James T. Chiampi 1

SER BRUNETTO, SCRIBA AND LITTERATO

he episode of the damnation of Brunetto Latini-or "Brunetto Latino", as he names himself-is an important moment in Dante's meditation on inscription, a meditation he carries out throughout Tthe Commedia as he elaborates a figured Christian metaphysics in both his narrative and in his addresses to the reader. Most importantly in the Paradiso: there Dante uses inscription to figure the reconciliation of the eudaimonistic with the deontological; that is, having chosen their good- and happiness-as God, the souls of the Just find their reward in forming letters which spell out the divine injunction, "DILIGITE IUSTITIAM.../ QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM..." (Par. XVIII, 91; 93), which is the first verse of the Book of Wisdom, for the edification both of the Pilgrim and the reader1. Perhaps surprisingly, the happiness of the Just is made to reside in their duty and their self-effacement; that is, in the spirit of humble Piccarda, they love their self-effacement. Theirs is a gesture of sublime humility, for Dante has these imagines Dei freely accept their secondary and derived status as copies, which makes their self-awareness both sacrificial and laudative. Put negatively, they thus acknowledge that they are neither the Exemplar nor unique-as if to demonstrate their innocence of pride, the primordial sin. After all, the Poet posits absolute creativity and uniqueness-be it of personhood or of activity-only of God: "Quei che dipinge lì, non ha chi 'l guidi; / ma esso guida, e da lui si rammenta / quella virtù ch'è forma per li nidi" (Par. XVIII, 109-11). Uniqueness and opacity in the imago would be difetto, deformatio, pondus darkness and aversio; transparency, on the other hand, is the correlative of the virtue of humility. Hell is the appropriate place for the most unforgettable personalities of the Divine Comedy.

1 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols. as 6, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970-75, III, p. 204. James T. Chiampi 2

To use Dante's own scriptive metaphor, it is as if the souls of the Just are as conformed and subservient to the Word as letters are to voice, existing, as they do, as a signifying of the divine will-they are the anagogy of the Pilgrim's "vo significando" (Purg. XXIV,54). For the Just, fullness of meaning is fullness of being, because they are read in love by the Father as the wisdom of His Son. And thus do they participate in a collectivity, a species of semanticized Church-a version of corpus mysticum-denying their individual personhood in order literally to body forth God's will. Dante thus makes inscription an introduction to sacred mystery-above all the mystery of sanctifying grace-for Dante has nature underwritten by what is mundanely understood to be artifactual. Salvational inscription speaks to the fate of Brunetto in antithesis; more to the point: it reveals and contextualizes Brunetto's narrow understanding of himself and his companions as litterati. For Dante, only God can successfully inscribe Himself as he would have Himself read, without irony, although he remains in excess of any reading; not so Brunetto, his pretension to the contrary. Dantesque irony arises from such comparisons between the divine and the failed, the univocal and the ironic: Brunetto is humiliated by the testimony provided by the contrast between his judgments and those of the Paradiso. Retrospective illumination, in this case, serves as exposure and repudiation through irony. Lady Philosophy's sixth poem from the Fourth Book of the Consolation of Philosophy-a portrait of the activity of God in nature- could exemplify the medieval sublime:

...Mutual love governs ["the sun and other stars"] eternal movement and the war of discord is excluded from the bounds of heaven. Concord rules the elements with fair restraint: moist things yield place to dry, cold and hot combine in friendship; flickering fire rises on high, and gross earth sinks down. Impelled by the same causes, the flowering year breathes out its odors in warm spring; hot summer dries the grain and autumn comes in burdened with fruit; then falling rain brings in wet winter. This ordered change nourishes and sustains all that lives on earth; then snatches away and buries all that was born, hiding it in final death. Meanwhile, the Creator sits on high, governing and guiding the course of things. King and lord, source and origin, law and wise judge of right. All things which He placed in motion, He draws back and holds in check; He makes firm whatever tends to stray. If He did not recall them to their true paths and set them again on their circling courses, all things that the stable order now contains would be wrenched from their source and perish. This is the common bond of love by which all things seek to be held to the goal of good. Only thus can things endure: drawn by love they turn Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 3

again to the Cause which gave them being2.

Boethius' picture of an omnibenevolent God shepherding a pliant, harmonious universe exemplifies two of the meanings of justice: justice as both right order, and justice as giving to each its due, figuring natural law as benevolent legislation. There is as yet no Cartesian alienation between the soul and nature; indeed, as Dante shows, grace offers mankind an unmediated participation in justice and union with nature. Thus, Dante presents a very similar vision of the terminus of Boethius' "course of things" in his Paradiso, where he has the order of nature reflected in salvation. When the ecstasy enkindled by possession of the Summum Bonum has freed mankind from free choice of the will-its ability to swerve downward in sin (Par. I,133-35)-it joyously obeys divine will just as the bee follows instinct in making honey (Purg. XVIII, 58-59); it can no longer stray. At the moment of his final vision, the Pilgrim is one with nature, enjoying a concord that surpasses mankind's original prelapsarian concord: "Ma già volgeva il mio disio e Ί velie, I sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa, / l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (Par. XXXIII, 143-45). Nature no longer resists saved mankind, and can no more harm it than the accidents of weather can harm the upper reaches of Dante's Purgatory. As if in anticipation of the last things, nature rejoices at salvation, as does the Purgatorial mountain when Statius is freed from his repentance (Purg. XX, 127-28); as do the heavens when the Pilgrim enters them (Par. V, 94- 99). Nevertheless, for imago Dei, such apocalyptic harmony with vestigia Dei requires, paradoxically and mysteriously, membership in the Church. Without faith, the medieval Church believed, there could be no salvation, because, according to the formula, extra ecclesiam nulla salus. In St. Bernard's gentle explication, only the Church, which knows God best and accordingly loves him most, can aid man to the complete love of God which is necessary for such inscription in the Book of Nature. Union with nature, a gift of sanctifying grace, figures the summit of resemblance between imago Dei and the Exemplar: God is love and the perfect love of God best resembles the divine existence of auto-affection, that is, the love of Father for Son and Son for Father with the Holy Spirit as the personhood of Their love. Resemblance thus becomes utter stability-what

