"Love follows knowledge."
"Beauty above all beauty!"
– St. Catherine of Siena

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Comments to Dante’s Paradiso, Cantos XV thru XVIII

Throughout what must be hundreds of characters that appear in La Commedia, Dante (the author) never brings in a single family member nor does he mention any, all except for one.  He doesn’t mention his wife nor any of his three children.  We never hear of a father or mother or siblings.  We hear of many father figures, men who in some respect “fathered” Dante.  The work of literature Dante most revered, Virgil’s Aeneid, had at its heart a trip to the underworld by the protagonist, Aeneas, to locate his father Anchises, to ask for some key advice about his future.  Here in this epic of a journey through the underworld, Dante (the author) never has Dante (the character) seek or encounter his father.  The theme of fatherhood being so important in the work, in lieu of encountering and speaking to his father, Dante has Dante encounter his great great-grandfather, Cacciaguida degli Elisei right in center of his third cantica, Paradiso.

Dante (the author) makes it quite clear that Cacciaguida is almost a parallel character to Anchises.  At the moment when Cacciaguida steps up to great his descendant, an allusion is made to the affectionate greeting Anchises gives Aeneas. 

With such affection did Anchises' shade reach out,
if our greatest muse is owed belief,
when in Elysium he knew his son. (XV. 25-27)

And so Cacciaguida greets Dante with much fatherly love.  Indeed, he greets him with pride.  He speaks in Latin, the only Latin tercet in the entire poem.  The Latin connects to Virgil’s work, and to an ancestry that goes back to the Roman Empire.  He says, “O blood of mine, O grace of God, poured down from above, to whom, as to you, have the gates of heaven ever been opened twice?”  He is proud that his blood descendent has been chosen by God to be the only person to ever enter heaven twice.  The pride blossoms just before he finally introduces himself: “O bough of my tree, in who I have rejoiced/even in expectation, I was your root.” (88-89). 

I don’t know what, if any is the significance of Cacciaguida’s name—and for some reason I have never seen any commentary on it—but Cacciaguida literally translates into “hunting guide.”  Perhaps it’s just the real name of his great great-grandfather, and so it doesn’t carry any significance.  But it is just too convenient and smacks of suggestion.  However, I can’t come up with any allusion or significance.  It’s a great name, having a sort of reverence and dignity, a sort of Hemingway-esk patriarch.  A masculine name.

That his character spans from Canto XV through the first half of XVIII, three and a half cantos, certainly suggests significance.  Also he gives his key advice right at the center of Paradiso, Canto XVII having sixteen cantos before it and sixteen cantos after it.  It is in Canto XVII, the exact center, that Cacciaguida tells of Dante’s fate in exile.  He is under the sphere of Mars, the fifth of the ten spheres of heaven.  Virgil has Aeneas meet with Anchises in the sixth of twelve books of the Aeneid, also exactly mid-way.  Having your protagonist meet with a lost father at the center of the structure to seek out wisdom is a powerful story element.  It is akin to a hero climbing a mountain or wandering through a desert to seek wisdom from some venerable sage who will set him on the right path.  When that sage happens to be your father, then all sorts of family dynamics and ancestry are intermingled. 

Cacciaguida says that he has read into The Book of Life and learned of his descendant’s history and knows his fate. 

And he went on: 'That long and welcome craving,
derived from reading in the massive book
where neither black nor white is ever altered,

'you have satisfied, my son, within this light
from which I speak to you by grace of her
who dressed you out in wings for this high flight. (XV.49-54)

By parsing through the various details of Cacciaguida’s monologue, we can piece together that he was born in 1090 in Florence, baptized in the Baptistery od San Giavanni, belonged to one of the oldest of Florentine families which traced its roots to Roman times, was knighted by the Emperor as he joined the Second Crusade, and was killed in action on crusade at the age of 57 in the year of 1147 trying to retake the Holy Land.  Since the Divine Comedy is set in the year 1300, Cacciaguida has been dead for 153 years, some six generations.

A poignant moment in the encounter is when Dante calls Cacciaguida his father.

I began: 'You are my father,
You prompt me to speak with bold assurance.
You raise me up, so I am more than I.

