Dante’s Theory of Signs and the Warping of Language

Brian Thomas Moriarty Charlottesville, Virginia

BA, Boston College, 1990 MA, Wake Forest University, 1997

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Religious Studies

University of Virginia May, 2015

Supervisor: Peter Ochs Committee: Larry Bouchard R. Edward Freeman Charles Mathewes

i

Abstract

This dissertation explores Dante’s theory of signs, or semiotics, through a close reading of his various written works. Recent scholarship has revealed Dante’s broad knowledge of medieval semiotics by identifying his use of a variety of semiotic terms in his writings. As others scholars have shown, Dante references semiotic terminology and images used by medieval exegetes at key dramatic turns in the Commedia. This important scholarship describing Dante’s strategic use of medieval semiotic nomenclature signals his knowledge of medieval exegetical tradition and its influence on his thought and poetry. Dante, however, does not only appropriate the semiotic tradition of the exegetes, he also contributes to it. The development of a clear understanding of Dante’s own theory of signs and his unique contribution to semiotics is the new knowledge this dissertation provides.

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my wonderful family, friends, students, colleagues and teachers. In the Convivio Dante remarks on the good fortune of a person whose is born to parents who exemplify how to live a good life. Such a fortunate person has only to walk in the footsteps laid out before him or her. I am extremely grateful for the many people who have been loving guides, walking ahead of me and beside me. Without them I could do nothing of worth.

I will not name them all here, but among them are my parents Jack and Emelie from whom I learned the extraordinary power of knowing that you are always loved. My brother Kevin whose love of learning and wonder at the world inspired me and continues to inspire others. In the smiling eyes of my grandmother Melina, I discovered a better image of the person I could become. From my Aunt Jeanine, I learned that suffering can have meaning and that courage has a face. From my father in law, my mothers in law, grandparents, great grandfather, many wonderful aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, the friends on my youth and of those of later years, I learned that home is spending time with people you love.

I am grateful for extraordinary classroom teachers who continue to serve as exemplars— Miss Hardy, Dorothy Bach, Marc O’Connor, John Michalczyk, Ralph Wood, Larry Bouchard, Peter Ochs, Charles Mathewes and Ed Freeman. I am also grateful to my students, my fellow coaches and the athletes whom we coach, for continually inspiring me to grow and learn.

I am also grateful for my wonderful colleagues and friends at the University of Virginia’s Darden School for embodying the spirit of teamwork and the joy of working together on things that matter. Also, I am grateful for the Dante scholars who preceded me and continually bring poetry and creativity to their academic writing. Reading their work is the next best thing to reading Dante.

Most of all I want to thank my wife Laurie and my sons Connor and Ian. This has been a very long road for my family, but they have supported me and continue to believe in me. I would not have completed this without their love and support—nor would it have the same meaning for me. Unlike Dante, I have gotten to spend my life with my Beatrice and our children—nothing is better than that and I am enormously grateful.

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Introduction

This dissertation explores Dante’s theory of signs, or semiotics, through a close reading of his various written works. Recent scholarship has revealed Dante’s broad knowledge of medieval semiotics by identifying his use of a variety of semiotic terms in his writings. As Zygmunt Baranski and others have shown, Dante references semiotic terminology and images used by medieval exegetes at key dramatic turns in the Comedy.

This important scholarship describing Dante’s strategic use of medieval semiotic nomenclature signals his knowledge of medieval exegetical tradition and its influence on his thought and poetry.

Dante, however, does not only appropriate the semiotic tradition of the exegetes, he also contributes to it. The development of a clear understanding of Dante’s own theory of signs and his unique contribution to semiotics is the new knowledge this dissertation provides.

The thesis of this dissertation is that one of the key—and as yet, largely unrecognized—contributions of Dante’s Comedy is its depiction of how the fixity of particular habits (repetitive actions, be they thoughts, emotions or physical movements) can bend or warp language. This vision of an innate and enduring link between language and behavior has crucial implications not only for our understanding of Dante’s semiotics, but also for how scholars view his poetics, theology and ethics—in short, it matters deeply to Dante scholarship as a whole.

The primary methodology of this dissertation is a close reading of Dante’s texts to illuminate his theory of signs and the sources he employs. All of Dante’s written works are included in the purview of this study. While some of Dante’s views on signs and iv

language change over time, many of the concerns found in his earlier writing are issues

that he continues to explore in his later works. One aim of this study is to demonstrate

how some of the rich ideas in Dante’s prior works are formative to the semiotics of the

Commedia

It is important to keep in mind Zygmunt Baranski’s claim that, the last several

decades of Dante scholarship have “formed a Dante to our own measure,

attributing precisely those qualities that we scholars of the last decades value most,

turning Dante into a modernist writer.”1 The irony here is obvious. Sometimes

scholarship that begins with contemporary theory, even when seeking to understand

medieval texts, ends up in the place where it began.2 To avoid the acoustical illusion of

hearing little more than our own echo when reading Dante’s works—which can results in

closure to the text in the very act of opening—scholars must, as Baranski has argued,

"learn to listen, with greater attention than has been done so far, to the voice of Dante

himself.”3 Thus, while all the major claims of this dissertation owe much to the work of

other scholars, they all begin in evidence from Dante’s texts.

While this dissertation gives some consideration to Dante’s semiotics in light of

other contemporaneous sign theories, its primary focus is on examining and clarifying

what Dante says about signs in his works. For example, this dissertation argues that

within the Commedia characters designated as guides are signs that points at or call the

reader’s attention to other signs. Thus Dante’s narrative voice in the Commedia and the

1 Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante Alighieri, (Napoli, Liguori Editore, 2000), p. 9. Translation is my own. 2 This issue of readers occupying a different temporal and cultural horizon from that which gave birth to a work they are seeking to interpret is, of course, an issue that Hans George Gadamer famously attempts to address in his classic Truth and Method. I believe that Gadamer’s suggestion that readers check the validity of their readings by continuing to reflect on the text, remains persuasive. 3 The extent to which this is possible, of course, is the fodder of much academic debate and speculation. v

role he assigns to the Dante Character’s guides—Virgil, Lucy, Beatrice, Bernard, and

their exemplar, the Jesus of scripture—have much to tells us about how Dante understands the dynamics of semioses—the movement, flow and growth of signs.4 The reader, I expect, will judge this methodology by its fruits.

Unless otherwise noted, English translations of Dante’s Italian come from the following sources for the following texts: Commedia, Robert and Jeanne Hollander

(trans.); Convivio, Richard Lansing(trans.); De Vulgare Eloquentia, Steven Botterill

(trans.); Epistole, Paget Toynbee (trans); Il Fiore, S. Casciani & C. Kleinhenz (trans.);

Monarchia, Prue Shaw (trans.); and Vita Nuova, Mark Musa (trans.).

4 The term semiosis was coined by the American philosopher, Charles S. Peirce. For a good summary of Peirce’s sign theory, see: Albert Atkin, "Peirce's Theory of Signs", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . As Chapter Six will note, comparing and contrasting Dante’s and Peirce’s theories of signs is an important undertaking for future scholarship. Peirce read Dante and thought highly of him, listing him as one of the great geniuses of history. vi

Index

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….i

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………iii

Chapter 1: The World is a Divine Poem and the Purpose of Language is Recognition…..1

Chapter 2: Love Shapes Signs, Relationships and Habits……………………………….22

Chapter 3: Signs are Meant to Move and Grow…………………………………………54

Chapter 4: The Warping of Language………………………………………………….100

Chapter 5: The Role of Signs Dante’s Christology…………………………………….130

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Directions for Future Scholarship…………………………177

Bibliography………………………………………………………..…………………..183

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Chapter 1: The World is a Divine Poem and the Purpose of Language is Recognition

Nearly seven centuries after Dante’s death, he is widely recognized as one of history’s greatest poets. Along with being a poet of enduring power, Dante developed important ideas about signs. This dissertation shows how Dante’s poetic greatness is nourished by his potent understanding of signs, the dynamic movement of language, and the relationship of signs and behavior.

One of Dante’s key—and, as yet, largely unrecognized—contributions to semiotics, poetics, theology and philosophy is his depiction of how the fixity of habit can bend or warp language, causing enduring harm to individuals and communities. He also describes a path for healing communities through language that is reshaped by acts of love.

This chapter is divided into two sections which illuminate the relationships of signs, bodies and habits that Dante describes in his written works. The first section furnishes evidence that Dante viewed the universe as a divine poem. The second section examines what Dante says about the distinctiveness of human language.

2

The World is a Divine Poem

“Voluntas quidem Dei per se invisibilis est; et invisibilia Dei ‘per ea que facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur’; nam, occulto existente sigillo, cera impressa de illo quamvis occulto tradit notitiam manifestam. Nec mirum, si divina voluntas per signa querenda est; cum etiam humana extra volentem non aliter quam per signa cernatur.”1

[For the will of God in itself is indeed invisible; but the invisible things of God "are clearly perceived by being understood through the things he has made"; for although the seal is hidden, the wax stamped by the seal (hidden though it is) yields clear knowledge of it. Nor is it a cause for amazement if God's will is to be sought through signs, since even the will of a human being is discernible to the outside world only through signs.]

In this passage from Monarchia, Dante describes the world as being composed of things which are also signs. Quoting Paul’s First Letter to the Romans which states that

“the invisible things of God are clearly seen through created things,” Dante asserts that everything in the universe is a sign suffused with invisible, divine meaning.2

The logic of Dante’s metaphor of the seal and the wax in this passage is similar to the logic of Thomas Aquinas’ five ways of proving the existence of God found in his

Summa Theologica.3 In this work, Aquinas first points to Romans 1.20 to argue that “we can demonstrate the existence of God from God’s effects; though from them we cannot perfectly know God as God is in God’s essence.”4 Influenced by Aristotle’s Metaphysics,

Aquinas lists motion as his first example of an effect that can be viewed as demonstrating the existence of God. Like Aquinas, Dante views motion as having deep theological

1 Monarchia, 2.2.8. 2 Romans, 1.20. From the time of Augustine onwards, this has been a key passage for exegetes who theorize and write about signs. 3 Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica I.2.3. 4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.2.2. 3 significance, as is demonstrated by the famous final line the Commedia: “l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle [the Love that moves the sun and the other stars].”5

As the passage from Monarchia cited above indicates, Dante’s concern with motion emphasizes movement as a sign of God’s will. Following Augustine, medieval exegetes typically viewed “mind” as being a composite of the intellect and the will.

These two components of mind are defined by their activities. The primary activity of the intellect is knowing, that of the will is loving. When Dante depicts the universe as a divine poem which signifies the divine will, the implication is that the universe and everything it contains signifies divine love. In other words, the love poet Dante is asserting that the world can be read as a divine love poem.

More than that, the fruit of loving is begetting. In the Commedia’s final verses

Dante artfully credits the same divine love that shines forth in the universe with begetting his human poem.

A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle, sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

[Here my exalted vision lost its power. But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving with an even motion, were turning with the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.]6

When the reader considers that for Dante the will is the origin of intentional movement, it becomes clear that this final statement about the Dante Character’s will

5 Paradiso, 33.145. 6 Paradiso, 33.142-145. 4 moving in unison with divine love makes a double claim.7 The first claim is that the final purpose and end of the poem of the universe is union with God. The second, more subtle claim is that the divine love which moves the Dante Character in the poem’s final scene is also what moves Dante the author to compose the Commedia.

As several commentators have noted, the conclusion of the Commedia depicts its origin as a poem and simultaneously demonstrates for the reader—through its model reader, the Dante Character—how the poet wishes his poem to be read. The implication is that the Commedia, read correctly, is a semiotic voyage through which the narrator attempts to guide the reader to the same end as the protagonist whom it portrays.8

The Commedia describes a world where the meaning of theological signs, divine love, is also the source of signification. In the first two books of the Commedia, the Dante

Character moves forward by walking one step at time (except a few instances where he is carried along with the assistance of others). By the end of Purgatorio, however, he has been purified of sin. No longer weighed down by vice, in the first canto of Paradiso the

Dante Character and his guide Beatrice begin to rise through the air. The Dante Character is befuddled by this new mode of movement and Beatrice explains that unburdened by sin, all things move naturally toward the end or harbor that God designed for them from the moment of creation.9

7 The Commedia is an autobiographical work of fiction. In order to avoid the confusion between the author of such a work, and the character depicted within in it, I use the term “the Dante Character” when discussing the protagonist of the Commedia. 8 Dante is self-consciously putting himself in the position of guide, a model reader of signs, by telling this story in the first person. Chapter Two will note that Augustine’s Confessions serves as a model in this regard, a connection first illuminated by John Freccero. 9 Paradiso, 1.109-114. 5

Beatrice says that everything in the universe signifies God in some way. She says,

“All things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.”10 Angels, who have immediate access to divine knowledge, can read the divine meaning of all signs which bear the “imprint of the divine Worth.”11 The meaning of all signs, according to this account, is in the destination toward which everything is meant to move—and every thing, every sign, has a unique destiny and unique way of signing forth its divinely ordered purpose.

Instinct moves all living creatures, Beatrice explains, like arrows shot from a bow that take flight along a particular trajectory towards a specific target (segno).12 Here, in this critical moment of the Commedia as the Dante Character enters paradise, Dante employs a double meaning of the word “segno,” which can mean both sign and target.

The Dante Character, who serves as the guiding sign for the reader, begins his flight toward the target intended for him. Just as the Dante Character’s final destination is union with his source, so does this double sense of “segno” reflect Beatrice’s depiction of a bowstring that puts arrows to flight, towards itself as the target.

Straight and circular movement are one in this motion of signs described by

Beatrice, because everything has a natural instinct to move towards God. It is this,

Beatrice explains, that both moves human desire and also binds earth to earth, makes the universe a dwelling, a whole, a community. Even though the arcs, the paths of all living signs are unique, the ultimate union with God is the same. The world is an arrow that

10 Paradiso, 1.103-105. 11 Paradiso, 1.107. 12 “Segno” or “sign” is used to mean target in Paradiso 1.126 as quoted above. Dante makes a similar point about the role of instinct in Book I of De Vulgare Eloquentia. 6

God has sent. People in this world have a vector—a vector that is similar, yet unique.

Everything is a sign, but each individual sign is meant to sign forth in a particular way.

As Dante also notes in De Vulgare Eloquentia and elsewhere, because humans are endowed with a free will and reason, they have the capacity “to swerve” away from their intended course and destination, “torto da falso piacere [diverted by a false pleasure].”13

This diversion is the result of a failure to read signs with respect to their divine meaning—ignoring or erasing their possible relationship to God—whether the sign in question be one’s self or another sign.

Divine love, in Dante’s view, pulls the reader of God’s signs to itself. While the intellect participates in the process of movement, its knowledge is secondary, serving as a vehicle to movement in which the will is primary. Dante’s theory of signs or semiotics is one where movement, the will and love reign supreme with respect to meaning, as opposed to dictionary definitions.

Romans 1.20 is the key biblical source of Dante’s depiction of the world as a divine poem and explicit and implicit references to this passage are found throughout

Dante’s writings. In the Convivio Dante writes that “every form in some way partakes of divine nature,” because “every effect retains part of the nature of its cause.”14 Everything that exists, in Dante’s account, is a sign that points to God in two directions. Signs point back to God as their source and forward to God as their goal or final destination.

Paradiso for example, begins with the statement that “La gloria di colui che tutto move per l'universo penetra, e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove [The glory of

Him who moves all things pervades the universe and shines in one part more and in

13 Paradiso 1.131; Paradiso 1.134. 14 Convivio 3.2.5. 7 another less.]”15 Although all things signify God, they do so uniquely—Dante’s theological semiotics does not erase difference, it highlights it. In this respect Dante follows Bonaventure, whose Hexaemeron likely served as source for the opening lines of

Paradiso:

“Just as you see that a ray of light entering through a window is colored in different ways according to the different colors of the various parts, so the divine rays shine forth in each and every creature in different ways and in different properties.”16

Throughout his written works, Dante’s supports his vision of the world as a divine poem composed of signs by referencing multiple biblical texts.17 As the passage from

Monarchia cited at the opening of this chapter indicates, people are simultaneously divine signs, readers of signs, and creators of signs—which makes the universe a most unique poem. It is a poem that is alive—it speaks, listens, moves and grows. This uniqueness, in Dante’s view, stems not only from God’s relationship with the world, but also from the human capacity for language.

Humans are Distinguished by Language

According to Dante, mastery of signs is not only of import to theologians, but also is a critical factor in all human relations. In Monarchia, for example, Dante states that

15 Paradiso, 1.1-3. 16 Saint Bonaventure. Hexaemeron, I.12-17 (V, 331-332), quoted by Ewert Cousins (ed.) in the Introduction to Bonaventure The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, and The Life of St. Francis (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978) 17 As Zygmunt Baranski has argued in Dante e i Segni, Dante is part of a larger conversation on signs among medieval exegetes who employ many of the same passages in scripture and Christian theological tradition. 8 signs are necessary for interpreting the will of others in order connect the inner worlds of human beings, because “de intentione omnium ex electione agentium nichil manifestum est extra intendentem nisi per signa exterior [it is only through external signs that anything about the intentions of all free agents is revealed to the outside world].”18

Likewise in De Vulgare Eloquentia—a treatise on language and poetry—Dante asserts that humans, unlike other species, require language. In this account, the actions of other animals are easily understood by one another because they all share and are moved by a common natural instinct. Humans, however, possess a rational capacity that other animals lack and our reason “takes diverse forms in individuals, according to their capacity for discrimination, judgment, or choice - to the point where it appears that almost everyone enjoys the existence of a unique species.”19 This is a remarkable statement about the depths of the inner worlds people create and inhabit, and the breadth of difference that exists among individuals. In studying signs, Dante does not seek to erase this difference, but rather to understand how the internal sign worlds of individuals can be united.

In the first book of De Vulgare Eloquentia Dante tells the reader that signs will be the focus of this work. “Hoc equidem signum est ipsum subiectum nobile de quo loquimur: nam sensuale quid est, in quantum sonus est; rationale vero, in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad placitum [The sign then, is the noble foundation that I am discussing; for it is perceptible, in that it is a sound, and yet also rational, in that this

18 Monarchia, 2.5.6. 19 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.1 Emphasis is mine. 9 sound, according to convention, is taken to mean something].”20 In particular, he is interested in exploring the vernacular, everyday language which he defines as “that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds” and

“that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses.”21

Dante believes he is the first to attempt to trace the vernacular, an undertaking he compares to hunting an elusive panther “whose scent is left everywhere but which is nowhere to be seen.”22 This figure of speech is meant to illustrate the point that while all communities utilize everyday or common language, human language is “neither durable nor consistent with itself,” even within individual communities.23 Having been exiled from his native city-state of Florence, Dante traversed much of Italy and in his journeying he has identified at least 14 distinct vernaculars linked to specific cities. All of these have so much internal variation that Dante estimates there were more than a thousand different vernaculars active in Trecento Italy.24

As an exile from a city torn apart by civil war, Dante’s concerns with the vernacular are practical as much they are philosophical. The vernacular, in his view, is not simply a way of speaking, it is also a way of being in the world with respect to others.

It is through common language that the thoughts and desires of individuals becomes known, recognized, and potentially united in community.

20 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.3. While this passage and others indicate Dante views speech as the primary mode of language, as we shall see in later chapters that he is keenly aware of multiple methods of signification. 21 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.1.2. 22 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.16.1.It is worth noting that this figure of speech is also similar in form to the medieval definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere, which Dante employs in the Comedy. 23 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.9.6. 24 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.10.9. 10

According to Dante’s early views on dialectical variation expressed in De Vulgare

Eloquentia, linguistic differentiation is a sign of communal divisions that usually leads to further disunion. At the heart of this account is Dante’s interpretation of stories of creation and the Tower of Babel from Genesis.25 As will be shown in Chapter Three,

Dante’s understanding of linguistic variation is amended prior to his composition of the

Commedia, nevertheless, it is important to recognize his earlier views to appreciate how they progressed over the course of his literary career and to challenge some mistaken interpretations of this modification.

In De Vulgare Eloquentia Dante claims that there was a “certain form” of language, an original Hebrew made by God along with the creation of the first humans.

The meaning of “form,” Dante tells the reader, refers both to particular words used to describe things as well as standard ways of forming new words and linguistic constructions.26 This original Hebrew made by God, grows within the human community, adding new words and signs, but in a way that is consistent with the original form until the Tower of Babel leads to a confusion of tongues.

As Umberto Eco and other commentators have noted, the account of linguistic differentiation that Dante’s Adam gives in canto 26 of Paradiso differs significantly from that in De Vulgare Eloquentia. In Paradiso 26, Dante’s Adam claims that this original form of Hebrew was lost as a result of the Fall: “La lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta innanzi che a l'ovra inconsummabile fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta [The tongue I

25 Interpretations of the Tower of Babel story also appear in the Comedy and in Monarchy. Each version has a different emphasis and all three provide important insight into Dante’s semiotics. 26 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.6.4. 11 spoke was utterly extinct before the followers of Nimrod turned their minds to that unattainable objective.].”27

Since Dante composed De Vulgare Eloquentia prior to writing Paradiso, it is clear that his understanding of the origins of linguistic variation and its implications changed during the interim. As Eco points out, accounts in Genesis 10 of multiple languages developing among the various sons of Noah in the post-diluvium—and before the scriptural Babel story is to have occurred in Genesis 11—may have led Dante to reconsider the account of the Babel story in De Vulgare Eloquentia and to develop the alternate explanation in Paradiso.28

According to Eco, “Dante believed that, at Babel, there had disappeared the perfect forma locutionis whose principles permitted the creation of languages reflecting the true essence of things.”29 When Dante’s Adam says, “La lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta innanzi che a l'ovra inconsummabile fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta: [The tongue I spoke was utterly extinct before the followers of Nimrod turned their minds to that unattainable objective],” in Paradiso 26, Eco takes this to mean that Dante envisioned the original Hebrew spoken by Adam and Eve to have actualized fully the potential of language to unite sign and object, or to use Saussure’s terms, signifier and signified.

In other words, Eco sees the account of linguistic diversification in Paradiso 26 to be a clarification of the account of Dante’s Tower of Babel story De Vulgare Eloquentia, not a complete erasure of these earlier ideas. Eco is partially correct about the

27 Paradiso 26.124-126. 28 Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, 23-26. 29 Eco, 40. 12 complementarity of these the two accounts in De Vulgare Eloquentia and Paradiso 26, but his interpretation of Dante’s own ambitions with respect to exploring the “illustrious vernacular” is off the mark.

Eco reads Dante’s project to delineate his own modern Italian vernacular in which to compose his poetry as an attempt to “establish his dream of the restoration of the natural and universal forma locutionis of Eden.”30 Eco asserts that Dante was seeking “a way in which a modern poet might heal the wound of Babel,” and that Dante was

“put[ting] forth his own candidacy as a new (and more perfect Adam).”31

While exquisitely crafted, Eco’s argument misses a critical element of Dante’s understanding of signs. As noted above, while Dante sees language as essential for humans to share the world with one another, he also asserts that the primary purpose of signs is union with God and that signs are most effectively moved via divine love. This latter point holds true, whether one is speaking of a person’s relationship to God or to another person. As Chapter Two makes clear in greater detail, Dante, like Augustine, sees signs as bound to behavior and dynamic. The value of signs for Dante is not so much defined by their fit with what they signify as it is defined by the manner and direction in which they help to move the sign-user, be that sign-user an individual or a community.

The meaning of signs for Dante is dynamic and living, not frozen—meaning is in the effect, act, or habit of an embodied person or community and develops in relationship to others.

30 Eco, 40. 31 Eco, 40-41. 13

In other words, the value of signs is in their use, the actions and habits that either move sign-users closer to God or further away. For example, in Paradise 32 those who reside closest to God among the divine community are John the Baptist, Francis,

Benedict and Augustine. This close proximity to God does not denote any particular genius on their part, but rather is due to how closely their own lives resembled the life of

Jesus. Dante does not assert, as Eco contends, that restoring the “primordial affinity between words and objects” will heal the wound of Babel; rather, he asserts that healing divided communities is more a matter of behavior and disposition, the enactment of divine love embodied in one’s way of being in the world.

As the character of Saint Bernard explains to the Dante Character in Paradiso 32, the divine community is one where individuals are still recognized while being part of a larger community:

Dentro a l'ampiezza di questo reame casüal punto non puote aver sito, se non come tristizia o sete o fame: ché per etterna legge è stabilito quantunque vedi, sì che giustamente ci si risponde da l'anello al dito;

['In all the ample range of this domain no trace of chance can find a place -- no more than sorrow, thirst, or hunger, 'for all you see here is ordained by law eternal, so that the circling ring here fits the finger that was meant for it.]32

32 Paradiso, 32.52-57.

14

The phrasing of a ring that “fits the finger meant for it” is a brilliant transposition of the reader's expectations. Rings are made for fingers in our world, not the reverse. But here the community circle is the ring and the finger is the human fingers and bodies that were made for this circle, this rose, this community in union with God. As signs, humans are like rings custom made and marked for a specific purpose by the digitus Dei that created the world of signs.

Similarly, the pre-Babel world that Dante envisions in De Vulgare Eloquentia has one common vernacular where people understand each other and share a true sense of community—a situation which he contrasts with his own Trecento Italy whose communities are marked by many vernaculars, by war, and by internal strife. In Dante’s retelling of the Tower of Babel in De Vulgare Eloquentia, human pride puts an end to this united community. Having been expelled from the earthly paradise, “almost all of the human race” decides to follow Nimrod in his quest to take heaven by storm

“intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator.”33

Nimrod and his followers are unsuccessful. God punishes them for their prideful undertaking by stripping them of the ability to use and understand original Hebrew which causes them to scatter in confusion. In a contrapasso [a counter-penalty] that seems similar in spirit to the punishments that Dante portrays in the Inferno, each of the different types of craftsmen are given a new language according to their particular occupation. It is their shared specialized activity that defines their idiom.

33 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.7.4. 15

Stone masons share a new common tongue with stone mason, and engineers can now only communicate with engineers. Members of different professions can no longer communicate with each other or collaborate. “As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented,” writes Dante, “and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke.”34

Two aspects of this account are particularly noteworthy for understanding Dante’s theory of signs. First is the idea that human actions have the potential to warp language, disabling our ability to read and understand signs. This concept is dramatized by Dante in

Inferno 5 where Minos “coils his tail around himself to count how many circles down the soul must go.”35 Minos is able to judge all sins and the souls in Hell are organized according to the sinful actions that define them. Second, in a post-Fall world marked by linguistic differentiation, Dante sees the major linguistic fault lines as being defined by a community’s occupation or habitual behavior.

These views are given some specificity when Dante discusses the Italian idiom found in Rome:

“Sicut ergo Romani se cunctis preponendos extimant, in hac eradicatione sive discerptione non inmerito eos aliis preponamus, protestantes eosdem in nulla vulgaris eloquentie ratione fore tangendos. Dicimus igitur Romanorum non vulgare, sed potius tristiloquium, ytalorum vulgarium omnium esse turpissimum; nec mirum, cum etiam morum habituumque deformitate pre cunctis videantur fetere.”

34 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.7.7. 35 Inferno, 5.11-12. 16

[Accordingly, since the Romans believe that they should always receive preferential treatment, I shall begin this work of pruning or uprooting, as is only right, with them; and I do so by declaring that they should not be taken into account in any didactic work about effective use of the vernacular. For what the Romans speak is not so much a vernacular as a vile jargon, the ugliest of all the languages spoken in Italy; and this should come as no surprise, for they also stand out among all Italians for the ugliness of their manners and their outward appearance.] 36

The idea here is that language is shaped by manners, habits and behavior because these are indivisible elements of signs, not something separate. This is why Dante views sin as a disease of the will which wounds language and divides communities. It is also why he asserts that love and language must be the site of healing.

In considering the first human communication in De Vulgare Eloquentia, Dante states his beliefs about the origins and purpose of signs and language. He says that

“everything that exists obeys a sign from God,” but that in creating the world God did not need to speak “using what we would call language.”37 Rather, in his imaginative re- reading of Genesis 1, Dante holds that Adam was the first to use speech in the form that is familiar to us, “as soon, indeed, as God's creative power had been breathed into him.”38

Dante’s explanation of why he believes Adam spoke first is of critical importance.

“Nam in homine sentiri humanius credimus quam sentire, dummodo sentiatur et sentiat tanquam homo. Si ergo faber

36 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.11.2. 37 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.6. 38 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.5.1. 17

ille atque perfectionis principium et amator, afflando, primum nostrum omni perfectione complevit, rationabile nobis apparet nobilissimum animal non ante sentire quam sentiri cepisse.”

[For we hold that it is more truly human for a human being to be perceived than to perceive, as long as he or she is perceived and perceives as a human being. So if our creator, that source and lover of perfection, completed our first ancestor by infusing all perfection into him, I find it reasonable that this most noble creature should not have begun to perceive before he was perceived.] 39

In Dante’s account, being recognized and known is the most fundamental human need—and the act of being recognized and known by another is what enables people to begin to perceive the world, to learn to read the world of signs. Reading signs correctly is critical to cooperative activity, to sharing a sign world or common tongue that enables people to grow and deepen their relationships despite individual differences. Recognizing difference, in fact, is what fuels the growth of signs and the movement of language.

Dante’s writings on the origin of language in De Vulgare Eloquentia indicate that he considers justice and love to be the central purposes of language and signs. As will be explored in later chapters, love and justice are intimately connected concepts in Dante’s theory of signs. A disposition of the will moving in concert with divine love is required for humans to read the world and ourselves correctly, while injustice that has become habitual creates barriers in an individual or community’s sign world that limits people’s ability to read the world. Only by recognizing one’s misdeeds, repenting them, and amending one’s actions do these blockaded portions of one’s sign world become liberated from captivity.

39 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.5.1. 18

It is through language and our own speaking, Dante holds, that humans experience God’s recognition and through language that humans recognize God as God.

It is also through signs that we come to know the world—the world which, in turn, is made up of things which are also signs through which the invisible things of God can be clearly seen (following the logic of Romans 1.20). It is through the exchange of signs, through dialogical recognition, that people come to know each other and form friendships and communities.

In the fifteenth canto of Paradiso the Dante Character meets his ancestor,

Cacciaguida, who descends towards him in the form of a star. As Cacciaguida approaches the Dante Character, he refers to him using the Latin phrase “o singuis meus [oh, blood of mine]” which signals their familial relationship.40 Although the Dante Character guesses

Cacciaguida’s identity, he wishes to confirm it. Cacciaguida tells the Dante Character

“you do not ask me who I am” because you know that I can already see your thoughts, since those in paradise have access to God’s knowledge.41 Despite being able to read the

Dante Character’s thoughts and desires, Cacciaguida encourages the Dante Character to

“let your voice resound sure, bold, and joyful, to proclaim the will, proclaim the desire, for which my answer is already set.”42 Cacciaguida insists that the Dante Character speak forth the longing of his will, because as a human, he is meant to use his body to navigate the world of signs and participate in dialog that recognizes otherness and builds familiarity and community.

The concepts of otherness and community are at the heart of Dante’s understanding of signs and a tension between a desire for unity and the recognition of

40 Paradiso 15.28. 41 Paradiso 15.38-39. 42 Paradiso 15.67-.69. 19 difference marks his literary corpus. Differences in signs, and the variety of ways in which particular signs are used, can divide individuals and communities. The use of signs, however, is also the only way of establishing a peaceful community united through mutual recognition and love, such as that depicted in Paradiso, where differences are appreciated and are not erased through violence.

As noted above, Dante suggests that every person—unlike members of other species—dwells in a partially unique sign-world developed through our own thought and experience with the world.

Cum igitur homo, non nature instinctu, sed ratione moveatur, et ipsa ratio vel circa discretionem vel circa iudicium vel circa electionem diversificetur in singulis, adeo ut fere quilibet sua propria specie videatur gaudere, per proprios actus vel passiones, ut brutum animal, neminem alium intelligere oppinamur;”43

[Since, therefore, human beings are moved not by their natural instinct but by reason, and since that reason takes diverse forms in individuals, according to their capacity for discrimination, judgment, or choice - to the point where it appears that almost everyone enjoys the existence of a unique species - I hold that we can never understand the actions or feelings of others by reference to our own, as the baser animals can.]

Our individual sign worlds are colored by unique experiences which in turn shape our understanding of things, their movements and relationships.44 Because of this, Dante claims, “we can never understand the actions or feelings of others by reference to our own.”45 Humans must engage in dialog in order to recognize elements of one another’s inner sign worlds and develop a greater mutual understanding. The reading of another

43 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.1. 44 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.1. 45 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.1. 20 person’s sign world, is largely an act of translation through which people gain a greater appreciation of the world and each other.

Were it not for the gift of language that is developed in childhood from the adults who care for us, Dante asserts, forming communities would be impossible.46 Signs,

“some signal based on reason and perception,” says Dante, are what enables a logic of relations between humans, communities and the world.47 This logic of relations, however, is not something static. In fact, as Chapter Three will illuminate, for Dante the meaning of signs is in their movement and growth—it is something that unfolds within communities, and is driven by relations.

Dante’s theory of signs is deeply theological and he envisions God as being the prime mover of signs. In Book I of Monarchia, Dante says that the role of every part of creation is to sign forth the divine likeness “in so far as its own nature can receive it.”48

Referring to Genesis 1.26-27, Dante claims that humans are special signs, having been made in the image and likeness of God. Unlike some exegetes who tend to view this passage from Genesis as referring primarily to individuals, Dante offers a communalistic interpretation writing that “genus humanum maxime Deo assimilatur quando maxime est unum [mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity].”49

Here again, is an example of the tension between unity and difference that underlies and shapes Dante’s concern with signs and language. Although Dante asserts that every person occupies a unique sign world, through recognition and dialog,

46 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.2. 47 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.3.2. 48 Monarchia, 1.8.2. 49 Monarchia, 1.8.3. 21 translation and understanding are possible. In this view human communities united by love represent an important, collective theological sign.50

The dream of Monarchia is that of a unified world community freed from war, a world that has overcome the linguistic differentiation that Dante depicts in the version of the Tower of Babel story which he tells in De Vulgare Eloquentia. The path that Dante envisions for counteracting Babel is both semiotic and theological. To understand the core of Dante’s ideas on signs requires examining their roots in the theology and semiotics of Augustine as will be done in Chapter Two.51

50 Dante portrays three such communal signs in Paradiso, where the blessed collectively form images of a cross, an eagle, and a rose. The first represents the church, the second represents government and the final one the blessed community itself. 51 Augustine’s influence is discussed in Chapter Two. The influence of Bonaventure is discussed in Chapter Three. 22

Chapter 2: Love Shapes Signs, Relationships and Habits

(16) Iacet Gregorius tuus in telis aranearum; iacet Ambrosius but in neglectis clericorum latibulis; iacet Augustinus abiectus, Dionysius, Damascenus et Beda; et nescio quod 'Speculum', Innocentium, et Ostiensem declamant. Cur non? Illi Deum querebant, ut finem et optimum; isti census et beneficia consecuntur.

