Prof: With Canto XXVI, the purgation of the pilgrim is
completed.
He has been going through the various stages of Purgatory:
from pride, as you remember,
to the sin of lust and in XXVII,
he crosses a wall of fire, so that he can be cleansed
completely of all the stains that may be residual on his soul
and approach and enter the Garden of Eden.
This is the action that takes place in XXVII and Canto XXVII
comes to a close with a passage that I would like to read to you
and comment on.
It's at the end of Canto XXVII and these are really the last
words that Virgil will speak.
We will not hear from him again.
In fact, from now on, the pilgrim will be entirely on
his own.
There's no dependency on him.
There is a sort of--actually very personal moment now that
starts and we'll see the drama that goes with time of--
this attainment of self-mastery and Dante goes on dramatizing.
These are the last words that he speaks from lines 130 on,
"The temporal fire and the eternal thou hast seen,"
meaning Purgatory and Hell which lasts forever,
"my son, and art come to a part where of
myself I discern no further."
This is the limitation of Virgil's vision.
This is--from now on he will be following--even the geometry,
the arrangement of their journey will be completely
reversed.
Up to now, the pilgrim has been a disciple, therefore,
one who follows the vestiges of the teacher.
Now the teacher with Statius will be following Virgil.
He sees no further.
And actually I can anticipate for you the pathos of Virgil's
departure-- sudden departure--when he,
the pilgrim, most wants him and needs him,
because Beatrice is approaching and the terror that--
with a terror that Beatrice represents for the pilgrim,
the pilgrim will turn back and his eyes will never see Virgil
again.
Virgil has disappeared an instant before he vanishes,
an instant before Beatrice arrives, as if there's a hiatus.
Dante is dramatizing the hiatus between the two guides and the
two particular stages of his own self-knowledge and life.
Let me continue with this, "Take henceforth thy
pleasure for guide."
What an extraordinary line: "take then henceforth thy
pleasure for guide."
This is the poem of desire in the sense that what pushes the
pilgrim to go on and impels him to this journey of discovery and
self-discovery is really desire.
Desire is the moving force in him, but now the language
changes.
Now in a sense a certain--the first part of the journey is
over and pleasure can become the guide, the guidance of his own
pleasure, what he likes.
That is to say, in a sense, it's an adumbration
of free will.
We'll talk more about the relationship between actually
pleasure and happiness, the way Dante will go on
dramatizing it and thinking about in Paradise.
"Thou hast come forth from the steep and narrow ways.
See the sun that shines on thy brow.
See the grass," near the earthly paradise,
"See the grass, the flowers,
and trees which the ground here brings forth of itself
alone."
It is as, by Dante, by taking his own pleasure as
his guidance, he now has reached an edenic
place.
Virgil is speaking of the pilgrim as if he were speaking
of the ground that thrives until the ground, the land produces
spontaneously.
Now he's capable at spontaneous action and spontaneous
decisions.
"Till their fair eyes come rejoicing which weeping may
come--made me come to thee thou mayst sit or go among
them."
Two details are expressed by these lines: one is Virgil is
recapitulating in many ways this first part of the journey,
the journey that began in Inferno I and ends here
in Purgatorio, in the Garden of Eden.
It began in the wilderness and ends in the Garden.
This is the first step of--the first stage of the journey.
You can now--he remembers, that's how recapitulates
"the fair eyes...
that made me," that begged me to come to your
help when you were lost and shipwrecked on the wilderness of
Inferno I; so now Virgil is going back to
that.
The second element is that this is the exercise:
"Now thou mayest sit or go among them."
Now this is exactly the major temptation for the pilgrim.
Is he going to think that the journey to the Garden of Eden,
which is a journey ahead, forward, but a journey back in
time?
The Garden of Eden is behind all of us and yet it lies ahead
of us.
The past is really the future.
He must decide whether he can go on or sit here.
It's a first decision.
Is he going to think that the journey is the journey to the
complacencies of the Garden, to the beauty and attraction of
the Garden?
Or is he going to turn, as he actually will--we can say
that because we have Paradise,
that he writes--into an anti-pastoral poet.
That is to say one, a poet who is always
questioning the sense of arrival and is always going on to new
departures that's really what the--
Virgil is telling him.
Now this is up to you; you have arrived here;
you have arrived there where I am, where Virgil is,
or you can even go further.
There's a peculiar language that resonates behind this kind
of moral dilemma which is placed in front of the pilgrim's mind.
It's called felix culpa, I don't know if you have--those
of you who are readers of Milton may know what I'm talking about.
Felix culpa, the idea that the fall of man
was actually a happy fall, because it allows human beings
to even want to go beyond it.
That's exactly what is resonating behind this.
You may sit and therefore turn into an Adam figure,
who is going back to the beauty and innocence which the pilgrim
doesn't have really.
He has a wisdom now of the Garden or you can go on even
further than that.
Then here is the final moment of a circle which now takes over
for the Purgatorio itself: "No longer expect
word or sign from me."
That's exactly--the teaching of Virgil has been completed and
then he ends with: "Free,
upright and whole is thy will, and it were a fault not to act
on its bidding; therefore, over thyself I crown
and miter thee."
This is the attainment of the free will so that the whole
Purgatorio moves between two poles: the pole of liberty
which was Cato's object, the object of his quest through
the wilderness of the Libyan desert,
and now the attainment of the free will which allows the
pilgrim to view it as a condition,
not just a point of arrival, but the necessary pre-condition
for moral life.