'My mind is flooded by such rivers of delight
that it exults it has not burst
with so much happiness and joy. (XVI.16-21)

Dante goes on to ask about his ancestors.  It is interesting that though Cacciaguida alludes to his noble ancestry, he refuses to answer Dante’s question on who his ancestors were (XVI.43). Why?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps it was just structural.  This would have been tangential and perhaps even a digression, and Dante (the author) didn’t have the space to dwell on it.  The suggestion was enough.

But he directly calls him  “his father” with such affection and joy, a burst of emotion that in human relationship is unparalleled.  My father has been deceased now for over twelve years.  What I would give to meet with him again.

Indeed, Cacciaguida is the culmination of the father theme that has run throughout the Commedia.  He speaks in three tongues, Latin (XV.28-30), a tongue Dante (the character) could not understand (XV.38-39), which could be a proto-Italian, and finally ”not in this our modern tongue” (XVI.33), which would suggest an earlier dialect.  So from Latin to early Italian, Cacciaguida spans over a thousand years of language evolution.  Dante (the author) who is so conscious of writing his poem in the colloquial language, has Cacciaguida encapsulate Italian’s etymology.  In effect his language is the great-grandfather of Italian.

Hollander cites that throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante directly refers to seven beings as “father”:  Virgil, God the Father, Cacciaguida here, St. Benedict, St. Peter, Adam, and St. Bernard.  The last four we encounter further into heaven, and so we get a sense of a journey to one’s father.  In addition to the direct addresses as fathers, Dante refers to five other beings as fathers: Brunetto Latini, Cato, the old Roman stoic, Guido Guinizzelli, St. Francis of Assisi, and the Sun.  Twelve fathers in all, a number which has much significance, one being the number of Jesus’ disciples.  Virgil and Guinizzelli are his poetic fathers, Latini his father in scholarship and learning, Cato his father in being a citizen, St. Francis for being his Franciscan father (Dante being a Lay Franciscan), the other saints for being his spiritual fathers, Adam for being his father in humanity, God for being the ultimate Father, and the Sun as analogous for God.

The search for one’s father is the search for identity, and Dante will find it in Cacciaguida.


###

So why doesn’t Dante (the author) have Dante (the character) meet his father in paradise instead of his great great-grandfather?  Well, the obvious answer would be that his father didn’t die in a crusade, and so wouldn’t fit the sphere of Mars.  But it’s more than that.  We don’t know of any rancor that may have occurred between Dante and his father that might have prevented Dante from including him in his cast.  But Dante is definitive in not including any of his immediate family anywhere in the Commedia.  The character of Cacciaguida, going back over 150 years, provided Dante (the author) with a number of advantages.  First he can create the character as he wishes, since no one knows what he was like.  Second, he’s free of any family dynamics, though I can’t see Dante really being worried of that.  Third, and most important—if not the single most important reason—Cacciaguida’s distance in history allows for a summation of Florence’s degeneration from an ideal past.

It is worthwhile to look at the transitions in the three and a half cantos with Cacciaguida.  (1) We meet Cacciaguida (Canto XV.25-87), (2) Cacciaguida speaks on the virtues of old Florence (XV.88-129), (3) Cacciaguida reveals his history (XV.130-148), (4) Cacciaguida speaks on the evolution of Florence through the great families (Canto XVI), (5) Cacciaguida foretells Dante’s future (Canto XVII), and (6) Cacciaguida catalogues the blessed under the sphere of Mars (XVIII.1-57).  Cacciaguida’s life from six generations back becomes an indictment against the mores of Dante’s day, the civil strife of Dante’s day, against Dante’s enemies who exiled him, and, as we see, against his comrades who were exiled along with him but ultimately abandoned him. 

In Cacciaguida’s character, we see the ideal citizen.  Obviously he is devout, noble, and patriotic.  When the need for the crusade comes up, he accepts at a fairly advanced age the Emperor’s request for recruits and leaves his beloved city and family to fight for the retaking of the Holy Land.  He provides a list of the great and honorable families of his day, and speaks on their virtues.  He shows how over time these virtues eroded, and how the influx of neighboring cities diluted the virtues of old Florence, both through the women who became obsessed with vanity and men who became obsessed with wealth.  He shows how citizens became more loyal to their political parties than to Florence herself, and how factionalism eroded the public good.

