Robin Kirkpatrick - Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy

My rather lurid title may already have been an occasion for some arching of the brow. If you were to consult Google rankings you would quickly find that the second most frequently cited verse in the Commedia is this line from the first of this trio of Fives, Inferno v: ‘Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona’ [Love, who no loved one pardons love’s requite],² prized, at least out of context, for its apparently romantic charm. Yet, responding to the demands of vertical reading, one quickly encounters a set of far from romantic considerations. Purgatorio v is a canto which, having depicted scenes of death in battle and a mafioso assassination, concludes with the elegiac words of a wife murdered by her husband. Worse still, if we ascend from Inferno v – which beyond question has always been the most popular canto in the whole Commedia – we arrive at Paradiso v, which may well qualify as the canto best avoided, depicting as it does a Beatrice who insists on arguing about the fine-print details of contract law. But, worst of all, I intend to concentrate precisely on Paradiso v.

Indeed, I want to raise the stakes still higher. So I shall be sorry if in the end I have not convinced you that Paradiso v is one of the most thoroughly humane cantos that Dante ever wrote. I might add, as a practical recommendation, that a student with whom I discussed this canto at great length a couple of years ago has now gone to Harvard Law School and persuaded the hard-headed Dean to supervise her dissertation on Dante’s conception of justice and mercy. Also, with no apology, I want to pay a

1 The video of this lecture is available at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website, https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1459503

2 The translations in this essay are my own.

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good deal of attention to Purgatorio v. This is a canto that T. S. Eliot cites in The Waste Land. Likewise, the poet Robert Lowell wrote two versions of its central episode. So there is surely some living poetry here as well.

But all of this is to imply, conversely, that Inferno v – so often applauded for its delicacy of dramatic voice and subtlety of psychology – might itself be seen, in the vertical perspective, as a manifestation of dead poetry – of cliché and preconception. Is this canto Dante’s version of Strictly Come Dancing, with the lovers Paolo and Francesca tangoing on the wuthering heights of adulterous passion? Well, no. I do not mean precisely that. But I do mean that the over-popularity of this canto – and indeed of Inferno at large – is something of a cultural disaster and certainly a profound distortion of the best that Dante has to offer. From Boccaccio’s first reading of the canto in 1373, Paolo and Francesca – she being the sole speaker from line 88 onward – have been seen as heroic exemplars of a doomed and illicit love that persisted, even in the face of murder and of Hell itself.

Tchaikovsky wrote a swooningly violent fantasia on this liebestod. Rodin did several sculptures of the episode – most famously ‘The Kiss’.

Yet to see what is going wrong here, one has only to stop murmuring for a moment ‘Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona’ and ask what the words here really mean. For the shocking truth is that these lines, read closely, amount to a stalker’s charter: Love dictates that no one who is the object of another person’s love (or obsession) can ever be allowed to resist the claims that love projects upon her, him or it. So, abandoning our lyrical absorption in favour of the fine-print – the nuance of the words – we see that Francesca here does not say she loves Paolo but rather that some supra-personal force of love, ‘Amor’, possesses her. The loved object – Francesca – willingly represents herself as an object; an unnamed past participle (amato) to be read in a passive application; the verb ‘pardon’ is torn from any context that might invoke the mercy of God (Miserere!) to be spoken here with a sentimental simper. And in the alliterative pattern amato/amar, the infinitive amare jags ambiguously close to the word amaro: ‘bitter’.

The depth, then, of Dante’s meaning lies as much in the syntax of these lines as in its dulcet alliterations. And syntax – which Chomskyans might say is as natural a part of our human apparatus as instinct is – emerges as the enemy of unthinking cliché. So, alliterative as my own title is, it is really meant as some sort of organizational guide to patterns of thought, theology and truly human interest that emerge in all three of Dante’s canto fives.

Violence is an issue in all three, and so is a consideration of how we can free ourselves from violence. The action of the human will is brought into

Massacre, 'Miserere' and Martyrdom 99 consideration and viewed in relation to the mayhem we can precipitate by violent action and equally by passive self-abandonment. Please remember here that the will in Dante’s understanding is an intellectual agent: it is not merely an obscure urge but (as Aquinas would also insist) an intellectual appetite, involving our discernment of those goals, patterns and purposes which will allow us to be fully human. The will, of course, may fail and, failing, reveals (Miserere again!) our need for compassion. Our perception of ultimate principles may lead us to acts of martyrdom – of bodily self-sacrifice.

But wait: what about the body in all of this? My claim is that Paradiso v is a distinctly humane canto. And we can hardly be human without our physical bodies. Dante would surely agree with this. He is not a dualist and never thinks of the body as a merely mulish impediment to the big idea.

But how is this conviction registered in these cantos? Francesca may at first glance appear to be its best representative. But I shall hope to show that Purgatorio v is a better point of reference and that Paradiso v – in its exquisite poetry – brings fully into view the intertwining shimmer of will, rationality and physical responsiveness that makes us fully human.