You can never really have an autonomous moral life only in
the measure in which you think you can have the free will.
Now the pilgrim is his own responsibility.
Let me say that once he's under the guidance of Beatrice the
issues, especially when it comes to
Paradise, there will be moral problems
while he is in the Garden of Eden we are going to look at in
a moment, but in Paradise
aesthetics takes over.
It's no longer an ethical problem.
Dante refers, you may have heard about recent
philosophers who think that life is arranged--
or knowledge is arranged--according to stages:
the aesthetic, the ethical and then the
theological.
Dante reverses this, the point that seems to be the
most mature is that dealing with the aesthetic one,
which others may view as the superficial,
the elementary one, the one where we are--
perceptions are going to be engaged and then at the time of
disengagement even before you can get involved and mature in
ethical experiences.
Dante changes; there are no ethical dilemmas
in Paradise.
Once you are in Paradise you can only enjoy and get to
know the world.
All the problems are intellectual problems,
not moral issues.
"So free upright and whole is the will,
and it were a fall not to act on its bidding,
therefore, over thyself I crown and miter thee."
This is a kind of secular coronation ceremony,
the crown--the royal and the episcopal--royal and the bishop,
which is a way of consecrating.
Virgil acts as a kind of lay priest,
consecrating the attainment of self-mastery in this moment
which could become a moment of self-assertion and yet Dante is
very careful in how he navigates all of this.
Now from Canto XXVIII to Canto XXXIII, which is the end of the
poem, we come to an area which is another fragment.
You already read a kind of segment which I will call the
literary segment that-- with Professor Lummus whom I'm
very grateful to-- covered and explained to you
and did with you last time.
That's a literary segment that goes from XXI to XXVI.
Now from XXVIII to XXXIII we have a different segment which
is--let's call it a pastoral oasis.
It's also the representation of what in classical literature is
called locus amoenus.
You may have seen adumbrations of this even in Limbo.
That's one of them, this lovely spot outside of the
world of history where something of relaxation can take place and
it's also which Dante combines actually with a biblical
hortus, enclosed garden,
the Song of Songs, for instance,
or the Garden of Eden hortus conclusus.
The interesting thing about Dante's representation of the
locus amoenus is it's never really outside of history;
it becomes.
That's the assumption: you have the garden and you
have the city.
This is the dual imagination whenever life becomes unbearable
in the city you take off and go into a villa in the garden
somewhere and find a relief, aesthetic relief from the
hustle--the time-- of hustle and bustle of the city.
Dante combines the two.
There's no easy position between them,
in the sense that the Garden of Eden where he finds himself,
is going to be the place of--a very problematical place,
a place where the pilgrim is engaged in a self-confrontation.
He experiences some actually terrifying moments in the
encounter with Beatrice, so the Garden of Eden is
represented in Canto XXVIII and I want to read a few passages.
This is--you see how this representation is carried out,
"Eager now to search,"
I'm reading from XXVIII, lines 1 and following,
and I'll go pretty slowly over this: "Eager now to search
within and about the divine forest green and dense,
which tempered to my eyes the new day,
I left the slope without waiting longer,
taking the level very slowly over the ground which gave
fragrance on every side."
It's the classical--this is--the warehouse of the
pastoral tradition is found here, a fragrance;
there's a running brook, deep shades,
the birds seem to be rivaling human beings,
introducing songs; plentitude of the natural order
and even the innocence of the natural order,
with the exception that Dante comes and though he has been
cleansed and gone through the wall of fire to further purify
him, he is not the kind of new Adam.
He carries with him the stains of experience and the stains of
history, so there is desire that acts in him, but let me
continue.
"A sweet air that was without change was striking on
my brow with the force only of a gentle breeze,
by which the fluttering bows all bent freely to the part
where the holy mountain throws its first shadow,
yet were not so much swayed from their erectness that the
little birds in the tops did not still practice all their arts,
but, singing, they greeted the morning hours
with full gladness among the leaves,
which kept such undertone to their rhymes as gathers from
branch to branch in the pine wood of the Chiassi shore when
Aeolus looses the Sirocco."
The interesting thing which is some kind of--
the poignancy of the autobiography and--
is that Dante is imagining the Garden of Eden as the pine wood
near Ravenna, which has completely
disappeared since then, but you can imagine how he
would take the morning walks in the pine trees around the city
and on the way to the sea.
And that, to him, was the garden:
this mixture of the ordinary and the great sublime
imagination.
That's what I'm--I think he wants to convey to us.
And now he continues, and I will ask you a question.
I want you to think about what I'm going to ask you,
because you're expected to have a shock of recognition in the
next three lines, and these are the lines in
English.
I'll read them in Italian, another little homage to my
m'avean trasportato i lenti passi
dentro alla selva antica tanto, ch'io
non potea rivedere ond'io mi 'ntrassi
che 'nver sinistra con sue picciole onde
And in English is: "Already my small steps
had brought me so far within the ancient wood that I could not
see the place where I had entered,
and lo, my going farther was prevented by stream with which
its little waves bent leftwards the grass that sprang on its
bank."
This is my question, what is this--what do these
lines remind you of?
They are meant to remind you of something.
The very beginning of Inferno.
Very good--which means that this is now really a new
departure for him, which means that the Garden of
Eden is exactly the wilderness that we saw--
that we left behind, seen from a different
perspective, which means that the
supernatural world is the natural world with a different--
to a different lens and different perspective.
This is--and is now re-enacting exactly the drama of
Inferno I; it's no shipwreck.
The mountain has been climbed.
