Introduction

Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy)1 purports to recount a visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, a journey which happened in the year 1300, around Easter. Precise information about the date is eventually given by the devil Malacoda, who describes the severe earthquake damage which happened almost exactly 1266 years before, at the time of Christ’s crucifixion (Inferno 21.112–14). Virgil, Dante’s companion and guide, had already mentioned this earthquake (In- ferno 4.54), and that it immediately preceded Christ’s arrival in Limbo to liberate Adam, Eve, and the other believers of Old Testament times – the action tradition- ally called the Harrowing of Hell.2 Though Malacoda soon proves himself a de- ceiver, Dante’s early commentators recognized that this talented fraudster was putting forward a truth already known to his interlocutors (the actual date) in order to gain credence for false information on another subject (the condition of infernal bridges within the Eighth Circle of Hell). Hence, they recognized that Dante, through Malacoda, was revealing the date of his vision, and using traditional information – that Christ, whose birth marked the first year of a new era, was crucified at age thirty-three – to indicate the year 1300.3 The perspective of 1300 and of Holy Week4 is maintained throughout Dante’s Commedia. Thus, from

1 The Comedy (La Commedia) is the title Dante gave his masterpiece. It fits, as he explains in his letter to Can Grande, Epistole 13.28 (sec. 10), because the work begins in adversity and ends in happiness. But Dante’s three-part epic needed a more distinctive title, so admirers soon called it The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia); see Toynbee, “Commedia,” Dante Dictionary,pp. 171–72. Here Toynbee points out that the poem was called La Divina Comedia in “some of the oldest [manuscripts]” as well as in Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante. 2 The clearest biblical reference is Matthew 27:51–53: “[A]nd the earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints that slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared unto many” (KJV). 3 Jacopo Alighieri, Jacopo della Lana, and Pietro Alighieri (1, 2, 3) all supply this date, glossing Inferno 21.112–14 (DDP). Anonimo Selmiano hesitates between 1299 and 1300 because he cannot decide whether Christ was crucified at thirty-two years and three months or thirty-three years and three months. 4 Malacoda’s words indicate that the previous day was the anniversary of the crucifixion. Dante and his contemporaries accepted a tradition, mentioned by Augustine of Hippo in On The Trinity, p. 118 (bk 4, chap. 11), that Jesus was both conceived and crucified on March 25. Florentines would remember this date because they began their New Year on March 25, a tradition continued by Florentine notaries and chroniclers until around 1749; see Santagata, Dante, p. 405 n22. Many scholars assume, however, that Dante meant, not the anniversary, but the movable feast, Good Friday, which was April 8 in 1300; see Grandgent, DDP, on Inferno 21.0 (proem). For most pur- poses, the difference between these dates matters little. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513725-001 2 Introduction the start to the end, anyone who addresses Dante, whether suffering soul, demon, angel, or saint in Heaven, speaks as though it were 1300. Allusions to later events take the form of prophecies, except when Dante occasionally addresses his readers as the retrospective narrator of his vision.5 Given Dante’s intense interest in later events, he might have been tempted to end the original dream and begin another, as Langland does with Piers Plowman, the better to address contemporary conditions. Yet even the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, which were not discovered until after Dante’s death on September 14, 1321,6 were written from the perspective of 1300. Dante’s son Jacopo (in Boccaccio’s account) only discovered the where- abouts of these last cantos, which Dante had presumably kept back for polishing, when the poet himself appeared in a dream to reveal it to him.7 This allowed Ja- copo to assemble the completed Commedia around 1322, adding his own commentary on the Inferno.8 With a poem so emphatically structured as a vision, written when dreams were widely accepted as conveyors of hidden truths, we might expect early commentators to focus on the Commedia’s visionary qualities. But prophetic dreams carry risks, both for those who dream them and those who accept and heed them.9 Early commentators were cautious, and Dante himself gives a carefully mixed message in his famous letter, of uncertain date, to his patron, Can Grande della Scala. After thanking Can Grande for his recent generosity, Dante explains that he has decided to dedicate his unfinished Paradiso to him. (Appar- ently Inferno and Purgatorio were disseminated by that time.) Dante then offers the beginning of a commentary on Paradiso. This poem, he asserts, is indeed upon a marvelous (admirabilis) subject, because its author “will expound those

5 For example, in Inferno 26.4–9, rebuking his city of Florence for its five citizens among the thieves in Circle 8, bolgia 7, Dante as narrator alludes to a recent prescient dream about some action soon to be taken by the town of Prato against Florence. This is not the dream of 1300. 6 Boccaccio, Esposizioni, DDP, on Inferno 1.1–3. Giovanni del Virgilio and Menghino Mezzano specify September 13 in their epitaphs, but Toynbee, Dante Alighieri, pp. 103–5, suggests that their reasons are “metrical.” Santagata, Dante, pp. 338–39, accepts September 13, evening, as a compromise date for Dante’s death. 7 Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Nichols, p. 65 (chap. 14). 8 Barański, “Textual Transmission,” p. 512; “Early Reception,” p. 521. 9 Around 1320, a certain Cardinal Beltrando investigated the Visconti rulers of Milan for a sup- posed plot to kill Pope John XXII by sorcery, an enterprise for which they allegedly considered recruiting Dante, though nothing indicates that they contacted him. This record does, however, suggest that Dante’s Commedia made some attribute sorcerous knowledge to him. After Dante’s death, Cardinal Beltrando was with difficulty dissuaded from exhuming and burning Dante’s body. He did burn Dante’s Latin treatise, De Monarchia (On the Monarchy). See Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Nichols, p. 70 (chap. 16) and Santagata, Dante, pp. 314–15, 453–54 and n20. Introduction 3 things which he saw in the First Heaven and was able to retain in his mind.”10 Is this premise fictional? “Fictive” (fictivus) does appear second among many adjec- tives which Dante applies to the work’s “form or manner” (forma sive modus). It is preceded by “poetic” (poeticus) and followed by “descriptive, digressive, and figurative; . . . analytical, probative, refutative, and exemplificative” (descriptivus, digressivus, transumptivus, diffinitivus, divisivus, probativus, improbativus, et exem- plorum positivus).11 Though “fictive” (fictivus) can mean “fictional,” it can also mean “composed” and does not clearly denote untruth. However, some early commentators, including Dante’s son Pietro, do discuss the Commedia as a fictitious vision, often using the formula “he feigns” (fingit).12 Dante’s careful words about the author’s memory are meant to indicate the poem’s range; he soon explains why those who visit the heavens have trouble remembering it:

For . . . the human intellect in this life, by reason of its connaturality and affinity to the separate intellectual substance, when in exaltation, reaches such a height of exaltation that after its return to itself memory fails, since it has transcended the range of human faculty.13