2 Trans. Richard Green, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, p. 97. James T. Chiampi 4

Augustine called the tranquility of order. Violence against nature, on the contrary, rejects both union with nature and with its Creator, and, as Dante suggests, it rejects the natural human community as well. It harms the individual and collective organisms. The order of nature, as we have seen, is an expression of love: Dante accordingly figures a rejection of community as a breaking of the bond of love that joins all things, "lo vinco d'amor che fa natura" (Inf. XI, 56). The Sinner prefers his private will to the gentle direction of Boethius' shepherd God. Moreover, just as sin destroys the order of the community, so does it destroy the order of the self. As the Middle Ages would have it: the soul unlike God is, for that very reason, unlike itself. Dante figures such violence against nature as a violence against the inscription which creates nature, that is, the stamping of the angels (Par. II, 123). In the Inferno, generic mortal sin is figured in legibility as a loss of meaning: the spirits of the thieves, for example, are compared to nonsense letters (Inf XXIV, 100), melting wax (Inf. XXV, 61) and burning paper (Inf XXV, 64-66). Later, the souls of the sinners will be called disfranca[ti] (Par. VII, 79), as is fitting for those in alienation from the Verbo. It is thus no surprise that the question, "...sarebbe il peggio / per l'omo in terra, se non fosse cive?" (Par. VIII, 116), should follow a discussion of the angelic orders operating in nature; citizenship in a community is natural to man. Nor is it surprising that the answer to the question will be "yes". It is mankind's goal and reward to enjoy the tranquility of order in community. Disordered elements in the punishment of Brunetto-fire that falls downward; a race that never ends, bringing about an endless repetition of the same; a scribal social exclusivity; a discordant language made up of bizarrely mixed metaphors-all these things are consequences of a rejection of the action of reason in nature. More to the point of Dante's figuration, they are a willed illegibility, a rejection of natural inscription-"la circular natura, ch'è suggello / a la cera mortal" (Par. VIII, 127-28). Dante's premise in the Paradiso is that fidelity to both nature and human nature requires that imago Dei achieve the supreme artifactual status of being rewritten to conformity with the Word, the Exemplar-"Alfa e Ο" (Par. XXVI, 17)-and inscribed within Him to become an object of the loving reading of the Father. Membership in the Church makes one legible and lovable in the Word. Salvation, the ultimate stultitia Dei, accordingly works a reversal of the common-sense relationship between cose nate and cose fatte. Few canti of the Divina Commedia have received critical scrutiny as gifted with erudition, perceptiveness and variety as that of Canto XV, the punishment of Brunetto Latini-who identifies himself to the Pilgrim as "Brunetto Latino"-which has benefited from critical movements that run Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 5 the gamut from semiotics to gender studies. Indeed, in 1994, Dante Studies published the papers delivered by a panel convened to celebrate him on the seven hundredth anniversary of his death3. I intend the observations that follow as both emendation and something of a belated prolegomenon to what has already been written. I believe that Brunetto Latino's name, which permits a literal translation as "Dark Language", is crucial to the understanding of the man's sin and his punishment, because his name introduces a scribal dimension to his figuration that makes it the antithesis of Dante's figuration of salvation as inscription, which, in the Paradiso means to be lovingly read by the Father in the Word. In short, Brunetto Latino is a version in malo of visibile parlare4. And dark language is an important theme of Canto XV, for Brunetto both performs and earns his name with his relentless and unforgiving vituperation of the Florentines, a vituperation dark with wrath and portent, that is expressed in a stilted parabolic language. The irony of the episode transforms "Dark Language" into a contrary of "Dante Alighieri", the "Wing-Bearing

3 On the episode of the punishment of Brunetto, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the "Divine Comedy ", Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, 66ff; Eugene R. Vance, "The Differing Seed: Dante's Brunetto Latini", in Marvelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp. 230- 255; N. R. Havely, "Brunetto and Palinurus", Dante Studies 108 (1990), 29-38; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Dante's Sexual Solecisms: Gender and Genre in the Commedia ", in The New Medievalism, eds. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee and Stephen G. Nichols, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 200-25, the "Panel Discussion in Commemoration of the 700th Anniversary of the Death of Brunetto Latini", in Dante Studies 112 (1994), consisting of articles by Peter Armour, "Brunetto, the Stoic Pessimist" (1-18); Richard Kay, "The Sin(s) of Brunetto Latini" (19-32); John M. Najemy, "Brunetto Latini's 'Politica'", (33-52), and Ronald G. Witt, "Latini, Lovato and the Revival of Antiquity" (53-62), and in the same issue, John E. Boswell, "Dante and the Sodomites" (63-76), and John Freccero, "The Eternal Image of the Father", in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's "Commedia", Rachel Jacoff, Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Robert Ball, eds., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 62-76, Thomas Werge, "Dante's Tesoro: Inferno XV", Romance Notes 1 (1965-66), 203-206, as well as his "The Race to Death and the Race to Salvation in Dante's Commedia", Dante Studies 97 (1979), 1-21. See also Umberto Bosco, Il canto XV dell'Inferno, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1961 and Ernesto Giacomo Parodi in Poesia e storia nella "Divina Commedia ", eds. Gianfranco Folena and P. V. Mengaldo, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1965, pp. 165-200. 4 See James T. Chiampi, "Visible Speech, Living Stone, and the Names of the Word", Rivista di Studi Italiani 14 (1996), 1-12. James T. Chiampi 6

Giver"5. Brunetto, enemy of every collectivity, is on no mission of reconciliation: he despises his compatriot Florentines and Fiesolans as implacably as the Scribes and Pharisees despised the publicans, prostitutes, tax collectors and other low-lives with whom Christ associated. And he despises no less implacably his eternal companions in this girone. Indeed, he makes everyone except his favored figliuolo his contrary. (Perhaps Brunetto's portrayal is a cautionary parody of the wrathful and unforgiving party of one that an embittered Dante might have become in exile [Par. XVII, 68-69], a fate precluded by the Pilgrim's encounter with Cacciaguida). My reading is animated by Brunetto's exclusivity and isolation-an isolation underscored by a figuration that elsewhere reduces his fellow damned to a parody of community by holding hands and running in a circle to protect themselves from the

5 Latino, as in Paradiso XII, 144 and XVII, 35, means "language", or "discourse". Brunetto's name illustrates a fate St. Augustine described in the thirteenth book of the Confessions (trans. John K. Ryan, Garden City: Doubleday, 1960): But it is good for [a spiritual creature] always to adhere to you [God], lest by aversion from you it lose the light gained by conversion, and fall back into a life similar to the darksome deep. For we also, who are spiritual as to the soul, being turned away from you, our light, were sometimes darkness in this life. Still do we labor amid the remains of our obscurity, until in your Only-begotten we may be your justice, as the mountains of God. For we have been your judgments, which are like a great deep. (336-37) As suggested by the image of the waters which open the canto. Brunetto's social exclusivity makes him an enemy of adherence to God, which is ultimate reconciliation, union with all of creation. Thus, "By your gift we are enkindled, and we are borne upwards. We glow with inward fire, and we go on for we go upwards to 'the peace of Jerusalem'" (341). Brunetto runs in an eternal cycle: we "were heretofore darkness, but now light in the Lord" (343). In his tractate on 1 John 1.1-2.11 (in St. Augustine: Tractates on the First Epistle of John, trans. John W. Rettig, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) St. Augustine makes existence in the light dependent upon the love of one's neighbor and membership in the Church, mystical body of Christ: "'He who says that he is in the light'-What is this? he who says that he is a Christian-'and hates his brother is in darkness even until now'... 'He who loves his brother abides in the light and there is no scandal in him'" (136). Brunetto retains the darkness for which he is named. He is as one burned by the sun on account of his rejection of Church: "How is he in Christ who is not in the Body of Christ? Therefore those suffer scandal who abandon either Christ or the Church. On what grounds do we understand that (it was) about this (that) psalm said, 'By day the sun will not burn you, nor the moon by night', that it intended the burning itself to be understood as scandal" ( 136-37). See Lawrence Warner, "The Dark Wood and the Dark Word in Dante's Commedia", Comparative Literature Studies 32 (1995), 449-78. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 7 punishing rain of fire. Taken together, they form the antithesis of the blessed sapienti in prudence whom powers will revolve around the Pilgrim in the Heaven of the Sun like a circle of fire (Par. XII, 1-3). The disunity of these damned is symptom and consequence of their vice: Origen taught in the Homilies in Ezechiel, "Where there are sins, there are also divisions, schisms, heresies, and disputes, but where there is virtue, there also are harmony and unity, from which arise the one heart and one soul of all believers" (PG 13:732). Even the ungraced salvation this self-made man proposes for himself-inscription in his own Tesoro-is solitary, an immortalizing autonomous of divine grace, Church and reader. How different this is from the punishment of the penitents of lust-heterosexual and homosexual-in Purgatory, who move in circles to offer each other a chaste and holy kiss of greeting in peace. Community in its cosmic sense is the fulcrum of the canto. And community underwrites a complex and properly literary play in which Dante engrafts the typological upon the typical. That is, in this episode, Dante takes a topos familiar from both epic and pastoral, the loving encounter between teacher and student-senex and puer-and reverses it from the standpoint of Christian spirituality, transforming the senex of classical literature into St. Paul's vetus homo, the spiritually blind "old man of sin" of Romans 6.6, and transforming the puer into the reborn convert. This pair is neither Euryalus and Nisus, Tityrus and Meliboeus, nor indeed, Socrates and Phaedrus. The transformation creates ironic tension because Pilgrim Dante, the student, has spiritually surpassed his teacher Brunetto, who is as inferior to him as the "old man of sin" is to the "new man" in Christ. Dante's play of reversal possesses a subtle duplicity which becomes clear only retrospectively with the education of the still immature reader. At the end of the poem, Poet Dante will stand revealed as, in actuality, a puer senex, one wise in his youth6. It is as if in anticipation of the ironic revelation of the student's superiority to his master that Brunetto announces himself to the Pilgrim

