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Dante Between Hope and Despair: the Tradition of Lamentations in the Divine Comedy

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Dante Between Hope and Despair: the Tradition of Lamentations in the Divine Comedy 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 45 Ronald L. Martinez Dante between Hope and Despair: The Tradition of Lamentations in the Divine Comedy During the interfaith service conducted at the Washington Cathedral September , , Rabbi Joshua Haberman read verses from the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah.As the book laments the fall of Jerusalem to Neb- uchadnezzar in b.c., its choice as a text after September was highly pertinent; chapter three, from which Rabbi Haberman’s excerpts were taken, offers some of the few expressions of hope in a book that primarily expresses grief. In addition to the verses read on that occasion, book three includes a cluster of sentiments that have been widely shared in the United States as the nation has grap- pled with the meaning of the disaster.Americans have felt dismay at the savage blow inflicted by shadowy enemies, and experienced the problematic reflex desiring that vindication, even revenge, which a God involved in history might be entreated to compass on behalf of those believing in Him; but they have also engaged in anguished speculation on why such a fell stroke was visited upon the nation, and in some few cases reflected on where our own responsibilities might lie in provoking such wrath. The text of Lamentations logos 5:3 summer 2002 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 46 logos strikes all these notes: astonishment at the magnitude of the losses (v. –), penitential sorrow (v. ), a mixture of doubt that God may have turned away his face (v. –) with confidence that divine assistance is forthcoming (vv. –, ), that vindication will be secured (v. ). Such a use of the text of Lamentations to reflect, fil- ter, and assuage catastrophe has of course a long history; in this paper I will discuss the use made of Lamentations by Dante Alighieri, poet and citizen of Florence. Of the special fitness of Dante for par- ticipating in this history there can be little doubt. Of the major long poems of the Western traditions Dante’s Comedy is the most imme- diately and concretely embedded in the historical context that accompanied its composition; for this reason, Dante is perhaps the foremost poet in the West of a history that is lived and understood as a contest in progress, an agon in the Greek sense, through which a providential order struggles to assert itself. In Jewish worship, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians—as well as the destruction of the city and temple by the Roman emperor Titus, in A.D.—are collectively lament- ed on the th of Ab, corresponding to a date in late July or August on the Gregorian calendar. This was, according to the Talmud, the anniversary of both destructions of the Temple and the city.1 In Dante’s day,Christians also commemorated the fall of Jerusalem: the th or th Sunday after Pentecost was “Destruction of Jerusalem Sunday,” but was an occasion of mourning only in a very qualified sense, as for medieval Christians the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions was held to be divine vengeance for the crucifixion of Christ by the Jews of Jerusalem, a view Dante explicitly shared.2 But a liturgy of mourning drawing on Lamentations was prominent in Catholic liturgy of the late thirteenth century, as it is still: this is the use of chanted extracts from all five chapters of Lamentations distributed over the first Nocturns of the Matins office on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of Holy week.3 In close association with the extinguishing of candles, the service of tenebrae, the chanting of 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 47 lamentations in the Lamentations during the deliberately truncated liturgies of these offices testifies to the mourning of the congregation for the death of Christ;4 as rendered liturgically, the extracts also impart a strong penitential theme, as each concludes with a refrain (adapted from Hosea :) calling on Jerusalem to return to her lord. Another implication of the liturgical use of these extracts is that certain pas- sages, such as Lam. :—“O you who pass by, attend and see, is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow”—spoken, in the biblical text, by the personified city of Jerusalem herself—are, when used as liturgical verses and responses, clearly understood as spoken by Christ on the cross: and indeed in late medieval devotional texts on the passion this verse is typically ascribed to the crucified Christ.5 In addition to its prominent liturgical use, the book of Lamenta- tions had a rich tradition of commentary; for my purposes, this tra- dition begins with the great Carolingian revival in the ninth century and culminates with commentaries by major scholastics of the thir- teenth and early fourteenth centuries—the Dominicans Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Cher, and the Franciscans John Pecham and Peter John Olivi.6 In the more elaborate of these commentaries, the ancient and somewhat daunting practice of uncovering three and even four distinct levels of meaning in the text of the Bible is applied to explaining the fall of Jerusalem. The first level is historical, and this is manifested in Jerusalem twice besieged and destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar and by the Roman Emperor Titus. Another level of meaning, the moral, treats Jerusalem as the human soul, alienated from God and surrounded by hostile enemies (such as the vices, or Satan himself). The greatest interpretive virtuosity is reserved for the allegorical level, by virtue of which Jerusalem can represent both Christ, the head, and the Church, the body of the mystical community of the faithful. To give an example of all the possibilities: a line such as Lam. : might be taken as spoken by the church besieged by enemies—persecutors or heretics; or it might be taken as spoken by Christ, suffering on the 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 48 logos cross; or it might be taken as spoken by the Synagogue, the rejected faith community in the medieval Christian view.In this case the alle- gorical and the historical sense would coincide, as the destruction of the Temple and a diaspora of the Jewish people did in fact ensue upon the Roman siege of A.D. And there is a fourth level of meaning that medieval interpreters discerned as implied by Lamentations: this is the so-called anagogi- cal meaning, which means that it concerns the transition from this life to the next. This meaning can be found by expanding the frame of reference and juxtaposing the sorrowful book of Lamentations to its opposite number among poetic texts of the Bible: the Canticle of Canticles. If, these interpreters reasoned, Lamentations furnishes sorrowful dirges suited to life in this “vale of tears,” the nuptial songs of Canticles suitably accompany the joy of restoration, after bodily death, to the homeland of heaven. The implication of this view for the personified Jerusalem is that however desperate her present case, she can hope for a future reconciliation with her Spouse— which, in the standard interpretation of the Song of Songs, was of course none other than Christ.7 What is suggestive about this dimen- sion of the meaning of Lamentations is that it generalizes the text into a theory of all mortal life on pilgrimage toward its final desti- nation: and this generality makes it peculiarly suitable for adaptation to Dante’s poem of a pilgrim on a journey from the sorrows of the present life to the joys of heaven; or as it is put in the poem, from the fractious city of Florence, corrupted by pursuit of the almighty florin, to “a people just and hale” (Paradiso .). For this and for other reasons that will presently emerge, Dante’s interest in the text of Lamentations was lifelong.He might well have wished it otherwise, for his uses of the book mark the profound pri- vate and public tragedies of his life. Three examples will graph this trend. When about thirty years old, Dante wrote the Vita nova,or “New Life,” a prose narrative, including carefully ordered lyric poems, about the dramatic effects on his life resulting from his 02-logos-martinez-pp45-76 8/1/02 2:45 PM Page 49 lamentations in the youthful encounter with Beatrice. When Beatrice died on June , Dante marked her death in his book with a citation of Lam. :, “How doth the city sit solitary, she that was full of people; how is the mistress of provinces become as a widow.” The announce- ment is especially dramatic in that it interrupts the composition of a poem already in progress and reorganizes how the book is put together from that point forward: in short, the book is subjected to a shake-up of its arrangement proportional to the impact of Beat- rice’s death on the author.8 Not many years later, probably about , when Dante had been in exile from Florence for several years, he wrote an ode in which the abstract figure of Justice is personified as a woman in abject mourning, cast out from the city that had unjustly condemned the poet and forced him into exile: again the text of Lamentations nourishes the poet’s inspiration.9 Late in life, in , Dante again turned to the first line of Lamentations to begin a letter to a group of six Italian cardinals preparing to elect a new pope after the death of Clement V. In this letter, Lam. : announces not the poet’s sorrow for Beatrice, but for the state of the Church.
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