Dante's Verbal Images and Their Pictorial Afterlife: Visualizing the Otherworldly Space in Terni and Orvieto (original) (raw)

Earthly Paradise: Dante's Initiatory Rite of Passage

Quaderni di Studi Indomediterranei 10, 2017

Despite reaching the summit of Purgatory, Dante is not quite ready for Paradise yet. Through a long sequence of seven cantos that begins in fire and ends in water, Dante the author now takes us through what, in the circumscribed space of pre-lapsarian earthly Paradise, needs to be shown, said and staged for his self as wayfarer to be rifatto sì come piante novelle / rinovellate di novella fronda (“made as new trees are / renewed of new foliage”), so that access to the stars be granted him. If the entirety of the Commedia can be understood as the poetic expression of a vision that finds its roots in love and its end in transformative, prophetic revelation, then the Earthly Paradise sequence goes right to the heart of the mystery that seals Dante’s poem. This paper approaches some of the complexities of that mysterial rite of passage.

True flesh: pilgrimage, measure, and perfecting the human in Dante’s 'Commedia

2017

Critics of Dante's Commedia have frequently maintained that the 14 th-century poem depicts a "pilgrimage" in the sense of a journey to God, undertaken both in imitation of the actual practice of pilgrimage to holy sites such as Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela, as well as of the Biblical Exodus, a journey from the exile of earthly life to the true patria of Heaven. Yet, since the middle of the 20 th century, this label has been taken for granted, without acknowledging a pivotal characteristic that determines both these historical precedents which is mirrored in Dante's text: the human body. This study maintains that the Commedia should be read according to Dante's understanding of the term "peregrinatio," the Latin word from which our English "pilgrimage" derives. Properly speaking, while the human body was considered the source of man's alienation from God, it is conversely also its source of potential inclusion through the figure of Christ, who, through the Incarnation, partook of both human and divine natures. Peregrinatio manifests this process of salvation through movement in imitation of Christ, allowing for the proper reintegration of humanity in the order of the universe and for the true revelation of man's resemblance to Christ that is revealed in the poem's final vision of God. Chapters 1-3 contextualize Dante's understanding of peregrinatio in both his works and broader medieval thought. Chapter 1 reveals how the entire journey of the Commedia is framed by the experience of Christ and how the reflection of the Incarnation in the character Dante enables the potential for salvation. By analyzing the etymology and history of the termoriginally denoting exile and travel in Roman culture, but then theologized to humanity's ontological state by the Church Fathers-we can see how Dante's understanding of the process was more nuanced than critics typically attest in their use of the labels "pilgrim" or "pilgrimage." Dante utilizes the polysemic nature of the word to portray the Commedia as the praxis of iii peregrinatio, a process of recognizing one's resemblance to Christ. Chapter 2 continues by focusing on how the above process manifests as the journey of physical movement presented in the poem. Classical usage of peregrinatio often indicated motion in space, a meaning that was transferred to the historical phenomenon of pilgrimage. Dante considered pilgrimage as travel to a holy place in order to access the sacred, which was done, as the cult of relics indicates, through the body and the sense of touch. Dante's understanding of this action is then contextualized by reading the relationship constructed between the body and sacred space in pilgrimage literature. These accounts reveal that people in the Middle Ages understood space through a sense of personal interaction and physical presence, emerging from primarily walking around and the absence of maps. This, connected with the practice of measuring holy spaces and relics, demonstrates that the body was thought to be necessary in order to access the sacred and reveal one's resemblance to God. Chapter 3 utilizes the understanding of peregrinatio furnished by the first two chapters to look specifically at the Commedia. The Christological dimension of this process informs Dante's journey from the first verses of the Inferno, where Dante repeatedly encounters signs of salvation through Christ much as pilgrims who journeyed to the Holy Land. The presence of these factors reveals that Dante recognized his journey as having to be carried out in imitation of Christ, and that this informs the potential of his text to lead its readers to salvation as well. The peculiarity of this conception emerges in the fact that Dante, through the presence of his human body, permanently alters the landscape of Hell, something that no one