Remember that he tried to climb the mountain?
The mountain has been climbed.
A new departure is going to take place.
Here we go then with this idea of the--
that's what I mean the anti-pastoral Dante:
the poet who dismisses and refuses,
and repudiates all the temptations of gardens,
all the temptations of premature halting,
premature self-enclosure into the fiction of gardens.
So this is really the strongest element that I would have to
point out about what's happening in Canto XXVIII.
Now what does he see?
"All the waters that are purest here would seem to have
some defilement in them beside that,
which conceals nothing, though it flows quite dark
under the perpetual shade, which never lets sun or moon
shine there.
With feet I stopped and with eyes passed over beyond the
streamlet to look at the great variety of fresh flowering
boughs, and there appeared to me,"
and the word, now, is really with a power and
force of an apparition, another epiphany of beauty and
love to him, "as appears of a sudden a
thing that for wonder drives away every other thought,
a lady all alone, who went singing and culling
flower from flower from which all her way was painted."
This is Matelda, as you have read,
the woman who goes dancing, singing, and gathering flowers.
A true picture a fascination, aesthetic fascination for him.
To give you the sense of how some resonance--
and in case you're stilling for a term that--
the final paper topic you might want to read--
there is a poem--there is a traditional poetry which is
The pastourelle was--a big practitioner is Dante here.
That's what he's writing.
It's the idea of the knight who goes to the woods or the meadow
and meets a young shepherdess-- gets off--it's very sensual,
and woos-- off the horse and woos this
young woman and usually ends with a kind of pun on the
promises of the ecstasies of paradise.
So it's an erotic kind of song.
The other practitioner of this genre was Dante's own friend,
Guido Cavalcanti.
Dante is using the mode and really definitely taking his
distance from him.
There is--this is a love scene.
There's nothing of the overtones of violence--
an erotic violence--that Guido Cavalcanti had celebrated in his
own version of the pastourelle,
a genre which is common to them.
This instead is what he says: "Pray, fair lady,
who warmest thyself in love's beam."
Now Dante has just come out of the circle of lust.
He has been cleansing himself and yet, this is the lingering
trace of his history, the lingering trace of his
body, and his humanity.
Here he goes through the Garden of Eden as a fallen man who is
redeemed and not quite redeemed, certainly not in the restored
or reinstated into the innocence of the pre-lapsarian garden.
"If I am to believe the looks which are wont to be
testimony of the heart,' I said to her,
'may it please thee to come forward to this stream so near
that I may hear what thou singest.
Thou makest me recall where and what was Proserpina,
at the time her mother," Ceres,
"lost her and she is praying."
That's the first--there is a series of three mythological
images, this is the first.
I think of you as Proserpina, but it's also a story of
Proserpina, as you know.
Well it's stated in the text: the story of the young woman
who is walking-- picking flowers on the plains
of Enna in Sicily and then death comes and takes her away.
It's a kind of death itself, loving human beings and taking
them, that's one myth.
The second one is "a lady turns in the dance with feet
close together" and so on,
and I skip a few lines: "And I do not believe such
light shone from beneath the lids of Venus when,
through strange mischance, she was pierced by her
son."
The second image, I think, it's more telling.
It's the story of Venus wounded by the arrows of Cupid and
falling in love with Cupid.
I think it's more telling because it's Dante's way of
casting, without going into
psychoanalysis--a psychoanalytical explanation--
that Dante is casting the Garden of Eden as also a desire
to return to the state of infancy of the child with the
mother, only to understand that this is
really a fantasy that would lead him nowhere.
And in fact, the third image is that of an
erotic image again, but one of distance.
"Three paces the river kept us apart;
the Hellespont where Xerxes passed,
a bridle still on all men's boasts,
did bear more hatred from Leander for its swelling waters
between Sestos and Abydos, than that from me because it
did not open then."
So, this barrier between Matelda and the pilgrim.
Between Dante and the fantasy of what the Garden of Eden may
be, the mother here is kept.
And Dante has to continue.
He goes on explain--she goes on explaining what this--
how the mechanics, so to say, about the Garden of
Eden and then the canto ends in--
and I'll look at this from lines 140 and following.
"Those," line 140 and following,
"Those who in old times sang of the age of gold and of
its happy state, perhaps dreamed on Parnassus of
this place; here the human root was
innocent, here was lasting spring and every fruit,
this is the nectar of which each tells.
I turned then right round to my poets and saw that they had
heard the last sentence with a smile.
Then I brought my eyes back to the fair lady."
From Dante's point of view, the perplexity that he feels,
is the perplexity of Virgil and the perplexity of Statius.
They know no more than he does; he knows no more than they do.
What is the other--the burden of this passage is that the--
clearly Dante is alluding to the bucolic quality of this
place, but it also suggests that in
passing that the ancient-- actually, he says that the
ancient poets prefigured the Garden of Eden in the fabulous
visions of the golden age and the Parnassus.
He's establishing a link between the poetic visions and
this encounter that he has in the Garden of Eden,
both projections of the poetic imagination.
So it also means that the Garden of Eden can be like the
bucolic fantasy of the poets and Parnassus.
We skip XXIX which is the story of--
really the world history here from--
it's an allegory that pageant of revelation and I will move to
Canto XXX which will take us a little bit of time.
This is the canto predictably where--since Beatrice is the one
who is linked to the number three, this is the canto where
Beatrice will arrive.
And surprisingly, for those of you who are lovers
of this open or hidden symmetry in the poem,
Canto XXX of Paradise is also the canto where Beatrice
will disappear.
