Dante in Love : The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History

by Harriet Rubin

• ISBN13: 9780743234467
• ISBN10: 0743234464
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-06
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

In the vein of "Brunelleschi's Dome, Galileo's Daughter, " and "Wittgenstein's Poker, Dante in Love" is a geographic and spiritual re-creation of the poet's travels and the burst of creativity that produced the greatest poem ever written. "Dante in Love" is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Rubin follows Dante's path as the poet, exiled from Florence, walked the old Jubilee routes that linked monasteries and all roads to Rome and Tuscany -- a path followed by generations of seekers from T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Primo Levi to Bruce Springsteen. Following Dante's route, we, too, are inspired to undertake the journey of discovering ourselves.

Table of Contents

Touching the Depths

A Time Run by Dreamers and Their Dreams

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

The Difference Between One Who Knows and One Who Undergoes

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

Inferno (1304-8)

The Fearful Infant Whose Ravenous Hunger Cannot Be Satisfied

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 Dante's dark twin St Francis, who gave Italy poetry, is Dante's 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 Ogre of the Brotherhood

The death of poet Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's first friend and "brother" in the Fedeli d' Amore -- "the brotherhood of the faithful in love." Was Dante responsible?

The birth of poetry; the first time the word "love" is uttered and Dante's vow to write what had never been written before

The blend of asceticism and passionate desire that led to conflicts among the brotherhood

Dante's sorrows take on a new depth as he travels deeper into the Inferno

The Golden SpermHow 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 "alchemy" -- literally, "golden sperm" -- for a new language, and finds a means by which loss can be reversed

The Difficult Discipline of "As Pleased Another"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."

Virgin DiscoveriesA 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 pity -- between ancient warrior Aeneas's pious devotion to his father and Michelangelo's Renaissance Pietà: 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

Number-Crunchers in ParisThe 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

"We Have Tears for Things," Said VirgilThe saddest moment in literature is not when Juliet dies undeflowered, Byron said, but wh

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Excerpts

CHAPTER 1: A Time Run by Dreamers and Their Dreams On January 27, 1302, a courier on a deadly mission arrives in bone-chilling Rome off the wintry paths from Florence. He bears a message for Dante Alighieri. Alighieri, who is thirty-six, is not yet the great Dante, author of the poem that will become like a religion to artists and statesmen and other seekers of perfection. Alighieri is in Rome on a doomed diplomatic mission -- a lethal pattern which seems to characterize the majority of his efforts. About most things Alighieri is cautious and indirect. Though he holds strong views, he seldom acts on them. He never told the woman he most loved of his feelings for her; and now that she is dead, words are meaningless. He expresses himself in precious verses that circulate among a small circle of his friends. He has tried everything, from law to war, and from politics to teaching, with mixed results. So why is this unthreatening father of three the object of a decree that is equivalent to a hanging -- exile -- and not even singling him out for a brave act, but accusing him of barratry or breach of duty along with 359 others -- an undignified lottery. He has simply found himself on the wrong side of an old political skirmish. His death notice is inconsequential to an observer of 1302 -- it is a tree falling in the forest.But the consequences will surprise the world: the edict will force Dante to take no other course than the pursuit of the education of his soul over the nearly two decades of brutal exile. The sentence will unsettle us more than seven hundred years later. Genius, happiness, love and vision will hereafter be measured by how Alighieri handles the awful sentence he receives this day. He will develop self-knowledge and self-mastery, brutal honesty combined with melting sweetness. Dante Alighieri represents the height and depth of a turning point in time. The years 1300-1320 are the pinnacle of the period known as the High Middle Ages, the foundation of modern commerce, art and faith. They are aptly named for the elation they inspire -- when genius ruled over laws and sometimes coursed out of control.The essential question is: How did Dante become Dante? Why didn't his fate silence him forever, reduce him to desiccating anguish? How did a man who had been unable to express his passion reinvent the nature of love and genius? How did he reverse his failures? How does one voice become the most important voice?Dante in Love suggests a love story, and some might expect this to be the tale of sweethearts beyond the grave: Dante and Beatrice, legendary lovers, divided by death, reunite in a poetic afterlife. In fact, it is a truer love story: that of a dispossessed soul learning the meaning of life and finding the grace to love that meaning. Attaining that kind of love depends on developing "the good of the intellect," Dante wrote.The Divine Comedy has exerted a shaping influence on the lives of a wide range of people: poets (T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and hundreds of others), writers (George Eliot, Primo Levi, Tom Stoppard), psychologists (Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung), philosophers (David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Hegel), rock stars (Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen), as well as butchers, bakers, air force pilots and political figures. One can ask without exaggeration: How did this poet help steer the medieval world into the modern one? In our time, we may wonder, what will the modern world coalesce into, and given that to a certain extent we can author our fortune and fate, can we look to visionaries, not merely soldiers and bureaucrats, to guide us?What follows is a tale for those who have dreamed of creating something that seems beyond them. Its purpose is not to save you a lifetime of reading one book, The Divine Comedy, but to start you on the project.At the beginning, the roads that link Dante to his fate are the Jubilee roads which two years earlier Pope