[(16) Your Gregory lies among the cobwebs; Ambrose lies forgotten in the cupboards of the clergy, and Augustine along with him; and Dionysius, Damascenus, and Bede; and they cry up instead I know not what Speculum, and Innocent, and him of Ostia. And why not? Those sought after God as their end and highest good; these get for themselves riches and benefices.]52

In this letter to the Italian Cardinals following the death of Pope Clement, Dante urges the church leaders of his day to dust off their copies of important theological texts that can enable them to better guide their community. The list of authors in this letter gives contemporary scholars insight into exegetes whom Dante viewed as most relevant for church leaders to know. There are, of course, many other clues to Dante’s sources throughout his writings. The signals of authorial influence to which Dante scholars tend to give the greatest weight involve writers who appear as characters within the

Commedia. While Augustine is included among the named characters in the Commedia, unlike some other major figures such as Aquinas and Bonaventure, he does not have a speaking role. In the Empyrean in Paradiso 32, Saint Bernard indicates Augustine to the

Dante Character where he occupies a privileged position on the post-lapsarian side of eternal rose —with only John the Baptist, Saint Francis and Saint Benedict positioned

52 Dante, “Letter to the Italian Cardinals,” Epistole 11.16. 23 closer to God. Despite Augustine’s laudable placement, his silence within the Commedia can make it seem that Dante too has forgotten him in the cupboard.

According to Peter Hawkins, Augustine’s silence within the Commedia led some earlier scholars to discount his influence on Dante. Hawkins and others have demonstrated, however, that both Augustine’s influence on Dante and his presence within the Commedia run very deep. As Hawkins asserts, “Augustine is present in the

Commedia via his language.”53 Likewise, John Freccero, speaking of Augustine and

Dante, says “there seem to exist between the two authors not only analogies of detail but also of structure.”54 Citing Augustine’s Confessions as a narrative model for the

Commedia, Freccero points to Convivio 1.2.12 where the poet ruminates on the motives that can justify an author breaking with medieval convention to include himself within his work. Here Dante writes that “reason moved Augustine to speak of himself and his

Confessions, so that in the progress of his life, which was from bad to good, and from good to better, and from better to best, he furnished an example in teaching which could not and obtained from any other equally truthful testimony.”55 Freccero argues that this is also Dante’s purpose for including himself as a character within the Commedia.

This chapter will serve to further clarify Dante’s debt to Augustine. It will demonstrate that Dante, following Augustine, considers love to be the dominant force that shapes signs, relationships and habits. Augustine’s writings on signs, particularly in

De Doctrina Christiana and De Trinitate, were key texts for influential medieval

53 Peter S. Hawkins. “Divide and Conquer: Augustine in the Divine Comedy,” in City of God: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995). Hawkins also notes that “In the Augustinian corpus, the Ostia ‘vision’ of Confessions 9. 10 …. provides an important precedent, perhaps even an actual model, for the dialectic of the Paradiso.” (page 219). 54 Freccero, Poetics of Conversion, 11.. 55 Freccero, Poetics of Conversion, 11. 24 exegetes who write about signs—such as Peter Lombard in his Sentences, Aquinas in the

Summa Theologica and his commentaries, and Bonaventure in several of his works (as is detailed in Chapter Three of this dissertation). Augustine influenced Dante’s semiotics, both through his own works and through medieval discussions of signs that Dante encountered, which were deeply rooted in Augustine’s thought.

In order to illuminate this relationship, this chapter will explore two key elements of Augustine’s sign theory that Dante employs: (1) the uti/frui distinction of things to be used and things to be enjoyed; and, (2) the concept of natural signs.

The Uti Frui Distinction

Critical passages from the Commedia will serve as major entry points into the two

Augustinian themes that are the subject of this chapter. As many scholars have noted,

Dante is a progressive thinker and the Commedia, to which he devoted the majority of the last two decades of his life, represents Dante’s most mature thought.56 Because

Augustine’s semiotic concepts are so integral to Dante’s thought and poetry, some of the passages from the Commedia cited here will be referenced in later chapters as well.

Two extremely important scenes occur in canto 26 of Paradiso. In the first part of this canto, the Dante Character has just been blinded by the divine love that visibly exudes from St. John. The Dante Character is then tested by this gospel author about his

56 It is important to note that while Dante is a progressive thinker, he is somewhat a-typical in his attitude toward his prior ideas and concepts. While he seems to abandon certain lines of inquiry and changes his objectives somewhat, much like a tinkerer, he keeps the signs, images and intellectual maps associated with prior systems and puts them to new use. 25 understanding of love and his deepest desires. After completing this examination successfully, the Dante Character’s sight is not only restored, but also improved and he notes that a “fourth light” (v. 81) has joined St. John and Beatrice. The Dante Character is quickly informed by Beatrice, that this new “light” is none other than Adam, the first human.

Although Augustine is not mentioned directly in in Paradiso 26, a close reading of this canto shows that he is indeed present by his language. First, St. John asks the temporarily blinded Dante Character to name his ultimate goal and reassures him that the

“la vista in te smarrita e non defunta [his power of sight is confounded, but not forever lost].”57 St. John then promises the Dante Character that Beatrice possesses in her glance,

“the power the hand of Ananias” had.58 Ananias, of course, restored St. Paul’s sight after he was blinded by a vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). That the

Dante Character needs a similar cure to Paul, suggests that their blindness may share a common cause. The use of the word “smarrita [confounded]” echoes the opening lines of the Inferno—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita [Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost]”—and suggests a connection between the confusion of the Dante Character in Inferno 1 and his blindness in Paradiso 26.59

The Dante Character answers St. John that his desire is for divine love.

Dissatisfied with this somewhat nebulous answer, St. John requests something more specific, asking his examinee to tell him “who made him aim [his] bow at such a target.”

57 Paradiso, 26.8-9. 58 Paradiso, 26.7-12. 59 Inferno, 1.1-3. 26

The Dante Character proclaims that it is God who embedded this desire for divine love in him through nature and that “ché 'l bene, in quanto ben, come s'intende, così accende amore [this good, by measure of its goodness, kindles love as soon as it is known].”60

St. John seems pleased by this more complete answer, but asks the Dante

Character to explain if there are “alter corde [other cords]” that pull him towards God “sì che tu suone con quanti denti questo amor ti morde [so that you may declare the many teeth with which this love does bite].”61 The Dante Character replies that “Tutti quei morsi che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio, a la mia caritate son concorsi [All those things the bite of which can make hearts turn to God converge with one another in my love].”62

He goes on to say that these things—which include the world’s existence, his own existence and the sacrifice of Jesus—“tratto m'hanno del mar de l'amor torto, e del diritto m'han posto a la riva [have drawn (him) from the sea of twisted love and brought (him) to the shore where love is just].”63

On the heels of this further testimony from the Dante Character, the heavens erupt in a song of praise, Beatrice removes his blindness with her glance, and the soul of Adam appears. After overcoming his initial shock at Adam’s arrival, the Dante Character addresses his primogenitor, “O pomo che mature solo prodotto fosti, o padre antico [Oh fruit who alone were brought forth ripe],” and requests that Adam read in the divine mind the questions that the Dante Character wants to ask.64 The Dante Character is so impatient for his questions to be answered that he does not wish to take time verbalizing

60 Paradiso, 26.28-29. 61 Paradiso, 26.50-51. 62 Paradiso, 26.55-57. 63 Paradiso, 26.62-63. 64 Paradiso, 26.91-92. 27 them to Adam. Adam obliges, noting that he can see the Dante Character’s desires “in that truthful mirror which makes itself reflective of all else, but which can be reflected nowhere else.”65

Comprehending the deeper meaning of the dramatic movement portrayed in

Paradiso 26 requires the reader to recognize several clues pointing to Book I of

Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana which the poet scatters throughout this canto. First is the Dante Character’s unusual choice of words in addressing Adam as “O fruit” (v. 91).

This greeting is reminiscent of that given to the Dante Character by his ancestor

Cacciaguida who says, “O fronda mia in che io compiacemmi pur aspettando, io fui la tua radice [O bough of my tree, in whom I have rejoiced even in expectation, I was your root],” when upon their first encounter in Paradiso 15.66 As Dante’s forebear, it makes sense for Cacciaguida to present himself as the root and Dante as a branch on his family tree. Adam, as the primogenitor, is more typically envisioned as the root of the human race, not as a fruit.67 In his greeting to Adam, however, the Dante Character seems to reverse this relationship, by calling Adam “fruit.”

If the reader reflects back to the earlier part of Paradiso 26, however, she will see that the Dante Character’s addressing Adam as “fruit” is a continuation of a trope about divine love begun by St. John who asks the Dante Character to “declare the many teeth” with which the divine love does bite. Humans, according to the logic of this metaphor,

65 Paradiso, 26.106-107. 66 Paradiso, 15.88-89. As Mandelbaum notes, Cacciaguida’s greeting is reminiscent of God’s voice in the gospel accounts of the Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3:17, "This is my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on him." (364) Mandelbaum points out that these resonances are more pronounced when comparing Dante’s Italian passage to the vulgate Latin. 67 See for example the use of the words radice [root] and frutto [fruit] in Purgatorio 28. 142-144: “Qui fu innocente l'umana radice; qui primavera sempre"" ed ogni frutto; nettare e questo di che ciascun dice. [Here the human root was innocent; here it is always spring, here is every fruit; this is the nectar of which each one tells].” 28 are fruit to be enjoyed by God.68 God’s teeth, unlike those of a beast, will not destroy the

Dante Character, but rather, will draw him from the “sea of twisted love” and bring him to the “shore where love is just.” This unusual trope is intended to draw the reader’s attention and to provoke a deeper reading—its target is Augustine’s discussion of love and the uti/frui distinction that he makes in De Doctrina Christiana. We shall turn now to

Augustine’s text, and then reflect on its dialogical presence in Paradiso 26.

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De Doctrina Christiana (On Teaching Christianity or On Christian Doctrine) is

Augustine’s guidebook for the interpretation of scripture. Augustine begins by noting that it is fitting for scripture to use human language since otherwise “charity itself, which holds men together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost mixing them together if men could teach nothing to men.”69 Like Dante,

Augustine sees language as foundational for recognition of otherness and the building of community, both of which are moved by charity or love.

In Book I of De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine makes a qualitative distinction between things that are to be used (uti) and things that are to be enjoyed (frui). Things to be enjoyed are those that are to be loved for their own sake, whereas things to be used are things that are to be loved for the sake of something else. In Augustine’s view, “God alone is to be enjoyed (frui) . . . while the rest are to be used (uti), in order that we may

68 Paradiso, 26.50-51. 69 De Doctrina Christiana, Prologue, 6. 29 come at last to the enjoyment of the former sort.”70 In other words, God alone is intrinsically worthy of human love, and all other things including people are worthy of love with respect to their relationship with God. Augustine says that “things that are to be enjoyed make us happy; things which are to be used help us on our way to happiness, providing us, so to say, with crutches and props for reaching the things that will make us happy, and enabling us to keep them.”71

Signs, which Augustine defines as “thing[s] which cause us to think of something else beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses,” are chief among these crutches and props by which people are to seek happiness.72 The value and purpose of signs, for Augustine, is the role they play as vehicles that move people toward communion with God and one another.

Discussing the purpose of signs, Augustine asks his reader to imagine herself as a pilgrim who has become miserable in her rootless drifting and begins to journey home to her “native country.”73 Such a wanderer would require the use of “vehicles for land and sea” that could aid her on her way.74 “If the amenities of the journey and the motion of the vehicle itself delighted” the traveler, Augustine warns, she “should not wish to end the journey quickly, and, entangled in a perverse sweetness” she would remain “alienated from [that] country, whose sweetness makes us blessed.”75

70 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.22.20. 71 De Doctrina Christiana 1.3.3 72 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.1.1. 73 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.4.4. 74 This heuristic notion of signs is fairly consistent throughout Augustine’s work. For example, in De Musica he remarks on signs that, “we shall keep free of them since they are temporal, by using them well, as with a board in a flood by not throwing them aside as burdensome and not grasping them as stable (6.46).” 75 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.4.4. 30

This brief tale, as Augustine reveals, is an imaginative retelling of Paul’s First

Letter to the Romans which should be rightly designated as the scriptural home of his uti/frui distinction. Citing Romans 1.20, he says that “we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the invisible things of God being understood by the things that are made may be seen, that is, so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and the spiritual.”76

For Augustine, the success or failure of a journey through signs hinges upon love.

As Augustine knows, Paul’s First Letter to the Romans does not stop at verse 20, but goes on to say that:

“So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images …”77

Like Paul, Augustine identifies idolatry – “exchanging the truth about God for a lie” – as the archetypal sin.78 The willed refusal to recognize the things of the world as things that are also signs with theological significance, Augustine claims, not only hinders progress to this ultimate human goal, but also it entangles people in a world of false signs that they create. Our desire to “enjoy creatures instead of their creator,”

Augustine states, makes people “conformable to the world,” and as such incapable of using the world as a via to God.79 Elsewhere, citing Paul’s Twelfth Letter to the

76 De Doctrina Christiana, I.4.4. Here Augustine quotes Romans 1.20 and the emphasis is in the original text. 77 Romans, 1.20-23. 78 Romans 1.25; DDC, I.4.4. 79 De Doctrina Christiana, I.12.12. 31

Romans—“Be not conformed to this world”—Augustine says that “the point [of Paul’s admonition] is to show that a person is conformed to whatever he loves.”80 Augustine understands the Fall as occurring in the will, in an “illicit use” of signs that people love in the wrong way.81 For Augustine, conformity to the object of love does not only define individuals, but also shapes communities. As John Freccero notes, “Augustine defined the city as a group of human beings joined together by the love of the same object.”82

The understanding of love which defines the two cities in Augustine’s City of God also defines the various communities depicted in the Commedia.

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Our focus now returns to Paradiso 26 where at least an outline of the dialogical presence of Augustine and Paul should now be visible.83 As Baranski notes in his exposition of Purgatorio 33 (which we shall encounter in the next section on natural

80 Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine: Volume I ed. Whitney J. Oates (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Book House). The citation is from Romans 12.12. 81 De Doctrina Christiana, I.4.4. It is worth noting that in De Trinitate (15.2.3) Augustine points to a similar interpretation of the Fall in the Book of Wisdom: “And hence they are rebuked in the book of Wisdom, "who could not out of the good things that are seen know Him that is: neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster; but deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods which govern the world .... For by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionally the Maker of them is seen (Wisdom 13.1-5)." 82 John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, Rachel Jacoff (ed). (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 153. 83 Robert Hollander believes the invisibility of texts which Dante incorporates is intentional, since his main motivation is in crafting a narrative that will utterly engage the reader. Hollander writes: “Most readers do not even notice the other works, so intent are they on the drama …. They are not supposed to notice, for Dante has used the other works without any desire to show off erudition. It seems to have taken six hundred years for the Augustinian parallels, like the Virgilian parallels in the opening cantos, to be observed." Robert Hollander. Allegory in Dante's Commedia (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 113. I agree with Hollander’s view that the narrative drama supersedes the recognition of references, but as I show in Chapter Three, the dialogical aspects of the Commedia constitute another level of drama for some of its anticipated readers. 32 signs), Augustine’s theological semiotics largely have their source in the letters of St.

Paul.84 In Paradiso 26, Dante clearly signals his awareness of this relationship. By mentioning Ananias, St. John characterizes the Dante Character’s blindness at the start of the canto as related to that of Paul who is blinded after his vision of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus. It is also alludes to a passage in De Doctrina Christiana where

Augustine says that a person who does not understand the uti/frui distinction “is like a blind man in the sun who profits nothing when his eye sockets are infused with the brilliance of the clear and immutable light.”85 In Paradiso 26, as in De Doctrina

Christiana, light is a metaphor for divine love and until the Dante Character successfully passes St. John’s examination on charity, this love blinds him. Once he demonstrates his understanding of divine love and the uti frui distinction, not only is his sight restored, but also his vision is now greatly enhanced.86

The light metaphor is further extended in the Dante Character’s response to St.

John who has urged him to provide further details about why divine love is his goal. The

Dante Character says that “che ciascun ben che fuor di lei si trova altro non è ch'un lume di suo raggio, più che in altra convien che si mova la mente, amando, di ciascun che cerne il vero in che si fonda questa prova [that every good outside of it is nothing but a

84 Zygmunt G. Baranski “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante” in Dante and the Middle Ages, John C. Barnes and Cormac B. Cuilleanain (eds.) (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995). Peter Hawkins concurs: “From the outset of Paradiso Dante makes it clear that his pilgrim is modeled on St. Paul, that “man in Christ” who was “caught up into paradise and heard such unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12.4). According to Saint Augustine, perhaps the most influential interpreter of this rapture, Paul's experience was nothing less than unmediated contact with the ineffable god—verbal beatitude. For one extraordinary “moment” of eternity the apostle was taken out of the diachronic body of our speech and enabled, along with the blessed, to understand God’s language—a language so unutterably beyond our own that Augustine will refer to it paradoxically as silence.” This quote is from Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 213. Hawkins reference to Augustine is from Confessions 11.6 85 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.9.9. 86 Paradiso, 26.76-79. 33 light reflected of its rays, the mind of everyone who sees the truth on which this argument is based must, more than anything, be moved by love].”87

While these verses continue to reflect the language employed by Augustine and

Paul, they also bring the voice of St. John into this theological chorus on signs and love.

St. John’s gospel begins with the following lines:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.88

The linguistic echoes of light and language between St. John 1 and Paradiso 26 are not accidental, nor should they be surprising given the St. John’s Character’s leading role in this canto. And yet, Dante makes sure that his reader will not miss the connection.

When naming the sources of his desire for divine love, the Dante Character tells St. John that “Sternilmi tu ancora, incominciando l'alto preconio che grida l'arcano di qui là giù sovra ogne altro bando. [You also set it forth to me in the beginning of your great message, which, more than any other herald, proclaims the mystery of this high place on earth].”89

“This high place” (v. 45) of which John’s gospel tells is where the community of the blessed enjoys (frui) divine love. As noted above, St. John asks the Dante Character to name the “many teeth” with which God’s love does bite him (v. 51). This trope, where

87 Paradiso, 26.32-36. 88 John 1.1-5. 89 Paradiso, 26.43-45. 34 people are God’s fruit, is a juxtaposition of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2-3, which is highlighted by the Dante Character addressing Adam as “O fruit.”90 This moniker, of course, is a reminder of the story of the fall from grace where Adam and Eve defy God’s command and eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of good and evil (Genesis

3.6). Although Dante uses the word (pomo) for fruit to open this dialog between the

Dante Character and Adam in Paradiso 26, he hopes that his reader will recall that

Augustine’s Latin word frui has multiple uses—it can mean both “fruit” and “to enjoy.”

Signs, Augustine claims, are to be used (uti)—that is, they are to be loved not in themselves, but rather as vehicles that can bring people to the enjoyment (frui) of God.

Following the logic of Paul in Romans 1.20, signs exist to bring people to the invisible things of God and the movement of signs is driven by love. Or, as the Dante Character says, “the mind of everyone who sees the truth on which this argument [i.e., that divine love is the ideal human target] is based must, more than anything, be moved by love.”91

As has already been remarked, Augustine follows Paul’s semiotic interpretation of the fall in Romans 1 where people failed to “honor God as God” and as a result

“became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”92 In the journey metaphor that Augustine employs to describe the predicament of loving signs for

90 Bonaventure’s is also present in this canto through his language. In the Tree of Life he writes: “This is the fruit … that is, the love of Christ …. Fruits nourish the soul … Abhorring the example of unfaithful Adam who preferred the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2.17) to the tree of life. No one can avoid this error unless he prefers faith to reason, devotion to investigation, simplicity to curiosity, and finally the sacred cross of Christ to all carnal feeling or wisdom of the flesh.” Bonaventure. The Tree of Life, prologue, 3. 91 Paradiso, 26.34-36. 92 Romans, 1.20-23. 35 their own sake, he says that people become “entangled in a perverse sweetness” which keeps us from our “native country.”93

The Dante Character’s phrase in Paradiso 21 that he has been “drawn … from the sea of twisted love,” signals the canto’s connection to De Doctrina Christiana, and

Romans 1 as does the character’s initial blindness and St. John’s description of him as

“smarrita [confounded].” Paul, however, is not the only scriptural source which

Augustine utilizes in describing the darkening of the mind, an inability to read signs that occurs as a result of loving them in the wrong way. Augustine says that people “were made conformable to this world by a desire to enjoy (frui) creatures instead of their creator … so that the Evangelist [i.e., St. John] says, ‘the world knew God not.’”94

The reference here is to John 1.10, the very chapter that the Dante Character credits as building the love of God in him in Paradiso 26. This is not, however,

Augustine’s only allusion to John 1 in this section of De Doctrina Christiana. Speaking of how God’s love overcomes sin, Augustine says “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” quoting John 1.14.95 This too is highly relevant to Paradiso 26. In John 1, the

“Word” (v. 1) is also the “light” which “enlightens everyone” (v. 9). This “light” is the

“Word” that “became flesh and dwelt among us” (v. 14) in the Incarnation. By recognizing Dante’s dialog with Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana in composing

Paradiso 26, the following becomes clear—Paul, who loses his sight upon encountering the resurrected Jesus on the Road to Damascus, and the Dante Character, who is rendered sightless by the divine love emanating from St. John, are blinded by the same light. While

93 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.4.4. 94 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.10.12. 95 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.13. 36 this instance of “smarrita” [confounding] recalls that of Inferno 1 and the darkening of the mind in Romans 1, it does so to highlight the difference. In Paradiso 26, the Dante

Character’s confusion is temporary because he has already been pulled from the sea of twisted love.

It should also be clear that love, for both Dante and Augustine, shapes people’s use of signs.96 Both authors, following the logic of the uti/frui distinction from De

Doctrina Christiana, view divine love as the motive force that can guide people from sign to sign toward the invisible things of God. They also warn their readers that idolatry is a love that erases the theological potential of signs by erasing the difference between

God and people or things. In Paradiso 26, Dante’s Adam who once sinned by seeking to erase the difference between God and himself, now asserts that this difference endures even among the blessed who share in the beatific vision. Adam tells the Dante Character that he can see his thoughts “in that truthful mirror which makes itself reflective of all else, but which can be reflected nowhere else.”97 Correcting his error in the garden,

Adam now recognizes God’s enduring otherness and the limits of godlikeness.

While this study will reengage its investigation of the semiotic importance of

Paradiso 26 later in Chapter Four, for now the discussion of this canto, and the uti/frui distinction concludes. Before moving to the next section, it is worth remarking that after this canto, the narrator says that he saw “un riso de l’uninverso [the universe smile].”98

Given the remarkable poetic and semiotic mastery displayed in Paradiso 26, such a

96 As will be discussed in Chapter Four, love and justice—two of the key themes of the Commedia—are connected in Dante’s semiotics. This is also true for Augustine who writes, “Justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly,” in “On the morals of the Catholic Church”, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine: Volume I, ed. Whitney J. Oates (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Book House), p. 331. 97 Paradiso, 26.106-108. 98 Paradiso, 27-4.5. 37 response seems utterly fitting. A smiling universe also looks back to the thesis of Chapter

One—that Dante views the universe as a divine poem—and ahead to our next section on natural signs.99

Natural Signs

The canto that concludes the second canticle of the Commedia, Purgatorio 33, is one of the dramatic highpoints of the entire poem. Not only is the Dante Character about to enter the heavenly paradise having been cleansed of his sins, but also, he at last has an opportunity to ask questions of the soul of his beloved Beatrice who will serve as his primary guide through Paradiso.100

The conversation gets off to a difficult start. The Dante Character struggles to speak in Beatrice’s presence. Beatrice says that she can see his confusion about the heavenly drama involving the griffon, the tree and the chariot that they observed in the earthly paradise. Beatrice attempts to explain the meaning of the drama, but the Dante

Character remains confused to such an extent that she commands him to “Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte, così queste parole segna a' vivi del viver ch'è un correre a la morte

99 Augustine also viewed the universe as a divine poem which has implications for his views on signs. In his early work, De Musica, Augustine says that “the heavens imitate eternity by returning to same state – terrestrial things are subject to celestial and their time-circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe (6.29).” Augustine. De Musica, trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro (Annapolis: St. John’s Bookstore, 1939). With respect to how this affected Augustine’s view on signs and language, John Freccero writes: “Of all the fathers of the church, Augustine, author and bishop, was most aware of the analogy between the realm of words and the theology of the word…. There is no conflict in his mind between literary interpretation and salvation history: on the contrary, poetry was for him the emblem of intelligibility and the cosmos. Just as meter gave a pattern and irregularity to the otherwise open ended flow of our words, so God’s providential intent gave meaning to the flow of time. History itself might be said to be God’s poem…” John G. Freccero. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, Rachel Jacoff (ed). (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 270. 100 The soul of Bernard is the Dante Character’s final guide from Paradiso 31 to the poem’s conclusion. 38

[Mark them, and, as they come from me, set these words down for those who live the life that is a race to death].”101 In commissioning the Dante Character to record what he does not understand for the good of those still living, Beatrice is likewise charging the reader with learning how to interpret the images and scenes that the poet describes.

The Dante Character agrees to accept this responsibility saying, “Sì come cera da suggello, che la figura impressa non trasmuta, segnato è or da voi lo mio cervello [Even as wax maintains the seal and does not alter the imprinted image, my brain now bears your stamp].”102 The vocabulary used in this reply—suggello/seal, figura/image, and segnato/stamp—as well as the canto’s theme of the difficulty associated with interpreting the ambiguity of metaphorical language, suggest that Purgatorio 33 is an important canto for understanding Dante’s semiotics. This suspicion is verified as the conversation continues.

The Dante Character asks Beatrice why her words remain beyond his grasp. She replies that his confusion is due to the, “quella scuola c'hai seguitata [school that you have followed],” and that his bewilderment should show him that “vostra via da la divina distar cotanto, quanto si discorda da terra il ciel che più alto festina [your way is as far from God's as that highest heaven, which spins the fastest, is distant from the earth].”103

The Dante Character does not understand Beatrice’s rebuke, because when he passed through the waters of the river Lethe they removed the memory of his past transgressions. He says to Beatrice, “Non mi ricorda ch'i' stranïasse me già mai da voi, né honne coscïenza che rimorda [As far as I remember I have not ever estranged myself

101 Purgatorio, 33.52-54. 102 Purgatorio, 33.79-81. 103 Purgatorio, 33.86; Purgatorio, 33.88-90. 39 from you, nor does my conscience prick me for it.]”104 Beatrice, of course, has previously chastised the Dante Character quite harshly in Purgatorio 31 for this exact deed, which provoked an emotional, choking confession from him. Smiling at how the Dante

Character has forgotten the passionate upheaval of his very recent contrition, Beatrice reminds him that he has just drunk the waters of Lethe and explains that “e se dal fummo foco s'argomenta, cotesta oblivïon chiaro conchiude colpa ne la tua voglia altrove attenta

[and if from seeing smoke we argue there is fire then this forgetfulness would clearly prove your faulty will had been directed elsewhere].”105

As Zygmunt Baranski notes, the smoke/fire example was a cliché among medieval exegetes, and its original source, like the uti/frui distinction, is Augustine’s De

Doctrina Christiana.106 Likewise, Beatrice's part of this dialog “echoes Augustine's discussion in De Doctrina Christiana” with respect to the “spiritual dangers of taking figurative expressions literally, and of the intellectual sin which is the cause of such behavior.”107

Augustine mentions the smoke/fire example twice at the start of Book II of De

Doctrina Christiana. In the first instance, the relationship between smoke and fire is an example which he includes to clarify one of his definitions of signs:

104 Purgatorio, 33.91-93. 105 Purgatorio, 33.97-99. 106 Baranski’s work on this canto, both his monograph, Dante E I Segni and his earlier chapter, “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante” in Dante and the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Essays, John C. Barnes and Cormac Cuilleanain eds. (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1995) are indispensable for anyone interested in Dante’s semiotics. 107 Baranski, Zygmunt G., “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante,” in Dante and the Middle Ages: Literary and Historical Essays, John C. Barnes and Cormac Cuilleanain eds. (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1995).

40

A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses. Thus, if we see a track, we think of the animal that made the track; if we see smoke, we know there is a fire that causes it; if we hear the voice of a living being, we attend to the emotion it expresses; and when a trumpet sounds, a soldier should know whether it is necessary to advance or to retreat, or whether the battle demands some other response.”108

In Augustine’s second mention of the smoke/fire example in De Doctrina

Christiana, he is using it to differentiate among two categories of signs—conventional signs and natural signs. The former, he says, are “those which living creatures show to one another” with the intention of communicating.109 Natural signs he says, however, are those which “without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of something beyond themselves, like smoke which signifies fire.”110

Immediately after defining natural signs, Augustine says that he does not plan to discuss them further and that he only mentioned them because they “formed a division of

[his] subject,” and that as such he “could not disregard it completely, and this notice of it will suffice.”111

While Augustine was quick to move on from the topic of natural signs which he initiates, claiming them to be unimportant, natural signs were the cause of much speculation and commentary among medieval exegetes including Dante, as his use of the smoke/fire example indicates. Dante’s mentioning of the smoke/fire example in

Purgatorio 33, however, is not simply an isolated instance meant to signal his knowledge of De Doctrina Christiana to a subsection of his contemporary readers; rather, Dante

108 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.1.1. 109 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.1.3. 110 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.1.2. 111 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.2.2. 41 expands upon Augustine’s concepts of natural signs not only in the Commedia, but also in his other works.

A critical trace to Dante’s concept of natural signs is found in Paradiso 1, the canto immediately following Purgatorio 33 where the fire/smoke example appears.

Guided by Beatrice, the Dante Character is flying through the heavens. Dazzled by the music of the spheres and the light, the Dante Character does not realize that they are flying and he asks Beatrice to explain what is happening. She explains to the Dante

Character that he is “not still on earth” and that “lightning darting from its source never sped as fast as you return to yours.”112

This explanation only leads to further confusion for the Dante Character, who cannot understand how his heavy body is rising through the “corpi levi [light bodies]” of the heavens.113 Beatrice again takes pity on him and explains that their movement upward—counter to his understanding of how the world works—is completely natural.

“All things created have an order in themselves,” she explains, “and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.”114

The divine order which Beatrice describes is one where everything has a unique providential destination planned for it by God from the beginning—like ships sailing upon “the vastness of the sea of being,” each one having its own purpose, its own path to follow, and its own harbor to which it is called.115 As was noted in Chapter One in our earlier discussion of Paradiso 1, Dante recognizes difference among humans as a divine

112 Paradiso, 1.91-93. 113 Paradiso, 1.99. 114 Paradiso, 1.103-105. 115 Paradiso, 1.112-113. 42 gift embedded in human nature and connected to the human capacity for language. From the time of their creation, Beatrice tells the Dante Character, each creature has been

“imbued with instinct that impels it on its course” which, according to this plan, has a unique final destination that is either closer or further from God within the heavenly realm.116

In Chapter One of this study, Bonaventure’s Hexaemeron was identified as a source for Dante’s vision of the universe as a poem which appears in the opening lines of

Paradiso 1 and which that celebrates both difference and unity. There Dante writes that

“La gloria di colui che tutto move per l'universo penetra, e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove [The glory of Him who moves all things pervades the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.]”117 Ewert Cousins was correct in citing

Bonaventure’s Hexaemeron as Dante’s source in these verses.

Beatrice’s further explanation of the order of the universe—i.e., the lines we have been discussing and which appear in verses 103-131—have another source, however, which Giuseppe Mazzotta has identified. Mazzotta points to Augustine’s “doctrine of the so-called pondus amoris, or weight of love” which appears in Confessions 13 and which outlines “the law of spiritual gravity, according to which all things, pulled by their own weight, return to their proper place.”118

116 Paradiso, 1.114. 117 Paradiso, 1.1-3. 118 Giuseppe Mazzotta. Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 202-203. Dante use of both Bonaventure’s image of divine order as light and Augustine’s image of the pondus amoris within Paradiso suggests that he sought to put these two images of universal order into dialog with one another. 43

In Confessions 13.9.10, Augustine begins by speculating about the Holy Spirit being born above the waters in the creation of the universe as described in Genesis 1 (v.

2). Since God is one, Augustine says that readers should understand the passage as indicating the presence of the entire Trinity. The Spirit, he suggests, is singled out here because the Spirit is also God’s gift, and that “in Thy Gift we rest; there we enjoy

[fruimur] thee.”119 The Spirit, which is love, Augustine continues, moves people upward toward God by love. He says that “the body by its own weight strives towards its own place” and in this striving, “weight makes not downward only, but to his own place.”120

Using the examples of fire and a stone, he says that as fire tends to move upward and stones tend to move downward by their own weight, so is everything in creation “urged by their own weights to seek their own places.”121 He goes on to explain that this

“weight” is a person’s love, a fire that is inflamed in each by the Holy Spirit and which carries them upward. This fire which causes a person to move also causes them to glow inwardly like a flame.122

The connection of Augustine’s concept of the pondus amoris to his uti frui distinction in De Doctrina Christiana is implied in this passage from Confessions by the use of “enjoy [fruimur] cited in the previous paragraph. Dante, did not miss the connection and expands upon it through Beatrice’s explanation of the order of the

Universe in Paradiso 1. Beatrice tells the Dante Character that while the bowstring of divine providence aims everything at a “segno lieto [joyful target],” creatures endowed with free will can choose to swerve away from this happy course and are sometimes

119 Confessions, 13.9.10. 120 Confessions, 13.9.10. 121 Confessions, 13.9.10. 122 Confessions, 13.9.10. 44 turned aside by “da falso piacere [a false pleasure],” that, “like fire falling from a cloud,” turns them toward earth.123 The Dante Character, however, was cleansed of all his “falso piaceri” in Purgatorio, so he now rises unhindered toward his “segno lieto.” Beatrice tells him that, “Maraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo d'impedimento, giù ti fossi assiso, com' a terra quïete in foco vivo [It would be as astounding if you, set free from every hindrance, had remained below, as if on earth a living flame held still.]” 124

Dante uses the image of fire to create a dialogical connection between Purgatorio

33 and Paradiso 1, and thus, between the penultimate and the ultimate canticles of the

Commedia. Both fire images he employs are from Augustine, but from different works where they have unique contextual meanings. The smoke/fire analogy from De Doctrina

Christiana used in Purgatorio 33 is a reference to the category of natural signs, or signs that communicate without having any intention to do so. The fire image that Dante uses in Paradiso 1 is from Confessions 13 where Augustine envisions God’s love as gravity- like force that inflames each person and moves them toward God along their own unique path to the place designed for them.

In weaving together these images and concepts, Dante expands upon the concept of natural signs which Augustine first designates and then quickly lays aside as unimportant to his purpose in De Doctrina Christiana. The result is a conjoined vision in the Commedia, where people are depicted as natural signs who have the capacity to sign forth (smoke) the divine love (fire), and so doing move themselves and others closer to

God as in the pondus amoris of Confessions 13. Natural signs, however, communicate

123 Paradiso, 1.134-135. 124 Paradiso, 1.139-141. This entire discourse is reminiscent of Augustine uti/frui distinction and the use of Romans 1 and the Pauline texts on signs and idolatry employed by both Augustine and Dante which are the subject of the prior section in this chapter. 45 without intending to do so. Or rather, they communicate according to divine intent, not their own, so long as they do not obscure themselves from signing forth by being diverted by a “falso piacere [false pleasure].”

Pursuing false pleasure is precisely the sin of which Beatrice accuses the Dante

Character in Purgatorio 30 when she says that, “e volse i passi suoi per via non vera, imagini di ben seguendo false [he set his steps upon an untrue way pursuing those false images of good].”125 It is also the sin of which she reminds him in Purgatorio 33 using the smoke/fire image from De Doctrina Christiana to signal that the Dante Character’s forgetfulness is the result of being cleansed in the waters of Lethe, not a sign that he had not previously wronged her. While Lethe has removed the memory of the Dante

Character’s trespasses, his former attraction to “falso piacere [false pleasure]” continues to hinder his ability to interpret signs that point to the invisible things of God. While the

Dante Character has been cleansed of sin, he has not yet learned to read theological signs and this is why he struggles to follow the meaning of Beatrice’s metaphoric language.