He illustrates this point with scriptural examples: the transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17:1–8), which was never afterwards clearly described by Peter, John, and James, the disciples who witnessed it; also, the Apostle Paul, who was “caught up” (raptum), he says, to the “third heaven,” where he heard things mortals cannot repeat.14 For Dante, Paul’s Third Heaven was the heaven of God’s presence, the highest or tenth heaven of Dante’s Paradiso but the “First Heaven” of the letter to Can Grande. Perhaps because numerology was important

10 Epistola 13.50 (sec. 19); my translation here of “se dicturum ea que vidit in primo celo et retinere mente potuit.” 11 PDP Epistola 13.27 (sec. 9) and Toynbee’s translation there (p. 176, Letter 10, in Toynbee’s edition). 12 Pietro Alighieri (1), DDP, on Inferno 1.1–3. 13 PDP Epistola 13.78 (sec. 28) and Toynbee’s translation there (p. 208–9, Letter 10, in Toyn- bee’s edition). By the “separated substance” with which the human intellect is “connatural,” Dante apparently means the angelic intelligence; see Toynbee, ed., Epistolae, p. 190 n2. The concept is that angels have some role in conveying to mortals their own vision of God, but this does not remain in human memory once the vision ends. See Dante, Convivio 3.4.9; also, Aqui- nas, Summa Pt 1.1, q86, art. 4; pp. 589–91: “Whether our intellect can know the future?” and Pt 1.1, q94, art. 2; p. 639: “Whether Adam in the state of innocence saw the angels through their essence?” 14 2 Corinthians 12:2, KJV and Vulgate. 4 Introduction to Dante, he knew that there was more than one way to apply numbers.15 As for the exalted experience itself, Dante declares that if any detractors questioned whether such an unworthy author could be granted it, they should read the prophet Daniel, where “even Nebuchadnezzar by divine permission beheld certain things as a warning to sinners, and straightway forgot them” (et Nabuchodonosor invenient contra peccatores aliqua vidisse divinitus, oblivionique mandasse).16 Dante specified that the poem should be interpreted by a fourfold method of exegesis,17 which, however, had hitherto been reserved for sacred Scripture, and which, moreover, implies a narrative with a literal aspect, from which allegory can then be extracted. Thus, to demand the fourfold method is to claim that the vision really happened, perhaps “the stuff of heresy” as Hollander puts it.18 Mulling these troubling issues, in the nineteenth century some scholars began to argue that Dante’s letter to Can Grande was wholly or partly faked. Indeed, its mode of transmission remains mysterious. Some early commentators (Pietro Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Guido da Pisa, and Francesco da Buti among them) seem to quote from it and even apply its methods, without identifying their source.19 Filippo Villani was the first to name both letter and recipient, around three-quarters of a century after Dante’sdeath.20 However, the letter’s authenticity has been convincingly de- fended, most recently by Robert Hollander.21 That Dante would use a dream or vision as the basis for his masterpiece would be no great surprise. In his youthful autobiographical work, La Vita

15 Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante all considered Paul’s “Third Heaven” to be the highest heaven, the Empyrean. Aquinas offers two ways of assigning it the number “three,” and Carroll paraphrases them, glossing Paradiso 28.97–105 (DDP): “Counting upwards from the earth, the first heaven is the Sidereal, divided into eight spheres – the Fixed Stars and the Seven Planets; the second, the Crystalline; and the third, the Empyrean. Sometimes also three kinds of supernatural vision are called three heavens, – corporeal, imaginary, and intellectual, the intellectual being, according to St. Augustine, the third heaven of St. Paul.” See also Aquinas, Summa, Pt 1.1, q68, art. 4; pp. 456–57: “Whether there is only one heaven?” 16 PDP Epistola 13.78–81 (sec. 28) and Toynbee’s translation (PDP; p. 192 Toynbee’s edition). 17 PDP Epistola 13.20 (sec. 7). 18 Hollander, Life, p. 100. 19 Edward Moore, “The Genuineness of the Dedicatory Epistle to Can Grande,” enumerates these early references, pp. 346 and n1. Later, pp. 349–54, he suggests that early commentators had seen a separate “memorandum” which Dante wrote for early readers of his unfinished poem. The actual letter to Can Grande might have been an elaboration of the memorandum. See also Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande, p. 28. 20 Filippo Villani, Expositio, DDP, on Inferno 1.0 (Proem; first “Nota”). 21 Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (1993). Introduction 5

Nuova, finished around 1292,22 he plainly discusses turning dreams into poems. The first such poem, placed in chapter 3, does not itself clearly announce a dream-vision, any more than the Commedia does. Instead, this dream-sonnet states that three hours after sunset, Amor (the god of Love) manifested himself to the poet, holding in his arms, asleep, the poet’s beloved. Given the hour and the supernatural visitation, Dante’s audience understood that he meant a dream. Simi- larly, in Inferno 1.1–54, the poet finds himself lost in a dark forest and confronted by three beasts, the most frightening of which is a preternaturally wasted she-wolf, more daunting than the lion at her side. Where would we meet such creatures? Possibly in a dream, an interpretation perhaps supported by Dante’sstatement that he was “full of sleep” (pien di sonno) when he strayed off the path (Inferno 1.11).23 To others, the phrase acknowledges, allegorically, that Dante’s sleeping moral senses led him astray.24 These interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Whether in a dream or conscious allegory, Dante is soon journeying as a living man among the dead, intending to recount his story to others on his return to the world. But he comes to doubt the prudence of relating what he has seen. When he confesses as much to his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in Paradiso 17.127–42, the latter exhorts him to reveal everything (tutta tua visïon) nevertheless, since after the initial shock, it will provide even those whom he offends with “vital nourishment” (vital nodrimento). Besides, the poem will not awaken new scandal, since the souls he has encountered are mostly already famous. Dante perhaps suggests that the vision he is granted has a specific time limit, as Longfellow implies in his translation of Paradiso 32.139–41. Here Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux cuts short his discourse on this account:

But since the moments of thy vision fly, Here will we make full stop, as a good tailor, Who makes the gown according to his cloth . . .

(Ma perché ’l tempo fugge, che t’assonna, qui farem punto, come buon sartore che, com’ elli ha del panno, fa la gonna . . .)

