1 Lectio Brevis
CHAPTER 1
Lectio Brevis
I’d like to begin with a brief introduction, what was once called a lectio brevis in the classroom setting, to the contents of this book and those of Dante’s texts and to the context of these contents—the context within which Dante thrives, grows, and writes his poem, a poem that, as you know, is called the Divine Comedy. First of all, the well-known title I just mentioned is not actually the title that Dante gives to his poem. Dante calls the poem simply “comedy.” “Divine” is the epithet that readers throughout the centuries have assigned to it, to indicate both what struck them as the sublime quality of this text and also the content therein. The poem deals, after all, with the imaginary journey of a pilgrim, an ordinary man living in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, to God—divine content, indeed.
The Comedy is the story of nothing less than seeing God face to face and coming back to tell the tale. Seeing God, being overwhelmed and dazzled by God, places the text squarely in a tradition of visionary literature, but here I will emphasize the writing of the poem about this fundamental experience. So, what kind of poem is this? What is its genre? Is it an epic? Is it an autobiography? Is it a romance? I think it’s all of the above. Perhaps the best term for it is encyclopedia, a word that means a “circle of knowledge,” representing a classical idea that derives from Vitruvius, who wrote of the genre. This idea of circularity is crucial, in the sense that to know something you have to have a point of departure, from which you will pass through all the various disciplines of the liberal arts, only to arrive right back where you started. The beginning and the ending in a liberal education must coincide, but you will find out things along the way that allow you to see with a different viewpoint or perspective.
So Dante has written an encyclopedia, taken to ordering a tradition of liberal arts. But what are these liberal arts? The liberal arts are the arts of words (as opposed to the arts of numbers like arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), and they include grammar, which also encompasses poetry and history; dialectics, or the art of deciding what the truth of a statement may be; and rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. The aim of these liberal arts is to arrive at ethics, metaphysics, and theology. And why are they called liberal? They are called liberal to distinguish them from the so-called mechanical arts, an old medieval distinction, and they are also called liberal because their aim is to free us. It’s as if knowledge contains within itself the power to give us some form of freedom, to free us from various sorts of tyranny: the tyranny of action, above all, the tyranny of having to do things with your hands that will distract you from the great aims of theory, contemplation, and thinking. So, the implication of calling the Divine Comedy an encyclopedia is that clearly it deals with education, with the path to knowledge. The aim of any encyclopedia is to educate its readers.
But Dante’s poem is also an autobiography, the tale of the poet’s own quest for knowledge, for it reveals the process by which he comes to know the world around himself. And what kind of question is Dante asking about the world around him? Dante raises a number of political, philosophical, and ethical questions in a very lucid and probing manner. What is justice in the world? How do the claims of justice go along with the realities of passions and the collision of conflicting desires? Do I know things, and am I all right on account of (or in spite of) what I know? Is my will really weak? If we know what we should be doing, then we all know we should be just, but that alone does not really make us just, right?
In order to attempt to answer these and other questions, Dante goes on writing a poem, which is about a literal voyage to Hell, in order to demonstrate that you can get out of Hell (literally or metaphorically) and rearrange your old vision of the world and yourself. Because every time you talk about ethics or politics, the real questions being asked are: “Who am I?” “What am I doing to come to some kind of understanding of the world around me?”
Of course, we can’t begin to understand that question from Dante’s perspective until we know something about the world around Dante. As a result, I’ll now turn briefly to a discussion of the concrete context of Dante’s life, the contours of his existence. Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, a city inhabited by seventy thousand people by the time that Dante was of school age. He was born into a family that he would claim was nobility, but which actually was quite impoverished, and Dante is known to have been embarrassed by the activities of his father. Dante never mentions his progenitor, but we know from poems that others had written against the poet, attacking Dante and his genealogy, that the father was accused of usury; he loaned money at a very high interest rate. So, we have a possibly unhappy domestic sphere within the wider realm of thirteenth-century Florence, the context of Dante’s childhood.
