Dante: The Everyman's Man of Many Ways

By Sean Johnson

Though it is a truth obscured by the setting (and sheer number of dead people involved), Dante’s Comedy is not ultimately a poem about the afterlife—even Dante’s dead are some of the liveliest characters in literature. Two recent biographies (technically a biography and a necrography) honor the reality that Dante’s work is not just about living, but was and continues to be the common inheritance of the living.

The Inferno opens on a fictionalized Dante stumbling “midway through the journey of this life,” and the Paradiso concludes only days later, the pilgrim having died a number of symbolic deaths but never a bodily one. Yet life goes on for the poet and for the audience who stands to profit from an account of his mystical journey. Like a swinger of birches, Dante rises briefly to heaven but is gently set down again on Earth, “the right place for love.”

The only portion of the Comedy to transpire entirely upon the earth (rather than within or beyond it) is the Purgatorio, and it is, coincidentally, the only realm where man can do much changing for the better. The souls in hell have tragically calcified in their sin and become fixed like Satan in the ice; the souls in heaven have entirely embraced their virtue and become fixed like the heavenly spheres that do not deviate from their appointed course. The souls on Mt. Purgatory instead mirror those a little lower down, in Dante’s own Italy and beyond—his fellow travelers on the journey of life. They are still mortifying sin and ordering loves, still striving, repenting, and being purified; it is the souls on earth who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the poet’s magnum opus. And because he left so much of himself in his Commedia, we thereby continue to be the beneficiaries of Dante’s self.

This reality is the surest defense—now that the poet has gone to his reward—for regularly disturbing his repose with book after book about the man and his work. After decades as a professor of Dante studies, John Took still experiences doubt over the propriety of his discipline. In the preface to his recent Dante, an intellectual biography of the poet, Took resignedly admits that “there is much to be said for leaving the great man in peace, he himself being far and away his own best expositor.” He immediately reverses tack though, these remarks coming in the first of nearly six hundred pages, invoking the similar ambivalence of an even greater critic. T. S. Eliot’s own seminal monograph on Dante opens with the deflating assertion that reading Dante “again and again” is superior to reading “modern books about his work and life and times, however good.” Eliot works quickly around to pardoning himself, arguing that writing about great men like Dante is in fact less presumptuous than writing of “smaller men. . . . The very vastness of the subject leaves a possibility that one may have something to say worth saying.” Took finds his marching orders in Eliot’s self-justification and, even a century later, succeeds in carving out a novel niche in the cathedral of Dante interpretation—eventually.

Dante is clearly the fruit of a career spent teaching the poet, and Took misses no stops on the grand tour through the divine Comedian’s life, thought, and intellectual influences. He mounts a painstaking discussion of each and every major writing—Vita nova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia (“On the Eloquence of the Vulgar Tongue”), the oft-overlooked Rime, the Commedia, the controversial Monarchia, the even-more-oft-overlooked Questio, and finally the Eclogues and the differently-controversial “Letter to Cangrande.” In preparation, he offers dizzying “Preliminary Considerations” on thirteenth-century Florentine politics, and they are not easily navigated.

Took is a gifted lecturer—watching him I am reminded of my own former teacher, Louise Cowan, who, long after ninety, could teach lucidly for hours without the aid of notes, drawling out lengthy passages of memorized poetry and offering analysis in a blend of insight and affection. Took, too, speaks with force and an air of comfortable mastery, dancing gracefully from thought to thought and spooling out stanza upon stanza of memorized terza rima with a verve that moves and mystifies. On paper, he is regrettably dense.