6 On this notion, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1953, pp. 98-101. St. Augustine also speaks of this "oldness" in his tractate on 1 John 1.1-2.11: "The blood", (John) says, "of his son will cleanse us of every offense". What is "of every offense"? Pay attention! Look, now in the name of Christ through his blood, whom these who are called "infants" have now confessed, all their sins have been made clean. They entered old, they went out new. What is, "they entered old, they went out new"? They entered as old men, they went out as infants. For the old life is old age afflicted with its lethargy, but the new life is the infancy of regeneration. (128) James T. Chiampi 8 with a gesture that is at once both Christological (Matthew 9.20; 14.36) and childish, taking the hem of his garment. "...Mi prese / per lo lembo..." (Inf. XV, 23-24): thus did the tigna of Christ's time approach Him to beg favors. The comparison is appropriate because the Pilgrim is on his way to the peace of the reformation of the image of God within him, when he will be a Christ in small. Brunetto, on the contrary, will continue his running in Hell. Nevertheless, the Pilgrim is the former student and it is the traditional role of the student to take the hem of the teacher's garment, but in this realm of falling fire, things are upside down, because infernal nature reflects the unnaturalness of sin-spiritual error. Nevertheless, the ironic denunciation that takes place via invidious comparisons forged by the Paradiso is very much at odds both with the warmth and reverence of the Pilgrim's greeting to Brunetto in Inferno, as well as with Brunetto's response of loyalty to his student. The still spiritually immature Pilgrim must be educated to a Beatricean indifference to the suffering of the damned-"la vostra miseria non mi tange" (Inf. II, 92)-even when the damned is a man he loved. To recognize this irony the reader must similarly achieve the cooler perspective of the blessed in Paradise to which she is being educated in an ongoing exercitatio animi7. Irony, as we shall see, is the particular enemy of Brunetto who wished to be recuperated whole and unambiguous from his Tesoro: "Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro, / nel qual io vivo ancora, e più non cheggio" (Inf. XV, 119-20). As the Middle Ages would have it, the desire for eternal life is a natural desire, and therefore must be capable of satisfaction, but such satisfaction requires the aid of grace8.

7 See James T. Chiampi, "Dante's Pilgrim and Reader in the 'Region of Want'", Stanford Italian Review 3 (1983), 163-82, and "Dante's Paradiso from Number to Mysterium", Dante Studies 110 (1992), 255-78. 8 Brunetto's notion that one can, under one's own power-that is, without the aid of divine grace-immortalize oneself recalls the prideful Platonists of Augustine's day who believed that they could purge themselves to see God. St. Augustine wrote in The Trinity (trans. Stephen McKenna, C.S.S.R., vol. 45 of The Fathers of the Church, Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1963): There are certain ones, however, who think themselves capable by their own strength of being purified, so as to see God and to inhere in God, whose very pride defiles them above all others. For there is no vice which the divine law resists more, and over which that most proud spirit, the mediator to things below and the obstacle to things above, receives a greater power of domination...(156). Let us give the penultimate word on fame to Lady Philosophy in the Seventh Prose of the Consolation: Many men who were famous during their lifetime are now forgotten because no one wrote about them. But even written records are of Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 9

The unnatural fire that punishes Brunetto suggests Pentecost here in Inferno just as it will in Purgatorio XXVI-XXVII and again in Paradiso XXVI-XXVII. Pentecost is traditionally understood as the moment when the Holy Spirit assumed the guidance of the Church. The hapless Pilgrim recalls why he made Brunetto his guide: "Chè 'n la mente m'è fitta, e or m'accora, / la cara e buona imagine paterna / di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora / m'insegnavate come l'uom s'etterna" (Inf. XV, 82-85). Such misguided nostalgia will be progessively denied and refuted. Thus, the fires of anti-Pentecost that punish Brunetto suggest their contrary to discredit him. The presence of this fire claims that old man Brunetto is not sanctioned by the Holy Spirit to the guidance of his puer's natural desire to eternalize himself. The grim rain of flakes of fire stresses that Brunetto is not reconciled with nature; no fiammeggiare di allegrezza here. This is, his burning is antithetical to the burning of the obedient orthodox contemplatives who dwell in the Holy Spirit: "Quinci [dalla luce divina] vien l'allegrezza ond'io fiammeggio; / per ch'a la vista mia, quant'ella è chiara, / la chiarità de la fiamma pareggio" (Par. XXI, 88-90). By means of the irony generated by these analogies, the Paradiso performs a rejection of Brunetto/senex no less harsh than Cato's rejection of Marcia, or Beatrice's humiliation of Virgil, the Pilgrim's erstwhile "dolcissimo patre" (Purg. XXX, 50). But then fathers are often disregarded by their sons in the poem: in Antepurgatory, Buonconte da Montefeltro has nothing to say about his father Guido, who is in Hell among the Evil Counselors, nor does Manfred mention his father Frederick II, who is in Hell among the Heretics. Indeed, one might find in this structural undercutting of the Pilgrim's imprudent warmth toward Brunetto the precursor for the penitent Sordello's crushing humiliation of Virgil in Antepurgatory. After eulogizing Virgil as "o gloria di Latin, ...per cui /

limited value since the long passage of time veils them and their authors in obscurity. When you think about future fame, you imagine that you assure yourselves a kind of immortality. But, if you consider the infinite extent of eternity, what satisfaction can you have about the power of your name to endure? If you compare the duration of a moment with that of ten thousand years, there is a certain proportion between them, however small, since each is limited. But ten thousand years, however many times you multiply it, cannot even be compared to eternity. Finite things can be compared, but no comparison is possible between the infinite and the finite. And so, however long a time fame may last, it must seem not merely brief but nothing at all if it is compared to eternity. (38) And let us give the last word to Ariosto whose sublime parody of this thought appears in Orlando furioso XXXV, 22-30. James T. Chiampi 10 mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra, / ο pregio etterno del loco ond'io fui" (Purg. VII, 16-18), Sordello proceeds to add, "S'io son d'udir le tue parole degno, / dimmi se vien d'inferno, e di qual chiostra" (Purg. VII, 20-21). Eternity is unimpressed by literary glory. The very way Brunetto and the Pilgrim walk together-with the Pilgrim still and Brunetto moving-is itself an etymologizing parody of the notion of peripateîn, in a poem that figures education as movement. More to the point: Brunetto's eternally cyclical running is the imagistic contrary of peregrinatio: his is no spiral movement upward that terminates all exile in patria. Thus, Brunetto's inability to linger travesties Cato's adjuration to the Pilgrim to rush to the mountain to purge himself in order to see God (Purg. II, 120-23). Because this poem is concerned with the direction of the will-the proper direction of love-it is concerned with legitimation. Legitimation is thus a necessary part of the poem's self-reflexivity: since every poetic choice the Poet inscribes represents his will in action, his every choice should ideally contribute to his legitimation as the reader's guide. The rejection of a false guide such as Brunetto is a moment in that legitimation, helping to define the Poet's eventual task, if only to avoid the compromising of his guidance by scandal9. When the reader has been educated to the divine perspective of the Paradiso, Brunetto's wisdom will be dismissed as merely the wisdom of the saeculum, which Paul in First