Her residence in the poem lasts for exactly XXXIII cantos.
Clearly it's sort of an accident: her name is three
times the good; she's in the Vita nuova
as linked with three.
It's this kind of way of--the arcane significance of her
presence in the pilgrim's--in the lover's life.
A canto that describes a double drama,
the drama of Virgil's disappearance and the arrival of
Beatrice, a change of the guard as it
were, in many ways, but you have two different
moods.
One of elegy for the loss of Virgil and the other one of
sacred terror at the arrival of Beatrice.
So it begins, he hears singing,
line 70: Veni, sponsa de Libano,
which, of course, is an echo from the Song of
Songs.
So the erotics of the previous canto continues now here.
The Song of Songs is notoriously one of a sublime
love poem.
It continues here in Canto XXX in anticipation of the arrival
of Beatrice.
"As the blessed shall rise at the last trump,
each eager for his tomb, the reclad voice singing
Hallelujah, there rose up on the divine
chariot at the voice of so great an elder,
a hundred ministers and messengers of eternal life,
who all cried: 'Benedictus qui
venis.'" This is now an allusion,
as maybe your notes will tell you--
should tell you--to the greetings of Jesus in the garden
when he comes-- I'm sorry--to Jerusalem and he
says, 'Benedictus qui venit,'
which means that Beatrice-- it means a number of things.
First of all, a typological connection
between garden and city which we have already been seeing here.
The garden is not opposed to the political,
let's say, to the city, it is the history and the
garden come together in Dante's imagination.
But there is a further typology that Beatrice comes the way
Jesus came into history.
Beatrice will come into the soul of the lover.
So that she is surrounded, she is wrapped in a kind of
aura of Christological language and she will become,
let's say, grace; the way one can experience
grace in the world through this kind of direct love onto
oneself, so Latin again.
Then, a third image, and throwing flowers up around,
"Manibus o date lilia plenis,"
another three phrases in Latin.
He will go on translating a fourth one.
This is a more interesting image because it's taken
straight out of the Aeneid--
of Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid--
so it's already an homage to Virgil who is about to
disappear.
Do you see how the dramas here are sort of interwoven?
The idea of what the garden is and how is the garden related to
oneself and to one's history.
The idea of--the arrival and the meaning of Beatrice into the
life of the pilgrim and then also the loss of Virgil as a
poet and whatever his vision may be.
Whatever his vision may be is indicated by these fragments,
the fragments refer to the premature death that Virgil
celebrates in a very elegiac way in Book VI of the Aeneid
where Aeneas has gone down into Hades in order to see the whole
of history.
This is the descent into the oracles' father and to see
Anchises, that it is the future that is going to derive and stem
from him.
And Anchises will point out to him the shade of a young man who
sits on the side, his name is Marcellus,
who will die too young and then he will add,
"all throw lilies with open hands,"
the lily being a funereal symbol like the chrysanthemums,
for instance, or some such things in some
cultures.
It's an image of a premature death which clearly is linked
also to Beatrice, but who died in a premature
death, but also to Virgil, because it's the anticipation
of the loss of Virgil.
It's an elegiac way.
It is as if Virgil's vision was under the aegis of mortality and
finitude, as if Virgil could never really
be thought of as saved because his song is a song limited to
the world of death.
Let's see how this continues, "I once saw at the
beginning of the day the eastern parts all rosy and the rest of
the sky clear and beautiful and the sun's face come forth
shaded...
" etc.
"...
a lady appeared to me," this is Beatrice,
"girt with olive over a white veil."
Look at her elegance.
Listen to how he describes the colors, the fashions.
"Girt with olive over a white veil, clothed under a
green mantle with the color of a living flame.
And my spirit," I call that the Italian flag by
the way, the way she seems to be the
red, white and green, "and my spirit,
which now so long had not been overcome with awe,
trembling in her presence, without having more knowledge
by the eyes, through hidden virtue that came
from her, felt old love's great
power."
This is a rewriting of the poem of the autobiography of Dante
that you remember, reading the Vita nuova.
He's experiencing the presence of Beatrice through exactly the
kind of effects that she has over him: the courtly love,
the sweet new style, the trembling,
the inability to speak.
"As soon as the lofty virtue smote on my sight which
already had pierced me before I was out of my boyhood,
I turned to the left with the confidence of a little child
that runs to his mother when he's afraid or in distress,
to say to Virgil: 'Not a drop of blood is left in
me that does not tremble.
I know the marks of the ancient flame."
He's scared and turns to Virgil and is about to say,
and will say the famous lines, "I know the marks of the
ancient flame," which is a translation of the
words Dido will speak when she meets Aeneas in Hades:
"I know the marks of the ancient flame,"
another image of death and mortality taken from the
Aeneid.
Dante's linking Virgil with that kind of metaphor and that
sort of limitation of passion.
"But Virgil had left us bereft of him,
Virgil sweetest father, Virgil to whom I gave myself
for my salvation, nor did all the ancient mother
lost avail my cheeks washed with dew that they should not be
stained again with tears."
These are Beatrice's first words: "Dante,
because Virgil leaves thee weep not, weep not yet,
for thou must weep for another sword.'
Like an admiral who goes to poop and prow to see the men
that serve on the other ships and to hearten them in their
work, so on the left side of the
car--when I turned at the sound of my name,
which is noted here of necessity--I saw the lady who
first appeared to me veiled under the angelic festival
direct her eyes on me beyond the stream.