22 In chap. 34 of La Vita Nuova, Dante mentions only one anniversary of Beatrice’s death, the first. This suggests that he finished writing it before the second one, in 1292. 23 Guido da Pisa, DDP, on Inferno 1.11, thinks a fictional dream is indicated. 24 Pietro Alighieri (1,2), DDP, on Inferno 1.10–11 and (3) on Inferno 1.10–12, cites Psalms, Prov- erbs, Seneca, Paul (Ephesians 5:14), and Boethius to support this interpretation. 6 Introduction

Others propose that Dante is not sleeping here, but awake and in need of sleep after a long watch.25 Nevertheless, that the Commedia was a dream-vision (fictitious or otherwise) seemed the predominant theory until the early twentieth century. Whether perceived as dream-vision or as something else, whether fictitious or (partly) true, Dante’s Commedia won extraordinary fame. More manuscripts survive of it “than for any other medieval vernacular work.”26 Other poets and writers, in Italy and beyond, responded to and emulated it. Commentaries mul- tiplied at first, then slacked off perhaps in the sixteenth century, then began multiplying again, in even more languages, about two centuries later.27 Now, nearly seven centuries after Dante’s death, his works reach quite a different audience, culturally and religiously, than the one he originally addressed. In modern times, dream-visions invite psychoanalytical interpretations. In fact, the psychoanalytical writings of Freud, Jung, and their successors have become so prominent that we tend to apply their insights in criticism, no matter the theoretical approach. Hence, specialized psychoanalytical approaches to Dante’s work seem appropriate. Suitably, then, in 2017, David Dean Brockman published a Freudian analysis of The Divine Comedy, in which we learn that Dante’sjourney through the afterlife is much like Freudian psychotherapy. Brockman is obliged to spend the first chapter reviewing Freud’s persistent and clearly articulated view that religious experiences are basically pathological. In contrast, Brockman can demonstrate, with his own insight from years of clinical experience and a re- view of psychoanalytical studies, that religious “conversion,” though differently described and not always understood by therapists, has therapeutic benefits.28

25 The first DDP commentator to clearly explain that Bernard means Dante’s sleep will soon end is Francesco da Buti (dated 1385–1395), glossing Paradiso 32.139–51. Twentieth- and twenty-first- century commentators on DDP who gloss Paradiso 32.139 this way include Tozer, Carroll, and Grandgent. Pietro Alighieri does not gloss this line. Barolini, Undivine Comedy,p.144,regards both Paradiso 32.139 and Inferno 1.11 as references to a dream vision, but says that Dante “does not dwell” on this aspect because he “need[ed] to veil in mystery the ultimate mode of an experience that he – like St. Paul – was unable to explain.” Benvenuto da Imola is the earliest commentator on DDP (on Paradiso 32.139–41) to propose that Dante is not asleep but weary: “After an extremely long effort and vigil, you wish to rest” (post longissimum et maximum laborem et vigiliam optas quiescere). More recent DDP commentators also deny that Dante is asleep (the dates supplied by the DDP): Manfredi Porena (1946–48), Siro A. Chimenz (1962), and Charles Sin- gleton (1970–75). Of these, some think Dante in a non-sleeping mystical state. Durling, in his translation, renders Paradiso 32.139 as “the time is fleeting that holds you asleep.” 26 Barański, “Textual Transmission,” pp. 511–12. 27 Hollander, Life, p. 93. 28 Brockman, A Psychoanalytic Exploration, pp. 1–22 (chap. 1). Introduction 7

In the Jungian approach, religious experience and its expression through the mythological imagery of dreams has a more positive value. From person to person, from century to century, among many different cultures, such imagery, which Jung called archetypal,29 shows many repeated but varying patterns, re- flecting common ground and differences in the way the psyche’s development and experience is understood. In the Jungian system, the ego,or“empirical personality,” that which says “I” in human consciousness,30 exists in dialogue with the mysterious Jungian Self, which is “not only the centre [of the psyche] but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.”31 The Self is not fully knowable, being linked both to biological matters below consciousness and perhaps to spiritual matters transcending consciousness. Infants make no distinction between ego and Self, but individuals develop ego-consciousness as they grow.32 Thus, Jung says, “The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover . . . . The Self . . . is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego.”33 As ego-consciousness develops, the Self manifests itself with archetypal imagery often involving gods and goddesses; hence, Jung also calls it “the God within us,”34 and sometimes identifies it with the imago Dei, the image of God within each

29 C. G. Jung found the word archetype in his philosophical reading and, thinking that it meant something like the Platonic Idea, used it to describe what he was observing because, as he explains to a correspondent (C. G. Jung to Bernhard Milt, 13 April 1946, in Letters 1:418–19, at 419), he preferred words with a historical connection to those which lacked it. But, as he explains in Archetypes, CW 9.1:43 (par. 89), he also drew on Levy-Bruhl’s anthropological concept of représentations collectives and the ethnologist Adolf Bastian’s concept of “elementary” or “primordial thoughts.” In “A Psychological View of Conscience,” CW 10:449 (par. 847), he also says that the term was meant to account for the fact that “myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere,” including “the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today.” (The latter passage is also cited in the glossary entry on “Archetype” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, p. 392.) The images themselves are not directly transmitted, but the “inherited structure of the psyche” passes on certain patterns of perception and communication. While retaining their ancient underlying patterns, the imagery and motifs produced can be shaped and changed by cultural forces, so that, as C. G. Jung put it to Father Victor White in 1954 (April 10), “Archetypes, in spite of their conservative nature, are not static but in a continuous dramatic flux” (Letters 2:163–74, at 165). 30 Carl Gustav Jung, AION, CW 9.2:3 (par. 1). 31 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:41 (par. 44). (This passage is cited in the entry for “Self,” in the Glossary of Jung and Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 398.) 32 Edinger, Ego and Archetype,p.5. 33 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11:259 (par. 361). 34 C. G. Jung, Two Essays, CW 7:237 (par. 399). 8 Introduction human individual, as postulated by Christian theology.35 Jung also likened it to the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of Atman.36 The Jungian Self performs some func- tions like those of the Freudian superego,37 but encompasses all potentialities of the psyche, good and bad. To find personal stability or happiness, a person must make peace with this Self. Unsurprisingly, then, Jung once mentions religious conversion as a milestone which some of his patients regard as a suitable conclusion to their psychotherapy; conversion in this context apparently means either adopt- ing a new religion or “having found one’s way back to the church or creed to which one previously belonged.”38 NotthatJungregardedallreligionsasequal. He observed that patients often benefited therapeutically from examination of the religious ideas suggested in their dreams and from conversion experiences,39 but he thought it no simple matter for an individual to exchange one culture’sarche- typal patterns for another.40 Personal, religious, cultural, and political struggles are all interconnected and a change in one can affect the others. The Jungian approach can, because of thisopennesstoreligiousimagery,treat Dante’s vision respectfully, yet take a perspective different from that of his original audience. Some Jungians have an affinity for Dante’s material and draw upon it fruitfully. Donald Kalsched, for example, in his recent book, Trauma and the Soul, uses Dantean imagery to describe how “dissociation” caused by childhood trauma can effectively split a subject’s personality, placing the innocent childlike “soul” into a limbo-like state, guarded by a diabolical “Dis” (Dante’s most usual appella- tion for Satan). As Kalsched explains it, this seemingly tyrannical Dis might