9 St. Thomas defines scandal in ST 2a2ae.43,l (Summa Theologiae Vol. 35: Consequences of Charity (2a.2ae. 34-46), ed. and trans. Thomas R. Heath. O.P. [New York and London: McGraw Hill and Blackfriars, 1972]) : A man's word or deed may be the cause of another's sin in two ways, directly or indirectly. Directly when he intends his evil words or deeds to lead the other into sin, or even if he does not intend it, when the act itself of its very nature is conducive to sin. An example would be when he publicly commits a sin or does something that appears to be a sin. In such cases he would properly be giving the occasion of another's fall. We call this active scandal. (113) One could certainly argue that Dante accepts too confidently the risk of scandalizing those who stop at the Inferno and read no further, those who, like the Pilgrim and in imitation of him, might well regret the damnation of a Francesca, a Brunetto, Farinata, or an Ugolino. That the Paradiso's role in orienting the reader toward the good and serving as corrective of the errors of the Pilgrim has for too long gone overlooked by Dante criticism might well attest to Dante's failure at protecting his reader from scandal. The example of much Romantic criticism of the Inferno would probably strengthen such a case. Let the example of Ugo Foscolo on Francesca (La Commedia di Dante Alighieri, 4 vols. [London: Rolandi, 1842]) serve for all: "La colpa è purificata dall'ardore della passione, e la verecondia abbellisce la confessione della libidine; e in tutti que' versi la compassione pare l'unica Musa" (I, 311). Francesca is, of course, eternally damned. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 11

Corinthians (3.19) claims is foolishness to God. The view backward from Paradise accordingly renders the putative sage almost comedic in his wrongheadedness and misguided exclusivity. To achieve such repudiation, Dante sets the rhetoric of mundane, sentimental attachment at odds with a structure forged by harsh charity. For example, as we have seen, the Pilgrim, forgetting the action of grace, will claim that Brunetto, who is damned to Hell, taught him how man makes himself immortal (Inf. XV,85), and the Pilgrim will wish he had not died (Inf. XV, 79-81). (Brunetto's intemperate rage at the depredations Fortune will cause his student by means of the Florentines recalls the dejected Boethius at the outset of The Consolation of Philosophy, not the serene and enlightened Boethius at the end, who has learned the lesson of contemptus mundi.) Hence more profound irony: Brunetto misidentifies Dante's glorioso porto- "Se tu segui tua stella, / non puoi fallire a glorioso porto" (Inf. XV, 55-56)-identifying his goal as acclaim from the saeculum rather than Heaven, true locus of glory-a glory that, as the Poet knows, comes only with the death Brunetto despises. Brunetto's words will be glossed and refuted by Cacciaguida, who reads in the book of God and knows that the Pilgrim's exile will end in the true homeland of Heaven. Cacciaguida fears neither Fortune nor death because he knows how Providence acts in history. Accordingly, Brunetto's work is not the definitive plenum he considers it to be, if only because it is not impervious to falsification by Cacciaguida's corrective gloss. Misinformation abounds: Brunetto's meager Paradise, the saeculum, which Brunetto calls a "vita bella" (Inf XV, 49), and later a "vita serena" (Inf XV, 57), cannot actually be either to the sinner who makes it an absolute. As Augustine and Boethius taught: once absolutized, earthly life becomes hell. Even as Brunetto and the Pilgrim speak, Italy above is at best "di dolore ostello" (Purg. VI, 76). The Poet signals the subversive, repudiating intent of the encounter when his ruthless irony compares the damned Brunetto of the "cotto aspetto" (Inf XV, 26) and "viso abbrusciato" (Inf. XV, 27) to the winner of a race. The Poet mimics a blindness analogous to Brunetto's. Finally, Brunetto's movement without progress in a never ending cycle suggests the immobility of Lucifer at the bottom of Hell who beats his wings and goes nowhere. Brunetto is another of Lucifer's imagines. This parody of stasis within movement, moreover, is the figurative contrary of the souls of the sapienti of the Heaven of the Sun who circle about the Pilgrim, all the while one with God. One reason for this invidious comparison is clear: Brunetto's understanding of divine mind acting in both history and in nature is defective: "Qual maraviglia!" (Inf XV, 24) he cries when he sees the Pilgrim, confusing the marvelous-an artifactual quality-with the miraculous. His question, "qual fortuna ο James T. Chiampi 12 destino / anzi l'ultimo dì qua giù ti mena?" (Inf. XV, 46-47), seems to beg the question whether indeed it is chance or destiny has led the Pilgrim to Hell; only an intervention in nature by God's special grace could have achieved such a miracle. Even Brunetto's pose as literary mandarin is undercut by his physical state-a point underscored in the later observation of Jacopo Rusticucci: '"Se miseria d'esto loco sollo / rende in dispetto noi e nostri prieghi,'/ cominciò l'uno, 'e 'l tinto aspetto e brollo, / la fama nostra il tuo animo pieghi / a dirne chi tu se', che i vivi piedi / così sicuro per lo 'nferno freghi" (Inf VI, 28-31). Bear in mind that the Pilgrim bends his head down only as if in reverence to Brunetto-"com'om che reverente vada" (Inf. XV, 45)-not in true reverence. Lacking any sense of brotherhood, Brunetto can have no true understanding of Church or State; that is, no sense of the collective nature of ultimate happiness10. And despite Brunetto's damnation of the Florentines, he was one himself; in short, he too is fruit of their letame. It is as if via the notion of body as organic metaphor for collectivity-be it body politic or mystical body- Dante is suggesting that even the most private misuse of one's body has macrocosmic significance. Indeed, although Dante may reach down to touch Brunetto's face (Inf. XV, 29), and although Brunetto may take the hem of the Pilgrim's garment, their hands do not touch. There is no touching just as there is no real communication between the two men, because, in speaking of the Pilgrim's undertaking, Brunetto speaks of a natural activity while the Pilgrim speaks of a supernatural one; nor can there be any solidarity. The reason for this suppressed alienation lies in the task for which the journey takes place-the writing of the Commedia, which is the enemy of the transcendance Brunetto believed he fashioned for himself. The proximate

