Chapter 7: Dante’s Labyrinth, Dante’s Cosmos

Abstract

The turning inside out of profane/sacred music has been an aspect of the doubleness of the Commedia. More obvious are those moments where the written text’s Cosmos turns inside out. There had been the moment in the bottom of Inferno where Dante and Virgil climb down/up Lucifer’s legs, the turning point at his groin, his genitalia. Another moment is in Purgatorio where Beatrice and the Gryphon gaze into each other’s eyes, Dante’s joining in that gaze, putting on the mind of Christ. Finally, in Paradiso, Dante drinks with his eyes and the Cosmos turns right way round, to God at the center, the earth at the farthest periphery, the perception Philosophia had taught earth-bound, self-pitying Boethius, and that Cicero had had Scipio Africanus see with his ancestors in his dream. Horia-Roman Patapievici, the physicist who was Romania’s Minister of Culture until he was unjustly ousted by Romanian Nationalism, discussed Dante’s Commedia showing that most perceptions of the Rose are wrong. It is not a small object perched atop the Cosmos but is instead the entire Cosmos righted, the Kingdom of Heaven that is here and now if we would but see it.

Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se

habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic.

Vita nova 5.11

This turning inside out of sacred/profane music is one aspect of the Commedia. More obvious are those moments where the written text’s Cosmos turns inside out. Already there had been the moment in the bottom of Inferno where Dante and Virgil climb down/up Lucifer’s legs, the turning point at his groin, eyeballing, smelling, his genitals (Inf XXXIV.76). Another moment is in Purgatorio where Beatrice and the Gryphon gaze into each other’s eyes, Dante’s joining in that gaze, putting on the mind of Christ (Philippians 2.5; Purg XXXI.118). Finally, in Paradiso, Dante drinks with his eyes and the Cosmos turns right way round, to God at the center, the earth with fallen Lucifer at the farthest periphery (Par XXX.85), the perception Philosophia had taught earth-bound, self-pitying Boethius, and that Cicero had had Scipio see in the Somnium Scipionis, in his dream with his ancestors. Horia-Roman Patapievici, a physicist who was Romania’s Minister of Culture until he was unjustly ousted by his country’s Nationalism, wrote a book on Dante’s Commedia, in its Italian translation titled Gli occhi di Beatrice: com’era davvero il mondo di Dante.¹ In it he brilliantly shows us that most perceptions of the Rose are incorrect. It is not a small object perched atop the Cosmos, even Dorothy Sayers getting this wrong, but is instead the entire Cosmos righted, turned right way round, the Kingdom of Heaven that is here and now, if we would but see it (Luke 17.21). It is not of cheapening rigid deadly squares and triangles forming tyrannical hierarchies and pyramids, but instead of Fibonacci’s natural rounding democratic curves, a fecund white/gold Rose. Ens, as Etienne Gilson explained, is an invented medieval Latin word, containing all that is, all time, all space, all being in one point at the center of otherwise diminishing returns, extenuated circles spreading further and further out from that existence, these as sin, as evil, as the tending to non-being.²

Dante’s Florence, Dante’s Rome

I have explained that Dante’s fantasy, his Commedia, is based on the literal level of his own flesh and blood self and those of his thieving neighbors, and of the stones, bridges, columns, churches, palaces, of his own city of Florence and its surroundings. We can add to this his knowledge from his failed embassy to Rome in 1301 of its papally proclaimed Jubilee year of 1300, having Rome now, a year later, take the place of the lost Jerusalem Kingdom of the Crusades with the Fall of Acre to the Muslim world in 1291, and which in turn was to suffer the destruction by earthquake in 1307 of the Lateran, a disaster the Dante “Pilgrim” within the poem’s dating of 1301 did not know, but which Dante as “Author” did and about whose Gates, of Jerusalem, of Rome, of Florence, he wrote.

Let us talk about the Gates of the poem. In Domenico de Michelino’s later painting we see three Gates, the dream vision ones of Hell and Purgatorio and the real one of Florence, outside of which exiled Dante stands like a lamenting Jeremiah (Plate LXVII a, b, c, Domenico di Michelino, Duomo, 1465). They are the city gates Arnolfo di Cambio built again and again around his Florence from 1282, recycling the stone of the Ghibelline prideful towers into the Guelf walls and gates of common defense. They are all the same Gate, just as the three Beasts became one. Even before Dante left Florence they had built the large Stinche prison, formerly on the Via Ghibellina using the stones of the tower belonging to Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, with only one low small door, called the “Porta della Miseria” (Plate X a, b).³ Then in Inferno III.1–6, Dante and Virgil enter through Hell Gate, inscribed like a Roman arch, such as Dante would have seen on embassy to Pope Boniface, with the words:Verse

Verse  PER ME SI VA NELLA CITTA’ DOLENTE; PER ME SI VA NELL’ETERNO DOLORE; PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE.  GIUSTIZIA MOSSE IL MIO ALTO FATTUORE, FECEMI LA DIVINA POTESTATE, LA SOMME SAPIENZA E IL PRIMO AMORE.

