Prof: We'll begin today
with Inferno.
Let me say a few things about
the poem in general,
the structure of the poem,
the formal structure,
and then we get into the cantos
I, II, III, IV which have been
assigned to you.
 
I already, in passing,
in my introductory remarks,
I did say something about the
title as you recall,
the title of the poem.
 
The poem, we refer to it as
the Divine Comedy,
it should be
"Comedy."
That's what Dante calls it and
he called it comedy for a number
of reasons.
 
The first reason is that it
ends in--with--in happiness.
It's a story that begins with a
kind of disorder,
catastrophe if you wish;
the pilgrim was lost in the
woods and then works himself out
toward the light,
toward the truth,
toward God.
That's--so comedy describes the
thematic trajectory of the poem.
It's going from one condition
to another, and from this point
of view, it's literally the
opposite of the tragic movement.
In the tragic movement,
you always have some kind of
initial state of cohesion or
initial state of happiness that
then goes on--
going toward some kind of
fatality or disaster.
 
There's a second reason for the
title "comedy"
and the second reason is
stylistic.
Dante, he calls it a comedy
because he adopts the
vernacular, first of all.
 
As opposed to--the possibility
would have been writing it in
Latin in a kind of--
the language of philosophy and
the language of great cultural
exchanges but he calls it--
instead he uses the Italian
vulgar language.
It also means that
stylistically he adopts a humble
style.
 
You know what the theory of
styles is coming to us from
ancient Greece and Rome.
 
There are three levels of
styles.
Three levels of style:
there is the high tragic style
or the sublime style that
describes exactly the events
that involve kings since style
is--
must have some kind of aptness
to the situation that the story
describes.
 
Then, there is a middle style
or an elegiac style,
and then there is a low style,
the style of comedy,
the style that indeed Dante
will adopt lowly;
but this is a kind of peculiar
implication for Dante to call a
story such as his,
a "comedy"
and this is the implication:
that,
in effect, he undercuts the
idea of a rigid hierarchy of
reality.
 
There is no such neat
separation of the high,
the middle, and the low.
 
That which is low and humble,
such as the experience he is
describing,
his own experience--an ordinary
human being of living around the
year 1300 who manages to have
this extraordinary experience of
going up to see the face of God
and come back--
to return--come back to the
earth to tell us about it.
 
It's really a sign that the low
can become high and the high can
become low.
 
That this--that the classical
distinctions that we read--
of which we read in the
Poetics of Aristotle that
Dante did not know,
or in Horace's Poetic
Art that Dante did know,
are really false,
are really illusory.
 
This is not the way to proceed,
so Dante has a number of items
that he's pursuing in calling
this text the
"Comedy."
 
The other thing I have to say
about the formal structure of
the poem,
as you all know,
it's divided into three parts:
Hell,
Purgatory,
and Paradise.
Easy.
 
Each of them has thirty-three
cantos, with the exception of
Inferno.
 
Inferno has thirty-four
cantos, which means there's
one--Canto I,
which we are going to read in a
moment, plus thirty-three.
 
They are neatly separated in
that, Canto I represents and
stands for a kind of general
rehearsal.
It's a journey that fails.
 
Dante--the real journey will
begin with Canto II.
It has 100 cantos,
but the basic unit of his
narrative is the number 3.
 
In fact, it's written in
so-called a style or a metrical
form,
but there're key devices,
a so-called terza rima,
that I'm sure you recall from
your own readings in high school
or in other courses,
the terza rima,
which is the rhyme scheme,
it's always going to be A,
B, A, B, C, B and so on.
Number 3 once again is the
fundamental symbolic number of
division within this text.
 
What is the reason for this?
 
There is a large aesthetic
reason and the aesthetic reason
that it can be found formulated,
crystallized in a verse from
the Book of Wisdom,
"You O God,
have created everything
according to number,
measure and weight."
 
And so the Divine Comedy
has to duplicate the symmetry
and the order,
and the harmony that he thinks
he sees in the universe.
 
The poem is presented and
introduced as a reflection of
that superior,
divine order of the universe
and wants to be part of it.
 
So it's both as this kind of
ambivalence to reflect it and
become what we call a metonymy:
the part that wants to be
attached to a larger whole.
 
So these are the--some general
concerns that you've got to have
about the poem,
some general ideas that will
help you understand the pattern
of parallelisms that we're going
to find within the poem.
 
And I can give you one very
quickly now.
Since I'm really asking you
that when you read the poem,
you should be aware that it's a
kind of linear structure from 1
to 100.
 
And yet, within the triple--the
tri-partition of the poem --
Hell,
Purgatory,
and Paradise --
there are cantos that
correspond to one another.
 
Canto VI of Inferno,
it prefigures Canto VI of
Purgatorio and both of
them in turn,
will prefigure Canto VI of
Paradise,
Canto VII and so on.
 
It can be done,
Canto X, X and X,
it can be done in a fairly
systematic way.
If you wish sometimes you could
really read I,
II, III, IV and yet I,
I, and I which is--
or maybe you wait for the end
of the poem when you have read
the whole poem then you can go
back and read it horizontally as
it were as much as vertically
down.
These are some ideas,
general concerns and
implications in Dante's
structure of the poem.
We begin now with Canto I;
it's a very well-known canto
where the--it's the general
preamble--you know how the poem
starts.
 
It's--I'm just reading the
famous lines,
everybody reads and everybody
probably remembers.
"In the middle of the
journey of our life,
I came to myself."
 
Those of you who have a
different translation will
nonetheless get the gist and the
changes, the shifts are really
minimal.
 
"I came to myself within a
dark wood where the straight way
was lost.
 
Ah, how hard a thing it is to
tell of that wood,
savage and harsh and dense,
the thought of which renews my
fear!
 
So bitter it is that death is
hardly more.
But to give account of the good
which I found there I will tell
of the other things I noted
there.
I cannot rightly tell how I
entered there.
I was so full of sleep at that
moment when I left the true way;
but when I had reached the foot
of the hill at the end of that
valley which had pierced my
heart with fear I looked up and
saw its shoulders already
clothed with the beams of the
planet that leads man straight
on every road.
Then the fear was quieted a
little which had continued in
the lake of my heart during the
night I had spent so piteously;
and as he who with laboring
breath has escaped from the deep
to the shore turns to the
perilous waters and gazes,
so my mind which was still in
flight turned back to look again
at the pass which never yet let
any go alive."
It's a great beginning.
 
It begins in a very
extraordinary way;
it begins with--in the middle
to begin with,
right?
 
That's--the beginning is in the
middle, the beginning is the
present reality of the pilgrim
who finds himself lost,
but it's more in that first
line.
"In the middle of the
journey of our life"--what
is he saying?
 
I think it's fairly clear the
first conceit and the
fundamental conceit of the poem
is that life is a journey,
which means that we are always
on the way.
I don't know where we are going
yet.
He will find out soon,
which means that we are
displaced, which means that we
are going to have a number of
adventures.
 