So let me start with Paradiso – and with its philosophy rather than its poetry (though, of course, in the end poetry is far more important than philosophy). This canto is the final movement in an intellectual symphony that began in Paradiso iii, with those considerations of free will and freedom that arose in the case of Piccarda Donati. We are still in the sphere of the Moon and the final phase of the canto will describe Dante’s ascent from the Moon to Mercury, where souls tinged with ambition introduce questions concerning Law, Governance and, ultimately, the Justice of God as displayed in the Atonement. (Vertical reading is a fine device – but one should not lose sight of the plod or dance that Dante pursues, horizontally, from one canto to the next.)

So in canto iv, Beatrice has insisted that Piccarda, though forced against her will to leave her chosen nunnery and to agree to a political marriage, did not resist to the ultimate extent of her powers. She therefore collaborated in her own violation, be it only to a minimal degree. She did not, in short, embrace martyrdom – as some might have done in such a case – and is still aware, while taken up to Heaven, of her own inconstancy of purpose.

The question in canto five is whether vows such as those Piccarda took are absolutely binding or whether they might – in the solicitor’s phrase – be varied in some particulars.

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At first sight, the answers that Beatrice offers might seem to be firmly authoritarian – and this, also at first glance, could well appear to be Botticelli’s impression too for, in his drawing, Beatrice bears down imperiously on a distinctly smaller Dante. But Beatrice’s argument deserves a second glance (as does Botticelli’s illustration). So at lines 45 to 47, Beatrice insists that a vow once made can never be cancelled. The fact that a vow has been made – its very existence – must always remain, as an entry, so to speak, recorded in the book of life. Now this insistence is parallel in its implications to the argument in canto iv which recalls that, in matters of the will, some of us at least have proved capable of martyrdom. And this connection is made explicit at lines 29 and 44 where a vow is spoken of as an act of sacrifice.

Yet it is here surely – at a second glance – that one begins to discern the profound humanity that displays itself in the canto. For Beatrice’s words are fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. On this account, human beings are heroically and clear-sightedly capable of entering into a contract with God, and thus to be bound, as to an equal, by our words of consent. In establishing this position, Beatrice prepares for canto vii of the Paradiso where, through the Incarnation and Atonement, human nature, in the person of Christ, is accorded the right to make reparation for its own original sin. Even in canto v, at line 123, Dante is told to trust the souls in Mercury – the ambitious rulers and jurists – as though they were Gods.

Yet there is also a gentler side to Beatrice’s humanity here, revealed on closer, syntactical analysis of the fine print. So at lines 64 to 75, it is emphasised that there is, after all, no need for us to make vows (and it is stupid to do so) unless, in proper self-knowledge, we are certain we can keep them. This is where the overly-heroic Agamemnon and Jephta went wrong, superstitiously seeking military success from the Gods by vows which led them to sacrifice their own daughters (this not being, generally, a humane thing to do). But even supposing that we do get into such a fix, there are still escape clauses. Granted that the fact of a vow must stand, the exact terms in which it is fulfilled can be subject to lawful negotiation.

The covenant established in the Old Testament offers precedents for such negotiation. And now (in lines 76 to 78) the Scriptures and the Church are authorised to apply a calculus – or legal-eagle syntax – to guide us to a sensible substitution.

With this we are already a long way away, lexically, from Francesca’s cooing ‘Amor che nullo amato amar …’. And in ethical terms a new

Massacre, 'Miserere' and Martyrdom 101 understanding is beginning to emerge of what our possession of free will implies. Free will is the ground of our human nobility and also of the violence we can suffer or perpetrate. Yet a vow, properly understood, is the very paradigm of intelligent choice. If we fulfil it, we are gods. If we choose not to make a vow, we do so in full understanding of our fragile mortality.

And even supposing we do act in foolish haste, then we can still choose to engage in further discussion. Nor is this all. For the whole of this sometimes pernickety argument is conducted in the context of the radiantly liberating hymn to freedom that Beatrice utters at lines 19 to 24.

These lines mark an absolutely crucial moment in the development of Dante’s thinking about freedom. In his illuminating account of Paradiso iii, Vittorio Montemaggi made clear how inadequate it is to think in the case of Piccarda of freedom as simply a matter of choice between alternatives.

That would be merely a supermarket view, of freedom as a choice between two brands of baked beans. (Vittorio put it far more elegantly than that.) We are rather to look for a form of freedom that leads into the very source and surge of life. And that is what Beatrice now lays before us. Freedom is to be understood as the freedom experienced in the wholly unconstrained giving and receiving of gifts. Free will is itself a gift that God has given us.

This gift, moreover, is an expression of the original and ever-continuing act of creation – note the gerund ‘creando’; and God’s ‘generosity’ is conceived here in terms not of arbitrary patronage but rather as ‘larghezza’, the opening up of a largeness or space in which our lives may be fully realised.