Her instructing the Dante Character on how to read God’s signs constitutes much of the action in Paradiso.

Beatrice tells the Dante Character, “your way is as far from God's as that highest heaven,” echoing Isaiah 55, which says “nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”126 This passage from Isaiah is another critical thread that

Dante employs in weaving together Augustine’s concept of natural signs with the pondus

125 Purgatorio, 30.130-131. 126 Isaiah, 55.8. 46 amoris. In this chapter, God says that he sends the snow and rain from heaven to water the earth “making it bring forth and sprout,” and that the water only returns to heaven once this has been done.127 “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth,” the passage continues, “it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”128

In Isaiah 55 as in the Commedia, creatures are words, natural signs sent forth to accomplish a mission that God has intended for them.

As in Augustine’s concept of pondus amoris in Confessions 13 and the passage from Isaiah 55, in Paradiso 1 Beatrice names divine love as the “moving force in mortal hearts” and that “né pur le creature che son fore d'intelligenza quest' arco saetta, ma quelle c'hanno intelletto e amore [this bow impels not just created things that lack intelligence, but also those that have both intellect and love.”129 People and angels, in other words, are signs who can signify with or without their own intent.130

127 Isaiah, 55.10. 128 Isaiah, 55.11. Dante’s use of this chapter from Isaiah has obvious Christological overtones, given the tradition of viewing Jesus as the Word of God that began with the John’s gospel as is discussed in opening section of this chapter regarding Paradiso 26. This chapter will forgo exploring this relationship further, since this topic is investigated in detail in Chapter Five. 129 Paradiso,1.118-120 130 Umberto Eco finds Dante’s speculation on the first instance of human speech be quite bizarre. Eco writes: “When Adam spoke to God, it was a response. Thus God must have spoken first. To speak, however, the lord did not necessarily have to use a language. Dante here appealed to the traditional reading of Psalm 148, in which the verses “fire, and hail; snow, and vapors; stormy wind” all “praise the name of the lord” thus “fulfilling his word” are taken to mean that God expresses himself naturally through creation. Dante, however, construes this passage in a singular fashion, suggesting that God was able to move the air in such a way that it resonated to form true words. Why did Dante find it necessary to propose such a cumbersome and apparently gratuitous reading? The answer seems to be that, as the first member of the only species that uses speech, Adam could conceive ideas only through hearing linguistic sounds. Moreover, as Dante also makes clear (I, V, 2), God wanted Adam to speak so that he could use the gift to glorify His name.” Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, William Weaver trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998), p. 36-37. The answer to Eco’s question would seem to be found in Dante’s speculation on the connection of natural signs to Augustine’s concept of the pondus amoris. 47

For people, signifying without intent is a matter of the body, and Dante, perhaps more than any other poet before or since, knows that bodies signify.131 As Denys Turner notes, “You find in every canto [in of the Commedia] that the language of persons is the language of their bodies.”132 This statement is also true of the Convivio and the Vita

Nuova where Dante recalls experiencing an extreme physical reaction to Beatrice’s presence. Before he has even seen Beatrice, Dante feels a “strange throbbing which began in the left side of [his] breast and immediately spread to all parts of [his] body.”133

Dante attempts to hide his shaking limbs, but the love he feels for Beatrice continues to exhibit itself in bodily signs and eventually, because of his appearance, “many people had learned the secret of [his] heart.”134

Remarking on the effect of powerful emotions in the Convivio, Dante says that,

“by none of these can the soul become impassioned without its semblance appearing at the window of the eyes, unless by exercise of great force it is kept closed within.”135

Among all the regions of the body, Dante views the face as pre-eminent with respect to signifying. The eyes and the mouth are the greatest focal points “since in the face the soul operates principally in [these] two places” which Dante names “the balconies of the soul.”136 Dante writes that “The soul reveals herself in the mouth, almost like a color

131 Oliver Davies writes that “Dante wants to show us that language is always material, and thus always part of the external world. In this –his unequivocal identification of the material nature of the sign–Dante is most radical and innovative.” Davies, Dante’s Commedia and the Body of Christ, p.165. 132 Denys Turner compares the way in which bodies speak in the Commedia to J.L. Austen’s renowned Harvard lectures on How to Do Things with Words, and his idea of the performative utterance, an “utterance that in saying something, does what it says.” Turner also notes that at least “since Wittgenstein” people have acknowledged “the fact … that actions speak as gestures do. But if actions speak, than verbal utterances are actions too, and so ‘utter’ as actions and not just as words uttered.” Turner, How to Do Things with Words: Poetry as Sacrament in Dante’s Commedia, p. 289-290. 133 Vita Nuova, 14.4. 134 Vita Nuova, 18.1. 135 Convivio, 3.8.10. 136 Convivio, 3.8.8-9. 48 behind glass,” a fascinating allusion to Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians that “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.”137 In looking at the face of another, Dante both sees mystery and recognizes difference—even seeing another person face to face constitute knowing and being known only in part.138

Despite the difficulty involved in reading faces, sometimes the body can betray emotions that a person may not wish to be visible to others. This, Dante indicates, is particularly true of shame. A sense of shame is something that Dante regards as a virtue that can help a person to prevent further wrongdoing, whereas a lack of shame is a sign that they are unlikely to modify their poor behavior. “Thus it is a good and perfect sign of nobility in children and in those not fully grown,” Dante writes in the Convivio, “when after a fault shame is painted on their faces, for then it is the fruit (frutto) of true nobility.” The signs of shame occur naturally on the body, unless an individual seeks to block them, to erase the body’s innate readability. On this point, Dante cites the epic poet

Statius who explains the self-blinding of Oedipus by saying “with eternal night he freed himself from his guilty shame.”139

The soul of Statius serves as one of the Dante Character’s companions in the

Commedia and he is present during the Dante Character’s initial encounters with Beatrice in Purgatorio.140 The Dante Character first sees Beatrice “vestita di color di fiamma viva

137 Convivio, 3.8.11; 1 Corinthians 13.12. It is worth noting that the subject of 1 Corinthians 13, the home of this this oft-quoted semiotic line from Paul’s letters, is love. 138 Peter S. Hawkins in his chapter “All smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante's Commedia” that “the Convivio made it clear that no two faces are alike because it reveals a unique soul …. by their smiles ye shall know them in eternity.” p. 51. 139 Convivio, 3.8.10. 140 When the Dante Character meets the soul of Statius in Purgatorio 21, his head is crowned with myrtle. This and other evidence suggest a connection between Statius and Dante’s use of Isaiah 55 which he uses to connect the pondus amori with the concept of natural signs. The last verse of Isaiah 55 is: “Instead of the 49

[dressed in the color of living flame]” and immediately his body begins to shake, just as in the real life encounters with the living Beatrice that Dante describes in Vita Nuova.141

He tells Virgil that even his blood is vibrating as he “conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma

[recognizes the signs of the ancient flame].”142 As Allen Mandelbaum and several others have noted, this phrase mimics Dido the queen of Carthage’s statement to her sister Anna in the Aeneid 4.23, when she encounters Aeneas in Virgil’s poem.143 Scorned by Aeneas,

Dido later sets herself on fire in despair. Dido’s last desire was that turning herself into smoke would wound her lover for abandoning her. Aeneas sees the smoke from his ship as he heads off to Rome, but he fails to guess its meaning. The smoke only signifies fire to Aeneas, not Dido’s love. Unlike Augustine’s fire of love in the pondus amoris of

Confessions 13, this is not a fire that leads a person to their providential goal. According to Virgil’s narrative, Dido wished to keep Aeneas in Carthage, which would have prevented the founding of Rome had she succeeded.

The similarity of the Dante Character’s words to those of Dido suggest that his love for Beatrice is in some way similar to that which Dido had for Aeneas. It is also noteworthy that Virgil never hears these words of the Dante Character that echo his own from the Aeneid. When the Dante Character turns back toward Virgil, he finds that his guide has disappeared, presumably having returned to limbo with the other ancient poets.144 This association with Dido, of course, is not a positive sign—in the Commedia,

Dido is depicted as residing among the circle of the lustful in Inferno—and the Dante

thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah 55.13) 141 Purgatorio, 30.33. 142 Purgatorio, 30.48. 143 Allen Mandelbaum, note to Purgatorio. This note to Purgatorio 3.48 appears on page 397. 144 Purgatorio, 30.49. 50

Character’s initial excitement at being reunited with his love quickly turns to shame as she begins to castigate him vehemently.

There are several elements of this scene which are highly relevant to Dante’s expansion of Augustine’s category natural signs which he accomplished through marrying it with Augustine’s concept and the pondus amoris. First, Beatrice’s initial word to the Dante Character is to call him by his name, the only time this happens in the

Commedia. Her next words to him are “Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice [Look over here! I am, I truly am Beatrice].”145 The implication is that their two identities are somehow tied together, and that the Dante Character has failed to recognize Beatrice fully. Beatrice’s movements are without restriction—she has descended from paradise to purgatory and previously went to hell to commission Virgil—and, as noted above, she is adorned in the color of a flame—a foil to Dido who is imprisoned within a flame in

Inferno, immobilized for eternity in the circle of the lustful.

In Confessions 13, Augustine say that the fire of love comes from God and is meant to lift people “upwards to the peace of Jerusalem.”146 Beatrice’s explains the flight that the Dante Character experiences in Paradiso 1 operates according to the same logic.

The Dante Character’s failure to “fly” earlier is at the heart of Beatrice’s accusations of him in Purgatorio where chastises him for “having allowed [his] wings to droop” when he should have been “full-fledged.”147 Beatrice says that the Dante Character was afforded so many gifts from both nature and grace that “questi fu tal ne la sua vita nova virtüalmente, ch'ogne abito destro fatto averebbe in lui mirabil prova [this man in his new

145 Purgatorio, 30.73. 146 Confessions, 13.9.10. 147 Purgatorio, 30.59-63. 51 life potentially was such that each good disposition in him would have come to marvelous conclusion].”148 While Beatrice was alive, she explains, her face guided the

Dante Character toward God by the love her beauty inspired, but this influence ended with her death when he “gave himself to others.”149

Beatrice tells the Dante Character that her beauty was a special sign for him, a love/fire that should have moved him closer to God. This view accords with Dante’s own assessment in the Vita Nuova where he asserts that she is “the best that Nature can achieve and by her mold all beauty tests itself.”150 He also says that Beatrice is “a miracle, whose root, namely that of the miracle, is the miraculous Trinity itself.”151 In

Purgatorio 30, Beatrice’s reference to the Dante Character’s “vita nova [new life]” in verse 115 is meant to remind the reader of this earlier work in which Dante names the living person of Beatrice as special theological sign for him.152

As Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, it is crucial that readers not forget that it is

Beatrice’s body that “initiates [Dante’s] poetic enterprise in the first place,” and it is his encounters with Beatrice, as chronicled in the Vita Nuova, that led him to adopt praise as his primary mode of discourse.153 Harrison believes that some scholars do Dante and the interpretation of his works disservice by overshadowing the silent Beatrice portrayed in the Vita Nuova and Dante’s verse, in favor of the more vocal Beatrice character portrayed

148 Purgatorio 30.115-117. 149 Purgatorio 30.121-126. 150 Vita Nuova, 19.11. 151 Vita Nuova, 23.9. 152 Vittorio Montemaggi writes: “To be human, for Dante, is to enjoy a direct relationship with god, relationship defined by the creation of the individual soul by god and by the fact that, in so been created, the human being is capable of speech.” In Unknowability As Love: The Theology of Dante's Commedia, p.69 153 Harrison, Body of Beatrice, p. 18. 52 in the Commedia. The success of the Commedia, Harrison insists, is the fact that Dante

“never ceased to acknowledge the exteriority of Beatrice or the historical otherness of her being in the world …. It is this otherness that I have been calling her body.”154

The Beatrice of Purgatorio confirms this assessment, saying that the beauty of her body should have continued to move the Dante Character toward the love of God as in the pondus amoris even after her body was “scattered and reduced to dust.”155 It should have done so, Beatrice indicates, because she was a special sign for the Dante Character not by her own intent. Rather, the cause of her unique impact on the Dante Character is wrought by the divine will, it is a result of God’s love for him. In other words, Beatrice’s accusation against the Dante Character is a declaration that she is a natural sign, a fire/love that without intending to do so, was meant to move the Dante Character to his place in the heavenly Jerusalem!156

After he confesses to this sin, the Dante Character blushes. Beatrice approves and echoes Dante’s words from the Convivio where he writes in praise of people who allow shame to be visible on their countenance. She says, “when a man's own blushing cheek reveals the condemnation of his sin, in our high court the grindstone dulls the sharp edge of the sword.”157 This too is a nod to Augustine and his concept of natural signs. For smoke and fire is not the only example of natural signs mentioned by Augustine in De

Doctrina Christiana—he also lists “the track of a passing animal” and “the face of one

154 Harrison, Body of Beatrice, p. 54. 155 Purgatorio, 31.51. 156 Although this topic will be addressed in later chapters of this study, it would be remiss not to at least mention Augustine’s writing on the imago Dei which have their primary scriptural homes in Genesis 1.26- 27 and the letters of Paul. The imago Dei is the central element of Augustine’s anthropology and he views this doctrine as justifying inward, spiritual investigations such as those he undertakes in searching for images of the Trinity in De Trinitate. 157 Purgatorio, 31.40-42. 53 who is wrathful or sad … even when he does not wish to show that he is wrathful or sad.”158

For Dante, the body is a sign that creates an encounter with otherness that can result in the movement of love. He also holds that love shapes the use of signs, and characterizes the nature of relationships and habits. Dante’s understanding of signs, as should be clear from this chapter, are deeply rooted in the semiotics and theology of

Augustine. While much more remains to be said on this topic—and Augustine will not be

“forgotten in the cupboard” in the remainder of this study—it is critical to understand

Dante’s view that signs are meant to grow and spread which is the subject our the next chapter.

158 De Doctrina Christiana, 2.1.2. 54

Chapter 3: Signs are Meant to Move and Grow

O divina virtù, se mi ti presti tanto che l'ombra del beato regno segnata nel mio capo io manifesti, vedra'mi al piè del tuo diletto legno venire, e coronarmi de le foglie che la materia e tu mi farai degno. Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie per trïunfare o cesare o poeta,

[O holy Power, if you but lend me of yourself enough that I may show the merest shadow of the blessed kingdom stamped within my mind, you shall find me at the foot of your beloved tree, crowning myself with the very leaves of which my theme and you will make me worthy. So rarely, father, are they gathered to mark the triumph of a Caesar or a poet …]159

The extended invocation that opens Paradiso, a portion of which is cited above in the epigraph to this chapter, highlights the extreme difficulty of the challenge that the poet undertakes in depicting his character’s journey through the heavenly realm. Dante tells the reader that the experience he will be describing is not something which he holds in memory, but rather is an “ombra [shadow]” that has left an impression within his mind. “Paradiso,” writes Zygmunt Baranski, “is the linguistic expression (the

‘manifestation’) of the memorial ‘semiotic mark’ of the ‘shadow’ (Paradiso, 1. 23-24) of a ‘sign’ of Heaven (Paradiso, 1. 38¬39).”160 The poet is fully aware that in the Paradiso,

159 Paradiso, 1.22-27. 160 Zygmunt Baranski, “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante” in Dante and the Middle Ages, John C. Barnes and Cormac B. Cuilleanain (eds.) (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 163. 55 he will be stretching and extending the limits of language and metaphor. As Peter

Hawkins says, "Dante knows that in the final canticle he is writing on water.”161

The poet takes on this challenge, however, because he believes that signs are meant to move and grow—and that the growth of signs is what make a poet “worthy”

(Paradiso, 1. 27) of winning “the very leaves” (Paradiso, 1. 26) that will “mark the triumph” (Paradiso, 1. 29).162 As is made evident from the retelling of the Tower of

Babel story in De Vulgare Eloquentia which was discussed in Chapter One, however,

Dante does not always view the growth of signs in a positive light. In fact, tension between the growth and unity of language—what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the centripetal and centrifugal aspect of “every utterance”—suffuses Dante’s opera, marrying the struggle of a fruitful imagination with a deep desire for unity.163

As others have indicated, the Commedia represents a groundbreaking change in

Dante’s poetics where he more fully exploits the literary potential latent in linguistic change and diversity. Dante’s earlier works, however, also provide important insights into his ideas about the growth and movement of signs—ideas that he continued to employ as he developed the poetic logic that enabled him to compose the Commedia.

Because the movement and growth of signs is such a fundamental element to the

Commedia’s structure, there is an abundance of potential entry points to studying this

161 Peter S. Hawkins. Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 278 162 The leaves with which the poet will be rewarded are typically viewed as a reference to the crown of laurel. This is certainly accurate, but as is shown below, the leaves have an additional meaning within the Commedia of pages that contain writing. Dante is saying that others will write about his great poem, perhaps for centuries after its publication, much as he writes of Virgil, and Homer more than a millennium after their deaths. 163 Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist; translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272. 56 topic. This chapter will focus on four that are most critical, each of which is referenced in the epigraph above.164

The first section of this chapter examines Dante’s use of plant images—seeds, leaves, trees, branches, flowers—to represent signs which grow and spread in positive ways. Next, this study reviews Dante’s discussion of poetic composition in De Vulgare

Eloquentia, where he describes how signs are bundled together according to a variety of logics. Dialogism and otherness are the subject of the third section of this chapter. The fourth and final section demonstrates Dante’s use of Bonaventure’s semiotic categories.

The chapter concludes by showing how all of these ideas about the movement and growth of signs connect in the story of St. Dominic which Bonaventure narrates to the Dante

Character in Paradiso 12.

Images of Growth

Dante’s use of plant images has been studied by a number of scholars, including

Paola Nasti who notes that “Dante compares the blessed to plants three times” within the heaven of the sun.165 Nasti’s references are to Paradiso 10.91-92, Paradiso 12.19 and

Paradiso 14.13. The first example occurs in the Dante Character’s dialog with Thomas

Aquinas. The Dante Character and Beatrice have been surrounded by two groups of

164 The four themes are all represented in these eight line from Paradiso 1: the image of “leaves” and” calls forth the trope of growth and writing; the word “gathered” refers to the idea of bundling or collecting signs; the phrase “lend me yourself” echoes theme of otherness; the word “ombra,” as is detailed below, is one of Bonaventure’s main semiotic terms; and, the “stamp” that makes one “worthy” evokes the stigmata of St. Francis, which in turn serves as the contemplative inspiration for Bonaventure’s Iterarium. 165 Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante’s Heaven of the Sun,” in in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) p., 231 57 dancing, singing and beaming lights, both of which have circled them three times.

Referring to the circle of which he is a member, Aquinas says, “You want to know with what plants and blossoms this garland is in flower.”166 Among individuals from the two circles of Paradiso 11 and 12, are “jurists and historiographers, grammarians and logicians, mystics and encyclopedists” along with exegetes and biblical authors—such as

Albert of Cologne, Gratian, Peter Abelard, Solomon, Dionysius, and Richard of St.

Victor.167 Many of these blossoms are those who were either credited in Christian tradition with the authorship of some portion of scripture—as a scriba Dei or vehicle of the Holy Spirit—or interpreted the words of scripture. Most of this latter group contributed glosses, or commentary that surrounded the scriptural texts in the margins of each page of the Bible. It is important to note that in the middle ages these glosses were commonly viewed as divinely inspired writings that were on a par with scripture.

Two cantos later, it is the narrator who refers to these communities of the blessed as “two wreaths of those eternal roses.”168 The final use of this trope within the heaven of the sun is made by Beatrice who asks Aquinas to clarify for the Dante Character if the

“light that blooms and makes your substance radiant shall remain with you eternally the way it shines today.”169 Because the final judgment still is in the future, the blessed do not yet have their resurrection bodies and the Dante Character is wondering how their current forms will translate into this later state. Aquinas assures the Dante Character that the light that shines forth from what Giuseppe Mazzotta terms the “Circle of Knowledge” will not be lessened by their resurrection bodies, nor will it harm their vision. As Aquinas

166 Paradiso 10.91-92. 167 Mazzotta, p. 210-211; Paradiso 10.99-132. 168 Paradiso 12.19. 169 Paradiso 14.13-15. 58 explains it is the blessed’s love that “si raggerà dintorno cotal vesta [shall dress us in this radiance].”170 The blessed souls’ love of God will only increase with their resurrected bodies, Aquinas expounds, because they will be more complete and will be able to reflect the divine light more fully. The increased light will expand their vision, which will in turn increase their ardor. In this fruitful back-and-forth, love increases knowledge and knowledge magnifies love in return, as the divine light of the Trinity continues to unfold in them ad infinitum.171 As Giuseppe Mazzotta has claimed, knowledge for Dante “is not a static, immobile entity”—even in heaven it continues to move and grow.172

While Dante uses plant imagery to describe the exegetes in the heaven of the sun, he also employs images—such as seeds, roots, branches, and leaves—elsewhere in the

Commedia to represent how signs are meant to move and grow. In Inferno 33, for example, Count Ugolino tells the Dante Character that his words are seeds which he hopes will bear fruit, if and when the Dante Character returns to the land of the living. It is not only seeds that are used to represent signs in the Commedia, but also the figure of leaves. More crucial than the trope used by Ugolino is Adam’s description of words as leaves in Paradiso 26. Adam tells the Dante Character that “It is the work of nature man should speak but, if in this way or in that, nature leaves to you, allowing you to choose at your own pleasure.”173 Adam says that the first name he used for God was “I,” but later

170 Paradiso 14.39. 171 Dante’s view of heaven in the Commedia, is one where humans, as the divine image, continue to participate more fully in the two processions of the Trinity, understanding and love, even though people never do so to the same extent as the persons of the Trinity. Recall Adam’s comment on the limits of human participation in the beatific vision from Paradiso 26 discussed in Chapter Two. 172 Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 5. 173 Paradiso 26.130-132. 59

God’s name was El “and that is as it should be, for mortal custom is like a leaf upon a branch, which goes and then another comes.”174

Dante revives this trope in the final canto of the Commedia. Struggling to recall the impression left by his experience of the beatific vision, the Dante Character compares his poetic exertion to grasp and record something of these fleeting signs to the “Sibyl's oracles” which were written “on weightless leaves” that “lifted by the wind, were swept away.”175 As Peter Dronke has indicated, Dante’s source for this image is Virgil’s

Aeneid. In Book III of the Aeneid, Helenus the son of the deceased Trojan king Priam, tells Aeneas that he must journey to the Sibyl at Cumae and receive her prophecy in order to help fulfill his destiny. The Sibyl usually writes her divinations on piles of dried oak leaves which are placed about the opening of her cave. If these leaves happen to be scattered in the wind, her message is lost and Sibyl will refuse to help their recipients to gather all the leaves and reassemble them in their proper order. Out of order and mixed with messages intended for others, these divinations are useless for guiding the actions of their intended recipients. To avoid this potential calamity, Helenus advises Aeneas to request his personal divinations in the form of a song, which Aeneas does in Book VI of the Aeneid when he encounters the Sibyl.176 This enables Aeneas to successfully journey to the underworld and return safely. Virgil, it would seem, views poetry as more powerful than prose due to its musicality.

In Paradiso 26, Dante’s Adam says that the movement and growth of signs is a good and natural thing. The scattered leaves of the Sybil suggests, however, that the

174 Paradiso 26.64-66. Mazzotta shows that Dante’s source for this image, which he also uses in the Convivio to communicate unending linguistic change, is Horace's Ars poetica (60-62). 175 Paradiso 33.136-138. 176 Peter Dronke, “The Conclusion of Dante’s Commedia” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 170. 60 movement of signs can lead to confusion, to a scattering that recalls the Tower of Babel story which Dante recounts in De Vulgare Eloquentia. In this same work, Dante proposes that time is a greater factor in linguistic differentiation than is geographic distance. “On this account, therefore, I make so bold as to declare,” Dante says, “that if the ancient citizens of Pavia were to rise from the grave, they would speak a language distinct and different from that of the Pavians of today.”177 What marks the distance between the ancient Pavians and the citizens of that city who were Dante’s contemporaries is not simply the words that they use, but also, the other customs that define their community. If people consider the wide range of customs that mark a city,

Dante says, “we can see that we differ much more from ancient inhabitants of our own city than from our contemporaries who live far off.”178

This suggests that linguistic changes and changes in customs are interconnected.

Dante views signs and language as far more than a technology that people employ—for him they constitute a way of being in the world. Such changes in customs are for the most part imperceptible to us when we take a short term perspective on the communities in which we are members. “For, when things happen little by little,” Dante writes, “we scarcely register their progress.”179 Using the example of a growing child whom a person has not seen for some time, he argues that the magnitude of growth and change is much more visible with the perspective afforded by considering a longer interval of time. This also suggests that the language and customs of a community can become wounded in some way, or branch off and slowly grow apart as did Dante’s Florence which was wracked by a civil war that led to the poet’s lifelong exile from his homeland.

177 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.9.7. 178 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.9.7. 179 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.9.8. 61

De Vulgare Eloquentia is after all, Dante’s book of exile. It is in his wanderings from city to city, as he is confronted with a multitude of dialects, that Dante develops major portions of his semiotic theory. While he envisions that the movement and growth of signs is natural, Dante also holds that this growth requires some level of cultivation in order for signs to serve their purpose—also mentioned in De Vulgare Eloquentia—of enabling mutual recognition, community, and a sharing of the world. Poetry, which collects signs and arranges them according to a particular order is in Dante’s view an effort to cultivate signs, as shall be discussed in the next section.

Bundling Sticks

The connection of one sign to another is what is meant by the movement and growth of signs. In Dante’s view, poetry is the ideal method for giving the movement of signs a vector and shaping their growth. Poetry’s rules of organization do not constitute a countervailing force to the growth of signs—rather, they provide an exemplary method for intentionally cultivating the growth of signs.

Dante’s definition of poetry in De Vulgare Eloquentia is that it is “nothing other than a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.”180 On its face, Dante’s definition seems rather straightforward and is rarely given much consideration by scholars, if it is mentioned at all. Many studies of Dante’s poetry—in which the Commedia is often taken in isolation from his other works—stress the poet’s leanings toward one thinker or another and then attempt to demonstrate how the logical

180 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.4.2. 62 structure that undergirds either the narrative of the poem as a whole or of a particular canto is Thomistic, Aristotelian, Augustinian, Avveroist, etc. Baranski’s warning, however, that when discussing Dante “it is necessary to not forget that we are talking about, first, a poet and not a thinker,” is a very important observation that demands a different point of departure—namely, attending to Dante’s understanding of poetic composition which he describes in De Vulgare Eloquentia.

First, Dante tells the reader of De Vulgare Eloquentia that his purpose in writing is to teach poets how to write in the vernacular effectively.181 This is something which

Dante considers to be extremely important. The “exalted power” of poetry is clear to

Dante, who rhetorically asks, “what greater power could there be than that which can melt the hearts of human beings, so as to make the unwilling willing and the willing unwilling, as it has done and still does?”182 Unfortunately, De Vulgare Eloquentia is an unfinished work and readers do not get to learn the full extent of the poet’s thoughts on the rhetorical power of poetry and all of the different elements and relations which contribute to it.

Readers can, however, gain a great deal of insight into the musical choices and considerations that Dante consciously makes in constructing his poetry. First, following the lead of Horace’s Ars Poetica, Dante says that an author’s first choice should be her subject or topic.183 Next, depending on the topic, the poet will need to select a style that is fitting. For Dante this means choosing among the tragic, comic, or elegiac styles. The third factor that a poet must consider is the number of syllables to employ in each line. In

181 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.19.2. 182 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.17.14. 183 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.4.4. 63 his readings of master poets Dante has found the number of syllables per line to range from three to 11. He states his strong preference for lines that include eleven syllables, known as hendecasyllables, because they offer poets greater space for creativity.184

Following his views on the benefits and drawbacks connected with the various numbers of syllables employed per line, Dante begins a discussion about the importance of construction, which he defines as “a group of words put together in regulated order.”185

The metaphor that he uses his to describe the process of poetic construction is that of a peasant gathering sticks and cords and bundling them together. In this trope, the sticks are signs, the bundles are microstructures within the poem, and the bundle is the canzone

(or the canto), Dante’s poetic form of choice.186

“The best language is suitable to the best thinking,” Dante writes.187 Here Dante asserts that the great poets are indeed sign-masters, not simply masterful users of signs.

Using the example of gold, which loses value when mixed with something lesser like silver, Dante says that the quality of the thoughts and the language must match or the result is jarring and benefits neither the thoughts nor the language used to express them.188 The superior understanding which master poets have, with respect to the mechanisms of musical and verbal signs working in combinations, shines through in the poetry they compose. It is for this reason that “writers of prose most often learn the vernacular from poets,” Dante explains, “because what is set out in poetry serves as a model for those who write prose, and not the other way about.”189

184 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.5.3. 185 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.6.2. 186 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.5.8. 187 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.1.8. 188 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.1.10. 189 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.1.1. 64

This “primacy” of the poets with respect to the vernacular is no small thing.

Earlier in De Vulgare Eloquentia, Dante says that “the whole flock of languages spoken in the cities of Italy turns this way or that, moves or stands still, at the behest of this vernacular.”190 The poets then are shepherds of this community of languages—languages which are also deeply connected to the customs, habits and beliefs of the people who employ them. Dante views the poets as gardeners tending the vineyard of the vernacular—weeding out the “thorn bushes” that act as a barrier, and grafting new branches and planting seeds that will bring forth fruit.191 The poet’s role in bundling and disentangling signs serves a crucial social role.

Given the emphasis that Dante places on the mastery involved in bundling signs when composing excellent verse, it is no surprise that he identifies hierarchical degrees of poetic construction. Dante argues that poetry is best written by imitating the master poets, “those great ones who wrote their poetry in a language, and with a technique, governed by rules.”192 What he terms “flavorless” constructions are bland styles used by authors who have not studied master poets. Other constructions which Dante calls

“barely flavored” and “graceful but flavored” are found among authors who have some familiarity with poetry or rhetoric, but their understanding is only on a superficial level which is reflected in their compositions. The highest degree of construction, which

Dante terms “flavored and graceful” are those which are authored by individuals who have a deep knowledge of poetry and rhetoric. Exemplars of this most excellent brand of

190 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.18.1. 191 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.18.1. 192 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.4.3. 65 poetic composition include, Guido Calvalcante, Arnaut Daniel and Guido Guinezzelli, all of whom are mentioned in the Commedia.193

While Dante communicates some principles about what constitutes superior composition, his main advice is to study the contemporary poets mentioned above, along with classical masters like Virgil, Statius, and Ovid.194 He then shifts his attention to choices of vocabulary, insisting on the importance of selecting the right words.

Categorizing words according to the effect vocabulary has on the reader, Dante says that words are variously perceived as infantile, womanish, and virile. Dante divides virile words into those which he calls the rustic and urbane. He further subdivides urbane words into the “combed and glossy” and the “shaggy and unkempt.”195 Combed and the shaggy words are the ones he recommends for the best poetry.

While Dante’s terminology for different categories of words may appear at first glance to be unsophisticated, his definitions are extraordinarily precise. “Combed words” for example are “those words that, having three syllables (or very close to that number), and neither aspiration, nor acute or circumflex accent, nor doubled z or x, nor twinned liquid consonants.”196 Further, combed words also do not have twinned “consonants placed immediately after a mute,” Dante says, and “instead seem, as it were, polished, and leave a certain sweetness in the mouths of those who utter them.”197 Shaggy words are those that do not fit within the descriptors of combed words, but which are still needed for communication in the vernacular. Examples of shaggy words that Dante that

193 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.6.4-6. 194 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.6.7. 195 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.7.2. 196 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.7.5. 197 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.7.5. 66 offers include words such as “ut sì, no, me, te, se [yes, no, me, you, him].”198 Word choice is not merely ornamental, Dante tells the reader, but a matter of great urgency.

Some words “reveal greatness of spirit and some are smoke,” Dante explains, and although to the untrained reader they “may seem to offer a way upwards … it will be clear to the sensible that they lead not upwards but to a headlong fall down the opposite slope.”199

Once Dante has given his readers a description of the basic materials of poetry— the words or sticks—he then begins to explain how these are to be bundled or composed into canzoni. Dante’s favors canzoni among all forms of verse because they offer the poet’s creativity the greatest technical freedom. “The technical possibilities of singing in poetry are fully exploited only in canzoni,” Dante claims, because “whatever features of the art are found in other forms are also found in canzoni - but the converse is not true.”200

Creating canzoni, or “harmonious words to be set to music,” is a very complex process that involves: developing the expression of a melody; organizing the different parts of lines, stanzas and a variety of mini-structures; and, balancing the numbers of syllables and lines to meet the intended effects.201 While the stanza is the most basic micro-structure within a canzone, there are several others that Dante mentions such as frons, versus, pedes, cauda, sirma and so forth—each of which can have differing relationships with the various other micro-structures that a poet decides to include, and

198 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.7.6. 199 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.7.2. There is an interesting parallel between Dante’s phrasing here and the predicament of the Dante Character in Inferno 1. 200 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.3.3. Dante's argument in favor of the canzone is very similar to that made by Bakhtin about the novel as a melding of genres. 201 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.8.6. 67 different relationships with the poem as a whole.202 The ordering of the constructions in turn determines whether or not it is “possible to repeat the melody exactly.”203

It is only after deliberating over all of these technical considerations that Dante begins to discuss one of the most elemental aspects associated with poetry, the subject of rhyme. Rhymes are yet another logic of relations used to weave together signs and bundles of signs. Each of the micro-and macro structures mentioned above can be designed to participate in an endless variety of rhyme schemes, depending on what the poet intends to convey or evoke through the combination of music and words. “Poets grant themselves a considerable degree of license” with respect to rhyme, Dante says, as this is the primary means for achieving “the sweetness of the overall harmony” of their poetry.204

Considered semiotically, rhyme is a repetition with distinction—it repeats in part, yet in so doing it extends and connects a sign or signs to another sign or series of signs.

As such, it is an orderly form of semioses, where the second rhyme word remains dependent upon its predecessor, a relationship that mirrors that which figural senses have with respect to the literal sense in allegorical interpretation. There is also an interesting parallel which rhyme, as semioses, has to the relationships of characters who are portrayed within the Commedia. For example, each character within Inferno can be thought of as words that refuse to rhyme. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase,

Dante’s hell is a place where nothing connects, where nothing moves or grows, where nothing rhymes with nothing. Purgatorio is a place where words rhyme with a better word in the form of the visible speech depicted on the steps that lead to each higher level.

202 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.11.12. 203 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.12.9. 204 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.13.3. 68

Paradiso is where all words rhyme with God’s Word in a harmony characterized by love, beauty, movement, song and dance.

Dante, however, has only initiated a dialog of the various relations that rhyme schemes can have among the various lines and micro-structures in a canzone when the De

Vulgare Eloquentia breaks off midsentence.205 In this final line of De Vulgare Eloquentia

Dante says that “sometimes we sing to persuade and sometimes to dissuade,” giving the reader a final reminder that poetry combines music and rhetoric.206 Although the reader is left wanting with respect to Dante’s views on the rhetorical aspects of poetry, this partial view of Dante’s poetics which De Vulgare Eloquentia affords makes a very powerful point within the context of this study.