It means that we are not yet
where we want to be.
Life is a journey.
 
In fact, he will go on--not
only go in the middle of the
journey;
he also calls it our
life.
 
That possessive,
"our"
life, it's his way of
establishing one fact,
that this is not really yet a
unique experience.
It's something we all share and
something which might also
concern us.
 
That we are also,
not only he is in the journey
of his life, but we too are in
that journey of--the common
journey of our life.
 
Then in contrast to that,
there is now an
autobiographical focus.
 
There is a stress of
"I found,"
"I came to myself
within a dark wood"
and so on,
"I,"
so this is going to be very
much the story,
once again, very much as the
Vita nuova,
an autobiographical story.
 
It can only be a personal
story, but here the self is
going to see the world--is going
to see himself through the prism
of the world.
 
He will enter a public space.
 
The great difference,
I will say, between the Vita
nuova which we just looked
at last time,
and the Divine Comedy is
the following.
The Vita nuova was
destined to fail as a narrative,
exactly because the protagonist
went on drawing us and drawing
himself within the solitude,
the interiority of his own life;
a life which was completely
disengaged from the concerns for
the outside world.
 
The Divine Comedy starts
exactly with that kind of
shipwreck,
the shipwreck of some other
intellectual activities that he
will go on describing and I will
describe with you.
 
As soon as we read this first
line,
"I came to myself in a
dark wood,"
and if you read a lot of
traditional commentators,
traditional commentators will
tell you,
oh well Dante is here in a
state of sin,
the dark wood is really the
condition of spiritual--
maybe despair.
 
He's at an impasse;
we know he doesn't know where
to go.
 
I think that this allegorizing
is a little bit too easy and
it's not really--we have no
evidence for this in the poem
yet.
 
We don't know,
but what we do know is that
Dante is lost in a landscape
that is terrifying.
He is caught within it;
he's clueless about how he got
there.
 
I don't even know how--he goes
on to say,
I don't know how I got myself
in that situation,
whatever that situation was,
but he knows one thing that he
wants to get out of it.
 
He understands that.
 
He does not yet know how he to
get out of this situation,
but he knows that he has to get
out of the entanglement of the
wood.
 
Then he goes on,
oh how hard it is,
etc., "so bitter is that
death is hardly more.
But to give account" --
that's the next tercet --
"of the good which I've
found there I will tell of other
things I noted there."
 
In a way, the poem is already
over.
He's now shifting from the
narrative of events:
I was lost in the dense,
savage, harsh wood of the
night.
 
His gaze rends this night,
tries to find out;
he cannot see anything beyond
himself, and then immediately
says, but to tell you the good I
noted there I have to tell you
other things.
 
The poem has,
right from the start,
the double narrative focus.
 
The first focus is that he's
going to tell us the story of a
pilgrim who is caught in the--
what we call the diachronic,
the time-bound,
the daily events--a number of
encounters which he cannot quite
decide as to their meaning.
So he's led by Virgil as we're
going to find out soon,
but he doesn't understand
what's happening to him.
Then there is the second focus
and it's the focus of the poet
who has seen it all and enjoys
what we would call an omniscient
perspective.
 
The whole poem really moves
around this double axis:
the axis of a synchronic view,
synoptic view of the poet who
has seen,
who has--he becomes a poet
because the pilgrim has had this
experience,
and then he goes on telling us
about this experience.
That's what I call a synoptic
and omniscient narrator and then
he looks at the--at what the
pilgrim did not know.
There's a kind of irony in this
discrepancy between the
diachronic viewpoint of the
pilgrim and the synoptic
viewpoint of the poet.
 
It goes without saying that the
structure is not that neat,
you will see that there are
moments when Dante will go on--
one's point of view will
encroach upon the other,
so I will tell you more about
this particular structure and
now he starts this narrative.
 
Let's see what has happened.
 
"I cannot tell how,"
this is the second paragraph of
our translation,
"I cannot rightly tell how
I entered there,
I was so full of sleep at that
moment."
 
It's a kind of torpid
lethargic, the lack of
consciousness,
the lack of
any--everything--his faculties
are dormant -- let's paraphrase
it like that.
 
"When I left the true way;
but when I reach the foot of
the hill at the end of that
valley which had pierced my
heart with fear I looked up and
saw the shoulders already
clothed within the beams of the
planet that leads men straight
on every road."
 
What he does -- dawn has come,
dawn breaks,
and he looks up toward the sun
believing that the natural
sunlight is going to unveil to
him the layout of the land and
he may find an escape route from
this particular disaster.
I'll tell you one thing,
that if this were a Platonic
narrative the poem would come to
an end right here,
because this is what happens in
a Platonic narrative.
You are in a cave,
you know we are all--this is a
famous myth of the
Republic;
we see nothing,
we only see flickers of light,
it's like being at the movies,
flickers of light,
unreal.
 
They are simulations of the
truth;
they are being projected on the
side of the cave,
and we mistake those shadows
for realities.
If you are really wise and you
are a philosopher then you do
know that you can turn your neck
around and find out where the
source of true light is and then
you are saved.
The whole experience of the
cave is predicated on this
premise: that knowledge saves
you, that knowledge is virtue.
And knowledge does save you to
the extent in which it really
can heal what one could call the
wounds of the intellect:
ignorance being the wound of an
intellect which knowledge,
learning, education,
philosophy, can really cure.
Dante will find out very
quickly that that is a false
promise;
that in many ways,
there are realities and that
his own realities are going to
be a little bit more complex
than what one can find in books,
manuals of philosophy,
about how we get saved and how
we can save ourselves.
 
Let's see what he says here and
what happens.
So he sees--he turns toward the
light,
I saw already that the sunlight
and then he feared this passion,
because it's a passion of the
soul,
the fear that paralyzes him and
paralyzes his discernment.
He cannot--it literally stops
him, does not know which way to
go and it's the overpowering
passion at this point of the
poem was quieted a little
"which had continued in the
lake of my heart during the
night I spent so
piteously."
 
It's a dark night.
 
Some mystics--Dante is not a
mystic, but he's clearly
alluding to the dark night.
 
This is the dark night of the
soul, this is a spiritual
experience that has found now;
it's coming to a head,
if you wish.
 
"And it is he who with
laboring breath his escape from
the deep to the shore turns to
the perilous waters and gazes,
so my mind, which was still in
flight."
Through the whole passage,
I have to tell you,
the two paragraphs we read is
replete with neo-Platonic
language.
 
He is talking about himself as
if this were a flight of the
soul, flight of the mind.
 
My mind which was still in
flight, this is the idea that we
have experiences which are
purely intellectual,
the kind of experiences that we
can all find when we are reading
a book,
we are studying,
we are thinking.
 
The mind takes its flight;
i.e., this is an intellectual
problem.
 