As Robert Hollander noted his student Geoffrey Curfmann to observe, this gate is also the triumphal Arch of Trajan, seen by Dante in Rome.⁴ Triumphal arches illogically are placed within cities and are free standing; they are not city gates set into surrounding walls; they function liturgically, rather than practically, denoting the threshold, the limen, to cross which signified a conversion, a public changing from one state to another, for the captives, to slavery or death, for the victors, to triumph and fame. Dante’s gates are Florentine, are Roman, are universal, both of horn, stone and real, and of ivory, dreams, ephemeral, as in the Odyssey XIX.560–569 and the Aeneid VI.893–898.

A further arch we had noted is of Dante’s use in Inferno VIII.2, IX.89 of what had been in the real but medieval landscape, but not of our present restored Arch of Titus back to its Roman original. The modern traveler to the Eternal City sees that Arch restored as a classical triumphal one. In the Middle Ages it was quite different in appearance. It was badly decayed though still possessing its two reliefs amid a mass of crumbling, shored-up brick, stones, and marble.⁵ At its side was a medieval tower, called by pilgrims, “Virgil’s Tower”, because of the legend that in it was the magician’s study, which told of a trick played on Virgil by a woman who enticed him into a basket that she let down from that study’s window, holding it suspended for three days in the heat of the sun in the sight of all Rome, a “Power of Woman” story like that of Phyllis and Aristotle.⁶ We had presented that story at the opening of this book.

Dante had already asked Virgil to let him see the Gate of St Peter (Inf I.134). We recall that physically in Florence Dante lived in the quarter of Porta San Piero Maggiore. But there is also the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Basilica San Pietro. Dante in Hell compares nude sinners he envisions to pilgrim-garbed visitors to Rome in the 1300 Year of the Jubilee crossing on the bridge over the Tiber, observing the two-way traffic control:

Verse

Verse   come i Roman per l’essercito molto,  l’anno del giubileo, su per lo ponte  hanno a passar la gente modo colto,   che da l’un lato tutti hanno la fronte  verso ’l castello e vanno a Santo Pietro,  da l’altra sponda vanno verso il monte. [As the Romans for the great crowd the year of the Jubilee have arranged for the people to pass, one side facing the Castle and coming to St Peter’s, the other side going towards the hill. (Inf XVIII.28–53)]

Then, just as in Paradiso XV-XVI he was recalling his neighbors’ houses in Florence (see this book’s “Chapter 2: Dante’s Circle in Space” on Dante’s Florence), in Paradiso XXXI he now maps the city of Rome from the perspective of her pagan invaders and Christian pilgrims from distant lands to her, as had he himself come,⁷ having visited the Lateran and the Vatican on his embassy to the Pope in 1302, these being seen so in ancient times and in the 1300 Jubilee, but when Dante writes the Commedia the Lateran was largely destroyed in 1307’s earthquake. Dante is playing time games.

We first see the Lateran Basilica of St John from outside the wall through the eyes of the long ago invading barbarian:

Verse

Verse   Se ‘ barbari, venendo da tal plaga  che ciascun giorno d’Elice si cuopra,  rotante col suo figlio ond’ ell’ è vaga,   veggendo Roma e l’ardüa sua opra,  stupefacénsi, quando Laterano  a le cose mortali andò di sopra;   ïo, che al divino da l’umano,  all’etterno dal tempo era venuto,  e di Fiorenz’a ppopol giusto e sano, [If the Barbarians coming from the region covered each day by the Great Bear seeking her son, with what astonishment he coming to Roma sees her works, when the Lateran surpassed mortal things, so I, to the divine from the human, to eternity from time, was come, and from Florence to a people just and sane. (Par XXXI.31–39)]

Then entering within the wall, first we become the 1300 Jubilee pilgrim and would have seen the equestrian statue thought then to be of the Emperor Constantine and the two columns, one with the cock that had crowed when Peter betrayed Christ, the other with the bronze Spinario (Plate LVIII a, b), outside the palace where the Pope then lived that in the Renaissance would be moved to the Capitoline.⁸ Next we enter within that Lateran basilica:

Verse

Verse   E quasi pelegrin che si ricrea  nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,  e spera già ridir com’ ello stea,   su per la viva luce passeggiando,  menava ïo li occhi per li gradi,  mo sù, mo giù e mo recirculando. [As the pilgrim who comes to the temple of his vow, seeing and hoping to tell how it was, so through the living light passing I led my eyes through all the grades, now up, now down and now circling again. (Par XXXI.43–45)]

Finally traversing all of ancient Rome, crossing the Tiber at the Castello Sant’Angelo and coming to the Vatican Basilica of St Peter, we are like some Croatian, some ex-Yugoslavian, pilgrim, seeing the now lost Veronica veil, in all these similes both marveling and incredulous (Fig. 1):

Fig. 1

Engraving of Rome’s Seven Pilgrimage Churches (From G. Hartwell Jones, Celtic Britain and the Pilgrim Movement, facing p. 187.)

