Chapter 8: Dante’s Decolonialism

Abstract

In the White and Gold Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees, a’building Dido’s Carthage, inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting, likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, the Kitab al-Mirag, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto/Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy. In whose God we see our Humanity. But we need to read his text “true”, to find this Decolonialism of Freedom, Peace, and Love. To do so we must tackle the false divisions, the injustices, of Nation, Language, Race, Gender, Class, Religion, as we find Dante to do. Dennis Looney so titled his book, Freedom Readers. We can become “Freedom Readers”, Dante explaining that the Freedom of the Soul is the intent and goal of his allegory, indeed the anagogy, of his Commedia’s use of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”.

Verse

Verse            Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.            Publius Terentius Afer, Heautontimorumenos            Tu solus peregrinus es            Luke 24.18

In the White and Gold Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees, a’building Dido’s Carthage, inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting, likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, the Kitab al-Mirag, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto/Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy. In whose God we see our Humanity. But we need to read his text “true”, to find this Decolonialism of Freedom, Peace, and Love, of Christianity at its roots as the religion of women and slaves. To do so we must tackle the false divisions, the injustices, of Nation, Language, Race, Gender, Class, Religion, as we find Dante to do. Dennis Looney so titled his book, Freedom Readers. We can become “Freedom Readers”, Dante explaining that the Freedom of the Soul is the intent and goal of his allegory, indeed the anagogy, of his Commedia’s use of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”.¹

I had titled this chapter, “Dante’s Democracy”. But an Italian colleague protested that Democracy is the “Tyranny of the Majority” forced by America’s military superpower on those weaker than herself. I replied that my sense of “Democracy” includes the Quaker practice of honoring even the one dissenting voice as being that of God within us, that sense of Justice as equal for all: but sadly remembered the fraudulent hypocritical phrase, “La Legge è uguale per tutti”, posted in every Italian courtroom. So I next chose the word, “Decolonialism”, particularly remembering a teenager poem I wrote to “my imperial father from his colonial daughter”. He was Gandhi’s friend and biographer and on the Salt March for the Times of India. I was eight when, glued to the radio, I heard Nehru proclaim India’s freedom. Jokingly, earlier, I was betrothed to a rajah.² Twenty years ago Dennis Looney, while he was researching his book, Freedom Readers: Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, stood with me on this hill, perhaps an Etruscan tomb, in Florence’s Abolitionist “English” Cemetery, telling me of Theodore Parker preaching against slavery in Boston with a loaded gun at the pulpit, of Frederick Douglass, 11 May 1887, visiting his grave and also those of Richard Hildreth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she part African, her family Jamaican slave owners, for their work against slavery, and of Frances Trollope and Hiram Powers, he part Native American, likewise buried here, creating waxworks of Dante’s Commedia on the American Frontier in Cincinnati. To which I now add Joseph Garrow, Justice of the Peace, whose mother was a princess in India, whose wife was Jewish, whose daughter Theodosia married Anthony Trollope’s brother, her background like Isa Blagden’s, Theodosia and Isa becoming Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miriam in The Marble Faun, and that Joseph Garrow was the first to translate Dante’s Vita nova into English.³ Theodore, Richard, Elizabeth, Frances, Hiram, Theodosia, Isa, Joseph, who were richly multicultural, likewise many Dante scholars, Adolfo Mussafia and Robert Davidsohn, among them: African American, Native American, Jewish, East Indian, Russian, American, European, of both genders and all ages, lie here forever in Dante’s Florence. Dante, as Monsignor Livi, the Prior of San Lorenzo, told me, “è per tutti”, is for all.

Freedom

Dante explains his use, his sovrasenso, of the two Allegories, of the Poets, of the Theologians,⁴ with Psalm 113, which he then places within his Commedia, sung by a hundred-fold pilgrims on Purgatorial shores to its unique and most ancient tonus peregrinus, celebrating the Exodus from slavery.⁵ In the Convivio II.1 he noted:

The fourth sense is called anagogical, that is to say, beyond the senses; and this occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense which, although it is true also in the literal sense, signifies by means of the things signified a part of the supernal things of eternal glory, as may be seen in the song of the Prophet which says that when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free. For although it is manifestly true according to the letter, that which is spiritually intended is no less true, namely, that when the soul departs from sin it is made whole and free in its power.⁶

And in the Letter to Can Grande he (or perhaps another), notes:

7. For me to be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemous, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion” (Ps. 113.1–2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the state of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means “other” or “different”.⁷

Pietro Alighieri is in accord with this and explains how the Fourfold Exegesis of the Theologians corresponds with Aristotle’s Four Causes—Efficient, Material, Formal, and Final.⁸ Then, for Purgatorio II he explains the anagogical sense of Psalm 113 is that the soul, released from sin’s bondage, becomes free and strong.⁹

I Egypt/Israel History ―› Material Cause Literal Level Flesh/Blood/Body Before the Psalm

II Psalm 113 Allegory ―› Formal and Efficient Causes Moral and Allegorical Levels Mind/Soul Psalm’s tonus peregrinus

III Everywhere, Exodus-now True Efficient and Final Causes Moral and Anagogical Levels Soul freed from Sin After the Psalm

Nation and Language

Dante was against nationalism, what northern Italians with their warring states still refer to as “campanilismo”, referring to their bell towers, like that of Giotto’s for Florence, like that of San Miniato il Tedesco, like those of San Gimignano and Bologna, like that of Venice. The building of towers of pride in these northern Italian cities, Brunetto Latino taught, was like Nimrod’s Tower of Babylon, called Nembrot in their texts, bringing about strife, causing gang warfare between uneducated powerful families, best excluded from communal government. Instead the educated merchant classes involved in world trade sought peace and prosperity for the Commonwealth, the Republic, the Res publica, with Arnolfo di Cambio constructing the city walls from the stones recycled from the lowering of these towers of pride built from the gray green stone earlier quarried from what would become the Boboli Gardens.¹⁰ In De vulgari eloquentia I.vi Dante eloquently wrote:

To me, however, the whole world is a homeland, like the sea to fish—though I drank from the Arno before cutting my teeth, and love Florence so much that, because I loved her, I suffer exile unjustly–and I will weigh the balance of my judgement more with reason than with sentiment. And although for my own enjoyment (or rather for the satisfaction of my own desire), there is no more agreeable place on earth than Florence, yet when I turn the pages of the volumes of poets and other writers, by whom the world is described as a whole and in its constituent parts, and when I reflect inwardly on the various locations of places in the world, and their relations to the two poles and the circle at the equator, I am convinced, and firmly maintain, that there are many regions and cities more noble and more delightful than Tuscany and Florence, where I was born and of which I am a citizen, and many nations and peoples who speak a more elegant and practical language than do the Italians.¹¹

Already Brunetto Latino had written Li Livres dou Tresor, incorporating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, following upon his Ciceronian Rettorica, in Italian, then had taught these in Italian to the young Dante.¹² Brunetto, however, deliberately mistranslated one part of the Ethics, where Aristotle had defined monarchy, like Sparta’s, as the best of the three: democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.¹³ Brunetto instead opted for the communal and republican form of government as the best choice.¹⁴ Dante, from the bitterness of his permanent exile, instead would see the solution to Ghibelline and Guelf strife to be the Roman Empire of the Pax Romana of a Caesar Augustus and therefore he supported Henry VII of Luxembourg as Holy Roman Emperor, writing for him the treatise De monarchia, much as had earlier Brunetto Latino written Li Livres dou Tresor for Charles of Anjou. Because, at the time of writing this treatise the Emperor Henry VII was still alive, Dante dreamed that this form of peace could be achieved through a universal form of Empire. Dante believed that freedom comes about with peace as a balancing of the particular with the universal and that humankind is with the angels and divine, “Thou has made him a little lower than the angels” (Psalms 97.7, 138, Hebrews 2.7). He lists democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies as perverted governmental forms. Dante argues for rulers as servants of their peoples’ freedoms.¹⁵

The De monarchia was placed on the Index of forbidden books by the Catholic Church in her defense of her temporal realms. The English Cardinal, Adam Easton, Julian of Norwich’s spiritual director, sought to counter Dante’s arguments in his defense of Pope Urban VI in his De ecclesiastice potestatis.¹⁶ The De monarchia’s concepts would lead to the imperialism of the British Raj in India, to Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Europe and to Benito Mussolini’s Fascism in Ethiopia, though it earlier shaped Italy’s Nationalism in the Risorgimento based on Tuscan Italian. Better solutions, though these too fail, have been William Penn’s proposed United States of Europe and realized Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the League of Nations in Geneva (at which I was conceived by my journalist parents before WWII), the United Nations in New York, and the European Union in Brussels and Strasbourg. Perhaps best of all, Montesquieu’s “Citizen of the World”, a concept held dearly by Roma who belong to no nation.

One night, at dinner with the Jungian psychiatrist, Maria Teresa Colonna, and other women scholars, and the following day at their conference on “Dialoghi tra Oriente e Occidente: Contaminazioni di luci e ombre tra civiltà”, we were discussing exile and the alternative universes of different cultures and their languages, how some can inhabit two or more worlds, yet not belong to any of them completely, straddling them in exile. Similarly, Lisa Dwan and I had discussed this with Dante and Beckett on exile on BBC4.¹⁷ A reality in which I live, my mind code-switching constantly between English and Italian; before, between English and American; before that, between English and French. How important it is to bridge to the feared Other, the English to the Irish, the American to the Russian, the European to the Roma, Europe’s largest, poorest, scapegoated minority. How it enriches even as it creates of us the feared Other, the prophet not without honor save in her own country. How cultures and their languages are universes of perception, of ordering. And how we have smashed ours into the egoism and globalized mechanized consumerism of imperial “English Only”, cruelly forced on First Nations and immigrants alike. Instead, Brunetto and Dante see how it is through one’s mother tongue that we access and learn the feared Others’ Latin, French, Provençal. Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, carefully discusses the uses in poetry of these different languages, yet sees in them all this universal economy and emphasis on love,

Learned writers in all three vernaculars agree, then, on many words, and especially on the word ‘love’. Thus Giraut de Borneil: Si.m sentis fezelz amics, per ver encusera amor; [If I felt I were a genuine and accepted lover; I would indeed bring charges against love] The King of Navarre: De fin amor si vient sen et bonté; [From true love come knowledge and goodness] Master Guido Guinizzelli: Né fe’ amor prima che gentil core, né gentil cor prima che amor, natura. [Nor did nature create love before the gentle heart, nor the gentle heart before love]. (DVE I.ix)

We see it too, today, in Bob Marley’s “One Love”, John Lennon’s “All you need is love”, and Leonard Cohen’s “Alleluia”. It is “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Par XXXIII.145) of the Apollo Astronauts’ “Blue Marble”.

Race

I have already, in “Chapter 6: Dante’s Theater, Dante’s Music”, shown how the ex-slave African playwright Terence was, because of African American slavery, white-washed out of imperialistic Old and New World classical education, though his Comedies had been used century after century for teaching the purest Latin to commoners and princes, to children, women, and men, and also how Dante, his teacher Brunetto, and his son Pietro had relied on Terence for their linguistic and democratic pedagogy, as had so many others through time.

Four Dante scholars, William Stephany, Rachel Jacoff, William E. Gohlman, and myself, on 15 October 1981, gathered at Attica Correctional Facility at the invitation of the State University of New York’s University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo and the Genesee Community College’s education program. Ronald Herzman and William Cook noted in their introduction to the Conference, titled “Learning in Exile: Dante in Attica”, held to commemorate the Attica Prison Riot of 1971, that this was a unique event in the histories of prisons and academia. The four of us talked on different aspects of Dante to an audience, for the most part, of Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Irish, a third of whom were murderers. We were searched at the entry of the prison. We walked to the lecture hall through a multitude of gates that had to be specially unlocked by guards. It was as if we were in the landscape of Dante’s poem.

William Stephany of the University of Vermont gave the first paper on “Dante’s Exiles”, describing Dante’s paralleling of Pier delle Vigne, the prisoner who commits suicide and who is met by Dante in Hell where he has become a tree whose branches bleed and speak when broken, and of Romeo, the pilgrim in Paradise. Both men were unjustly accused of crimes they had not committed, like Dante himself, and had then responded, in the first case by suicide in the prison tower of San Miniato il Tedesco, in the second by leaving the court, penniless, possessing only a staff and a mule and going forth on pilgrimage. Rachel Jacoff of Wellesley College gave a paper on “Dante and Virgil”. She stressed the poignancy of Virgil as the pagan, as the outsider, who is the instrument of Dante’s salvation but who is himself damned to remain in Hell for all eternity. The final paper, by William E. Gohlman of State University College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo, on “Dante and Islam”, was of interest to the audience, many of whose members were Black Muslims. He stressed the universality of Islamic beliefs, its respect for Judaism and Christianity, the “Peoples of the Book”, and of Dante’s interest in Islam.