There are many other terms here
that remind us of the--his use,
his deliberate use of
neo-Platonic language.
For instance the word wood
which is in the Latin--
in the Italian is selva,
which translates the Greek
hyle,
which as you know,
is the primal matter out of
which the demiurge will form and
shape reality.
 
Yet, immediately there is a
great shift that I want to focus
on briefly.
 
"After I had rested my
wearied frame for a little,
I took my way again over the
desert slope,
keeping always the lower foot
firm;
and lo, almost at the beginning
of the steep,
a leopard light and very swift,
covered with a spotted hide,
and it did not go from before
my face but so impeded my way
that I turned many times to go
back."
He has been just now talking
about the flight of the mind;
"my mind was still in
flight."
It's an experience of a
shipwreck, first of all,
that many epic stories begin
like that.
Think of the Aeneid,
the shipwreck of Aeneas on the
shores of Africa as he is about
to enter the city that Dido is
about to build and that will
bring him to a great revelation
and a great love story with
Dido.
Here there's no such a relief
for him.
It's the shipwreck of the mind,
a mind that seems to be
literally unable to define both
his whereabouts and his
destination,
but as soon as he does this,
as soon as he understands that
that's what the problem is,
he shifts the language from
mind to body.
"My wearied body,"
and this is the great
difference between neo-Platonic
narratives and Dante's kind of
experience.
 
The intrusion of body and what
is the body--what does the body
stand for?
 
The body stands for the limit
of purely intellectual journeys.
The real journey that he has to
undertake is the journey of mind
and body, and the body stands
for the irreducible historicity
of one's self.
 
The body stands for one's own
reality, the passions;
it stands for one's own will.
 
This is the difference between
what the Greeks understand as
the great intellectual
adventure,
which is one of knowledge,
and Dante's idea that the real
problems are problems of the
will.
We may know all where we are
and we all may understand that
we are not happy with the
situation that we find ourselves
with,
but we cannot quite solve it by
knowledge because the problems
are problems of willing.
What is he doing?
 
Let me just try to make this
very simple.
There are two schemes,
I'm really simplifying it too,
because I think this is
dramatic enough in and of
itself.
 
I don't have to overdo it with
unnecessary complications.
There is a Socratic scheme
whereby all issues are issues of
intellectual sorts.
 
I know, and therefore I am
virtuous.
I know what justice is and the
implication is:
I'm just.
 
That's a false implication
because if I go around the room
here and ask you all to give me
a definition,
of each and every one of you of
justice,
you'll all tell me something:
that justice is a justice
within the self,
that justice is a way I relate
to my family,
or justice is a way I relate to
the city,
or justice is a way I take care
of the problems or whatever of
the world that I find myself in.
Dante will say this is not the
knowledge of what--the
definition of justice cannot
make you just.
The issue is one of willing,
desire.
The other scheme that Dante
opposes to the Socratic idea
that all issues are issues of
philosophy or issues of
knowledge is one of the will.
 
In the Letter to the Romans,
St.
Paul writes,
"The good that I will do,
that I do not do.
 
The evil that I would do that I
do."
He draws attention to the
essential existential problem,
the problem of the self.
 
My will is divided against
itself.
The only way I may know what to
do, but I do not know really,
I am not sure that I will,
I will it.
That's the fatality of life.
 
We all know what's good.
 
How many of us go around
choosing and doing what we know
it's not good for us,
it's not the best in terms of
our judgment of situations.
 
So it's willing and the
perspective of the will becomes
Dante's perspective in coming to
terms with the limitations of
philosophy and intellectual
knowledge.
We shall see Dante talks about
the will in a number of ways.
Last time, talking about the
Vita nuova,
I began mentioning to you that
the will is even better of
course for him than unwilling,
and yet the best experiences of
life seem to be those of one
does not want to happen to us;
such as a dream,
for instance,
the dream of falling in love or
sometimes in the death of the
beloved.
 
You don't--he certainly did not
want the death of Beatrice.
It's a way of understanding
that unwilling is as compelling
as willing.
 
And yet he understands that as
soon as he focuses on Beatrice
as the figure,
the real contingent historical
figure of love,
that he has to give a direction
to his own desires,
that he has to define the
will--it's--
you understand what I'm saying?
He understands that too.
 
That's already an anticipation
of what--of the problems of the
will.
 
Now he starts exploring other
problems,
which we shall see,
both as they relate to the
self,
to the psychology of the
character,
but also as they relate to
politics for instance.
 
To a vision of the world as an
act of and the projection of our
own will;
that the world is the way we
want it to be,
and that men are too--to the
way in which we relate to
problems which are of problems--
necessary problems,
the problems of reality,
etc.
 
For the time being though,
Dante takes the will as his
own, or the body,
his own perspective.
He finds out that he cannot go
up the hill that he has seen.
Three beasts,
just paraphrasing the text,
a leopard, a she-wolf,
a lion, and the lion and the
she-wolf will block his journey
up and so he's going right back
where he finds himself and he's
now back into the deepest
despair possible because there
seems to be now really no exit.
Then he sees something,
"when I was rushing down
to the place below,
there appeared before my eyes
one whose voice seemed weak from
long silence.
When I saw him in that great
waste," and as you know,
because this is the first words
that Dante will say,
the pilgrim,
"have pity on me whoever
thou art,
I cried to him,
shade or a real man."
 
These are the words taken from
Psalms,
"misere" --
he's prostrating -- of King
David,
so he's prostrating himself and
I stress this because the voice,
the Davidic voice will
constitute an important strain
in this narrative.
How does Dante talk?
 
That's one of the ways and we
shall see how discretely it will
appear further down in the poem
and now the conversation what he
meets is--
the fear he meets is Virgil.
"Not man,
once I was a man."
Look at what--we can stop a
little bit to reflect on what
this experience here has been
like and can we define it in
some ways.
 
Dante finds himself lost in the
landscape.
He does not know how he got
there.
He mistakes the sunlight,
the natural sunlight,
as the light of truth by
following which he thinks he can
reach the plain of truth,
up to the top of the hill,
the top of the mountain from
which he can survey the land and
find the exit,
find an escape,
find a transcendence,
we'll call it.
Let's call it a way of getting
out of that disentanglement.
Then he comes right back.
 
He sees the three beasts that
we don't know what they are.
Are they sins?
 
Are they dispositions to sins?
 
They are animals and therefore
they stand for animal
projections of our desires,
of his desires,
the she-wolf,
the lion and the leopard,
that's all we can see about
them.
Then he meets a figure that
can't even know if it's a shade
or a man.
 
He's dramatizing what a
medieval thought,
a medieval literature;
it's called the land of
dissimilitude,
the land of an unlikeness.
He finds himself in a world
where things are not what they
seem.
 
Where there seems to be a
disparity between,
let's call it--let's use the
literary language,
with the signs and
things--signs and their
meanings,
things and what they stand for
and part of this effort is to
literally stitch this to,
this break between signs and
symbols,
meanings and signs,
stitch them together.
First meeting then is with this
figure by the name of Virgil,
who will become his guide.
 