Poetry—as Dante describes it in De Vulgare Eloquentia and as he actually composes it in the Commedia—involves extraordinary logical rigor and is sign mastery on an astonishingly high level. Dante’s poetic considerations show that composing poetry is a practice that integrates multiple logics simultaneously for bundling signs together— and again, this is the case even without considering the rhetorical and semantic issues that are obviously at play. While this study provides only a skeletal view of Dante’s poetics, it clearly demonstrates the exceptional poetic effort brought to bear by Dante in order to craft his poetic language. Each of the logics of composition that Dante identifies is in a sense a language, a distinct way of signifying. For Dante, the composition of his poetry is a heteroglot undertaking that results in works which, like pomegranates that hold within

205 Why Dante chose to abandon the De Vulgare Eloquentia mid-sentence has been the subject of much speculation, since Dante himself gives no explanation—at least not one that has survived or been discovered. The most common interpretations are that he decided to devote most of his time to writing the Commedia or that he changed his mind about some of the ideas expressed within this work. While clarity around this decision would be beneficial, the main point of this study’s explication of the treatise is to show the multiple systems or logics that Dante considered in composing poetry. 206 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 2.13.3. 69 themselves a myriad of seeds, provide the germs for a multitude of readings that are unitary, heteroglot, or both. 207

Dialogical Heteroglossia and Otherness

Zygmunt Baranski asserts that Dante quit De Vulgare Eloquentia midsentence because of a “radical change which took place in Dante’s attitude to linguistic variety sometime around 1307, when he began to compose the Comedy.”208 This change is reflected in the different versions of the story of the Tower of Babel which Dante’s tells in De Vulgare Eloquentia and in the Commedia. In the former version, the poet seems to view linguistic variation as strictly resulting from God’s punishment for human pride in trying to retake heaven by storm. Dante laments the loss of a stable, universal idiom such as he understands to have existed in the original Hebrew that was given as a divine gift to

Adam and Eve in the creation account of Genesis. When the Dante Character meets

Adam in Paradiso 26, however, Adam tells Dante that nature gives people the ability to speak, but “così o così, natura lascia [if in this way or that nature leaves to you].”209

Using different words to describe things is natural, Adam says, “for mortal custom is like

207 It is important to note Dante’s repeated insistence that young poets learn from contemporary and prior masters, which indicates that he does not see this as his own achievement, but views himself a part of a tradition. This perspective is further supported by the credit that both the Dante Character and Statius extend to Virgil within the narrative of the Commedia. While some, such as Harold Bloom, take these expressions of gratitude to be a veiled version of poetic agon, the comments on poetic masters in De Vulgare Eloquentia suggests that they are sincere. 208 Zygmunt G. Baranski. “Significar per verba: Notes on Dante and Plurilingualism,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 184. 209 Paradiso, 26.131. 70 a leaf upon a branch, which goes and then another comes.”210 Because human creations do not last forever, Adam explains, “la lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta [the tongue I spoke was utterly extinct]” before Nimrod and his followers built the Tower of Babel.

In the Commedia, Nimrod appears as a giant in Inferno 31. Along with three other prisoners, Nimrod resides in Inferno’s Well of the Giants. His upper body overlooks the pouch of falsifiers, while his feet are grounded in the frozen lake of Cocytus. As the

Dante Character and Virgil approach Nimrod, he shouts out “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi,” which Virgil explains is a nonsensical phrase that is understandable to no one.211

Nimrod’s punishment is that he speaks a language that is not interpretable and he is likewise incapable of translating anyone else’s language into his own. In the Commedia, it is not linguistic differentiation that is the penalty of Babel, but rather, the inability of one’s language to connect with others. Nimrod is isolated within a sign world disconnected from every other person. Whether or not Nimrod understands his own babbling is not made clear in the Commedia, but is left for the reader to ponder.

While Dante’s account of the Babel story in the Commedia differs from that in De

Vulgare Eloquentia, it does not erase this earlier version, but rather, refines it. In De

Vulgare Eloquentia linguistic differentiation is viewed as causing political division, whereas in the Commedia, it is not. Political division, in this later account, stems from greed and a desire to dominate others. For example, in Inferno 28, it is the sewers of discord, such as the trubadour poet, Betran de Born who have been found guilty of dividing communities—a misdeed that is marked by their own severed bodies, parts of

210 Paradiso, 26.131. 211 Inferno, 31.67. 71 which are described as being scattered throughout this bolgia.212 Souls in this pouch march endlessly in a circle. Just as their wounds begin to heal they walk past devils with swords who reopen their lacerations by cutting them repeatedly. Bertran, who incited

Prince Henry to wage war with his own father, King Henry II, holds his own head

“swinging in his hand as if it were a lantern.”213

While Dante continued to view the violence associated with warring communities as connected to language, the Commedia offers an amended diagram of this relationship.

In his earlier description of the Tower of Babel story in De Vulgare Eloquentia, Dante understood linguistic differentiation to be the cause of political division. By the time he composes the Commedia, however, Dante has disentangled the knot joining multilingualism to the evils of violence and war. Instead, Dante came to view human greed and a desire for unwarranted power over others as the cause of violence. Those who incite others to war do so through the power of their words—they bend signs to their will and through signs bend others to discord and violence. This is why the sewers of discord are positioned in Hell’s circle of the fraudulent, wedged between the evil counselors and the falsifiers.

As Teodelinda Barolini has shown, Dante’s characterization of Bertran is not based on the bellicose poems that Bertran composed, but rather, “on reports about

Bertran that circulated in the Provecal vidas …. or biographies” which accuse Bertran of

212 Teodelinda Barolini notes that Inferno 28 “ranks high in the infernal lexicography of body parts. In a catalogue of body parts in Inferno according to usage per canto, compiled by Grace Delmolino, Inferno 28 ranks second after Inferno 25: 44 body parts are named in Inferno 28, as compared to 69 in Inferno 25. Teodolinda Barolini. "Inferno 28: Contrapasso" Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014. http://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-28/ 213 Inferno, 28.122. 72 inciting war between Prince Henry and his father.214 According to these accounts, Bertran was able to manipulate Prince Henry and his father through the persuasive power of his poetry, bending them toward whatever actions were most likely to benefit his own coffers.215 This portrayal of Bertran is consistent with Dante’s vision of poetry in De

Vulgare Eloquentia, where he asserts that poetry has the power to “melt the hearts of human beings, so as to make the unwilling willing and the willing unwilling.”216 At stake here is the very nature of language, and of poetry in particular.

As sign masters, skilled poets have the capacity to define reality not only for themselves, but for others as well. The positive aspect of this is that poetry and language can be used to create a shared understanding of the world that involves mutual recognition—which Dante identifies as the core purpose of language in the first book of

De Vulgare Eloquetia—thereby uniting a community. As Dante’s example of Betran shows, however, poetry or sign mastery also entails a potential to manipulate signs for one’s own gain, to remake the world in one’s own image. Such manipulations involve the erasure, elision or replacement of existing relationships. Prince Henry’s vision of King

Henry as his father is erased by a portrait of the king as his enemy that Bertran paints in the Prince’s mind.

For Dante, how people use signs is of tremendous practical importance. By the time Dante wrote the Commedia his views on the relationship among signs and things was similar to that of Augustine who wrote in De Musica that while “things are implanted in the minds of all in common,” the particular signs we use “are imposed

214 Teodolinda Barolini. “Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante's Comedy,” in Dante, Jeremy Tambling, ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), p. 94. 215 Barolini, Bertran de Born and Sordello, p. 94-94. 216 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.17.14. 73 arbitrarily,” and the force of signs, in turn, “depends for the most part on authority and usage.”217 As Adam explains in Paradiso 26, “mortal custom is like a leaf upon a branch.”218 Custom and usage, however, are not simply random, but are determined by human volition which can impact how the things of the world are viewed and interpreted.

This bestows a great deal of power among skilled sign users such as poets, theologians, politicians, academics and philosophers.

As Dante’s story of Bertran shows, this power can be used to incite war and to divide communities by purposefully creating a view of the world that is partially false yet compelling. In Purgatorio 17, Virgil explains that love is the cause of every virtue and every vice. What “mal si torce [bends to evil]” our loves, Virgil says, is usually a desire to have evil visited upon our neighbor.219 This bent love towards the neighbor usually comes in three forms: a desire to gain greater recognition for one’s self by having the neighbor humiliated (pride); fear that one may lose social status or power if the neighbor thrives (envy); and the desire for vengeance against a neighbor whom a person feels has offended them (anger).220

Bertran’s sin fits the description of envy, and it is this bent form of love that moves him in his efforts to persuade the young prince to wage war against his father. The cause of political division in this story is not the diversity of tongues, but bent love.

Dante, like Augustine, had come to believe that “there can be diversity in tongues; but in the very truth of constituted things there cannot be.”221 Bent love uses signs to present a

217 St. Augustine, De Musica, 3.3. 218 Paradiso, 26.137. 219 Purgatorio, 17.100; 17.14. 220 Purgatorio, 17.114-123. Mandelbaum notes that these three ways in which love is bent is reflected in the architecture of Purgatorio, where the first three terraces cleanse sinners of pride, envy, and anger. 221 St. Augustine, De Musica, 3.3. 74 warped view of some aspect of the world. Semiotic violence can lead to physical violence, which in turn can beget even more violence, as described in the endless cycles of wounding and dismemberments of Inferno 28.

Determining that bent love, and not linguistic differentiation, was the source of political violence provided Dante with a much wider creative clearing in which to compose his poetry. It enabled Dante to release poetic power that he had held in check, because he previously viewed plurilingualism as a source of political upheaval. While the seeds for a new heteroglot style of writing can be found in Dante’s earlier works—for example, Dante’s incredible ear for linguistic differentiation as he writes about the different Italian vernaculars in De Vulgare Eloquentia and the manifold ways in which he says signs can be bundled when composing verse—these seeds do not fully bloom until he writes the Commedia. By the time he composed the Commedia, however, Dante has come to believe that signs grow by being united with other signs and that the unity of communities is realized through this semiotic growth.

The idea that the Commedia differs dramatically from all of Dante’s other writing is not new, nor is the idea that this remarkable evolution is connected with Dante’s views on plurilingualism. Baranski, for example, observes that “two phases can be distinguished in the development of Dante’s position in relation to the intricate world of mediaeval plurilingualism.”222 In Dante’s works prior to the Commedia, Baranski asserts, the poet largely views plurilingualism as a problem to be solved, whereas in the Commedia, Dante

222 Zygmunt G. Baranski “Significar per verba: notes on Dante and Plurilingualism,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 184. 75 embraces plurilingualism as a natural fact of life which he exploits in several innovative ways.223

The drastic change in Dante’s poetry marked by the Commedia has also been recognized by scholars such as John Freccero and Harold Bloom who are both fascinated by the great originality of Dante’s masterpiece. Freccero claims that Dante combines the circular form of the epic with the linear structure of the novel to create a “poetic synthesis which has always been considered a genre unto itself.”224 Bloom goes further, insisting that Dante, like all great originals among the strongest authors, breaks all forms. Thus,

Bloom asks the rhetorical question: “What is Dante’s Commedia . . . is it an epic, a comedy, a spiritual autobiography, or a prophecy in the mode of the wild Joachim de

Flora?”225 Bloom’s point is that Dante’s Commedia has the characteristics fundamental to each of each these genres and therefore cannot be contained by any one of them.

The poetic innovations realized in the Commedia are not just evident on the macro level, but also are deeply embedded within the language of the poem. As Baranski has demonstrated, Dante includes in the Commedia “every register of his native language, and further embellishes this with Latinisms, Gallicisms, a wide range of neologisms, regionalisms, words associated with particular literary genres, [and] other kinds of technical vocabulary.”226 The technical vocabulary includes terminology from geometry, theological exegesis, semiotics, astronomy, optics, philosophy, navigation, business, agriculture and geography—in short every area of knowledge that was available to Dante

223 Baranski, 1999, 184. 224 John Freccero. “Dante’s Ulysses: From Epic to Novel,” in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Norman T. Burns and Christopher J. Reagan (eds.), (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), p. 104. 225 Harold Bloom. The Book of J, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 226 Baranski (1999), 192. 76 in his milieu.227 One of Dante’s early commentators, Benvenuti, noted that the Commedia not only contains every form of knowledge, but also, every form of writing.228

The characters in the Commedia also utilize an immense variety of vocal registers which include the formal elocution of the Farinata, the garbled language of Nimrod, the singing of psalms among the penitents in Purgatorio, the metaphorical language of theologians, and the beast-like wailing of pain that echoes throughout the various pits of

Inferno.229

As Mikhail Bakhtin has noted Dante, like Dostoevsky, had a rare proclivity for language, a “particular gift for hearing and understanding all voices immediately and simultaneously.”230 The same aural sensitivity that enabled Dostoevsky to create the polyphonic novel enabled Dante to create a heteroglot poem which gathers multitude forms of social speech and bundles them into a cohesive narrative.

The Commedia is created by depicting the “diversity of social speech . . . a diversity of individual voices” which form the content of the sign world that Dante represents in his great poem.231 In writing of novels, Bakhtin claims that the telos of a heteroglot literary creation is not internal to the work, because “the signifying word lives

227 Many of these areas of knowledge are cited by Baranski (1999), 191-192. 228 Benvenuti’s commentary is cited by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis, William Trask trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 188. 229 See Baranski (1999) 191; Paula Nasti writes that “for a poet like Dante, however, whose verse could open up to a plurality of motives and issues while preserving its formal cohesion, poetic structures in signification were never monolithic. On the contrary, in Dante a variety of principle “topics” can cohabit with the same enclosed structure when the logical and poetic links are strong enough to justify the risks related to multiple signification. Paula Nasti. “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) pp 217 230 M. M. Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Caryl Emerson trans. and ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). P. 30. 231 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 278 77 beyond itself, that is, it lives by directing its purposiveness outward.”232 This same idea applies to the Commedia as is evidenced by Dante’s multiple addresses to his reader and the presence of the Dante Character—who serves as a proxy and guide for the reader— within the poem.

This is also consistent with the poetic mission that the Dante Character receives in

Paradiso 17 from his ancestor Cacciaguida. Cacciaguida tells the Dante Character that he has been shown well-known people in the realm of the dead because his poetry would otherwise lack the power to inspire his readers, “since the mind of one who listens will not heed nor fix its faith on an example that has its roots in things unknown or hidden or on some other proof not clearly shown.”233 In order to fulfill his poetic mission of “in pro del mondo che mal vive [serving the world that lives so ill],” Cacciaguida tells the Dante

Character that he must “forswear all falsehood, revealing all that [he has] seen” and heard.234 If we interpret the calling that the Dante Character receives within the

Commedia as the poet’s self-conception of his artistry, it is clear that he came to view the inclusion all the languages, habits, and bits of knowledge from multiple disciplines to be the touchstone of his poetry. Whereas the vision of poetry expressed in De Vulgare

Eloquentia put a great value on the careful selection of words or sticks gathered by the poet before bundling them together, the emphasis in the poetry of the Commedia is on the gathering and bundling of all relevant signs. The logic and mechanics of how Dante bundles signs has also changed by the time he begins composing the Commedia, as is

232 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 353-4 233 The first quote here is made by Beatrice in Purgatorio 32.103. The second is said by Cacciaguida in Paradiso, 17.139-142. 234 Paradiso, 17.127-128. Italics are mine. 78 shown below. First, however, it is necessary to provide some further justification for employing Bakhtin’s ideas to understand what Dante has achieved in the Commedia.

As Jeremy Tambling has noted, “Bakhtinian accounts of Dante are rare, because the drive towards hierarchization and to single truth seem out of place in comparison to

Bakhtin’s emphasis on the grotesque and the non-classically ordered.”235 Also, in delivering his description of the novel as a unique genre, Bakhtin contrasts the novel to poetry, which serves as an additional impediment to scholars wishing to employ his literary concepts to Dante. Bahktin says that while the sphere of a novelist is filled with a multitude of voices and visions of the world, the poet’s world is “unitary and singular.”236

He says that the “poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a … unitary sealed-off utterance” where “each word must express the poets meaning.”237 To create this unitary world, “the poets strips the words of other's intentions,” Bakhtin says, and “everything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget it previous life in any other contexts.”238

Bakhtin’s mention of immersing language in the waters of Lethe is, of course, reminiscent of Purgatorio 31 where the Dante Character confesses his sins and is cleansed of them in the earthly paradise. While this might seem to be a caveat to avoid using Bakhtin’s ideas as an interpretive tool to understand Dante’s poetics, it is important to note that in the midst of Hell in Inferno 14, the Dante Character asks Virgil when they

235 Tambling, Jeremy. Dante, Jeremy Tambling, ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 183. Here Tambling is referring primarily to Baranski’s work on Dante. 236 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, p. 286. 237 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 296-297. 238 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 296-297. 79 will cross the Lethe.239 Virgil explains to him that they will not find the Lethe in Hell, because it is located in the earthly paradise and is where Dante’s sins will be washed from him. This, of course, differs from Virgil’s positioning of Lethe in the underworld in the sixth book of the Aeneid. In Virgil’s version of Lethe, which also has a prior source in

Greek mythology, the deceased who have been purified during their stay in the underworld can drink the waters of Lethe and be reincarnated into a new body.

In Greek, lēthē means oblivion, and unlike the river in Dante’s earthly paradise,

Virgil’s river reflects this meaning since its waters erase the entire memory of a person’s life on earth. Virgil’s Lethe eradicates identity. Dante’s Lethe, however, only removes the memory of guilt. Like a second baptism, it removes the sin that weighs penitents down and which keeps them from flying toward their destined port in union with God according to the pondus amoris. A person who plunges into Dante’s Lethe retains the memory of the life they lived and what they have suffered—even the risen Christ (as is discussed in Chapter Five) retains the scars of his crucifixion. Given this distinction, it seems likely that Bakhtin is either not speaking about Dante when he uses the image of

Lethe to describe how some literary works strip the words they use of others’ intentions to present a monological vision, or he has not read Dante carefully enough. Given the great admiration he expresses for Dante—identifying him as a Dostoevsky’s only equal in hearing and understanding the heteroglossia in his surroundings—it is most likely that the former is the case.240

239 Inferno, 14.130. 240 Bakhtin says that there was a profound tension in Dante between temporal/historical meaning and theological meaning and the poet strives to maintain connections to both by putting them in dialog. I assume that Bakhtin is referring primarily to the Commedia in this context. Bahktin writes: “This is the source of extraordinary tension that pervades all of Dante’s world. It is the result of a struggle between 80

Of course, Dante’s displacement of the Lethe from out of the underworld and into the earthly paradise, is in fact dialogical. It is a sign that points to another a series of tales outside its own borders. The conversation that the Dante Character has with Virgil in

Inferno 14, points to Virgil’s Aeneid as the Commedia’s primary dialog partner with respect to Lethe.

References to the mythical river, however, are scattered throughout classical literature including Plato’s Republic and Ovid’s poetry. On the terrace of the lustful in

Purgatorio 26, the Dante Character encounters the poets Guido Guinizelli, whom he says is “il padre mio e de li altri miei miglior che maiand rime d'amor usar dolci e leggiadre [father to me and to others, my betters, who ever used love's sweet and graceful rhymes],” and Arnaut Daniel.241 At first, the Dante Character is so moved in encountering

Guinizelli that he cannot speak, but at last he expresses his enduring love for his mentor.

Guinizelli replies that “Tu lasci tal vestigio, per quel ch'i' odo, in me, e tanto chiaro, che

Letè nol può tòrre né far bigio [all that I hear you tell leaves so deep and clear a trace in me that Lethe cannot wipe it out or make it dim],” and requests that the Dante Character tell him the source of his enduring affection.242 The Dante Character responds that the source of his love is Guinizelli’s “sweet verses, which as long as modern custom lasts,

living historical time in the extra temporal other-worldly ideal… There is a contradiction, and antagonism between the form generating principles of the whole. And the historical and temporal form of the separate parts. The form of the whole wins out the artistic resolution of precisely the struggle is what gives rise to the tension and provides Dante's work with his extraordinary power to express its epoch, or more precisely the boundary line between two epochs.... After Dante, the most profound and consistent attempt to erect such a verticality was made by Dostoevsky.” M. M. Bakhtin. The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 158. As Tambling has pointed out, Baranski’s work on Dante owes much to Bakhtin, and Baranski writes about this crisis as the battle between the Aristotelians and the exegetes, arguing that Dante comes down more on the side of the exegetes. 241 Purgatorio, 26.97-99. 242 Purgatorio, 26.106-108. 81 will make their very ink seem precious.”243 Upon hearing this, Guinezelli points ahead to

Arnaut Daniel, proclaiming Daniel to be his superior in the composition of verse.

Besides pointing beyond himself to the poetry of Arnaut Daniel, Guinizelli also surreptitiously directs the reader to Ovid, for his statement about Lethe mirrors Ovid’s phrasing of his dedication of Book IV of Tristia Ex Ponto to the Roman Senator Sextus

Pompey. Crediting Sextus with having saved his life, Ovid, writes, “Give me, if such thing there be, the waters of Lethe that benumb the heart, yet I shall not be able to forget you.”244

This reference to Ovid is typical of the way in which Dante seamlessly weaves the words and phases of others into the narrative of the Commedia. A similar instance is indicated in Chapter Two, when the Dante Character sees Beatrice and proclaims to

Virgil that he “conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma [recognizes the signs of the ancient flame].”245 The Dante Character’s phrasing mimics the words of Virgil’s Dido in the

Aeneid 4.23, which the soul of Virgil would presumably recognize, even if the reader does not.246 Another example is that cited by Rachel Jacoff who shows that Dante interlaces the words of Orosius into Inferno 5 where “he virtually quotes [Orosius’] description of Semiramis as she who ‘made lust legal in her law.’”247 Such hidden quotes do not interrupt the flow of Dante’s narrative, but like dormant seeds, they enrich the drama when encountered by a reader who hears the echo of an earlier text, recognizes the

243 Purgatorio, 26.112-114. 244 Ovid. Tristia Ex Ponto, 4.1, Arthur Leslie Wheeler trans. (Cambridge, Mass; The Loeb Classical Library, 1939), p 424. 245 Purgatorio, 30.48. 246 Allen Mandelbaum, note to Purgatorio. This note to Purgatorio 3.48 appears on page 397. 247 Rachel Jacoff. “Transgression in Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999). 82 source, and participates in this dialogism by speculating on what the meaning of this relationship between the multiple texts might be.

As Baranski has demonstrated, “When Dante quotes an auctoritas … he tries to minimize its force as a quotation … often giv[ing] only one or two words of a famous passage, in order not to distract the reader’s attention.”248 Dante takes a similar approach,

Baranksi notes, with foreign words and phrases that appear in the Commedia. “Dante matches foreign words and phrases with the weave of his poem,” Baranski says, “he ensures that these rhyme with an Italian word or words, a technique which [Baranski] has not yet noticed elsewhere in plurlingual literature.”249 This also marks a change for how

Dante employs foreign words in his earlier works. As Baranski observes, even though

Dante’s includes multiple languages throughout his oeuvre prior to the Commedia, “the different languages are structurally kept apart and introduced in a regular manner.”250

In writing the Commedia Dante attempts to include “all the social and ideological voices of [his] era” in order to bring them into dialog, what Bakhtin terms dialogical heteroglossia.251 The point of the dialogical heteroglossia in the Commedia is not simply remove social barriers, but also, as Bakhtin says of the novels of Dostoevsky, to “open new worlds of verbal perception.”252 Bakhtin’s theory of discourse in literary works is based on a particular understanding of the world as an environment where:

“In the everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by

248 Zygmunt G. Baranski, “Significar Per Verba: Notes on Dante and Plurilingualism,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 193. 249 Baranski, Significar Per Verba, 193. 250 Baranski, Significar Per Verba, 189. 251 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 411. 252 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 323. 83

him will be someone else’s words (consciously someone else’s), transmitted with varying degrees of precision and impartiality (or more precisely, partiality).”253

Dante is consciously employing the speech of others in his composition of the

Commedia. As demonstrated in examples above where he integrates phrases from

Virgil’s Aeneid and the poetry of Ovid, Dante uses the words of other authors with great precision. The language that he includes from a wide variety of sources is integrated seamlessly into his narrative. Dante is not attempting to conceal his sources, but rather to create a text whose engagement is not dependent on the erudition of the reader, yet encourages and teaches the reader how the text ought to be read. The discussion of

Paradiso 26 in Chapter Two shows that to read the Commedia in its full richness requires the reader to participate in a dialog not only with other texts, but also to recognize the multitude of connections that the poet has constructed between various cantos, lines, and images within the Commedia. The Dante scholar David F. Ford recalls a conversation he had with Christian Moevs at a conference on Dante’s poetics and theology where Moevs remarked that “there is no reduction” in reading the Commedia, “You get in there and you can’t just say ‘I’ve got it.’”254 Ford asserts that as a reader of the Commedia, “You inevitably have to make all these rich connections.”255 The Commedia is designed to expand and transform the reader’s understanding of her social world, of her relationships with other people and with God.

Dante’s Commedia never presents itself as an isolated text, but rather, purposefully gathers and engages in a wide variety of discourses. It is not only various

253 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 339. 254 Christian Moevs quoted in David F. Ford, “Dante as Inspiration for 21st Century Theology,” p. 324. 255 Ford, David R. “Dante as Inspiration for Twenty-First-Century Theology,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) p. 324. 84 regional languages that are placed in dialog within the Commedia, but also terminology and discourse associated with various academic and professional disciplines. Mazzotta points out that Dante’s definition of poetry in De Vulgare Eloquentia, as rhetorical fiction set to verse, declares poetry to be a “unique art capable of crossing the boundaries between a discipline of the trivium (rhetoric) and two of the quadrivium (music and arithmetic), as an art capable of harmonizing and joining together words and numbers.”256

While Dante exhibits a profound respect for the difference of persons and areas of knowledge, he also believes that the mutual recognition of difference is what reveals our own limits and is what enables dialog that can lead to unity. Like Augustine, Dante holds that while the language used to describe the world differs according to custom and one’s area of knowledge, there can be no diversity “in the very truth of constituted things.”257

Dante also holds that everything which exists has its own singular purpose. “Each thing exists for its own particular purpose, so too each purpose has something of which it is the purpose; and so it is impossible strictly speaking for any two things, in so far as they are two, to have the same purpose,” he writes in Monarchia, “for the same inadmissible conclusion would follow, i.e. that one of them would exist in vain.”258

Dante’s “inordinate anxiety about differences,” says Robert Pogue Harrison, is precisely what enables him to become “the greatest synthetic poet” in history.259 The tension between Dante’s view of humans as “highly unstable and variable animals” whose “language can be neither durable nor consistent with itself” and his vision of a heaven that “is full of all peace and suffers no diversity of opinion” generates in the

256 Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, p. 21 257 Augustine, De Musica, 3.3. 258 Monarchia, 2.5.21. 259 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice, p. 90. 85

Commedia what Bakhtin terms “the most profound and consistent attempt to erect such a verticality.”260

Dante incorporates the languages of multiple disciplines, social strata, literary genres, political factions and cultures into the Commedia. As Bakhtin would phrase it, he composes the Commedia from language that he recognizes as being “over-populated with the intentions of others.”261 The fact that language can be populated with the intentions of others is something that Dante celebrates in De Vulgare Eloquentia, because it allows human being to escape from their own isolation, to know and love one another, and to form communities that unite our intentions. It is through signs that humans can discover otherness and that people can come to know and love God. The difficulty for Dante lies in language being “over-populated,” being the site of diverse opinions that can lead to violence and division.

The memory of the prior anxiety caused by differing opinions remains even in

Dante’s heaven. For example in Paradiso 28 Beatrice recalls St. Gregory’s disagreement with Dionysius over the angelic orders. She reports that Gregory “opening his eyes here in this heaven …saw his errors, laughing at himself.”262 Gregory and Dionysius were both revered as exegetical authorities and Dante uses this example to show that the languages and concerns which join people can also divide communities on earth.

Languages conflict because they are “indissolubly connected,” Bakhtin says, to

“ideological systems and world views” which are at odds.263 Baranski maintains that

260 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.9.6; Convivio, 2.14.9; and Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 158. 261 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 294. 262 Paradiso, 28.134-135. 263 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, p. 296. 86 while other medieval authors made observations about their heteroglot milieu, “Dante perceived it as a crucial cultural problem, which he had to resolve if he was to succeed as a poet.”264 This sensitivity is related to the intimate relationship and profound appreciation that Dante had with respect to the language which he inherited. “This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together,” Dante says in the Convivio,

“for they conversed in it … and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being.”265

While Dante maintains this profound relationship to his own Florentine vernacular, by the time he writes his book of exile, he is able to say, “to me, however, the whole world is a homeland.”266 Dante also notes that as a result of his travels, he has come to believe that there are “many nations and peoples who speak a more elegant and practical language than do the Italians.”267 In composing the Commedia, Dante’s poetic resolve with respect to heteroglossia is no longer an issue of hierarchical ordering, but rather about designing an architectonic that enables him to bring these various languages together through dialog. What enables Dante to create what Baranski has termed “a new rhetoric a new language for literature” is the belief that linguistic change and differentiation is natural, as Dante’s Adam states in Paradiso 26. This realization also leads to an apophatic turn in Dante’s poetic style.

Heteroglossia becomes a sign for Dante of God’s eternal difference. In Paradiso

26, Adam notes this difference in his description of God as a mirror “which makes itself

264 Baranski, Significar Per Verba, p. 194. 265 Convivio, 1.13.4. 266 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.6.3. 267 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.6.3. 87 reflective of all else but which can be reflected nowhere else.”268 Dante’s view of God’s otherness is similar to that of Aquinas who says that humans are like God “only according to some sort of analogy,” because “God is not related to creatures as though belonging to a different genus, but as transcending every genus, and as the principle of all genera.”269 In other words, God cannot be captured in the mirrors of human thought or language.

The apophatic idiom of Christian mystics provides Dante with a language for speaking of God in a way that acknowledges God’s unknowability. “Many readers, quite mistakenly, neglect the importance in Dante of the apophatic” Denys Turner has argued, yet “apophaticism pervades so much of the Commedia as to constitute its very nature as poetry.”270 Dante’s recognition of the unknowability of the other does not only apply to

God, but also to his fellow human beings who bear God’s image. As Turner says,

“Dante’s apophaticism is, in short, an ethical apophaticism.”271 Robert Pogue Harrison’s work on Beatrice’s otherness as the generative principle of Dante’s verse is suggestive of the idea that Dante’s apophaticism perhaps begins with his struggle to praise Beatrice as she deserves—that the unknowability of a human other reveals to the poet the unknowability of a divine other.

In the Commedia, Dante’s apophaticism becomes the gateway to a unifying poetic method. Mazzotta observes that Dante bundles contending opinions together by demonstrating that each side of an argument offers “polemical, partial glimmers of the

268 Paradiso 26.106-108. 269 Summa Theologica, resp. Q. 4, Art. 3, Pt. 1; rep. 2, Q. 4, Art. 3, Pt. 1. 270 Turner, Denys. “How to Do Things with Words: Poetry as Sacrament in Dante's Commedia,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) pp. 293; 286. 271 Turner, How to Do Things with Words, p. 286-287. 88 total light, or, at best, resilient imaginative constructions akin to an aesthetic vision.”272

Dante reminds theologians and philosophers that they too are poets whose language remains distinct from the “very truth of constituted things.”273 Instead of viewing the limits of signs in a negative light, Dante “redefine[s] the understanding of order … as dynamic and not static.”274 Signs are meant to move and grow, and this movement and growth is through the encounter with another and an encounter with an other’s signs and language.

Dante views otherness as an emancipatory blessing and not as the curse of unsolvable conflict. Only by appreciating and listening to the voice of the other can we come to see ourselves, and the world that we share with others, in a different light.

Failure to recognize otherness is akin to creating worlds in the image of our own languages, becoming trapped in a circle of behavior, like the damned souls in Inferno who eternally repeat behaviors they identified as ultimate. Literary works that create dialogical contact of alien languages with “normative” discourse, Bakhtin says, enable

“entirely different possibilities [to] open up” for the reader.275

In the Commedia, there is no figure who better stands for “the activity of coming to know another’s word” than the poet Sordello whom the Dante Character and Virgil meet in ante-Purgatory. Virgil asks Sordello if he can indicate the best way to ascend

Mount Purgatory and Sordello responds by asking him to name their homelands and condition. When Virgil responds by saying “Mantua --,” Sordello cuts off the remainder

272 Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, pp. 232-233 273 Augustine, De Musica, 3.3. 274 Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, pp. 203-204. 275 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, p. 345. 89 of Virgil’s answer and immediately leaps forward saying “O Mantuan, I am Sordello of your city,” whereupon these two sons of Mantua embrace.276

Teodelinda Barolini has shown that Sordello serves as a foil to Bertran de Born within the Commedia. As Barolini notes, they are the only two political poets included in the poem, and while Bertran is a figure for poetry that incites war and divides communities, Sordello emblemizes “crossing over, bringing together, reuniting what has been torn asunder.”277 Dante includes Sordello in the Commedia because of the

“linguistic internationalism” that he exhibited in his poetry and his life.278 When Dante mentions Sordello in De Vulgare Eloquentia it is in the midst of remarks about how the

Bolognese speak an exceptionally beautiful vernacular which they have created by engrafting linguistic customs from other regions into their own speech. Of Sordello he says, “this man of unusual eloquence abandoned the vernacular of his home town not only when writing poetry but on every other occasion.”279 Dante holds Sordello in high regard for forsaking his own vernacular to write and speak in Provencal. This sense of sacrifice which is highlighted by Sordello’s excitement upon encountering a fellow

Mantuan in ante-Purgatory is also emphasized by Dante’s view that “a man’s vernacular is nearest” to him because “it is connected to those persons who are nearest to him, that is, his kin, his fellow citizens, and his own people.”280 While Bertran’s poetry sunders the bond between a father and a son, Sordello’s creates a new bond between two formerly disparate communities. In the Commedia “Only the epic poets are permitted to move …

276 Purgatorio, 6.71-75. 277 Barolini, Bertran de Born and Sordello, p. 98. 278 Barolini, Bertran de Born and Sordello, p. 92. 279 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.15.2. I am grateful to Barolini who mentions Sordello’s presence in De Vulgare Eloquentia on p. 92 of her article, “Bertran de Born and Sordello.” 280 Convivio, 1.12.5. 90 while the lyric poets remain fixed in the respective circles, terraces or heavens,” says

Barolini.281 “And yet Sordello moves,” Barolini notes, “He is … the only lyric poet to move at all.”282

Bonaventure

St. Bonaventure’s theology is also characterized by movement and growth which are reflective of his mystical outlook. Bonaventure, like Augustine, views life as a journey through a world of signs to God. And in accord with Augustine’s vision of the pondus amoris in Confessions 13, Bonaventure sees love as the primary motive force that moves a person from sign to sign, much like the action of climbing a ladder.

In the heaven of the sun, the Dante Character encounters the souls of the

Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas where the two church doctors each tell the life story of the saint who founded the mendicant orders to which they belong. In an act of mutual charity and respect, Aquinas, a Dominican, tells the story of St. Francis followed by

Bonaventure, a Franciscan, telling the story of St. Dominic.283 Despite the relative parity of these saints’ roles within the Commedia¸ Dante scholars have given far more attention to Aquinas than to Bonaventure. In contradistinction to this tendency among scholarship that reflects upon the theological aspects of the Commedia, Baranski convincingly argues that Bonaventure’s theological opus has a greater impact on Dante’s thought than has that of Aquinas. In particular, Baranski shows that in Dante’s Paradiso, Aquinas speaks with

281 Barolini, Bertran de Born and Sordello, 98. 282 Barolini, Bertran de Born and Sordello, 98. 283 Baranski notes there were “deep ideological divisions” between these two orders during Dante’s time. Baranski, “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante,” 157. 91 a Bonaventurean voice. 284 In the heaven of the sun Aquinas forsakes the clear terminology characteristic of his written works in favor of “symbolic discourse” that typifies Bonaventure and the Franciscans.285

Bonaventure is important for understanding Dante’s ideas about signs in multiple ways, only two of which are discussed in this chapter. First, this chapter will examine how Dante employs Bonaventure’s technical delineation of signs from his Commentary on the Four Books of the Sentences of Master Peter Lombard.286 Then this chapter concludes by reviewing Bonaventure’s appearance in the Heaven of the Sun in Paradiso

12.