My paper, “Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile”, was the second to be given. As you read its words, imagine yourself not in your comfortable office chair but instead as in its audience, composed of young “Lifers”, who are in the prison’s college program, in a room with bars on the windows, with uniformed guards, many of them surprisingly, women, and also surprisingly, all of them unarmed, standing behind you, and resenting the fact that you have the privilege of hearing this lecture. (Guards with machine guns man the Gothic-styled Disneyesque outer towers of the prison, but since the Riot, guards on the floor of the main prison, which is built like a Romanesque dungeon and fortress, are never armed.) The lecture will be interrupted by walkie-talkies’ noisy commands and guards calling out individual inmates’ numbers, not names, who will momentarily stiffen in resistance, then obey and leave the room.Verse

Verse Boethius the Prisoner, Dante the Exile This would be an easy lecture to give on the outside. In the present context I find giving this lecture both humbling and intense. I feel that I am inadequate to give it to this audience and yet that this material is far more meaningful here than in a more ordinary institution. I should actually like to begin with a story that happened in Italy, in Rome. I was there when it happened. The Italian Cardinals had elected an old man to be Pope, thinking that he would die soon and wouldn’t be a nuisance. Pope John XXIII, however, was of peasant stock, the kind of person who would take the Christian Gospel literally. One morning, and I heard them, the Italians in Rome were saying to each other: “Do you know what the Pope did this morning?” “He went to Regina Coeli prison and visited the prisoners.” The Regina Coeli prison means the Prison of the Queen of Heaven, of the Virgin Mary, a beautiful name, like Attica, for a terrible place. The Romans were delighted at what he had done. The Pope’s actions, which obeyed Christ’s command in the Gospel that Christians visit prisoners, seemed to say that even the most sinful had the chance of being forgiven by the most holy, and this made everyone happy that morning, everyone could forgive themselves. A much loved photograph of Pope John XXIII shows him with a pajama-striped prisoner of Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison.Footnote

John Robert Glorney Bolton, Il Papa, p. 272; Living Peter, pp. 185–186.

I am going to talk about two Italians, Boethius and Dante, both of whom were punished for crimes they had not committed. Boethius was exiled, imprisoned, and executed in a most brutal manner, ropes being twisted around his head until his eyes burst out, and he was finished off with a bludgeon and an axe. While on Death Row, awaiting his execution, he wrote a most remarkable book which he called the Consolation of Philosophy. Dante, at Beatrice’s death, and then when exiled from Florence, would turn to that book for consolation and use its patterning for writing the Commedia. Dante and Boethius lived many years, centuries even, apart. Boethius (470–524 A.D.) lived in the twilight of the Roman Empire. He was one of the last men, until the Renaissance, to know of both Greek and Latin philosophy. He was a Senator of Rome, descended from ancient Romans, but his Emperor was a Barbarian, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. That was in the fifth century after Christ. Ten centuries before that, Socrates had been tried and imprisoned and forced to drink the hemlock in Attica, in Athens, in the fifth century before Christ. Boethius knew the texts, written by Plato, describing the last days of Socrates, about Socrates on Death Row, and so he modeled his Consolation of Philosophy upon those works. Dante was to be exiled from Florence and to write the Commedia in the fourteenth century. During the nine centuries in between and beyond, Boethius’ work was read, copied, and loved by all who knew it, at a time when Plato’s work concerning Socrates’ imprisonment in Athens of ten centuries earlier was lost. The Consolation of Philosophy was translated into our language by King Alfred, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and by Queen Elizabeth I.Footnote

Trans. King Alfred, ed. John Walter Sedgefield; trans. Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Riverside Chaucer; trans. Queen Elizabeth, in Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, Plutarch and Horace, ed. C. Pemberton, EETS OS 113.

Socrates was imprisoned and executed largely for political reasons.Footnote

I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates. I had heard him lecture at Princeton on Socrates’ dislike of “eleutheria”, freedom, for which I.F. Stone taught himself Greek in his eighties. Later I heard Michel Foucault at Boulder explain that all that Socrates had needed to do to attain freedom was to plead for “parrhesia”, the right to speak the truth at personal risk for the public good. The classicists in the audience at Princeton had hissed at Stone refusing to give up their paradigm of him as democratically noble, rather than as a lover of Sparta’s fascism, her racist “Myth of the Metals”, justifying the slavery of the Helots as mere Iron to their Silver and Gold.

Boethius was likewise exiled from Rome, imprisoned, and then executed for political reasons. Dante had grown up in the city of Florence, had been intensely involved in his city’s politics (a word which literally means the affairs of the city), and had then had to go into exile when his political party lost power. Both Boethius and Dante first knew success, then utter failure. Both men found consolation in their writing and in turn their works console their readers. I shall need to discuss, for a moment, what were the customs in the ancient world for the punishing of traitors and criminals. The Mediterranean civilization insisted that the stranger, the pilgrim, the exile, be treated with respect, as if he were a god, or God, in disguise. If a man committed a murder, or were, for political reasons, sent into exile from his city, he had to leave his immediate surroundings and journey elsewhere, receiving shelter, bread, and water, wherever he went. Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’ Oresteia show this. In the Greek world such a stranger, such an exile, was considered to be under Zeus’ protection. He was paradoxically sacred, though a criminal. He was considered to be as if one of the sacred gods in disguise visiting mortals to test their piety. If such a person did not go into exile as a pilgrim, then he would be imprisoned and executed, as was Socrates. Socrates preferred the latter because he could not conceive of the idea of living away from his beloved city of Athens, in the region of Greece known as Attica. Boethius later had to endure both imprisonment and exile, meeting his death in the city of Pavia, not the city of Rome of which he was Senator. Dante is forbidden to return to his city of Florence, of which he had been Prior, unless he would publicly undergo a humiliating penance in the Baptistery of St. John; failing that he would have been publicly executed by burning if he were to have returned unrepentant. Instead, he chose to live as a pilgrim exile, traveling to the cities of Padua, Bologna, Verona, Treviso, Venice, Ravenna, composing the Commedia, all the while eating the bitter bread and climbing the hard stairs of others, as he states in his writings.Footnote

Convivio I.iii; Paradiso XVII.58,60. To this day Florentine bread is not salted.

Christian pilgrimage and exile had inherited both the concept of the Greek exiled stranger, who was to be under Zeus’ sacred protection, and also the Judaic story of Cain, who had murdered his brother Abel and who was marked by God to signify that no man was to slay him in turn while he wandered homeless about the earth. We witness such brands being used upon the forehead in Boethius’ account of his accusers, Opilio and Gaudentius,Footnote

Of his accusers, Boethius says, “One of them was Basil who had earlier been expelled from the King’s service and was now forced by his debts to testify against me. My other accusers were Opilio and Gaudentius, also men banished by royal decree for their many corrupt practices. They tried to avoid exile by taking sanctuary, but when the King heard of it he decreed that, if they did not leave Ravenna by a certain day, they should be branded on the forehead and forcibly expelled. How could the King’s judgement have been more severe? And yet on that very day their testimony against me was accepted.” Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, p. 11.

and also in Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto IX, where Dante himself is branded by the angel with seven P’s, cut by a sword blade, upon his brow, seven letter P’s which signify the seven deadly sins, peccati, that he has committed and which are then to be erased one by one by an angel’s feather upon each of the terraces in turn.Footnote

I saw, at the dispensary at Cistercian Casamari Abbey, where Joachim da Fiore had his visions, 1183, monks dispensing penicillin, but also dressing sores by applying lotion with a bird’s wing feather from a jar.

Pilgrims wore such badges which both marked their shame and yet paradoxically protected them from harm from others. A further story, a Gospel account in Luke 24, told of Christ himself going about disguised as a pilgrim, a stranger, not recognized by two of his disciples who traveled with him. That tale made the medieval world treat the stranger, the pilgrim, as if he were Christ in disguise, though he might be a Cain-like murderer. Dante refers to that story in Purgatorio XXI. Medieval law stated that no pilgrim could be killed, even though he were a murderer; if he were to be killed, his murderer in turn was to be instantly slain. It is for these reasons that Dante has himself and Virgil be as pilgrims who meet others upon their pilgrimage; in Purgatorio all of them expiating their crimes, in Hell to be exiled, unrepentant, and damned forever. The Consolation of Philosophy, written by Boethius when imprisoned and in exile, is a deeply moving book. It is not an academic text at all. I turn to it when I am in despair. It is a book that functions toward its readers as if it were the most humane and wise, compassionate and effective psychiatrist treating his favorite patient whose restoration to sanity he most wishes to achieve, but such psychiatrists would be rare in reality. A modern parallel could be Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, a book likewise written in a prison context and likewise speaking of hope, rather than despair, understanding, rather than negative bitterness, a mental freedom that can, in one’s thoughts, cancel out physical imprisonment.Footnote

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice.

The Consolation, modeled on Plato’s account of Socrates’ imprisonment, has two main characters. Plato had described Socrates speaking of a beautiful woman who came to him, clothed in bright garments. Just so Boethius describes himself in prison visited by Lady Philosophia: While I silently pondered these things and decided to write down my wretched complaint, there appeared standing above me a woman of majestic countenance whose flashing eyes seemed wise beyond the ordinary wisdom of men. Her color was bright… and yet she seemed so old that she could not be thought of as belonging to our age. Her height seemed to vary: sometimes she seemed of ordinary human stature, then again her head seemed to touch the top of the heavens… At the lower edge of her robe was woven a Greek P, at the top the letter TH [for practical, praxis, and theoretical, theoria, applied and pure philosophy, the letters really being the Greek Pi, Π, and Theta, Θ], and between these were seen clearly marked stages, like stairs, ascending from the lowest level to the highest.Footnote

Pp. 3–7.

Medieval manuscripts of this scene show Philosophy with an embroidered ladder on her dress between the two letters.Footnote

The Bigallo fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia translates that theta and pi into the Seven Acts of Mercy embroidered on her cloak.

The two dialogue with one another. Boethius the prisoner is presented as despairing, stupid, and self-pitying. Lady Philosophia, who is really a part of himself, her name in Greek meaning “Love of Wisdom”, is shown as wise, sane, optimistic, looking on the bright side of things. The two characters in the literary work are really the two sides of Boethius’ own personality, one being the willful, self-destructive, and despairing side, the other, the wise, creative, and hopeful one. The one behaves like a stupid student, the other like a wise, tolerant, forgiving, inspiring teacher. But this is really a work of self-teaching, of self-consoling, of self-help, and it teaches its readers to choose to laugh at their own self-pity and to cast it aside. Boethius is presenting a dialogue between his foolish side and his wise one. Boethius spends most of his time with Philosophy going over the accusations against him and complaining about how fickle Fortune has been to him. Philosophy gets him, slowly, to realize that all this is a question of perspective, of seeing things in proportion. She gets him to stop thinking of himself as a mere pawn who has been manipulated by events and to see that he has himself partly shaped his present predicament, that he has himself chosen to consider himself as a victim and to wallow in self-pity, when he could rise above that state and look at events clearly while standing apart from them. He asks her whether she is also now a prisoner.Footnote

P. 7: “Mistress of all virtues,” I said, “why have you come, leaving the arc of heaven, to this lonely desert of exile? Are you a prisoner, too, charged as I am with false accusations?”

Her answer is “No”, and she adds that though he may consider himself such he nevertheless helped his own becoming a prisoner because he has chosen to “fasten the chain by which he will be drawn”.Footnote

P. 9. George Eliot in Middlemarch will say the same.

She chooses not to share in his dungeon of despair, in his agony over the loss of his library, in the bitterness of his exile.Footnote

He speaks of ivory and crystal book cabinets, p. 18.

