Dante in Love Read online

  For these medieval poets, the central concerns of life were – obsessions with sex in general, girls in particular; ditto with God. Another preoccupation was the political one, wondering whether anyone would ever devise a decent method of organizing human society. In politics, Dante’s questions were sane – but his answers, particularly in the open letters he wrote to the Emperor Henry VII and to the cardinals of Italy – were deranged with violent hatred. The force of Dante’s hatreds was undiminished, even when he was supposedly describing the condition of the blessed in Paradise. You can see why Dante was not widely read for centuries, and why the Enlightenment, in particular, found him unsympathetic. The aesthete and wit Horace Walpole (1717–97; son of Sir Robert) dipped into Dante and found him ‘extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam’.4 Any account of Dante which does not capture some of these qualities, of the Methodist parson in Bedlam, misses some of his flavour. That is what is so good about Charles Williams’s book, though Williams lacks Dante’s wrath and is closer at heart to his weird quasi-sexual women-mysticism.

  A contemporary political figure in England in my lifetime who did possess some of Dante’s rage, and quirkiness – his memory already fading fast – was Enoch Powell. Elias Canetti, exiled in England because of Hitler, met Powell at a London party.

  ‘He straightaway broached Nietzsche and Dante with me. Dante he quoted in Italian, and at considerable length. The thing that attracted him about Dante was the explicitly partisan nature of it, the civil war in the population still meant something, it hadn’t degenerated into civilities. The civilized tone that prevailed in the House of Commons he [i.e. Powell] disliked. In Dante’s day, people were burned at the stake. When the other side came to power, you had to leave the city, and not come back as long as you lived. Hatred of the enemy burned. Dante’s Commedia was full of this. He was a man who neither forgot, nor forgave.’5 Canetti almost seems here to equate Dante with the eccentric and marginal figure of Powell. But the ultra-Conservative, intellectual English politician had found something in Dante which was there, as had, in the eighteenth century, the languid wit who saw the Methodist parson in Bedlam.

  But, while these snapshots of Dante explain some of his power, and flavour, they are distortions. Central to the abiding Dantean fascination is the question of Love – how we understand it, what the very word means. We live in a culture whose popular songs, music, films and soap operas are obsessed by Love, but whose articulate thinkers shy away from exploring it. This is very unlike the Middle Ages. We leave it to pop singers to tell us what Love is, whereas the Middle Ages brought forward the weighty intellect of Thomas Aquinas.

  I remember one evening over thirty years ago at New College, Oxford, when sitting next to A. J. Ayer at dinner. I was the most junior of college lecturers, he was the Wykeham Professor of Logic and a famous philosopher. He told me that no medieval philosopher was worth reading, and he was proud to be able to say he had not read one word of Thomas Aquinas. Ayer was a genial man, but his breathtaking arrogance meant that, unless you were skilled in the tricks of analytical philosophy, it was difficult to keep up with him. I remember feebly asking him if he would think it permissible for the English tutor at the college not to have read any medieval literature – Chaucer, let us say – and he kindly conceded that it would not. But there was a difference. Chaucer’s poetry was still worth reading. Ayer and the analytical philosophers had, in his opinion, solved the basic problems which confronted philosophy. There were a whole lot of questions which it was not the business of philosophy to answer and which were quite simply meaningless.

  As the evening wore on, wine flowed and it would not be possible to outline his argument (if it existed) in any detail. But I do remember what he said at the end of the dinner: ‘Even Logical Positivists think Love is important!’