Cacciaguida’s discourse is one of the great conservative diatribes in all of literature.  Progressives place some sort of ideal in a utopian future; conservatives place the ideal in the past and rant about the decay in the present.  It doesn’t mean one is more correct than the other; it’s a matter of view.  Cacciaguida expresses a conservative’s appeal to the state of Florence in the day of his great great-grandchild.  And in turn, since Cacciaguida is really the mouthpiece of the author here, Dante is one of the great conservative writers in history.

By bringing in Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor, through Cacciaguida’s life, we see what a good and proper role of an Emperor was supposed to be like, and in reflection we see the good and proper role of the city-states, and by suggestion the good and proper role of the Pope.  The Holy Father identifies the religious crises of pilgrims denied a visit to the holy sites; the emperor coordinates the martial means to right the injustice; the citizens of the city-states volunteer with knightly honor to support the call to arms.  This harmonious social constitution counterpoints the social discord of Dante’s day.

Cacciaguida identifies the roots of the social discord in the murder of Buondelmonte in 1216and it has the sense of a mythic story akin to the apple of discord that was supposed to have started the Trojan War.  Buondelmonte dishonors his betrothed lady by running off with another woman.  The family of the insulted lady take revenge and murder Buondelmonte.  A feud develops, which spills over into the political parties, and the die is cast for not just factionalism, which had begun to form anyway, but for factionalism where disputes are settled through violence.

Placing the situation into history, we see how the feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibelline parties is settled through the violent expulsion of the Ghibellines.  The then dominating Guelphs shortly divide into the Black and White parties, and ultimately leads to the violent exile of the Whites of which Dante is a leader.  Dante will be exiled in 1302.  He starts to write the Commedia in 1308 but sets the date of the story back in time to 1300, two years before he is exiled.  He completes the work just short of his death in 1321, so even as he edits the work in his late years he has been in exile from his beloved Florence for nearly twenty years.

We have gotten tidbits of his exile to come throughout the Divine Comedy, but it is here with Cacciaguida that it is confirmed and explained.  Cacciaguida’s foretelling of events brings this thread in the story to a climax and conclusion.  The foretelling of Dante’s future occurs in Canto XVII, the exact center of Paradiso. 

There are some great lines from Cacciaguida’s foretelling of Dante’s future.  Lines 52 through 69 deserve explication.

The populace shall blame the injured party,
as it always does, but vengeance
shall bear witness to the Truth that metes it out.

'You shall leave behind all you most dearly love,
and that shall be the arrow
first loosed from exile's bow.

'You shall learn how salt is the taste
of another man's bread and how hard is the way,
going down and then up another man's stairs. (XVII.52-60)

The general population will blame him, but vengeance will be obtained through the “Truth,” and the capitalization implies a divine justice.  Leaving behind all he most dearly loves (his city, his honor, his property, and his family) will be the first arrow to be shot.  And then the great and memorable tercet, “'You shall learn how salt is the taste/of another man's bread and how hard is the way,/going down and then up another man's stairs.”  He will have to live in poverty in another man’s house and eat another man’s bread.  The synesthesia—providing an analogy through a sensation—of salty bread is magnificent.  Salt can make food so tasty, but if overdone can make it bitter.  Hollander also points out the salt can be a result of tears.  Cacciaguida continues:

'But the heaviest burden your shoulders must bear
shall be the companions, wicked and witless,
among whom you shall fall in your descent.

'They, utterly ungrateful, mad, and faithless,
shall turn against you. But soon enough they, not you,
shall feel their faces blushing past their brows.

'Of their brutish state the results
shall offer proof. And it shall bring you honor
to have made a single party of yourself alone. (XVII.61-69)

His “wicked and witless” companions will be ungrateful and turn against Dante.  But ultimately the honor will be his alone because Dante in the end will be a party of one.  That phrase, “party of one” has been used often since it was written. 


Finally Cacciaguida will devote some time to predicting the good fortune and future heroics of Cangrande della Scala, a nobleman from Verona, who would become Dante’s patron while in exile.  In 1300, Cangrande would only have been nine years old, so this is purely a foretelling.  Cangrande apparently was a brave warrior and conquered a number of northern city-states.  I don’t know if Cangrande’s conquests had a religious element to it, but it is fitting that they he is featured in the sphere of Mars.  Dante (the author) in gratitude for the patronage immortalizes Cangrande (which by the way translates into “big dog”) with this passage.


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