She tells him that Philosophy dwells in the mind rather than in books on shelves. She points out that while he complains of being an exile he is living in a place that to others is home. She then teaches him to appreciate “the love that rules the earth and the seas and commands the heavens”,Footnote

P. 41, Book II, Poem 8.

a phrase that will be echoed and reflected and repeated more and more in the last lines of the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, culminating in “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” of Paradiso XXXIII.146. She next speaks of Fate, whose other names are Fortune and Lady Luck, and its reverse, or perhaps, obverse, Freedom. These contraries she analogizes to the circle and the center. For Philosophy evil does not really exist; it is simply the tending toward non-being, the choosing to depart from the center into the greater spaces of the exterior circles, the choosing to depart from God “whose service is perfect freedom”. Chaucer translated this as the departing “into the greater envirownings”. Boethius, no longer self-pitying but caught up in the intricacies of her arguments, protests, and does so by writing, like Dante, in the first personFootnote

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, especially notes the relationship between first-person narrative and right hemisphere activity, pp. 59, 70, 75–76, 81, 88, 89, 191, 397 (e-mail communication, 8/3/2016).

: “You are playing with me”, I said, “By weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of the divine simplicity? A little while ago you began with happiness, declared it to be the highest good, and located its dwelling in almighty God… You also affirmed that God rules the universe by the exercise of his goodness, that all things willingly obey him, and that there is no evil in nature. And you proved all this without outside assumptions and used only internal proofs which draw their force from another”. Philosophy answered, “I have not mocked you at all… For it is the nature of the divine essence neither to pass to things outside itself nor to take any external thing to itself. As Parmenides puts it, the divine essence is `one body like a sphere, perfectly rounded on all sides’; it rotates the moving orb of the universe while it remains unmoved itself. You ought not to be surprised that I have sought no outside proofs, but have used only those within the scope of our subject, since you have learned, on Plato’s authority, that the language we use ought to be related to the subject of our discourse”.Footnote

Pp. 72–73.

The intellectual construct that results from Philosophia’s argument and which shaped medieval thought is a simple one of a circle and its center, the circle representing fate, time, man, the lessening of being (the only evil there is); the center, freedom, eternity, God, being. It is the same scheme that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’ writings. It is both shaped by Plato and by Aristotle, while having its roots in the Pre-Socratics.Footnote

Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “The Philosophy of Parmenides,” Ph. D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1963. I found this dissertation thrown out by a professor in a Princeton University corridor and treasure it.

Philosophy explains: Consider the example of a number of spheres in orbit around the same central point: the innermost moves towards the simplicity of the center… whereas the outermost, whirling in a wider orbit, tends to increase its orbit in space the farther it moves from the indivisible midpoint of the center. If, however, it is connected to the center, it is confined by the simplicity of the center and no longer tends to stray into space. In like manner, whatever strays farthest from the divine mind is most entangled in the nets of Fate; conversely, the freer a thing is from Fate, the nearer it approaches the center of all things. And if it adheres firmly to the divine mind, it is free from motion and overcomes the necessity of Fate. Therefore, the changing course of Fate is to simple stability of Providence…as time is to eternity, as a circle to its center.Footnote

Pp. 91–92.

Dante, before his exile, is to make use of this image of the circle and the center in the Vita nova in which he has Love appear to himself, telling Dante: “I am at the center of the circle, equidistant from all parts; but you are not”. In the Commedia the image of the circle and the center will be paramount. I especially love one example. Dante has taken it from a line in Virgil, about the reflections of water in a golden bowl as being analogous to thought within the mind. But here he is speaking of the relationship of man and God as a two-way communication, both from the center and from the circle, a reaching out to each other. In Paradiso XIV, Dante tells us:   The water in a round vessel moves about  from center to rim if it is struck within,  from rim to center if it is struck from without. I knew about ripples in a pond circling ever outward, but not of this other movement. I was studying Dante in graduate school and came to this line, so I asked my children about it. We got down our big bread-making bowl and tried it out. Yes, Dante is right, when the outside of the bowl with water in it is banged the ripples go ever inward meeting at the center. Now turn to the previous lines at the end of Paradiso XIII:   Let Tom and Jane not think, because they see  one man is picking pockets and another  is offering all his goods to charity,   that they can judge their neighbors with God’s eyes:  for the pious man may fall, and the thief may rise. Those words are spoken by Thomas Aquinas in the poem. Dante’s image of the bowl, partly from Boethius, is the thought that comes to his mind as he tries to understand the theologian’s paradoxical statement, which to him does not seem to make sense. Dante’s text is speaking of the good thief and the hypocritical philanthropist. One is Dismas; the other, Dives, finding tax loopholes. There are many aspects of the Commedia that are reflections of Boethius’ observations in the Consolation. The structure itself of the Commedia has the Inferno be the region of fate, Fortune’s Wheel, a labyrinthine prison of eternity, the Purgatorio be a half-way house, and the Paradiso be freedom. Dante, like Boethius, had been accused of a crime he had not committed. In Inferno XIII Dante shows a person, named Pier delle Vigne, who likewise was accused of a crime which he did not commit, but who in his despair killed himself. We meet Pier delle Vigne, as like a thorny tree, which, when a branch is broken off it, bleeds and speaks in a nightmarish way. Dante himself could have been such a bitter suicide as is Pier delle Vigne had he not heeded Boethius’ Consolation against despair. In Paradiso VI Dante meets another person, who also had been accused of a crime which he had not committed. Romeo, whom Dante meets in the realm of the pearl, tells Dante that when this happened to him he had simply asked his ruler for his pilgrim staff and his mule and had then set forth to continue on the pilgrimage which had first brought him to Raymond Berengar’s court. Dante, likewise, in writing his Comedy, has chosen not suicide, but pilgrimage. Both he and Boethius openly state that they write their Consolation and their Comedy in order that “posterity may know the truth and have a record of these events”. Similarly, Dante gives the souls of Pier delle Vigne and Romeo the chance to speak of the false accusations made against themselves, to counter the bearing of false witness, of calumny. Cicero had earlier written a work called the “Dream of Scipio”.Footnote

Cicero, “Dream of Scipio” in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller, pp. 96–105.

It was known and loved by both Boethius and Dante. Boethius quotes from it when he speaks of the smallness of the earth in contrast to the rest of the universe: “You know from astrological computation that the whole circumference of the earth is no more than a pinpoint when contrasted to the space of the heavens; in fact, if the two are compared, the earth may be considered to have no size at all”.Footnote

P. 37.

Dante knew this statement in Cicero and in Boethius concerning the smallness of the earth, engarlanded by the ocean. In classical and medieval cosmology, astronomy, this small earth was nevertheless thought to be the center of the universe. Galileo was to be in serious trouble with the Church for observing that the earth was not the unmoving center, but instead one of the planets that circled about the sun. But Dante lived before Galileo. In Paradiso XXII Dante looks down from heaven and this is what he sees:   My eyes went back through the seven spheres below,  And I saw this globe, so small, so lost in space,  I had to smile at such a sorry show. 133–135 It is almost, but not quite, what the astronauts saw. I do not think we ever realized until those photographs were published how beautiful the earth is from space, how fragile, how delicate.Footnote

A prisoner said here, “It was beautiful!” when I asked them what the earth was like in those pictures.

Classical Cicero, patristic Boethius, and medieval Dante all thought of the earth as an object of contempt, imperfection, sinfulness, not of exquisite loveliness. It, for them, was fallen, sinful, matter, at the center of their universe, but it was the exact opposite of Boethius’ godlike center to a circle of ever-increasing non-being. So Dante turned the whole thing inside out. He does this in Paradiso XXIII. Beatrice has him look at God and Mary who are within the Rose, around whom all sing the anthem “Regina Coeli”. (Remember that was also the name of the Roman prison Pope John XXIII visited.) The ordering of the universe, Dante implies, was inside out, and now is the right way round, with God at the center, the humble earth and sinning man at the outermost part of the circle. Yet not so, for sinning man, who is represented by the figure of Dante, has come to the center; the Regina Coeli, the Queen of Heaven, has redeemed the earth and man. It is as if we are caught up in Gödel’s Theorem, in the eternity of eight on its side, everything twisted into the double helix of the true. But before that happens, and before we find Boethius, where Dante placed him, in Paradiso X, we must still journey through the prison that is Hell and the correctional facility that is Purgatory. Inferno is set in the realm of darkness, of the terrible three days from Good Friday until Easter Sunday, and its similes are set in the season of winter, that season Shakespeare was to call “the winter of our discontent”, the winter of despair. Purgatorio returns us to the “sweet season” of the poem’s opening, to Spring, to Easter, to Resurrection from death, while Hell had been deadly. Both regions are stony, but upon Purgatorio’s cliff walls the sun shines like a blessing. Actually the two places mirror each other. Both are labyrinthine gyres, the first being the inside-out version of the second. Both have entry gates. We remember vividly the horror, the inexorability of the first, its words chiseled upon granite, as upon a tombstone, as Moses’ law upon the stone tablets, as upon a Roman triumphal arch: “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” Yet that same gate spoke of itself as made by Sacred Justice, Divine Omnipotence, Primordial Love, and Ultimate Intellect. How could Love create such an artifice, a memorial to despair, to negation, to atheism, one asks? However, there is a similar gate in Purgatorio IX, upon entering which Dante is branded with the seven P’s upon his forehead. A fresco in 4. Santa Maria del Fiore, painted by Domenico di Michelino, shows Dante explaining his Commedia to the city of Florence (Plate XIX). The gate to the city of Florence is mirrored in that to Hell. And both of these are shown as the same as that to the cornices, to the terraces, of Purgatory (Plate LXVII b). It is the same gate: but the first time it is entered in a state of despair; in the second it is the Golden Gate of hope. What Dante has done is to present it twice over, the first as if seen by a Boethius wallowing in despair, the second as if by a Boethius imbued with hope by Philosophia. It is the same gate but perceived from a different mental perspective. This time it is more truly the gate of Sacred Justice, Divine Omnipotence, Primordial Love, and Ultimate Intellect. It is not the gate into the prison, but the gate out of it. My inclinations are to leave Hell far behind. But I must return there to discuss two episodes. In Inferno V Dante and Virgil meet Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini. Francesca tells her tale of woe and includes in it the statement, in the subjunctive, that if God were their friend she would pray for Dante. It is not that God is really their enemy, but only that their perception of God is that he has withdrawn himself from them. In fact, in the light of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, it is they who have chosen to withdraw themselves from God and therefore speak of him in the subjunctive, twisting language to match their twisting of truth. It is actually they themselves who do not forgive themselves, not God. Later, in Inferno, the souls will speak of God in ever worsening terms, as the enemy power, the Podestà, the tyrant, as they, in the form of that verb that denotes choice, will themselves further and further from his presence, voluntarily placing themselves in eternal exile from him.Footnote

One convict in Attica State Prison said to me that had been true of himself, he had blamed everyone else but himself.

The other tale is that of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca of Pisa in Inferno XXXIII who, shut up in prison with his little sons for having betrayed his city, in his hunger took to devouring their dead bodies, a terrible act of cannibalism that he now carries out in revenge on the frozen ice upon the head of Archbishop Ruggieri who had so imprisoned him and his progeny. Further on, across the ice, in this realm of uttermost despair, is found Satan, the most imprisoned prisoner in the prison of hell, and he is mirroring that same act of Ugolino, as he in turn devours his three sons, Judas, Cassius, and Brutus, traitors to the holy cities of Jerusalem and Rome. This devouring of one’s progeny, this annihilation of oneself and one’s kin, is that Boethian definition of evil, that annihilation of self, that tending to non-beingness, that despair brings about. Despair, in theology, is the worst sin, the sin against God and against oneself in the image of God. But it was from the genitals of Saturn, devourer of his progeny, that Venus, Love, was born. Individuals under stress, such as the stress of imprisonment or the loss of identity that exile brings about, compensate in some cases by creating works that restore meaning to their lives. Carl Jung observed mental patients to create mandalas, labyrinths that restored order to their psyches.Footnote

Carl G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R. F. C. Hull.

Viktor Frankl, experiencing Auschwitz, understood that it is neither Freud’s sex drive, nor Adler’s power trip, but the quest for meaning that heals.Footnote

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.

Thomas Usk, Chaucer’s friend, when awaiting his execution, wrote in prison a Boethian Testament of Love which spells out in acrostics a prayer on his behalf to a Margaret, a Pearl, who symbolizes his soul.Footnote

Thomas Usk, “The Testament of Love,” in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. W. W. Skeat, vol. VII.1–145.

King James I of Scotland, when captured by the English, wrote a poem in Chaucer’s manner and based on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, which is known as the Kingis Quair, the King’s Book, with a similar theme.Footnote

King James I of Scotland, The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith.