Already the veil that fell from her head,
and circled with Minerva's leaves, did not let her be
plainly seen, royally, still stern in her
bearing, she continued like one who
while he speaks holds back his hottest words:
'Look at me well; I am, I am indeed Beatrice.
How durst thou approach the mountain?
Didst thou not know that here man is happy?"
Well a number of things here--Virgil has disappeared.
Dante now is alone, so that's what I call the
self-confrontation with his past.
Who is Beatrice?
How am I going to account for my failings to Beatrice?
What is she going to expect of me?
She's harsh, the harsh language of love,
to the point if I may be a little bit too--
without really lessening the intensity of this passage,
this passage is pretty intense, but I feel that I have to tell
you a little-- to distract you a little bit
for ten seconds.
Borges has written about this passage, a beautiful essay on
this scene and he says, this is the only time that
Dante really made a mistake.
Because if Beatrice spoke to me the way he spoke--
she spoke to Virgil--to Dante--I'm sorry--
I would have said to her, look if that's the way you feel
I'm going to go right back and-- but Dante won't say that.
This is a contemporary visionary like Borges,
not Dante.
What we are told is that this is the first,
and only, time in the poem that Dante's name is heard.
Dante.
She will never call him Dante again and he has never been
called Dante before.
In other words, this the point where the poem,
from the epic that it has been, the epic of desire,
the epic of hope, the pilgrim,
lost the longing and memory, between hope and memory,
the poem of justice, now it becomes an autobiography.
Now it is his own story.
There is a shift in genre: from an epic story:
from the loss of Virgil, the epic poet,
to an autobiographical focus.
Dante, this is you, the specificity and
irreducibility of his own experience.
Dante, she says, and he will add that his name
is here registered out of necessity.
And what is the necessity that he has?
What's the necessity about speaking of oneself?
Why would one go on speaking of oneself?
One speaks of oneself because one wants to be exemplary to
others.
One believes that what one has experienced is crucial for
somebody else's self knowledge, somebody else's experience or
one wants to exempt vituperation from his own name.
It's--I'm paraphrasing Dante's words,
and the way he registers them in this philosophical text that
he writes called, the Banquet,
where he speaks of-- about himself.
And he says, there are two people who have
spoken about themselves in exemplary ways.
One is Augustine in the Confessions,
a book that I have asked you repeatedly to read and I have
read from, and the other one is Boethius
that I have alluded to in The Consolation of Philosophy.
The philosopher, who is in jail,
seeks to find comfort to the imputations of criminal conduct
laid on him, by thinking about philosophy
and talking about himself, and whereas,
Augustine, of course, is discussing his own
conversion.
The idea of the necessity is both--Dante is alluding to two
autobiographical texts, both of which make it
the--talking about oneself indeed,
as he calls it, a necessity.
So this now will continue with Canto XXX.
The first thing that she will do--Beatrice will do--and we
turn to Canto XXXI.
There's an account--and Canto XXX continues with the story of
his failures when she died as told in the Vita nuova,
he went on looking for someone who could replace Beatrice.
And now Dante goes on asking--actually indulging in a
confession, literally an Augustinian
moment, another part of the autobiographical moment and a
confessional form and this is-- let me just read a few lines
here, before we move on.
"Oh thou that art on that side of the sacred river,' she
began again, turning against me the point of
her speech which even with the edge that seemed sharp to me and
continuing without pause, 'say, say if this is true;
to such an accusation thy confession must needs be
joined.'
My faculties were so confounded that my voice began and was
spent before it was released from its organs.
She forebore a little, then said, 'What thinkest
thou?"-- A phrase that should remind
you--I know that it's too little and I will not too demanding,
but it should remind you of the fact that this is Francesca's,
this is what Dante was asking Francesca in Canto 5.
And now it's Beatrice--the roles are inverted--
who is asking Dante to resume as if it were that confession of
a failing that Francesca had undergone in Canto V of
Inferno.
"What thinkest thou?
Answer me, for the sad memories are not yet destroyed in thee by
the water.'
Confusion and fear mingled together drove forth from my
mouth a Yes such that to hear it there was need of sight.
As a crossbow shot with too great strain breaks the
cord," let me just go on.
"After," with line 36,
"After heaving a bitter sigh,
I had--I had hardly the voice to answer and the lips shaped it
with difficulty; weeping, I said:
'Present things with their false pleasure turned my steps
as soon as your face was hid."
The--he's alluding, exactly as he did in the
Vita nuova, to his change of heart as soon
as Beatrice died, and now she continues.
"And she: 'Hadst thou kept silence or
denied what thou confessest, thy fault would be not less
plain, by such a judge as it known,
but when from a man's own cheek breaks forth condemnation of his
sin, in our court the wheel turns
back against the edge.
Nevertheless, in order that thou mayst now
bear the shame of thy wandering, and another time hearing the
Sirens, be stronger,
lay aside the sowing of tears, and hearken;
so shalt thou hear how my buried flesh should have
directed thee the other way.
Never did nature or art set before thee beauty so great as
the fair members," etc.
The passage is extraordinary because it helps us to gloss
retrospectively what was a fairly mysterious allegory in
Purgatory.
You remember, where Dante meets the siren,
or dreams of the siren and then a lady appeared?
The siren was an allegory of a temptation, an erotic
temptation.
Someone who wants to lure the pilgrim and promises happiness.
Remember?
I'm going to make you happy, you need to go nowhere else and
now-- and then there was also the
appearance of a mysterious woman,
an equally mysterious woman who manages to send away the siren.