10 The example provided by the exclusivity of Brunetto's behavior is exactly contrary to Paul's lesson in Ephesians 2.13-19, which speaks of Christ's reconciliation of opposites, of spiritual newness and of political unity in Himself: But now in Christ Jesus, you, who some time were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh: making void the law of commandments contained in decrees; that he might make the two in himself into one new man, making peace; and might reconcile both to God in one body by the cross, killing the enmities in himself. And coming, he preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh. For by him we have access both in the Spirit to the Father. Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners; but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the domestics of God. Brunetto is a wound to the body of Christ. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 13 end of the freely bestowed grace Dante has received is to help him write a work which will subvert Brunetto's self-portrayal/self-creation in the Tesoro by revealing God's judgment of the Brunetto inscribed within it. Dante's poem-whether as comedia or as poema sacro-is the countertextual supplement that will refute, annul and transcend Brunetto's version of himself in the Tesoro11. It is, of course, a staple of the literature of Christian rationalism that fame exposes the vices of its subject; so it is here. Brunetto's mention in the Commedia, a work he misunderstands, is, in Ugolino's turn of phrase, "seme che frutt[a] infamia" (Inf. XXXIII, 7-8). Even though early in his journey the Pilgrim pridefully made himself a higher judge than God by wishing Brunetto were still alive-"Se fosse tutto pieno il mio dimando, / ...voi non sareste ancora / de l'umana natura posto in bando" (Inf. XV, 79-80)-his discovery that death is actually a good repudiates his earlier imprudence: "Qual si lamenta perchè qui si moia /

11 It should come as no surprise then that the Poet is at such pains to show in Brunetto's eternal bitterness his lack of ministerial grace, gratia gratis data. St. Thomas Aquinas provides its scientific definition in Summa Theologiae la2ae. 111, 4, responsio (Summa Theologiae Volume 30: The Gospel of Grace [la2ae. 106- 114], trans. Cornelius Ernst O.P., Oxford: Blackfriars, 1972): Freely bestowed grace is ordained for the cooperation of one man with another so that he might be brought back to God. Now man cannot work toward this by moving someone internally, for this belongs to God alone, but only by teaching him or persuading him externally. And so freely bestowed grace includes all that man needs to instruct someone in divine matters, which are above reason. Three things are required for this. Firstly, that a man should have obtained the fulness of knowledge of things divine, so as to be able to instruct others on this basis. Secondly, that he should be able to confirm or prove what he says, or else his teaching would lack force. Thirdly, that he should be able to express satisfactorily to his hearers what he has in his mind. Brunetto's distractingly precious use of metaphorical language that concludes in a mixed metaphor with Dante identified as both fig and grass argues his lack of this ministerial grace, and further suggests how Brunetto's humanity has been "posto in bando". Brunetto enjoys the grace of prophecy only on account of the particular way in which the damned see. Brunetto is unable to suggest a way to resolve into charity the greed, envy and pride he notes and damns. See Kenelm Foster, O.P., The Two Dantes and Other Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1977), pp.213ff., Antonio C. Mastrobuono, Dante's Journey of Sanctification (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1990) pp. 1-129, and Robert L. Montgomery, The Reader's Eye: Studies in Didactic Literary Theory from Dante to Tasso (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 50-92. See also James T. Chiampi, "The Role of Freely Bestowed Grace in Dante's Journey of Legitimation", Rivista di Studi Italiani 16 (1998), 89-111. James T. Chiampi 14 per viver colà sù, non vide quive / lo refrigerio de l'etterna ploia" (Par. XIV, 25-27). St.Thomas denounced such sapientes huius mundi in Summa Theologiae la2ae. 106,1 ad 1: "As regards our attitudes and attachments, again, the Gospel contains teaching about the contempt of the world, by which man becomes open to the grace of the Holy Spirit; for the world- that is, lovers of the world-cannot receive the Holy Spirit" (5)12. This speaks directly to the consequences of Brunetto's absolutizing of the saeculum; because of it, he is permitted no refrigerio by his eterna ploia of fire. This is the lesson of the puer. Brunetto's appropriation for himself of the patronizing role of senex thus becomes yet another symptom of the oldness of one in love with the world, blinded by the stultitia huius mundi. Despite Brunetto's pretensions, the poem will show that his prophecy borders on irrelevance, not just because Farinata has already prophesied the Pilgrim's exile, but because Cacciaguida's gloss is necessary to reveal its true significance, and that it is only an apparent evil. That is, Cacciaguida is in many ways to Dante as Lady Philosophy was to the dejected exile, Boethius. Both Bible and the exegetical tradition further impugn the Pilgrim's sentimental and carnal response to Brunetto. Luke 14.26-where Christ tells his followers the price of discipleship-can help us further recognize and judge the imprudence of the warmth that figliuol Dante-Pilgrim displays toward the man he calls his cara e buona imagine paterna: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"13. A mistake made by the immature Augustine anticipates the equally immature Pilgrim's proud and misguided eulogy of Ser Brunetto in which he claims that if it were up to him, Brunetto would not have died (Inf. XV, 79-81). In the fourth book of the Confessions, St. Augustine confesses to having loved a man as if he were more than a man, and accordingly to having implicitly questioned the divine judgment that he die: "Why did that sorrow penetrate so easily into my deepest being, unless because I poured out my soul upon the sand by loving a man soon to die as though he were one who would never die?" "Poured out [his] soul upon the sand": the onanistic sterility of this prideful, misdirected

12 John (1 John 4.5) speaks of false prophets thus: "They are of the world: therefore of the world they speak, and the world heareth them", and later, "He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity" (8). 13 The Holy Bible Translated from the Latin Vulgate, ed. and trans. English College at Douay and Rheims (New York: Douay Bible House, 1953), p. 96. Of course, given the prominence of the sodomites from Brunetto to Priscian, some might say that the Pilgrim's discipleship under Brunetto is actually a discipleship in scandal, and that Dante's irony is aimed at lessening that possibility. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 15 love anticipates the sand of the third circle. When, in Of True Religion, St. Augustine glosses Christ's teaching in Luke, he anticipates the presumption behind Brunetto's unilateral and unsolicited adoption of figliuollpuer Dante, and provides the ideology of a judgment that becomes clear only in Paradise:

Man is not to be loved by man even as brothers after the flesh are loved, or sons, or wives, or kinsfolk, or relatives, or fellow citizens. For such love is temporal... Accordingly, the Truth himself calls us back to our original and perfect state, bids us resist carnal custom, and teaches that no one is fit for the kingdom of God unless he hates these carnal relationships...Let a man love his neighbor as himself. No one is his own father or son or kinsman or anything of the kind, but is simply a man14.

Augustine proposes a sterner line of behavior: "We should have no such connections as are contingent upon birth and death. If our nature had remained in obedience to the commandments of God and in the likeness of his image, it would not have been relegated to its present corrupt state" (270). The Poet's memory of an unmediated vision of perfect charity grants him this wisdom expressed in Luke's gospel and glossed in Of True Religion and Confessions. Unlike his former, sinful self who is the Pilgrim, the reformed and renewed Poet will go on to rejoice in the divine justice which has damned Brunetto, and eventually to forgive himself his faults, for in Heaven, "Non però qui si pente, ma si ride, / non de la colpa, ch'a mente non torna, / ma del valor ch'ordinò e provide" (Par. IX, 103- 105). Brunetto's love for the Dante he knew-the Dante who has died in conversion-is thus no less misguided than Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti's carnal love for his son Guido. In Paradiso XV, the Poet expresses his love for God's damnation of his senex: "Bene è che sanza termine si doglia / chi, per amor di cosa che non duri / etternalmente, quello amor si spoglia" (10-12). Another reason why Brunetto must be discredited lies in the threat he poses both the Poet's legitimation as guide of the reader's desire and his mission. The encounter between the Pilgrim and Brunetto, which begins with the failure of touch, proceeds to the Pilgrim's inability to descend to Brunetto's level (Inf. XV, 43-44). They cannot go on together. The reason is spiritual: they cannot share the same level because Brunetto sees the very community the Poet would reform as at best a collusion in malevolence. Unlike the Poet, Brunetto has no concept of repentance, so