Clarifying how God can be signified is Bonaventure’s sole aim in his development of sign categories in the Commentary on the Four Books of the Sentences of

Master Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Paris (the Commentary).287 While Bonaventure is a skilled academic theorist, his focus is on how people can know and love God and he is not at all interested in developing a general theory of signs. The Commentary has a dialogical question/response/conclusion form—and the question that frames

Bonaventure’s discussion on signs is: “Whether God is cognizable through creatures.”288

In the first opinion stated under this question, Bonaventure cites Augustine’s assertion from On the Free Will, that creatures “turning (their) back to Thee, they are fixed on a corporal work as upon their own shadow (umbra)” as evidence that cognition

284 Baranski, “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante,” 157-159. 285 Baranski, “Dante's Signs: An Introduction to Medieval Semiotics and Dante,” 157. 286 I am indebted to Zygmunt Baranski for making noting this connection. 287 Peter Lombard’s Sentences are themselves largely a commentary on Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana which includes some of Augustine’s important passages with respect to signs. 288 Bonaventure, Commentary on the Four Books of the Sentences of Master Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Paris, I.1.2. Hereafter cited as Commentary. Peter Lombard’s Sentences, it should be noted, are themselves a commentary on Augustine’s discussion of signs in de 92 of divine things through creatures is an error.289 In this theological genre it is important to note that opinions stated at the beginning of questions are a rhetorical device for emphasizing points that the author intends to reject. It is precisely this use of Augustine’s text, as framed by the imaginary interlocutor (not Augustine’s text per se), that

Bonaventure turns on its head.

In his conclusion to this question, Bonaventure states that God is cognized through creatures in two ways—either because they “lead more unto God than to something else” or “on account of indigence.”290 This is to say, creatures are indexical signs which either point directly to God through some likeness or point indirectly to God through their lack … through a wound. This latter category of signifying God through a wound is a good description of the narrative that is operative in Inferno and partially operative in Purgatorio.291

The former type of index is cognized through perceived “conditions of perfection.”292 In such instances, Bonaventure says that people either cognize God as a

“picture” (pictura) or as an “image” (imago).293 In a pictura, our cognition “rests in the beauty” of the object, but in the case of an image, “through this it tends to another.”294 As with Augustine’s uti/frui distinction, the only object fit for contemplation in which a person’s mind rests and “cognition stands still,” is God. Any other cessation in the movement of signs is idolatry for Bonaventure, the danger of which runs as a consistent

289 Commentary, I.1.2, q.1. 290 Commentary, I.1.2, resp. 291 Every character in these two cantos reflects the Trinity in their speech, which follows the terza rima rhyme scheme. Following the logic of Romans 1.20, the language of these characters signals an invisible truth about God, even though they have no cognizance or intention of so doing. 292 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.1. 293 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.1. 294 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.1. This also echoes Augustine’s uti/frui distinction from DDC noted above. 93 theme though the semiotic writings of Paul, Augustine, and Dante.295 Bonaventure’s distinction here aligns with Augustine’s uti/frui distinction which is discussed in Chapter

Two.

At this point, Bonaventure returns to the passage from Augustine’s On Free Will which was cited in the earlier opinion to show that such fixation is a deviant act. Reading further in the text, Bonaventure notes that Augustine also says, “Woe to those who love

Thy noddings in place of Thee and wander about in Thy footprints (vestigiis) and forsake

Thee as their leader.”296 As will be examined in Chapter Four—which discusses the biblical proof text for the Adam character’s comment in Paradiso 26 that he was evicted from the earthly paradise because of his “ trapassar del segno [the trespass against the sign]”—the idea of forsaking God’s footprints is central to Dante’s understanding of sin.297 God’s vestiges are signs or guideposts that mark out a way for humans to live and grow in their love and knowledge of God. For Bonaventure and Dante, these guideposts include not only Jesus and scripture, but also everything that exists when viewed through the light of faith.298

Creatures can be signs of God in three ways according to Bonaventure. They can signify “through a shadow (umbra), through a vestige (vestigia) and through an image

(imago).” These three types of signs are distinguished by their mode of representation.

Shadows “represent in a certain elongation and confusion;” vestiges represent in

295 There is an analog in the works of Charles Peirce who views the premature arresting of semiosis as an error that thwarts growth. 296 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.1. 297 This reference is to Paradiso, 26.117. 298 Following the logic of Romans 1.20. 94 elongation “but in distinction,” and an image in represents in “nearness and distinction.”299

As Baranski has shown, “this tripartite semiotics” which Dante employs in the

Commedia, and especially in Paradiso, “appears only in Bonaventure.”300 For example,

Dante uses the word ombra [shadow] in the invocation to Paradiso (quoted in the epigraph of the chapter) to describe his poetic aspirations for this final canticle of his great poem.301 Many of the characters whom the Dante Character encounters in the

Commedia are referred to as ombrae or shades. Ombra, is not only one of the most frequently used words in the Commedia, it is also a privileged term, given its use in the invocation that opens Paradiso and in the closing lines of the Commedia’s final canto.302

A notable aspect of Bonaventure’s shadows/umbrae is that they are signs that signify according to an “indeterminate reckoning.”303 Shadows likewise represent God in the most vague, least personal sense—i.e., not as a Trinity but simply as the one God.304

The important point to note here is that Bonaventure’s signs categories seek to describe different types of relationships that creatures can have to God. As Robert Davis has

299 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.4. 300 Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 74. 301 Bonaventure’s Commentary is composed in Latin, so he used the Latinate term umbra. In the Commedia Dante uses both the Italian term ombra and the Latin version umbra, but his use of the latter form is extremely infrequent. 302 In Paradiso 33.96 Dante compares the fading of the divine vision in his mind to the forgetfulness of the Argo’s journey 2500 years later (i.e., in Dante’s day). He refers to this journey as Neptune gazing up in wonder at “l'ombra d'Argo [the Argo’s shadow].” 303 Bonaventure’s concept here is remarkably akin to Charles Peirce’s concept of irremediable vagueness. While Peirce’s writings on signs make a fascinating comparison to those of Dante and Bonaventure, that is not within the scope of this study 304 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.4. 95 shown, umbrae and vestigiae refer to God as their cause.305 Thus, even the souls in

Dante’s Hell signify God in this way as well, though the distance of the “indeterminate reckoning” aspect of the ombrae here is extreme, since the relationship of the damned is a mis-relation.

Bonaventure’s vestigiae or vestiges—literally footprints—also signify from a distance or obscurely, but unlike umbrae they can represent specific aspects of the

Trinity.306 Dante uses this term in some important passages in the Commedia, such as

Guinizelli’s moving statement to the Dante Character that his loving words have left such a deep and vivid “vestigio [trace]” in him that Lethe could not dim it in the least.307

Toward the end of Paradiso, after Beatrice has parted, the Dante Character expresses his gratitude for her having left her “vestige [footprints]” in Hell in order to save him from ruin.308

Images represent God with regard to “nearness and distinction” and can signify particular attributes of the Trinity: “paternity, filiation and spiration.”309 These aspects are actions, with the implication that an image has the potential to participate in some way in such actions. Only rational creatures can be this type of sign, according to Bonaventure, because this mode of representation requires that God be an object of the creature’s

305 Robert Glenn Davis. The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure (Harvard University DASH Repository, 2012) accessed January 26, 2015 8:10:09 PM EST at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9385627. 306 Bonaventure’s understanding of vestiges is somewhat related to Augustine’s discussion of natural signs in De Doctrina Christiana which is discussed in Chapter Two. Augustine uses the tracks, vestigiae, left by animals as an example of a natural sign, or sign that signifies without requiring an act of will or intent by the sign giver. In Augustine conception of the world as a divine poem, these types of signs which result from how the world works can, however, be understood to signify with divine intent. Bonaventure, unlike Augustine, is not giving general categories of signs; rather, he is specifically focused on ways that God can be signified, and his categories are reflective of that purpose. 307 Purgatorio, 26.106. 308 Paradiso, 31.81. 309 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.4. Translator’s note 8. 96 knowledge and love. Chapter Five examines the Christological aspects that Dante envisions with respect to people being the image of God as is asserted in Genesis 1.26-27 and elsewhere in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

Bonaventure’s unique ideas about signs are integral to Dante’s Commedia. What is distinctive about Bonaventure’s semiotic is that it purposely avoids seeking a foundation in reason, much as a farmer would shun planting seeds in rocky soil. Instead,

Bonaventure consciously chooses the softer, more dynamic grounds of love—not any love, but God’s love. Since Bonaventure asserts that all beings are “separated from God by an infinite distance” the relationships described by his semiotic categories should be understood as apophatic and ecstatic.310 Bonaventure’s hope in signs is that God uses them to move people and communities into a closer relationship with God. While people participate in this movement and growth through signs toward God, this movement is enabled by grace.

In The Soul’s Journey into God Bonaventure’s warns the reader against overly intellectualizing its content:

If you should ask how these things [union with God] come about, question grace, not instruction; desire, not intellect; the cry of prayer, not the pursuit of study; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the whole flaming fire which will bear you aloft to God with fullest unction and burning affection. This fire is God, and the furnace of this fire leadeth to Jerusalem; and Christ the man kindles it in the fervor of His burning passion.”311

310 Davis, 138. 311 Bonaventure, The Souls Journey into God, 7.6. Bonaventure imagery in this passage is of importance to Dante’s interpretation of Augustine’s concept of natural signs. 97

Dante’s Commedia exemplifies this idea that the meaning of signs is in their movement and direction, more than in any static definitions. Meaning is dynamic and directional in the Commedia. Signs are like steps or footfalls and semioses is a journey that either ends prematurely in idolatry, where a sign is treated as ultimate, or leads to another sign that brings a person closer to God. Signs for Augustine, Bonaventure and

Dante are things that move people, which propel people beyond themselves. That is to say, people’s use of signs is meant to be dynamic—moving the will and intellect in unison like the two circles of the blessed in the heaven of the sun or the two wheels of a cart.

The Dante Character meets Bonaventure in Paradiso 12 after Aquinas finishes his narrative of Francis. Following this story of Francis, the “two wreaths of those eternal roses” circle one another and sing music that surpasses that of both the muses and sirens in its beauty.312 As they come to rest, the Dante Character hears Bonaventure’s voice which makes him turn toward the second ring. Bonaventure’s first word is “L’amor [the love],” which he explains is the love of God which makes him beautiful and inspires him to tell the tale of St. Dominic.313

Bonaventure says that Aquinas’ mention of Francis already includes a mention of

Dominic, since both founders sought and led others to the same goal “al cui fare, al cui dire [through their deeds and words].” The lives of Francis and Dominic and their close relationship to God are signs, Bonaventure says, which “lo popol disvïato si raccorse

[brought together the scattered people].” Bonaventure describes Dominic as a worker in

God’s “garden” (v. 72) who is charged with “preserv[ing] the seed” (v. 95) of God’s love

312 Paradiso, 12.19. 313 Paradiso, 12.31. 98 from the “tangled weeds of heresy” (v.100). From Dominic “other streams” (v.103) burst forth to water “saplings [that] grow with greater vigor” (v. 105). Dominic’s friars who

“started out setting their feet in his footprints,” however, Bonaventure says, turned their steps backward and began “setting their toes where once they placed their heels,” creating a “harvest of bad tillage.”314 “I readily admit that, should one search our volume leaf by leaf,” Bonaventure says, “one still could find some pages where one might read, ‘What once I was, I am.’”315

In this remarkable canto are united all of the major themes of this chapter, which collectively show how signs are meant to move and grow. Bonaventure’s narrative of

Dominic as a gardener in Paradiso 12 asserts that the movement of signs requires guidance or cultivation. This guidance is provided, Bonaventure indicates, in the leaves of Dominic’s Rule which are bound together by the divine love which also bundles together the footprints/vestigiae that make up the life of the saint. Recalling Dante’s invocation in the opening canto of Paradiso, the reader’s movement through the world of signs that constitute the Commedia is what the poets says will make him “worthy”

(Paradiso, 1. 27) of winning “the very leaves” (Paradiso, 1. 26) that will “mark the triumph” (Paradiso, 1. 29). Poetry, as Dante imagines it in the Commedia, is the bundling and cultivation of signs aimed at guiding the reader to a closer relationship to God.

The meaning of signs and narratives for Augustine, Bonaventure, and Dante is in their lived aspect.316 For Dante, the movement of signs is subject to moral assessment

314 Paradiso, 12.115-117. 315 Paradiso, 12.121-123. 316 There are intriguing connections here between Dante’s understanding of signs and Charles Peirce’s concept of the interpretant. A detailed comparison of Dante’s understanding of signs with the semiotics of Peirce would make an excellent scholarly contribution. While the medieval figure that seems to have most 99 according to theological norms, based on his understanding of the universe as a divine poem. Dante believes that failing to recognize the universe as a sign of divine love—and instead loving things in a way that erases this relationship—prevents people from moving into a more proximate relationship with God. Flowers and fruit are not the only plant metaphors in the Commedia related to signs. There are also images of briars and weeds which act as barriers, throttling growth, halting the movement of signs, and distorting language. Dante’s assertion that vice warps language is the subject of Chapter Four

heavily influenced Peirce is Duns Scotus, there is reason to believe that Dante may have shaped his ideas about signs as well. Peirce mentions Dante a number of times as a great poet, claims that true poets are prophets, and makes a literary allusion to the Commedia in his Neglected Argument for the Existence of God. If such a study is now possible, much of the credit belongs to Baranski whose work has brought Dante’s understanding of signs to the fore. 100

Chapter 4: The Warping of Language

While prior chapters have emphasized Dante’s vision of how signs are used well by individuals and communities, this chapter focuses on Dante’s understanding of the misuse of signs and the warping of language and habits that results. The chapter is divides into three sections that illuminate the Dante’s understanding of how vice impacts the ability of individuals and communities to interpret and share the world.

The first section examines Adam’s claim in Paradiso 26 that he was expelled from the earthly paradise for “il trapassar del segno [the trespass against the sign].”317

The central position of this phrase in Dante’s theory of signs is demonstrated by contextualizing this claim with related concepts that appear in Dante’s other works.

Furthermore, a greater understanding of Dante’s concept of the trespass against the sign is provided through reviewing the wide variety of uses to which he puts the word “segno

[sign]” within the Commedia.

The second section of this chapter studies one of the model cases of transgressive behavior that Dante depicts in the Inferno. The examples of Francesca and Paulo in the circle of the lustful demonstrates how the refusal of moral boundaries constitutes the violence of erasure.

Dante’s belief that the violence of erasure wounds the intellect is the subject of the third and final section. Erasure leads to the darkening of the mind, trapping individuals and communities in a world of bent signs from which they cannot escape without assistance.

317 Paradiso, 26.117. 101

The Trespass Against the Sign

One of the great contributions that Dante makes to semiotics is the understanding of evil which he integrates into his theory of signs. Dante believes that the meaning of signs is human conduct and the relationships which a person’s behavior fosters or harms.

The primary relationships that concern Dante are those involving God and those with other people. For Dante, signs are meant to move and grow dialogically—with the sign user progressing from sign to sign, moving into closer proximity to God. It is through the recognition of God’s otherness and dialog with one’s fellow human beings, Dante suggests, that people realize their own life purpose.

Conduct in Dante’s model is not best understood as one behavior in isolation, but rather as a path of semiosis, a linking together of successive signs and behaviors that interconnect to form a narrative or journey. The narratives of other people’s lives, whether historical or fictional, can become signs that inform the conduct of readers or auditors. The most unique aspect of Dante’s semiotics is that he does not only diagram positive semiosis, but also portrays harmful chains of signs that result in self-imposed limits. In the narrative of the Commedia, the unwarranted limits placed upon certain signs, in turn, lead to a variety of disasters that result in the warping of language and the ruin of individuals and communities.

In Paradiso 26, Adam tells the Dante Character that his initial transgression led to his exile from the earthly paradise, and ultimately to his suffering in the “anguish of Hell” until the resurrection of Jesus.318 As Augustine remarks in the City of God, from a post-

318 Paradiso, 3.26.133. 102 lapsarian perspective, it is difficult to grasp how “great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression.”319 Augustine argues that the seemingly outsized punishment of

Hell is justified because the “more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning Him; and he who destroyed in himself a good which might have been eternal, became worthy of eternal evil.”320 As the primogenitors, Adam and

Eve’s sin opens the gateway to death and to a rarely interrupted series of violence and war that marks the history of human communities.

While Dante’s retelling of the Fall in Paradiso 26 corresponds with the account given by Augustine, Dante’s Adam makes an important distinction. Proclaiming that his sin occurred prior to his enjoying the fruit of the forbidden tree, Adam tells the Dante

Character that, “not the tasting of the tree in itself was the cause of so long exile, but solely the trespass beyond the mark (segno).”321 Dante does not identify the Fall as the effect of replacing one form of enjoyment (frui) for another—for trading the fruit of the tree of life for that of the tree of moral knowledge—but rather, for desiring to erase the difference between himself and God. Partaking of the tree of moral knowledge is not the cause of the Fall, but is a damaging result.

This accords with Dante’s earlier retelling of the Fall in a passage of De Vulgare

Eloquentia where he speculates about which words were initially spoken by Adam and

Eve. The first direct quote attributed to either Adam or Even in Genesis, Dante notes, is

Eve’s reply to the serpent’s temptation to partake of the fruit of the forbidden tree and become like God. Eve says, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees that are in Paradise: but

319 Augustine, City of God, 21.12. 320 Augustine, City of God, 21.12. 321 Paradiso, 3.26.115-117. 103

God has forbidden us to eat or to touch the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of

Paradise, lest we die.”322 Although Eve reiterates the boundary and the guidance that God has provided, Dante argues that hearing the sounds issuing from the serpent’s body as speech is already to have sinned.

Dante also insists that while the sound which issued from serpent’s mouth

“resembled real speech … to the serpent, [it was] only hissing.”323 What Eve hears then is not speech, but rather is an act of demonic ventriloquism. The devil, Dante says,

“manipulated [the serpents] vocal organs.”324 While Dante’s claim that the sound that comes forth from the serpent’s body is not speech may seem to be an odd and minor point initially, the reasons for this assertion are made clearer later in his treatise when he again turns to the topic of the first human words.

In De Vulgare Eloquentia 1.4, Dante speculates that although Genesis does not record any specific instances of speech prior to Eve’s reply to the serpent, “it is apparent to anyone in their right mind” that the first human word had to be the name of God.325

Before the Fall, Dante explains, human words were an expression of joy, “and, since there is no joy outside God, but all joy is in God and since God Himself is joy itself, it follows that the first man to speak should first and before all have said ‘God.’”326 He ventures that God allowed Adam to speak first, asserting that “it is more truly human for a human being to be perceived than to perceive, as long as he or she is perceived and

322 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.2. 323 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.2.6. 324 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.2.6. 325 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.4. 326 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.4. 104 perceives as a human being.”327 In Dante’s narrative God’s two great gifts to human, speech and free will, are used immediately and simultaneously as soon as the spirit has been breathed into Adam.

Dante also declares that although Adam speaks first, this speech is a response, pointing out that God does not need our form of language to speak. Noting that

“everything thing that exists obeys a sign from God,” Dante says that God as the creator and lord of the universe can move nature as God wills.328 Thus, he says, it is entirely feasible that God moved the air “as to make the sound of words” to Adam.329 Dante’s point here is that the universe signifies divine meaning—a similar point to that which

Paul makes in Romans 1.20, where he asserts that the invisible things of God can be clearly seen through created things.

Given this perspective, Eve’s understanding the sound issuing from the serpent as language is to have imagined a part of nature as disconnected from God. Although she echoes God’s setting of the boundary in the earthly paradise in her reply, that boundary has already been crossed. Natural signs, according to Dante’s interpretation of

Augustine’s definition from De Doctrina Christiana, signify by divine intent. Only God can speak through nature. Believing that there can be a part of the world that is disconnected from God defies the doctrine of creation and attempts to erase God’s otherness. As the Eagle in Paradiso 19 notes, although God’s otherness informs the world, it is not contained by the world. “He who with His compass drew the boundaries

327 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.5.1. 328 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.6. 329 De Vulgare Eloquentia, 1.4.6. 105 of the world,” the Eagle says, “did not imprint His power so deep throughout the universe that His Word would not with infinite excess surpass His making.”330

The qualitative gap between humans and God is not a result of the Fall, but rather due to the fact that humans are of a different nature than God. As Peter Damian indicates in Paradiso 21, God’s will remains a mystery even to the angels in heaven who participate in the beatific vision. The Fall, according to Dante and Augustine, results from a willed erasure of this qualitative gap. Our creation in the image and likeness of God,

Augustine says, was coupled with a “danger lest the human mind, from being reckoned among invisible and immaterial things, should be thought to be of the same nature with

Him who created it, and so should fall away by pride from Him to whom it should be united by love.”331 Beatrice likewise claims in Paradiso 29 that pride was caused Lucifer and some of the other angels to fall from grace.332 To be like God means to be participating and growing in the habits of loving and understanding, it does not mean to be God’s equal.

The fruit from the tree of moral knowledge does not satiate human hunger, but feeds a desire to dominate others, to bend some piece of the world to one’s will, and to persuade oneself that this domination is justified. Viewing others from a slant that portrays oneself as more than their equal, Dante suggests, stands in direct opposition to what he identifies as God’s two greatest gifts to humans—free will and the ability to communicate. The desire to dominate not only neglects to recognize other people as free beings, but it divides communities and damages human likeness to God. Dante asserts

330 Paradiso, 19.40-45 331 Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, 12. 332 Paradiso, 3.29.55-57. 106 that “genus humanum maxime Deo assimilatur quando maxime est unum [Mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity].”333

While Paradiso 26 marks the first instance of Dante identifying the trespass against the sign as the cause of the Fall, he expresses his disapproval of elicit boundary crossings multiple times in earlier works. A number of these examples are found in the

Convivio, including the most important one. In Convivio 4 Dante disputes common opinions about what determines a person being considered noble or “valente [worthy].”334

Rejecting the idea that nobility necessarily translates from one generation to the next,

Dante suggests that worthiness should be defined by one’s own conduct, not the social standing of one’s family. To further emphasize this point he writes that a person “who is descended of noble stock through his father or some ancestor, and is also evil, is not only base but basest and deserving of contempt and scorn more than any other ill-bred person.”335 Unlike those who are orphaned or born to depraved parents, people blessed with virtuous parents who can serve as trustworthy guides, Dante holds, have no excuse for foul conduct. He supports his opinion by citing the authority of scripture, namely

Proverbs 22, which says, “Non trapasserai li termini antichi che puosero li padri tuoi [Do not transgress the ancient landmarks which your fathers have set].”336

Other than Adam’s “trapassar del segno” in Paradiso 26 and one other example in

Paradiso 14 that foreshadows Adams claim, this is the only instance of the verb trapasso in Dante’s opera, which strongly indicates that Proverbs 22:28 is the scriptural home of

333 Monarchia, 1.8.3. 334 Convivio, 4.7.2. 335 Convivio, 4.7.9. 336 Convivio, 4.7.9. 107 the trespass against the sign in Paradiso 26.337 The context in which Dante employs this scriptural prooftext—the “termini [landmarks]” here refer to the good conduct of others which can guide a person’s behavior—is a crucial for understanding Dante’s semiotics.

In Convivio 4 Dante asks the reader to imagine a plain that is “full of hedges, ditches, stones, timber, with obstacles of every kind blocking the way.”338 Under normal conditions, navigable paths among this tangle of obstacles are visible. But now this landscape is blanketed by snow and “presents the same image in all places,” Dante says,

“so that no trace of any path can been seen.”339

If a skilled navigator was able to successfully cross the snow-covered plain and reach the dwelling that stands upon its far end, Dante says, he would leave a clear set of

“vestigie [footprints]” that could serve to guide to anyone else “wishing to travel to this same dwelling.”340 The error of any traveler who rejects the guidance of these footprints and then becomes lost and trapped among the various pits and snares hidden beneath the blank surface of the snow, Dante says, “must be called not simply base, but basest.”341

Peter Hawkins has noted that this imaginary scenario from the Convivio not only

“works its way into the opening canto of the Inferno,” but also “is full of vocabulary that will carry massive freight over the course of the Commedia.”342 Of particular note is

Dante’s use of the word “vestigie [footprints]” in this passage. As is noted in Chapter

Two, vestigia—by which he means the tracks left by animals—are one of the examples

337 This in in Paradiso, 14.111. 338 Convivio, 4.7.6. 339 Convivio, 4.7.6. 340 Convivio, 4.7.7. 341 Convivio, 4.7.8. 342 Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 137. 108 that Augustine gives for natural signs in De Doctrina Christiana. Chapter Three, however, shows that Bonaventure develops a more detailed definition of vestigia as types of signs that represent God from a distance, “but in distinction.” 343 The phrase “in distinction” refers to the ability of vestigia to represent aspects associated with specific persons of the Trinity.

It is Bonaventure’s category of vestigia that Dante employs in Convivio 4. If

Dante’s main concern in crafting this scene of an imaginary plain filled with obstacles is simply to show the wisdom of accepting the guidance of forebears, there is no need for him to include the additional obstacle of snow. To make this point, Dante could have his prideful traveler stray from the “narrow path” and become entangled “among the bramble and brier.”344

Dante, however, chooses to blanket everything with snow in order to emphasize the special ability of this skilled navigator who still knows the way and is able to avoid every snare and pitfall, even when all the landmarks—including those produced by nature and by humans—have been erased. In a situation where the “certi sentieri [established paths]” have been rendered useless, only the “vestigie [footprints]” of an expert navigator capable of “taking himself as a guide” can help others reach their intended destination.345

In Book I of De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine envisions just such a guide who can lead others through a field rife with stumbling blocks toward greater union with God.

Augustine explains that this journey “is not by change of place,” but rather, “by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits,” which is precisely the point of the

343 Commentary, I.1.2, resp.4. 344 Convivio, 4.7.6; 4.7.7. 345 Convivio, 4.7.6-7. 109 metaphorical journey that Dante Describes in Convivio 4.346 The obstacles on

Augustine’s journey “through a change of affections” are the “guilt of our past sins” which block people’s progress “like a hedge of thorns.”347 The Incarnation, Augustine says, is God’s further movement toward the human community, a motion not through space but through the condescension of God taking on flesh.

Citing a passage from John 1—which is also highlighted by Dante Character just prior to his meeting Adam in Paradiso 26—Augustine says that God was already in the world, but that because of people’s “eagerness to enjoy the creature instead of the

Creator” the human community had “grown into the likeness of this world” and were no longer able to recognize God’s presence.348 It is earlier in Book I that Augustine delineates his vision of proper human loving via the uti/frui distinction of things that are to be loved for their own sake and things that are to be loved for the sake of something else. Loving creatures in the wrong way, Augustine claims, also entails a failure to love

God correctly. The boundary improperly crossed in the Fall, for Augustine, is the distinction between these two forms of love. The purpose of scripture and the

Incarnation, he asserts, is “to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor.”349

With God’s presence in the world no longer discernable, the Incarnation provided an example of virtuous habits and properly ordered love that others could follow. Dante’s concept of a guide capable of navigating without assistance recalls another statement that

Augustine makes in Book I of De Doctrina Christiana. Augustine says that a person

“who is resting upon faith, hope and love, and who keeps a firm hold upon these, does

346 De Doctrina Christinana, 1.10.10. 347 De Doctrina Christinana, 1.17.16. 348 De Doctrina Christinana, 1.12.12. 349 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.36.40 110 not need the Scriptures except for the purpose of instructing others.”350 Augustine here is referring primarily to Jesus and secondarily to the saints.

The use of “vestigie” in Convivio 4 suggests that Dante is referring to the

Incarnation when describing the guide who can navigate “by his own efforts.”351 Notably, this description of footprints unites Augustine and Bonaventure’s definitions of vestigia.

Augustine writes of vestigia as the tracks left by animals. As a type of natural sign, the track signify the creature’s passing, without any intention to signify on the part of the beast. Rather, the intention to signify in this way is built into how the universe works—

God creates a purposefully readable cosmos. Bonaventure’s category of vestigia from the

Commentary on the Four Books of the Sentences refers to a type of sign that represents

God. Unlike Bonaventure’s description of umbrae [shadows] which can signify God in

God’s unity, his vestigia can signify particular aspects of the Trinity, although in a vague way. These two accounts of vestigia become one in Dante’s image of the footprints of

Jesus which both trace the Word of God’s action in the world and signify according to the divine intent embedded in how the universe works.

Because the Dante Character has many guides in the Commedia, it is easy to forget that each of them walks in the vestigia or footsteps of Jesus. According to Adam’s tale in Paradiso 26, Jesus entered Hell following the crucifixion, freed many of the souls imprisoned there and led them to heaven. The Dante Character’s journey follows in the footsteps of Adam, who himself follows in the footsteps of Jesus. Virgil, of course, shares his recollection of the harrowing of Hell with the Dante Character during their journey

350 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.39.43. 351 Convivio, 4.7.7. 111 through the Inferno. Experiencing tremendous trepidation near the beginning of his journey through Hell, the Dante Character asks Virgil if “ever anyone, either by his own or by another's merit,” did “go forth from here and rise to blessedness?”352 The image of one who could navigate Hell by his or her own merits recalls the trope of the skilled navigator who crossed the field of snow covered obstacles in Convivio 4. Virgil says that he had only been dead for a short time when Jesus descended and from “out of our midst he plucked the shade of our first parent … as well as many others, and he made them blessed.”353

Virgil describes Jesus as “un possente, con segno di vittoria coronato [a mighty one crowned with the sign of victory].” 354 The earliest readers of the poem and those who followed have interpreted this use of segno to refer to the wounds that Jesus sustained in the crucifixion.355 As Peter Hawkins has observed, this marks Dante’s first use of the word segno within the Commedia.356 Segno is a “privileged word” in the

Commedia, Hawkins asserts, noting that Dante employs it 53 times, with the majority of these mentions (30) appearing in the Paradiso.357 Segno has several meanings and Dante fully exploits this semantic flexibility. It’s meaning include: a sign; a target toward which one aims; an intended destination; a trace; writing; a boundary; or, the sign of the cross.358

352 Inferno, 4.49-51. 353 Inferno, 4.53-54. 354 Inferno, 4.55-61. 355 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, p. 140. 356 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, p. 140 357 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, p. 140. 358 See Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, p. 140-141. 112

As is noted above, Dante’s first use of the segno in Inferno 4 refers to the sign of the cross by alluding to Jesus’ wounds. In Purgatorio segno is again used to represent the sign of the cross as Dante narrates the actions of the angel who ferries the Dante

Character, Virgil and the a boatload of penitents to the shores of Mount Purgatory where they will begin their journey of ascent. As the passengers sing “ad una voce [with one voice]” Psalm 103 which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt, the angel “poi fece il segno lor di santa croce [then blessed them with the sign of Holy Cross].”359

In the phrase “trapassar del segno” in Paradiso 26, “segno” can be translated as

“sign,” “mark,” or “boundary.” While Proverbs 22:28 is the clear biblical source of

Adam’s “trapassar del segno” in Paradiso 26, Dante slightly alters the wording of his scriptural source, exchanging “termini [landmarks]” for “segno [the sign].”360 This is a crucial change, literally and figuratively. As with the word it replaces (termini) from

Proverbs 22:28, the literal meaning of segno in Paradiso 26 is the boundary that God has set with respect to the prohibition on eating the fruit from the tree of moral knowledge.

Figuratively, however, the “trapassar del segno” also refers to Adam’s sin against the sign of the cross, that other tree upon which Jesus was put to death. This is why Dante chooses to use the word “segno” instead of “termini” in Adam’s citation of Proverbs

22:28. Dante’ multivocal use of segno signals that Adam’s trespass is also a failure to recognize and follow God’s Word who was already in the world, reflecting the logic of

John 1which the Dante Character references just prior to Adam’s appearance in Paradiso

26. Adam’s failure to move forward to “the invisible things of God,” which Romans 1.20

359 Purgatorio, 2.49. I am grateful for Peter Hawkins for mentioning this example in Dante’s Testaments, p. 140. 360 Convivio, 4.7.6-7. 113 says are clearly seen through created things, is what necessitates the Incarnation and the vestigia/footsteps of Jesus which led to the cross.

The Violence of Erasure

The gate to hell is also a boundary marker and a warning sign meant to direct people away from using their free will poorly. The letters upon the gate, the only example of writing in Inferno, emphasizes its message by using capital letters: “THROUGH ME

THE WAY TO EVERLASTING PAIN, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE

LOST …. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.”361 Formed by God’s love, the gate is the twin boundary to that placed upon the tree of moral knowledge and a reminder that crossing this boundary leads to ruin.

Dante provides a variety examples in the Inferno that detail specific boundary crossings, but those in the circle of the lustful are especially relevant to this study. “I reached a place mute of all light, which bellows as the sea in tempest tossed by conflicting winds,” Dante says, describing what his character experiences upon entering this pocket of Hell.362 His portrayal of the darkness as mute or voiceless light contrasts with the intense volume of the shrieking and weeping that characterizes this “hellish squall, which never rests.”363 Powerful and tempestuous winds fling the souls of those overcome by their licentious desire, first in one direction and then another as they are caught up in the endless, forceful blows of a conflicting gale. The movement of these

361 Inferno, 3.2-9. 362 Inferno 5.28-30. 363 Inferno 5.31. 114

“carnal sinners … who make reason subject to desire” is constant and violent, but goes nowhere.364

This account of the lustful emphasizes Dante’s assertion, which accords with the views of Augustine and Bonaventure, that the descent into vice is primarily an act of the will, not the result of faulty understanding. The Dante Character tells Virgil that he wishes to speak to two of the shades who “move together and seem to be so light upon the wind.”365 Virgil instructs him to call them in the name of the desire that blows them about. The irony here, not to be lost on the careful reader, is that Beatrice had given

Virgil similar instruction when she descended to Hell on the Dante Character’s behalf.

“Set out, and with your polished words and whatever else is needed for his safety,” she tells Virgil, knowing that Dante can be moved by his love for Virgil’s verse.366

The shades of Francesca and Paulo—an adulteress and her lover/brother-in law— respond to the Dante Character’s “affectionate call,” and Francesca participates in a dialog with him.367 Francesca tells Dante that she and Paolo were spurred on in their yearning while reading an Arthurian romance that told of Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit affair. These two lovers are forever tossed about and scattered amidst the tempest like the

Sybil’s leaves, never able to grasp the object of their love, unable to connect themselves with anything. Francesca says: “A Gallehault indeed, that book and he who wrote it too;

364 Inferno 5.38-39. 365 Inferno 5.74-75. 366 Peter Hawkins notes that the words Beatrice uses to describes Virgil’s verse, “parola ornate,” is the “same phrase used to describe Jason seductions.” Hawkins reads this as a warning “that all language, all the tokens and fair words of poetry, are by nature as ambiguous (and as perilous) as discovery itself.” Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 283 367 Inferno 5.87. 115 that day we read no more.”368 While there is no disagreement about the line “we read no more” referring to Francesca and Paulo’s sexual tryst, scholars and readers have debated whether or not Dante wishes to say the book and its author have some culpability in

Francesca and Paulo’s transgressive act—whether, like Gallahad in this French version of the romance, this book encouraged their acting upon the lust they felt. Some, such as

Allison Milbank, make the valid point that if Francesca and Paulo had kept reading, they might not have sinned, since the ill-fated romance in the story can be read as a sign recommending against the path of Lancelot and Guinevere.369

Upon hearing Francesca’s indictment against this romance, however, the Dante

Character falls “as a dead body falls.”370 Given Dante’s prior poetry which can be read as glorifying the obsessive aspects sometimes associated with romantic love, interpreting the fall of the Dante Character as a confession of poetic culpability seems warranted.