Sir Thomas More, when a prisoner in the Tower of London wrote the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation in which two Christian Hungarians, an uncle and a nephew, console themselves about the coming of the infidel Turks.Footnote

Sir Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, eds. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol 12.

Sir Walter Raleigh and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi’s father, when in prison wrote histories of the world.Footnote

Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, ed. C.A. Patrides; Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People.

Navaho when they are ill have sand paintings done while the narration of the creation of the world is recounted, narrations which name the individual patient for whom the rites are performed.Footnote

Mircea Eliade, Aspects du myth, pp. 33–70.

In all these attempts to reorder human lives, these accounts, whether on paper or in sand or with the spoken word or with paint, center themselves upon the individual in question, including that person in the totality of the work, and have that person be at the center of the design or order, of the re-creation of meaning and sense and pattern. Similarly, Boethius and Dante place and name themselves within their labyrinthine, mandala-like works in which they journey from the outside of the circle, which lacks meaning and sense and has the wrong perspective, to its center where they attain meaning, truth, freedom, and consolation. We are dealing with a paradox, for that very design, that very order they create is somewhat akin to a prison. Why is it that man has always loved rigorous design and pattern, planning cities out in blocks, designing hell with bolgias and purgatory with cornices, and prisons and monasteries with cells, I do not really know. I do know that while I would gain a certain sense of satisfaction in creating a Utopia, an ordered community, I would not choose to inhabit one designed by another, in which I had no choice as to its shaping. The French Poststructuralist, Michel Foucault, has studied this aspect of prisons and found that the origin of the concept had as its intention the aiding and reforming of prisoners, rather than the destruction of their souls.Footnote

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir.

Let us say that, for some, the idea of order is seen as like a paradise; a medieval monastery was understood in this way for its cells centered upon a cloistered garden with a well that thus represented the City of God on earth.Footnote

Herrad von Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green; George Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of the University.

While for others, such order is the stuff of nightmares. Dante’s Hell is most certainly that. Interestingly it was partly modeled upon the medieval tale of St. Patrick’s Purgatory as seen in the Vision of the Knight Owain. He had slept in St. Patrick’s Cave, which was on an island in the middle of a lake in Ireland, and there he had dreamt a most fearsome dream of bridgy chasms, bolgias, catwalks, from which he nearly did not emerge alive.Footnote

St. Patrick’s Purgatory: The Versions of Owayne Miles, ed. Robert Easting, EETS 298; Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives.

In the nineteenth century the English essayist, Thomas de Quincey, described Coleridge showing him Piranesi’s prints, called the Carceri, the Prisons, prints which the Italian Renaissance Piranesi engraved in the aftermath of a fever delirium, of terrible stone vaulted prison cells that went on forever, with awful instruments of torture upon the floors, great racks, and wheels, while balustrades and terraces lead from one tier to the next, upon which one can see the diminutive figure of Piranesi himself, striving to escape from one region of the prison only to find himself in the next.Footnote

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

I have always wanted to do a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with these scenes as scrims and backcloth to illustrate its Denmark as a prison. This is what Dante in a sense himself does in stealing, plagiarizing, his Hell from Virgil’s Aeneid VI and placing himself and Virgil within that construct, naming himself within the text, giving himself perverse meaning. He sees the Inferno as a prison of eternity, a nightmare, from which there is no escape for its inhabitants, other than for himself, and his reader mirrored in himself. These prisoners are Lifers. They do not themselves even ever wish to earn parole. But Purgatorio is an utterly different kind of imprisonment. It is willed and chosen by its participants, much as the inhabitants of a medieval monastery chose for themselves their lives of orderliness. The Purgatorio’s inhabitants are not static exiles at the outside of being, but can choose to ascend from one cornice to the next, journeying as pilgrims toward the center whenever they themselves know they are ready to do so. The inhabitants of Purgatorio have sinned the same sins as the inhabitants of Inferno, but their attitude, their perception, is different. They have died in hope of redemption, not despairingly convincing themselves they are damned. The Purgatorial mountain is thus a Penitentiary in the original sense of the word, where pilgrims could atone for and expiate their crimes, after which the slate is wiped clean, the record clear, their debt to man and God paid up. Paradiso is a realm of utter freedom, where the souls are both at the center and wherever else they choose, bringing with them that all-encompassing perspective of the center’s freedom even when they descend earthward, as in Beatrice’s case when, at the instigation of Mary and Lucy, she can even come to Virgil in the Inferno, these three ladies being the three Graces, rather than as three Fates and Furies. What is especially important to realize in Dante’s text is that the inhabitants of Hell’s bolgias and circles, while they consider themselves fated and imprisoned by God, the enemy power, have, in fact, chosen freely, in bitterness and self-pitying rage, to pervert the truth and the reality of their existence, blaming another for what is their own doing. They have chosen, freely, to believe that they are fated and punished and damned; they have done this to themselves and it is not the deed of another. God, who upon the Gate of Hell is noted as being Power, Love, and Wisdom (in some translations, Omnipotence, Love, and Intellect), has created these beings in his image, so that they share his power, love, and wisdom as well, if they choose to do so. Or they may just as freely choose to relinquish that power, that love, and that wisdom, becoming powerless, hateful, and mad, and thereby alienate themselves from God; as, in fact, their personae have done. Dante, in creating these bitter, proud, and willful souls, has shaped them, and also himself, in the image of the foolish Boethius in the Consolation. And through the pages of the Comedy, he journeys away from that foolish arrogant self to the wisdom of Philosophia and Beatrice, he journeys from pride to humility, quite literally from the tragedy of Virgil’s pagan Aeneid to a Christian comedy of salvation attained through the choice made to know himself, to forgive himself, and to purge himself with the medieval rites of confession, contrition, and satisfaction, which includes restitution to one’s victim and to society. A quality all these works share is that the author quests or meets another, who is female, rather than male. This occurs in Boethius’ Consolation, in Dante’s Commedia, in Usk’s Testament, and in King James’ Book or Quaire. This female represents the author’s soul, from which he is no longer alienated when he attains wisdom. (In the same way, Shakespeare has Lear’s soul be Cordelia, Prospero’s, Miranda, Leontes’, Perdita.) Her love is at the center. There, as well, is her power and her wisdom. For Socrates in prison in Attica this was Diotima. For Boethius in prison in Pavia this was Philosophia. For Dante in exile from Florence this was Florentine Beatrice. For Thomas Usk this was Margaret and for the King of Scotland the woman he glimpses through the bars is to be his wife and Queen. For Eldridge Cleaver, writing Soul on Ice in prison in San Quentin, this is the Black Queen of the Song of Solomon in the Bible. By these means, on a mental plane, these writers cancel out the horror of imprisonment and exile. Let me end this prison talk by noting that when Dante meets the soul of Boethius in Paradiso X he speaks of him as having come  to this peace…  from exile and martyrdom. 128–129 In those words Dante mirrors his own journey from despair to hope, from fate to freedom, and from the bitterness of his own exile to that “vision of peace”, the meaning of the word, “Jerusalem”, he so joyously celebrates in the Comedy’s Paradiso.

That was my paper at Attica State Prison. We mentioned to the guards how attentive and how perceptive the inmates had been to us. A guard’s angry reply was that they had only behaved well in order to have another such conference. During the “Symposium on Learning in Exile” the guards shuffled their feet and the chairs, talked on their walkie-talkies, called out the prisoners by number rudely and loudly, and rattled plates. The prisoners sat in such rapt attention that a pin could have been heard dropping, and they won our hearts by conveying to us that they were people of dignity and worth. They made comments, relating the texts to themselves, noting they had been like the souls in Hell, blaming everyone but themselves, with disarming honesty.⁵⁰ One young Hispanic asked whether we could include Spanish and Caribbean texts in our material next time. I told him of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto, a Spanish Commedia, and of Jorge Luis Borge’s writing on labyrinths,⁵¹ but confessed my ignorance of Caribbean poetry and apologized. Another, African American, asked me whether it was not the difficulties and vicissitudes (yes, that was his vocabulary) of Dante’s life that had caused him to write such an exquisite and powerful work as the Commedia. A third, Native American, made a similar comment. We saw that America warehouses its minority races in prisons wholesale. Almost no Whites, who could pay lawyers to be free, but African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Irish were our audience. We went to Attica State Prison, now euphemistically named Attica Correctional Facility, thinking we would be teaching; instead we learned, we were taught, and in that prison found Philosophia, Lady Wisdom, for her home is less in a university library than it is in a place of misfortune.

The Symposium lasted most of the day. We came back again that evening to meet with the class that had been studying Dante that semester. Once again we were escorted past many locked gateways by guards. As we went down one corridor, Ron and Bill were telling us that the rioting and shooting of ten years before took place in the courtyard we could see outside that corridor’s windows. That night, under the moon, it looked strangely peaceful. The next evening we went to Vespers at the Cistercian Abbey of Genesee. It felt right to combine a prison and a monastery. We spent hours talking together about the experience at Attica and of our research on Dante. The prisoners taught us much about the outsiders, Virgil, Boethius, Dante, Saladin, we had half-encountered within our texts, and also they taught us about themselves in such a way that we found ourselves fully being, understanding ourselves and others.⁵² They, like Beatrice, led us to the center.

We four Dante scholars had spoken in 1981 at Attica State Prison. To write this book, following Black Lives Matter in 2021, I turned to Wikipedia on the Attica State Prison Massacre and found this speech, a “Declaration to the People of America”, given 9 September 1971, by a young suiciding African American convict orator, Elliott James Barkley⁵³:

We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace, that means every one of us here, has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed. We will not compromise on any terms except those terms that are agreeable to us. We’ve called upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens the lives of not only us but of every one of you, as well.

His words echo Catiline and Ulysses’ “You were not made to live as beasts!” I questioned my academic colleagues Ronald Herzman and Dennis Looney on whether the inmates, prior to the 1980s program on Dante, had any cognition of Dante and the answer was “No”. This rhetoric for freedom is inherent and universal in all humanity.⁵⁴ But it can be twisted tragically into propaganda, as a demand for freedom of one part only, not of all the people. I remember well when teaching John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, at Berkeley, that a young white Rhodesian in the class was insisting his whiteness entitled him to such “Liberty” at the cost of the indigenous African majority. Guelf Brunetto Latino was, instead, teaching real Justice, Peace, and Freedom to his students. Some of his most eloquent speeches are about Freedom, including the request to free slaves in medieval Florence.⁵⁵

Gender and Language

Christianity, from its revolutionary Gospel, is the Religion of Women and Slaves, the depiction of its Founder androgynous,⁵⁶ though this aspect of gender inclusion became obscured when, in Crusading times, Christians came to mirror their enemy, importing Islam’s Greco-Arabic model of the University which excluded women and barred them from the authorized teaching in Latin of theology to clergy.⁵⁷

Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, though written in that excluding Latin, nevertheless opens that text by speaking of the primacy of the language of women and children as the natural Word, which grammar is not, and Dante will choose to write the Commedia in that language of women and children:

Since I find that no one, before myself, has dealt in any way with the theory of eloquence in the vernacular, and since we can plainly see that such eloquence is necessary to everyone—for not only men, but also women and children strive to acquire it, as far as nature allows—I shall try, inspired by the Word that comes from above, to say something useful about the language of people who speak the vulgar tongue, hoping thereby to enlighten somewhat the understanding of those who walk the streets like the blind, ever thinking that what lies ahead is behind them.⁵⁸

In Convivio I.xiii.4–5 Dante spoke of parents of both genders speaking in Italian, their shared language, and the mingling of their bodies, engendering his own, words and flesh.

This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together, for they conversed in it, just as it is the fire that prepares the iron for the smith who makes the knife; and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being. Moreover, this vernacular of mine was what led me into the path of knowledge which is our ultimate perfection, since through it I entered upon Latin and through its agency Latin was taught to me, which then became my path to further progress.

In Paradiso he speaks of Florentine mothers, while spinning and weaving cloth, telling orally to their babies in cradles and their female companions, the epics “d’i Troiani, di Fiesole e di Roma” [of Trojans, of Fiesole and of Rome (Par XV.121–126)].

Again, like a woman creating a patchwork quilt out of pieces of cloth already cut out and used in clothing, or like a man creating a prosimetron Menippean satura, like the Vita nova recycling earlier lyrics, I turn again to previous papers, one on Dante and the Body, which plots his progression from that of the male father figure to that of the nurturing mother/child symbiosis.