No man, you know who he is.
 
He's the author of the
Aeneid, but look how he
presents himself.
 
I think it's crucial you pay
attention: "Not man;
once I was man,
and my parents were Lombards,
both Mantuan by birth.
 
I was born sub
Iulio,"
meaning Caesar,
which is true,
"though,
late in his time and I lived in
Rome."
 
And he gives a biography of
himself, a self-presentation in
terms of his life,
the historical circumstances
and also his works.
 
That's what we call a miniature
biography: a sense that I came
into this world and somehow.
 
This is what it all comes down
to, this is really the sense of
my birth, and he speaks about
his own birth.
"I lived in Rome under the
good Augustus in the time of the
false and lying gods.
 
I was a poet,
and sang of that just son of
Anchises,"
Aeneas, "who came from
Troy after proud Iliam was
burned.
But you?
 
Why are you returning to such
misery?
Why dost thou not climb the
delectable mountain which is the
beginning and cause of all
happiness?"--
meaning the Mountain of
Purgatory that will take him to
Eden--
which is really what all things
according to the biblical
version of cosmology,
all things started.
 
He'll say, "art thou then
that Virgil the fountain which
pours forth so rich stream of
speech?
I answered,"
etc., "O glory and light
of other poets,
let the long study and the
great love that has made me
search thy volume avail me.
Thou art my master and my
author.
Thou art he from whom I took
the style whose beauty has
brought me honor."
 
This is Virgil,
clearly, the poet.
And the extraordinary
recommendation,
which I can tell you as a
teacher, every teacher really
would love,
years after the students have
been studying with the teacher,
to give them this kind of great
acknowledgement:
how I remember your teaching.
That's what he does,
very rhetorical;
we'll call it the rhetoric of
capturing the benevolence of the
interlocutor.
 
It's clear that the exchange
between them and the recognition
of Virgil is as a poet,
and therefore I have to take a
few minutes to tell you a little
bit about this.
It's--because Virgil,
we know, he's the poet of
the Aeneid,
clearly the story of a journey,
of a grand epic journey by
Aeneas.
We'll talk a lot about it;
I hope you've been reading that
poem, if you haven't already.
 
That's not the way he was known.
 
Virgil was not known this way
in, what we call the
twelfth-century Europe,
in the culture immediately
preceding Dante's time.
 
He, Virgil, more than as a
poet, was known as a
philosopher.
 
He was a neo-Platonic
philosopher.
That is to say,
a neo-Platonic philosopher is
one who had written a poem,
but the substance of the poem
was not the fiction about the
burning of Troy,
the journey of Aeneas to--as an
exile who could go around
looking for a new land with his
father on his back and the kid--
the Ascanius by his hand;
it was nothing like that.
It really had some
philosophical depth.
It was a way of acknowledging
that poetry is capable of
providing philosophical
illumination.
What was the philosophical
message?
I call it neo-Platonic,
because it was just very much
like what they thought was the
Odyssey in that same
time: the Odyssey,
the story of Odysseus or
Ulysses, who goes from Ithaca to
Troy,
and then after ten years of the
war in Troy goes back to Ithaca.
It takes him ten more years to
do that.
The neo-Platonists,
the allegorizers,
were viewing that poem as the
metaphor for the journey and the
experience of the soul.
 
It was the story of the soul
that goes from the point of
origin,
one's home, one's home is
always--we call once home a
place of one's--
where one's soul is--when one
can find oneself somehow and one
is familiar,
comfortable, whatever.
He leaves Ithaca,
goes to Troy,
goes through life,
and then he has to purify
himself in order to go back,
as in a circle,
a neo-Platonic circle back to
the point of origin.
This is the neo-Platonic
allegory of the Odyssey.
They will do the same thing in
the twelfth-century France.
I could give you names if you
wish: Bernard Sylvester,
Fulgentius a little bit
earlier, John of Salisbury who
was an Englishmen of the twelfth
century,
who will go on writing about
the Aeneid is the story
of a hero who is born in Troy
and then goes through the stages
of life.
 
Each book represents a stage of
life: childhood,
youth, maturity,
with all the temptations of the
flesh that happened with Dido
and then he goes back to--
arrives in Italy and that's the
Book VI.
They would never really bother
reading the other book.
The Aeneid was viewed as
a philosophical text
illustrating the pattern and the
movement of life.
It was really telling us,
and that's really the promise
of philosophical knowledge,
that we all,
like Aeneas,
are born,
but with care and prudence can
reach the Promised Land.
Dante changes this
interpretation and he changes
this interpretation by making
and insisting that you--that
Virgil is a poet.
 
He replaces the philosophical
promises with the idea of poetry
in the belief that poetry is
better than philosophy.
That philosophy cannot quite
reach the depth of immense light
that makes two general promises
for everybody.
It tells that we can all be
like Aeneas, going from Troy to
Latium.
 
And Dante says no;
this is not really saying much,
but saying at all about the
reality and the individuality of
my life.
 
Poetic language is for him,
the language that addresses
these issues,
and therefore,
poetry here is seen as a
version of history.
This is--you are the writer,
he says to Virgil,
who wrote the poem dealing with
Roman history.
Poetry and history--they deal
with the world of contingency
and not the world of universal,
and therefore,
potentially empty promises.
 
That's the great change,
the great new interpretation
that Dante's advancing about
Virgil.
What Virgil will tell him is
that the--they go on talking
about--Dante will call him
master and author,
this is--and great sage and all
that.
And Virgil says to him,
this is very simple,
you must take another road;
you are going the wrong way.
This is the--that's what I call
the idea that Canto I is a
rehearsal to the whole poem.
 
It gives the story of a
journey, a journey that fails,
a journey that is aborted,
that's not the way you go.
It's not--you find yourself
lost, what do you do?
You try to go quickly up to the
destination, you climb up the
hill and you think you can make
it.
No, no, no.
 
Virgil replies that he has to
go in a different way.
He may reach the same point,
the same destination,
the world of justice,
the vision of God,
the idea of love,
the good as he calls it,
but he must go down.
 
That the way up is down,
he has to go through the whole
spiral,
through the horrors and the
suffering of Hell,
then reemerge through Purgatory
in order to be able to reach the
beatific vision.
That's very simple.
 
The way up is down and this is
something that marks the
difference between philosophical
presumption and the notion of a
spiritual Christian humility
that he has to pursue and wants
to pursue.
 
This is--the conversation
between them goes on with this
prophecy of the so-called hound,
page 27, line 100.
It says, the world is in such a
disarray,
and yet now there's very
mysterious and enigmatic
prophecy that we'll come to and
discuss by the time we come to
the end of Purgatory and
so now the journey begins,
"then he set out and they
came on behind him."
That's the end of Canto I and
we come to Canto II,
where now it's--what's the time
of the year?
If this has to be a historical,
a reducible,
and essentially a biographical
experience, Dante has to be very
careful.
 