  He had no doubt trotted out, in the previous hour, a recitation of his non-creed – namely, that most aesthetic, moral and spiritual judgements were ‘meaningless’. Logical Positivism is itself a vanished philosophical concept, based upon a strange notion devised in Vienna nearly a century ago – namely, the ‘Verification principle’: a proposition could not be said to have meaning unless it could be verified either by sense-perceptions or a priori. That ‘a priori’ begged so many questions that even champions of the notion, such as the young Ayer, came to abandon it. I asked myself – if even Logical Positivists thought Love was important, was it not strange that they had not set their nimble minds to saying why they thought it was important, and what they thought it was? Cycling home under the starry sky of an Oxford night, I felt, yet again, that there were more interesting philosophical questions, and answers, in Dante’s Comedy than in A. J. Ayer’s once-famous book, Language, Truth and Logic. Love dominates our lives. Its rampages dislocate the heart. Sometimes it seems linked to sexual desire, sometimes it seems different. Religion, especially the Christian religion, uses the word to describe the life and activity of God. But when we are kept awake by thinking of the beautiful face of the girl we currently adore, is this ‘love’ at war with the Love of God or is it, as Charles Williams and Dante apparently thought, somehow or other connected? What use was a philosophy which refused to ask such questions, let alone provide an answer?

  I left Oxford, and teaching and medieval literature, behind me, and for twenty years became a jobbing man of letters in London, writing novels, working as a journalist on various papers, and still, from time to time, adding to my Dante library when browsing in a second-hand bookshop. The bibliography in the back of this volume is a list of the books which I have consulted over the years. Particular mention deserves to be made of W. W. Vernon’s Readings of the Comedy, which I found in a Norwich bookshop when rummaging about in Tombland with my brother Stephen. Vernon was a Victorian aristocrat who based his readings on one of the medieval commentaries on Dante – that of Benvenuto da Imola. If that makes his book sound alarming or high-falutin, it shouldn’t. The six volumes of Vernon are wonderfully approachable books, and they elucidate line after line of the poem. So too did a book by a brilliant amateur Dantean called M. A. Orr – Dante and the Early Astronomers – to which I was introduced by Barbara Reynolds, herself the translator, with Dorothy L. Sayers, of the Paradiso, and author of a fine book on Dante. Among the French Danteans, I learnt much from Etienne Gilson, and among the Americans, Richard Pogue Harrison of Stanford University reawakened in me the sense of Dante’s perennial and ever-repeated modernity.

  Yet although I continued to read, decade by decade, in the field of Dantean studies, and although, every few years, I reread the Comedy, ‘my book’ – the book I wish I had read before I started – has still eluded my grasp. W. B. Yeats would probably have been able to write such a book. I see the outline of it glimmering in his magnificent poem – one of the best things ever written about (among other things) Dante – ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, which are the words spoken to Dante by Love in a dream in the Vita Nuova:

  Hic: And yet

  The chief imagination of Christendom,

  Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself

  That he has made that hollow face of his

  More plain to the mind’s eye than any face

  But that of Christ.

  Ille: And did he find himself

  Or was the hunger that had made it hollow

  A hunger for the apple on the bough

  Most out of reach? and is that spectral image

  The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?

  I think he fashioned from his opposite

  An image that might have been a stony face

  Staring upon a Bedouin’s horse-hair roof

  From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned

  Among the coarse grass and the camel-dung.

  He set his chisel to the hardest stone.

  Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,

  Derided and deriding, driven out

  To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,

&
nbsp; He found the unpersuadable justice, he found

  The most exalted lady loved by a man.6

  Yeats saw that Dante was the first modernist, the first modern man. The puzzle of existence either resolves itself into the materialist notion that this overcrowded planet is crawling with lumps of surplus meat, calling themselves human, but eating and making war to such a destructive extent that the only sane approach to life would be that adopted by Stalin or Hitler, to cull and remove the surplus. Or – or! – it is worth investigating the sense possessed by most, if not all, of these individuals on the planet that love is the most important thing in their life, that love is what defines them, that ‘even Logical Positivists think Love is important’. The general can therefore only be understood in terms of the particular, the experience of one man seen as an allegory of all men. Yet solipsism, egotism which excludes consciousness of the Other – both as beloved human love-object, and as a society of which we are all part – is not merely a moral, but an intellectual mistake. Into this picture, God fits somewhere. Thomas Aquinas has interesting things to say about this, some of which a modern philosopher could read with profit. Dante had set some of these thoughts to poetry which continues to haunt the intellects, as well as the imaginations, of his readers.

