight of her faithful one? Lucy in turn asks Beatrice, How she could forget the one who loved her so? Can she not hear his anguished cry as he wars against the death that menaces him? This death is above all that “second death” of those in hell. Lucy and Beatrice may have forgotten Dante, but Mary has not, and out of pity she calls the others into action.
For all that, Mary seems to drop out of the picture while Virgil and Dante descend through the circle of hell to the lake of ice at the center of the world, in which Lucifer is frozen. There is one other allusion to her intercession on the way down, but, again, she is never named in hell. That would be as unfitting as invoking the name of Christ in hell. This is the realm where all hope has been abandoned. If Dante is being led through it, it is because he needs this way to reach his final destination. He needs a vivid reminder of the state of souls after death and how their state is explained by the free acts they performed while alive. It is a dramatic and moral lesson, meant to lead him from the misery of sin to eternal happiness. And not just him, of course. This singular Florentine poet stands for all of us, and Mary’s concern for him embraces each of us. Only after Dante and Virgil, having reached the frozen pit of hell and ascended through the opposite hemisphere, “emerge to see again the stars” (Inf. 34.139) does the role of Mary become central again, until, at the end of the Commedia, her intercession gains for Dante a glimpse of the glory that awaits in heaven.
{2} Guglielmo Gorni, one of the most helpful of Dante scholars, has dedicated an entire book to this opening canto of the Comedy. See Gorni, Dante nella Selva, Il Primo canto della Commedia (Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1995).
{3} Maurice Baring, in Have You Anything To Declare? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), pp. 127-29, noting that it was under the influence of the German higher criticism of the Bible that Ernest Renan lost his faith, adds intriguingly that many, in following the course of Renan’s argument, have been led into the faith the great apostate lost. Baring also suggests that if only Renan had lived to see what such criticism did to Shakespeare, he might himself have retraced his steps.
{4} C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
{5} According to Robert Hollander on the letter and the controversies it has generated, this approach is reasonably well-grounded. See Robert Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
{6} Convivio 1.1. See also Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie (Montreal: Vrin, 1970).
{7} Cicero, in his De senectute (On Old Age), a favorite of Dante’s, discusses the aetas media in section 76. A current Italian translation of Cicero, facing the Latin text, renders this unabashedly as “si trova ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’” that is, “finds himself ‘Midway this way of life we’re bound upon.’” Cicerone, De senectute, De amicitia, a cura Guerino Pacitti, Classici Greci e Latini 109 (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1965), p. 73.
{8} Thomas’s commentary on 2 Corinthians can be found in Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, ed. Raphaelis Cai, O.P., editio 8 revisa, vol. 1 (Turin, Marietti, 1953).
{9} The jingle runs,
George Brush is my name;The proper name and home town, of course, varied with the pupil. See Thornton Wilder. Heaven’s My Destination (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935).
America’s my nation;
Ludington’s my dwelling place
And heaven’s my destination.
{10} In a much later book The Eighth Day, addressing a more jaded reader, Wilder ends his fascinating story thus: “History is one tapestry. No eye can venture to compass more than a hand’s breadth….There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some” Here the sentence and the book ends. One is tempted to complete it thus: Some, like Dante, with a vision infused with faith, give us the truth of the matter.
{11} Thus begins the fifth of the “Divine Poems.” John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 295.
{12} This veltro, or greyhound, who will come and solve the political problems of the age can serve as an indicator of the risks of scholarship. Since Virgil is making a prediction, it would seem fairly easy to identify this savior ex post facto. But perhaps more ink has been spilled on this single reference than on any other.
{13} I am summarizing the opening five questions of Summa theologiae IaIIae (First Part of the Second Part), and Nicomachean Ethics 1.13 and St. Thomas’s commentary thereon.
{14} This seems strong, if Virgil was simply born at a time and place where the Good News could not have come to him. Elsewhere, Virgil stresses that he is in Limbo through no fault of his own.