In the book, one frequently meets the kind of sentence that simulates the turning labyrinth of Inferno’s lower circles. These sentences are longer than seems decent and layered with so many clauses that it is possible to reach the period and no longer remember the subject. I offer just one (and not the most egregious) wending example:

Feelings at home, however, and especially in Tuscany, were mixed; for if, say, Pisa was more than ever eager in its espousal of the project, putting up in advance sixty thousand golden florins with more to come upon delivery, Florence, already perturbed by the appearance in the city of an imperial envoy charged with bringing her round, was in two minds, her reluctance manifesting itself by way both of a refusal to send a goodwill delegation to Lausanne as a stopping-off point for the emperor-elect on his way to Italy and of the setting up of a Tuscan and Lombard league designed to frustrate the whole thing.

While these sentences are ubiquitous, they are occasionally interrupted by the more eloquent turn of phrase: “Florence, in short, was doing what Florence was so good at, namely delivering herself despite herself to her undoing.” This was a manuscript initially due to Princeton in 2014, probably in anticipation of the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth, and one wonders how much time editors have had with it between then and now. Nevertheless, there is plenty in the content to redeem the uneven prose.

Took’s first big score comes early, in the aforementioned preliminary considerations, with his reading of Augustine between the lines of the Comedy. Too often discussions of Dante’s influences reduce him to Thomistic philosophy in poetic form. Took measures Aquinas’s impact on the poet more carefully—“Aquinas, beloved of Dante as a matter not, certainly, of discipleship (for the differences here are as great as the similarities) but of admiration in respect of a superlative cast of mind”—while pointing to a singular significance in allusions and quotations from Augustine. When Took sets passages cheek by jowl it is impossible not to hear the echoes of Augustine’s “I know not whence I came into this . . . dying life or living death . . . yet overcome with drowsiness” in Dante’s “I cannot say how I came to be here so full of sleep was I in the moment I forsook the true way.” Other examples are no less compelling. In the Convivio Took finds a nod to Augustine’s own artistic decision to place himself in the foreground of his Confessions as the likely inspiration for Dante becoming the main character of his equally confessional Comedy. The bishop of Hippo is notoriously absent from the Comedy, appearing only briefly in the Paradiso’s conclusion and never speaking. Yet Augustine’s influence, especially on the early cantos of Inferno, suggests he “subsists as a structure of consciousness, as the in-and-through-which of self-knowledge at its most profound and, often enough, its most painful.”

The Vita nova is often filed away as Dantean juvenilia, but Took also labors manfully to rehabilitate it as an early iteration of the Comedy’s mature outlook. In spite of the almost-comical swooning over a girl he never speaks to, Took contends, the Dante of the Vita nova already understands love to be “the principle of properly human being and becoming.” The work is a Commedia a minore (Comedy in miniature) already offering what Took perceptively marks out as the framework undergirding the Comedy: an account of the poet’s presence in the world under the aspect of captivity, of emancipation and of emergence—of, precisely, the infernal, the purgatorial and the paradisal.”

All told, Dante is too long, though stripping it back to only its best portions is unimaginable. A biography of any sort has to stand or fall as the treatment of a whole life.

I salivate at the thought of Took putting together a book of topical essays on Dante—something like Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments—brief, minutely-focused considerations of only those things that hold his attention and inspire his loves. Until then, Professor Took’s liveliest readings of the poet are shackled to a regrettable quantity of lifeless prose. In a poetic reversal worthy of Dante, it is a book about the Comedian’s corpse that manages to bring him more consistently to life. The poet’s remains have enjoyed an after life of their own and in Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, Guy Raffa recounts the unlikely odyssey of the revered bones from the day Dante surrendered them through the centuries of their disputed ownership, mysterious disappearances, and miraculous reappearances. Most who have been teachers or students of the Comedy in the last decade will have encountered Danteworlds, the expansive, multimedia study guide and critical companion to the Comedy created by Raffa for the University of Texas at Austin. His knack for vivid Dantean exposition is on extensive display there, and no one who has spent time in Dante worlds will be surprised when this “graveyard history” grips them and refuses to let go. In fairness to Dante’s conventional biographers, Raffa can’t take all the credit. He landed a haul of source material that boasts ghosts, bombs, papal controversy, two world wars, fascism, and several monastic intrigues that Umberto Eco would have been proud to dream up.