14 Ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, vol. 6 of The Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, n.d., pp. 270-71. James T. Chiampi 16 in death he is not permitted to abet a journey which he, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding (Inf. XV, 58-60), could not really have abetted in life. In other words, at the level of allegory, the Pilgrim is forbidden the absurd: he cannot lower himself either to accompany, or follow in the footsteps of one who rejects community, yet damns collectively15. Brunetto's exclusivity is part of his blindness: like Farinata, who appears to hold "l'inferno a gran dispitto" (Inf. X, 36), Brunetto is able to ignore both his own damnation and his collocation among the damned. To the degree to which he rejects the death in which he abides, he rejects reason in the form of the judgment Perfect Wisdom has made on him. His exclusivity and solitude in life and in Hell are strikingly similar: his companions are absurdly his "traccia" (Inf XV, 33) (is it possible that even those who died before Brunetto are following him, or is this another example of his prideful self-aggrandizement?), and, inappropriately enough for a group moving restlessly and relentlessly, a "greggia" (Inf. XV, 37) and a "masnada" (Inf. XV, 41). The group in which he locates himself includes clerics (Inf. XV, 106)-Church-while the other group contains laymen-State-a separation that to the penitent Marco Lombardo would cause a blindness fatal to cities. Rome, Marco argues, had two suns to illuminate its way, dux and pontifex (Purg. XVI, 106-108). Fastidious Brunetto is committed to neither party. Even the group to which Brunetto is relegated is a despised "turba grama" (Inf. XV, 109) in his eyes, its members nothing more than "tigna" (Inf. XV, 111). The Florentines are "quello ingrato popolo maligno" (Inf. XV, 61), who still have about them "del monte e del macigno" (Inf. XV, 63). They are "gent[e]...avara,

15 Once again in the Tractates on the First Epistle of John, St. Augustine offers an illumination of the apparent justice of the raging Brunetto: "A new commandment", (Jesus) says, "I give to you, that you love one another". In this we know that we are in him", if we have been perfected in him. He calls them perfected in love. What is the perfection of love? Even to love enemies and to love them to this end, that they may be brothers. For our love ought not to be carnal. To desire temporal well- being for anyone is a good thing, but even if that should be lacking, let the soul be safe. Do you desire life for some friend of yours? You do well. Do you rejoice over the death of your enemy? You do wrongfully. But perhaps even that life that you desire is advantageous for your friend, and the death over which you rejoice is advantageous for your enemy. It is uncertain whether this life is advantageous or disadvantageous to anyone, but the life that is with God is beyond doubt advantageous. Love your enemies in such a way that you desire (them to be) brothers; love your enemies in such a way that they are called into your fellowship. (133-134) Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 17 invidiosa e superba" (Inf. XV, 68), and they are "orbi" [Inf. XV, 67]). The Pilgrim, on the contrary, is for Brunetto a "dolce fico" (Inf. XV, 66), while his enemies are "lazzi sorbi" (Inf. XV, 65). Similarly, the Pilgrim is "l'erba" (Inf XV, 72), who will remain far from the Florentine "becco" (Inf. XV, 72). The strained and bizarre multiplication of metaphors suggests that Brunetto's student and the Florentines for whom he will write do not even share a common biological kingdom. Not merely "bestie" (Inf. XV, 73), the rocky Florentines are collectively a "letame" (Inf. XV, 75), and Florence a "nido di malizia tanta" (Inf. XV, 78): whatever do the Pilgrim and the Florentines share in common that would permit him to aid them?16 This is the rhetoric of the death of community. Brunetto's Hell is actually the supreme nido di malizia tanta: the mixed metaphors that separate Dante from all but Brunetto suggest a matrix in Christ's teaching from Luke 6.39-45:

And [Christ] spoke also to them a similitude: Can the blind lead the blind? Do they not both fall into the ditch? The disciple is not above his master: but every one shall be perfect, if he be as his master. And why seest thou the mote in thy brother's eye: but the beam that is in thy own eye thou

16 Compare Brunetto's treatment of the Florentines with that of Job's apologia in defence of his righteousness (31.13-15): If I have despised to abide judgment with my manservant, or my maidservant, when they had any controversy against me: For what shall I do when God shall rise to judge? And when he shall examine, what shall I answer him? Did not he that made me in the womb make him also: and did not one and the same form me in the womb? Job makes his servants his neighbors and carries on to name his enemies as well: it is sin "if I have been glad at the downfall of him that hated me, and have rejoiced that evil found him. For I have not given my mouth to sin, by wishing a curse to his soul" (29-30). Then "let thistles grow up to me instead of wheat, and thorns instead of barley" (40). Job's words anticipate Christ's extension of the notion of neighbor to enemies, to imitate the love of the Father: "Be...merciful, as your Father also is merciful. Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not and you shall not be condemned. Forgive and you shall be forgiven" (Luke 6.36- 37). Brunetto Latini's intemperate judgment turns the Florentines into despised Samaritans; his defective friendship for his neighbor suggests a defective friendship with God; that is, a lack of charity; this indicates the defect of Brunetto's politica. Brunetto is, accordingly, an Abraham who cannot find a single just man in the Sodom and Gomorrah he makes of Fiesole and Florence. His uncharitable, intemperate raging denies him incorporation into both the corpus mysticum and the body politic. Put somewhat differently: he is not communicant with either. James T. Chiampi 18 _

considerest not? Or how canst thou say to thy brother: Brother, let me pull the mote out of thy eye, when thou thyself seest not the beam in thy own eye? Hypocrite, cast first the beam out of thy own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to take out the mote from thy brother's eye. For there is no good tree that bringeth forth evil fruit; nor an evil tree that bringeth forth good fruit. For every tree is known by its fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns; nor from a bramble bush do they gather the grape. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

One verse before, Christ abjured his hearers from judging, warning them: "For with the same measure that you shall mete withal, it shall be measure to you". What is perhaps worse than Brunetto's judging the Florentines is the determinism implicit in his judgment-"quello ingrato popolo maligno / che discese di Fiesole ab antico" (Inf. XV, 61-62)-precludes their salvation by denying them the freedom that would permit them reform. Father Brunetto is an Abraham who cannot find even one just man in all of Sodom and Gomorrah; he is an Abraham who begs God to destroy them all. Brunetto's harsh judgment is accordingly a counsel of despair to one whose avowed intent in writing-as stated in the Letter to Can Grande della Scala-is to "remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness"17. Exclusivity even suffuses the end of Brunetto's conversation with the Pilgrim: "Gente vien con la quale esser non deggio" (Inf. XV, 118). One might well ask oneself how, condemned by God to damnation, Brunetto can escape inclusion in his own universalizing condemnation? His blindness is shocking, leading one to wonder if it would not have been more fitting for the Pilgrim, chosen by God's special grace for a journey to Heaven, to have exclaimed the moment he saw his mentor: "[Brunetto] vien con [il] quale esser non deggio"? Dante teaches that only God is the adequate judge and measure of Himself because nothing transcends infinite divinity: "...Ogne minor natura / è corto recettacolo a quel bene / che non ha fine e sè con sè misura" (Par. XIX, 49-51). It is this very power that Brunetto arrogates to himself when he claims that his Tesoro contains and perpetuates him as he wishes himself to be perpetuated. He accordingly believes it to be beyond change and supplementation by a later gloss or historical addendum. But