Much like Augustine, who in his Retractiones warns the reader of the dangers associated with some errors contained in his earlier written works, Dante is signaling that his past works stand in need of correction.371 In the Vita Nuova, for example, he writes that his love for Beatrice is so powerful that “it destroys anything in my memory that might have been able to restrain it.”372 Desire’s erasure of restraint, of all boundaries, is precisely what is being censured in Inferno 5.

368 Inferno 5.138. 369 Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 158. 370 Inferno V.142. 371 In the Commedia, the Dante Character’s experience of afflictions, such as fainting of becoming blinded, are instance of the poet taking a self-reflective dialogical posture towards his own opinions. This is another similarity that Dante has to Dostoevsky who tends to make cannon fodder of his previously held convictions within his dialogism of his novels. 372 Vita Nuova, 15.2. 116

The Dante Character faints because Francesca and Paulo are a mirror in which he is able to see an accurate diagram of his love for Beatrice, as something that is bent and destructive, as will be confirmed later in his confession in Purgatorio. This fall also indicates that the poet recognizes writing and reading as potentially dangerous and culpable activities. Poetry and narratives are powerful precisely because people can and do participate in them. In reading narratives, Bakhtin says, people participate in “the activity of coming to know another’s word.”373 If a narrative is “internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us,” he says, it may alter our own language, our own world view, our own way of negotiating our way in the concrete world.374

Specifically, people can participate in narratives by mimesis, replicating the actions of characters from a story in their own lives. Narratives can have a positive impact, in Dante’s view, when narratives depict exemplars of virtue, but can be destructive when they glorify vice, which is Francesca’s accusation against the romance she read with Paulo. As Rachel Jacoff has shown, Inferno 5 “is saturated by tropes of repetition: alliteration, assonance, anaphora, paronomasia and derivatio occur with such specific density that they acquire iconic status.”375 The moral value of mimesis depends on who a person decides to follow and how they choose to follow them. Mimesis can become a trap, says Augustine who asserts that while a person may “start carnal movements as he wishes, he does not stop them as he wishes.”376

373 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, p. 353. 374 Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, p. 345. 375 Rachel Jacoff, “Transgression in Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999) , p. 56. 376 Augustine, De Musica, 6.14. 117

The Dante Character’s fall is also a version of mimesis. It is a sign of his compassion for Francesca and a sign that his prior love for Beatrice bears a resemblance to the love of these shades. Such a love which seeks an end other than God only serves to distance a person from their desired destination. In the earthly paradise the Dante

Character is warned by the theological virtues, that his staring at Beatrice is “Too

Fixed!”377 In a line that echoes the Vita Nuova, the Dante Character says that as he gazes at Beatrice “all [his] other senses were undone, walled off from anything around them, enclosed in their indifference.”378 His immodest gazing results in a temporary loss of sight. Dante’s sin against Beatrice is precisely his unjust love which fails to recognize her as a sign of God’s love for him—like Francesca and Paulo, he halts the semiotic process too early. He stares too fixedly—he foreshortens Beatrice’s possibility as a sign for him in his concupiscent love, traps her meaning within a static window, and limits his own relationship with God and with Beatrice.

Borrowing a trope from Dionysius, Dante compares humans to wax that receives the stamp of God’s archetypal seal.379 We are each uniquely stamped, Dante claims, in

“the image of the seal of that Eternal Pleasurer through whose will each thing becomes the being that it is.”380 As wax, however, people also are malleable and can conform themselves to something other than God, obscuring the image of the divine seal. Heeding

Augustine’s claim that we are conformed to what we love, Dante writes that people “are led to error by the matter of love, because it may seem – always – good; but not each seal

377 Purgatorio, 32.9. 378 Purgatorio, 32.3-5. 379 Gardner, p. 101. 380 Paradiso, 20.76-78. 118 is fine although the wax is.”381 People are conformed to what they love, and when their love excludes God they fail to become their true selves. Like the disfigured inhabitants of

Hell they live as warped images, warped people who are deaf to each other and incapable of communion.

Loving anyone or anything other than God for its own sake (frui), Dante suggests, places both oneself and others in danger, because people are conformed to what they love. When a person loves another person without reference to God (frui), they fail to recognize the other’s capacity for infinite growth and become conformed to a static image. Instead of moving from sign to sign and growing in love toward God, the signs upon which they become fixated are “old, familiar, net[s]” that impede their movement.382 As Beatrice explains to the pilgrim, God “has made many mirrors which divide its light.”383 As with the archetypal seal that stamps every piece of wax in a unique way, “the First Light reaches [the mirrors] in ways as many as are the angels.”384

Reflecting the one light in one’s particular manner is the mark of true individuality. As

Beatrice tells Dante in Paradiso 2, all those in heaven reflect the same divine light, including herself.385

Beatrice accuses the Dante Character of “setting his steps [passi] upon an untrue way” in his “imagini di ben seguendo false [pursuing those false images of good].”386

Here Beatrice uses Bonaventure’s term imago to proclaim that Dante failed to read her as

381 Purgatorio, 18. 4-39. The source for this connection is David N. Bell. The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St. Thierry, (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publishing, 1984), p. 61. 382 Purgatorio, 32.6. 383 Paradiso, 29.143-144; p. 267. 384 Paradiso, 29.136-137; p. 267. 385 Joseph Anthony Mazzeo. Structure and Thought in the Paradiso (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1968), p. 86. 386 Purgatorio, 30.131. 119 a sign of the divine love and, more specifically, one that according to Bonaventure’s semiotic terminology represents the Trinity by her likeness.387 She also accuses him of choosing the logic of replacement over the logic of growth with respect to her as a sign.

While Beatrice’s countenance had guided the Dante Character in the “right direction” during her life, after her death he sought to replace her with “false delights” that “turned

[his] steps backwards.”388 The Dante Character thinks that Beatrice can be replaced because he loved her more as an object to be possessed than as a sign to follow.

In loving Beatrice as an object, the Dante Character failed to recognize her true merit as a person bearing the image and likeness of God. Love that ignores or erases a relationship to God, Augustine says, “is better termed hatred,”389 Augustine’s argument is that when someone loves a person other than in God, they do not love them as a person, but as a thing. On the other hand, to love one’s neighbor in God is to behold them as one’s true equal in their unique otherness and difference, resisting the proclivity “to lord it over . . . other human beings.”390

In loving one’s fellow human beings in reference to God people respect them as unique individuals who have an “end and purpose of their own.”391 Loving another person in God for Dante means refusing to bend their image to fit one’s own desired map of the world. This is at the heart of Beatrice’s repeated accusations of the Dante Character that he stares at her “too fixedly.” This type of fixation—where a person loves something in a way that wishes to dominate, control, define or limit the object of their love—creates

387 Bonaventure’s understanding of the divine image in humans has its greatest source in Augustine’s De Trinitate. 388 Purgatorio, 30.123; Purgatorio, 31.35. 389 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.23.23. 390 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.23.23. 391 See Baer, pp. 60. 120 a false boundary that halts semiotic and dialogical growth. This error creates a false sign, a phantasm that becomes frozen within the lover’s signs world.

Phantasms, incapable of sating desire, are often replaced repeatedly in the hope that the next one will satisfy more than the last. As Dante says in Convivio 4, the soul’s longing for the supreme good can lead a person to believe that “everything it sees which seems to possess some good in it is that supreme good.”392 When these goods fail to satisfy, the desire replaces them with successive objects such as “a woman, and then modest wealth, then greater riches, and then still more” which “comes about because in none of these things does one find what one is searching after.”393 Like the souls tossed about in the circle of the lustful, the hope in each object that replaces the last moves a person in a new direction, but never forward. Reading the world in a way that only echoes back in one’s own voice or reflects one’s own image into what we encounter in the world, is to close off dialog, to live as if inhabiting a hall of mirrors of which one is the sole occupant. Lust is a dead end for those in Hell, who falsely imagined its fruits to be paradise, and then refused to abandon their false hope.

Paolo and Francesca sin because they take the narrative they are reading as final, a closure that acts as a mask hiding the person right in front of them. Francesca tells the

Dante Character that as they read of Lancelot and Guinevere their eyes met a few times and “drained the color from [their] faces.”394 In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine says that the change of pallor is a natural sign of shame, one that signifies without a person’s intent. Both of them misread the blushing face of the other as a sign of passion instead of

392 Convivio, 4.12.15. 393 Convivio, 4.12.16. 394 Inferno, 5.131. 121 as a reflection that mirrors the sense of shame that each of them feels internally. In erasing each other, Francesca and Paulo misread and erased themselves.

Francesca and Paulo demonstrate how a single loop, a single closed-off sign in one’s sign world can become a vortex. Francesca describes her love as “love, that releases no beloved from loving.”395 In the Convivio Dante says that the concupiscible appetite “never does anything except pursue and flee; and whenever it pursues what is proper in the right degree and flees what is proper in the right degree, one keeps within the boundaries of one's perfection.”396 Temperance, Dante says, “marks the limit

[termine] up to which something may be pursued.”397

Francesca and Paulo lack the temperance to flee in the right degree, to recognize the proper limit, and so become ensnared in a love that blinds them to anything outside of it, anything other, any word or sign that would speak against their grasping at one another’s image. They erase every possible dialog that would enable them to connect with a better sign, or that would offer them a more virtuous way of relating to one another, to relating to one another as persons and not as animals.398 They are trapped in a sign world that fanatically insists their love is all in all. And so they never grasp one another, remaining blind to each other as persons with an infinite capacity for growth.

They are fixated upon the image of each other, an image shaped by a fictional text.

395 Inferno, 5.103-106. 396 Convivio, 4.26.5. 397 Convivio, 4.26.7. 398 In the Convivio Dante says that “the more the soul is impassioned, the more closely it is united with the concupiscible appetite, and the more it abandons reason, so that it then judges a person not as a human being but almost as a lower animal, according to appearances only, without discerning the truth.” Convivio, 3.10.2. 122

Fooled by gesture, they ventriloquize themselves into striking poses that have now become habits to which they are addicted, and from which they cannot escape.399

The Darkening of the Mind

There are many pockets in Dante’s Inferno, each defined by its particular vice.

What unites all the characters in the Inferno, however, is their fixity in isolation and their wounded intellects which are darkened by sin. No group in Hell exemplifies utter solitude more that the circle of heretics, who in Inferno 10 are described as each lying enclosed in their own tomb.

As the Dante Character and Virgil converse, one of these shades, Farinata, recognizes Dante’s Florentine dialect and rises up partway from his sepulcher to address him. Farinata soon discovers that Dante and his family belonged to the opposing political faction and he notes with disdain that he twice drove them out of Florence.

This political conversation is interrupted by Calvalcante Calvalcanti, the father of

Dante’s first friend and fellow poet, Guido Calvalcanti. Calvalcante only seeks news of his son and so obsessive is his concern with Guido that he misinterprets the Dante

Character’s reply. The Dante Character uses the past tense in one of his verbs, which

Calvalcante mistakenly takes to mean that his son is dead and in anguished silence he falls back into his tomb.

399 Giuseppe Mazzotta notes that the siren who appears to the Dante Character in a dream he has in Purgatorio attempts to cast Dante into the role of Ulysses, whereas Beatrice, who is the only person to speak the Dante Character’s name in the Commedia, calls him to become the unique person who he is meant to be. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 149. 123

Just as with those held within the circle of the lustful, Farinata and Calvalcante are summoned only by the things that they loved as ultimate. For Farinata this is Florence and for Calvalcante it is his son Guido. Signs related to these loves open these characters like magic words, but neither pays the least bit of attention to anything else. Calvalcante interrupts Farinata’s conversation with the Dante Character without apology, and his words hint that Calvalcante is more in love with his son’s genius than his son as a person.

He remarks to the Dante Character that if his genius is allowing him to pass through Hell while in the flesh, then surely Guido, with his superior intellect should be there as well.

As Robert Pogue Harrison has noted, “Guido Cavalcanti is one of the most remarkable poets who ever put pen to paper, and Dante knew it.”400 The Dante Character tells

Calvalcante, however, that it is not his personal genius that enables his journey, but grace.

As soon as Calvalcante sinks back down into his grave, Farinata continues his conversation with the Dante Character as if Calvalcante had never spoken. The Dante

Character asks Farinata to let Calvalcante know that “his son is still among the living,” but given that “the beginning, middle and end deal only with Florence” for Farinata, it is safe to assume that he will never deliver this message.401 In Purgatorio Virgil receives a warm greeting and an embrace from his fellow Mantuan, Sordello.402 This political poet who forsook Italian to write and speak in a Provencal dialect, rejoices at hearing another speaking in his own native tongue. Farinata’s greeting, unlike that of Sordello, is cold and formal and his tone turns from condescending to contentious as soon as he learns that

400 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 401 Inferno, 10.111; Ricardo J. Quinones, “Inferno: Fame and Children,” Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 39 402 Teodelinda Barolini notes that Sordello should be viewed “as a purgatorial corrective to Farinata” and the continuing social division that he represents. Teodelinda Barolini, “Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante’s Comedy, in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), p. 91. 124

Dante’s family belonged the rival Florentine political faction.403 Even in the midst of

Hell, Farinata’s political leanings prevent him from communion with his fellow citizens,

Calvalcante and Dante.404

“In hell, whether the damned spoke in eloquent monologue or utter gibberish,” says Peter Hawkins, “all were in some radical sense soloists doomed to repeat their own private stories, to sing the songs of themselves.”405 While the Paradiso is marked by dialog and harmonious song, Inferno is a series of monologs, language that like Farinata and Calvalcante remains segregated, solitary and entombed. Bakhtin’s writings on monologism at its extreme provides an excellent analysis for the situation of these characters. Bakhtin says that monologism “denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with the equal rights

(thou).”406 As such, monolog “is finalized and deaf, to the other’s response, does not

403 Noting the numerous Florentines who populate Hell, Ricardo Quinones says: “Dante is the Christian chronicler of the fall of Florence, as Augustine had been that of Rome’s demise. The commedia, particularly in the inferno, is a gallery of portraits and roster of names.” Dante’s criticism is based on his view that the civil strife that tore the city-state apart was caused by “a mad flight of acquisitiveness and economic expansion,” undertakings like Dante’s imagined voyage of Ulysses which has “no moral or merit.” Ricardo J. Quinones, “Inferno: Fame and Children,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999) p. 34-36. 404 Rachel Jacoff has written a fascinating article that demonstrates Dante’s association of incestuous desires with the desire to erase political boundaries. Jacoff traces this association to Augustine who writes in City of God: “For if it is wicked to go beyond the boundary of one’s lands in the greed for increasing possession, how much more wicked is it to remove a moral boundary in the lust for sexual pleasure!” (City of God, 15.16). Of interest to the puposes of this study, Augustine’s Latin bears some similiarity to Adam’s “trapassar del segni”: “Si enim est iniquum auiditate possidendi transgredi limitem agrorum, quanto est iniquius libidine concumbendi subuertere limitem morum!” (City of God, 15.16). See Rachel Jacoff, “Transgression in Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999)., , p. 58 405 Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 44. 406M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Caryl Emerson trans. and ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 292-3. Dante connects this erasure of the other to envy, saying that “in vicious people equality causes envy, and envy causes bad judgment, because it does not allow the reason to argue on behalf of whatever is envied, and the faculty of judgment is then like a judge that hears only one side.” Convivio, 1.4.6. 125 expect it and does not acknowledge it in any decisive force.”407 It would be difficult to find a more accurate assessment than this of the relationships that Dante depicts in

Inferno 10.

Bakhtin notes that a monolog “pretends to be the ultimate word.”408 This is an apt description of the monologists in Dante’s Inferno. In Dante’s view, the idea of God is particularly repellent to those accustomed to making their own rules, because God’s otherness implies that no person can be the ultimate word—it implies a boundary, a limit.

This belief has its origins in the writings of Paul, who says that people “by their wickedness suppress the truth” in order to erase limits on their behavior.409

Aquinas, also part of this Pauline tradition, holds that hatred of God is “a greater sin than unbelief,” because it is the cause of unbelief.410 This willed erasure of limits and otherness harms people’s ability to interpret signs and understand the world. On Mount

Purgatory when the Dante Character has failed to understand the moral sense of the inverted tree, Beatrice remarks that his “mind has turned to stone and, petrified, has gone so dark that the light of what I say confounds you.” Beatrice’s phrasing purposefully echoes Romans 1.21 which says that sin caused humans to become “futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”411 The inverted tree in Purgatorio, of course, is the tree of moral knowledge, the boundary that Adam transgressed. The Inferno dramatized Paul’s proclamation in Romans 1.21about the darkening of the intellect,

407 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 292-3 408 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 292-3 409 Romans 19; 18. 410 Aquinas, ST, II-II.34.2. and ad 2. 411 Romans 1.21. 126 depicting how the erasure or avoidance of any sign warps a person’s map of reality and limits their ability to understand the world.412

There are multiple images of linking vice with blindness and confusion in the

Commedia, including Virgil’s reference to the entirety of Hell as “the blind world.”413 In

Purgatorio, Marco Lombardo proclaims that “world is blind” in his conversation with the

Dante Character on the terrace of the wrathful.414 Upon this terrace, the Dante Character is blinded by a thick smoke that blocks out everything including the stars and forces him to close his eyes to mollify its sting. Grasping the shoulder of Virgil, the blinded Dante

Character relies on his guide to keep moving forward. The smoke is a metaphor for what

Bonaventure terms a “bleary (lippus) eye.”415 For those not wholly given over to vice, this condition does not, in Bonaventure’s opinion, prevent them from advancing toward a partial recognition of God, it simply means they continue to through a “dark medium,” through “clouds,” through “ground snatching up the clarity of a light,” through signs made perplexing to their interpreter due to the interpreter’s imperfection.416 In

Bonaventure’s account, like that of Dante, the lippidity of the eye is deeply connected to the disposition of the heart.

As part of the Pauline tradition, Dante asserts that peoples’ habits (their loves, especially if they are unjust) determine and limit their ability to understand the world.

Dante makes this conviction central to his semiotics and in the Inferno he provides an unprecedented series of narrative maps that demonstrate several variations of this

412 According to Aquinas, the “true knowledge of God in itself leads human beings to the good, but it is bound, as if held in captivity, by the condition of injustice.” Aquinas, quoted in Eugene Rogers, Aquinas and Barth, p. 103. The source of this quote is Super epistolam Sancti Pauli ad Romanos lectura, par.112. 413 Inferno, 4.13. 414 Purgatorio, 16.66. 415 Bonaventure, Commentary, I.1.2, resp.2. 416 Bonaventure, Commentary, I.1.2, resp.2. 127 condition. Unjust habits imprison knowledge, beauty, and the growth of community.

Such imprisonment is injustice—and in Dante’s view, reason offers no cure for this self- blinding/self-binding ailment.417 The only escape from this inward spiral of vicious habits, from a sign-world become vortex, in Dante’s account is a change of habit, a new way of being in the world made available by someone who moves within the community, but whose habits and understanding are not shaped by it. On the terrace of the wrathful the penitents sing the Agnus Dei, Virgil explains, to “undo the knot that was their wrath.”418

For Dante, a person moved by the divine love that moves the sun and other stars can offer footprints that others can follow. These footprints are the trace of such a person’s actions in the world, a trace that can guide others, helping them to avoid the obstacles and snares hidden from their understanding in the blindness that results from sin. This is the love that begets the chain of charity that comes to the Dante Character in the dark wood, the love that is made present in the words and lives of the prophets and saints, and most especially, in the Incarnation. Dante’s Adam remains trapped in Hell, unable to reason his way back to the earthly paradise atop Mount Purgatory until his return is secured by the actions of Jesus which allow Adam to follow his footsteps.419

417 In Romans 7.15-19 Paul writes of the condition of akrasia, or consciously acting in a way one knows to be wrong: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” 418 Purgatorio, 16.23-24. 419 This is reminiscent of Augustine’s state as detailed in the Confession. Augustine came to believe, like St. Paul, that he was incapable of ascending in virtue via an intellectual quest. After many years of rational searching Augustine writes, “I had become to myself a vast problem.” (Confessions, 4.4.9) Like Dante who comes to himself in the dark wood, Augustine cannot retrace the steps that brought him to this state of despair. Augustine concludes that his will has become enslaved to sin – he can no longer do what, through the powers of his intellect, he recognizes as virtuous. What were once Augustine’s bad habits have now become calcified into necessity that holds him prisoner. Augustine did not believe that he could escape 128

Dante holds that people cannot untie the semiotic knots within their darkened minds unaided. Inhabiting sign-worlds that contain recalcitrant errors to which people are bound by desire, individuals and communities cannot logic their way to freedom, growth and peace. In a deep sense, within a bent sign world, not only are other people and the world unknowable to us, but also because we cannot recognize people for what they are or what they could become, we cannot truly love them.

The entire Inferno depicts example after example of how conduct can limit interpretations, bend signs, divide communities, freeze identities, and warp conduct which is represented by bodies twisted back upon themselves, inhibiting their movement.

Most bonding of signs is healthy, promoting growth and understanding. Any bonding however, which unites a sign to an act of injustice or erasure that limits growth and halts the ongoing dialogical activity of recognition, is a destructive caricature of semioses. This movement of signs that goes nowhere is best symbolized in the Inferno by the ceaseless waving of Lucifer’s wings, which only causes the frozen lake of tears that entraps him to harden further.

In Paradiso 26 the Dante Character says he has been “drawn … from the sea of twisted love” and delivered to “the shore where love is just.”420 The sea of twisted love and the dark wood of warped signs where the way has become lost are tropes that emphasize different aspects of one and the same condition. For Dante, the opposite of

from the bondage of his perverted will which he had wrought through his own actions. Instead, Augustine professed that he and others can be cured of sin only through the divine grace made available to us through the incarnation. See David N. Bell. The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St. Thierry, (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publishing, 1984), p. 62. 420 Paradiso, 26.62-63. 129 love is not hate, but rather, love that is unjust and which seeks to erase the other.421

Concupiscence has the effect of freezing signs, hardening our misinterpretations of the world and of God into habit. For Dante, this is the heart of injustice, the violence of erasure, the freezing of love which halts the dialogical movement that expands the recognition of people as human being and of God as God. Injustice is not letting our idea of somebody or something grow as it should. This is what Inferno depicts, a semiotic diagram of injustice and the violence of erasure, the captivity of the signs.

Dante considers living people, who bear the image of God, to be the most important category of signs. People sign forth through their bodies, and bent bodies in the

Commedia are bent signs that warp movement and can lead others astray. As the Dante

Character says, one must not be persuaded by souls “whose twisted love tries to make the crooked way seem straight.”422 For Dante, this curative action is primarily Christological, which is the subject of Chapter Five.

421 It is worth noting in this study that Dante participates in a view of Islam that is deeply flawed and stands in need of correction. As Mazzotta says: “The reference to Mohammed as a prophet of war deserves a special gloss. The medieval mythology about him is utterly imaginary: in the Chanson de Roland Mohammed is seen as a god of the Moslems; in Brunetto's Tresor he is a cardinal of the church; in other sources he is always a heretic. All of them (and Dante's text is consistent with this tradition) bypass Islam's otherness in relation to Christianity.” Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 91. There is certainly much more to be said on this topic and hopefully this will be a dialog that continues in future scholarship. 422 Purgatorio, 10.2-3. 130

Chapter 5: The Role of Signs in Dante’s Christology

“Beloved: If you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in His footsteps.”

1 Peter, 2.20-25

Dante’s Christology is central to his understanding of signs and how people and communities can be liberated from vicious habits that limit their ability to interpret the world. Like Augustine, Bonaventure and others in the Pauline tradition, Dante views

Jesus to be the incarnate Word of God as described in the Gospel of John. As such, Jesus is seen as the ultimate theological sign who can effect an exodus of drawing people “from the sea of twisted love” and delivering them to “the shore where love is just.”423

The entire Commedia is marked by references to Jesus and the Dante Character’s journey is shaped by the gospel narrative of the crucifixion and resurrection. While some elements of Dante’s Christology in the Commedia are explicit, others are more subtle and indirect.424 For example, it is not until Inferno 21 that readers are provided with a clue that the Dante Character’s voyage follows the timeline of the Christian Holy Week. The

Dante Character and Virgil are halted on their way when they come across a stone bridge in ruins. As a band of demons with hooks approaches, Virgil instructs the Dante

Character to hide behind a rock while he speaks with them.

423 Paradiso, 26.62-63. 424 This is not a surprising fact, since Dante is first and foremost a poet and the Commedia is poem, not a summa. 131

On one level of reading, the Dante Character’s taking refuge behind the boulder of a ruined bridge is simply part of the dramatic landscape of the poem. A closer reading, however, shows that this scene has deep Christological significance. In the image of the boulder, Dante points back to the punishment depicted two cantos earlier in Inferno 19 where the simonist popes are encased face down in rocks, with their legs sticking up in the air as flames burn the soles of their feet. Dante describes the holes in which they are entombed as mouths that are the size and shape of baptismal fonts.

Zygmunt Baranski has demonstrated that in constructing this contrapasso in

Inferno 19 Dante is employing an image from Saint Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of

Songs.425 In Exodus God tells Moses that “I will hide you in the crevice of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by.”426 Bernard interprets the rock that shelters Moses from the deadly danger of seeing God’s face, to be a figure for Jesus.427

The church and the saints, Bernard says, are like tiny crevices in the wall to the kingdom of heaven, while Jesus is the crevice or gate in the rock.428 The sin of simony turns access to the kingdom of God into something to be bought and sold for gain. As Baranski shows,

Dante’s punishment for simony is to become trapped in the crevice in the rock from

Exodus 33, which was meant to offer shelter.429 The gate becomes a tomb.

In Inferno 21, the rock behind which the Dante Character hides, in order to avoid a groups demons who are tearing sinners to pieces with their hooks, offers a counter example to the simonists. Once the leader of the demons, Malacoda, learns that the Dante

425 Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 168. 426 Exodus, 33.22. 427 Baranski also notes that Augustine had made the same association earlier in his commentary on Exodus. Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 168. 428 Saint Bernard, Sermons on the Song of Songs, sermon 62. 429 Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 168. 132

Character’s voyage has been divinely ordained, he agrees to let the Dante Character and

Virgil pass unharmed and provides the travelers with an alternate route around the destroyed bridge. While giving directions, Malacoda notes that “at a time five hours from now, it was a thousand two hundred sixty-six years since the road down here was broken.”430

The bridge, of course, was destroyed during Jesus’ harrowing of Hell after the crucifixion. This indicates that the Dante Character’s journey begins on Holy Thursday.

Once this starting time is determined, other temporal signs provided throughout the course of the poem show that the Dante Character’s voyage stretches from Holy

Thursday to Easter. Malacoda’s seemingly off-hand remark about the bridge’s demolition also suggests that the rock behind which the Dante Character hides is an understated figure for Jesus. The images of the shielding boulder points back to both the contrapasso of the simonists in Inferno 19 and to the rock provided to Moses on Sinai. The Dante

Character’s rock also signifies the Christian church.

As Baranski notes in his explication of Inferno 19, Dante is purposefully contrasting the two Simons, Simon Magus and Simon Peter, in the penalty that he chooses for those who would sell access to the Holy Spirit.431 Simon Magus was a magician from Samaria who was converted by Philip in Acts 8. When Peter and John travel to Samaria to lay their hands on converts to deliver the gifts of the Holy Spirit,

Simon Magus offered to give Peter money if he would share this great power with him.432

An angry Peter tells Simon Magus that he has failed to understand the nature of God’s

430 Inferno, 21.112-114. 431 Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 167-169. 432 Acts, 8.19. 133 love and is caught in “chains of wickedness” if he thinks that people could “obtain God’s gifts with money.”433

While the sin of simony takes its name from Simon Magus, the name of Peter is given to another Simon directly by Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew, after this Simon proclaims to Jesus “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus responds by saying, “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of

Hades will not prevail against it.”434 The rock behind which the Dante Character cowers in Inferno 21 was made by the passing of Jesus in the harrowing or exodus from Hell which he effected by the cross. The boulder in Inferno 21 is intended by the poet to represent an act of providence and grace—one that is unrecognized as such by the frightened Dante Character within the narrative, yet is discoverable by readers versed in medieval exegetical writings and scripture.

Much of Dante’s Christology in the Commedia is covert and involves making connections to other narratives and signs that are external to the poem. There are two key

Christological themes that become evident once these relationships are recognized. First,

Dante envisions the liberation from the world of bent signs to be a matter of grace and habit, effected by following in the footsteps (the piedi) of Jesus. Second, in Dante’s account, the marks of the cross, the wounds of Jesus demonstrate God’s recognition of human suffering and are a sign that a balm exists for what ails the human community.

These topics are examined in the two sections which comprise this chapter.

Within the Commedia there are a number of entry points to these Christological themes, but nowhere are they so superbly interwoven as in Paradiso 11 where the spirit

433 Acts, 8.20-23. 434 Matthew, 16.16-17. Baranski makes this connection to the two Simons. Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 167-169. 134 of Aquinas narrates the life of St. Francis. This canto will serve as the doorway to the two sections of this chapter.

The Footsteps of Jesus

In Paradiso 11 Aquinas narrates the story of Saint Francis, whom he names one of two princes whom God sent to serve as guides for the Christian church. The other prince is Saint Dominic, the founder of Aquinas’ order whose life is chronicled in

Paradiso 12 by Bonaventure, a Franciscan. What makes Francis a suitable guide for the church is the “serafico ardore [seraphic ardor]” for God that he happily embodies, even when this means forsaking his own social standing and taking up a life of poverty.435

Francis’ sanctified way of life, empowered by grace, leads his souls “al suo regno [back to its kingdom]” upon his death.436

The final destination of union with God, according to the Aquinas Character’s narrative, is the meaning of Francis’ life. As was noted in Chapter Three above, for Dante the meaning of signs is directional—it has more to do with where they lead than with static definitions, because the purpose of signs is to move and grow peoples’ love and understanding of God and of each other. Individual signs are like steps or footfalls and semiosis is a journey that either leads to union with God or to a variety of dead ends— destinations in which people should “abandon all hope.”437

The dead ends that Dante describes in Inferno are an imprisonment in habitual vice that darkens the intellect when particular signs become attached to sinful conduct.

435 Paradiso, 11.37. 436 Paradiso, 11.116. 437 Inferno, 3.9. 135

Reason offers no escape, Dante holds, and only the divine grace effected by the

Incarnation, cross and resurrection can release a person from captivity. Dante’s Adam says, “I longed for [the heavenly] assembly more than four thousand three hundred and two revolutions of the sun,” before his was freed by the footsteps of the crucified Jesus which shattered the portions of Hell where he was captive.438 The Dante Character’s journey recapitulates that of Jesus and of Adam who followed in his footsteps. Like the exodus from Egypt, this flight to freedom which is empowered by God, is also a matter of the feet, crossing the desert step by step. Adam the earthly father, the primogenitor, follows in the footsteps of a son of man who is also the Son of God—in essence becoming the son of his son, a child reborn through the exodus of divine love.439

Although Aquinas delivers the narrative of Francis in Paradiso 11, Dante’s main source in constructing this story is Bonaventure’s Legenda Major, the saint’s official church biography. According to Bonaventure, even before Francis took on the habit and devoted his life to Christian service, he “could scarcely hear any mention of the love of

God without being deeply moved in his heart” and “he would never refuse those who begged from him for the love of God.”440

Francis is not only a follower of directives dictated by divine love, but also someone who garners other disciples for God. “Francis’s example when considered by the world,”

Bonaventure says, “is capable of arousing the hearts of those who are sluggish in the faith of

Christ.”441 This power is illustrated in Paradiso 11 by the examples of Francis’ first

438 Paradiso, 26.119-120. 439 The overlapping of transposing of relationship here is reminiscent of the opening words Saint Bernard’s supplication to the Virgin Mary that opens the Commedia’s final canto, “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio [Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son.” Paradiso, 33.1. 440 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 1.1. 441 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 10.7 136 followers—Bernard, Giles and Sylvester—who each shed their shoes and run “scalzasi

[barefoot]” to pursue Francis’ tracks. Their change of clothes mirrors Francis’ own transformation when he threw away all of his garments and “exchanged his leather belt for a piece of rope.”442 Similarly, after emerging on the shore of Mount Purgatory, Virgil washes the Dante Character face which “restored the color Hell had obscured” and then girds his waist with a “l'umile pianta [humble plant],” a simple reed that they find along their way.443

The image of running barefoot in this canto not only represents the shedding of prior habits, but also references Bonaventure’s semiotic category of vestigia or footprints.444 As is noted in Chapters Three and Four, vestigia are an important type of signification whereby creatures signify specific aspects of the Trinity. Vestigia,

Bonaventure says, signify from a distance. Bonaventure uses the trope of proximity as a comparative measure expressing a person’s likeness to God through sanctification.

Francis has a great likeness to God because he follows closely in the footsteps of Jesus by imitating Jesus’ habits and choosing to have his life be shaped by divine love.

In Bonaventure’s biography, Francis repeatedly says that he has been called by

God to teach through his example more than by his preaching. Bonaventure says Francis

“chose to live for all men rather than for himself alone.”445 He also speaks of Francis as

“shining with the splendor of his life and teaching like a morning star in the midst of clouds,” because his example can help those who are lost find a fixed point by which they

442 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 3.1. 443 Purgatorio, 1.127.133. 444 This points back to the terrace of the slothful in Purgatorio where the Dante Character encounters penitents who run in order to overcome their laziness with enthusiasm. Weeping, they cry out positives examples, the first of which is the Virgin Mary running “with haste into the mountains” to share the goods news of the Annunciation with her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Purgatorio, 18.100. 445 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 4.2 137 can reorient their own lives.446 In Paradiso 11, Aquinas echoes this idea, saying of

Francis’ birthplace of Assisi, “let anyone who would speak of this place not say Ascesi, which would come up short, but call it Orient, to sound its proper worth.”447

Aquinas indicates that Francis' way of life is like a map or guide—it is a life that is meant to direct others to labor to the same “single end” which Francis and Dominic represent in Paradiso 11 and 12.448 In Paradiso 11 Francis’ true followers throw off their shoes and sprint in their desire to conform their lives to his.449 Running is a sign of their ardor, a sign that Francis’ new adherents have been inspired. Dante purposely contrasts the running of these mendicant friars who throw off their shoes to the simonists in

Inferno 19 whose feet writhe in the air, burning upside-down, moving but going nowhere.

The feet of early Franciscans, however, are not moved by greed, but by the Holy Spirit like the apostles at Pentecost.