Raffa leads with a mystery. In 1865, the six hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth, the city of Ravenna planned to renovate the chapel housing Dante’s remains. The small mausoleum—containing little more than a memorial relief and a modest tomb of marble—stood in the same cramped complex as a Franciscan monastery and another, older chapel in disuse. Thinking to open up the space and make Dante’s final resting place more prominent, the city began labors to demolish portions of the other chapel. But the demolition stalled abruptly when a small crate of human remains was discovered bricked up in a wall. The worn crate bore the modest inscription: “Dantis ossa”—Dante’s bones.

Even before his death there were hints that Dante’s body would one day belong to the city of Ravenna in a more than conventional sense. After a career of political service and sacrifice for his native city, Florence, Dante suffered the fate of so many great Florentines throughout the ages: political betrayal and exile. A gifted statesman and renowned poet (even before his Comedy saw the light of day), Dante ultimately found an ardent welcome in Ravenna and gave himself wholeheartedly to the work of securing that city’s health and felicity. His commitment to this new alma mater was so great that he undertook an urgent diplomatic mission to Venice on her behalf in August of 1321. The region between Venice and Ravenna was mostly marshland and known to be a malaria hotspot in the summer months, but the poet made the trip anyway, hoping to head off a war that Ravenna had little hope of winning. Dante contracted the disease on the return trip and died shortly thereafter, sacrificing his body as the last full measure of devotion to his adoptive city.

After Dante’s death Ravenna interred him as one of her own. At the time, the political wounds of his exile were still too fresh for Florence to have any interest in repatriating his remains, but it would not stop a number of prominent Florentines from making impassioned appeals to do just that. One can only guess how Dante, who came to style himself “Florentine by birth, not by disposition,” would have responded had such an offer been extended, but it was not.

These Florentine advocates for Dante’s posthumous return included Boccaccio, who would become Dante’s first biographer and, more significantly, grant his Comedy its “Divine” sobriquet. He reasoned that Florence should do right by one of her greatest sons, showing remorse over his ill treatment and symbolically welcoming him home. The city’s refusal further perplexed Boccaccio when he considered that the gesture would cost Florence no more than an apology—there was precious little chance of Ravenna handing over Dante’s treasured remains, even if asked.

The Florentine outlook changed as Dante’s original detractors began to die off, and when the city’s most prominent family—the House of Medici—gained control of the papacy in the sixteenth century, it appeared Ravenna would have no choice but to surrender her prized bones. Indeed, a Medici pope interfered in city politics to have several prominent officials temporarily detained in a neighboring city, clearing the way for a papal delegation that arrived in Ravenna with the sole purpose of acquiring the poet’s bones—and they didn’t plan on saying “please.” Even with the pope’s imprimatur upon their mission, the delegation opted to wait until night before forcing their way into the chapel housing Dante’s tomb in order to carry his remains back to Florence. Still, their raid came to naught. A historian and descendent of one of the delegates, Carlo Maria Nardi describes their discovery this way:

The eagerly desired translation came to naught because when two deputies . . . arrived at the tomb, they found Dante neither in soul nor in body; and it being believed that he had in his lifetime, in body as well as in spirit, made the journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, so in death it must now be assumed that in body as well as in spirit he had been received and welcomed into one of those realms.

Nardi’s comments poke fun at the possible explanations the delegation devised to rationalize their failure, but, as Raffa emphasizes, they also point to the specialized vocabulary that attached itself to the Comedian and his remains—his relics. Within a century of his death Tuscans began to speak of “Saint Dante” with no shadow of irony. Credible sources even chronicle miracles associated with the poet. Boccaccio records, via firsthand account, Jacopo Alighieri’s discovery of his father’s last work: the final thirteen cantos of Paradiso. Nearly a year after his death, the story goes, Dante appeared to his son in a dream, led him to a house he lived some of his last months in, and laid his hand on the wall before vanishing. Jacopo rushed to the place and found, at the exact spot Dante had touched in the dream, a decorative wall hanging that, when removed, disclosed a recess in the wall filled with mildewing pages in the poet’s own script—the culminating lines of what many had mourned as an incomplete work of genius. This discovery was the first “miracle” associated with the man who would come to be seen as the unofficial patron saint of Italy and whose relics would be guarded and venerated as fervently as if they belonged to an apostle.