35 C. G. Jung, “Concerning Mandala Symbolism,” CW 9.1:354 (par. 626). Though Jung acknowledged that the divine image, or imago Dei, in man – mentioned in Genesis 1:26–27 – originally signified what he meant by the Self, he doubted whether the contemporary Christian understanding of it was the same. In AION, CW 9.2:4 (par. 74), he stated that “an all-embracing totality” of the divine image and the Self must include “the animal side of man,” as well as “the dark side of things,” and even “the Luciferian opponent.” The modern Christianity he knew rejected at least the last of these. 36 C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10:463 (pars. 872–73). 37 The Freudian superego and the Jungian Self both command moral authority and both sometimes resolve or modify conflicting moral claims. For superego, see Brockman, Psychoanalytic Exploration, p. 20; for Self, see C. G. Jung, “A Psychological View of the Conscience,” CW 10:453 (par. 854). 38 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:4 (par. 3). Specifically, Jung lists “conversion” as the eighth of nine such milestones. Other milestones include (6) “the disappearance of painful symptoms” (presumably the ones that brought the subject to psychotherapy in the first place), and (7) “some positive turn of fortune, as an examination, engagement, marriage, di- vorce, change of profession, etc.” 39 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:15 (par. 17). 40 C. G. Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” pp. 311–12. Introduction 9 actually be an emissary of the Self or god-within, which in such cases protects the soul from unbearable experience. Meanwhile, a more sophisticated but “frag- ile” ego-consciousness makes decisions and deals with the world, preferring the “chronic” pain of “an inner Hell” to the unpredictable “acute” pain of facing real- ity.41 Benevolent figures who console and protect the imprisoned innocent seem to be emissaries of the mysterious god-within, but may quickly show themselves to be demonic tyrants if any attempt is made to free the imprisoned child-soul. Some- times through therapy, the child-soul can be strengthened and re-associated with the more mature personality. Sometimes ego-consciousness, with implied repen- tance for previous defiance, offers itself as a sacrifice for the child-soul, bringing about a reconciliation in which the psychic guardian’s punishing aspect disap- pears, replaced by benevolence.42 These Dantean images, along with the Christian motifs associated with them, fruitfully illuminate Kalsched’s case histories, though Dante’s vision does not in its entirety match the pattern found in the survivors of infant trauma with whom Kalsched is mostly concerned. In interpreting Dante’s Commedia as a whole, the Jungian approach, like any other, must be applied with care. C. G. Jung sometimes preferred to draw examples for his theories from unsophisticated or popular art, because such art displays human motives and archetypal motifs most naively, relatively unham- pered by cultural mechanisms for concealing or suppressing them.43 Dante’s Commedia, however, ranks among the most carefully structured epics ever written, the masterpiece not merely of an individual but of a culture whose special passion, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was in the elaboration and systematization of its knowledge.44 Dante’s finished work represents eminently thoughtful and conscious artistry, not the guileless outpourings of the unconscious. But awareness of an original unconscious inspiration will cast its artistic shaping in a different light. In the Jungian view, different cultures direct and channel their psychic ener- gies in different ways, some possibly improvements over others, though perfec- tion has not been attained or even defined. For the sake of his patients, Jung, by necessity, focused on the culture, literature, and religion of the Western world,

41 Kalsched, “Dissociation and the Dark Side,” p. 90. 42 Kalsched, “Loss and Recovery,” esp. p. 55; “Dissociation and the Dark Side,” pp. 86–93; “Trauma, Transformation,” esp. pp. 154–55; “Innocence, Its Loss, and Recovery,” pp. 214–42. 43 C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, CW 15:88–91 (pars. 137–43). Here Jung says that literature concerning “the sphere of conscious human life” is of less interest than the “visionary” expression of the unconscious – that is, the “primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding and to which in his weakness he may succumb” (p. 90, par. 141). 44 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, pp. 1–12 (chap. 1). 10 Introduction largely Christian, although he also explored and incorporated insights from tribal societies and Eastern religion. He regarded Dante’s vision as data for his studies and came close to perceiving Dante’s vision as the definitive elaboration in archetypal imagery of medieval Roman Catholic dogma, of which he admired the psychic effectiveness. He wrote, “Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale. The Catholic way of life is completely unaware of psychological problems in this sense. Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channeled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual.”45 In contrast, for many of his patients, such imagery had become abstract and inac- tive in the psyche. Artists like Dante, Jung thought, could sometimes renew and revitalize a culture’s encounter with the archetypes, as evidenced by the play of imagery from art and literature in individual dreams.46 Though at his cultural distance Jung may have perceived Dante as a conveyor, par excellence,ofdogma’s “well controlled stream,” he understood that persons playing this cultural role sometimes encounter considerable turbulence. This he ex- amined in the case of Nicholas Flüe, or Brother Klaus, a fifteenth-century monk and mystic (canonized and declared the patron saint of Switzerland by Pope Pius XII in 1947).47 Brother Klaus, Jung concludes from the fragmentary evidence, had a visionary experience in which he encountered a wrathful God. This “terrified and shattered him.” But besides wrathfulness, he found in God a troubling femininity which the tradition he had absorbed did not support.48 More broadly, Brother Klaus’s tradition contained archetypal imagery which could express the nature of his god-within or Self as including some qualities which his ego-consciousness considered base, contemptible, and wrong (the Shadow) and some which it considered gender-inappropriate (the Anima). However, an individual’spsychological balance does not necessarily matchthatofthecultureatitsgreatestdynamisnand wisdom. The individual must struggle tofindharmonyandbalance,ataskmore difficult for some than others.

45 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:12 (par. 21). 46 In two extensive dream-sequences which C. G. Jung examines for insight on a subject’s psychic development, he finds not only archaic images but also imagery mediated by literary works important to the dreamers – Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in one case, and Goethe’s Faust in the other. See C. G. Jung, Symbols, CW 5:171–206 (pars. 251–99), and Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:39–224 (pars. 44–330). 47 C. G. Jung’s first article about “Brother Klaus” was published in 1933. Subsequently (after Klaus’s canonization) it was reprinted in Jung’s Psychology and Religion, CW 11:316–23. Jung revisits the case in Archetypes, CW 9.1:8–12 (pars. 13–21). 48 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:64 (par. 131). Introduction 11