Verse

Verse   Qual è colui che forse di Croazia  viene a veder la Veronica nostra, —che per l’antica fame non se ‘n sazia,   ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra:  `Segnor mio Iesù Cristo, Dio verace,  or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?’; [As he who comes perhaps from Croatia to see our Veronica, for its ancient fame is not satisfied, but says in his thought, so long as it is shown, “My Lord Jesus Christ, True God, or was this made your likeness? (Par XXXI. 103–108)]

Dante mentions other real places mixed into his dream vision, many of which Vittorio Alinari published in sepia photographs in 1921.⁹ These are the literal level of his poem, both real outside of it and dreamed of and remembered again within it. On one side of his gates are lies that seem truths, on the other, unlearning lies, yet also questioning, doubting, as to the truth, being thus truth.

When I traveled on trains with a Eurailpass from library to library with medieval manuscripts, to Florence, to Rome, to Ferrara, to Bergamo, to Brescia, to Genoa, to Venice, to Treviso, to Gerona, to Madrid, to Salamanca, to Paris, to Arras, to Amiens, to Carpentras, to so many other places, I would talk with Japanese students in the carriages and also a Japanese scholar of Flaubert, who recalled spatially where each great French author was born. I discovered that Easterners explored our Western civilization in space and time, creating useful maps and timelines, with booklets in dual facing languages, their own and that of the country in which they were traveling. One can learn from learners. So I came to do the same in my research and taught my students to likewise combine history and geography in literature, in each World Literature course having one text in a facing page edition, not just a translation but parallel with its original language—for Dante the Mandelbaum, for Boethius the Loeb. Dante likewise does these windows, this code-switching, into other languages, into Latin for liturgical time with the Psalms, and startlingly into Provençal with Arnaut Daniel (Purg XXVI.139–148).

Many, many years ago in San Francisco I attended an exhibition of treasures from the Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan. Elderly Chinese grandmothers were explaining to their grandchildren how to read the inked scroll paintings on silk. I overheard them telling the children to image themselves into the paintings, to be the figure on the rock listening to the water rippling downstream, to hear the wind rustling the leaves. That was how I realized Western art also had been of the viewer’s presence within the frame, not beyond, that we were there in collapsed time, at the Nativity, at the Crucifixion, our patron saints accompanying us, like sponsoring godparents at a baptism, in what art historians call a “Sacred Conversation”. Dante does the same, particularly when catechized by Pietro, Jacopo e Giovanni, whose names he gave his three sons. Is he in those Cantos recalling his own children catechizing in turn their father in lost Florence, that Biblical becoming as little children? I well remember my sons, when small, catechizing me in Theology, my first child demanding I count to “imfimity”. Art abolishes time and space, into an infinity of presentness, into Australian Aborigine “Dreamtime”, into Etienne Gilson’s Ens.¹⁰

Dante uses stratagems with us. In reading him we join in both profane and sacred conversations, collapsing reality into infinity, muddling fact and fiction, melding science and poetry. Years ago a Princeton student had loaned me Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s science fiction paperback, Inferno, which, collapsing time, gives a modern Hell, where cars rush unnervingly by on freeways and where Virgil is named “Benny”, “Benito”, who damns himself to save his reader, his “Freedom Reader”, and whom I only discovered in its last pages to be Benito Mussolini, in their brilliant use of dramatic irony.¹¹ Years before that, my father would later tell me, I had played as a child in Sussex with the young Count Ciano, whose father, married to Mussolini’s daughter, was murdered by his grandfather. Then I came to live in Italy and to study her poet, despite a hellish war-tide childhood wrought by Germany with Italy. Shades of the Ugolino Cantos and the Pisan Cantos; history, biography, mingled with poetry, not only repeating but collapsing in upon themselves in tragic fractalling arabesques.