17 Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante, ed. and trans. Paget Toynbee, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966, pp. 202. On Brunetto's determinism, see Peter Armour, "Brunetto the Stoic Pessimist", Dante Studies 112 (1994), 7. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 19 the testimony of the Inferno itself, that exposes Brunetto's sin and the divine judgment made on it, gives such immutability the lie. It is the prerogative of God alone to inscribe Himself with both finality and adequacy in his own written universe, the Book of Nature, via the Word: "...Colui che volse il sesto / a lo stremo del mondo, e dentro ad esso / distinse tanto occulto e manifesto, / non potè suo valor sì fare impresso / in tutto l'universo, che Ί suo verbo / non rimanesse in infinito eccesso" (Par. XIX, 40-45). Hence the ultimate failure of Brunetto's rejected companions, the proud "litterati grandi e di gran fama" (Inf. XV, 107), to inscribe themselves like God: they are lettered as Brunetto is lettered, believing that they survive ensconced in the self-love of the narratorial voice of their works. But unlike God, they are ensconced only in signs and not in signs and things. Thus, it is Dante in his Inferno, who, quite beyond their control, shows the defamatory afterlife of those narratorial voices, removing them from the Empyrean in which they had inscribed themselves and depositing them in Hell. Dante's gloss and supplement-the Inferno-is fatal to the pretension that signs are utterly docile to the intention of their author, and immune to the twists and misprisions of inattentive, incompetent or other concupiscent readers-the tigna. Such hermeneutical pretension is perhaps itself a form of violence against nature. Given Brunetto's immortalizing ambitions for his Tesoro, the words of Guido da Montefeltro would have formed a more apt preamble to a conversation with his pupil: "S'i' credesse che mia risposta fosse / a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, / questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse" (Inf. XXVII, 61-63). Brunetto shares an exclusivity with Farinata who judged Dante's speech and ancestry before addressing him, but Farinata is merely a provincialist snob. Brunetto's exclusivity, on the contrary, is more profound: it recalls that of the scribes from the Gospel, whom Christ vituperates in Matthew 23 (13; 16): "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter...Woe to you blind guides..."18. Brunetto's exclusivity is expressly

18 Indifferent to his own fate, and ignorant of the degree he damns himself by his damnation of the Florentines, Brunetto is also blind in a way familiar from the gospels. His blindness recalls that of the Pharisees in Matthew 21.14-15 (and Luke in 6.10-11): "And there came to [Christ] the blind, and the lame in the temple; and he healed them. And the chief priests and scribes, seeing the wonderful things that he did and the children crying in the temple, and saying: Hosanna to the Son of David', were moved with indignation". The scribes can no more recognize a miracle of Christ's healing than Brunetto can understand the miracle of Dante's James T. Chiampi 20 contrary to the inclusiveness that Piccarda demonstrates and propounds in Paradise (Par. III, 43-45): "La nostra carità non serra porte / a giusta voglia, se non come quella / che vuol simile a sè tutta sua corte", and contrary as well to the mercy that saved a horrible sinner like Manfred (Purg. III, 121-23). The charity which is God is inclusion. Too many of Brunetto's pitiless reproaches against the Florentines are perversely apt at describing Brunetto himself, and do so in language which Christ used to condemn the Pharisees: He deplored their outward righteousness (Luke 5.30), and their capacity for self-justification in the eyes of men (Matthew 23.27). If Brunetto can call Fiesolans "bestie" (XV, 73), might not Christ have damned him with the Pharisaic vipers (Matt. 12.24)? Indeed, the risk he poses the reader is not unlike the one Christ saw posed by the Pharisees: that they might become an obstacle to potential believers (John 9.16; 22). Thus, for all one might admire Brunetto's civic righteousness- however hyperbolic its expression-one should bear in mind that one is admiring only acquired virtues and not infused virtues; only the latter abet the movement toward God, the final end. Nor does acquired virtue require the grace conferred by the Church. In short, the civic virtue that Brunetto displays in his heavily ornamented vituperations, even if it were charitable, would not be sufficient to earn him Heaven. On the contrary, the self-righteousness of its expression marks it as the contrary of infused virtue which wills in conformity with the inclusive love of God. This is the true pietas which founds the true order that characterizes the City of God. Ignorance of this distinction led to Romantic criticism's unquestioning presence in Hell, Brunetto's qual maraviglia notwithstanding. Like the scribes in Mark 2:16 (or Luke 15.1-2), Brunetto is extremely fastidious about the company he keeps. He is exclusive to a fault: "And the scribes and the Pharisees, seeing that [Christ] ate with publicans and sinners, said to his disciples: Why doth your master eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" More to the point: Brunetto betrays the lesson Christ taught the scribe in Mark 12.28-34: And there came one of the scribes that had heard them reasoning together, and seeing that he had answered them well, asked him which was the first commandment of all. And Jesus answered him: the first commandment is, Hear, Ο Israel: the Lord thy God is one God. And thou shalt love theLord thy god with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is no commandment greater than these. And the scribe said to him: Well Master, thou hast said in truth, that there is one God, and there is no other besides him. And that he should be loved with the whole heart, and with the whole understanding, and with the whole soul, and with the whole strength; and to love one's neighbor as oneself, is a greater thing that all holocausts and sacrifices. Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 21 admiration not only for Farinata, but for Rusticucci, Arrigo and Mosca, the other just Sodomites punished in this girone. Charity, abundance and fertility characterize those who will be citizens of the true city, Heaven: from St. Dominic, "si fecer poi diversi rivi / onde l'orto catolico si riga, / sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi (Par. XII, 103- 105). In a prophetic dream, Dominic's godmother saw "il mirabile frutto / ch'uscir dovea di lui e de le rede" (Par. XII, 65-66), a monk's vows of chastity notwithstanding. Cacciaguida foresees a similar abundance in his great-great grandson Dante Alighieri who will earn his name as the "Wing-Bearing Giver" when he feeds the Florentines with his poem: "Chè se la voce tua sarà molesta / nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento / lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta" (Par. XVII, 130-32). Cacciaguida's choice of imagery suggests that, unlike Brunetto, the Poet will follow the resurrected Christ's order to St. Peter to feed his sheep (John 21.17). Brunetto's sterile exclusivity and rage, on the contrary, figure him as Jeremiah's evil shepherd who scatters and destroys God's sheep (23:1-3). Moreover, there is a strong flavor of presumption in his figuration of the Florentines as the damned goats of Matthew 25 (33-46) (Inf. XV, 72). Unlike Brunetto's vituperations, the Poet's words will nourish to repentance those who heed them. Cacciaguida will claim: "Questo tuo grido farà come vento, / che le più alte cime più percuote; / e ciò non fa d'onor poco argomento" (Par. XVII, 133-35). These words of Cacciaguida, Dante's "tesoro" (Par. XVII, 121), are expressed "per chiare parole e con preciso / latin" (Par. XVII, 34-35)-the very contrary, I hasten to note, of brunetto latino. The Poet's description of Brunetto's punishment accordingly becomes food for Dante's banquet as a variety of Cacciaguida's vital nodrimento. By announcing the spiritual benefit to come from the harsh words Dante will write in exile, Cacciaguida displaces Brunetto as cara e buona imagine paterna to this figliuol. Even though Brunetto/senex gives much to his student Dante, his gift of guidance, unlike Cacciaguida's, is not sanctioned and legitimized by the Holy Spirit to direct him to a supernatural destiny, the ultimate glorioso porto. When Brunetto declares of his companions in damnation, "In somma sappi che tutti fur cherci / e litterati grandi e di gran fama" (Inf. XV, 106- 107), and again when he concludes, "Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro, / nel qual io vivo ancora, e più non cheggio" (Inf. XV, 119-20), he is exalting the letter, which, according to St. Paul in Second Corinthians 3.1- 9, killeth:

Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or do we need (as some do) epistles of commendation to you, or from you? You are our epistle, written in our hearts, which is known and read by all men: Being manifested, that James T. Chiampi 22

you are the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, and written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart. And such confidence we have, through Christ, towards God. Not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves: but our sufficiency is from God. Who also hath made us fit ministers of the new testament, not in the letter, but in the spirit. For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth. Now if the ministration of death, engraven with letters upon stones, was glorious; so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses, for the glory of his countenance, which is made void: How shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather in glory?