As Jung saw it, human beings do not experience life in isolation but in an “I and You” relationship with others in a society which includes male and female. Hence the individual psyche possesses both male and female attributes, and the Jungian Self is androgynous, sometimes seen as a hermaphrodite but more often as a divine couple. In Christianity, this couple is often represented as Christ with his Church (the Church being, scripturally, the Bride of Christ),49 or as Christ and the Virgin Mary, his mother. In individual psychology, individuals develop and refine into consciousness the psychic abilities appropriate to their gender much more extensively than those belonging to the other gender. As a result, the perceptions and attributes appropriate to the other gender form a sort of unconscious secondary personality, Anima for males and Animus for females. Anima and Animus are Latin words whose ordinary meaning translates to English as “soul” (anima) and “mind or spirit” (animus), and in plain Latin, both sexes have both. Thus, Jung’s usage simultaneously retains and changes the original Latin meaning, since in Jungian usage, only males have an Anima, while only females have an Animus. The separation of Anima and Animus from the conscious ego is stronger in youth; for as people age and gain status, perhaps marry, and take on roles of increasing significance in society (dealing with people of both genders), they may develop the wisdom and insights belonging to the opposite gender, though in a style appropriate to their own, hence ab- sorbing Anima or Animus into their personalities. But in youth, when they have not done this, they tend to project the qualities of Anima or Animus onto other people of the opposite sex, especially parents and spouses.50 However, because the Anima ultimately is part of the man’s own psyche, C. G. Jung sometimes found her represented in dreams by unknown women or by women known only in dreams.51 Encounters between men and the Anima could often be troubling. Whatever the nature of his vision, Klaus prayed, studied, and painted while grappling with his insights. That he ultimately found peace, Jung declares, is shown in the intricately balanced patterns of his paintings: the mandala form, which ideally incorporates both a circle and square but often includes much

49 C. G. Jung, Symbols, CW 5:269 (par. 411). 50 Clearly the projection of Anima and Animus will affect the way couples interact with each other. If the partners are compatible and actually do possess the qualities of the Anima or Ani- mus projected on each other, they can help each other in the development and “assimilation” of their own qualities, in time. See C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:70–72 (pars. 144–47); also Harding, The Way of All Women, p. 70 (chap. 2). 51 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11:28–29 (pars. 45–47); also “Flying Saucers,” CW 10:366 (par. 693); and Archetypes, CW 9.1:199 (par. 356). 12 Introduction elaboration of imagery, especially of flowers, animals and human figures.52 Man- dala images represent balance among the contending forces of the psyche, and harmony between the conscious ego and the Self or god-within. Had Brother Klaus failed to achieve this, he might have been “torn asunder”;thatis,avariety of cultural, judicial, or psychiatric disasters might have befallen him.53 Klaus’s case and Dante’s might have much in common, but Dante’s more clearly involves what Jung called nekyia (also transliterated as nekuia and given as the title of the eleventh book of Homer’s Odyssey), a ceremony to summon ghosts for prognostications.54 Dante’s journey, on the other hand, follows the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas himself descends to the underworld to speak with the dead. Both ancient stories are analogous with the shaman’s spiritual journey, as known in tribal cultures.55 Communication with death and the dead presumably puts the totality of human insight before the protagonist when, in a crisis, the balance of psychic forces is disrupted and harmony between the conscious personality and the inner divinity has been seriously com- promised. Then the subject undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth, followed by a new childhood and growth to new adulthood, achieving a new harmony and balance between ego-consciousness and Self (or god-within). Such experiences are intense and troubling in dreams but worse when the unconscious invades waking life with hallucinations or irrational actions which ego-consciousness is too weak to control.56 Jung himself approached such a crisis when, after his painful break with Freud in 1913, he suffered horrific waking visions of worldwide bloodshed, melding into ominous night-dreams. Later he took comfort in the thought that some of this was not merely personal agony but a foretelling of World War I, which soon erupted. Although in his official

52 C. G. Jung, Integration, p. 95n3 (chap. 3), explains that mandala,inSanskrit,“means circle or magic circle,” and that “[i]ts symbolism embraces all concentrically arranged figures, all circular or square circumferences having a centre, and all radial or spherical arrangements.” The circle implies protection, and a square implies union of “a single or double pair of opposites,” as C. G. Jung states in AION, CW 9.2:194 (par. 304). Consequently, a square or cross within a circle is “the traditional antidote for chaotic states of mind,” because it represents stable wholeness desired by the Self; see C. G. Jung in Archetypes, CW 9.1:10 (par. 16). But mandalas often form shapes involving flowers such as the lotus or rose or a golden flower, and these symbolize the womb, “the birthplace of the gods”; see C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy,CW12:180n125. 53 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:10–11 (pars. 16–19). 54 See “vέkυια,” in Liddel and Scott, Greek English Lexicon. Also C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:53 n2. I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. Charles Lloyd, professor of Classics, for alerting me to this issue. 55 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, pp. 202–11. 56 C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10:236 (pars. 472–75). Introduction 13 writings he stated that images from the collective unconscious arise from “the inherited brain-structure itself” of human beings,57 in his later memoir he sometimes writes as if the collective unconscious were an interpersonal medium al- lowing images to pass from mind to mind.58 Jung recorded the vision and his experience in notebooks as he worked through this psychic material, sometimes holding the images at bay with yoga until he was calm enough to deal with them, sometimes yielding to them. In this way, he developed his practice of “active imagination,” although at the time he still feared that he was lapsing into mental illness or “doing a schizophrenia,” as he later wrote.59 Active imagination is a Jungian technique for “com[ing] to terms in practice with the unconscious” when the natural balancing tendency of the unconscious has been disrupted or annulled. Consciousness is then left too much to its own devices, with bad results, until eruptions from the unconscious overwhelm it. Ac- tive imagination,whichcanmoderatethisprocess,involvestakinganimageor motif from the unconscious and subjecting it to what Jung once called “meditative observation.”60 By definition, the unconscious is not directly accessible to consciousness, but some sense of its preoccupations can be obtained in various ways, typically through dreams, though other sources include “waking fantasies” and “automatic writing.”61 The “meditative observation” might involve engaging in imaginary dialogue or trying to model, draw, or paint an image.62 The point is to avoid “fantas[izing] aimlessly into the blue,” and instead to “grasp the meaning of the inner object.” This technique can produce “amutualrapprochement and synthesis of the conscious and unconscious halves of the personality.”63 Sometimes this will seem like a conversation with a person, as Jung suggests when instructing one correspondent: “Hold fast to the one image you have cho- sen and wait until it changes by itself. [E]ventually step into the picture yourself, and if it is a speaking figure at all then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say.”64 This deliberate inquiry into the unconscious

