BBC on Justinian

The BBC has a story about Justinian (above flanked by military and clergy), whom we encountered in Paradiso 6.  It's worth recalling the enormous work of  the Emperor as we encounter the eagle of Paradiso 18-20. Justice remains a key concern throughout the canticle.

Vampiric Mimesis: Farinata and the living blood of history

If Auerbach's Mimesis tells a story, it's not one that is obvious or simply summarized. His close reading of passages from widely disparate times requires some tenacity to weave into a narrative. The reader at times feels he's been left to do the work of making connections among ganglia that hover on all sides.

At moments, though, Auerbach will yoke expanses of history. Time, instead of flowing uniformly, has long inert periods that undergo sudden seizures that leave imprints on all that comes after. It can be like visiting an archaeological dig, and finding, beneath the structure of one age, that of another. Here's James I. Porter connecting two passages from Mimesis:

Christianity could not, however, have succeeded without the lessons it learned from Judaism’s capacity first to conceive and interpret the world historically (based on its notion of universal, “world-historical” events) and then to organize this history into a single coherent transcendental order (Mimesis 17). In doing so, Christianity inherited not merely a religious sensibility, but an ineluctable antagonism: “the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which permeates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality” (Mimesis 49).

Introduction to Time, History, and Literature:  Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, xxvii. Page references work for the edition of Mimesis we've been using.

Christianity, which Auerbach sees as the primary organizing principle of history even to our day, has a substratum that is unlike it -- an order that is manifest in Judaism. Judaism is profoundly different, radically other than Christianity, yet the latter, learning its "lessons," was shaped fundamentally by this previous order, which it immediately set about re-interpreting. That reinterpretation was so complete as to devalue, even to deface, the legacy that Christians inherited. 

Whatever else is involved in that "antagonism" Auerbach speaks of, it's fairly clear that between Jerusalem and Rome there was never a harmonious synthesis, or syncretism. Auerbach sees rupture:

History for Auerbach is marked by two major ruptures, each constituting moments when vertical, transcendental meaning is shattered in the course of the horizontal, forward propulsion of history, while history is etched in turn with the scars of these traumatic unfoldings, and so acquires a depth of its own. First there is the devaluation (Entwertung) of Judaism through Christianity . . . Porter ibid xxvii.

Nearly at the last page of Dante: Poet of the Secular World, Auerbach will see in Christianity the seeds of its own supercession:

With the discovery of individual destiny, modern mimesis discovered the person. It lifted him out of the two-dimensional irreality of a remoteness that was only constructed or imagined and placed him in the realm of history, which is his true home. . . . The immanent realism and historicism that are found in the eschatology of the Comedy flowed back into actual history and filled it with the lifeblood of authentic truth. . . . Radiating out from here, history as such— the life of the human being as this is given and in its earthly character— underwent a vitalization and acquired a new value. (178)

It is this "lifeblood of authentic truth" that Auerbach sees in Farinata's commanding presence, even in his tomb; in Cavalcante's grieving; in the power of Dante's poetics to move the reader in ways that draw away from, rather than toward, the remote godhead:

Even the Comedy barely manages to subdue the wild spirits of life within the framework of its eschatology, and one senses how quickly and forcefully these spirits will soon prise themselves loose from their constraints.

Somehow it seems that this sanguinaceous theme -- one that runs throughout Auerbach's work -- is always within earshot of Farinata -- as if this wild spirit who rises with the apostrophaic "O Tosco" is always about to break out of the eternal walls of hell itself.

If time permits, I hope to briefly return to Inferno 10 with this in mind.

Opening Paradiso 1-6: A working hypothesis

Raffaello Sorbi: Piccarda taken from the convent

Often close reading is a matter of attention to words -- their nuances, quirks of sense, their sound or metrical emphasis, even their literal appearance (their shape in letters and fonts). Sometimes a single word can connote a great deal.

In a recent post about Justinian's retrospective view of Roman glory, for example, we noticed certain features of his speech that didn't seem consonant with a vision of a secular state of mankind in harmony with the providential destiny of Christian souls. His dream of justice might be divine, but the reality of the armies of Rome racing behind the rapacious bird of prey seemed to fall short of that ideal.

Along the way in that speech, Caesar Augustus is called a baiulo, a porter. Whatever Augustus might have thought of that term, it does bump him down a bit. Behind this proletarianization of Rome's great emperor might lie the suggestion that humans taking credit for the existence of Justice in the world -- or historians who credit humans with such single-handed achievements -- risk falling into that irrelevant portion of law that Justinian calls il troppo e'l vano, and which he labored to excise.

