Dante Alighieri: A Divided and Divisive Figure

By Elizabeth Greenwood

Dante Alighieri, the medieval Italian lyric poet, has long been the province of right-wing scholars with conservative standards. However, recently, an English conservative prime minister changed all that (probably unbeknown to him) when he declared publicly that he believed in gay marriages because he believed in marriage, thus lifting the interdict on Dantes sexual identity, clearing it of the idealistic mist in which it had been clouded for centuries with the support of relevant texts susceptible of a loaded interpretation as if a sexual issue could demean such a genius or take anything away from the pathos of The Divine Comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504988100

Elizabeth Greenwood

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, VICE, O, the Oprah Magazine, Longreads, GQ, and others. 

Book preview

Dante Alighieri

A Divided and Divisive Figure

ELIZABETH GREENWOOD

36800.png

AuthorHouse™ UK

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 2015 Elizabeth Greenwood. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   08/17/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8811-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8812-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8810-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Preamble

1 The Convivio Crisis

2 The Terza Rima

3 A Surprising Encounter in Hell

4 An All-Important Confession in Purgatory

5 Dante’s Dreams

6 The Ancestry of Knowledge

7 The Earthly Paradise

8 Three Anomalies

9 The Eclogues

10 Paradise

11 The Detto d’Amore and The Fiore

12 The Strain of Dualism

Notes

Appendix

FICTION by

ELIZABETH GREENWOOD

Utopia 2000 (1994)

Loftycross (1995)

Collected Short Stories and Four Novellas (2006)

Out of This World, a Space Romance (2009)

Sophie’s Friends and Other Stories (2011)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part I (2012)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part II (2012)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part III (2013)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part IV (2013)

Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye, Part V (2014)

OTHER WORKS

Nietzsche, Redeemer of Chance (1998)

Sigmund Freud and the Decline of The Judeo-Christian Culture (2008)

POETRY

Pebbles on a Beach (2011)

‘Sharpen thy sight now, Reader, to regard

The truth, for so transparent grows the veil,

To pass within will surely not be hard.’

Purgatory Canto VIII, 1.19-21

INTRODUCTION

The polemics which surround the critical study of Dante’s Divine Comedy make the innocent independent enquiries in which some of us would like to engage almost impossible; and yet the time for them seems to be right in an era when legislation has been passed by governments regarding the rights of gay people to marry including members of the clergy, promising an objective rite of passage. Dorothy Leigh Sayers who graduated with first class honours in French from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1915, in addition to translating La Chanson de Roland translated The Divine Comedy which was first published for the Penguin Classic series in 1949, and in her introduction she writes:

‘We must forget a great deal of the nonsense that is talked about Dante – all the legends about his sourness, arrogance, and obscurity and especially that libel…that he was a peevish political exile who indulged his petty spites and prejudices by putting his enemies in Hell and his friends in Paradise…’ This last statement needs to be challenged for actually Dante did put a man who had befriended him in Hell, a man against whom he had no grudge and with whom he converses intimately in that infernal place, but more of that anon. This peremptory statement about summary judgement coming form Dorothy Sayers, a serious Dante scholar, shows the kind of partisanship that precludes open-minded debates about Dante as the fierce preserve of right-wing intellectuals ready to defend him tooth and nail against indiscreet incursions likely to tarnish the image of a typically ‘medieval’ man, i.e. someone who cast a backward glance at the twelfth century and its noble pursuits, (idealistic Christian Chivalry and the lyrics of the troubadours) rather than look forward to the fifteenth century which paved the way for the age of enlightenment when the knowledge of the Greek language was revived. As a young poet Dante lived and composed poetical works in a transitional age using the style of the Tuscan school after its central figure Guittone d’Arezzo while evolving a new style, the sweet new style, with a group of young Tuscan poets under the leadership of Guido Cavalcanti, who was a good deal older than Dante. Most of the group shared the same views regarding the nature of love, writing about relationships between young men and women with a kind of tender, familiar banter which indicated a departure from the old style of idealistic courtly love, in other words a less chivalrous outlook as social attitudes between men and women evolved in the new cultural and political climate of the communes. The change from castle life, where well-born women lived in secure isolation wearing chastity belts, while their lords and masters were away at the crusades, to an urban way of life created among other things a change in the style men addressed them. It became more flirtatious, more familiar as salutations were exchanged in the streets. Women were no longer remote objects of veneration. We see the change culminating in the painting of Raphael where the Madonna is represented as an ordinary Italian housewife with a chubby child on her knees.