He will give us the time,
the precise time and place of
this experience.
 
We are--the poem starts on Good
Friday, on the evening of Good
Friday of the year 1300.
 
These are the--so it's a very
Christo-mimetic we call it,
an imitation of Christ-like
experience,
because he will emerge to the
light of Purgatory on Easter
Sunday.
 
Dante says, why should I take
this journey to
extraordinary--you here--this is
the whole brunt,
the whole substance of Canto
II.
"I'm not Aeneas,"
he says, "I'm not
Paul."
 
"Why should I go
there?"
Why should I go on?
 
"You poet"
-- I'm on line 10,
"you guidest me,
consider my strength,
if it is sufficient...
 
You tell us of the father of
Sylvius as he went,"
meaning of course Aeneas,
etc., and then you also tell us
about the Paul and he concludes,
"but I,
why should I go there,"
line 32.
"Who grants it?
 
I'm not Aeneas,
I'm not Paul."
First of all,
these are the coordinates,
the imaginative coordinates for
his own journey.
Aeneas, the hero who brings
about the foundation of Rome and
then Paul,
the Apostle to the Gentile,
the thirteenth Apostle who
really brings about--
who also goes to Rome,
but he was also the spiritual
domain of the Church.
 
So these are the two--so who is
he?
That's the first question he
must answer.
"I'm not Aeneas,
I'm not Paul."
The implication is who am I?
 
This whole part of this story
is to find out who he is and
part of this journey is indeed
to find out--
the beginning of this journey
at least,
is to find out that the poem is
written in order to bring some
degree of redemption and clarity
to the world.
He really believes in this,
in what we call
"salvific"
role of his own voice.
Not without irony,
not without discouragement,
not without a sense that this
may indeed be a proud arrogant
kind sort of posture.
 
This whole idea about who he
is, is immediately countered by
a reflection on his own divided
will.
I just want to read this
thematically,
"and as one who one wills
what he willed,
and with new thoughts changes
his purpose,
so that he quite withdraws from
what he has begun,
such I became on the dark slope;
for by thinking of it I brought
to naught the enterprise that
was so hasty in its
beginning."
 
It would take me really too
long to give you a sense of an
appropriate gloss to these
lines.
They are lines about the
limitations of willing.
Dante begins by claiming the
importance of the will in the
act of knowledge and we do see
that he so aware of it--
there's one detail that I did
not mention.
You realize how the pilgrim
moves throughout in Canto I and
he will move in the same way but
he'll never talk about it again.
He hobbles in--toward the
light, he goes around hobbling
and that hobbling is part of his
being wounded,
having a wounded will that he
must somehow heal.
Someone will say,
good, Dante's a voluntarist,
not quite.
 
Dante doesn't believe in
philosophy and intellect,
not quite.
 
He believes that the two
faculties of the soul,
intellect and will,
are like the feet of one's
body.
 
They got to--if you really want
to walk fast,
at least, and safely,
you got to be using both.
You got to use the intellect
and the will.
As soon as he claims the
importance of the will,
which the Socratic experience
had somehow neglected,
he goes on reflecting about the
limitations of the will.
What are the limitations?
 
One of it is that the will can
be divided against itself.
The second one is that the will
needs something to regulate it,
because I can will anything,
I can will this and that,
how do I order what I will?
 
The third limitation of the
will, and we'll talk more about
the--
some of these aspects but
there's a third limitation of
the will is that I can never
really go faster than my own
will.
I'm a prisoner of my--if I
believe that that's all I have,
my will -- I can't go faster
than it.
If the will is weak and slow,
and divided,
that's what I am.
 
I can't go past it,
some of the difficulties.
Here he goes,
Canto II, trying to think about
the identity and the purpose of
this journey--who am I?
"I'm not Aeneas,
I'm not Paul,"
then who am I?
 
That's the great question and
as soon as he does this,
he admits--he sheds light on
the first internal issue that he
must cure,
the internal issue is the
divided will.
 
We come to Canto III,
I'm sorry that we go a little
fast but that's the way -- our
will moves fast.
This is now Dante enters into
the gate of Hell,
the famous inscription,
"Through me the way,"
pretty scary and that scares
him quite a lot.
Dante meets--the first sinners
that he meets are the so-called
neutral angels,
Canto III, around lines 30 and
following,
"And I,
my head encircled with horror,
said: 'Master what is this I
hear, and who are these people
who seem so mastered by their
pain?'
 
And he said to me:
'This miserable state is borne
by the wretched souls of those
who lived without disgrace and
without praise.
 
They are mixed with that
caitiff choir of the angels who
were not rebels,
nor faithful to God,
but were--'my text says,
"for
themselves."
 
The right translation is,
"by
themselves,"
because if you are for
yourself, you are for someone.
 
These are the angels called
neutral who in the great cosmic
battle with which the world
begins between God and the
satanic forces,
just became spectators,
just watching.
 
The translation is per-
in Italian it says "per
se stessi,"
which we translate as "by
themselves,"
sort of taking a separation.
In other words,
Dante begins by dramatizing
that which to him is the most
serious of sins,
not--being disengaged,
not taking sides,
in the belief that somehow you
wait and see what the outcome is
and then you can go on taking
sides.
That's the start of this
experience and then he goes on--
why are they--he responds,
"They have no hope of
death,
etc., pity and justice despise
them.
 
Let's not talk of them but look
at them and pass."
He doesn't even name them,
he won't even name them because
to name them would be to bring
them into reality and the
neutrality stands and is a sign
the way in which they de-realize
the world.
 
They reduce the world to a pure
show of their own--for their own
spectatorship.
 
So, he goes on from here and
now the second action is that he
sees Charon the famous--
he goes into the ferry,
Charon who will ferry all the
souls and gives an extraordinary
description of this figure and
the souls who blasphemed God and
the parents,
the humankind.
And then there is an
extraordinary image that I want
to read with you when Dante
describes the souls and what he
sees are souls that go on the
boat of Charon.
This is toward the end of Canto
III, lines 112 and following.
"As in autumn the leaves
drop off one after the other
until the branch sees all it
spoils on the ground,
so the wicked seed of Adam
fling themselves from that
shore,
one by one at the signal as a
falcon at its recall.
 
Thus, they depart,
of the dark water and behold of
the land on the other side a
fresh crowd collects again on
this.
 
'My son, said the courteous
master,
'all those that die in the
wrath of God assemble here from
every land and they're eager to
cross the river,' etc."
I really want to focus on this
image of the autumn leaves,
whereby Dante describes the
dead souls as the leaves in
autumn that have fallen from the
tree.
The conceit is that the souls
are leaves, and it's an image
that Dante takes straight from
the Aeneid of Virgil.
In Book VI, also Virgil
describes--Book VI of the
Aeneid,
focuses on the descent of
Aeneas into Hades and there he
also waits and he sees the souls
waiting for reincarnation,
the famous theory of
metempsychosis.
 