57 C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10:10 (par. 12). 58 Jung and Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 137–38. 59 C. G. Jung, The Red Book, pp. 201, 205 (Introduction). Jung first wrote of this experience in his “Confrontation with the Unconscious,” Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 170–99, esp. 175–81. See also Kalsched, “C. G. Jung’s Divided Self,” pp. 262–63. 60 C. G. Jung to Pastor A. F. L. van Dijk, 25 February 1946, in Letters 1:415–16, at 416. 61 C. G. Jung, “The Transcendent Function,” pp. 95 (preface), 109–10 (pars. 152–54), 114 (par. 162), and 118 (par. 172). 62 C. G. Jung to Count Hermann Keyserling, 23 April 1931, in Letters 1:82–83. 63 Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, p. 143 (chap. 8). 64 C. G. Jung to Mr. O, 2 May 1947, in Letters 1:459–60, at 460. Here Jung recommends his essay, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” in CW 7:123–304, where (222–24) 14 Introduction may have become more necessary in modern times because the normal cyclical process by which unconsciousness balances consciousness is disrupted more continuously than in the past, partly because the line dividing conscious and unconscious is much more sharply drawn. In primitive cultures, where it is far more porous, no such artificial exercises are necessary.65 Though Dante’sculturewas not exactly primitive in Jungian terms, the division between conscious and unconscious probably was not as definite as it was becoming in Jung’s time. We see this in the readiness with which Dante and his contemporaries discussed dreams. But, as Jung later wrote, even in cultures more open to what dreams can convey, this psychic journey of maturation can fail, if the subject flees the trials and continually retreats to infancy.66 On the other hand, if all goes well, the subject grows to a stronger maturity, better aware of unconscious conditions and adapted to individual circumstances. All this can be part of what Jung called the individuation process, which, as the name implies, must happen on an individual level. However, one person’s experience can inform or guide another’s. For Dante’s Christian culture, Christ was the example and guide, exem- plar of the Self or god-within. Thus, Dante’s descent into Hell followed by ascent to Paradise is an imitation of Christ.67 Just as Jungian theory predicts, Dante’sac- count refreshes a traditional image which had grown abstract and stale by his time. Thomas Aquinas had parlayed Christ’sinfernaldescent“in essence,” only to the shallowly placed Limbo, specifying that he visited the rest of Hell merely “in effect.”68 Dante, in his imitation, penetrates the depths of Hell and goes out the other side. At the time of his dream, Dante is, as he says himself, “in the middle of the path” (nel mezzo del cammin) of human life (Inferno 1.1); that is, thirty-five years old, and, in Jungian terms, on the hinge between the first half of life, focused on the development of consciousness, and the second half, focused on “coming to

he defines the technique as “intense concentration on the background of consciousness” and gives examples. 65 C. G. Jung, “The Transcendent Function,” pp. 101 (par. 139), 111 (par. 158). 66 C. G. Jung to John Weir Perry, 8 February 1954, in Letters 2:148–50, at 148: “First of all, the regression that occurs in the rebirth or integration process is in itself a normal phenomenon inasmuch as you observe it also with people that don’t suffer from any kind of psychopathic ailment. When it is a matter of a schizoid condition . . . there is a marked tendency of the pa- tient to get stuck in the archetypal material. In this case, the rebirth process is repeated time and again.” 67 For key points on Dante’s “imitation of Christ” in the Commedia, see Martinez and Durling, “Additional Note 16,” in Durling, ed., Inferno, pp. 580–83. See also C. G. Jung, “Christ, the Sym- bol of the Self,” CW 9.2:36–71. 68 Aquinas, Summa, Pt 3, q53, art. 2; p. 3068. Introduction 15 selfhood” or “self-realization,”69 during which, as part of achieving harmony with the Self or god-within, the unique individual seeks to fulfill his or her individual potential or destiny.70 This is also called the individuation process, and differs from individualism in that the individual is not necessarily exalted over the culture or nation but may find fulfillment in assuming cultural roles or in self-sacrifice.71 For Dante in 1300, a crisis impended, one with religious, political, and personal aspects. His dream shows them all interconnected. In the Commedia’s opening lines, he finds himself lost in a dark forest, trying to climb a sunlit hill, only to meet three terrible beasts, which might be called Shadows – cultural, spiritual, and personal. For all Jungian archetypal figures have their shadow- aspects,72 and then there is the personal Shadow, which, as C. G. Jung states, “personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet will (especially if not acknowledged) always be interfering with conscious intentions, directly or indirectly – for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.”73 Dante flees these beasts, running down- ward toward a terrible valley, a chasm representing death, damnation, and psychic destruction. A stranger then appears, and Dante begs his help. The newcomer reveals himself as the Roman poet Virgil, whom Dante already trusts, both as a moral and a literary teacher. In Jungian terms, Virgil is a Wise Old Man, a messenger of the Self, come to offer help in accordance with the principle which Jung calls Logos, roughly corresponding to reason or knowledge.74 His pagan wisdom is suspect, but less suspect, in Dante’s crisis, than Pope Boniface, chief religious authority of Dante’s own culture. Virgil explains that it is currently impossible to bypass the three beasts to gain the sunlit hilltop by a direct approach. He proposes instead to lead Dante the opposite way, going first through Hell, where evil souls are punished, and

69 C. G. Jung, Two Essays, CW 7:173 (par. 266). 70 Emma Jung and Maria von Franz, Grail Legend, p. 85 (chap. 5). 71 C. G. Jung, Two Essays, CW 7:173–74 (par. 267). 72 C. G. Jung, “Christ, the Symbol of the Self,” CW 9.2:36–71, discusses Shadows of the Self and of Christ. 73 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:284–85 (par. 513). This passage is also cited in the glossary entry for “Shadow” in Jung and Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 398–99. 74 Some confusion results from the fact that Logos is a Christian name for Christ, while Christ, in Jungian terms, is also the symbol of Self. Also, in C. G. Jung to Albert Jung, 20 May 1947, Letters 1:462, Jung explains that one aspect of the Anima is Sophia – that is, Wisdom, sometimes called the Eternal Feminine. In “Answer to Job,” he acknowledges that Anima/Sophia is partly identified with “the Johannine Logos” (CW 11:387, par. 610). But the interconnection and interchange among the Jungian archetypes render the fluid identities less troubling. 16 Introduction then through Purgatory, where souls suffer gladly for their own purification. After Purgatory, a more worthy guide may show him the heavens. Dante readily agrees, but soon has second thoughts, which prompts Virgil to explain that their meeting was not by chance, and he was sent to Dante’s rescue by Beatrice, the beloved of Dante’s youth. She, for Dante’s sake, briefly left her place of bliss in Heaven to obtain Virgil’s help in Limbo (Inferno 2.52–81). Unmentioned here but relevant is Dante’s resolve, years before, to compose some great work in Beatrice’s honor,75 for which purpose he evidently pored over Virgil’sepicandcametoad- mire his vision. With Beatrice involved, Dante once more agrees to Virgil’splan. This confirms that Virgil, as Wise Old Man, is a messenger of the Anima,senttothe subject or dreamer who has lost connection with the “valid principle” which gives meaning to his life76 and is thus “in a hopeless and desperate situation.”77 Beatrice is the Anima figure, and like the Wise Old Man, a messenger of the Jungian Self. She represents Divine Eros, the complement to Logos.ByEros,Jung did not mean (as in popular usage) merely sexual attraction. Though he admits taking his concept from Plato, he also does not mean the passion to possess and increase the beautiful, as described in Plato’s Symposium.78 He defines Eros as “psychic relatedness,” meaning, in colloquial terms, love as a real force in the psyche, ideal or not. (Because more prestigious words such as “charity,” and its Greek parallel agape, were often acknowledged as remarkable virtues or unreal- ized ideals, he avoided using them in his system.)79 Jung perceives Eros as the female aspect of the divinity, and defines the masculine aspect, Logos,as“objec- tive interest.”80 Later, aware of difficulties this nomenclature created, he suggested that Logos and Eros might be exchanged for the images of Sol (Sun) and Luna (Moon), respectively, to appeal to “an alert and lively fantasy” instead of implying impossible precision. Explaining his original choice, he said, “By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I meant the capacity to relate. I regarded both concepts as intuitive ideas which cannot be defined accu- rately or exhaustively.”81 Indeed, since both men and women clearly need and have Eros and Logos, to identify either as exclusively feminine or masculine is problematic, but the