It is a fact that The Divine Comedy does contain a lot of violence and a lot of strife, and that to some extent must reflect the character of some of Dante’s involvements in the religio-political affairs of Florence at the end of the Thirteenth Century, and in particular the factional rivalry within the Guelph party itself between the Whites, to whom Dante’s family belonged, and the Blacks. The Whites were the more traditional ones. In matters of foreign policy they supported the pope and the emperor and looked to them as pacifying rallying influences, both holding their powers from God. It is of some importance to note here that although bitterly divided the Guelph party overwhelmed the Ghibellines who went into exile and never gained political influence again in Florence, though they were very powerful in other cities, leaving the political field clear for the internecine struggle between those Guelphs who were in favour of the papacy and the Roman Empire – the traditionalist like Dante – and those who refused to be subservient to foreign interest, the new trading class… At this point we may possibly begin to perceive from afar the origin of a possible source of spiritual tension in Dante as an impoverished aristocrat between the poet and the man of action involved in the public affairs of Florence as a prosperous trading commune In order to understand what made Florence a most dangerous city to live in despite the delightful scenery of the surrounding hills suggestive of the bucolic life, it is necessary to appreciate its unique position on the Via Francese which connected Rome with France; Florence as a city in that region was destined for trading in a big way¹.

It might be a good idea for a non-specialist proposing to delve into Dantesque affairs to remember Alexander Pope’s saying ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ in An essay in Criticism. When it comes to literary criticism, Dante is huge, the Everest of exegesis, demanding a knowledge of History (ancient and modern), Philosophy and Religion beyond the range of the classical education required for the modest uses of a creative writer whose licence to tackle Dante will seem impertinent to specialist scholars. This being said we live in an era when what with Twitter an Facebook, the sky is literally the limit for self-opinionated disclosures about almost anything as there is no censorship of any kind, not even that of personal modesty in keeping quiet to let the other person have their say in a tolerant multi-cultural society, considering all such disclosures have an evanescent character. It is also an age where humane feeling about people’s diverse sexual orientations have been encoded in laws enabling self-same couple to live with dignity as citizens with equal rights and not be ostracized as perverts committing sins against nature which were condemned both in this world and the next, as Dante’s Inferno shows. This then to my mind suspends the interdict on some of Dante’s more extreme moral and political views in the sense that we may be at long last able to lift the veil on them and speak about them with equanimity in a spirit of reconciliation, soft pedalling the partisan stridency of the poet’s most vociferous admirers because after all that kind of partisanship is regrettable; it demeans the man and his work.

PREAMBLE

Dante was born in Florence in 1265 into an impoverished aristocratic family of Guelph convictions; he had a sister born after him of whom nothing is known. He was born between the 21st of May and the 7th of June under the sign of the Heavenly Twins. (This is mentioned because Dante believed in horoscopes like a great many educated people in his time; in Paradiso he ascribes his vivacious mind to the light shed by Gemini). Between the age of two and five and closer to two because he remembered nothing of her, here according to psychiatrists being the age for the earliest recollection of infants, Dante lost his mother. It is likely that he was told what most orphaned Catholic children often are. i.e. that his mother had gone to heaven with the angels and was watching him from up there, and he had to be a good boy to please her, and that notion left an imprint at a level accessible to adult consciousness… Soon after his mother’s death his father remarried and had three more children who were too young to act as playmates for Dante, so he must have felt rather isolated within the family though not completely lonely…

In 1274, when Dante was nine years old, at a children’s party he found himself in the company of a heavenly creature of the same age as himself. Her name was Beatrice. She was the daughter of Folco Portinari, a philanthropic banker of the same political party as Dante’s father and he fell in love with her at first sight forever. He was not to meet her again in the flesh until nine years later when they were both eighteen at a wedding reception when the shock of seeing her nearly caused him to pass out, and a relative had to lead him out. In 1287 probably, according to Boccaccio, Beatrice was married to Simone de’ Bardi, a member of the wealthy Florentine family who founded the Bardi banking house. In December 1289, she lost her father and on June 8 1290, she herself died at the age of twenty-four, probably from a miscarriage. Dante could never have claimed her hand in marriage. As was the custom in those days, her hand had most likely been ‘promised’ in marriage at a very early age to a husband of suitable standing by legal contract between the two families, just as Gemma Donati’s hand had been to Dante in a formal document dated 1277 when Dante was twelve years old. All Dante did when he married into the Donati family was to fulfil the contract. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s best friend in Florence, also a stilnovist, who had been engaged to the daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, the famous Ghibelline leader, at the age of twelve, complied with the same obligation. All those arranged marriages were meant to seal political as well a financial alliances between the richest and most influential Florentine families who shared the same political convictions. To eschew the commitment which had been undertaken before notaries would have entailed bloody feuds¹ between families and their supporters. (Basically, the document fixed the amount of the dowry for the girl, the dot²). After Beatrice died, Dante delayed his marriage to Gemma Donati, which is understandable. When he did honour his commitment under pressure from friends and family who hoped it would take his mind off Beatrice, there ensued a disorderly period in his life which his friend Cavalcanti qualified as ‘vile’, reproving him for resorting to low company. During that time, Dante fulfilled his marital duties, eventually giving his wife two or three sons and two daughters. Then one night, Beatrice appeared to him in a dream and the vision brought him back to his senses; he determined from then on to sing her praises and achieve reconciliation