  I am still looking for a book which is a life of Dante set against the background of his times, which is also an introduction to the Comedy, and which gives the necessary historical and cultural background. At the same time, I want a book which will retain the excitement which Charles Williams continues to inspire in me, the sense that there is a connection between fancying women, wanting to understand poetry, and answering the deepest questions about life and the deepest needs of the human heart. Hence my title – Dante in Love. Dante believed that Love encompassed all things, that it was the force which moved the sun and other stars, so my title must be allowed to cover a wide range. At the outset, I should like to repeat that I am in no sense a Dantean scholar or expert. This book would be so much better if such a scholar had written it, but only provided that he or she had kept in mind the enthusiastic intelligent audience whom I know to be out there – persuadable, if not easily – to do that difficult but infinitely rewarding thing, beginning to read Dante. In the absence of such a book, I have done my best.

  Let’s start in the middle. Dante did. He set his Comedy in the year 1300. By then he was the most celebrated poet in Italy. He was also a diplomat and politician, who, during this year, occupied one of the most important offices of state in the biggest city republic in Italy – Florence. He was in middle age, but also ‘in the middle’ not of ‘my life’, but of ‘our life’ [Inferno I.1]. It is, in a sense, to be a poem for everybody and about everybody. But it was focused upon the experience of one remarkable man; focused during one particular three-day period – 7–10 April 1300; and the mighty clash of personalities between the greatest poet of the age and the most autocratic of Popes – between Dante Alighieri and Pope Boniface VIII.

  II

  ROME

  THERE ARE SOME DATES IN HISTORY IN WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL destinies of men and women come together with public events, and the date itself achieves almost mythic status. One contemporary American has written, ‘I imagine that most of us can cite a particular historical event – Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 – that we look on as a defining moment, the specific encounter of self and world that became the cradle of our historical consciousness.’1 Easter 1300 (7–10 April) is such a date for Dante Alighieri. This Easter was also of immense significance for many Europeans. And it was during the period of Easter that year that Dante underwent his imaginative journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The Comedy is very specifically dated to those three days. When he wrote the poem, he tells us that he was journeying, in the company of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, through the three regions of the afterlife. He actually spent those days, with tens of thousands of others, on pilgrimage in Rome.

  As the thirteenth century drew to a close, many looked to the year 1300 as one of special omen. Europe had passed through prodigious changes in the previous century. Those historians who now look in the previous hundred years for the Birth of the Modern would read it as a century in which the human race began a surge of technological competence. It suddenly discovered buttons for clothing (pioneered in Germany during the 1230s), spectacles (Italy, 1285), spinning wheels (France, 1268), windmills (England, 1185). The first mechanical clock was made in England in 1283.2 It was also the era when Europe ceased to be an economy where kings controlled the supply of money, and became an economy where banks, Italian banks, were the source of money. But it was also an age of marvels and miracles, an era of tremendous religious revival. It was the century in which God had touched the body of St Francis of Assisi (1181/2–1226) and marked him with the wounds of Christ. It was a century in which the Church had fought for its very life against heresy, which it had persecuted ruthlessly, against schism – the Eastern Churches made final their severance from the West – and against Islam, an ever-present threat. Though much of Spain had been won back from the Muslims, Grenada still remained in their hands, and, intellectually speaking, the Islamic philosopher Averroes (1126–98) remained arguably the most influential thinker in Europe. In the Middle East, the occupation by Muslims of the Christian Holy Places remained a perpetual threat in the eyes of many Europeans; and for many – Dante among them – this remained the ultimate scandal of Christendom. The last Christian strong-hold in the Middle East had fallen to the Muslims only nine years before 1300. As reconquest of the Holy City of Jerusalem looked ever less feasible, Western Christians naturally looked towards Rome as a suitably sacred alternative for their pilgrimages.