Dante’s Hellish Labyrinths

Modern literate adults are left-hemisphere dominant, appreciating linearity, square boxes, plane geometry, logic.¹² Medieval culture, instead, balanced the hemispheres, Boethius discoursing on the circle and the center,¹³ Brunetto observing the superiority of circles in planets, including the earth, with eggs, and also wine barrels, as containing the greater volume, using instead spherical geometry.¹⁴ The modern hermit monk Justo Gallego Martínez, building a cathedral from scrap outside Madrid, hated sharp angles and straight lines and tried to avoid them at all costs. He preferred curves and circles—vaulted ceilings, domes, arches, rounded chapels, annular altars and spiral staircases. “God made all things round. He made the planets round. He made the earth round”.¹⁵ This book’s title fittingly uses the word “Circle”. But modern perceptions of Dante try to force, as it were, his round peg into their square box. I cringed twice, when the “Musica della Commedia”, instead of being performed in the Baptistery’s octagonal almost circle, was produced against the back linear wall of the Duomo, the singers going back and forth across two stages, and then again when a lecture was given on a series of paintings on Fibonacci and Dante, where all the pictures, except one, were of squares and, moreover, were all confined within ugly cheap square frames.

Dante and, with him, Botticelli, Piranesi, and Sayers create the dream landscape we experience vicariously, virtually, muddling it with places in the real world, as the pioneer photographer Vittorio Alinari was able to show.¹⁶ I found, apart from Botticelli’s brilliant diagram for Hell and Piranesi’s nightmare Carceri Invenzione,¹⁷ that detective writer Dorothy Sayers’ maps are the most useful for mapping that poem landscape, having us with Dante enter into its frames (Plates LXVIII, LXIX, LXX, LXXIV a, b, c, d),¹⁸ which are always circles, never squares (except for oblong tombs or book pages), that will then turn into Fibonacci’s curves, Giambattista Vico’s spirals beloved by Joyce and Beckett, ¹⁹ the Möbius strips of Gödel, Escher, Bach’s eternal golden braid,²⁰ of fractalling DNA and the heart’s double helix, of Quantum mechanics, where on reaching its ending, it forever finds again its beginning, beginning over again, “mi ritrovai”, or, as Dante’s descendant, the astronomer Sperello di Serego Alighieri, magnificently phrased it, as “a kind of cosmic Penelope’s shroud”.²¹

But first a word on labyrinths before I let Giambattista Piranesi and Dorothy Sayers take over and guide you visibly into that blind world of nightmare. Pagan elements contaminated Judæo-Christian pilgrimage syncretically, among these perhaps being the use of labyrinths. Daedalus’ labyrinths, as on Crete and at Epidauros, are also found on medieval cathedral floors and these are thought, probably erroneously, to have functioned as miniature penitential pilgrimages.²² The word “ambages” that Dante took from classical texts, the Aeneid VI.29–30, the Metamorphoses VIII.160–161, the Thebaid XII.668, by Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, could mean erroneous paths, or the doubleness of oracles, could mean labyrinths with misleading paths that block and endanger one to the Minotaur at its center. In pagan initiation rites, in which success spells life, failure, death, labyrinths were frequently traced by the initiand bearing a staff, which could be sacrificed at need in place of its bearer, as surrogate. In these rites the labyrinth could represent the female; the staff, the male.²³ In Dante’s text these are the multiple manifestations of the three beasts, the tryform feminine “bestia” of Leopard, Lion, and Wolf, the Siren, Beatrice, and Mary; the staff being the “Falstaff” of Virgil, to be sacrificed and discarded in a de-sexualizing castration of the hero philosopher.

John V. Fleming illustrated his study of The Allegory of the Roman de la Rose from a Spanish manuscript in which the poet/dreamer (for the Roman de la Rose is the ultimate wet dream/dream vision which Dante turns right way round), in the final scene raped the rosebud with his pilgrim staff.²⁴ Cesare Ripa in his 1611 Nova Iconologia took his description of the Esilio from that in Dante’s Vita nova for the pilgrim, taken in turn from that for the pilgrim given by Alfonso X el Sabio.²⁵ Then Justus de Harduwijn in his 1629 Goddelyche wenschen showed the pilgrim figure within the labyrinth, looking toward the mountain of salvation (Fig. 2).²⁶

Fig. 2

a, b,: Emblems of Pilgrims

So now let us as in an Alice through the Looking Glass way enter into the pages, first of the tragedy, of the Libro del Chiodo, then of the comedy, of Dante’s Commedia. For this part of the book I again turn to Dorothy Sayers, particularly to her diagrams in the Penguin editions of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (Plates LXVIII, LXIX, LXX, Dorothy Sayers, Sins of the Leopard, of the Lion, of the Wolf).²⁷

“‘So now let us descend into the blind world here below’, said the poet all pale” (Inf IV13):

We shall meet those gates again in Purgatory, seven of them in turn, going through them the opposite way, not to slavery but to freedom.