Dante and the Body

Verse

Verse                 Man dies because he cannot join                 the end to the beginning.                 Alcmeon, Aristotle’s PhysicianFootnote

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Mary Flexner Lectures); Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, p. 20.

A recent online conference on Dante and the Sciences of the Human: Medicine, Physics, Soul, held 23 October 2021, sponsored by CSMBR (Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance) based in Pisa, resulted in a discussion of Robert Durling’s comparison of the Inferno to the human—and male—body.⁶⁰ To which I replied, briefly, with the following arguments concerning women’s nurturing bodies in the Commedia. I take this paper’s arguments from primary materials, from Dante’s biography, from his immediate cityscape and milieux, and from Italian iconography, less than from received opinion in Dante scholarship.Verse

Verse From my research on Brunetto Latino, appointed Dante’s guardian at the death of his father by his stepmother, Lapa, and on Dante’s Commedia, I had been coming to see that Dante, born in 1265, was orphaned twice: first at his mother Bella’s early death in 1270, when he was five; then at the death of his money-lending father, Alighiero di Bellincione, before 1283, when he was still a teenager. The manuscripts which I believe could have been copied out by Dante from Brunetto, first of the Tesoretto in a schoolboyish hand, and later the Tesoro, by the same scribe but now mature, as these are the only ones in the group of manuscripts from the 1280s and 90s of Brunetto’s writings in Italian to employ cancelleresca, that script which Leonardo Bruni described he had seen in Dante’s hand, the others being in littera textualis. These particular manuscripts in cancelleresca are written on poor parchment. The young Dante, though promising intellectually, was by no means rich.Footnote

JB Holloway, Il Tesoro di Brunetto Latino, Maestro di Dante Alighieri; https://www.florin.ms/OpereBrunettoLatino.html

The Inferno is filled with dead Oedipal father figures in turn, his guide Virgil first, then Cavalcante and Farinata in their shared tomb, being the father and father-in-law of his soon-to-be-dead Guelf friend Guido Cavalcanti who had been married to Ghibelline Farinata’s daughter Beatrice at the Peace of the Cardinal Latino in 1280,Footnote

Robert Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, trans. Giovanna Battista Klein, 8 vols, VII, 358.

then Brunetto Latino, his beloved father surrogate guardian, then Ugolino, devouring his progeny, and finally to Satan as Saturn devouring his. But the poem pivots from the masculine to the feminine, already prophesied in the rescue chain of Mary, Lucia, Beatrice, dispatched to Virgil in the Inferno, with Lia and Rachel becoming Matelda and Beatrice in the Purgatorio, virile Virgil vanishing back into the shades of Hell. An intriguing 1964 study by Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer discussed the journey motif as undertaken to the Mother Goddess, represented by the labyrinth to be traced by the staff, the virga, the male member, which is then sacrificed as a surrogate, to attain the goal.Footnote

Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims, pp. 35–36.

This patterning is found in the journey to Isis by Lucius in Lucius Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, in Guillaume de Lorris’ continuation to the Roman de la Rose, and in Cesare Ripa’s Emblem for the Pilgrim (“Chapter 7: Dante’s Labyrinth, Dante’s Cosmos”: Fig. 2 a, b).Footnote

Apuleius, Opera, BML Plut.54.32, scribe, Giovanni Boccaccio; The Golden Ass Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, trans. W. Adlington; John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography, from Valencia, MS 387, fol. 146^v; Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Venice: Cristoforo Tomasini, 1655, Esilio, p. 184, https://archive.org/details/iconologia00ripa/page/184/mode/2up: Pilgrim in Labyrinth, Boethius von Bolswart (1580–1634) in Hermann Hugo, Pia desideria (1624), https://emblems.hum.uu.nl/hu1624.html:

Virgil is to Dante a Mercury as “Psychopomp” (the guide to the souls of the dead with snake-wreathed caduceus), his pilgrim staff, his virga, his Falstaff, leading him astray, as in John Webster Spargo’s research of the medieval Virgil as necromancer.Footnote

John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends, pp. 136–197, 256.

One can read the relationship of Dante to Virgil as that of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, mirrored again in the Canterbury Tales’ Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, and in Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. We recall, too, that the Commedia’s architecture is formed of labyrinths, the first, subterranean, the second, the Purgatorial mountain’s gyring terraces, the final, that of the Cosmos and its celestial wheeling spheres. Dante, orphaned at five years old, had probably been breast fed until a later age than would be today’s practices. Sheep’s milk and goat’s milk could be given as a supplement. He speaks of his baptism in the fair sheepfold of St. John’s Baptistery in Paradiso XVI.25–27,Footnote

I use the Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1975, edition, taken electronically from the Società Dantesca Italiana website for https://www.florin.ms/Dantevivo.html for the hypertexted searchable Italian text with images, readings, and music, and my own adaptations from the Temple Classics, ed. J.A. Carlyle, Thomas Okey and P.H. Wicksteed.

   ditemi de l’ovil di San Giovanni   quanto era allora, e chi eran le genti   tra esso degne d’i più alti scanni. [Tell me of the sheepfold of St John, how great it then was, and who were the folk worthy of the highest seats in it.] and, Paradiso XXV.1–9,   Se mai continga che ’l poema sacro al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, sì ch’e’ m’ha fatto per molti anni macro,   vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra del bello ovile ov’ io dormi’ agnello, nimico a’ lupi che li danno guerra;   con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte del mio battesmo prenderò il cappello; [Should it ever come to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth so have set hand, that it has made me lean through many years/ should overcome the cruelty which bars me from the fair sheepfold in which I used to sleep, a lamb, foe to the wolves which war on it,/ with changed voice now, and with changed fleece shall I return, a poet, and at the font of my baptism shall I assume the chaplet.]Footnote

On liturgy of the Reconciliation of Penitents see JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 62–63.

And he often speaks of both sheep’s milk and human milk. First of Roman and Greek poets as nursed by lactating Muses in Purgatorio XXII.97–104, of poetry as milk,   «dimmi dov’ è Terrenzio nostro antico, Cecilio e Plauto e Varro, se lo sai: dimmi s’e’ son dannati, e in qual vico».   «Costoro e Persio e io e altri assai —rispuose il duca mio—sian con quel Greco che le Muse lattar più ch’altri mai,   nel primo cinghio del carcere cieco; spesse fïate ragioniam del monte che sempre ha le nutrice nostre seco, » [“Tell me, where are our ancient Terence, Caecilius, Plautus and Varro, if you know; tell me if they are damned, and where”. “They, and Persius, and I, and many others,” my Leader answered, “are with the Greek to whom the Muses gave milk more than to any other,”] of sheep’s milk in Paradiso V.82–84, where Beatrice chides him,   «Non fate com’ agnel che lascia il latte  de la sua madre, e semplice e lascivo  seco medesmo a suo piacer combatte!»  [“Do not do as the lamb who leaves his mother’s milk, silly and wanton, fighting with himself for his own pleasure”] and again in Paradiso XI.127–9,   e quanto le sue pecore remote  e vagabunde più da esso vanno,  più tornano a l’ovil di latte vòte.  [and the more his sheep leave from him afar and wandering off, the emptier of milk they return to him.] then of human milk in Paradiso XXX.82–84,   Non è fantin che sì sùbito rua  col volto verso il latte, s’e’ si svegli  molto tardato da l’usanza sua.  [Never does a child rush so quickly, his face turned to milk, than when he has slept later than usual.] repeated in Paradiso XXXIII.106–108,   Omai sarà più corta mia favella,  pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante  che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.  [Now shall my speech fall more faint even of what I recall, than does the infant who still bathes his tongue at his mother’s breast.]Footnote

Both structures, the Baptistery and the future Santa Maria del Fiore, are domed like the Madonna’s breast, the latter prompted by the Baptistery, and the miracles of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria that also engendered Orsanmichele. See, for instance, Lorenzo Monaco “Intercession of Christ and Mary”, The Cloisters of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Christ is in red, Mary in white, their blood and milk interceding with God the Father for the salvation of Florence from the plague in 1402, a work formerly in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

Dante, in order to participate in Florentine politics following the Ordinaments of Justice, had to be a member of a Guild, choosing that of Doctors and Spice Merchants, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (1294–1302), whose stemma is the image of the Virgin and Child, mirroring her thaumaturgical image in 30. Orsanmichele (Plate XXXII a, b, c, d), about which his poet companion Guido Cavalcanti wrote his 1292 sonnet, given at the opening of this book, praising the faith of the laity with their Compagnia dei Laudesi as greater than that of the clergy, such as the mendicant friars of 43. Santa Croce.Footnote

Sonnet XXXV to Guido Orlando in Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, trans. Ezra Pound, p. 85: given in Preface; for Florence’s Compagnie dei Laudesi see Ursula Betka, https://www.florin.ms/beth2.html#lauda. Brunetto Latino’s daughter, Biancia, left Orsanmichele’s Compagnia dei Laudesi a handsome endowment of ten gold coins and a third of the remainder of her estate, JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, pp. 168–169, 175.

In Paradiso XXXII, Dante maps out the life of Mary, whose face genetically is so like her Son’s, while describing her Annunciation, that moment of Christ being conceived within her womb, even having it be sung, in that iconography Florence so celebrated:   Riguarda omai ne la faccia che a Cristo più si somiglia, ché la sua chiarezza sola ti può disporre a veder Cristo».   Io vidi sopra lei tanta allegrezza piover, portata ne le menti sante create a trasvolar per quella altezza,   che quantunque io avea visto davante, di tanta ammirazion non mi sospese, né mi mostrò di Dio tanto sembiante;   e quello amor che primo lì discese, cantando “Ave, Maria, gratïa plena!”, dinanzi a lei le sue ali distese.   Rispuose a la divina cantilena da tutte parti la beata corte, sì ch’ogni vista se n’ fé più serena,   (85–93) [“Look now on the face that is most like Christ’s, for its brightness and no other has the power to prepare you to see Christ”./ I saw pour onto that face such joy, born on the sacred minds created to reach such heights/ that all which I had seen before held me not in such marvel nor showed me such likeness to God./ And that love which first descended to her, singing ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace’, now spread his wings before her./ The divine canticle was answered from every side by the blessed Court, so that every face became more serene], then the poetry enacts the foretelling of her death, likewise by the angel who now bears her the palm, and the no longer authorized iconography of the Dormition of the Virgin, but used by Arnolfo di Cambio for the Duomo and by Orcagna for the Orsanmichele Tabernacle, relating her body to our own,Footnote

The “Dormition of the Virgin” was eclipsed by the dogma of the “Assumption of the Virgin”. Brunetto Latino, who himself wrote a magnificent lauda to the Virgin, online Appendix, says in the Tesoro: “Et sappiate che la nostra donna moriò al secolo corporalmente. e portarolla li apostoli a seppelire ne la valle di iosaphat. faciendo si grandi canti li angeli in cielo ke non si potrebe ne dire ne contare. |Et quel canto udirono li apostoli. e molti altri per l’uniuerso mondo. |Ma poi chella fu seppellita. al terço dì li apostoli non ui trouaro el corpo suo. |Onde douemo credere che domenedio la resuscito. et è collui ne la gloria di paradiso” [Tesoro BML Plut.42.19, fol. 15^rb].

  perch’ elli è quelli che portò la palma  giuso a Maria, quando il Figliuol di Dio  carcar si volse de la nostra salma. (112–114)  [for it is he who brought the palm to Mary, when the Son of God turned to bear our corpse.] And now we turn to the opening of the final Canto of the final Canticle, to Bernard’s Song on the Canticle of Canticles. First we must ask why Bernard, who preached bloody Crusades against the Saracens, is in this Gold and White Rose, “quella pacifica oriafiamma” (Par. XXXI.127)? And following that discuss the meaning of his paradoxical address to the Virgin. I sought in vain on the Internet for an appropriate medieval image of St. Bernard and the Madonna lactans, the Lactatio Bernardi. It is censored there except for a paucity of late examples because of Google’s rules against showing lactating women and their babies, though this was ubiquitous in the Middle Ages of Mary as the nurturing and natural model for all mothers and all their infants.Footnote

Renate Lellep Fernandez, my colleague at Princeton University where we co-taught in the student-initiated Woodrow Wilson Seminar, Problems of World Hunger, observed that with the introduction of American cattle in the Asturias, for bottle-feeding babies, the images of the lactating Madonna and Child came to be seen as obscene and were covered up, when she lectured on the pros and cons of human lactation.