While still a child, Dante experienced two critical private events. The first is that by the time Dante was eight years old, his mother died. The second, slightly connected to the first, is that when he was nine years old, he met a young woman: it is as if he could not but transfer onto the newly found girl the love for the lost mother. He doesn’t even know what her name is, or at least that’s the fiction he wants us to believe, since he probably knew the name of his neighbor, but at any rate, he calls her Beatrice. These two events can be interpreted as intertwined through a sort of psychological transfer onto this young woman of the love Dante feels toward or wanted from his mother, for he talks about Beatrice as if she were a mother to him. He describes her in the poem using very maternal language, a language of great generosity, the language of the generosity of love.
Dante lives through these two critical events in Florence, and then he goes to school, beginning his education with seven thousand Florentine boys and girls in the public schools that were available to them. Of all the teachers Dante encounters at this school, only one stands out to him, only one gets pointed out in the Comedy, a man by the name of Brunetto Latini, whom Dante places in Hell. Many students want to send their teachers to Hell (not my pupils, of course), but Dante actually does it. Who was this man? Why was he important enough for Dante to include in his poem? If you go to Florence and read the memorial stones that are all over the walls of the city, Brunetto Latini is remembered as one of those who civilized the city of Florence. How? Well, he was a rhetorician first and foremost, in the Ciceronian tradition (he actually translated and commented on Cicero’s rhetorical works). He was a rhetorician who believed that politics and rhetoric go hand in hand, that political problems are ultimately problems of speech and argument, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in parliament and in the streets of the city, where large decisions can be made and reached. This was the essential work of Brunetto Latini, bringing together rhetoric and politics. Dante admires him especially because he is a teacher who gets involved in the political realities of Florence, and Dante wants to follow him in turn.
Brunetto Latini dies while Dante is still young, of course, but in 1290 Dante decides to follow in Latini’s footsteps and enter the political life himself. It was his greatest mistake because political life in Florence meant being in the throes of harsh partisan battles between two factions known as the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The distinctions between these two groups are not so clear-cut: the Guelphs were supposedly those who believed in loyalty to the Church, while the Ghibellines believed in loyalty to the empire, but this sharply separated division of loyalties to the two major institutions of the time is overly simplistic. At any rate, Dante becomes an ambassador for the city of Florence and starts to travel all over the place, much as Latini had done, but he finds himself caught in the middle of this factional war, and when he is sent to the pope in 1302, he is banned from returning to the city. Machinations had taken place, so that Dante’s property is confiscated and there is a threat placed on his head, a threat that should he be caught returning to Florence he will be put to death.
So, 1302 marks the beginning of Dante’s new education and new experiences. He goes into exile, an exile which was deemed at the time to be the severest possible condemnation of an individual. The medieval idea was that the inherent value of an individual depended on the position that the individual occupied in the city. Thus, to be without a city, to hold no place within the city, is to be nothing. As a result, Dante goes begging from one city to the next, maybe even traveling as far as Paris, but exile, this harshest of punishments, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as well. A blessing because it removed Dante from any sense of loyalty to partisan viewpoints. He was no longer a Guelph or a Ghibelline, he was no longer caught in these wars, he was now able to occupy a transcendent point of view.
Ultimately, then, this is the true story of the Divine Comedy. Dante died in 1321 in Ravenna, where he was buried, so he wrote the entire poem in exile, and the poem came out of his experience of exile. The Divine Comedy is the story of how exile allows one to see best what the problems of cities can be. It is the story of how one can go from perceiving the world in a partial, provisional, fragmentary manner to pulling that world together and seeing it in its totality. In exile, he started one project that aimed to find a possibility of unifying all the languages of Italy, he wrote a political text about the necessity of unifying the world with the empire, but the real process of unifying all of his experiences is to be found in the Divine Comedy.
But before we get to this poem written in and of exile, we will turn to a discussion of another great work by Dante, a work inspired by another meeting with Beatrice: the Vita nuova.