You may have heard of this
term, which means the
reincarnation of the souls.
 
The souls are waiting to be
reincarnated and come back in an
endless cycle.
 
Dante--Virgil himself had taken
this image from Homer,
of course.
 
Dante changes Virgil's,
the thrust of Virgil's image,
because in Virgil it's quite
accurate since he has a
Pythagorean understanding of
existence.
That is to say,
life is a continuous circle,
the wheel of becoming,
Plato's wheel of becoming.
Time goes on and on returning
on itself.
We always witness these circles
and cycle of the seasons,
and this is also what happens
with human life.
There is nothing really unique
about us because we die and then
we can wait for the
reincarnation of our soul.
Death in Virgil is an elegiac
experience: it's never really
tragic and cannot be tragic,
because it lacks that edge of
the uniqueness,
the edge that something
particular and special has been
happening to the world because I
am here,
certainly to my world,
because I am here,
and then I may disappear.
Dante changes this idea of this
circularity, the elegiac quality
of death and life that we have
in Virgil.
Why do I call it elegiac?
 
Because you die and yet you can
come back, because we're really
like leaves: and just as leaves
fall in the autumn,
you just wait for the spring.
 
We might not be the same
leaves, but leaves very much
like those that have just fallen
will return.
Look what Dante does.
 
Dante goes on focusing on the
idea of uniqueness of every
leaf.
 
"As in autumn,
the leaves drop off one after
the other until the branch sees
all its spoils on the ground,
so the wicked seed of
Adam," we--
there is already some kind
of--some evil being acknowledged
at the root of our own
existence,
"the wicked seed of
Adam,
fling themselves from the shore
one by one at the signal,
as a falcon at its recall.
 
Thus, they depart over the dark
water and before they have
landed on the other side,
a fresh crowd collects again on
this."
 
For Dante, this image shows not
that leaves are--
our souls are like leaves,
but that a leaf can be
described as a soul only if you
insist on its own uniqueness and
the fact that it will never
return.
There is one fairly
contemporary poet who understood
this and I really want to quote
to you a few lines.
I don't know that I remember
them all, it's Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
 
Some of you will have read--who
read English literature remember
this, you may remember this.
 
He writes his famous poem,
called Goldengrove
Margaret.
 
Do you know the poem?
 
Do you know what I'm talking
about?
"Margaret,
are you grieving of a
Goldengrove unleaving?
 
Leaves like the things of man
you ...
care for, can you?
 
As the heart grows older it
will come to such sights
colder,"
etc.
and continues.
 
What is--Hopkins really is
reading this image.
What is he really saying?
 
He's saying he understands that
leaves,
like the things of man you care
for,
can you--what comes back that's
not the life of human beings,
but comes back are the things
that human beings may use and
waste and those things.
 
So the right analogy for Gerard
Manley Hopkins,
in a sense, really in the wake
of Dante,
is between the things of man,
the things that we have,
the things that we can produce
and leaves, not souls.
In formal terms,
this really means that Dante is
replacing the notion of epic
circularity that you find in the
classics,
the classics of Homer,
the classics such as the
Aeneid,
with an idea of linear novel.
 
The life of human beings is
best described formally by a
novel in the sense that we are
caught in a journey that goes
on.
 
It's unique and will reach its
destination whatever it will be.
We don't know yet,
at this point,
of the poem.
 
Now Dante enters into a circle,
into the garden,
the first experience in Canto
IV.
I will--I want to give you some
time to--I will have to deal
with Canto IV and then I will
stop.
I'll have to come straight to
the point about Canto IV.
Dante comes to what is called
"limbo"
the--
a word that comes from Latin,
in Latin it--
that's what limbo is,
this is the edge,
that's what it means,
lembos.
 
In Italian you speak of the
lembo,
the edge of a dress or a jacket
and so on;
comes to the area of Hell which
really is outside of Hell.
In fact, it's very much like
the Virgilian after-life of the
virtuous.
 
And he meets a lot--it's
described as a garden,
one of the gardens,
one of the three,
four gardens we find a sort of
pre-figuration of the--
in many ways of the earthly
paradise and gardens in
Purgatory,
but it's also pre-figuration of
the world of Paradise where the
city,
Jerusalem, is described as a
garden.
The first thing about this:
it's called the locus
amoenus in case you want to
know what the technical term,
locus amoenus,
the kind of idyllic place,
and this is a term,
a phraseology that belongs to
very much the epic world.
 
And in the world,
for instance,
later in the Renaissance
whether it's--
it could be Spencer or Tasso,
or Milton,
there is always the story of
the hero who reaches this
idyllic bucolic place and-- to
relax.
It's really a place of the
breakdown of the errancy of the
hero,
of the adventurous spirit,
and always shows,
or maybe it's just the irony in
literary structures,
that whenever heroes seem to
look for a pause to the quest by
reaching the garden and
relaxing,
that's where they find out they
are in the most dangerous
situation.
That whenever you think that
you are safe and you can disarm,
and there's the running cool
water of the river.
There is the shade;
there is the fragrance of the
landscape,
this is the way that we're--the
wherewithal,
the description of these
bucolic gardens,
that's exactly when the snake
will appear.
 
That's exactly when the enemy
will be capable of reaching you
and overwhelm you.
 
This is also--in other words
there are all these places of
temptation and that's what
happens here.
Dante here, arrives and he sees
the poets,
Canto IV, it's an
extraordinary--they're all
virtuous heathens,
he sees the poets,
and the great poets that he
will see--
the first poets that he will
see are--
first of all he sees all the
figures from--
he will enumerate the
characters, scientists,
philosophers from the Greek and
Roman world,
but put a little bit at the
edge.
They really don't seem to have
much impact on the situation
here.
 
But then the dramatic situation
is when here,
lines 80 and following,
"O you,"
he sees the poets,
the classical poets from Homer
to Horace and Ovid,
"O you who honored both
science and art,
who are these to have such
honor that it sets them apart
from the condition of the rest?'
And he said to me,"
Virgil speaking,
"their honorable fame
which resounds in thy life
above, gains favor in Heaven,
etc.
'Honor the lofty poet,
his shade returns that left
us.'
 
When the voice has paused and
there was silence...
I saw four great shades coming
to us;
their looks were neither sad
nor joyful."
As befits limbo.
 
It's clearly like life here.
 
That's what the after-life is
in Dante's conception.
It's only an extension of what
we choose to do on this earth.
If you really think that life,
the beauty of life,
which is not a bad idea,
is talking about having endless
seminars of aesthetics or
poetry,
as these poets do,
that's what your after-life is.
You sit down,
sit on the grass and go on
talking about beautiful things,
he says.
"The good master began:
'Mark him there with sword in
hand who comes before the three
as their lord.
He is Homer, the sovereign poet.
 