The legend concerning St. Bernard has him taught wisdom by the Virgin expressing her milk, from quite a distance, into his mouth while he kneels before her in prayer.Footnote

Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend does not give this story but notes that St. Bernard’s mother breastfed him and her other children rather than giving them to wetnurses, while Caroline Walker Bynum gives the importance of the legend, giving an early example from Palma de Mallorca, 1290, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Arnaud Delorme on Academia.edu notes that Carlo Ossola, Introduzione alla Divina Commedia, had already observed this relationship to the Lactatio Bernardi and also to the “Dormition of the Virgin”. Likewise the importance of milk and blood can be seen in the Lorenzo Monaco “Intercession of Christ and Mary”, The Cloisters of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later, Filippino Lippi, son of Fra Lippo Lippi and his nun model for the Virgin, Lucrezia Buti, will paint the Virgin appearing to St. Bernard, 1485–1487, for Dante’s 21. Badia which is where Dante as a boy had heard the monks’ Gregorian chanting of the Psalms, including the Miserere Psalm he cites five times over in his David/Solomon like poem and where Boccaccio would give his lecture commentaries on the Commedia.

Then, thanks to Manu Radhakrishnan, I found the right image, “Lactatio Bernardi” 1290, Palma de Mallorca, in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. We are mammalian. I can testify from my own experience with my own body and its breasts with my own three sons that this can occur. The end becomes the beginning where St Bernard does not sing in Gregorian chant in Latin but a Franciscan lauda such as composed and sung by Orsanmichele’s Compagnia dei laudesi, in the language that also women and babies could know, in Tuscan Italian, their “Mother Tongue”, in the volgare of the laity, a song which is nowhere to be found in Bernard’s Latin writings, being, now humbly, anonymously, of Dante’s own composing, Paradiso XXXIII.1–6, in a Magnificat Bakhtinian world upside down, or right way round, reversal of the hierarchy of learned Latin over the vernacular of mothers and babies, women and children.Footnote

Luke 1.45–55; M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.

  «Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio,  umile e alta più che creatura,  termine fisso d’etterno consiglio,   tu se’ colei che l’umana natura  nobilitasti sì, che ’l suo fattore  non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura. »  [“Virgin Mother, Daughter of your Son, lowly and exalted more than any creature, fixed goal of eternal counsel,/ you are she who so enobled human nature that its own Maker scorned not to become its making”. ] The paradox of “Vergine Madre, Figlia del tuo Figlio” was inexplicable—until I saw the sculpture by Dante’s contemporary, Arnolfo di Cambio, of the “Dormition of the Virgin”, where he had sculpted the anatomically correct boning of a little girl’s smiling face for the Soul of the Virgin which Christ carries to the Heavens with such love (Plate XXIII c, Arnolfo di Cambio, “Dormition of the Virgin”, Florence, Opera del Duomo). The iconography of this scene is ubiquitous in the Eastern Churches, though it came to be eclipsed in the Latin West by the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin. Arnolfo’s and Orcagna’s sculptures in hard marble, the former known to Dante, explain how the smiling Mary can be both Mother and Daughter to her Son, that Wisdom of Proverbs 8.22.31, who played as a girl child at the side of God at the Creation of the Cosmos. A further parallel to playfulness, and we can imagine the orphaned child, Dante, then his half-brother and -sister, Francesco and Gaetana, and next his own children, John, James, Peter, and Antonia, playing in the little 14. Piazza Donati (Plates XXVI a, b), is that of the story of the jongleur who fails as a monk except when dancing naked—like King David before the Ark to Michol’s scorn (Purg XI.55–70)—before the statue of the Virgin and Child.Footnote

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity.

But there is yet another layer. Dante progresses from his pride in being led by the imperial poet Virgil and taught by the republican chancellor Brunetto, to humbly being instructed and led by a woman, Beatrice—like Socrates by Diotima, like Boethius by Philosophia. Orphaned Dante has created a poem that pivots away from masculine father figures, from the bloodshed of Virgil’s martial epic, and from the shades of feuding Guelfs and Ghibellines, to whom Virgil guided him, and it now turns toward the lost and found maternal milk of Bella, with Bernard’s Mary, guided by the Beatrice of the Vita nova, whose father, Folco Portinari, had founded Santa Maria Nuova’s Hospital and whose nurse Monna Tessa had founded the still extant Oblate order of nurses for it,Footnote

8. Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, founded by Folco Portinari in 1288, in Dante’s time, still functions today, 700 years later. As I write I hear 7. Misericordia ambulances sirening their way to it; the Misericordia likewise founded centuries ago, in 1244. Michelangelo in his Florentine Pietà reflected his own portrait as a Misericordia worker as that of Nicodemus supporting the grieving Mary as she supports her dead Son. Likewise had Piero della Francesca painted the Madonna del Parto above his mother’s tomb, whose name “della Francesca” identifies his female parentage, not that of an absent male father.

whose number is “nine”, of the 3+3+3+9 of the Angelus, rung from the 21. Badia’s belltower (Plate XXVIII a, b, c, d, e, f), within earshot of Dante’s natal home (XXXI a, b, c, d), of the Sybil’s nine prophetic books, of the woman’s womb gestating her child for nine months. His end becomes his—and our—nurturing beginning.Footnote

While Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents disparaged the “oceanic feeling” as merely derived from the memory of the mother’s breast, William Blake in The Everlasting Gospel wrote, “This world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal”. Freud manifests left-hemisphere dominant atheism, Blake, like Dante, right-hemisphere perceptions.

We can see that Dante’s Decolonialism is the opposite of Milton’s misogyny, in his women, Bella, Lapa, Beatrice, Saint Lucy, Francesca, Semiramis, Pia, Sapia, Lia, Rachel, Matelda, the Ethiopian Queen of Sheba, Queen Dido of Carthage, even Pharoah Cleopatra of Egypt, Piccarda, Cunizza, Antonia, so many.⁷⁷ Though sadly the later mutilations of the splendidly illustrated Paris/Imola Commedia seem to be the work of a disturbed women hating her own body, who disfigures the nude souls in its illuminations. At UNESCO in St. Petersburg and again in Brussels at the EU, I spoke of the Great European Books by both women and men on Good Government: Hildegard von Bingen, Alfonso X el Sabio, Dante Alighieri, Christine de Pizan, Birgitta of Sweden, Miguel de Cervantes, Madame de Staël, Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. I believe it is for these reasons that so many women have loved and written on Dante: Christine de Pizan, ⁷⁸ Maria Francesca Rossetti,⁷⁹ Aurelia Henry Reinehart, Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Reynolds, Irma Brandeis, Helene Wieruszowski, Maria Corti, Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Rachel Owen, Barbara Nolan, Teodolinda Barolini, Prue Shaw, Rachel Jacoff, Gabriella Pomaro, Marisa Boschi Rotiroti, Barbara Bordalejo, Sonia Minutello, Irene Maffia Scariati, Sara Ferrilli, Claudia Di Fonzo, Heather Webb, Alison Cornish, Paola Allegretti, Anna Pegoretti, Teresa De Robertis, Francesca Pasut, Elisabetta Tonello, Elisa Brilli, Kristina M. Olson, Catherine Adoyo, and “one other”.

Gender and Race

Dante’s Beatrice in Purgatorio XXX is presented in multiple forms, as David’s Bathsheba, as Solomon’s Queen of Sheba (Plate LXVI Piero Della Francesca, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Arezzo), and as Virgil’s Aeneas’ Dido, Queen of Carthage (in turn in the epic recited by Virgil to Caesar Augustus, a shadow of the Pharoah Cleopatra, tragically beloved by Julius Caesar and by Mark Antony). While Israel’s Solomon honored Ethiopia’s Queen, Virgil’s Rome devastated and destroyed the Queens of Carthage and of Egypt with her Imperialism. We have already in “Chapter 5: Dante’s Three Beasts” discussed the episode in Aeneid I where Venus substitutes her own son, Amore, Cupid, for Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, in the lap of Dido, Queen of Carthage. As again later with that of Cleopatra, Empress of Egypt, beloved by both Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, whose tale Virgil is reflecting and echoing in his epic poem he is reciting to Caesar Augustus, in which he has Aeneas recite his tale to his African Queen, that love between Aeneas and Dido that will end with her tragic suicide. Dante’s Beatrice is perceived in the Commedia by Dante as a shadow of Virgil’s tragic Dido, “Conosco i segni delle antiche fiamme” (Purg XXX.48), in a transgendering.

I repeat here how Dante Author presents us Dante Pilgrim coming into the presence of his lost Beatrice in a burst of song, of transcending polyphony. In Purgatorio XXX the motet, this time triple, not double, is entirely in Latin, from the Song of Songs, the Gospel (Luke 19.38; Matthew 21.5 and 9) and from Virgil’s Aeneid, the Jewish, the Christian, and the pagan Roman, all musically blended together (Purgatorio XXX.11,19, 21). We know of Dante’s friendship with Jewish Immanuello Romano at Verona, likewise a composer of polyphony, and thus that he could also know that the “Benedictus qui venis” sung at Palm Sunday at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, comparing him to David, and placed in the Mass, derives from the wedding song sung at a bridegroom’s entry into a Synagogue.⁸⁰ Here we have Beatrice being greeted as if Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, the Pharoah Cleopatra, Dante being greeted as if David, as if Solomon, as if Caesar, as if Marc Antony, while the Aeneid recalls the lines about the funeral of Marcellus over which his uncle Caesar Augustus wept and Octavia fainted on hearing Virgil chant Aeneid VI.884 in Rome. It is possible that this motet is even more complicated, that it is quadruple, its burden Psalm 31 at lines 83–84. For in the same canto we find angels singing, “In te, Domine, speravi”, until they come to the lines of “pedes meos” (Purg XXX.82–84, Psalm 31,1–8).

Dante, on seeing Beatrice, turns to Virgil to say that line Virgil’s Dido murmurs on her widowed sexuality reawakening, “Agnosco veteris vestigial flammae”, “Conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma” [I recognize the signs of the ancient flames, Aeneid IV.23, Purg XXX.48,)], amidst so many words concerning his own being orphaned from his mother and then father so young (40–54).Verse

Verse   Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse  l’alta virtù che già m’avea trafitto  prima ch’io fuor di püerizia fosse,   volsimi a la sinistra col respitto  col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma  quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,   per dicere a Virgilio: `Men che dramma  di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi:  conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma’.   Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi  di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,  Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi;   Né quantunque perdéo l’antica matre,  valse a le guance nette di rugiada,  che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre. [As soon as the high virtue struck my sight, which had already pierced me when I was a boy, I turned to the left with the trust a little child runs to its mother, when he is frightened or when hurt, To say to Virgil, “Not a drop of blood is left in me that does not tremble, ‘I recognize the signs of the ancient flame’”. ]

But Virgil, too, is gone from his side. Or is he? In Dante is an economy in which nothing is lost. The pagan world and the Christian world for him coexist harmoniously. When Aeneas first came to Carthage its Empress was on a vast building campaign that will come to an end with her love affair with him (Aeneid I.430–440).Verse

Verse Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole labor, cum gentis adultos educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto ignavom fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent: fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella. ‘O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!’ Aeneas ait, et fastigia suspicit urbis. Infert se saeptus nebula, mirabile dictu, per medios, miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli.

Before that tragedy and later when Rome will plough it under with salt we see Carthage’s abuilding as compared to bees. When we come to the Commedia’s White and Gold Rose it is being inseminated, pollinated, by these same Virgilian and Homeric bees, tragedy moved back in time to felicity and productivity, to comedy (Par XXXI.7–12):Verse

Verse   sì come schiera d’ape che s’infiora una fïata e una si ritorna là dove suo laboro s’insapora,   nel gran fior discendeva che s’addorna di tante foglie, e quindi risaliva là dove ’l suo Amor sempre soggiorna. [as like a swarm of bees where one plunges into a flower, another turns back to the hive to turn work to flavor, so did they ever descend into the great flower, then reascend to where its love for ever dwells.]