  So, 1300 was, for many, a date which would witness ‘the specific encounter of self and world’. Attentive to the current mood, the Pope had instituted 1300 as a Holy Year. And clearly, the Easter pilgrimage for that year would be of particular importance, with Easter, the Feast of Christ’s Rising from the Dead, being a high point of the Christian calendar. It was the first Holy Year (sometimes called Jubilee3) in the Roman Catholic Church’s history. For some time before the close of the century, there had been murmurs that any who visited the Holy City of Rome during the year which brought the turbulent thirteenth century to an end would receive a plenary indulgence – that is, a completely clean slate, forgiveness of all their sins. At Christmas 1299, there were more pilgrims than usual in the city, urged on by these Vatican rumour-mongers. The Pope himself, though not an especially religious man, was beset by the medieval obsession with numbers – endeavouring to persuade himself, by juggling the figures, that he was the two-hundredth Pope, and that this ‘fact’ somehow added mystic significance to the coming of the new century.4

  By February, the Pope had decided that he could exploit the groundswell of public support for the idea of a grand pilgrimage. On 22 February, the Feast of St Peter’s Chair, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull – Antiquorum habet fida relatio. In it, he stated that any who visited the ‘venerable Basilica of the Prince of the Apostles’ during this Holy Year would receive ‘great remissions and indulgences for sins’.

  For the next two months, snow fell almost without cessation, making the Apennines all but impassable. The Emilian plain had turned into a blinding desert of trackless white. Nevertheless, Europeans turned out in their tens of thousands to make the pilgrimage. They came from all over Italy, from Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. They came from Eastern Europe, from Hungary and from further East. They came from the North, from Germany and from England. Sons, in imitation of Aeneas, carried aged parents on their shoulders.

  Children came, old women, families. A great number walked the entire journey, though the better-off rode. By the time they reached the city, the swarm of poor beggars was immense, huddled around the gates of Rome, calling out for alms, for food, for shelter. One witness estimated that 30,000 pilgrims entered Rome each day. Another believed that there were over 200,000 extra inhabit
ants in the streets. By no means all of them were beggars. ‘A vast army was seen to pass daily in and out by the Claudian Way; barons and ladies from France and other distant lands rode in, attended sometimes by a cavalcade of more than forty or fifty followers. And nearly all the houses along the same Claudian Way both within and without the city were turned into inns, and sold food and drink to the foreigners; and every day they were thronged with people, and there was a very good supply of food’.5 The prices were inflated, particularly of much-sought-for lodgings, and the Jubilee was big business for the Romans.

  The numbers, and the wealth, of the pilgrims made the Jubilee Year a great financial boom for the Papacy itself. The Pope was literally raking in the money. One chronicler observed that ‘Day and night two clerics stood at the altar of St Paul with rakes in their hands, raking in the pecuniam infinitam’.6 Even princes came to obtain the expiation of their misdeeds, visiting the two shrines of St Peter and St Paul fifteen times on fifteen different days, as the Pope had decreed.

  So great were the crowds that it became necessary to operate a one-way system for pedestrians, rather as happens on the pavements of busy streets in the modern West during hectic periods of Christmas shopping. Pilgrims swarming towards St Peter’s were forced to trudge on one side of the road as they crossed the bridge at Castel Sant’Angelo, and back on the other side. One pilgrim who observed them, when he came to write his Comedy, likened the shuffling crowds in the moat-like prison of the hellish city of Dis to the pilgrims in Rome on this occasion. This particular pilgrim was Dante Alighieri, who had reached the mid-point of his life. That is to say, if you take the scriptural three-score years and ten as the norm, he was thirty-five years old. If we had seen him in the crowd, would we have noted, as the poet Yeats was to observe seven centuries later, that his long face, aquiline nose and jutting jaw were to become ‘more plain to the mind’s eye than any face/But that of Christ’?