She wakes up the pilgrim and the journey there can continue.
As you recall, we are saying,
well we don't know who this mysterious woman is,
though there are a number of hints.
I had read this part of the poem before you had,
probably, and it's Beatrice.
Beatrice was a kind of--an allegory of the confrontation of
two women, the siren on the one hand,
and on the other hand, this unknown,
mysterious Beatrice.
Now this scene just makes it clear,
because what Beatrice says, you have to make a confession
in case shame, "Now bear the shame of thy
wanderings and another time, hearing the Sirens,
be stronger, lay aside the sowing of tears
and hearken; so shalt thou hear how my
buried flesh," and so on.
She is now glossing the scene of the siren that appeared in
Canto XIX, but there is more to it.
There is a little phrase that Dante's using,
or Beatrice is using for him: "another time,"
when you hear the siren, which means that the siren is
not just the encounter with the siren.
It's not just an event that happened in the past.
It can happen all over again.
"Another time."
In other words, it can still happen in the
future, which means that Dante's
conversion, which is really what this poem
has been telling us-- especially now that it has
reached this kind of autobiographical quality--
is not over and done with, that it is a conversion.
It has to be understood as an ongoing journey and that the
future itself is fraught with temptations,
just as much as it was fraught with temptations in the past.
What Dante is changing is the Augustinian idea of a conversion
that takes place once and for all and is making--
it is replacing that paradigm with a different paradigm,
a paradigm of a conversion in its openness to time,
with the idea that it is an ongoing process.
You have--look what the poetic technique--
as Dante is remembering a scene of the past and glossing that,
the encounter, the temptation of the siren
moved away, dispelled by the arrival of
Beatrice.
Now Beatrice is talking once again about the siren,
"another time," meaning,
I know who she was in Canto XIX of--
in the dream of Canto XIX--she may come back again.
In other words, once again, this is the
anti-pastoral imagination of the poet.
Do not believe that you can ever stop on the way.
Do not ever believe that there are truths that are going to be
unchallenged or untested in time.
I think that this is a way of truly casting Dante for what he
is; the poet of--open to the power
of the future and drawn to the idea that the future is still
part of his experience.
By the way, he goes on, which would really takes us--
but that's the essential point, "Truly that thou,"
this is line 55, "thou oughtest,
at the first shaft of deceptive things,
to have risen up after me who was such no longer.
No young girl or other vanity of such brief worth should have
bent thy wings downward to await more shots.
A young chick waits for two or three, but in vain is the net
spread," and so on.
This is another, literally, the allusion to the
poems that Dante wrote for what he called the pargoletta,
the little--the young woman that Beatrice seems to be--
remind him of.
Now we come to Canto XXXIII, the end of Purgatory--
the end of Purgatory, where I really want to focus on
one image and one image in particular,
which is the image of a prophecy that Beatrice will
make.
Beatrice--we are at the end of time--Purgatory,
and he goes on--I'm sorry, she goes on promising a
deliverer who will come.
The argument now is no longer about Dante himself;
it's an argument about history.
Is there a deliverance for history?
Is it possible for the whole human family to go back to a
condition that, at least if not the Garden of
Eden as such, from the point of view which we
can see, at least the towers of the true
city, that's the way Dante calls it
in the political tract Monarchia.
He's talking about a figure that may enter history--
that will enter history at the end of time,
that's why I stress that dramatically the poem is
literally poised at the outer edge of time.
There's not time, when we are going to
Paradise once again, so let me tell you what
this--and we'll try to explain it for you,
lines 30 and following: "And she said to me:
'From fear and shame I would have thee free thyself
henceforth, that thou mayst no longer speak
like one that dreams.
Know that the vessel," she is tough.
The way she is attacking him, she will be the teacher from
now on, "Know that the vessel the
serpent broke was and is not, but let him that has the blame
be assured that God's vengeance fears no sop.
Not for all the time shall the eagle," probably the eagle
of the empire, "be without heir that left
its feathers on the car so that it became monster,
and then prey; for I see assuredly,
and therefore tell of it, stars already near,
to give us the time, secure from all check and
hindrance, when a five hundred,
ten and five, one sent from God,
shall slay the thievish woman and the giant who sins with her.
And perhaps my dark tale, like Themis and the Sphinx,
persuades thee less because, in their fashion,
it clouds thy mind; but soon the facts shall be the
Naiads that will solve this hard enigma without loss of flocks
and corn."
She delivers an enigma--an enigmatic prophecy.
Enigma is a word that obviously means mystery,
but it's also linked to allegory.
You talk about irony, allegory; they're all tropes that
grammarians place under the same general subdivision.
It's an enigma.
It's mysterious.
It's not quite clear, and the lack of clarity only
adds, I think, to the fear and the
speculations of course about what this is.
It's a numerical symbol, which he says,
it's a five hundred, ten and five.
That's the way it's written, five hundred,
ten and five: DXV.
And you do know that numbers--we have been talking a
little bit about this, numbers viewed as containing
medieval numerical symbolism views numbers as containing the
essence of the secret actually of creation.
They would go writing--this is Isidore of Seville,
goes on writing, take the number away from
things and things will perish, will fall apart.
It's a Pythagorean idea, what keeps all things together
is just a sense of--call it musical rhythmic numerical
ordering.
Of course, there are--a great other number that maybe
everybody knows is 666, which is the number of
anti-Christ.
Dante's writing a five hundred, one, and five--what on earth
could it be?
Oh the speculations I could--they're hilarious,
some of the spec--what they could mean.