In our white Euro-centrism, though at the same time despising the “Old World”, we forget that the Alphabet and the Bible, the building blocks of all our civilization, began outside of Europe.⁸¹ Our maps place us at the center, at the top, as superior, ignoring what is outside our ken. But it can help to up-end the Mediterranean and see how Phoenician, Greek, Egyptian, Carthaginian, and Roman culture were each other’s neighbors. The map drawn by Sabine Réthoré, a brilliant French cartographer, shows this well (Plate LXXVI e).⁸² We can juxtapose to it one by Francesco da Barberino illustrating Brunetto Latino being taught that same map by Natura with Ulysses’ Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar in the Arabic way (Plate LXXVI c, BML Strozzi 146, fol.10^r), that Brunetto had already placed in the Bodleian Douce 319 Li Livres dou Tresor with its associations to Hereford’s bishops and their Mappa Mundi. Europe and Africa are ambages of each other, are equally side by side (Plate LXXVI a, BBodleian Douce 319, Arabic Mappa mundi, Tresor, fol. 8^r, b, detail, d, Hereford Cathedral Mappa Mundi). The Arab world knew of the four stars of the Southern Cross of the Antipodes that Dante sees in Purgatorio I.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi map has interesting links with the manuscript of Brunetto Latino’s Li Livres dou Tresor in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Douce 319. In the Mappa Mundi “AFFRICA” is written in gold letters over Europe, and “EUROPA” over Africa, “MORS” over all of it, its “RS” signifying Bishop Richard Swynford, while Dædalus’ labyrinth is shown on Crete, Augustine in Carthage, Circe tempts voyagers, Nimrod builds his tower, and the Pliny and Othello monsters of ”men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” abound.⁸³ While the Bodleian Douce 319 similarly has the Mediterranean with Africa at the top, Europe at the bottom in its Mappa Mundi.⁸⁴ Brunetto Latino’s Westminster Abbey document (“Chapter 3: Dante’s Schooling, Dante’s Library”: Plate XXXVI d) notes his relationship to the earlier “Episcopus Herbipolensis” [Bishop of Hereford], Peter de Egeblanke.

Instead of conquest and suicide on the part of these dark African Queens, in Dante’s text they triumph. I loved, during Civil Rights, when I was doing Voter Registration in Oakland, that on the buses were posters that quoted from the Song of Solomon 1.5, “Black is Beautiful”, “She is Black but Beautiful”.

Class

Scholars generally tend to argue that Dante’s family is of the minor nobility. They desire to elevate him according to class. I believe that that is a mistake and that Dante instead argues against the hierarchy of social classes as being unjust.⁸⁵ He de-gentrifies and decolonializes, although he has to walk a sword’s edge to obtain the means through patronage from the rich and powerful to sustain his family and himself, as well as to obtain parchment and ink for his writings, during his exile.⁸⁶ In Florence, the uneducated monocultural nobles of inherited lands and wealth were seen as the problem, as causing violence and unrest, the Primo Popolo expelling them, among them Farinata degli Uberti, because of their bloodshed in the streets from their tower societies and their feuds between these. The confiscated property of the Uberti, in Dante’s day, was used for building the Stinche prison. The Secondo Popolo, in which Dante served as a member of the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, even as Prior, likewise restricted their presence from government, in favor of the now educated, skilled, broader-minded merchant class, proficient in other languages and their cultures from international trade in wool, silk, and banking.

There is a moment during Dante’s dialogue with Cacciaguida in Paradiso XVI.13–15 when Beatrice laughs reprovingly at Dante Pilgrim persona who is boasting of his noble lineage; he, as Author, comparing that laugh to the Lady Mallehaut’s coughing reprovingly at the first adulterous kiss between Guinevere and Lancelot which would bring down King Arthur’s holy Camelot. Beatrice is laughing at her pupil for having forgotten his Christian lesson in humility, in chastity, in justice. The Master of the Paduan Antiphoner brilliantly illustrates this self-correction by the Author through his anima Beatrice’s remonstrance at the fallible persona’s self-idolizing esteem for his “noble” ancestors (Plate LXXVII Commedia, BLEgerton 932, fol. 154^v, Fallacy of Nobility).

This Arthurian reference reflects back to Inferno V’s perception of the De vulgari eloquentia’s “ambages pulcherrimae”, of Francesca and Paolo’s dominoing reading of Guinevere and Lancelot, which has the Arthurian/Commedia author of Inferno V be a “Galeotto”, a pornographer and pandar. Like Ovid and like Andreas Capellanus he plays out the two textual levels at once. We are all sons of Adam and therefore equal. “Nobility” is a fallacy, as is Plato’s Myth, his Lie, of the Metals, that society needs to pretend that kings are golden, nobles silver, slaves merely iron, in order to “justify” injustice.

It is in Convivio IV that Dante speaks most clearly against the classism of the “nobility”. He is basing this argument on the Bible and on Boethius who taught that nobility merely by birth with ancestral wealth is of no value, unless lived virtuously. In this Dante inveighed against persons such as Catiline and Corso Donati, of noble stock but whose violent actions were evil.Verse

Verse IV.7 This is the part which begins And so ingrained Has this false view become among us That one calls another noble If he can say `I am the son, Or grandson, of such and such A famous man,’ despite his lack of worth. Consequently it must be observed that it is extremely dangerous to allow a false opinion to take root through negligence. Thus he who is descended of noble stock through his father or some ancestor, and is also evil, is not only base but basest and deserving of contempt and scorn more than any other ill-bred person. IV.9 Consequently with full license and with utter conviction we must now strike at the heart of the received opinions and throw them to the earth so that by reason of my victory the true opinion may stand its ground in the minds of those for whom it is a benefit that this light shines strongly. Lucan attests to this when he addresses them by saying, “Without a fight the laws have perished, and your riches, the basest part of things, have led the battle.” Who does not still keep a place in his heart for Alexander because of his royal acts of benevolence? Who does not keep a place for the good King of Castile [Alfonso el Sabio], or Saladin, or the good Marquis of Monferrato, or the good Count of Toulouse, or Bertran de Born, or Galeazzo of Montefeltro? When mention is made of their gifts, certainly not only those who would willingly do the same, but those as well who would sooner die than do the same, retain in their memory a love for these men. IV.13 Thus Boethius says, in the same book, “Money, then, is good when, having been transferred to others through generosity, it is no longer possessed.” IV.15. Therefore if Adam himself was noble, we are all noble, and if he was base, we are all base, which eradicates any distinction between these conditions and so eradicates the conditions themselves. This means that from what has been said above it follows That each of us is noble or each base. The canzone adds Nor do they either, if they are Christian. It says “Christian” and not “philosophers” or “Gentiles” (even their opinions are not to the contrary) because Christian doctrine has greater strength and destroys all calumny, by virtue of the supreme light of the heaven which illuminates it. IV.20 So let none of the Uberti of Florence or the Visconti of Milan say “Because I am of such a race I am noble,” for the divine seed does not fall upon a race (that is, family stock) but on individuals; and as will be proved below, family stock does not make individuals noble, although individuals make family stock noble. IV.27 Hence we read of Cato that he thought of himself as born not for himself, but for his country and for the whole world. Ah, you ill-fated and misbegotten men who defraud widows and wards, who steal from the very weakest, who rob and seize by force the rights of others, and with these gains arrange banquets, make gifts of horses and arms, goods and money, dress in striking attire, erect wondrous buildings, and believe yourselves to be acting with generosity! What is this but to act like the thief who takes the cloth from the altar to cover his own table? We should mock your gifts, you tyrants, like the thief who would invite guests into his house and spread upon his table the cloth stolen from the altar with the ecclesiastical signs still upon it, and think that others would take no notice. Listen, you stubborn men, to what Tully has to say against you in his book On Offices: “There are many wishing to be impressive and famous who take from some in order to give to others, believing that they will be well regarded, and make them rich for whatever reason they so choose. But nothing is more contrary to what is proper than this”. Where you should take your rest, you shipwreck yourselves against the force of the wind and perish at the very place to which you have so long been journeying! Certainly the knight Lancelot did not wish to enter with his sails raised high, nor the most noble of our Italians, Guido of Montefeltro. These noble men did indeed lower the sails of their worldly preoccupations and late in life gave themselves to religious orders, forsaking all worldly delights and affairs. No one can be excused because of the bond of marriage, which may still bind him late in life; for not only those who conform to the life and ways of St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic dedicate themselves to living a religious life, but even those who are married can dedicate themselves to living a life that is good and truly religious.

This decision against classism is not only on the social level, but Dante also applies it to his choice of literary form (if the Epistle to Can Grande is his), the decision against the aristocratic violence of epic and tragedy in Latin to instead opting for comedy, for what is of the village, what is humble, and in the vulgate, the vernacular. When pressed by Giovanni del Virgilio to write in Latin he will only do so in the pastoral form of the eclogue, not the aristocratic epic, which Petrarch would later attempt and fail with his Africa. Meanwhile there is that Biblical “Put not your trust in princes” (Psalm 146.3), the stance also of Brunetto and Machiavelli, who write to princes sarcastically and familiarly, as equals, addressing them as “tu”, while showing the people how best to overthrow their tyranny.

Not only that, Dante Alighieri is writing much as would also Cardinal Newman in The Idea of a University, on education for all as a right also for the poor and oppressed, for women and children, widows and orphans, for Catholics, Jews, and Dissidents, not just a privilege for the rich and powerful, adult and male, communicating members of the Church of England, who only could attend Oxbridge, continuing his teacher Brunetto Latino’s creation of an encyclopedia that contains a university education within the covers of one book, to teach kings and republicans, men, women, and children alike. For this reason Dante in Convivio II.14–15 sets up a university curriculum to correspond with the spheres of the Cosmos, in the medieval manner, similar to the Hebrew Kabbala, and the Hindu chakra, with Grammar for the Moon, Dialectic for Mercury, Rhetoric for Venus, Arithmetic for the Sun, Music for Mars, Geometry for Jupiter, Astrology for Saturn, Physics for the Fixed Stars, Metaphysics for the Galaxy, Moral Philosophy for the Crystalline Sphere, Divine Science for the Empyrean. He creates, in the Commedia, an Open University.⁸⁷ As had Brunetto before him, he creates that book, tuition free, debt free, for you.

Religion

Dante reads the Bible and the Gospel, seeing their teachings as being from Pride to Humility, paralleling this as being from Latin to Italian, Tragedy to Comedy, through inclusion. He embraces both the pagan world and the “Peoples of the Book”, in De vulgari eloquentia seeing the Hebrew language as that of Adam and Jesus.

One reason is this: no one, whether philosopher, pagan, Jew, Christian, or member of any sect, doubts that they are full of all blessedness, either all or the greater part of them, or that these blessed ones are in the most perfect state of being (Conv II.iv).

I say that of all the follies the most foolish, the basest, and the most pernicious is the belief that beyond this life there is no other; for, if we look through all the books of both the philosophers and the other sages who have written on this topic, they all agree in this: that there is some part of us which is immortal. Aristotle seems to confirm this above all in his book On the Soul; every Stoic seems above all to confirm this; Tully seems to confirm this, especially in his short book On Old Age; every poet who has spoken according to the pagan faith seems to confirm this; every creed confirms this–whether Jews, Saracens, Tartars, or whoever else lives according to any principle of reason (Conv II.viii).

He includes the declared heretic Sigier of Brabant, Averroës’ disciple teaching the “Unity of the Intellect”, among the doctors of the Church (Par X.136). Likewise the Aeneid’s Ripheus (Par XX.68) and the just Brahmin on the Ganges are worthy of salvation (Par XIX.70).⁸⁸ Dante gives in sculpted marble on the Terrace of Pride, side by side with that of the Annunciation, and of David dancing before the Ark to Michol’s scorn, the story of the pagan Emperor Trajan for whose soul Pope Gregory had prayed, baptizing him with his tears, that domino effect from the widow’s tears (Purg X.73–93).

There were several European centers open to the “Peoples of the Book”, Frederic II’s Sicily of Palermo, Alfonso X el Sabio’s Seville and Toledo, and Can Grande della Scala’s Verona. We have already discussed the Arabic-Jewish translations of texts at Alfonso’s court, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Alfraganus’ Almagest, the Kitab al-Mirag (Book of the Ladder), and the multiculturalism of the regal Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, that Brunetto taught his students. Giorgio Battistoni has edited the Heaven and Hell written in Hebrew by Dante’s friend in Verona, Manoello Giudeo/Immanuello Romano and discussed the sonnets exchanged between Immanuello Romano, Bosone da Gubbio, and Cino da Pistoia (whose poetry is so present with Dante’s in De Vulgari Eloquentia and in the Vatican canzoniere, BAV lat. 3793, while the Palatino canzoniere, BNCF Banco Rari 217, includes lyrics by Frederic II and Saladin).⁸⁹ Bosone da Gubbio and Jacopo Alighieri, in 1322, joined forces in writing commentaries to early “Danti del Cento” manuscripts of the Commedia associated with Francesco da Barberino.⁹⁰ It is clear that Dante, his sons, and his fellow poets created an Open Society, a Republic of Letters, and that they collaborated in their revolutionary seizure of scriptoria to do so. Today we use Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian technology to power our electronic communications systems. The circle about Dante, following Alfonso X el Sabio and Brunetto Latino, was doing the same in adopting the superior architecture and scribal technology of the Islamic world to the Christian one.