Indeed, it was reverence for the bones that moved several Franciscan monks to steal them before the pope could carry them away to Florence. Dante’s chapel abuts a Franciscan monastery and his tomb rests against a wall shared by both buildings. Cut stone on three sides, the tomb’s fourth side was hidden from view and made of brick and plaster like the wall it adjoined. Upon learning of the papal delegation’s mission, enterprising monks accessed the tomb in secret by unbricking a portion of their own wall and emptying the tomb without setting foot in the locked chapel. The brothers saw Dante’s great affinity for Francis (there are even unconfirmed hints that he was himself a third-order Franciscan) as adequate grounds for taking custody of his remains. Because there was no telling when the bones would be safe again, Dantis ossa became the secret possession of the monastery, secreted from hiding place to hiding place on the premises and handed on from abbot to abbot until, at some indeterminable point, they were forgotten.

The secret location of the disinterred poet went unknown until that fortuitous demolition project began in 1865, and Dante’s reemergence could not have been more timely. Italy was humming with talk of national unification and could not have asked for a better icon to rally around than one of the earliest advocates for a unified Italy, “the most Italian Italian who has ever existed.” As region after region adopted the poet as a common hero and symbol, older inter-city rivalries gave way to a sense of common possession: Dante still reposed in Ravenna, but now he belonged to a nation.

The happy ending was short-lived, however, and the

Comedian’s bones were disturbed once more. When World War II broke out, Ravenna endured the double threat of Nazi looting and Allied bombing. To protect Dante’s remnants from both, they removed them from the tomb the bones had only recently returned to, encased them in a box of half-inch steel, buried that box in a hole eleven feet deep, poured a sizeable layer of concrete over top, buried a decoy corpse above that, and finally placed a conical concrete mound above the whole mess. Of course, it worked. The treasures of Ravenna did not come through the war entirely unscathed, but their most beloved immigrant did, and when peace came Dante was finally returned to a place of honor in a marked grave worthy of his legacy.

Perhaps, though, the earlier saga of Dante’s bones was the more fitting fate. In death as in life, Dante’s body trod the path of the exile. To this day the man’s remains have not returned to the place of his birth (except for an envelope of bone dust which the Florentines promptly lost and never recovered) and have spent as much time out of a proper grave as they have spent in one. Raffa may not be as bold as Harold Bloom—who is?—but he has laid the groundwork for making, and comes close to actually uttering, a rather Bloomean claim about his subject. Dante invented Italy, sure, but Raffa closes the curtain with the bigger suggestion that Dante has done what Bloom claimed for Shakespeare: invented a new way of being in the world. He has at least given new expression to the oldest way of being in the world—the life of exile.

It is as an icon of the exile and the pilgrim that the world beyond Italy has come to identify with Dante. His life and his language made him first the poet of Florence or Ravenna and then the poet of Italy; his lifetime of glimpsing paradise through chinks in an unscalable wall has made him the poet of humanity. “Dante’s was indeed a journeying humanity,” Took observes, “a humanity jealous in respect of everything gathered up and taken to heart along the way but nonetheless a venturing humanity.” The path of the faithful so often leads outside the city gates; the Son of Man has no place to lay his head; God calls his people to himself in the wilderness. Dante, in life as in death, is the poet appointed to be our guide along the way. “For rather like those coming down from Jerusalem to Emmaus in the evening hour, we too have witnessed a strange and marvellous thing,” and Dante comes beside to talk it all over again and again.

Sean Johnson teaches humanities at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He is an editor at FORMA.