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Brunetto Latino&Q 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.
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