At Pentecost, Bonaventure says “The Spirit descended … (Acts 1.15) and appeared in the form of tongues of fire to give speech to the mouth, light to the intellect

446 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, Prologue.2. Bonaventure here is speaking of Francis, but the phrasing is also biblical (Ecclus. 50.6) and may also have been adopted by Dante in the Commedia in the tri-fold references to stars which ends each book of the poem. Peter Dronke notes that Dante’s use of stars in the concluding line of each canticle of the Commedia may be dialogical references to Virgil. Dronke writes: “Virgil, his beloved guide, have three times concluded poems with a word that was weighted very differently: not stars, but shadows (umbrae).” Peter Dronke “The Conclusion of Dante’s Commedia” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), 178-179. Although Dronke gives no indication here of recognizing the theological semiotic tradition around umbrae among medieval exegetes, not Dante’s own Bonaventurean use of this term throughout the Commedia, this is an important observation that deserves further consideration by scholars. 447 Paradiso, 11.52-54. 448 Paradiso, 11.42. 449 The friars’ transformation is not primarily intellectual and the implication seems to be that God’s calls to come is not a time to deliberate, but a time to move. In Matthew 4 Jesus calls out to Peter and his brother Andrew to follow him, saying he will make them fishers of men, as he walks along the shores of the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 4.18-19). Peter and Andrew “immediately left their nets and followed Him” (Matthew, 4.20). Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus proclaims that prostitutes and tax collectors rush through the gates while priests and philosophers try to keep them outside in the prideful cupidity for their own interpretations … or even, perhaps, cupidity for their own methods of interpretation (Matthew, 21: 31-32). To “rush through the gates” is to be moved by God’s love without halting to judge whether such a relationship is justified or foolish. 138 and ardor to the affection.”450 The speech which is given at Pentecost enables the unschooled apostles to speak to the crowd in many languages, a reversal of the confusion of tongues described in the story of the Tower of Babel.451 The pretentious popes who committed simony are trapped head-down in the mouths of stone baptismal fonts with tongues of flame at their feet, Dante’s portrayal of an anti-Pentecost.452

Unlike the wayward church leaders portrayed in Inferno 19, Francis is a simple man, not an intellectual. As Bonaventure says in the Legenda Major, Francis is moved by

God’s love following the example of Jesus who “began first to act before he taught.”453

Francis is unskilled in speech and yet he is able to preach effectively both to crowds of people and to various assortments of wild creatures—who respond to his words and acts alike. Francis’ acts of love, seem to precede and empower his considerable understanding of the divine will. In the Commedia, likewise, it is the inspiration of divine love, not the power of individual genius, that leads to useful interpretations. As Beatrice tells the

Dante Character in Paradiso, “Down there, when you philosophize, you fail to follow one true path.”454

Particularly striking in Bonaventure’s narrative is how the meaning of signs grows for Francis during the course of his life. For example, young Francis has a vision of a cross and he hears “a voice coming from the cross telling him three times: ‘Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling completely into ruin.’”455 Francis takes this command literally, understanding it to refer to a single church building, not to

450 Bonaventure, Tree of Life, 10.39. 451 Acts 2.4. 452 See Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 167-169. 453 Bonaventure, Tree of Life, 3.9. 454 Paradiso, 29.85-86. 455 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 2.1. 139 the entire Church, not to the temple of the Holy Ghost, and not to the spiritual Body of

Christ.

Bonaventure says that Francis physically repaired three churches before he began to consider a more figural interpretation of the command he received in his vision.

Interestingly, Bonaventure does not present these initial literal interpretations as errors, but rather as useful experiences or steps that themselves become distinct signs.

Bonaventure implies that correct interpretations depend on the extent to which the movement of signs which leads to them is inspired by divine love. As Paola Nasti says,

“Dante’s account of the life of Saint Francis is the epitome of Dante’s belief in the supremacy of caritas as the principle that holds together the church in this world and the other.”456

These initial literal interpretations are presented by Bonaventure as an embodied spiritual exercise that is necessary for preparing Francis for his future work. A potentially non-rational initial act, with an embodied and enacted interpretation prepares the way for the growth of understanding.457 The act of repairing churches by hand is part of what enables Francis to develop a figural understanding that God’s words to him in the vision of the burning cross are a calling to battle corruption within the Christian Church.

Francis’ obedient act precedes the growth of meaning, of further interpretation, of knowledge.458 The change in habit is a door to growth in understanding.

456 Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 237. 457 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 2.8. 458 Augustine exhibits a similar constant re-reading of his own life in Confessions as does Dante with his reinterpretations of his own life and poetry in Convivio and the Commedia. 140

Francis is a special sign for Dante and Bonaventure because of his likeness to

Jesus, his embodied expression of divine love for God and everything in creation. As

Dante notes, Francis is marked by an exceptional humility that is expressed by his embrace of poverty.459 Francis tells his friars that “poverty is the special way to salvation

… [it] is the Gospel’s treasure hidden in a field (Matthew, 13.44).” For Francis, poverty is not simply a renunciation of material wealth, but more so a habitual recognition of a person’s otherness from God. For Francis, embracing poverty is a profoundly spiritual act. “No one can be said to have perfectly renounced the world,” Francis explains, “if he still keeps the purse of his own opinion in the hidden recesses of his heart.”460 Poverty is a continual openness to recognizing the otherness of God and one’s fellow human beings.461

For Dante, the category of vestigia/footprints does not only refer to the life of

Jesus, but to the whole of Christian scripture. Pointing to Guinezelli’s comment to the

Dante Character that his words “leaves so deep and clear a trace (vestigio)” in him,

Jeremy Tambling suggests that “vestigio suggests writing.”462 A similar association between feet and words is made earlier in Purgatorio, where the Dante Character tells

Virgil, “Se i piè si stanno, non stea tuo sermone [If our feet must rest, do not arrest your words].”463 This implies that God’s footprints are found in the written words of scripture

459 Paradiso, 11.58-75. 460 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 7.1 461 Francis’ humility also serves as a model for the way in which Dante repeatedly describes his authorship of the Commedia as taking dictation. Bonaventure writes that “Francis used to say that nothing of what he had placed there [the rule] came from his own efforts but that he dictated everything just as it had been revealed by God. To confirm this with greater certainty by God’s own testimony, when only a few days had passed, the stigmata of our Lord Jesus were imprinted upon him by the finger of the living God, as the bull or seal of Christ.” (Legenda Maior, 4.11). 462 Purgatorio, 26.107; Jeremy Tambling, 'Nostro Peccato Fu Ermafrodito': Dante and the Moderns,” in Dante, Jeremy Tambling, ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 108. 463 Purgatorio, 17.84. 141 and other divinely inspired works such as those of the exegetes. According to Baranski,

Beatrice’s description in Paradiso of the “higher creatures [who] see the imprint of the eternal Worth” does not refer to the angelic orders, but rather to the “authoritative exegetes.”464 This idea of following or forsaking God’s footprints—understood as a way marked out for humans by signs embedded in creation—and repeated and extended by the life of Jesus and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, is key to Dante’s understanding of sanctification and sin and is a major thesis of the Commedia.

In Dante’s narrative of the Commedia, not even Francis can follow in Jesus’ footsteps without grace. In Paradiso 11, it is “the providence that rules the world with such deep wisdom that any God-created eye must fail before it reaches to the very depth” which chooses Francis as a special sign of God’s grace.465 Dante’s depiction of Francis as being empowered by grace corresponds with Bonaventure’s account. In the Legenda

Maior, when Francis is anxious about his friar’s adherence to the order’s rule he prays to

God for guidance. God tells Francis that his worrying is pointless, because God is the order’s true leader. “I chose you because you are a simple man and what I would do in you would be ascribed to divine grace and not to human effort,” God says to Francis. God assures Francis that there will always be shepherds to lead God’s flock, noting that “even if they are yet unborn, I will have them born.”466

The humility of Francis is but a distant shadow of the humility involved in the

Incarnation, where God takes on human form in order to become a usus. In De Doctrina

464 Paradiso, 1.106-107; Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 74. 465 Paradiso, 11.28-30. Simplicity and humility are important concepts to Dante. As Zygmunt Baranski says, “you notice the discomfort Dante felt in regard to proposals where knowledge is presented as something precious, and therefore inaccessible for the majority.” (Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 94). Dante rejects the idea that knowledge, and especially theology, is for the elite. This is a major reasons why he chooses to compose his great poem in vernacular. 466 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 8.3 142

Christiana, Augustine says that Christ, as divine Wisdom, “is our home [and] also made

[God’s] self for us into the way home.”467 In Paradiso 4 Beatrice makes the stunning statement that all of heaven has configured itself in a way that condescends to the Dante

Character’s limited understanding, similar to how scripture “attributes hands and feet to

God, but has another meaning.”468 As John Freccero says, “the extraordinary implication of Beatrice’s remark is that the whole of the Paradiso, at least until the crossing of the river of light toward the poem’s ending, has no existence, even fictional, beyond the metaphoric.”469 Beatrice’s point is that if God could not speak to us through our error, our lack of understanding, God could hardly speak to us at all.

In the Commedia, Jesus is the one who “has need of none to guide Him,” like the navigator of Convivio 4.7, and can lead the way to the final destination.470 The

Incarnation, according to Augustine, is God’s “generosity . . . [in] making [God’s] self the pavement under our feet along which we could return home.”471 People were originally given immortality, Augustine claims, but used this gift in a perverted manner which resulted in death. Conversely, Jesus’ perfect use of his mortal existence resulted in the forgiveness of sin and reopened for humanity the gate to eternal life.472 What enables the journey of the Dante Character is the guide who is not only the way to the truth, but is also the truth.

467 De Doctrina Christiana, [I.11.11], p. 111. 468 Paradiso, 4.43-45. 469 John Freccero, “An Introduction to the Paradiso,” in Jeremy Tambling (ed), Dante (Longman: London, 1999), 128. In my view, this also this reflects the tremendous respect that Dante has for the sign worlds of individuals, where even the condescension of God in displaying the universe is personalized for the individual. This also suggests a recognition by the poet that the journey of reading his text will be significantly different for every reader. 470 Paradiso, 18.109. 471 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.17.16. 472 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.14.13. 143

Journeying through the eighth circle of Hell among the sewers if discord, the

Dante Character says he “follows in the imprints of [Virgil’s] cherished feet].”473 The acknowledgement and gratitude given to Virgil has the double meaning of the Dante

Character tracking both Virgil’s footprints and Dante the poet utilizing the feet of Virgil’s great epic poem. The Aeneid’s description of a journey through the underworld provides

Dante with several threads that he employs in weaving his own Christological narrative.

In the world of the Commedia, people are able to participate in God by imitating Jesus— much as the Dante Character and Virgil navigate the underworld by following in Jesus’ footsteps—but it is important to consider the practical impact that Dante hoped his poem would have.474

Although the world of the Commedia is a fictional world, the poem has a purpose which is aimed at the reader. For example, while describing some of the misshapen people in Inferno, Dante proclaims, “May God so let you reader, gather fruit from what you read.”475 The stated intent of the Commedia is to “profit that world which lives badly.”476

Dante knows, however, that this purpose is difficult to achieve given the predilections people have for seeing themselves in a positive light. In the Convivio he notes that “in judging the self, everyone uses the measures of a dishonest merchant who

473 Inferno, 28.148. 474 To be like Christ, for Augustine, is to empty oneself (kenosis) and become transparent to God. Augustine relying on the authority of Paul, claims that God “has predestinated us that we should be conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29, quoted in De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, 13). He also envisions the love of the Holy Spirit acting as a purifying fire that fuels sanctification by burning away the debris of sin, giving birth to a sanctified ‘new man.’ (Confession, 11.19.39). 475 Inferno, 20.19-20. 476 This purpose is stated by Beatrice in the earthly paradise, Purgatorio, 32.103-104. 144 buys using one measure and sells using another.”477 As the Dante Character says to his ancestor Cacciaguida in Paradiso 17, he expects that the stories in the Commedia will

“discomfort many with their bitter taste” and he does not want to “lose still others through my songs.”478 Cacciaguida responds by saying that the Dante Character should

“forswear all falsehood” despite any misgivings, and erase nothing of what he has seen.479

The concerns about the effectiveness of the moral suasion of literary works found within the Commedia are not the first instance of Dante mentioning the challenges associated with such a goal. In interpreting one of his earlier poems in the Convivio,

Dante says that authors offering “admonitions” can often be heard as “presumptuous” which leads others to dismiss what they have to say.480 In such instances, Dante recommends an alternate strategy of “speak[ing] to people indirectly, addressing [one’s] words not to the person for whom they are meant, but to another,” which is the method

Dante has employs in the canzone he is explicating in this passage and in the

Commedia.481

Dante suggests that people often reject another’s critical words when they are experience as aimed directly at them, as pushing them to change their behavior in some way.482 Such frontal assaults on someone’s behavior can make a person feel threatened or

477 Convivio, 1.2.9 478 Paradiso, 17.111-117. 479 Paradiso, 17.127. 480 Convivio, 2.11.6. 481 Convivio, 2.11.6. 482 Interestingly, Purgatorio seems to be the least popular canticle of the Commedia among scholars. Jeremy Tambling notes that in his effort to find essays for his collection of essays on the Commedia he was able to identify an abundance of articles on the Inferno and Paradiso, but “it was surprisingly hard are the fine work which could be anthologized on Purgatorio.” Tambling, Jeremy. “Introduction: Dante and Modem Criticism,” in Dante, Jeremy Tambling, ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 3. 145 erased.483 Francis offers an alternative model for encouraging positive conduct which

Dante utilizes—that of his own penitence. As Theresa Federici notes, Francis and his friars viewed penitence as “the state of the man who recognizes God … the only possible condition before God.”484 Francis encouraged others to change their conduct by the joyfulness of his own penitence.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Dante portrays the process of purgation as joyful suffering. Dante held freedom and community to be the two greatest gifts that people had received from God, and both are held in check by vicious habits that freeze the understanding and halt the growth of signs. As Matthew Treherne has noted, the replacement of vice by virtuous habit portrayed in the Purgatorio is a movement “from the vicious to the sacramental.”485 Other “mediaeval visionaries of the afterlife, who imagine all kinds of purgatorial suffering,” Peter Hawkins claims, “never depicted what

Dante shows on every level of the mountain: the singing of hymns, the recitation of the our father and other prayers, the echo of the beatitudes.”486 Dante’s Purgatorio is a place where “whereby biblical passages and other religious texts are enacted” and where this enactment is not a monolog but a communal activity that helps to build unity among the

483 This indirect method is also employed in the Christian scriptures by Jesus who often uses parables in his preaching. This is the method that the prophet Nathan employs to get King David to recognize his own sin in sending Uriah to his death. It is also critical to Kierkegaard’s method of writing philosophical works through pseudonymous perspectives. Research in psychology supports this approach to moral suasion. In the 1960s Jack Brehm designated the behavioral category of “reactance” which consist of “hostility, flouting of authority, and resistance to persuasion.” “Reactance often causes people to resists attempts to change their behavior,” say psychologists Emily Moyer-Gusé and Robin L. Nabi, noting that “one way to overcome that is to embed persuasive messages in stories with relatable characters.” These quotes on reactance are taken from “IdeaWatch,” Harvard Business Review (October, 2010), 28-30. They suggest that storytelling is an essential mode of discourse for moral suasion. 484 Theresa Federici, “Dante's Davidic Journey: From Sinner to God's Scribe,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 186. 485 Matthew Treherne, “Liturgical Personhood: Creation, Penitence, and Praise in the Commedia,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 149. 486 Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 256. 146 penitents. While the penitents undergo painful corrective labor as they progress through

Purgatorio, such as the prideful who carry heavy stones upon their backs, they also “sing their way up the mountain.”487

Dante believed that penitence involves committed effort and suffering. “The habit of virtue, whether moral or intellectual,” he says in the Convivio, “cannot be had of a sudden, but must be acquired through practice.”488 Despite the suffering involved, Dante says that the “perfection which illuminates not only ourselves but others” makes purgation a happy undertaking because “one should open out like a rose that can no longer remain closed, and disperse the fragrance which is produced within.”489

Dante believes that all people long to sign forth in this way, but having “tied … our hands and feet” through vice, people must first remove these bonds through purgation.490 While it is difficult to begin the process of changing one’s conduct, the natural longing for freedom—and the opportunity to fully sign forth and unfold like a flower “that can no longer remain closed”—gives a person momentum once their efforts have begun. As Virgil explains to the Dante Character, “This mountain is so fashioned that the climb is harder at the outset and, as one ascends, becomes less toilsome.”491

Grace contributes to the momentum that souls gain, since God wills this movement. As

Statius explains to the Dante Character shortly after they meet in Purgatorio, a person

487 Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 256. 488 Convivio, 1.11.7. 489 Convivio, 4.27.4. Notably, Bonaventure describes the stigmata that appears in Francis’ side as a most beautiful rose, the same image that Dante employs for the community of the blessed in the final cantos of Paradiso. 490 Purgatorio, 19.24. 491 Purgatorio, 4.88-90. 147

“wills the same before, but holy Justice sets the soul's desire against its will, and, as once it longed to sin, it now seeks penance.”492

Movement in Purgatorio is by ascending literal steps, beginning with the three leading up to its gate. The first step is made of white marble in which, Dante says, his

“image was reflected in true likeness.”493 The second step is purple and cracked and the final step is “flaming red as blood that spurts from a vein.”494 As Mandelbaum notes, these stairs represent the three stages in confession: recognition of one’s own sin; the bruising process of verbally declaring your faults; and, satisfaction through acts of contrition, a genuine effort to change one’s conduct and the grace made possible by the blood shed by Jesus in the crucifixion.495 The first step’s reflection of the Dante

Character’s true image and likeness is a clear reference to the creation of Adam and Eve in the image and likeness of God in Genesis 1.26-27. The implication is that while the image remains intact, the stair reflects one’s unlikeness to God, the false signs and vicious habits that will be “washed away” during the journey up the mountain.496

In the Purgatorio, the washing away of vice is a matter of the feet. The angel who guards the gate rests both of his feet upon the blood red top step, which symbolizes the crucifixion. After ascending, the Dante Character casts himself upon the angel’s feet and begs him to show mercy by securing him entrance. The angel grants this request noting

492 Purgatorio, 21.64-66. 493 Purgatorio, 9.96. 494 Purgatorio, 9.97-102. 495 Allen Mandelbaum, Notes to Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Allen Mandelbaum (trans.), (New York: Basic books, 1984), 338. In The Poetics of Conversion, John Freccero points to the fact that Augustine begins the confessions by stating that he needs the help of a guide. John G. Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, 9. 496 Purgatorio, 9.114. 148 that Peter had instructed him “to err in opening rather than in keeping locked, if but the soul fall prostrate at my feet.”497

Dante associates the act of confession not only with laying prostrate before God’s feet—represented by the angel standing on the step that represents Jesus’ blood—but also with looking down at one’s own feet in humility to see the marks one has left upon the earth and upon the lives of others, for good or ill. On the first terrace of Purgatorio, the prideful bear the weight of boulders on their backs, learning the practice of humility in part through this habitual movement. These penitents are so weighted down by their burdens that they “do not look like people” and the Dante Character at first is unable to distinguish their bodies from the weight they carry.498

The corrective work accomplished by the prideful in transporting these oppressive stones is not only physical, but also spiritual. The burdens they carry force the pilgrims in

Purgatorio to direct their eyes downward in order to see a series of stories carved into the stones that comprise the road that leads upward to the earthly paradise at the mountain’s summit, and ultimately, to heaven. Like the tablets of the law given to Moses on Sinai these stones have been carved by the digitus Dei, the finger of God. Dante reports that there are “effigies on all the path protruding from the mountain” and advancing in sanctification in this realm is by navigating from one narrative sign to another.499 Many of these perfectly lifelike scenes are from scripture and, beholding these images, the

497 Purgatorio, 9.128-9. 498 Purgatorio, 10.113. 499 Purgatorio, 12.23-24. 149

Dante Character proclaims, “the dead seemed dead and the alive, alive: I saw, head bent, treading those effigies, as well as those who'd seen those scenes directly.”500

The first images that penitents encounter are positive exemplars of humility, the corrective habit to the vice of pride. Mary and the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation comprise the first scene which is so lifelike that Mary’s body seems to speak “Ecce ancilla Dei [Behold the handmaid of the Lord].”501 The subjects in these stone works of art seem to move and speak as if alive, causing the pilgrims to reflect on narratives that serve as spiritual exercises for the penitents. Some textual evidence suggest that

Bonaventure may have inspired Dante’s use of these images of “visibile parlare [visible speech],” including this first exemplar of Mary at The Annunciation.502 For example, in the Tree of Life Bonaventure writes of the Annunciation, “The Holy Spirit came upon

[Mary] like divine fire enflaming her soul and sanctifying her flesh in perfect purity ….

But the power of the Most High overshadowed her (Luke 1.35) so that she could endure such fire.”503 Bonaventure’s language employs images of fire and smoke that recall

God’s presence on Sinai. He then adds an address to the reader, saying, “If you could hear the Virgin singing with joy … then I am sure you would sing in the sweet tones with the blessed Virgin, that sacred hymn.”504 The very next image that the Dante Character

500 Purgatorio, 12.67-69. 501 As Mandelbaum notes, this is a quote from Luke, 1.38. Peter S. Hawkins, writing about this image says “the poet deliberately emphasizes a scripted nature of such a visual representation by having the silent images seem to speak the words of the vulgate Luke (1:28-38).” Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 46. 502 Purgatorio, 10.95. 503 Bonaventure, The Tree of Life, 1.3. 504 Bonaventure, The Tree of Life, 1.3. 150 comes upon is that of the psalmist David singing and dancing “with his robe hitched up” before the Ark of the Covenant.505

Both Dante and Bonaventure view the reading of narratives as an important spiritual exercise in the process of sanctification.506 In the Convivio Dante says that “the habit of virtue, whether moral or intellectual, cannot be had of a sudden, but must be acquired through practice.”507 Sanctification involves both “a transformation of the will through the physical (or virtually physical) suffering” and spiritual exercises that involve the “use of exempla.”508 As Augustine says in De Musica, “When the mind is raised to spiritual things and remains fixed there, the push of this habit is broken, and being little by little repressed is destroyed.”509

Exempla in Dante’s Purgatorio do not only provide guidance to the penitents on the ways that leads to God, but also indicate dead ends to be avoided. Some of narratives signs depicted by God’s visible speech are cautionary, a reminder that the work of sanctification is by the slow steps of dialogic encounter. Toward the end of the terrace of the prideful the Dante Character encounters a series admonitory images of hubris that

505 Purgatorio, 55-66. 506 Augustine credits the narratives of the desert saints as being critical to his own conversion, seeing in their lives stories a new possibility for himself. See Augustine, Confessions, 8.6. 507 Convivio, 1.11.7. 508 Matthew Treherne, “Liturgical Personhood: Creation, Penitence, and Praise in the Commedia,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 135. 509 Augustine, De Musica, 6.33. Bakhtin’s ideas are also relevant here. For example, Bakhtin says “when someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up. M. M. Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 345. From Augustine’s perspective, the persuasiveness of an other’s narrative is empowered by grace. He says that “anyone moved externally ‘by another’ to the eternal truth must first have been moved inwardly by God.” Augustine, De Musica, 6.36. 151 cause him to weep, beginning with the fall of Lucifer and including the Tower of

Babel.510

At the conclusion of this series of cautionary narratives, Dante issues his own warning to the reader: “Wax proud then, go your way with head held high, you sons of

Eve, and no, do not bend down your face and so reflect upon your evil path!”511 While this line is usually interpreted simply as a moral instruction given to the reader, it is in fact a critical signal meant to draw the reader’s attention to the dialogical aspect of these images. Recall that the first step leading to the gate of Purgatorio is made of white marble in which the penitents’ “image was reflected in true likeness.”512 Dante tells us that God’s visible speech is also made of “white marble carved with so much art.”513

While Dante does not explicitly state that the penitents’ image and likeness is reflected in these narratives, he hopes that readers will make this connection. What makes these stories spiritual exercises in not merely their content, but the dialogical engagement with them that the Dante Character models, comparing his own likeness or distance from each of the positive and negative exemplars. The point of these narratives—like the stories of the various characters who populates the Commedia and the Commedia itself— is for the reader to look down at their feet to see the evil path they trod, the evil path communities trod, wracked by violence and sin.

510 The language Dante employs in describing these images is again very reminiscent of one of Bonaventure’s addresses to the reader in The Tree of Life. Four times Dante begins stanzas with “Ah”—a verbal signifier for grief—to address the subject of the scene being portrayed (e.g., “Ah, Saul, you too appeared there, dead”) Purgatorio, 12.40. After describing the crucifixion in The Tree of Life, Bonaventure writes: “Ah, you, lost man [to the reader], the cause of all this confusion and sorrow how is it that you do not break down and weep.” Bonaventure, The Tree of Life, 6.24. Breaking down and weeping is precisely what the Dante Character does at these scenes which in Christian theology represent both the loss of beauty and goodness and the need for the work of Jesus on the cross. 511 Purgatorio, 12.70-72. 512 Purgatorio, 9.96. 513 Purgatorio, 10.31. 152

Looking down and seeing one's feet in Purgatorio, the traveler comes to herself, viewing her own reflection in the footpath along with the vestigia¸ the footprints or marks that she has left on the lives of others. While Dante’s invention of images that speak and reflect is already exquisite poetry, there is one additional connection that must be made.

These instances of God's visible speech are road signs—in fact, they are the same segno that marks the boundary that Adam and Eve violated in their “trapassar del segno.”514

Those moved by God are signs of divine love operating in the world. For Dante, God’s most important vestigia or footprints are people—the saints, martyrs, and exegetes who like Jesus, signs forth divine love.515 These guides, like Beatrice, are signs who point to other signs and together make “a ladder” that climbs to God.516

The Commedia is meant to function as a looking glass for the reader who is called to participate in the text by dialogically comparing herself to the figures whom she encounters in its cantos. Dante encourages this introspective participation through the reactions of the Dante Character who, for example, faints “as a dead body falls” after seeing Francesca and Paolo within the circle of the lustful.517 This dialogic is not only embedded in the architectural landscape of Purgatorio, but also in the microstructures of the poem.

In particular, Dante constructs a number of tropes that act as spiritual exercises in miniature. As Richard H. Lansing demonstrates, Dante encourages the reader to join in an active dialog with Commedia through a wide variety of similes. Dante’s similes “do not

514 Paradiso, 26.117. 515 Dante, following Christian orthodox views, As Augustine says, following John’s Gospel, Jesus as the Word of God was in the world prior to the Incarnation. Following the logic of Romans 1.20 and Wisdom 13.1-5, the Word’s footsteps were available through the creation 516 Paradiso, 21.29. 517 Inferno, 5.142; p. 47. 153 lull the mind into easy agreement or passive acceptance, but rather challenge the imagination, involv[ing] the reader in the interpretive act of seeking out contained significance.”518 In the Commedia, Lansing says, the “simile serves as a heuristic device, calculated to stimulate active intellectual participation.”519 Dante carefully constructs his similes to prompt the reader to become skilled at moving from sign to sign, to see the many ways that signs can be bundled together, and to think like a poet. To read Dante, one must follow the poet’s feet, his methods for connecting images and words.

In the Inferno Dante employs a number of similes which emphasize the dissimilitude between the two things being compared. Describing the motion of

Phlegyas’ bark, Dante writes, “Bowstring has not thrust from itself an arrow that ever rushed as swiftly through the air.”520 Though there is a similarity between the bark and the arrow, it is expressed by means of the negative term which emphasizes their mis- relation.521 The relationship between the vehicle and the tenor of this simile mirrors that between God and the inhabitants of Hell whose association with God is essentially a disassociation.

In Purgatorio the reader encounters another type of simile which echoes the characteristics of those whose loves, knowledge and habits are being reshaped by grace.

This group of analogies “reflect stylistically the element of difference within a general similarity.”522 In Purgatorio’s final terrace Dante describes the movements of the lustful as being “just like cranes, of whom a part, to flee the sun fly north to Riphean mountains,

518 Lansing, p. 14. 519 Lansing, p. 14. 520 Inferno, 8.13-16; p. 69. I have borrowed this example from Lansing, p. 26. The emphasis is mine. 521 For other examples see Lansing, pp. 22-28. 522 Lansing, p. 56. For other examples of this type of simile see Lansing pp. 54-58. 154 while the rest to flee the frost, fly toward the sands, one group moves with – the other opposite – us.”523 In this simile, harmonious likeness is the overall theme, yet a note of discord remains, reminiscent of this canticles characters in the midst of the process of sanctification.

In Paradiso, the souls “express only a quality of likeness.”524 These similes emphasize proximity and communion. For example, in the first heaven Dante characterizes Justinian’s approach as being “just as the sun.”525 Here the vehicle participates fully in the tenor, just as the blessed in Paradiso participate fully in God according to their ability.

The Wounds of Jesus

For Dante, people are by far the most important type of sign. People can serve as guides who point beyond themselves to signify the otherness of God, the unity of God, and the aspects of the Trinity. People are also the central category of sign for Dante because he believed that in the Incarnation, Jesus condescends to be a guide. As

Augustine says, unless “Wisdom herself had seen fit to adapt herself even to an infirmity such as ours, and had given us an example of how to live, in no other mode than the human one, because we too are human,” the journey to God could never be actualized.526

For Dante, Augustine, and Bonaventure, the body of Jesus, his physical being, his actions and movements in the world, his suffering death, and the resurrection of his body are

523 Purgatorio, XXVI, 43-46; p. 243. 524 Lansing, p. 154. 525 Paradiso, V, 133; p. 45. This type of simile is used throughout the Paradiso. See Lansing for additional examples 526 De Doctrina Christiana, 1.10.10. This interpretation, as Augustine himself points out, is [1 Cor. 1:25]: “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” 155 necessary for the work of salvation.527 To borrow a phrase from Robert Hollander, for medieval theologians “Christ is no metaphor.”528

According to the gospel narratives, Jesus was without sin, yet his resurrected body retains the wounds of the cross—the marks of payment for human sins. In John’s Gospel the resurrected Jesus twice identifies himself to his disciples by showing them the bodily marks of the crucifixion.529 In the City of God, Augustine notes Jesus’ statement in

Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 13.43) that after the final judgement resurrected bodies will shine with the brightness of God’s love. When the resurrected Jesus appears to Mary

Magdalene and the apostles, however, this brightness is held back by Jesus, Augustine says, since it would blind their eyes not accustomed to beholding God’s light. Jesus, however, did want his followers to recognize him so that they could spread the good news of the gospel, Augustine says, and “For this purpose also He allowed them to touch the marks of His wounds.”530

In Paradiso 11, Dante interprets the marks of the cross as signs of the presence of divine love—a love that when embodied moves a person to live and even die for others.

This love marks both Jesus and Francis in Dante’s retelling of the Legenda Maior. While

527 In his discussion of vestigia in the Commentary on the Four Books of the Sentences of Master Peter Lombard, Bonaventure quotes Augustine as writing, “Woe to those who love Thy noddings in place of Thee and wander about in Thy footprints (vestigiis) and forsake Thee as their leader.” Bonaventure, Commentary, I.1.2, resp.1. Interestingly, Karl Barth names Judas “the great sinner of the New Testament,” arguing that his betrayal of Jesus is rooted in an earlier judgment he makes of Jesus for allowing Mary Magdalene to anoint his feet in John 12.1-8. [Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics II.2: The Doctrine of God, G.W. Bromley, trans., ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 461.] Barth explains that Judas’ uncleanliness is made evident in this episode where Judas wants “to exploit” Mary Magdalene’s offering to Jesus, “not for himself, as he explains, but for the poor.” (Barth, 462). Barth explains that Judas “is not opposed to Jesus” per se, but that he “actually is against him” by keeping for himself “the right to decide, in the face of Jesus, what the way of apostolic discipleship really involves.” (Barth, 463). Ironically, Dante and medieval exegetes such as Bonaventure often interpret Jesus’s feet to signify his true disciples. 528 Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's Commedia, 21. 529 John 20.20; John 20.27. 530 Augustine, City of God, 22.19. 156 praying on Mount La Verna, Dante’s Aquinas reports that Francis “from Christ he had the final seal, then for two years he bore His wounds upon his limbs.”531

Dante’s description of the marks of the crucified Jesus, or stigmata, in Paradiso

11 copies Bonaventure’s account which says that Francis’ wounds were “imprinted upon him by the finger of the living God, as the bull or seal of Christ.”532 Bonaventure reports that this marking occurs after Francis has a seraphic vision of Jesus crucified. Francis, like a new Moses, then “came down from the mountain, (Matt. 8.1) bearing with him the image of the Crucified which was depicted not on tablets of stone (Exod. 31.18),”

Bonaventure says, “but engraved in the members of his body by the finger of the living

God. (Exod. 31.18; John 11.27).”533

Francis’ body, like the stone narratives that mark the road in Purgatorio, is an example of God’s visible speech meant to guide others to follow the footsteps of Jesus.

What defines Francis in Paradiso 11 is “his ardor” and it is because he is moved by the love of God that he can be said to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Francis is sanctified by the presence of divine love, which comes to mark his body with the signs of the cross.

The giving of the stigmata is understood by Dante as God’s witness to the sanctification of Francis, an act that verifies Francis with the divine stamp of approval as a worthy

“guide,” one to be followed by others.534 Dante’s interpretation accords with Augustine’s writings on sanctification. In the City of God, Augustine says “vices are then only to be considered overcome when they are conquered by the love of God,” through the

531 Paradiso, 11.107-108. 532 Bonaventure, Legenda Major, 4.11. 533 Bonaventure, Legenda Major, 13.5. 534 Paradiso, 11.36. Here Thomas says that Francis and Dominic were chosen “to serve as guides” for the sponsa Dei, the bride of God which is the community of the church. 157 mediation of “the man Christ Jesus, who became a partaker of our mortality that He might make us partakers of His divinity.”535 Dante, like Augustine, views the work of sanctification as a leaden-footed process that is accomplished with grace and effort one step at a time. The “mind is purged by faith,” says Augustine, “by more and more abstaining from sins, and by doing good works, and by praying with the groaning of holy desires.”536

As Paola Nasti has noted, in Paradiso 11 and 12 Dante also describes the lives of

Francis and Dominic allegorically “as love affairs.”537 Specifically, Dante depicts Francis as the lover of Poverty, employing sensual imagery that hints at the joining of their two bodies in loving intercourse. As Nasti explains, using the trope of bodily love to describe the relationship between God and the church has a long tradition that began with

Solomon’s Song of Songs and its sponsa Dei [bride of God] and continued with

Christological interpretations of this text by exegetes such as Augustine and Bernard of

Clairvaux.538 “If, in Augustine’s mind, love was at the heart of the true church,” Nasti says, “there could be no better texts than the Song of Songs to express this notion.”539

Dante signals his use of this tradition of interpretation at the close of Paradiso 10 with the image of a clock “that calls us at the hour when the bride of God gets up to sing matins to her bridegroom, that he should love her still” to describe the movement of the

535 Augustine, City of God, 21.16. 536 Augustine, De Trinitate, 4.21.30 537 Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 235. 538 Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” 215. 539 Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” 215. 158 two circles within the heaven of the sun.540 In Paradiso 11, the Song of Songs imagery of the bride and bridegroom is not only used to describe Francis’ relationship with Poverty, but also Jesus’ death upon the cross. Jesus, says Thomas, “crying out in a loud voice, espoused her [the bride] with his sacred blood.”541 Dante depicts the crucifixion as a joyful wedding between the bride and the bridegroom, but one that also deprives the bride of her beloved’s presence. In order to ensure that the bride “should go in joy to her beloved,” says Thomas, God “ordained in her behalf two princes,” Francis and Dominic,

“to serve as guides.”542 The central message of Paradiso 11 is that the cross, a sign of suffering, is also the mark of divine love. Francis, in Dante’s telling, bears the signs of the crucifixion because he was chosen by God and because in his ardor he embraces the way of the cross with a “happy countenance.”543

There are two distinct kinds of suffering in the Commedia. The first type of suffering, found in Inferno, is a sign of sin which points to the need for correction and gives witness to the falsehood of arresting the movement of signs by erasure that is tied to vicious habits. This former type of suffering is marked by the meaningless babble of disunion, and by the senseless and repeated wounding of other people, of the self and of communities in a Hell characterized by division. This suffering bears the mark of irreparable despair, the grotesque shadow of language (e.g., Nimrod and Geryon) and the lost possibility of communion. Not even Francis can wrest the deceitful Franciscan friar

540 Paradiso, 10.139-140. I am grateful to Paola Nasti’s work for making this connection. 541 Paradiso 11.31-32. 542 Paradiso 11.33-36. 543 Paradiso, 11.76. Citing Augustine’s In epistolam Iohannis 5.3, Paola Nasti says, “According to Augustine… only caritas, the mark of Christ, is important in the history of salvation: ‘Therefore, love alone puts the difference between the children of god and the children of the devil. Let them all sign themselves with a sign of the cross of Christ; let the all respond, Amen; let them all respond, Alleluia… They that have charity are born of god: they did have it not, are not born of god… This is the pearl of price, charity, without which whenever you may have, brings you no profit: if you have it alone, it is sufficient for you.’” 159

Guido da Montefeltro from the clutches of the devils in the pouch of fraudulent counselors, because he is unrepentant.544

The second type of suffering depicted in the Commedia—that of Purgatorio—is marked by song, by teamwork, by suffering together, by hope in the footsteps of one who has gone before and who shows the way. While the first genre of suffering is the way of the damned, a dead end, an end in which hope should be abandoned, the second is demarcated by the vestigia/footsteps of Jesus and is marked by the sign of the cross. On the terrace of the gluttonous in Purgatorio the Dante Character’s friend Forese Donati describes the people around him as “these people who weep while they are singing.”545

This sense of joyful suffering is repeated shortly after in Donati’s description of the crucifixion as Jesus who says God’s name “Elì with such bliss when with the blood from

His own veins He made us free.”546 As Matthew Treherne notes, “Christ sacrificing the cross, is radically rewritten by Dante as a joyful calling of God’s name rather than …

[the] anguished lament” that appears in Matthew 27.46.547 In Inferno the tears of the damned flow to the bottom of the pit where they are solidified by the wind from Lucifer’s wings into the frozen river of Cocytus in which Lucifer and the worst sinners are bound.