before or after has done, with the sole exception of Christ. Chapter 4-6 turn their focus to the end point of this process of peregrinatio experienced in the final vision of God at the end of the Commedia and the identification of man's image in iv God through the Incarnation. Dante expresses this relationality through a simile of a geometer trying to measure a circle. While it is typically argued that this is merely a reference to the impossible geometric problem of squaring the circle, that reading does not attend to the use of "measure" and its precedents in Dante's other works. Instead, measure was understood through a complex set of dynamics that permeated various aspects of medieval life, from intellectual activity to trade. In this regard, Dante utilizes the term to express how the imitation of Christ central to the process of peregrinatio actually takes place: by establishing an intertwined metaphysical and ethical understanding of humanity. Chapter 4 examines the history of the idea of measure as it would have been known to Dante, from: the Bible, Greek philosophy, Christian theology, courtly ethics, and material culture. While each thinker and tradition expresses different aims, measure is universally used to denote a sense of a larger order to which man wishes to belong. Specifically in the Christian tradition, this manifests through a history of interpretation around Wisdom 11:21's statement of the universe being ordered by God in "measure, number, and weight." This reveals itself to operate by the same mechanics of peregrinatio, as this triad was seen as a trace of Trinity in all creation and as dictating the ways in which ethical behavior can comport oneself to Christ. Chapter 5 utilizes these precedents to examine Dante's complex use of the term measure in his works outside of the Commedia. Particularly in his growing education after his exile in 1301, Dante became increasingly aware of the intellectual richness behind the concept, which he seeks to ground specifically in Aristotelian thought and scholastic theology, predominantly in the Convivio and the Monarchia. The use of measure in both these texts displays Dante's grasp of its Christological richness, where proper ethical action "measured" by the standard of Christ can induce the ontological change that was the goal of peregrinatio, allowing for participation in the v divine order. Chapter 6 returns to the Commedia and the simile of the geometer to contextualize the 20 uses of forms of misura (measure) in the poem according to Dante's previous utilization of the term and the intellectual inheritance discussed in chapter 4. This reading reveals that, contrary to typical scholarship on the word, Dante does not use it as an Italian rendering of the Aristotelian mean-the conception of virtue as the middle ground between the extremes of vice-but rather views misura as an active process conceived through Christ. Through a series of uses of the verb "to measure," Dante depicts the culmination of the process of peregrinatio to express the goal of full personhood, body and soul, in the image of Christ, and thereby as a return to the full potential for which humanity was created. vi For Michelle and Amelia vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the kind and generous support of many individuals. Foremost thanks to my advisor, Eleonora Stoppino, for our countless discussions, for reading through numerous revisions, and for the encouragement to give shape to my ideas. I would also like to thank my committee members-Robert Rushing, Renee Trilling, and Theodore Cachey-for their guidance and support. In addition, thanks to Claire Honess for kindly reading an early version of Chapter 1, and to the other Fellows at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for encouraging my work in its early stages and for their productive comments on what would become Chapter 2. Finally, I'd like to thank my friends from the "Dante's Theology" Seminar held in Tantur, June 2013, for the many discussions that led to this project, and especially to Christian Moevs for the numerous and kind conversations in the years since. It is also necessary to thank the numerous organizations whose support made this entire project possible. My thanks to: the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, for the wonderful experience and support as a graduate fellow in AY2013-14; the Program in Medieval Studies, for support in research materials, conference travel suport, and for a Course Release Fellowship; the Arquilla Family and the Arquilla Family Fellowship; and finally the University of Illinois Graduate College for awarding me the Dissertation Completion Fellowship, providing me with the means to complete this work. And last, but certainly not least, I'd like to thank my friends and family for their love and support over the years, and my wife, Michelle, without whom, ultimately, none of this could have been possible. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER

Journeying with Dante – Part I: Facing Our Shadows

Roberto Assagioli invites us to read Dante’s Divine Comedy and reflect on its various symbols in order to evoke the spiritual Self as we journey towards spiritual psychosynthesis (2000, p. 179). In this essay, we would like to explore from a psychosynthesis perspective how the poem illustrates the two fundamental concepts which define the central functions of both the Self and ‘I’; namely, consciousness and will. Our life’s journey is to seek, reconnect, and synthesize the consciousness and will of the Self with the consciousness and will of the ‘I’—in other words, to synthesize the transpersonal and the personal. In the Divine Comedy, the aim of Dante’s long journey is precisely this reconnection. In this essay, we analyze his journey through Inferno in order to discover how, from a psychosynthesis perspective, his ‘I’-Self connection is being realigned so that he might ultimately reach his full human potential at all levels physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Dante's Otherwordly Voyage. 2nd Part, The Metaphisical Ascent. Calgary 22

2022

The speech aims to show some fragments of the complexity of Dante's otherworldly journey. It is, first, a descent into the deep chasm of the Hell and, then, a climb up the slope of Antipurgatory and a gradually easier ascent up the seven cornices of the mountain of Purgatory. This earthly journey was the topic of the first lecture (January 20th, 2022). In all this, we must bear in mind an objective condition and a subjective gesture. The first: the ancient and medieval cosmos is finite, not infinite, solid not empty, it has the Earth at its center, not the Sun. The second: the pilgrim Dante, like every traveller, often uses his gaze both to scan the path and to recognise those he encounters, and this is familiar from our earthly experience. But in Paradise, these very same physical eyes become the means of prodigious events and metaphysical knowledge. The physical aspect of the journey diminishes as he climbs the mountain of purgatory until he reaches the summit, where Eden is, the earthly Paradise that the Lord had reserved for Adam and Eve. From that extreme height of the Earth he will ascend, we would say by levitation, rising through the nine material skies up to the immaterial light of the divine Empyrean which S. Benedict says: «non è in loco e non s’impola» “it is not in space, nor turns on poles” ("Paradise" XXII, 67. En. Tr. Longfellow). This heavenly journey is the topic of the new, second lecture, or to better put it, seminar. Now, The Seminar itself is divided into two sections. The first focuses on certain principles of Neo-Platonic theology: the absolute transcendence of the One or First Cause, from which derives its total unknowability, so that of the Platonic One or of the God of Neo-Platonic Christians you can only say what it is not: it is a negative theology. The second aims to read, explain and order the ultimate experience that Dante had when looking, however illogical it may seem, at the invisible divine; its object, therefore, are the accounts and narratives of his vision of the absolute transcendent.

‘Tutto avem veduto’? Enumeration and ‘Forgetfulness’ in Dante’s Commedia

Deleted Journal, 2022

Despite the Commedia's nominal aspiration towards encyclo paedism, Dante consistently draws attention to the apparent incompleteness of his vision. One of the primary ways in which this is accomplished is, paradoxically, through Dante's use of enumeration. Scholars have frequently interpreted the poem's rosters of souls as symptomatic of its epic impulse towards totality, and though they have often examined Dante's use of preterition in these cases, less attention has been given to those instances where they draw attention to characters 'present' in the afterlife, but conspicuously absent from the poem's narrative. In this paper, I focus on two particularly suggestive cases. The first occurs in Inferno 6, where Ciacco informs Dante that he will meet a figure named 'Arrigo': an encounter that does not take place. The second is in Paradiso 15, in which Cacciaguida alludes to Dante's ancestor Alighiero I, telling him that he is among the penitent prideful in Purgatorio. Though Dante spends a great deal of time on this terrace, he does not meet his namesake. I propose here that, far from being any kind of mistake, these 'forgetful' moments cast significant light on the poem's shifting treatments of absence, as well as its overarching narrative strategies.

Dante's Otherwordly Voyage. 1st Part, Cosmos, Gaze, Ascent. Handout. Calgary 22

2022

The speech aims to show some fragments of the complexity of Dante's otherworldly voyage. It is, firstly, a descent into the deep chasm of the Hell and then, a climb up the slope of Antipurgatory and a gradually easier ascent up the seven cornices of the mountain of Purgatory. On this journey, Dante, led by his guide Virgil, must deal with all sorts of difficult situations: both because of the physical condition of the terrain he has to travel over (rivers; ravines and mountain walls; walls and gates); and because of the hostility of the infernal devils; but also because of the tragic encounters with the damned or penitents, often horribly transformed by the punishment. The physical aspect of the journey diminishes as he climbs the mountain of purgatory until he reaches the summit, where Eden is, the earthly Paradise that the Lord had reserved for Adam and Eve. From that extreme height of the Earth he will ascend, we would say by levitation, rising through the nine physical heavens up to the immaterial light of the divine Empyrean. The last concept raises the great metaphysical question of what is beyond the bounded cosmos. The most famous argument is that of the hyperuranion place in the allegory of the two-winged horses and the charioteer in Plato's Phaedrus (246a-sq). In all this, we must bear in mind an objective condition and a subjective gesture. The first: the ancient and medieval cosmos is delimited not infinite, solid not empty, it has the Earth at its center not the Sun. Again, its 8/9 skis are perfectly spheric and move around the earth with a steady, perennial, circular revolution. The second: the pilgrim Dante, like every traveler, often uses his gaze both to scan the path and to recognise those he encounters, and this is familiar to our earthly experience. But in Paradiso, these very same physical eyes become the means of prodigious events and metaphysical knowledge.