75 Dante, La Vita Nuova, chap. 42. 76 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:34–35 (pars. 71–75); also C. G. Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,” CW 9.1:217–18 (pars. 400–402). 77 C. G. Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,” CW 9.1:17–18 (par. 401). 78 Plato, Symposium, 199C–212B. 79 C. G. Jung to Erminie Huntress Lantero, 18 June 1947, Letters 1:464–65. 80 C. G. Jung, “Woman in Europe,” CW 10:123 (par. 255). 81 C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14:179–80 (pars. 224–26). Introduction 17 tendency of archetypal figures to manifest themselves, at times, in gendered ways is too obvious to ignore. Since Jung’s time, some of his successors have denied that either the Anima or the Animus has “fixed gender,” and others assert that the Anima is not a specifically female entity but “the archetypal structure of consciousness,” for both sexes.82 Actually, Logos and Eros, working together like Einsteinian time/space, are united in the unknowable Self, and cannot really be understood separately, despite their sometimes diverse manifestations. Besides being the partners of the divine couple representing the god-within, Logos and Eros also take turns being parent and child. In some contexts, Jung explains, the Anima is the daughter of the Wise Old Man, but from another perspective “she is also his virgin mother.”83 Overtly Eros maintains connections, while Logos governs direction and action. In an effort to link these archetypal figures to human biology, some suggest an association between the Anima and the right hemisphere of the brain, used “for the processing of spatial, aesthetic, and emotional information,” while the Animus would represent the left hemisphere, “verbal, mathematical and logical analysis and synthesis.”84 As Kalsched points out, the right hemisphere “is more richly connected to the primitive centers in the brain stems and limbic system,” and “seems to be ‘earlier’ both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.”85 This helps to connect right-brain perception with the Anima, since those would be the perceptions of everything we inherit, the world we first perceive as infants in the care of our mothers or mother-surrogates, and which we thus naturally associ- ate with mothers. It also explains why the Mother archetype, associated with the Anima, sometimes appears as a hermaphrodite.86 This does not, however, explain the Anima’s apparently subordinate status; indeed, as Kalsched puts it, the posi- tion and structure of the right brain hemisphere make it “the real master hemisphere, with the left hemisphere its emissary.”87 The left brain, Kalsched says, is the hemisphere of “denial”; that is, it doubts preconceptions, devises questions, investigates conflicts, chooses actions which lead to further discoveries, and forms detailed pictures about specific things or situations. However, when all goes well,

82 Rowland, Jung: A Feminist Revision, pp. 51–53; 75–76. 83 C. G. Jung, in Archetypes, CW 9.1:35 (par. 74), describes the Wise Old Man as “the father of the soul.” (The “soul” in this context is the Anima.) He adds, “yet the soul in some miraculous manner, is also his virgin mother, for which reason he was called by the alchemists the ‘first son of the mother.’” 84 Oxtoby, Two Faces of Christianity, pp. 25–26. 85 Kalsched, “Wholeness and Anti-wholeness,” p. 172. 86 C. G. Jung, Archetypes, CW 9.1:67–68 (par. 138). 87 Kalsched, “Wholeness and Anti-wholeness,” p. 172. 18 Introduction discoveries made by its more conscious thought process will be integrated into the larger contextual picture of the right hemisphere.88 These later observations about the left hemisphere harmonize with Emma Jung’s definition (several decades earlier) of Logos as a quality bringing meaning and power together, not merely physical power, but the power of reason, into “directed power.”89 But Emma Jung also observed that while C. G. Jung identifies the Anima both with female and with “primitive” consciousness, and associates Logos with males and “consciousness,” the Logos he encountered was actually the educated consciousness of Western Civilization. As (Western) women became more educated, she noted, their consciousness also developed along the lines of Jungian Logos, relegating Eros qualities to the unconscious as “weak, passive, subjective” and “feminine.” Meanwhile, the prevailing Logos became increasingly detached from instinctual life in both females and males.90 At the same time, the Logos of Western Civilization, insisting more and more on de- finable and immediate material results, was becoming more detached from any- thing indistinct, uncertain, unfinished, or speculative. Taken to extremes, this would deprive Logos of any opportunity to direct power meaningfully. But while this may be a problem for Western Civilization, it does not threaten Jungian Logos, which is not really separate from Eros. Like Einsteinian time/ space, these entities are different aspects of the same force. Eros both contains the whole and maintains relationships. Logos gives meaning to the whole and defines relationships. Logos governs the relationships that can form and persist (thus, Eros), while Eros shapes the way power is directed (thus, Logos). For Dante, Beatrice, as Anima, represents most directly Dante’s connection to his own inner God, and thus to the mythological realness and wholeness of his childhood faith.91 She bypasses the institutional and intellectual religious hierarchies associated with masculine authority, which for Dante were compro- mised or broken. Yet she also implies a relationship with the true, undistorted meaning behind those hierarchies. Besides that, Beatrice’s bond with Dante be- longs to the Courtly Love tradition within his culture, which is simultaneously a