Now, none of this implies that the Baked Bean model of choice is unimportant in Dante’s view. The cantos which stand, numerically, at the very centre of the Commedia – Purgatorio xvi to xviii – are throughout concerned with the ways in which our choices can be regulated so as to make our particular choices properly consistent with the ultimate source of good. To fail in that regard is to fall into Francesca’s sort of sin. To succeed is to achieve that utter self-possession of an ethical self that Virgil recognises in Dante himself at the summit of the Purgatorial mountain. But to speak of

‘gift’ is to speak, rather, of dis-possession, of a self-abandonment which also makes possible, paradoxically, a new and unexpected endowment. Thus the paradox is that in making a vow (lines 25 to 30), we freely give back to the source of our freedom that freedom we have freely been given – and bind ourselves by doing so to the ‘creando’ that is the origin and end of our existence.

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The realm that we are now entering is a realm of theology rather than of ethical or philosophical argumentation. And the space that theology opens up is one in which argument is concerned less with confirming propositions than with the pleasures of performance. The point of theological argument is to define and also enrich those words that lead us to participate in other lives – or, indeed, in life itself. This space is one that admits of entrancing paradox and, as will be seen, of poetry. And the air that breathes in this region is the air of faith, not merely faith in dogma but faith in persons (such as Beatrice) along with the hope that we shall share in the gift of their unfolding possibilities. In a word, this space is one in which ‘Amor’ is seen to move the sun and the other stars and Paradiso v is one of the first steps that Dante takes towards that realisation.

We shall see more of this when we return to the poetry – and especially the poetic rhythms of canto v. But we need to be cautious here lest by invoking too easily ‘The love that moves the sun and other stars’ we fall into the kind of chick-lit cliché of which, so far, I have suggested Francesca is guilty. Words need to be syntactically enriched and focused; and love needs to be lived with, not merely spoken. And in fact the process of theological discrimination exemplified in Paradiso v can be traced back, in however oblique and remote a way, to the other two cantos under consideration.

So back we go for a while, vertically down to Inferno, though not, I hope, to conduct any witch-hunt against Francesca or to contrast her too unfavourably with Beatrice. Rather, I want to argue that Inferno v is the beginning of a critique of the culture that Dante himself inhabited and equally an exercise in self-criticism, directed at some of his own most central preoccupations.

The culture from which Dante’s poetry emerges is a love-culture – exhibiting at times its own tendency to Tchaikovskian sturm und drang. Most of the poems written in the vernacular tradition and most of Dante’s own early poems had been love poems. And the Commedia, in the end, is also a love-poem. Yet to see how, ultimately, love in all its aspects might be consistent with the love – and life – of God, it is necessary to overcome at the outset the commonplace – the glamorously melancholic cliché – which proposes that love is a destructive or fatal attraction. At the dark heart of many of Dante’s contemporaries – even of his closest associate, Guido Cavalcanti – lay the truly dreadful pun amore/ad mortem, love leads to death. This is reflected in Francesca’s words at lines 100 to 108:

‘Amor condusse noi ad una morte’ [Love drew us onwards to consuming

Massacre, 'Miserere' and Martyrdom 103 death]. And we have already suggested how her ‘amare’ collapses into

‘amaro’ – ‘bitterness’.

Now Dante himself in his earliest work, the Vita nuova, had already begun to resist any such conclusion. It is there that he writes: ‘Amor e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa’ [Love and the noble heart are one thing], attempting to establish an absolute identity between love and ethical prowess; love is a noble virtue and virtue displays itself in love. So what is happening when in Inferno v he allows himself to write, on Francesca’s behalf, the verse at line 100: ‘Amor che al cor gentil ratto s’apprende’ [Love, who so fast brings flame to generous hearts]? The diction and phonetic patternings of the two lines seem almost indistinguishable. Yet on closer analysis the meaning of the two lines are diametrically distinct. The Inferno line proposes not an identity but an aggressive opposition, in which Love, as an impersonal and numinous force, takes possession of the ethical heart and brings it to instantaneous destruction. It would be easy to blame Francesca at this point for failing to display the lexical intelligence that Beatrice exhibits whenever she utters. Yet that is hardly fair. After all, Dante himself wrote the line.

And this, I suggest, can be taken to imply that he knew as well as T. S. Eliot did that words, even his own most well-defined words, can ‘slip, slide, perish / Decay with imprecision’. Setting out to write a narrative poem, all but unprecedented in the vernacular verse-tradition, Dante confronts a kind of imaginative schizophrenia which will lead him, in dramatising alien voices, to employ his own best words against his own best interests.

‘Love’, then, as everybody knows, is a slippery word. But Dante, knowing this, has also built into his poem a principle that, at least until Beatrice arrives, can help to resist such slippage. And the name of that principle is Virgil, who has already established himself in the poem not only as the model for Dante’s unprecedented foray into the epic mode but is also from the first a paragon of linguistic precision. This principle bears upon one particular word which is as much a leitmotif in Inferno v as is the word ‘amore’, this word being pietà – pity or compassion – which appears in one form or another at three crucial moments in the canto. The notion of compassion will eventually prove to be of great importance in Dante’s thinking. Indeed, one of the characters in Purgatorio v is named La Pia and the canto in which she appears introduces in its first notes the

Im Dokument Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Seite 112-134)