In Purgatorio, the Dante Character describes the tears of penitents as “drop by drop” dissolving “the evil filling all the world.”548

Unlike those imprisoned in Inferno, the penitents in Purgatorio are moved by divine love and suffer willingly. For Dante the cross comes to “define human nature,” explains Vittorio Montemaggi, and willingly “sharing in the dynamics of cross” is how

544 Inferno, 27.112-120. 545 Purgatorio, 23.64. 546 Purgatorio, 74-75. 547 Matthew Treherne, “Liturgical personhood, 142. 548 Purgatorio, 20.7-8. 160 people come to grow in their love and understanding of God.549 This perspective is brought to life in Bonaventure’s life of Francis, which serves as Dante’s primary source for Paradiso 11. Bonaventure says that Francis had a vision of Jesus on the cross which moved him “on the innermost recesses of his heart.”550 After repeatedly contemplating this vision, Bonaventure says, Francis “understood as addressed to himself the Gospel text: ‘If you wish to come after me, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me’

(Matt. 16.24).”551

On the first terrace in Purgatorio, when the prideful carry heavy stones that bend the penitents’ faces toward the ground with their weight, they are taking up the way of the cross.552 Dante says in Monarchia that “the foundation of the church is Christ” and

“He is the rock on which the church is built.”553 As noted above, the rock behind which the Dante Character hides in Inferno 21 is likewise a figure of Jesus, the gap in the rock that protected Moses on Sinai. The prideful bear their burden gladly because it is the way to freedom that removes the chains of sin in which their understanding of God and the world is held captive. They experience not only the effort involved with changing their habits, but also the greater freedom and self-control that results from this. Francis serves as a model guide for the church, in Dante’s view, because he joyfully pursues Poverty or the suffering associated with sanctification—he runs to pick up the cross and follow

Jesus.

549 Vittorio Montemaggi, “In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante's Commedia,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 75. 550 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 1.5 551 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 1.5 552 Purgatorio, 11.52-57. 553 Monarchia, 3.10.7. 161

According to Bonaventure, the stigmata is but one way in which Francis’ life was marked by the sign of the cross. After throwing off his clothes and declaring God to be his true parent, Francis adorns himself in an old cloak “and with his own hand marked a cross on it with a piece of chalk, thus designating it as the covering of a crucified man and a half-naked beggar.”554 When Francis prayed he would stand up with his arms straight out, as if hung on a cross.555 Likewise, when he would bless his followers, he would cross his arms over them to mark them and, when they went out to preach, he would instruct them to walk in the formation of the cross. Francis seeks to shape his whole conduct according to this sign.

Dante, like Bonaventure, believes that Francis’ “true love of Christ had transformed his lover into his image (2 Cor. 3.18).”556 The marks of Jesus’ wounds on

Francis’ body are described by both Dante and Bonaventure as being divine artwork that demonstrates Francis’ interior life as defined by his loving relationship with God. Of

Francis’ body, God makes a map.557

In Dante’s Commedia, bodies are the key maps, and poetry or song is what connects them, even when no connections appear possible.558 In Purgatorio bodies are marked by one of God’s angels who writes seven Ps upon the forehead of each penitent to represent the sins

(peccator is Latin for “sin” or “sinner”) that will be overcome in Purgatorio.559 These signs constitute for each of penitents a map detailing their personal road to sanctification, written

554 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 2.4. 555 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 10.4. 556 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 13.5 557 As the anthropologist Victor Turner points out, all you need is a body to have a map. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 161-162; 281-282. 558 Like the song that connects the Sybil’s oracles in the Aeneid, when the leaves upon which the oracle usually writes her prophecies are scattered in the wind and lost. 559 Purgatorio, 9.112. 162 upon their own face. As the angel explains, these signs, like the stigmata, are also wounds.

“Once you are inside,” instructs the angel, “see that you wash away these wounds.”560

Progress in Purgatorio is the removal of false barriers that prevent signs from growing with a natural, free movement that tends toward the invisible things of God

(Romans 1.20), specifically, towards love and justice. This is, Dante argues, the most pure form of loving God and loving the world—it is essentially a poetic notion of love. It is not signs that are erased in Purgatorio, but rather the barriers, the concupiscent loves that hold signs in captivity and prevent people from participating in the dialogic of love and recognition that leads to communion with God and other people.

In Purgatorio the suffering that marks distance from God—the sign of the need for healing—remains, but an additional sign is added, the P that is a stand-in, an indirect indicator of what will be purged, what will be erased, and most importantly, what will be freed. The angel’s mark is a revelation of how people have marked their own bodies by their loves and their conduct in the world. For example, Beatrice is not erased for the Dante

Character in Purgatorio, but the signs that the Dante Character connects to her are unbound from his concupiscent desires. This loosing is not so that the Dante Character can be free of

Beatrice, but so that she can grow for him as a sign, so that his love for God and for himself can grow. Beatrice’s exclamation—“Look over here! I am, I truly am Beatrice”—is an accusation that the Dante Character has made of her a false image.561 The Dante Character’s own vision of himself is limited by how he sees and diagrams Beatrice, how he connects her with his life.

560 Purgatorio, 9.113-114. 561 Purgatorio, 30.73. 163

Warped loves bend signs and people’s interpretations in a way that halts dialog and limits recognition. Dante believes that developing new habits can offer correctives to vices.

Although it is a person who achieves a new habit, the movement that leads to liberation from vice is initiated and supported by grace. The Commedia is, among other things, an indefatigable reconfiguring of Dante’s sign world undertaken through the trope of viewing key signs and stories through the lens of an imagined God’s-eye-view, from the perspective that Francis mentions as the one true measure of all things.

As the penitents complete the journey that comprises each level of Purgatorio, one of the Ps is erased from their foreheads by the wind of an angelic wing which signifies the grace of the Holy Spirit, typically represented in scripture by a dove.562 In the first such instance, the Dante Character says the angel “brought us where the rock was cleft, there tapped my forehead with his wings.”563 While the wings signify the procession of the Holy Spirit, the cleft rock not only represents Jesus but also recalls Saint Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of

Songs. Bernard begins Sermon 62 by quoting the Song of Songs: “My dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the crannies of the wall (Sg 2.14).”564 Bernard interprets the wall in this passage to be a figure for the heavenly assembly of saints and the crannies in the wall to be places that God has made for people. The rock, in his account, signifies the body of Jesus and the cleft in the rock is the wounds of the cross through which people enter the kingdom of heaven.565 When the Dante Character leaves Inferno he does so through a cleft made in the

562 For example see Purgatorio 12.94.98, Purgatorio 17.58-68 and Purgatorio 19.46-49. 563 Purgatorio, 12.97-98. 564 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 62. 565 I am grateful to Zygmunt Baranski for identifying this important connection. Zygmunt Baranski, Dante e i Segni, 167. 164 rock, a pattern that is reiterated at every transition from one terrace to another on each level of Purgatorio.566

In the Purgatorio, following the footsteps of Jesus, walking through the wounds of the cross, leads to the flight of Paradiso. Flight as Beatrice explains is a renewed free will where “the true light” that brings peace to those in heaven “does not allow their steps to stray.”567 For Dante the process of purgation and sanctification is about liberty. When questioned by Cato, Mount Purgatory’s first guardian and himself a symbol of liberty,

Virgil says of the Dante Character, “'May it please you to welcome his arrival, since he's in search of liberty, which is so dear.”568 The angel on the terrace of the prideful tells the

Dante Character that once the Ps on his forehead are “erased, your legs shall be so mastered by good will, not only will they feel no effort going up, but they will take delight in being urged to.”569

Once the wounds of the P’s have been washed away in Dante’s Purgatorio, people possess a renewed free will wherein sin is no longer a part of freedom. “Your will is free, upright, and sound,” Virgil tells the Dante Character after he ascends the summit of Mount Purgatory, “Not to act as it chooses is unworthy: over yourself I crown and miter you.”570 The idea of a second free will where sinning is no longer possible comes from Augustine who writes of the blessed: “Neither are we to suppose that because sin

566 Inferno 34.85 reads “Then out through an opening in the rock he went.” 567 Paradiso, 3.32-33. 568 Purgatorio, 1.70-71. As Mandelbaum explains, the historical Cato demonstrated his liberty by taking his own life instead of surrendering to Julius Caesar during the Roman Civil War. Mandelbaum, Purgatorio, 318. Cato was viewed by Dante in a similar regard to how Americans view the revolutionary figure Patrick Henry, recalling his famous quote, “Give me liberty or give me death.” 569 Purgatorio, 12,121-126. 570 Purgatorio, 27.139-142. 165 shall have no power to delight them, free will must be withdrawn.”571 Rather, Augustine asserts the blessed will “be all the more truly free” because they can no longer become captive to sin.572 Both the former and latter free wills are gifts from God, he asserts, noting that the first was “adapted to the acquiring of merit, the latter to the enjoying of the reward.”573

Dante’s image of foreheads marked with writing comes from a story about

Francis that Bonaventure relates in the Legenda Maior. A “composer of worldly songs” who had been “crowned by the Emperor and was therefore called the King of Verses” decides to seek out Francis “who despised the things of the world.”574 When this poet hears Francis preaching in San Severino, he is overcome with a vision wherein he sees

Francis “signed with the cross, in the form of two flashing swords.”575 Listening to

Francis, this man’s conscience became wounded by Francis’ words “as if pierced by a spiritual sword coming from his mouth.”576 This poet decides to leave his past life behind and became a friar called Brother Pacificus, whom Bonaventure reports was the first to serve as the order’s provincial minister in France. There, Brother Pacificus has a second vision of a great Tau on Francis’ forehead which “shone in a variety of colours and caused his face to glow with wonderful beauty.”577

Dante combines the images from Brother Pacificus’ two visions of Francis in

Purgatorio, where the penitents’ faces are first marked with a P by the angel’s sword.

571 Augustine, City of God, 22.30. 572 Augustine, City of God, 22.30. 573 Augustine, City of God, 22.30. 574 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 4.9. 575 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 4.9. 576 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 4.9. 577 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 4.9. 166

This P is then erased by the sign of the cross, the crossed swords or Tau of these visions of Francis, being marked on their foreheads by the flutter of angelic wings. Making the sign of the cross over the letter P makes the Chi Rho, a symbol for Jesus which combines the first two letters in the Greek word for Christ (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ).The work of Purgatorio is to transform the Ps, the wounds of sin, into the wounds of Jesus, to make human suffering cruciform and redemptive.

The Ps are not the only wounds mentioned in Purgatorio. In ante-Purgatory the

Dante Character encounters Manfred, the king of Apulia and Sicily, who has a cleft brow and a wound upon his breast.578 After receiving these wounds in battle against forces supported by the papacy, Manfred says that he turned to God and received forgiveness just before dying. Manfred, however was excommunicated by Pope Clement IV and his body was disinterred by the pastor of Cosenza, and reburied in unconsecrated ground.

Recognizing that the Dante Character is among the living, Manfred requests that the

Dante Character heal his story on earth, by letting his daughter know that her father is not among the damned.

As John Freccero notes, Manfred’s wounds “demand an interpretation” since they are on a purgatorial body, which as is explained later in Purgatorio by Statius is “made of thin air,” which means that wounds “ought not to be” there.579 The explanation for these wounds is found in Augustine’s City of God. Discussing the love the church has for martyrs who suffer willingly, Augustine says that people desire to “see in the heavenly

578 Manfred’s historical background is from Mandelbaum, Purgatorio, 324. His two wounds are mentioned at Purgatorio 3.108 and Purgatorio 3.111. 579 Freccero, Dante’s Conversions, 196. 167 kingdom the marks of the wounds which they received for the name of Christ.”580

Augustine speculates that this desire will be fulfilled since these wounds will “not be a deformity,” but rather a sign of worthiness.581

In Dante’s tale, Manfred’s wounds are transformed by his contrition before God and the divine forgiveness he receives. Although his wounds have been turned into signs of redemption, like those Augustine attributes to the resurrected bodies of the martyrs, the world has misread these signs, an interpretation which Manfred asks the Dante Character to correct. Manfred laments that if the pastor “avesse in Dio ben letta questa faccia [had read that page in God with greater care]” his body would have remained in consecrated ground and his true end would be not be in doubt by his daughter. As Freccero notes, the word “faccia” can mean either face or page.582

Like the other souls in Purgatorio, Manfred’s face has been marked with the sign of the cross and his complaint is against the church authorities who seek to erase this writing. In the heaven of Mars, Dante writes an invective against popes who no longer

“go to war with swords,” but instead perpetrate attacks by excommunicating their enemies or denying them access to communion bread.583 Dante refers to these church officials as “you who write only to erase,” but reminds them that “Peter and Paul, who died to save the vineyard you lay waste, still live.”584 Human violence which is characterized by erasure, Dante asserts, cannot erase God’s signs—even the violence of authorities who seek to erase by further writing.

580 Augustine, City of God, 22.19. 581 Augustine, City of God, 22.19. I am grateful to Charles Mathewes for indicating these passages to me. 582 Freccero, Dante’s Conversions, 206. 583 Paradiso, 18.128-129. 584 Paradiso, 18.130. 168

Unlike the oracles of the Sybil that were lost, in the final canto of the Commedia

Dante says all of God’s signs, “the pages scattered throughout the universe” are gathered by divine “love into a single volume.”585 This image of gathering scattered pages is borrowed by Dante from Bonaventure’s narrative of Francis. In the Legenda Maior,

Bonaventure’s says that Francis once convinced a group of friars to “gather all pieces of paper wherever found and to place them in a clean place, so that if the sacred name happened to be written there, it would not be trodden underfoot.”586 This gathering, in a sense, is an icon of Francis’ life as interpreted by Bonaventure—a life being continually reshaped by God’s love, a living movement stirred by that love to gather and witness all things as related to God in and through that same love. Francis gathers every scattered leaf of paper connected to the divine name, to give them a special place where they are recognized as signs of God’s love.

Among the pages that God gathers in the divine book which the Dante Character sees as part of the beatific vision, some pages are also faces, that like Manfred’s are marked with a wound that is also the sign of the cross. The gift of the bodily signs of the stigmata in Paradiso 11 and the Legenda Maior are portrayed as an act of recognition, of

God bearing witness to Francis’ relationship with God. Likeness is about sanctification, the habit of loving and acknowledging God and God’s signs in a way that only rational creatures can embody. In Purgatorio Dante depicts the penitents’ journey toward a greater likeness to God by replacing vicious habits with virtuous ones, which simultaneously is a healing of the wounds that divide the human community.

585 Paradiso, 33.86-87. 586 Bonaventure, Legenda Maior, 10.7. 169

Francis signifying in the flesh does not only refer to the stigmata, but even more so to acts of charity such as tending his to sick and suffering brothers and sisters, his feeding of the hungry, his clothing of the naked and his preaching about God’s love to both humans and animals. Dante and Bonaventure interprets the stigmata as God’s witness that Francis is God’s witness—a divine sign confirming that a sign is a faithful sign of the divine love.

Dante further signals this recognition of Francis by creating a special rhyme scheme that he employs in Paradiso 11. Narrating the scene of Francis’ death Dante writes:

e del suo grembo l'anima preclara mover si volle, tornando al suo regno, e al suo corpo non volle altra bara. Pensa oramai qual fu colui che degno collega fu a mantener la barca di Pietro in alto mar per dritto segno;

['From his lady's bosom the illustrious soul chose to set forth, returning to its kingdom, and for its corpse would have no other bier. 'Now think what kind of man it took to be a fit companion to maintain the steadfast course of Peter's bark upon the sea]587

The key rhyme words in this sequence are regno [kingdom], degno [worthy], and segno [sign or course]. Here the rhyme words are used to compose a mini sentence indicating that Francis is a “sign worthy of the kingdom.” Most of Dante’s terza rima in the Commedia do not have this additional semantic significance. As has already been noted above, however, Hawkins has shown that segno is a “privileged” word in the

587 Paradiso, 11.115-120. 170

Commedia with the majority of its mentions occurring in Paradiso.”588 As noted above, its first use of segno in Inferno 3 is in reference to the wounds of Jesus as his royal crown.

It is also well recognized that Dante is very particular about which words he chooses to associate with sacred words through the relationship of rhyme. Specifically, there are four separate instances where Cristo, the Italian word for Christ, is used as an end rhyme in the Commedia, and Dante only rhymes Cristo with Cristo. Instances of rima equivoca, where Dante rhymes a word with itself, are extremely rare in the Commedia.

Rachel Jacoff has identified only two other instances, both which involve the word legge.

In both cases, Dante rhymes “legge (meaning law) with legge (meaning read), enacting the problem of identity in difference.”589 The logic of rhyme, as Jacoff notes, operates on the principle of similarity without equality. Because the instances of rima equivoca involving legge denote different meanings, Dante’s triple rhymes of Cristo remain unique within the Commedia.590 Rhyming itself also denotes temporality, which has led John

Freccero to interpret the rima equivoca of Cristo as a signal that Dante views God alone as existing outside of time.591

While Ferrero’s interpretation of the Cristo rima equivoca is plausible, an alternate explanation is that Dante wishes to signal the segno, the boundary of absolute difference between Jesus, who is God by nature, and all other people who are not. In this

588 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 140. 589 Rachel Jacoff, “Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante's Commedia,” in Dante, Jeremy Tambling, ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 56. 590 Additionally, the instances of rima equivoca with legge involve only two lines of the terza rima, not three. 591 John Freccero, “The significance of Terza Rima,” in Dante: the Poetics of Conversion, Rachel Jacoff ed. (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 171 interpretation, the triple rhyme also serves as a reminder of the Christian theological view that every act of God is Trinitarian, and that Jesus is the person who reveals the nature of the Trinity through his life and teaching. Nothing can rhyme with Cristo but Cristo, because God has no equal and in naming one person of the Trinity, you name them all.

Speaking of Francis and Dominic in Paradiso 12, Dante’s Bonaventure says, “it is fitting that, in naming one, we name the other,” since both saints lead to the same goal.592

Bonaventure keeps his word a few lines later, using the same rhyme triplet—‘nsegna, regna, degna—that Thomas employs in his narrative of Francis in Paradiso 11.593

Bonaventure signals that Dominic, like Francis, is a sign worthy of the kingdom. Dante only uses the segno/degno/regno rhyme triplet five time in the entire Commedia. It appears four times in Paradiso, once in Purgatorio, and never in Inferno.594 Similarly, all four instances of the Cristo rima equivoca are found in Paradiso, and the first one is in

Paradiso 12, the canto of Dominic.595

While the Cristo rima equivoca is not used in Paradiso 11, the word Cristo appears three times prior to the segno/degno/regno rhyme triplet. The association between these two rhymes schemes is further strengthened in Paradiso 14 where the rhyme words segno [sign], ‘ngegno [skill or genius], and degno [worthy] are interwoven with the rima equivoca of Cristo in alternating lines—essentially bundling the one sequence to the other. The phrase “venerabil segno [venerable sign]” that initiates the former rhyme structure in Paradiso 14 refers to a cross composed of the blessed that

592 Paradiso, 12.34. 593 Paradiso, 12.38-42. 594 This rhyme triplet appears in the following cantos: Purgatorio 21; Paradiso 6; Paradiso 11; Paradiso 12; and Paradiso 31. 595 The rima equivoca of Cristo appears in the following cantos: Paradiso 12; Paradiso 14; Paradiso 19; and Paradiso 32. 172 covers the entire sky and “flames forth Christ.”596 Dante says that this image is difficult for him to describe since it has no “essempro degno [worthy comparison],” adding that

“he who takes his cross and follows Christ shall yet forgive” him for this.597 This collective image communicates participation in the cross through following the footsteps of Jesus, but indicates that participation is distinct from equivalence.

This theme is further emphasized by the last echo of Cristo in the second interlocked rhyme sequence in Paradiso 14, where the Dante Character says “vedendo in quell' albor balenar Cristo [for shining in that dawn I did see Christ].”598 Upon this cross of lights, the Dante Character sees Jesus’ body, stretched from arm to arm, and head to foot in the shape of the cross. From side to side, and up and down Jesus’s body, the moving lights of the blessed form the shape of the cross that shimmers as they meet and pass. The verb that Dante uses for “pass” is “trapasso,” which foreshadows Adam’s statement in Paradiso 26 that the fall from grace was caused by the “trapassar del segno

[the trespass against the sign].599

Earlier in Paradiso 14 the Dante Character has a conversation with Solomon, the author of the Song of Songs. Dante asks Solomon if the souls of the blessed will shine as brightly once they receive their resurrection bodies after the final judgment. Solomon answers that people will shine even brighter in their final condition, and, verifying what

Solomon has said, the souls of the blessed gleam even more to show how much they long for their bodies. While Solomon speaks these words in the Commedia, their source is

Augustine’s discussion of the resurrected bodies of Jesus and the martyrs in City of God

596 Paradiso, 14.101-104. 597 Paradiso, 14.105-107. 598 Paradiso, 14.108. 599 Paradiso, 14.111. 173

22.19. Augustine expresses his view that the wounds of the martyrs, the marks of the cross, will remain visible in heaven as signs of their worthiness and points to Matthew

13:43, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” as indicating that the blessed will gleam with a radiant light.

It is not Augustine who delivers these words in Paradiso 14, however, but

Solomon. Dante chooses Solomon to provide details on the condition of resurrected bodies because, as the author of the Song of Songs, he is the poet of bodily love which is interpreted by exegetes as a trope for union with God. As Solomon tells the Dante

Character, the blessed’s desire for their bodies is “not perhaps for themselves alone, but for their mothers, for their fathers, and for others whom they loved before they all became eternal flames.”600 For Dante, people’s bodies—the site of their otherness—are not an imperfection, but rather, essential to how people communicate with, recognize, and love one another.

For Dante, Francis’ body and actions constitute a map that signs forth an image of what it means to follow the way of the cross and be crucified with Jesus. Dante uses

Solomon’s Song of Songs and its concept of the sponsa Dei to frame Paradiso 11 by introducing its nuptial language in Paradiso 10, telling Francis’ story as a love affair with

Poverty in Paradiso 11, and having Bonaventure continue this trope of the sponsa Dei in speaking of Dominic in Paradiso 12.

Dante’s main source for interpreting the Song of Songs, as has been demonstrated above, is Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs. Bernard, of course,

600 Paradiso, 14.64-66. 174 serves as the Dante Character’s final guide in the Commedia¸ precisely because of these sermons and other works which detail his interpretation of the loving union with God. In

Sermon 69 Bernard begins by reflecting on a single sentence from the Song of Songs:

“My beloved is mine, and I am his.”601 Bernard notes that this sentence applies to the community of the church, but notes that some have speculated that it could also apply to an individual person. Bernard’s opinion is that God alone knows who such individuals are, but says that such a person “loves nothing but God and what is to be loved for God's sake, to whom to live is Christ.”602 Of an individual who embodies the divine love in a way that models Christ, Bernard says, “ego non nego dignam Sponsi cura, maiestatis respect [I will not deny that it is worthy of the Bridegroom's care and of the regard of

God's majesty].”603

Here in Bernard’s sermon are found the three great themes that underlie Dante’s depiction of Francis in Paradiso 11. Dante describes Francis as one worthy (dignam in

Latin, degno in Italian) of the Bridegroom, a prince (maiestatis in the Latin, regno in

Italian) who serves as a guide (segno) by the love that he embodies. All of the elements of Dante’s regno, segno, degno rhyme scheme are present in this passage from Bernard— framed by the consideration of an individual as the sponsa Dei—and are its likely source.

According to Bernard, only God can identify a person who is united to God in love. In

Paradiso 11, Thomas describes Francis’ wounds as a “final seal” that he receives “from

601 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 69. 602 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 69. 603 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 69. I am grateful to Paola Nasti for showing the importance of this passage to Dante’s theology. I have quoted Bernard’s Latin from that cited in her article. See Paola Nasti, “Caritas and Ecclesiology in Dante's Heaven of the Sun,” in Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne eds. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) pp. 224-225. 175

Christ.”604 The segno, degno regno rhyme triplet further signals the representation of

Francis within the Commedia as a sign worthy of the kingdom, or a worthy sign of the king.605

Writing about the invocation that opens Paradiso, Robert Hollander remarks that

“it is probably worth noting that in Italian the verb segnare often means ‘to mark with the sign of the Cross.’”606 Hollander does not expand on this critical insight, but the implication is that the entirety of Paradiso is an examination of signs marked by the sign of the cross, signs redeemed by God’s love.

Here is the part of the invocation under consideration:

O divina virtù, se mi ti presti tanto che l'ombra del beato regno segnata nel mio capo io manifesti, vedra'mi al piè del tuo diletto legno venire, e coronarmi de le foglie che la materia e tu mi farai degno.

[O holy Power, if you but lend me of yourself enough that I may show the merest shadow of the blessèd kingdom stamped within my mind, you shall find me at the foot of your beloved tree, crowning myself with the very leaves of which my theme and you will make me worthy.]607

The rhyme words in this passage—regno [kingdom], legno [tree] and degno

[worthy]—are very similar to those in Paradiso 11.608 Segno is not used as a rhyme word

604 Paradiso, 11.107. 605 Bonaventure asserts that “A king is not derived from a kingdom but a kingdom from a king.” Bonaventure, Tree of Life, 12.45. By depicting Lucifer as employing royal heraldry in Inferno, Dante suggests via Bonaventure’s statement is precisely what Lucifer gets backward. 606 Hollander, 201. 607 Paradiso, 1.22.27. 176 in this passage, but it is present in the verb form, segnata, which starts line 24 of Paradiso

1. While “segnata nel mio capo,” is usually translated as “stamped within my mind,” or

“impressed within my memory,” Hollander’s observation suggests that the phrase may signal Dante either making the sign of the cross or praying that his brow, and the sign world he depicts, be marked with the sign of the cross, the Chi Rho that the Holy Spirit marks upon the souls that Dante portrays attaining the summit of Mount Purgatory. The invocation is Dante’s appeal that his signs, his poetry, might be made worthy of the kingdom of heaven.

608 Legno is used throughout the Commedia variously to mean: a branch; a tree; a boat; and the cross of Jesus. 177

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Directions for Future Scholarship

The primary aim of this study was to examine and clarify what Dante says about signs in his written works and to identify some of the key sources that Dante employs in his writings about signs. While there is much that can be said of Dante’s ideas about signs, this paper focused on demonstrating five theses:

1. Dante conceives of the world as a divine poem.

2. Love, in Dante’s view, shapes signs, relationships and habits.

3. Dante believes that signs are meant to grow and spread.

4. Evil, according to Dante, effectively erases or freezes signs in behavior.

5. Christology, for Dante, is key to understanding how signs can be loosed from

the bondage of vice.

In demonstrating these propositions, this dissertation makes a number of significant scholarly contributions, four of which I will highlight. First and foremost, this dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of Dante’s theory of signs. The central role of semiotics in Dante’s works, and in the Commedia in particular, is relevant to a number of current scholarly debates, including those concerned with the relative influence contemporary thinkers and schools of thought had upon Dante. This dissertation lends further support to Zygmunt Baranski’s view that the medieval exegetes—especially Bonaventure, Augustine, Bernard and Aquinas—influenced Dante more heavily than any other group of writers. This dissertation will not settle any debates 178 about Dante’s intellectual history, rather, it is a new branch in a dialog with deep roots and no final conclusion in sight.

Second, this dissertation breaks new ground by illuminating the role that Dante assigns to narrative and poetry with regard to human logic and ethics. Among other things, the Commedia aims to be a spiritual exercise wherein the reader participates in the narrative remaking of the Dante Character’s sign world. Narratives frame people’s interpretation of the world, of their place in that world and of their relationships to other people and communities. This argument asserts that poets, as masters of signs, are not simply suppliers of tropes for philosophers, but are creative logicians and theologians in their own right.

Third, this dissertation counters the notion that theology is more concerned with knowledge than with love. This perspective is critical for issues of religious violence, for embracing embodied persons and communities as having inherent theological significance. Assessing others solely by their stories and diagrams of the world—letting their embodied lives drop away from view as theologically insignificant—can lead to perceiving other communities as a threat to one’s sign world (as opposed to being divine signs that must never be erased and with whom we must constantly engage in dialog).

Dante indicates that theological errors of this type are at the root of the discord that plagued his home city-state of Florence, which serves as an emblem of human violence and discord within the Commedia.

Fourth, this dissertation develops new insight into the multiple connections Dante makes between love, habits, and knowledge. Signs and narratives, while frozen in captivity to habits, can become vehicles for oppression and violence. Dante argues that 179 this captivity is political in a secondary sense—the prime captivity is theological and has to do with interpreting signs through the lens of warped love. Dante tells us that theology is not for liberation per se, but for divine love. From this perspective, liberation of and care for the suffering of oppressed persons is an index of the active presence of divine love in our lives and communities. Oppression and suffering within communities, Dante suggests, is a sign of the absence of divine love’s presence in our actions and habits, a sign of the need for witness, confession, repentance and reconciliation.

Directions for Future Scholarship

Each of the preceding five chapters used only a portion of the evidence that could have been employed from Dante’s works. The most difficult challenge in composing this dissertation was deciding what pieces of Dante’s writing to exclude and leave for future scholarship. Much of importance remains to be said on each of the five theses argued above, but making the overarching argument had to be completed first.

Besides expanding on some of the concepts demonstrated in this study, there are four additional directions for future scholarship that this study suggests. First, very little has been written comparing Dante’s thought to that of Charles Peirce, especially with respect to signs. This is due primarily to the dearth of writing thus far on Dante’s semiotics. Peirce was familiar with Dante. The Dante scholar Charles Eliot Norton was a family friend and colleague of Peirce’s father, Benjamin Peirce. When Peirce lists great geniuses of history in his writings, he usually includes Dante. For example, in his

Neglected Argument for the Reality of God, Peirce mentions Dante after speaking about 180 how walking at night among fields looking up at the stars encourages musement. He goes on to say that it is a challenge for a thinker to appreciate her uniqueness in the same way that it is difficult for a writer to see her particular style from an objective standpoint. “I do not mean that a Dante did not know that he expressed himself with fewer words than other men do,” Peirce explains, “but he could not admire himself as we admire him.”609

Directly after this, Peirce discussed how a sense of wonderment at nature gives rise to the idea of God which results in the muser becoming “enwrapt with Love of this idea.”610

There are at least four areas in which studies of Dante and Peirce would be very fruitful. First, would be an investigation that details the extent to which Dante, or the understanding of Dante in Peirce’s time, may have influenced Peirce’s thought. The second study of value would be a comparison between Dante’s understanding of the imagination and the bundling of signs and Peirce’s concepts of musement and abduction.

A third area or interest would involve evaluating their understandings of semioses, the flow of signs, and what tends to halt this process. Finally, it would be very beneficial to assess and compare Dante’s understanding of meaning as directional and relational with

Peirce’s writings on meaning as being in the interpretant.

Second, while this study has shown Dante to be a sign master, the same can be said a variety of other authors who have a deep concern with the dynamics of signs, but who are not typically thought of as having expertise in semiotics. Like Mikhail Bakhtin, I would suggest that Dostoevsky’s understanding of how signs operate and relate to human actions is extraordinary. For example, his novel The Devils depicts the process of self-

609 CP 6.501. 610 CP 6.501. 181 erasure in the character of Stavrogin, as well as the purposeful freezing of signs to gain political power through the creation of revolutionary cells connected by a bond of fear.

Similarly, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, a novel that is based on the Wilmington coup d’etat of 1898, which was formerly—and for 100 years incorrectly—referred to as the Wilmington Race Riot attempts to reconfigure the semiotics of race in late nineteenth century America. Through his fictional account,

Chesnutt demonstrates how power dynamics can warp language in a way that signs become practiced tools of erasure. In this, Chesnutt does in fact stand in the marrow of a strong tradition of African American authors like David Walker, Harriet E. Wilson,

Frances Harper and W.E.B. DuBois who write about living on the border between sign worlds that are at war.

Prominent poets and novelist—individuals who often create sign worlds that define their works—have a great deal of value to say about signs and how they operate among people on a practical level. Great literature, as Dante notes in his discussion of master poets in De Vulgare Eloquentia, is created by people who are exceptional at connecting signs. In short, scholars interested in semiotics would benefit from engaging the ideas about signs found in literary works that are not typically viewed as semiotics texts.

A third area for future scholarship is a major study on Bonaventure’s influence on

Dante. While the impact of Aquinas has been a subject of that has garnered a great deal of attention in Dante Studies for some time, much less has been written about

Bonaventure. Given Dante’s emphasis on love, his use of the Legenda Maior, his 182 employment of Bonaventure’s sign categories, the model of the Iterarium as a journey to

God, and the many images that he borrows from the Hexaemeron and the Tree of Life, the time for a major study on Dante and Bonaventure has come.

Finally, much more remains to be said about the segno/degno/regno rhyme scheme identified in Chapter Five. For example, of the 25 times that segno is employed as a rhyme word in the Commedia, 15 of these occurrences are in Paradiso. There are 14 instances where segno, or one of its forms, is a potential end rhyme in the Commedia where segno is not used. In some cases—like the example from Paradiso 1 at the conclusion of Chapter 5—segno is in proximity and may contribute to the semantic significance of a mini-sentence formed by rhyme words in the terza rima.

Likewise, there are many instances where segno appears but one of more of the other two terms (i.e., regno or degno) are not. Many of these instances also operate as mini-sentences. For example, in Inferno 8, when a group of devils are insisting that the

Dante Character must traverse Hell alone or not at all, Virgil “fece segno [made a sign]” that he wants to speak with them in private. The rhyme words here are segno [sign], disdegno [disdain] and regno [king or kingdom]—those who disdained the sign of the kingdom or of the king. In fact, most of the rhyme combinations involving segno seem to be variations on this theme which fits the particular context in which it appears. In other words, it is possible that this rhyme scheme operates as a short hand map where the units of distance refer to the likeness or proximity of particular characters to Jesus. This, however, is a subject for a future study.

183

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