Sandow Birk magnificently gives in his graphic novel a Latina Beatrice with Dante gazing down at the Kaaba at Mecca for the Celestial Rose.⁹¹ Religions are sandboxes where cultures either convey a moral compass of meaning—or smash it with crusades. I make present the founder from the past, become this male/female persona, ingesting memoried wheat and grapes, bread and wine, flesh and blood, death and life, uttering “Amen”. The word as deed. Knowing the teachings—ob-audire, “to hear”, the true meaning of “obedience”—listening to them, heeding them, not to crusade/crucify the Other, the stranger, who would have us welcome the stranger, the Other, as God in the disguise of the beggar’s rags—who is ourselves. The Buddha’s calm kindness in going from rich prince to poor monk, the ethics of humility, the Beatitudes, the Magnificat, the world-upside-down or inside out, because we are Adam, who is Eve, made of earth, to which we shall return. In this we can learn wisdom. Dante, and we with him, seek this—as Pilgrim Readers—as Freedom Readers—through the prose writings of the De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio and through the singing poetry of the Vita nova and the Commedia.

Justice

See especially the essays by Anna Pegoretti, Giuseppe Ledda, Justin Steinberg, in Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante, eds. Giulia Gaimari and Catherine Keen.

Brunetto Latino’s known students were Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino. I studied a cluster of manuscripts written out during the time when Brunetto was teaching these youths in Florence, in the 1280s–1290s, following his return to the city after the Peace of Cardinal Latino and the Sicilian Vespers.

The 1280s–1290s cluster of manuscripts of Brunetto Latino’s Tesoro taken down in dictation by his discipuli scriptores importantly gives diagrams which include the Squaring of the Circle (Plate LXXVIII a, Tesoro, BML, Plut.42.20, fol. 74^r; b, Baptistery Mosaic; c, BNCF Magl. VIII.1375, fol. 26^v; d, BAmbrosian G75 sup, fol. 30^v; e, BGuernerian 238, fol. 99^v).⁹² In Convivio II.xiii Dante discusses this Squaring of the Circle:

Geometry moves between two things antithetical to it, namely the point and the circle–and I mean “circle” in the broad sense of anything round, whether a solid body or a surface; for, as Euclid says, the point is its beginning, and, as he says, the circle is its most perfect figure, which must therefore be conceived as its end. Therefore Geometry moves between the point and the circle as between its beginning and end, and these two are antithetical to its certainty; for the point cannot be measured because of its indivisibility, and it is impossible to square the circle perfectly because of its arc, and so it cannot be measured exactly.

In De monarchia III.iii.1–8 Dante would further discuss the Squaring of the Circle.

Multa etenim ignoramus de quibus non litigamus; nam geometra circuli quadraturam ignorat, non tamen de ipsa litigat; theologus vero numerum angelorum ignorat, non tamen de illo litigium facit; Egiptius vero Scitharum civilitatem, non tamen propter hoc de ipsorum civilitate contendit.

[There are many things about which we are ignorant but which are not subjects of dispute: the geometers do not know how to square the circle, but they do not dispute the question; the theologians do not know how many angels there are, but they do not debate the issue; the Egyptians know nothing about the civilization of the Scythians, but they do not argue about it.]

And the concept recurs where Dante describes God in Paradiso XXXIII.133–136:Verse

Verse  Qual è il geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritruova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, [As the geometer who sets himself to measure the circle and who cannot find, however he thinks, the principle he lacks.]

These manuscripts by Brunetto’s students share these cosmological drawings,⁹³ including this Squaring of the Circle. They share how a stone dropped through the earth stays by gravity at its center from Gossuin de Metz’ Image du Monde (Plate LXXI a, b, BML Plut.42.20, fol. 72^v; c, BNCF Magl.VIII.1375, fol. 26^r; d, BAmbrosian G75 sup, fol. 29^v; e, BGuarnerian 238, fol. 96^r. Two also share lunar tables, one with a horoscope (Plate XL b, BML Plut.42.20, Dante’s hand?, fol. 110^v; a, c, d, BNCF II.VIII.36, Guido Cavalcanti’s hand?, fols. 82^v–84^r with horoscope), it being noted in several early commentaries that Brunetto drew Dante’s horoscope.⁹⁴

These manuscripts all share the Celestial Hierarchies, Brunetto Latino listing them in turn as “Homo, Principates, Troni, Serafini, Cherubini, Potestates, Dominaciones, Archangeli, Angeli”, presenting “HOMO” within that Hierarchy, turning it into an Equality (Plate LXXIX Man as Angel, as mirroring God, a, Tesoro, BML Plut.42.20, fol. 79^v; b, Baptistery Mosaic; c, BNCF II.VIII.36, fol. 82^r; d, BGuarnerian 238, p. 105; e, BTrivulzian 1080, Paradiso). Dante, when he discusses the Angelic ranks, notes the discrepancies between those listed by Dionysius the Areopagite (whom Abelard discovered to be a fraud) and by Pope Gregory (Par XXXVI.130–135), casting doubt on the opposing by Church hierarchies to the Gospel’s inclusion of the least, the leper, the prostitute, the Samaritan, the despised outsider. Dante in the Commedia unlearns. Dante’s earlier use of “VOM” had been of giants, such as Nimrod, builder of Babel’s Tower,⁹⁵ felled for their Ghibelline-like pride, their figures carved upon marble tomb stones (Purg XII reflecting back upon Inf XXXI).⁹⁶ We are all mortal, all destined to be entombed, death is a democracy. The Gospel is a democracy, is Decolonialism, is a Kingdom of Heaven of Justice, moved by Power, Wisdom, and Love. Thus Amyclas, the pagan fisherman in his poverty, is equal to Caesar and to Francis, for Lucan in the Pharsalia and for Dante in Paradiso XI.67. Likewise the Aeneid’s Ripheus (Par XX.68) and the just Brahmin on the Ganges (Par XIX.70) are worthy of salvation.⁹⁷ Dante is writing lay theology, a universalist theology, shaped by Avverroës and Sigier de Brabant’s “Somma Sapienza” [Highest Wisdom, the “Unity of the Intellect”], that the Church, in its self-interest, decreed as heresy in 1270, but which in the Gospel is no heresy at all.⁹⁸

The Emperors of Constantinople had given to the Kings of France the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, believing him to be the St. Dionysius on the Areopagus converted by St. Paul, along with the woman Demaris (Acts 17), a fraudulence which was unmasked by the difficult brilliant Abelard, the monk of St. Denis where French kings are buried in pomp, that cathedral which caused the birth of Gothic architecture, so influenced by Islamic architecture, by its Abbot Sugar. The pseudo-author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and the Celestial Hierarchies, who, in fact, invented the word “Hierarchy”, was pretending he was St. Dionysius but was instead a brilliant fraudster, a Syrian writing centuries later.⁹⁹ Next, Pseudo-Dionysius was believed and even cited as an Apostolic Father about 1700 times by Thomas Aquinas.

Though in Convivio II.v, Dante supposedly returns to the more conventional, safer teachings of the Church, giving them as Gregory’s Angels, Archangels, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Principalities, Powers, Cherubim, Seraphim (actually Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels, Angels), and in Paradiso XXVIII instead of using that, he says, listing as of Pseudo-Dionysius, “Dominazioni, Virtudi, Podestadi, Principati, Archangeli, Angeli” (actually Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels), omitting the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim.¹⁰⁰ But in all this he replicates most closely the depiction of the seven hierarchies in the 3. Baptistery’s mosaics (Plates XVII a, b, LXXVIII b, LXXIX b), which give the figure of Christ the God Man with the Seraphim and Cherubim, then clockwise, Thrones, Virtues, Principalities, Angels, Archangels, Powers, Dominations, thus rendering the Hierarchy and its Gregorian and Dionysian Authorities unstable, doubtful, contradictory, anarchistic, like his changing opinion on moon spots (Convivio II.xiii.9; Par II.49–148), until he comes to his Vision of God, his “mi parve pinta ne la nostra effige” [he seemed to me as if painted in our image], which is firmly based on our so human mortal image.¹⁰¹ He had already told us that he himself was painting angels, their supposed hierarchy, back in Florence, the year after Beatrice’s death, Vita nova XXXIV.

Victor Turner studying liminality in pilgrimage,¹⁰² Mikhail Bakhtin studying the Carnivalesque in literature,¹⁰³ Julian Jaynes and Iain McGilchrist studying the bicameral brain,¹⁰⁴ all saw a breaking down of hierarchies in a universalizing of particulars, where nation, race, gender, class, religion cease to differ, where we become the freed African slave Terence’s Chremes declaring “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto” [I am human; therefore I consider no one a foreigner to me], answering Luke’s query to his unrecognized resurrected Christ on the Emmaus road “Tu solus peregrinus es?” [Are you the only foreigner here?]. The dogma of hierarchy is the opposite of the Carnivalesque Christ of the Gospels’ inclusion of women, lepers, outsiders, the disenfranchised poor. This is the true anagogy, where we recognize that of God in everyone, that we are not born to live as beasts but that all of us are among the angels.¹⁰⁵

Orsanmichele (Plate XXXII) and the other great monuments in Florence were the creation of a lay piety outside of ecclesiastical structures, these often carrying out the Gospel’s Seven Acts of Mercy, such as the 7. Misericordia (Plates XXII, XXIII a, b), 8. Santa Maria Nuova Hospital (Plate XXIV), the 24. Buonuomini di San Martino (Plate XXX a, b), the Hospital of the Innocenti, all still functioning for their original purposes apart from Orsanmichele.¹⁰⁶ Pope Boniface VIII’s espousal of the Ghibelline-like and violent Black Guelf party led by Corso Donati resulted in Dante’s exile and his stance as prophet outside his city, preaching to her. One can see his Decolonialism, beyond nation, language, race, gender, class, as based on Terence, Cicero, the Gospel, Boethius, Francis, and Clare. In this Dante was not only speaking to Florence in his fourteenth century but to the entire world for all time. His Commedia teaches, with laughter, Freedom and true Justice. Belonging to the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, Dante, through his Commedia, becomes the “Sanatore”, Viktor Frankl’s Doctor of the Soul.

Charles Singleton argued in his study of the Vita nova that medieval theology paired the Book of the Word and the Book of the World.¹⁰⁷ Dante re-creates the Book of the Word as World in our midst, “Incipit erat Verbum” [In the Beginning was the Word], to become “Nel mezzo dal cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai in una selva oscura” [In the midst of the road of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood], as Creation, Annunciation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, updated in time to 25 March 1301, and now, at the present moment, as we read his words mirroring the Word.¹⁰⁸ We come to ourselves, whether women or men, Black or white, Jew or Gentile, Muslim, Buddhist or Communist atheist, in that poem world’s landscape, first lost in a labyrinth of darkest despair, then assaulting a seven-story sun-clad mountain, mirror-reversing it, finally soaring through the nine spheres in this most splendid sci-fiction psychiatric soul healing metanoia to seeing each other and ourselves in the image of our Creator, as Creator ourselves, “mi parve pinta ne la nostra effige” [who seemed to me as if painted in our image].

In the Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees a’building Dido’s African Carthage (Par XXXI.7), inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting,¹⁰⁹ likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace, “pacifica oriafiamma” (Par XXXI.127), her Gonfalone of Justice. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Augustine, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto and Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy, joining end to beginning. In God we see our Humanity.

Study Questions

Discuss the preferability of Empire or City State. Discuss “Me, too”, “Black Lives Matter”, and Dante’s writings. Study Avverroës and Sigier of Brabant in relation to the Commedia. Discuss Abbot Sugar, Abelard, Julian of Norwich, and Dante Alighieri on Pseudo-Dionysius and ask whether hierarchies are consonant with Christ’s teachings of inclusion in the Gospels. Discuss Humanity as in God’s Image in Genesis, Terence, Luke, Dante. Study the Squaring of the Circle.