88 Kalsched, “Wholeness and anti-wholeness,” pp. 175–78. 89 Emma Jung, “On the Nature of the Animus,” pp. 2–3, explains that Logos involves meaning and power together – that is, “directed power.” C. G. Jung refers his readers to this explanation of the Animus in his Two Essays, CW 7:90 n1. 90 Emma Jung, “On the Nature of the Animus,” p. 41. 91 The Jungian Anima and Animus, like the Shadow, belong partly to what Jung regards as the personal unconscious and partly to the collective unconscious, though the boundary between the personal and the collective unconscious is fluid; see C.G. Jung, AION, CW 9.2:10 (par. 19); also Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14:106 (par. 128). Introduction 19 rival to the religious tradition and an asset to it, when preachers and teachers put forward its claims on behalf of the Virgin Mary and of Christ.92 But when the poem opens, Dante has so far lost his connection to Beatrice that she cannot even appear to him directly. Therefore, she chooses Virgil to find him and lead him over the distance that lies between them. Besides being bearer of the poetic wisdom that Dante needs, Virgil, though pagan, had a repu- tation for at least unconscious sympathy with Christianity, enough so that he had foretold Christ’s birth in his famous Fourth Eclogue, about a wonderful child who would overcome ancient evils and bring back the golden age.93 The beginning of Dante’s descent represents, in Jungian terms, a regression to childhood. Honoring Dante’s obedience and childlike trust, Virgil soon calls him “my little son” (figliuolo mio)(Inferno 3.121–23). Following Virgil, he leaves behind the sighing infants of Limbo, who represent his feeling of lostness, and is soon recognized among the ancient poets at the Noble Castle as Virgil’s pupil, advancing in his individuation process and taking up the lifelong task of writing a poetic masterpiece for his own culture. He continues on his journey, facing what seem huge dangers. However, he is all the while under the protection of the divine Self, represented, among other things, by a geometric mandala form deter- mining the pattern even of the underworld. The mandala’s elaborate circular patterns mark a protected space in which ego-consciousness can encounter entities from the unconscious without being overwhelmed or annihilated.94 Dante meets many manifestations of his personal Shadow, souls disturbingly like himself in the good they have neglected or the evils they have done. The deeper Virgil and Dante go into Hell, the more repugnant, in general, the damned souls become. Dante’s response shifts from sympathetic identification to indignant rejection. Yet he still experiences empathy for a soul in the lowest circle, Count Ugolino of Pisa (Inferno 33), a personal Shadow. That empathy, however, is limited to shared wrath at the persecution of innocents. At the very bottom of Hell, Dante meets the Shadow of all humanity, three- faced Satan, or Dis (as Virgil calls him), whose form mimics the divine trinity. Para- doxically, this encounter with bounded and limited evil is an inverse revelation of

92 See, for example, Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight.” 93 According to Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition,pp.487–503, Virgil’sFourthEclogue, written around 40 BC, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of Christ from the fourth century AD until beyond Dante’s time. Famous people cited for this opinion include the Emperor Constantine, Augustine of Hippo, Peter Abelard, and Jean de Meun. Modern scholars assume that Virgil meant to flatter the family of Octavius Caesar with this prophecy, but there is no consensus about what impending birth he had in mind; see Carroll, DDP, on Purgatorio 22.63–93. 94 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:54 (par. 63). 20 Introduction divine power and goodness. Hell and Purgatory, both created through Satan’sfall fromHeaven,representabrokenmandala,cutinhalf,andseparatedbyahemi- sphere. Here for Dante the process of rejecting ends, and healing begins. As Virgil carries Dante through the center of the earth and out the other side, to where Satan is seen upside down, Dante’s symbolic rebirth is complete. As Dante and Virgil climb Mount Purgatory, the relationship between Vir- gil’s pagan wisdom and the Christian understanding Dante must develop become central concerns. In Cato of Utica, the guardian of Purgatory, the Roman and Christian concepts of liberty, both allied to Jungian wholeness, are linked. When the two are joined by Statius, the pagan poet turned secret Christian (Pur- gatorio 22–33), the systems apparently are contrasted. When, in Purgatorio 27, Virgil leads Dante and Statius through the fire marking the border between Pur- gatory and the Earthly Paradise, all three travelers are welcomed into the divine kingdom by a bright presence speaking the words of Christ, the god-within or Self. Having completed his mission and taught Dante what he could, Virgil leaves Dante with Beatrice. Beatrice, representing Divine Eros, then guides Dante’sascentthroughthe nine material spheres of Heaven and on to the non-material Empyrean, encom- passingalltheothers.HereDanteseesagreatwhiterose,whosepetalsformthe amphitheater on which the blessed are enthroned, an elaboration of the mandala, as Jung himself points out.95 Here, through the mediation of the Virgin Mary, Dante is granted a vision of Christ, united with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Though he cannot long retain or remember the vision, it still leaves him strengthened and in harmony with “thelovethatmovesthesunandotherstars” (l’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle)(Paradiso 33.145). Broadly speaking, this is the overarching Jungian pattern in the Commedia.In what follows, chapter 1 gives an overview of Dante’slife,withfocusonthecontent of his dream and his subsequent composition process. Chapter 2 examines how the multiple dreams Dante used in his youthful work, La Vita Nuova, shed light on the Commedia and Dante’s approach to it. Chapter 3 examines questions about Gemma Donati, Dante’s wife, and her relationship to the image of Beatrice in the Comme- dia. It also explores her possible connection to the “compassionate lady” (pietosa donna)ofLa Vita Nuova, who tempts Dante to set aside his grief for the deceased Beatrice and accept her love instead; Dante later claims, in his unfinished Convivio, that she is a personification of his second love, Lady Philosophy.

95 C. G. Jung, “Concerning Mandala Symbolism,” CW 9.1:363 (par. 652); also, he reproduces an image of the great Rose of the Empyrean in Dante’s Divine Comedy (from Codex Urbanus Latinus 363) in his discussion of the mandala imagery in Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12:173 (fig. 83). Introduction 21

Chapter 4 examines the Commedia’s opening, with Dante finding himself in the dark forest, confronted by three hostile beasts who make a quaternity with the benevolent Hound whose eventual arrival Virgil predicts. Chapters 5 considers the mystery of Dante’s crossing the Acheron, and the meaning of two groups of inhabitants of Limbo – infants sighing in darkness and virtuous pagans in the shining Noble Castle. Chapter 6 explores Dante’s Limbo in its cultural context, as the concept and image developed and changed over time, and how Dante’s version aligns sometimes more with his culture’s past and future than with its present. Chapters 7 and 8 follow Dante as he meets, learns from, and passes beyond several ver- sions of his personal Shadow: Pope Celestine, Francesca da Rimini, Ciacco, and Filippo Argenti in chapter 7; Brunetto Latini, Guido da Montefeltro, and Count Ugolino of Pisa in chapter 8. Chapter 9 considers the resolution of Virgil’s journey with Dante from Hell through Purgatory, while chapter 10 follows his journey with Beatrice from the Earthly Paradise to the Empyrean, and his vision of the Trinity. For modern readers, a focus on Dante’s personal dream-journey may offer the best way into his poem. The reader will encounter him and his culture through the human circumstances revealed in the dream-images, as he searches for wholeness. On the way, we learn that experience, though differently interpreted, makes its demands upon traditional understandings while evoking new insights.