There are those who believe, well it really refers to the
year 1315.
We have no reason to believe that is the case,
because it's 800, the year of Charlemagne's
declaring the Holy Roman Empire and 515 gives you 1315.
So Dante's really thinking about an imminent event in his
own time.
There's nothing in the text that would allow us to see this
and allow us to make it credible.
So what is it?
Actually, it was found that the way--
the best way to describe it is really in--
written in DXV in five hundred, ten,
and five that this is--the best way to try to make any sense of
this prophecy and of course, another hilarious
interpretation that I just regale to you for your own
temporary relaxation this was immediately--
became the D V X.
Between 1923 and 1943, this was a prophecy of
Mussolini, of all people, who would come and deliver the
world.
Another ridiculous--of course--interpretation.
But it was found by some very good--
by two, simultaneously, it's amazing--
by two historians, one actually a historian and
one a literary historian, and therefore they took two
different views, that in the medieval
illustrations, there is a moment--By the way,
let me just preamble this, they found it in medieval
illustrations of the mass.
There's a moment in the mass, where there's a so-called
antiphonal prayer, the idea that Christ is coming
sacramentally and they have 'it is truly right and just' and in
Latin veridignum et justus est,
and it's always written like this and they explain V and X,
a cross that joins the human and the divine.
So that really the prayer, or the enigma of Beatrice,
is for the apocalyptic end of time.
The time when Christ will return to the earth,
the first time he came, first of all,
as a human being five, ten and five hundred.
The second time he will come first in his divinity so five
hundred, ten and five: the divinity and the humanity
second, the second element.
The two, humanity and divinity join together by the X of the
cross.
A great discovery, a number of infinite problems
that I have.
I hope I have--let me--bear with me for a couple of minutes
so that I can tell you more about this.
If this is an apocalyptic symbol, that is to say,
you understand what we mean by an apocalyptic symbol,
apocalyptic prophecy, that for prophecy apocalypse
means for visionary coming from the Apocalypse of St.
John, and implying that Dante believes in some kind of
imminent end of time.
History is coming to an end.
If he believed in this, and this is to be understood as
an apocalyptic symbol of an imminent end of time,
this would make Dante what is called a Joachist,
and I have to explain to you who this man is.
There's a man by the name of Joachim of Flora who was--
and we'll see him in Paradise,
Joachim of Flora, who had a theory of history in
a kind of tripartite structure, Joachim of Flora.
The idea is that history is patterned on the Trinity,
so there is an age of the father which roughly goes from
creation to the time of the biblical patriarchs.
Then there is the age of the son that goes from the time of
the incarnation to roughly 1260, his own time.
This is Joachim of Flora and then there's in the age of the
spirit, that goes from the time of
1260--with thanks to the fraternal orders,
all structures and all institutions will disappear and
mankind will experience a time of brotherhood and chastity.
There will be no marriages, there will be no state,
there will be nothing, and I say California is already
anticipated and seen by this great figure of Joachim of
Flora.
If Dante were a Joachist that would create a number of
problems, because what I have just been
describing to you was viewed as a most heretical theory of
history.
Why was it heretical?
Because, in effect, Joachim of Flora was,
with this theory of an age of the father,
the age of the son, and the age of the spirit--
was in effect undoing the unity of the Trinity.
That is to say, the Trinity is no longer
simultaneously together.
He's dividing the Trinity into three distinct parts,
and no less a great theologian of Dante's own time,
and whom Dante will encounter very soon in Paradise,
and they are going to discuss Joachim of Flora together,
Bonaventure, will go really writing a piece
in order to declare Joachim of Flora heretical.
So if this a very powerful explanation that Dante's really
alluding to the second coming at the end of time,
the DXV, when Christ will return to earth to restore the
Messianic advent, to restore justice to the
world, and it will come first of all in glory of the divinity
first and the humanity second, both joined by the cross,
the humanity and the divinity together.
Then and--if there's not enough--is he an apocalyptic
writer?
I doubt that he is an apocalyptic writer,
because there's no poet I know, and I think we have given
plenty of evidence of this over the last two months,
who cares more about the institutions,
who believes that the institutions are history.
And of course he attacks them in the measuring in which he
thinks that they have to be revitalized, refreshed,
and improved.
You cannot go on attacking the institutions from--without
really believing in their vital importance in history.
He talks about the Empire, he talks about the Church,
he talks about law, he talks about family,
etc.
They're all institutions that preserve their enduring
importance.
If he's not an apocalyptic writer, what is he then?
I think that this is an allusion to the coming of--
the second coming, but without--removing all of
the Joachist paraphernalia that accompanied that prophecy.
This is indeed the time.
It doesn't refer to the now of history, it refers to a time
that nobody can really fathom and nobody can really know.
So I'm giving--I have given you a reading of this passage and
given you a glimpse of the logical complications that
usually accompany what it would seem to be such a neat discovery
or a neat glossing of an image.
Of course with this prophecy the poem will come to an end,
and the poem comes to an end with Dante,
who goes--and I will talk about this image again--
who has to be ritually immersed.
He will be immersed into two rivers.
The river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and
the river Eunoe, the river of good memories.
It's a ritual--this is toward the end of Canto XXXIII--
that reminds you of the ritual actions at the beginning of
Canto I, where Dante washes his face and
has to gird his loins with-- you remember with the reed that
was growing spontaneously on the shore of the sea.
What Dante goes on saying is the two rivers,
Lethe and Eunoe, derive--flow out of the same
source.