He that comes next is Horace,
the moralist.
Ovid is the third,
and the last,
Lucan,"
famous epic poet whom Dante
will again celebrate in
Purgatory,
"Since each shares with me
in the name the one voice
uttered they give me honorable
welcome and in this do well.'
Thus I will assemble the noble
school,"
school in Greek means--
it's also leisure,
the leisurely life,
scholar, the world of play and
the world of leisure,
" the lord of loftiest
song who flies like an
eagle," Homer,
" above the rest."
 
And the irony,
of course, is that he's blind
and the eagle to have the sharp
view, the sharp vision,
but that Homer's vision is an
inner vision.
He looks--he's blind because
he's looking inward in order to
know what the song he is to sing
will be about.
"After they had talked
together for a time,
they turned to me with a sign
of greeting and my master smiled
at this;
and then they showed me still
greater honor,
for they made me one of their
number, so that I was the sixth
among those high intelligences.
Thus, we went on as far as the
light, talking of things which
were fitting for that place and
of which it is well now to be
silent."
 
Here is Dante.
 
He inscribes himself in the
history of Western poetry;
from Homer to Dante,
he counts himself as sixth
among them.
 
Here's Virgil,
here's Lucan,
here's Ovid,
here's Horace,
and of course,
the master of them,
all Homer.
 
We go from Homer to Dante,
it's a little history,
if you wish,
of Western poetry and Dante
thinks that he belongs to it.
 
We could say a number of things
about what they are talking
about.
 
He says he doesn't say.
 
We talk about beautiful things
which we--I infer we can easily
infer they talk about poetry:
they talk about their craft.
There may be a little link that
I would like you to reflect on,
on your own,
between the garden and the kind
of poetry,
the kind of beauty that they
are really talking about.
 
This is the way Dante's
imagination works.
You have to pull together
things that don't seem to be
described.
 
So this is the garden,
there's some kind of
self-absorption about this.
 
There seems to be a kind of
self-enclosure about this kind
of poetry.
 
It's a little scene that
reflects on what the spiritual
condition may have been like,
but what is the most surprising
and what constitutes the
temptation of this canto,
the temptation of the scene for
the pilgrim's own spiritual
pilgrimage;
he's involved in the spiritual
descent which turns out to be an
ascent.
He says at one point "I
was sixth among such
genius."
 
Do you see the discrepancy?
 
Do you see how this is jarring?
 
Can you hear it?
 
He is going down for redemption.
 
He is descending in humility,
and yet now he talks as a poet,
his poetic voice is one that
elevates itself.
There seems to be a kind of
discrepancy between the two,
that's the great temptation of
Dante.
To believe that as a poet he
has been claiming that poetry is
better than philosophy,
that poetry is like history,
and the first concern Dante has
is to reflect on the wholeness
of this claim.
 
How this kind of claim about
the importance of poetry can
turn out to be a temptation for
him.
It's a hubris and I focus on
it, as I have focused on it,
because in effect what we're
going to discuss next time.
Canto V, it is an extended
reflection,
a way for Dante to reflect on
this claim,
an extended reflection on the
dangers of such a claim and the
responsibility of writing
poetry.
Dante will meet the great
heroine of all love stories,
Francesca.
 
Everybody knows about this
fantastic figure,
a lovely figure Francesca who
dies for love,
but Dante's actually
encountering a reader of his own
poetry and he witnesses the kind
of traps and risk that reading
implies.
 
We are going to go on next time
thinking about this whole
question of reading and
responsibilities of writing.
Canto IV, by the way,
I cannot leave without saying
something about the epic quality
because I have been just talking
about--
I have been defining the poem
really as a novelistic
vis-à-vis the
circular structure of an--
of Virgil's understanding of
the reincarnation,
and therefore,
the great notion of what an
epic is and now I will say--
actually Dante goes on mixing
his genres.
As soon as you formulate
something, Dante has a way of
undercutting that formulation.
 
Canto IV ends with a miniature
representation of the epic
quality of this text.
 
It goes on enumerating all the
souls that he can see,
which is really as you know,
if you remember from your
Iliad on the Gates of
Ilion,
at one point Helen will go on
numbering all the ships of the
Greeks to the old Priam.
 
You remember that scene?
 
Some of you may remember that,
and this is the way Canto IV
ends with lines 124 and
following:
"There before me on the
enamelled green were shown to me
the great spirits by the sight
of whom I am uplifted in myself.
I saw Electra with many in her
company, of whom I knew Hector
and Aeneas and Caesar..
 
.I saw Camilla,
Penthesilea on the other side,
and I saw the Latian king who
sat with his daughter Lavinia;
I saw Brutus who drove out
Tarquin, Lucrece,
Julia, Marcia,
and Cornelia;
and by himself ...
 
I saw Saladin,"
a great sign of honor,
Saladin who sits by himself as
a kind of lofty state and,
" when I raised my eyes a
little higher I saw the master
of them that now sitting amid a
philosophic family...
Socrates...
 
Plato,"
the other one was Aristotle,
"Democritus,
Diogenes..."
all the Greek philosophers and
then Orpheus,
Cicero, Linus,
Seneca, Euclid,
Ptolemy.
 
A version of the classical
encyclopedia:
all of the knowledge is
gathered here,
and yet Dante has a way of
saying that traditional
encyclopedias,
these formal structures as he
wanted to organize the world of
knowledge,
there is something wanting
about them.
Why?
 
What's wanting about them?
 
They never tell you how you can
really educate yourself.
They never describe the process
of education.
To know that to describe the
process of education you go to
have an encyclopedic poem where
you are showing the phases and
the stages of learning;
as the pilgrim will it was the
second thing that I have to say
is that,
in any enumeration as you have
here,
an epic enumeration,
and I will close my remarks for
the day.
 
Enumerations always imply the
wish of a narrative such as an
encyclopedia,
because it's as little bit of
an encyclopedic form I say,
to encompass the whole of
reality: that's what
encyclopedias want to do.
The reality of it,
the intellectual reality,
and yet enumerations by their
virtual being enumerations will
tell you that no totalization is
possible.
There is something that always
escapes the formal ordering that
the encyclopedias want to reach.
 
And for now I stop with my
remarks and we have a few
minutes in case there are
questions, as I hope there are.
I welcome questions.
 
I will repeat your questions,
by the way, for the benefit of
the videotape.
 
Please.
 
Student:  So when Dante
talks about the first group of
sinners who work for themselves
who didn't take a side,
so you think that was also
political commentary?
Prof: Yes.
 
The question is,
Dante talks about the neutral
angels.
 
