Harriet Rubin - Dante in Love: The Worlds Greatest Poem and How It Made History

For Steven Lowenstam (19452003)

di tante cose quant i ho vedute,

dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate

riconosco la grazia e la virtute.

through your power and your excellence alone

have I recognized the goodness and the grace

inherent in the things I have been shown.

(Paradiso 31.8284; trans. Ciardi)

The High Middle Ages reached their greatest height in a brief thirty-year period, when the thirteenth century ended and the fourteenth century beganthe source of the great institutions we call modern.

In this tale of how Dante, ill-fated fugitive, became Dante, creator of a masterpiece that influences readers from beyond the grave, we take a look at how readers become Dantisti pursuing the art of perfection as did their master. Why anti-Shakespearians see farther. The reward of happiness and genius for readers of The Divine Comedy.

Two worlds that define the High Middle Ages: poverty and plenty; purity and power. The fanaticism of ambition shapes both church and state. Pope Boniface VIII is Dantes dark twin; St. Francis, who gave Italy poetry, is Dantes vagabond hero. Giotto, who raised the modestly human to the level of high art, defines the third element of achievement in these expansionist times. Throughout Italy, the search for the grail shifts to the search for sugar, cinnamon and gold. Dante experiences this double, squinting time of spiritual forces and commerce as he enters the wilderness of the Inferno.

The death of poet Guido Cavalcanti, Dantes first friend and brother in the Fedeli d Amorethe brotherhood of the faithful in love. Was Dante responsible? The birth of poetry; the first time the word love is uttered and Dantes vow to write what had never been written before. The blend of asceticism and passionate desire that led to conflicts among the brotherhood. Dantes sorrows take on a new depth as he travels deeper into the Inferno.

How Dante constructed the Comedy. The poet vies with the ghost of St. Thomas Aquinas, author of that other epic, the Summa Theologica, to lift poetry from its bookish deadness. He studies alchemyliterally, golden spermfor a new language, and finds a means by which loss can be reversed.

Can failure be reversed? Wandering the open roads of Italy, an outcast and fugitive with a death warrant hanging over his head, Dante compares himself to the heroic wanderer Ulysses and his failed last voyage. To what can one aspire that is free of the deadlock of ambition? One can try to see morally and aesthetically, looking for the divine in things, learning to read the mystery of history, which is that God writes straight with crooked lines.

A woman takes on the role of a god. Dante, in the midst of this revolution, discovers the feminine mysteries. Something very dramatic had happened between the two notions of tenderness: piety and pitybetween ancient warrior Aeneass pious devotion to his father and Michelangelos Renaissance Piet: the sculpture of a young woman cradling her dead son in her lap. Out of this, the definition of genius becomes linked with sweetness. Dante prepares for meeting his dead lover, Beatrice.

The abduction of the papacy to Avignon, dashing hopes for a new Roman Empire. Dante voyages to Paris in 1309 in the wake of the pope. The new sciences and Gothic churches fill his imagination and provide him the means for Paradise and Paradiso: sacred geometry, apparent in the magisterial Gothic cathedrals that are rare in Italy but which dominate France.

The saddest moment in literature is not when Juliet dies undeflowered, Byron said, but when Virgil leaves Dante at the pinnacle of Purgatory. The ghost of the great ancient poet has guided his protg Dante through Hell, which he knows all too well, up the Mountain of Purgatory and then disappears when the student surpasses the teacher with his newfound certainty.

Inside the mind of God, fully and at last, Dante learns how to see beyond human sight. Dante reaches this pinnacle in his fifties in Ravenna, truly a secret Paradise. The High Middle Ages is ripening to its death. The poet completes his greatest and most modern work, Paradiso, as chaos threatens. Dantes death, and his restless bones.