And then he says, like two lazy friends,
friends who are fond of each other, they go on departing
lazily.
That's the image that he uses.
What is interesting is that he's thinking of memory and
forgetfulness, the Lethe and Eunoe,
as entailing each other, so that there's no erasure
which is not at the same time a memory,
that each contains the other and Dante will go--
has a lot to say about forgetful memory,
especially in the way the poem will be written.
Finally, with a line, the whole poem ends with--
the whole of Purgatorio ends with a line that obviously
reminds you of the very end Inferno,
"From the most holy waters,"
this is Canto XXXIII, "I came forth again
remade, even as new plants,"
the very language of the beginning of Purgatorio,
"renewed with new leaves, pure and ready to mount to the
stars."
Dante once again now is at the top of Purgatory and he will fly
next, like lightening,
onto the Moon and we shall see him in this kind of planetary
epic, cosmological epic that we'll
start on next time.
Now I'm sure you have questions and we are doing okay with
timing, so please shoot.
Yes.
Student: You mentioned a transition from the ethical in
Purgatory to the aesthetic in Paradise.
Could you just expand >?
Prof: Very good question.
The question is--that I spoke about in Canto XXX of
Purgatorio, I spoke about the transition,
formal transition from the structure of the epic with
Virgil, the poet of the epic,
and then moving onto-- in effect I spoke of the
autobiographical, first of all where Beatrice
refers to-- calls Dante by name.
So it's his story, Dante, don't cry because Virgil
has disappeared, I'm going to give you a chance
to cry for other reasons and then goes on into a confession,
which is an Augustinian poem.
But also it's true, I mentioned there is a
transition to-- I mean, I did say that in
Paradise is the world of aesthetics where the ethical
ordering is liquidated in a certain sense.
So the question is, how does this respond to the
whole arc of the poem?
What kind of--what am I really saying about the whole
experience of the poem to make the aesthetic essential for
knowledge, if that's the argument?
That is true.
I really welcome this question because that's the way I'm
reading poetry, as if poetry were a way of
knowing.
I keep saying this, that it's really a way of
knowing from that point of view, a philosophical kind of poetry,
realizing and keeping in mind that there are always
distinctions and ongoing quarrels between poetry and
philosophy.
Paradiso is--like any true ethics,
this is a general pronouncement,
Dante doesn't make it, but it's a kind of premise to
what I'll be saying later.
Any true ethics can only be successful in the measure in
which it stops operating.
That's when the ethics is really--you can say that it has
done its job as it were.
So we enter a world where now is the world of Paradise
and Dante goes on representing this world.
He'll never forget the earth.
I have to qualify that, even in Paradise,
he's going to look at the earth.
He celebrates the greatest aspects of human life:
work, love, things that join--joy--the community
together.
He will see also the distortions that are going
on--where they are the--in the Empire, in the political life or
in the life of the Church.
Every time that there is a retrospective look,
there is a kind of dismay that he will feel.
So there is all of that, but the emphasis is on the
world of Paradise: it's about dance,
it's about songs, it's about love,
it's about stars wooing each other,
the pyrotechnics of--it's about different forms of light.
What is this about?
Exactly what I call the aesthetic experience;
these are all poetic artistic experiences.
The first thing we are to keep in mind is Dante really thinks
of a theology that is really like poetry: a theology that is
like poetry, in the sense that both are part
of-- or if you wish an even--won't
even call it theology.
Let me call it--finish that sentence--
theology which is like poetry in the sense that it's a playful
theology, a way of understanding that the
essence of God now can be seen in his comical figuration.
A God who is the artist, a God who thinks that this the
way in which human beings were supposed--
were first created in the Garden of Eden,
where we are really in a garden, meant to play,
and that's where we are going back too.
It's a way of casting the divinity in the most--as beauty,
a beauty that also encompasses the good.
Beyond that, beyond this playful or ludic
theology, this idea of an aesthetic
theology, there is something else that
Dante is saying about the proximity between the poetic and
the religious.
It's not a connection that is usually made because we tend to
believe that the poetic is just the world of deceptions,
make believe.
In fact, it's both, the poetic and the religious,
and we can say that even about the philosophical if you wish,
they respond to profound impulses within us.
They are emotions that we have.
You see beauty and you tremble in the presence of beauty,
whether it's a human beauty, it's natural beauty,
or artistic beauty.
Whatever it is that we're encountering there is something
that responds in us and the same thing about the idea of awe,
and the idea of discovery of sense of the sublime,
whenever you have what we call a religious experience.
The two are not neatly separated;
this is what drives the poet in the journey of Paradise.
This is where the actual source of his inspiration,
that's the novelty that Dante represents and which probably
some Romantic poets much later-- I'm talking about the
nineteenth century have been trying to restore or grasp,
or understand.
You do have that in Dante.
Do you have it for instance in the Bible?
I dare say you do, because whenever we think
about-- there are so many courses at
Yale that used to be taught, I don't look at the offerings
anymore because I think I know them by heart,
not for any other reason--but "the Bible as
literature."
It is great, but the idea,
the underlying idea is always that the Bible can only has to
be read-- novels--that's all right,
that's very good but that's not all.
To say that, as I did, that the Song of
Songs is a fantastic--I said it ten minutes ago,
that the Song of Songs is a fantastic love poem.
What I'm really saying is that the poetic is already in itself
proximate to the religious, so that when we think about the
Bible and literature we are already rephrasing another
version of this problem which is that of--
that Dante presents as the religious and the poetic in
Paradise.
I hope I've answered your question.
Thank you.