The following is part two of a four-part series taken from a speech delivered by Michael Knowles at the National Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Conference.
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In “Inferno” VI, Dante calls his political party “the party of the woods” — “la parte selvaggia” — because its central family, the Cerchi, came from a rural area. It seems to me — though I’ve never seen this in any commentaries on the poem — that this explains the repetition in the first lines. Especially when we consider the timing of Dante’s arrival in the dark wood just before his ascent to the Priorate, it seems to me Dante is calling our attention immediately to the political cause of his losing the straight way.
Some additional evidence for this view comes from Dante himself, in a letter preserved by the historian Leonardo Bruni, in which he says, “All my woes and all my misfortunes had their cause and origin in my ill-omened election to the Priorate.” So, if my interpretation is correct, this means even the vaguest and more general scene in the poem, “Inferno” I, is rooted in highly particular historical experience.
Dante then encounters three beasts at the foot of a “desert slope”: a leopard, a lion, and a lupa — a “she-wolf.”And the she-wolf scares him the most. Why? Lions and leopards seem scarier to me. What is it about the she-wolf?
We know that later on Dante will connect the she-wolf with avarice. Beyond that, we really don’t know Dante’s precise meaning. And I suspect we’re not supposed to know because we usually don’t understand the meaning of events as they occur. This isn’t “Pilgrim’s Progress.” In Dante’s journey, just as in real life, we don’t encounter giant, talking allegories. We encounter literal events and figures — with allegorical significance, no doubt, but allegorical significance that often eludes us, at least at first.
In the fallen world, there is a distance between sign and signified, between symbol and symbolized. It is a distance present in language itself. Angels don’t need language. Angels’ knowledge is directly infused. Humans need language because we’re incarnate. So we communicate in perceptible sounds and scribbles. But there’s a problem with our language. As a consequence of the Fall, a chasm has opened between what we say and what we mean. This distance — this desert, we might say — constitutes another kind of exile between word and meaning. We don’t quite say what we want to say, and we don’t immediately grasp the meaning of symbols.
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So politics is the particular things that happen, the full meaning of which we cannot know as they occur. And history is the record of politics, the significance of which we later interpret. But if we can interpret history, that means that history is not merely literal. Every particular thing evinces some universal truth, and the universal is made manifest to us only through the particular.
So what does the she-wolf mean? It seems to me the clearest connotation is political. The she-wolf nurses Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. What strikes the most fear into Dante’s heart — what most obstructs his path — is a political beast, a beast, we’ll read 40 lines later, which “lets no one pass by her way, but so much impedes him that she kills him.”
We learn this from the first character that Dante meets: Virgil, the poet of empire and history, whose “Aeneid” tells the story of the founding of Rome, the universal empire, transferred west from Troy to Italy through Aeneas, ancestor to Romulus and Remus.
Dante’s journey is not a straight-shot to God. It’s a journey incited by a particular individual, Virgil, whom we later learn was sent by another individual, Dante’s beloved Beatrice — not even a public figure — who will then introduce Dante to another individual, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who will serve as the final guide on the pilgrim’s journey, which is mediated at all times by real and specific people.
Dante Alighieri and Beatrice in Florence. 20th century illustration. Italian poet, 1265-1321. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
When Dante sees Virgil “in the great desert,” he cries, “‘Miserere di me,’ whatever you may be, whether shade or true man.” Dante doesn’t quite meet “Virgil.” He meets the “shade” of Virgil.
“Not a man — I was once a man,” Virgil explains. “My parents were Lombards, both Mantuans by birth. I was born under Julius, though it was late, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods.” Virgil is not a man because men are irreducibly historic beings. We are not souls flitting through eternity. We are incarnate creatures — composites of body and soul — and we can only ever be men by virtue of our place in history.
Therefore, Virgil identifies himself by his political circumstances: geographic in that he is Mantuan, and temporal in that he was “born under Julius.” Which isn’t even true, by the way. Virgil was born in 70 B.C. He was 21-years-old when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But Dante is connecting Virgil with the Empire, the perfection of political order.
Virgil speaks of the journey that they are about to undertake — even of God himself — in imperial terms. He refers to “that Emperor who reigns on high,” and he informs Dante that they will not exit the wood by going up. Dante will not retrieve the straight path by virtue of his own intellect and will. To go up, he must go down.
Dante is skeptical. He says, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” Why invoke Aeneas and Paul? What do they have in common? Two things. They both travel to the “immortal realm” — Aeneas to the land of the dead, Paul to the third heaven. And they both go to Rome.
Dante writes of Aeneas:
He in the Empyrean heaven had been chosen to
be father of mother Rome and her empire:
and Rome and her empire, to tell the truth, were
established to be the holy place where the successor
of great Peter is enthroned.
Through this journey that you claim for him, he
understood things that were the cause of his victory
and of the papal mantle.
Later the chosen Vessel [Paul] went there, to bring back
strengthening for that faith which is the beginning of
the way of salvation.
Virgil tells Dante that he must venture into the pit of Hell, and the first thing Dante thinks of is politics. And it’s not a frivolous obsession. For Dante, Rome is divinely imbued with authority. God the Father sent his only begotten Son to be incarnate in the fullness of time into the Roman Empire. For Dante, Rome has a divine mandate to govern the whole world attested to in the Gospel of St. Luke: “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,” which for Dante signifies, as he explains in his political tract “Monarchia,” “that at that time the Romans exercised jurisdiction over the whole world.”
For Dante, it’s appropriate that the Romans governed the world because they were not only the noblest people but also providentially formed, as we see in the marriages of Aeneas, who had three wives: Creusa in Troy, then Dido in Carthage, and finally Lavinia in Italy — Asia, Africa, and Europe, all brought under the headship of one man. “Who will fail,” Dante asks, “to recognize divine predestination in that double confluence of blood from every part of the world into a single man?”
The Roman Empire’s divine mandate to govern is not only apparent but necessary, according to Dante, if Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is to redeem all of mankind. As Dante explains in “Monarchia,” “If the Roman empire was not based on right, Adam’s sin was not punished in Christ.” That is, “If Christ had not suffered under an authorized judge, that penalty would not have been a punishment. And no judge could be authorized unless he had jurisdiction over the whole of mankind, since the whole of mankind was punished in that flesh of Christ.”
So Rome had the special right to govern the world. And this is good, Dante believes, because “mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity.” Today we worship “diversity” for diversity’s sake. Dante does not. Mankind, he writes, “is in its ideal state when it follows the footsteps of heaven, insofar as its nature allows. And since the whole sphere of heaven is guided by a single movement … and by a single source of motion (who is God) … mankind is in its ideal state when it is guided by a single ruler.”
In other words, we ought to imitate the heavens, and the kingdom of heaven is not a democracy — or an oligarchy, or a tyranny, or any form of government other than universal monarchy, which Dante concludes “is necessary to the world.”
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