This passage serves to abjure the Pilgrim from becoming in any sense Brunetto's letter, because contrary to St. Paul, Brunetto believes that the letter quickeneth. In Romans 7.6, Paul urges his Christians to "serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter", but Brunetto, on the contrary, believes that his afterlife and survival lie in union with the "oldness of the letter". And is it not an extreme violence against nature and against the nature of things to require that mere human words "an artifact" provide salvation? After all, as Cacciaguida reminds us: "Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte" (Par. XVI, 79), and mankind is saved by grace in the increate Verbum, not by its manipulation of the verba multa. Brunetto's misplaced faith in the efficiency of the "oldness of the letter" confuses an always unstable memorialization with resurrection. The ultimate contrary of Brunetto's immortalizing inscription of himself in his Tesoro is provided by the Poet's description of the Father's amorous reading of the Word in Heaven:

Guardando nel suo Figlio con l'Amore che l'uno e l'altro etternalmente spira, lo primo e ineffabile Valore quanto per mente e per loco si gira con tant'ordine fé ch'esser non puote sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira. (Par. X, 1-6)

The testimony of this passage reveals that the cruelest irony of the episode lies in the disparity btween the Father's love for his Son and Brunetto's love for his figliuolo. True inscription, the Poet suggests, lies in achieving a graced union with the Word that will make one the object and subject of the rapt attention of the Father and enkindle one with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Being read to life by one's student on the inscribed page, on the contrary, is simply a linguistic fantasy of resurrection, a strained, unnatural metaphor and not the naming of a mystery. More crucial to the refuting of Brunetto's teaching on immortality are the words that follow, describing Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 23 the Divine Existence: "Leva dunque, lettore, a l'alte rote / eco la vista.../ e lì comincia a vagheggiar ne l'arte / di quel maestro che dentro a sè l'ama, / tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte" (Par. X, 7-8; 10-12). Dante understands the Word as the all-absorbing and prototypical artifact, the perfect likeness of the Father in whom the Father is inscribed, His Son and perfect Tesoro19. From the Father's loving reading of the Word emerge all bonds of resemblance to the Word, and accordingly all bonds of resemblance that created goods may share not only with each other, but with their natures. Moreover, Dante is claiming that if we look at the world, we read the art of Love. Thus Dante will write of Divine Love: "Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte, / Alfa e Ο è di quanta scrittura / mi legge Amore ο lievemente ο forte" (Par. XXVI, 16-18). Absorbed reading, rightly understood, is an image of the Trinity (Par. V, 7-12). Charity is accordingly the Alfa and Omega of the writing of the Inferno also, as we know from the Letter to Can Grande; and such harsh love is at the same time the annihilating supplement to the oldness of Brunetto's Tesoro. In other words, the Father's love for the Son can be tasted -gustat[ο]-even in Brunetto's damnation as described in the Inferno. Trinitarian love can be tasted in Brunetto's misuse of himself in the Tesoro, because the Tesoro is its travesty. That is, in writing his Tesoro, proud Brunetto tried to be like God by creating a world through which he might be known and loved. The Father's reading of the Word is, however, creative and mysterious, because it is the very contrary of the otiose, elaborating worlds and offering Itself therein to its creation. Valid love of the world is accordingly love of the world for the sake of the Word, Who should be a terminal value for man, just as He is for the Father. Love of the world should include the Word as an always legible palimpsest. To love otherwise is to love the saeculum for its own sake, as the object of an Augustinian frui, and thus to do it the violence of making it the object of an excessive and misdirected love. Dante, in the tradition of Christian rationalism, makes it clear explicitly and ironically that the will of the creature whom Happiness has loved to creation (Purg. XVI, 85-90) should

19 Brunetto's attempt at self-fashioning and transcendence through writing is expressly contradicted by the tradition of wisdom literature; thus, the words of Lady Philosophy in the Seventh Metrum of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy : Where now are the bones of faithful Fabricius? What has become of Brutus and stern Cato? Their slight surviving fame entrusts their empty names to some few books. But, although we know these fair words, we cannot know the dead. They lie there quite unknown, for fame will not keep fresh your memory. If you hope to live on in the glow of your mortal name, the day will come at last to take that too, and you will die a second death. (39-40) James T. Chiampi 24 be absorbed only in the Word and not in the words. The earthly misuse of literature as the object of a fruitive absorption-as when the Pilgrim in Antepurgatory listens to Casella sing his song, halting his journey to the unmediated vision of God (Purg. II, 87; 115-20)-becomes trinitarian reading in malo, because it is implicitly idolatrous. All that is good in literature and the world can be reduced to the intransitive reading of the Son by the Father, a reading which the contemplative glance can find everywhere in the Book of Nature. Trinitarian love can be heard if the reader listens carefully (Par. XXVI, 16-118), and it can be seen if the reader looks deeply (Par. X, 7-10). This suggests a theological ethic of distraction: the believer should live his life looking at the saeculum in relation to its Final End. Once again, the reader is encouraged to look upward to the starry heavens and there "...vagheggiar ne l'arte / di quel maestro che dentro a sè l'ama, / tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte" (10-12) in order that he may realize that neither the saeculum, nor any of its works is a terminal value, because they can be reduced to signs of Trinitarian love. Thus, she will learn that Dantesque astronomy has replaced the astronomy Plato would have the guardians of his ideal polis learn. Dante is demonstrating the superiority of Christian contemplation over pagan, because Christian contemplation "abetted by grace" has as its term the mysterium of a creative three-personed God, and not merely the forms. Thus it is that the eternally cyclical motion of Brunetto's running becomes a travesty of the order which emerges from the Father's reading of the Son. Thus it is that the swerve of his sin (Par. I, 133-35) finds its afterlife in the sterile repetition of both his running and his recuperation in the Tesoro. "Dark Language" is among the disfrancati as one who is excluded from the Word that is lovingly read by the Father, and is, from the standpoint of the last things, virtually insignificant. His Tesoro is mundane, and the flames that assail him travesty those of the Holy Spirit which are nest to the properly inscribed souls of the blessed (Par. V, 124). And, lacking any sense of community, Dark Language's raging, intemperate justice will not earn him inscription among the souls of the Just who fill out the letters of the words "DILIGITE IUSTITIAM.../ QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM..." (Par. XVIII, 91; 93). No dark language, this speech of God is ideally transparent and univocal, a call to obedience to otherness, renouncing concern with self. Thus, we could say that in the Commedia the ironic is the sign of the unnatural in bono as grace, and in malo as sin. Moreover, nothing that Brunetto would teach Dante regarding his future is definitive, requiring as it does an ulterior gloss for its proper understanding. Unjustified Latino is not the transparent transcription of a truth of faith-a divine prescription-in his Tesoro. Unlike Brunetto, in the deadness of Ser Brunetto, Scriba and Litterato 25 script, the Just in the Word form a living visibile parlare.

JAMES T. CHIAMPI University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California