Gravity, Gauthier/Gossouin du Metz and Satan

Among the delicate drawings in the “First Redaction” Tesoro manuscripts of the 1280s–1290s taken down in dictation when Brunetto Latino was teaching his Republican students in Florence, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco Barberino, are those taken from Gauthier/Gossuin du Metz’s Image du Monde showing how a stone dropped through the earth would come to rest by gravity (before the round apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s round head circa 1666), at the very center.²⁸ This is from folio 72^v of BML Plut.42.20’s Tesoro by the same scribe, possibly Dante, though now mature, instead of as a schoolboy writing out BRicc 2908’s Tesoretto (Plate LXXI Tesoro, Gossuin de Metz on Gravity, 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). Dante will have his Satan be so cast down by the weight of sin to the very center of the earth, Virgil and he struggling to climb down/up his legs to come to the Antipodes of Purgatorio, Inferno XXXIV/Purgatorio I.

St Patrick’s Purgatory

Dante concocts his dream landscape from the text he was reading when he fell asleep over it, Virgil’s Aeneid VI. It is the same map, the same monsters. But there are other landscapes patchworked into the text.

Dante as a child played in the 14. Piazza Donati (Plate XXVI a, b). But in the hot Florentine summers all these families went away into the countryside where the land was higher and more healthy, where the Etruscans had dwelled in citadels, in contrast to the Roman love of low-lying mosquito and malaria-infested river valleys. Dante’s own family, the Alighieri, and that of the Portinari, would have exited from the Porta a Pinti, the Porta Fiesolana, out into the countryside around Ontignano and Santa Brigida, around Monte Ceceri of the Domenico di Michelino painting in the 4. Duomo (Plates XIX, LXVII a, b, c), Montesenario and Sasso, the region where I heard contadini still reciting Dante’s Commedia cantastorie by heart when I lived for four years as a hermit in that region.

An Irish pilgrim was coming through Fiesole’s town square during the election for a new bishop and so “Sanctus Donatus Scotus” was himself elected, the writer of Latin poetry about St Bridget of Ireland and the first to tell of the miracle of her placing her wet cloak on a sunbeam to dry, a tale I found in a manuscript (BML Mugellanus de Nemore 13), written out in the twelfth century in the Mugello, that was so huge that I had to stand to read it in the Laurentian Library. Sant’Andrea also arrived from Ireland and became a hermit on the mountain of Sasso, 829, San Donato then having him be his Archdeacon, and who became Bishop of Fiesole in turn. Sant’Andrea built the church of San Martino in Mensola that is below Harvard’s I Tatti, its altar, decorated by Fra Angelico, telling his legend from the ninth century. His sister, a different and later Santa Brigida, likewise came over from Ireland and lived in a grotto below that of Sant’Andrea’s cave at Sasso (a mirroring of Benedict and Scholastica’s Subiaco), the little Tuscan town of Santa Brigida growing up around her and to whom she taught the Bible. Locally the people think Donatus and Andrea came from Scotland as they were named “Scoti” in the Latin documents about them. But the Irish, known as “Scoti”, settled Scotland from Ireland giving that region their name.

Then, 2 July 1490, during the Renaissance, the Virgin next appeared to the two Ricoveri shepherd girls at Sasso, their father imprisoned and ill in the Stinche, telling them to tell Florence to study the Bible. When the girls were not obeyed, she next healed their father’s illness, freed him, and appeared to the adults, telling them to believe the children, giving to all the same Magnificat world-upside-down message, that Florence must study and live the Gospel. Pilgrims from the regions around would come to the beautiful church and their own hospices at Sasso, these being bombed in WWII, though pilgrims are still welcomed there.

The next mountain over, Montesenario, was the site and still is the monastery, where seven rich merchants’ sons, all Florentines, and members of a Compagnia dei laudesi, had a vision of the Virgin, 15 August 1233, and several more following that. They gave up all to be the Servi di Santa Maria, the niece of one of them, Santa Giuliana di Falconieri, next founding the lay Order of the Servites, of which I am one. Their church in Florence is the Santissima Annunziata with its legend of the miracle-working frescoed Madonna at the Annunciation as finished by an angel.