He calls them "for
themselves"
and we say it's "by
themselves"
and the question then really
is,
is that also a political
commentary?
Before I could rephrase,
I could repeat this--the
question--I said yes,
absolutely.
Dante will use the very same
experience for himself later in
Paradise where he will say that
in many ways being by oneself,
there are times when that can
become an act of virtue where
the notion of neutrality is
going to be redefined.
Dante doesn't like clearly
neutrality, all right.
Why is he--does he find
neutrality?
Because it's a language of
privation for him,
it's really way of--it's the
decision not to take decisions
because you are always making a
decision even when we think that
we are not making a decision,
so you really are.
To him that is the sign of a
great cowardice.
He explains that in cosmic
terms.
This is the metaphysics the
great war in Heaven,
which by the way,
enables me now to say that it
gives the whole of Hell a kind
of symmetrical structure because
it clearly begins with the
neutral angels and ends with the
encounter-- with Lucifer at the
end.
So you that this is really the
kind--what frames the narrative
of Hell.
 
To go back to your question,
when Dante is going to talk
about politics,
he also believed,
for a while,
that he had to take sides.
He did, and he did by going
back now to the few remarks
about his language,
his political involvement,
on the first class,
the first seminar.
He was banned,
he was sentenced to exile,
and then he removed himself
from all partisan politics.
How did he do this and why did
he do this?
For a while he was a Guelf
being thrown out of Florence
with many others,
also as an act of punishment
for a decision he had made to
throw out the Ghibellines,
among whom his own best friend,
Guido Cavalcanti,
who died in exile.
 
He's thrown out,
and we do know these historical
happenings.
 
They spend the first few years
of their exile plotting and
making,
and going on through
machinations as to how to get
back to Florence and damn it,
really make them pay.
 
He realizes very quickly the
wickedness of this plan.
He realizes that his own party
is no better than that of the
Ghibellines and so he removes
himself from them,
the act of removal from the
criminal violence that he and
his other accomplices were for a
while thinking about,
turns out to be madness and so
he decides in this act of
virtue,
absolute solitude and that is
by himself.
 
There is a kind of judgment,
but let me refine that,
how can you go on really
describing that the act of
neutrality is bad.
 
And yet there is a way in which
there are times where neutrality
can become nothing less than a
virtuous decision as he will
make.
 
Other questions?
 
Please.
 
Student:  I have a
question from last Tuesday's
lecture.
 
Prof: Last--yes please.
 
Student:  Last
Tuesday--you talked about
friendship and love,
love and
>.
 
There was no conversation about
lust,
and we know from this history
that both of them,
Beatrice and Dante were married
and that he had children and I'm
wondering if the physical aspect
above is irrelevant for the
poet.
 
Prof: The question
refers to the remark I made
about--
that was picked up by a student
also,
another student,
the remark about love and
friendship as the two are
dramatized in the Vita
nuova.
It refers--wants to know,
wants me to explore more the
role of lust,
since we know that Dante was
married and what does lust have
to do with love.
I take, that's really the
question.
Let me just say that it's a
very complicated question and I
will talk about this next time
when we deal with Francesca,
who is of course,
the heroine of lust,
if there was ever one.
 
Then we'll see what Dante means
by that.
I mean the--it clearly is an
issue related to love,
fundamentally related to love.
 
But to believe and I'm
really--probably have confused
some of you here,
but don't be confused,
to believe that Dante's
judgment of Francesca is limited
to the representation of Canto
V,
where he describes the
relationship between lust and
love,
lust and love,
would be a grand mistake.
 
Dante understands that without
physicality there could be no
love, that there's no soul which
is not connected to a body.
In fact, some of the remarks
that I made today are really
about--
can be construed--I did not
make the point but it can be
construed as his sense of the
inevitability of the body,
that the intellect in and by
itself,
the soul in of and by itself,
without materiality,
without some degree of being
wedded to the body,
is really not part of the human
experience.
 
This is what I was saying today
about the fact that the journey
is not only just an intellectual
journey.
It has to be done in the body;
it's part of the sense of the
inevitability of the body.
 
After all, this is really what
his Christianity is about:
it's about the incarnation.
 
It's about the being embodied,
about the divinity being
embodied and therefore entering
our human condition.
Let me also say that Dante goes
on thinking about Francesca.
He condemns her and Francesca
is always circling around in
this state of permanent desire
with power,
in other words by moving
around, they're really
describing their unquiet hearts.
 
If you are--when you are at
peace you just stop and sit.
She just goes on moving around
and around;
that's their punishment and
yet, he remembers her.
When Dante reaches the Heaven
and metaphysics in Paradise and
he has to talk about the kiss of
creation,
how creation--God creates the
world by imprinting a kiss on
the material that he had at his
disposal.
The language that he will use
is going to be the language of
Francesca and that to me means
that the kiss of Francesca can
also be construed as the
existential encounter to God's--
;the--God's kiss on creation.
 
It's a way--I don't think that
he's redeeming her,
there's no such thing as the
redemption for the infernal
souls,
and yet there is an idea--there
is something that may have gone
wrong,
and we'll have to see what it
is, and it's not the lust.
We have to see what the
situation is;
it's not lust.
 
I don't think it's only lust
and that is part of--there's
something even larger about her.
 
What--the mistake that she
seems to be making is of a
different sort and I'll keep you
hanging until next time so
that--otherwise what's the
point?
We have to look at Canto V.
 
Let's read Canto V for next
Tuesday, but before you go,
there's some time so in case
there are-- we have a couple of
minutes, other questions?
 
Please.
 
Student:  In Canto I,
when he is talking to Virgil
and he says,
"you're the only one from
whom my writing drew the noble
stuff of which I have been
>."
It's really kind of a lie isn't
it?
Prof: It--he says--
Student:  So he's saying
that he's--
that he's taken his style from
him and that's the style for
which he's been--
for which he's gained honor,
but he's not honored as an epic
poet,
he's not--that's not--what are
the implications of what he's
saying because it's really not
actually true.
 
Prof: Okay,
the question is,
a reference to the encounter
between the pilgrim and Virgil
in Canto I of Inferno
where Dante--
in what I called the
captatio benevolentia,
what are captured in the
benevolence of Virgil,
the only living-- he doesn't
even know if it's a shade or a
human being,
turns out that he is a human
being,
he says, well you are the poet
from whom I took the style that
has honored--
has made me honor.
 
The sort of--the real question
is, this is a little bit of a
lie isn't it,
because Dante by this time is
not really known as an epic
poet.
I would really say--call it a
lie, say it's part of the
simulation, rhetorical
simulation of--captured in the
benevolence of the listener.
 
At the same time it's really an
acknowledgement of Virgil's
mastery, and what is Virgil's
mastery?
Dante really thought that his
own poetry is--
that Latin is not a dead
language, that the vernacular is
really the way Latin has become
in time,
so the continuity between
Virgil and him is real,
so there's a kind of continuity
of poetic continuity.
You're quite right that it's
literally--literally it's not
true.
 
At that point,
Dante's more of a provincial
poet or the poet who follows the
stilnovisti,
the poets of the Sweet New
Style from Bologna and Florence
and then Virgil.
 
Thank you so much;
we'll see you next time.
