The Mystery of Dante

Unveiling the Mystery of Dante: An Esoteric Understanding of Dante and His Divine Comedy, by Eric L. Bisbocci. Lindisfarne Books, 2017.

review by Terry Hipolito

Mr. Bisbocci has written a comprehensive study of Dante’s Commedia, one that should appeal especially to students of anthroposophy interested to fit this great landmark of European culture into their work with the society. Those who are innocent of anthroposophy may find many of the general conclusions in this volume nearly incomprehensible. Anyone however who simply wants to rehearse or preview the contents of the Commedia will discover clear and effective précis of this medieval masterwork.

For Mr. Bisbocci’s book is written in two distinct sections, so distinct in fact that there are even separate and separately numbered notes. There is, as is too often the case these days in volumes of literary criticism, no index; this is especially unfortunate with an author like Dante and his proliferation of (to us) obscure names and places. Anyhow, the first section of this volume serves as prolog to the second; it has an academic form devoting itself to “the esoteric background” in eleven distinct chapters covering such topics as “Deciphering the Meaning of Love” and “The Sufis and their Influence.” In all, this preliminary material comprises about one third of the entire volume (190 of the 571 pages).

The second concluding section follows the Commedia itself. After a brief discussion explaining the full shape of the poem, is an annotated paraphrase of it. Its three major subdivisions are those of the work itself: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The paraphrasing commentary at times refers back to the introductory material and also (if memory serves me) introduces some new background material. For the most part however the paraphrase carries the load; it makes for a useful way to review the contents of the Commedia somewhat above the entanglements and details of Dante’s allusive and demanding verse. Bisbocci uses Ciardi’s translation throughout (as well as some of Ciardi’s commentary). There is little Italian and less Latin in this study.

These details would hardly matter if one uses this volume as an introduction to Dante’s great work or as a refresher. We are however offered a great deal more than that: an “esoteric understanding.” This volume does certainly offer esoteric understanding. Most of the remainder of this essay deals with the esotericism as Bisbocci studies it; he feels it unveils the anthroposophical meaning of medieval literature and culture in general.

There are two major forms of esotericism which the book considers: the “public” esotericism of general Rosicrucianism and the “private” relationship between Dante and Beatrice. The public strand, roughly, is to describe how the Templars and Rosicrucians influenced the Commedia. The private strand involves Dante’s use of the conventions of courtly love to examine his own spiritual erotic life, however frustrated and however fictional.

These strands, as Bisbocci presents them, form an ever diverse pair. There is very little exoteric evidence that Dante actually had ties to Rosicrucianism. Meanwhile Dante himself exerted the extent of his awesome exoteric literary powers to make sure the world was aware of his attachment to Beatrice.

Bisbocci’s early chapter “Resurrecting the Temple” (pp. 127-37) offers an example. He quotes Rudolf Steiner asserting that the Templars possessed a kind of faith and reverence that were “feminine,” rather one supposes than the brutally masculine militarism of the so-called Dark Ages. Henry Adams, in a writing roughly contemporary with Steiner, contrasts the masculine island fortress of Mont St. Michel with the feminine presence of the Virgin at Chartres and sees in this dichotomy a major turn in world history. Steiner’s thesis concerning the Templars I take to be an example of what anthroposophy means by spiritual science. Much the same might be said of Adams. Spiritual science seems very much, that is, to be an artifact of modern culture stemming from the phase of romanticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The feminine pole of love in Dante’s work could hardly be more open. Nor I think could the portrayal of Beatrice be more empirical, more exoteric, or more complete. Bisbocci’s mention of Virgil and Beatrice nearly always includes an abstract formula. Virgil is nearly always accompanied by “(reason)” or some near equivalent. Beatrice is characterized in greater detail: “…as long as Dante stayed on track by cultivating the knowledge leading to Divine Wisdom, she was alive” (p. 391). Beatrice is most often mentioned as though she represented “Divine Wisdom” itself. Dante’s work of course is in many ways an allegory, and many of the characters, stuck in their own spiritual neighborhoods, are clearly meant to stand for moral abstractions. The Commedia‘s structure is also more complex than a pure allegory, such as Prudentius’ "Psychomachia".

In the opening chapter of his volume “The Tower of Babel and the Problem of Dialecticism,” Mr. Bisbocci sets forth his methodology; where he begins I shall end. He finds much to condemn in the literary criticism of the twentieth century which he implies has raised more than one tower of Babel almost always around a bastion of incoherent and incomprehensible jargon. These verbal structures are what he labels dialecticism. One sympathizes. The rather lengthy epigraph to his book is a quotation from Owen Barfield’s "Saving the Appearances" which describes essentially a Gestalt experiment in which the appearance of a rectangular box can seem to be a view of the outside or the inside of the box depending upon how one orients one’s gaze. Barfield’s focus in "Saving the Appearances" is on how to conduct empirical science; the point of the quote, it seems to me, is how materialistic science, even physics itself, can never be free of questions that are ultimately subjective if not spiritual.

More apt to the point of Bisbocci’s introduction might have been a quotation from Poetic Diction where Barfield, I believe, anticipates and answers many of the dilemmas of “poststructuralism” which Bisbocci finds so troublesome. This early Barfield is, I believe, nearly a precognition of phenomenology. It is something like this sort of activity which underlies much of Heidegger, the postmodern Derrida and their fellow travelers exactly the sort of thinkers whom Bisbocci terms dialectical. Their work is often incorrect (whose isn’t?) but it seems to me that what it attempts to do very often is exactly to break free of dialecticism, from the rigid categories which Descartes posited in order to render them mathematical. Getting it wrong or getting it incomplete are quite distinct from getting it backwards. Husserl, a founder of phenomenology, attempted to save philosophy for science, much as Saving the Appearances also attempts, although by very different means and for very different ends. Husserl’s near contemporary Bertrand Russell is the true believer in dialecticism as we have characterized it here. Russell was not exactly an enemy of poetry; he considered it simply “noise.”

One might well see Beatrice as Divine Wisdom, but one cannot read Bisbacci, much less Dante himself, carefully and not perceive that she is alive as well perhaps as wise and divine. Mr. Bisbacci gives us a careful and well written guide to help us perceive divinity and wisdom bound up in an earthly feminine form, one of the first and certainly among the finest such expressions in human evolution.

Terry Hipolito (tahipolito@earthlink.net) became (anathema) a software developer, part of the artificial intelligentsia, and student of medieval literature, but he has been active in the Anthroposophical Society and in the Literary Arts & Humanities Section of its School for Spiritual Science.