I learned these stories mainly orally, taking them with a grain of salt but also with the Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”. Just as I had in accepting, in Complementarity, St Helena’s choice of Mount Sinai, though knowing she had got it wrong, when I climbed it in 1992. In 2001 I organized an international conference on the Alphabet and the Bible to which Jewish, Russian, Icelandic, Spanish, Irish, and English scholars came and I took them to these sites, St Bridget’s grotto at Santa Brigida, Sant’Andrea’s hermitage at Sasso, the monastery of the Servites at Montesenario, explaining that these oral traditions about Irishmen in the region where Dante and Beatrice as children went each summertide could well have meant that Dante heard the likewise mainly oral traditions of the tales of the Voyage of Bran, of the Voyages of St Brendan, of St Patrick’s Purgatory. ²⁹ Dante gave that voyage beyond the Straits of Gibralter, of the Pillars set by Hercules, which Francesco da Barberino illustrated in the Tesoretto (Plate LXXVI c, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 10^r), to Ulysses in Inferno XXVI.³⁰ And then he gave that landscape, of the island of Purgatory in the midst of the Ocean at the Antipodes to Jerusalem, to himself as a Pilgrim in the Purgatorio. Indeed, the Catholic Church had already taken on board that Irish concept of Purgatory, which came to permeate European culture, just as did also Celtic rhyming take over from Latin’s long/short quantitative measures. Dante’s terza rima is still sung today in cantastorie by Tuscan contadini. I have heard and recorded their chanted poetry for you.³¹

Dante’s Seven Story Mountain

Inside the Duomo on its left wall is this 1465 painting by Domenico di Michelino, showing Florence as it then became, with Dante preaching to Florence as her prophet, the three gates of Hell, of Purgatory, and of Florence, all like those built by Arnolfo da Cambio, while Mount Purgatory is a composite of Fiesole’s Monte Ceceri with its galleries quarried for pietra serena, a gray porous sandstone (the galleries now hidden by the cypresses planted by Victorian Englishmen), approached across marshy land around the Arno, beyond Florence’s Porta Fiesolana/Porta a‘ Pinti city gate,³² and those of Mount Sinai, similarly with terraces at which the monks of St Catherine’s Monastery heard pilgrims’ confessions (Plate LXXII a, Domenico di Michelino, Monte Ceceri; b, Confession gate on Sinai, c, David Roberts). Because I had read John Demaray’s book, The Invention of the Divine Comedy, I went with Franciscans to the Holy Land and climbed Mount Sinai, taking this photograph before entering my Anglican convent in Sussex.

As children we all learned that bathwater at the Antipodes of Australia and New Zealand spiraled in the opposite direction to ours down their drains. That the stars there formed the Southern Cross. Dante creates a spiraling labyrinth downwards in Hell, ever narrowing as it goes, like being in the darkness of the womb, then the birth canal, until it emerges on the opposite side into sunlight and going in a reverse spiral that undoes the first, replicating its labyrinth, as if in a photographic negative, a mirror reversal, to being the right way round, a spring wound up into furthering bondage, then releasing its torque into freedom. A freedom Dante gives as the sovrasenso of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”, and of his poem echoing it.

Let me give one example of Dante’s brilliance, observed by Anna Pegoretti of the BLEgerton 943 manuscript and its use of shadows, a manuscript I believe created under the aegis of Francesco da Barberino with the Dominicans, using his illuminator, the Master of the Paduan Antiphoners. Anna Pegoretti notes of one illumination, BLEgerton 943, fol. 68^v, corresponding exactly to the words of the text (Purg. IV.52–54), “It is late morning, Dante turns to the north and the sun’s rays fall correctly to the left, because we are in the Southern Hemisphere”³³ (Plates LXXIII BLEgerton 943, fol. 68^v, Shadows on antipodal Mount Purgatory, LXXIV Dorothy Sayers, Purgatorio).

The Sun and the Other Stars

Dante had already had Love say in the Vita nova, “Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili modo se habent circumferentiae partes; tu autem non sic” [I am at the center of the circle, equidistant from all parts; but you are not]. This is also the Paradiso, where all the Heavenly Spheres collapse inward to the one point who is Ens, who is God, who is Love, and expand outward to include all that is, though the farthest from the center becomes the diminishing to the mirror opposite of God, of Earth with Satan at its center. Dante’s Cosmos is that of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, behind them being the Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Plato, the Stoics. Let me let them explain this mystery, about which Dante was reading, he says in the Convivio, in Florence around 1291. Imagine yourself as Dante reading and writing these words:

Verse

Verse Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis: For men were created subject to this law, to keep to that globe, which you see in the center of this region and which is called the Earth; and to them a soul was given formed from those everlasting fires, which you mortals call constellations and stars, that, round and spherical in form, alive with divine intelligences, complete their orbits and circles with marvelous swiftness. So, my Publius, you and all good men must allow the soul to remain in the keeping of the body, nor without his command, by whom it was given to you, must you leave your human life, lest you should appear to have deserted the post assigned to men by God. 8. But rather, my Scipio—like your grandfather here, like me your sire—follow justice and natural affection, which though great in the case of parents and kinsfolk, is greatest of all in relation to our fatherland. Such is the life that leads to heaven and to this company of those who have now lived their lives and released from their bodies dwell in that place which you can see”,—now that place was a circle conspicuous among the fires of heaven by the surpassing whiteness of its glowing light—“which place you mortals, as you have learned from the Greeks, call the Milky Way”. And as I surveyed them from this point, all the other heavenly bodies appeared to be glorious and wonderful,—now the stars were such as we have never seen from this earth; and such was the magnitude of them all as we have never dreamed; and the least of them all was that planet, which farthest from the heavenly sphere and nearest to our earth, was shining with borrowed light, but the spheres of the stars easily surpassed the earth in magnitude—already the earth itself appeared to me so small, that it grieved me to think of our empire, with which we cover but a point, as it were, of its surface. 9. And as I gazed upon this more intently, “Come!” said Africanus, “how long will your mind be chained to the earth? Do you see into what regions you have come? See! the universe is linked together in nine circles or rather spheres; one of which is that of the heavens, the outermost of all, which embraces all the other spheres, the supreme deity, which keeps in and holds together all the others; and to this are attached those everlasting orbits of the stars. Beneath this there lie seven, which turn backwards with a counter revolution to the heavens; and of these spheres that star holds one, which men on earth call Saturn’s star. Next is that bright radiance, rich in hope and healing for the sons of men, which is called Jove’s star; then one fiery red and dreaded by the world, which you call Mars; next lower down the sun holds nearly the middle region, the leader, chief and ruler of the other lights, the mind and ordering spirit of the universe, of such magnitude that he illumines the whole and fills it with his light. With him Venus and Mercury keep pace as satellites in their successive spheres; and in the lowest zone of all the moon revolves lighted up by the rays of the sun. Now below these there is nothing more but what is mortal and transient except those souls which the bounty of the Gods has given to the sons of men; above the moon all is eternal. As for the earth, the ninth and central globe, it does not move but is the lowest point, and towards it all heavy bodies tend by their own gravity”. 10. And, as I gazed on these things with amazement, when I recovered myself: “What”, I asked, “what is this sound that fills my ears, so loud and sweet?” “This”, he replied, “is that sound, which divided in intervals, unequal, indeed, yet still exactly measured in their fixed proportion, is produced by the impetus and movement of the spheres themselves, and blending sharp tones with grave, therewith makes changing symphonies in unvarying harmony. For not only is it impossible that such vast movements should sweep on in silence; but, by a natural law, the outermost parts on the one side give a grave, and on the other a sharp sound. Wherefore the highest of all, the celestial zone equipped with stars, whose revolution is more swift, moves with a sharp, high note; while this one of the moon, as it is the lowest, with the deepest tone of all. For the earth, which is the ninth, remaining motionless is ever firmly planted in one spot, clinging closely to the center of the universe. Now the revolutions of those eight spheres, of which two have the same power, produce seven sounds with well-marked intervals; and this number, generally speaking, is the mystic bond of all things in the universe, And learned men by imitating this with stringed instruments and melodies have opened for themselves the way back to this place, even as other men of noble nature, who have followed godlike aims in their life as men. 21. Exercise this soul in the noblest activities. Now the noblest are cares and exertions for our country’s welfare. And the soul which has been enlivened and trained by these will speed more fleetly to this its resting-place and home. And this will it do more readily if, even while still imprisoned in the body it strains beyond it, and, surveying that which lies outside it, as much as possible, endeavors to withdraw itself from the body. For the souls of those who have given themselves over to the pleasures of the body, and have yielded themselves to be their servants, as it were, and at the prompting of those lusts which wait upon pleasures have broken the laws of God and man; when they have glided from their bodies, go groveling over the face of the earth; nor do they return to this place, except after many ages of wandering”. So he departed, and I woke from my dream. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy Book II, Prose 7 Boethius: You know that ambition for material things has not mastered me; but I have desired the opportunity for public service so that my virtue should not grow old and weak through lack of use. Philosophia: But think how trivial and empty such glory is. 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.…But, if the soul, in full awareness of its virtue, is freed from this earthly prison and goes to heaven, does it not disregard all earthly concerns and, in the enjoyment of heaven, find its satisfaction in being separated from earthly things? Book II, Poem 8 Philosophia: Love rules the earth and the seas, and commands the heavens. Poem 3 Philosophia: The only stable order in things is that which connects the beginning to the end and keeps itself on a steady course. Poem 9 Philosophia: You [God] who are most beautiful produce the beautiful world from your divine mind and, forming it in your image, You order the perfect parts into a perfect whole. Prose 12 Philosophia: Then it is the supreme good which rules all things firmly and disposes all sweetly (Wisdom 8.1). Boethius: I am delighted not only by your powerful argument and its conclusion, but even more by the words you have used. And I am at last ashamed of the folly that so profoundly depressed me. Philosophia: Then can God do evil? Boethius: No, of course not. Philosophia: Then evil is nothing, since God, who can do all things, cannot do evil. Boethius: You are playing with me by weaving a labyrinthine argument from which I cannot escape. You seem to begin where you ended and to end where you began. Are you perhaps making a marvelous circle of the divine simplicity? Philosophia: As Parmenides puts it, the divine essence, is “in body like a sphere, perfectly rounded on all sides”. Book IV, Prose 6 Philosophia: Consider the example of a number of spheres in orbit around the same central point: the innermost moves toward the simplicity of the center and becomes a kind of hinge about which the outer spheres circle; 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. Therefore, the changing course of Fate is to the simple stability of Providence as time is to eternity, as a circle to its center. Dante’s Convivio II.3 The order of their position is as follows. The first in number is the one in which the Moon resides; the second is the one in which Mercury resides; the third is the one in which Venus resides; the fourth is the one in which the Sun resides; the fifth is that of Mars; the sixth is that of Jupiter; the seventh is that of Saturn; the eighth is that of the Stars; the ninth is the one which is not perceptible to the senses except for the movement mentioned above, and which many call the Crystalline (that is to say, the diaphanous or completely transparent) Heaven. Moreover, outside all of these the Catholics place the Empyrean Heaven, which is to say, the “heaven of flame,” or “luminous heaven”; and they hold it to be motionless because it has in itself, with respect to each of its parts, that which its matter desires. This is the reason why the Primum Mobile has the swiftest movement; for because of the most fervent desire that each part of the ninth heaven has to be conjoined with every part of that divinest, tranquil heaven, to which it is contiguous, it revolves beneath it with such desire that its velocity is almost incomprehensible. Stillness and peace are the qualities of the place of that Supreme Deity which alone completely beholds itself. This is the place of the blessed spirits, according to the will of the Holy Church, which cannot lie. Aristotle, to anyone who rightly understands him, seems to hold the same opinion in the first book of Heaven and the World. This is the supreme edifice of the universe in which all the world is enclosed and beyond which there is nothing; it is not itself in space but was formed solely in the Primal Mind, which the Greeks call Protonoe. This is that magnificence of which the Psalmist spoke when he says to God: “Your magnificence is exalted above the heavens”. So to sum up what has been said, it is apparent that there are ten heavens, of which the heaven of Venus is the third, mention of which is made in that part of the canzone which I now intend to explicate.

