#this is mostly courtly romance at the first glance (and that's also what this is and I go bonkers for all those tropes) but Geralt- | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

antiquery · 6 years

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please tell us more about the subversiveness of dante!!

so there are…a lot of aspects of the divine comedy that are intensely transgressive— from the explicit condemnation of the papacy, to the inclusion of virtuous pagans in limbo that flew in the face of all established theology, to the by-name callouts of sometimes-still-living individual public figures as present in hell. and that’s not even counting the poetry, or de monarchia, which is a whole other post on its own.

i mean, the political aspect of it is one thing. in dante’s time, europe was essentially split into guelfs, who supported the right of the papacy to act as a political power; and ghibellines, who thought that the papacy ought to limit itself to just the religious sphere, and the holy roman empire ought to do all the politicking. ideally, that is. oftentimes ghibellines were leaders of independent city-states who just wanted the papacy to stop sticking its nose where it wasn’t wanted. but the thing is that by the time dante came of political age, in the 1290s, the golden age of ghibellinism had come and gone with the failure of frederick ii to consolidate an empire in italy— before dante was even born, every single ghibelline had been violently driven out of florence. for him to express the explicitly ghibelline views he does in the divine comedy, then, is an incredibly radical thing; had he not already been exiled, that would probably have done the trick. ghibellines in the political sphere were simply not tolerated, especially after the ascension of boniface viii— one of the most politically-involved popes of the middle ages, and in many ways the forerunner of alexander vi— to the throne.

besides all that, dante was fiercely opposed to political corruption and barratry in a way that most people just weren’t, because such practice was considered typical, even necessary. think gilded-age america, and the massive political machines that ensured that the government ran smoothly (if unfairly). this makes a lot of sense when you remember that when dante was exiled in 1302, the offense he was charged with was taking bribes during his time as prior back in 1300— something he emphatically did not do, but was punished for anyway. therefore, he has zero tolerance for corrupt officials, and that sentiment extends toward a relatively new practice at the papal court: the indulgences boniface initiated for the first-ever papal jubilee, in 1300.

which brings me to my next point: dante hated the papacy, and especially popes boniface viii and clement v. he thought the papacy was an agent of corruption in politics and in the life of the spirit, and (as you might imagine) was in no way convinced of the pope as the mouthpiece of god on earth. we actually see multiple popes in hell! in heaven, st peter himself rails against the debasement of his office! the extent to which dante not only wanted the papacy out of politics, but actively despised what it had become, cannot be overstated. and in a guelf world, a world in which the papacy was one of the most important political powers in europe and would continue to be so for the next 250 years, that was not a very popular opinion. people call dante the medieval luther for his attitude towards the papacy, and towards papal corruption— and while i can see where they’re coming from, the key difference is that dante was a radical in service of the church, because he understood that christianity is not theology alone but community as well, whereas martin luther was a radical in separation from the church. (fuck martin luther, is what i’m saying.)

all that aside! i could also talk about the ways in which dante is theologically subversive, the ways in which his cosmology is at odds w/ a thomistic perception of the world, but i don’t know anything about theology, so what i AM going to talk about is the sexual aspect. this goes back to the whole courtly love schema, which is: lover is in love with his lady, but in an idealized, un-physical manner, and his devotion requires nothing from her. she doesn’t even have to notice him. that’s the tradition that informs the way dante writes about beatrice, but when he does it, it’s…different, in several important ways. one is that dante is also informed by the poetry of his best friend/poetic mentor/possible (probable) boyfriend guido cavalcanti, who wrote that love is a sickness, an affliction that ought to be avoided so that you can live a good life. for dante, love— his love for beatrice, at least— is absolutely an affliction, in the cavalcantian sense. in his first book, la vita nuova, he chronicles the story of their, uh, “romance,” which mostly consists of him being in awe of her and her occasionally noticing him, until she dies and he resolves not to write any more poetry about her until he’s skilled enough to do her justice. but whenever she gets close to him— whenever she touches him, smiles at him, even just looks at him— he completely loses the ability to be a person. he gets faint, turns pale, can’t even speak; i think he even swoons once or twice. the thing is, though, that that love-sickness, that pain, isn’t a bug, as guido would say, but a feature— for dante, being hurt is a part of being in real, transcendent, spiritual love.

now, that’s not something new— it’s a very catullan, very classical elegist sentiment— but it becomes pretty darn transgressive when you couple it with the other way in which dante subverts the classic courtly love schema. in that, the lady is almost always silent, disengaged— i wouldn’t go so far as to say objectified, but she isn’t a part of the emotional life of the poetry. she doesn’t engage with the lover, or if she does, it’s brief and perfunctory. that’s somewhat like the beatrice we see in la vita nuova— as much power as she has over dante, as easily as she can make faint and dizzy with emotion, she doesn’t really talk. she isn’t participant. she doesn’t care what she is to him. in the divine comedy, though, that all changes— from the minute beatrice shows up, in the last canto of purgatorio, she’s extremely vocal. she spends most of that canto yelling at dante for letting himself get lost in that metaphorical dark wood of inferno i; for letting himself stray from her, and (by implication, because the whole thing is that beatrice is the personal embodiment of the divine) from god. and when she’s done with him, when he’s on his knees in front of her, he tries to answer her, and finds that he’s physically lost the capacity for speech. he’s been reduced to total silence. and this is so much not just because it very clearly subverts the normal courtly love formulation of vocal lover/silent lady, but also because his voice, his words are what make dante important, in the grand scheme of things. he’s a poet— he proclaims himself one of the six best poets of all time— without that, he is absolutely insignificant. that’s what beatrice makes him, when she takes his voice away.

that dichotomy continues, even into the rest of the poem. most of paradiso, all the knotty theological explanation is done by beatrice, rather than dante having some male saint relate it. she talks, teaches him; he listens, learns, is enlightened, because she’s divine and he isn’t. there are a couple of times when he asks her to tell her something, and she says: i can’t do that, because you’re human, and fragile, and i don’t want to break you. the point is, though: she knows and he doesn’t, she speaks and he’s silent, she can make him faint with just a glance. she has power over him in every possible way, which is partly an extension, but mostly a subversion, of the courtly love schema. and when you take that and you add in the theological explanation, the fact that beatrice is the one who imparts to dante the truths of the universe— it’s a kind of mixing of sex and scholasticism that you just. didn’t do. not even if you were heloise and abelard. he’s helpless to her in every way imaginable, and their power differential is framed with theology. it’s so much, y’all.

#i been down on bended knee #bookshelf blogging #I LOVE DANTE YOU GUYS #terpsikeraunos #q&a

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