But the final series of Dorothy Sayers’ diagrams, though useful, fails. Far better is the understanding by Horia-Roman Patapievici of the inversion that happens, where Cicero, Boethius, Dante have God be the inside-out or right-way-round of the Universe, of Sperello Alighieri’s concept that the Cosmos unwinds like Penelope’s shroud, that God at the center is all. Now let us end where we began—as in Dante’s Commedia (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Pre-Copernican Cosmos (Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice, p. 75)

I here deliberately repeat my beginning at my ending. The turning inside out of profane/sacred music has been an aspect of the doubleness of the Commedia. More obvious are those moments where the written text’s Cosmos turns inside out. Here I repeat that already there had been the moment in the bottom of Inferno where Dante and Virgil climb down/up Lucifer’s legs, the turning point at his groin, his genitalia. Another moment is in Purgatorio where Beatrice and the Gryphon gaze into each other’s eyes, Dante’s joining in that gaze, putting on the mind of Christ. Finally, in Paradiso, Dante drinks with his eyes and the Cosmos turns right way round, to God at the center, the earth at the farthest periphery, the perception Philosophia had taught earth-bound, self-pitying Boethius, and that Cicero had had Scipio Africanus see with his ancestors in his dream. Horia-Roman Patapievici, the physicist who was Romania’s Minister of Culture until he was unjustly ousted by Romanian Nationalism, wrote a book on Dante’s Commedia, in its Italian translation titled Gli occhi di Beatrice: com’era davvero il mondo di Dante. In it he brilliantly shows us that most perceptions of the Rose are wrong. It is not a small object perched atop the Cosmos but is instead the entire Cosmos righted, the Kingdom of Heaven that is here and now if we would but see it.³⁴

Study Questions

Discuss multicultural practices of psychiatry using labyrinths and mandalas (Crete, Epidauros, Tibetan, Navaho, etc.) for healing in relation to Dante’s Commedia. Skim John Demaray, The Invention of Dante’s Commedia and Approaching the Holy Mountain: Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, eds. S.E. Gerstel, R.S. Nelson, to study Mount Sinai and Dante’s Mount Purgatorio. Discuss medieval pilgrimage and Dante’s Commedia. Find a Planetarium program that maps Dante’s Cosmology of the planets and fixed stars for Easter 1301. Compare Dante’s vision of the Cosmos to the images from the Hubble and Webb telescopes.