A question for any reader is to consider what part of a story she/he might be missing. A good deal of commentary on the Commedia takes the canto as its basic unit. Each canto is read, annotated and commented upon, then one moves on.

Horizontal view across all three canticles

Some readers have begun to read the poem in a more dynamic mode. Hollander, for example, notes that the theme of Justice appears across all three canticles, precisely in canto 6 of each. Calling this a "horizontal" reading, he and others have illuminated how, as we progress from Ciacco to Sordello to Justinian, there's a recurrent concern with Justice, played out at different scales:

Inferno 6:  Ciacco -- city -- Florence
Purgatorio 6: Sordello -- nation -- Italy
Paradiso 6: Justinian -- empire -- Troy-Rome-Holy Roman Empire

The differences between Francesca, La Pia, and Piccarda in their respective cantos are similarly meaningful. Each canticle benefits from comparison with the others, and the sense of an exponential scaling up, from intimate local concerns (Ciacco's entire life revolves around his stomach) to a perspective that looks across all known time and space, contributes to the sweep of the Commedia as a whole.

So the reader will listen, compare, contemplate the echoes and differences across the canticles and find plenty to think about.

Dynamic development within groups of cantos

There's yet another way of approaching the poem to consider, one that breaks the cantos' frames to explore the movement between them in search of the structuring logic of larger "plot" components. As argued in several earlier posts here, the initial movement of the poem explores matters of knowing, illusion, and natural grounds for belief. it then moves to the nature of the will, which leads to an inquiry into the nature of vows.

Standing back to look at this development on a more macro level, we can describe a movement from interiority -- the self grappling with questions of what it can know and will -- to volitional acts -- nuns' vows as an example of all vows, intentions, promises -- which leads to a concern with external action, rule, judgment, and the deployment of power over the peoples of the world.

Formally the poem goes from early dialogue between Dante and Beatrice to the more drama-like encounter with Piccarda and Costanza, and Beatrice's clarification of doubts arising from their words. Then, passing from the fickle moon to self-concealing Mercury, we find no dialogue, but a compressed vision of history spoken by one speaker.

This development takes the form of the extraordinary leap from the cloistered consciousness of the nuns to the emperor who imposed reason upon the imperial code of laws. Dante has given us two extremes -- between them is the space given to human intellect and will to think, decide, and act.

So at least for now, given our reading of Paradiso 1-6, I offer a tentative working hypothesis that Dante opens the third canticle with a procession of themes that move from epistemology to praxis, contemplation to action, interior reflection to the imposition of rule -- and the rule of rules -- upon the world. The logic of the development is quite clear; I'd argue that it flows with an internal necessity. In a later post, I'll try to talk about why this is the case.

As this opening movement has unfolded we have seen the will as fire, the intellect as wild beast (fera in lustra). Although we are in Paradiso, beyond the earthly limits of time and space, what is under examination is the same human nature we find right here, right now, every breathing moment.

Nothing as of yet in the opening development of this canticle depends upon Revelation, divine grace, or power from a source beyond the human. Beatrice might find her truth in the Deity, but what she has taught us so far helps us understand ourselves, and see the lengthening shadow of mankind moving through time, on Earth.

Justinian: Mosaic at Ravenna

Rape: The predatory eagle of history

When one wants to indicate that something is right, fair, or fitting in modern Italian, one often uses the word giusto. If someone says something that is in accord with one's own views, you might say it with the same intonation as we would say "right" -- giusto!

Paradiso 6 is entirely the speech of Justinian,

Cesare fui e son Iustinïano

and, while it might not seem so at first glance, it is entirely concerned with the nature of justice.

It might not seem so because in some ways, it is a very one-sided canto. Justinian does all the talking, He compresses the history of Rome from the time of the Trojan War to the reign of Charlemagne into 62 lines, describing a zig-zag course of violence, rape and conquest that hardly intimates the presence or evolution of justice -- human or divine.

And he describes that history not as a chronicle of larger than life human actors whose intentions and actions dictate the course of events, but rather from the perspective of the Roman segno, the eagle that was the insignia of the legions of Rome. Segno of course can mean battle standard, but its root sense is "sign." From Justinian's perch on Mercury, viewing the eagle's course 745 years after his own death, what stands out from Roman world dominion is an alignment by virtue of which all the wars, conquests, rapes and subjugation enacted under the that sign made possible the justified, violent death of Jesus and the justified, violent destruction of the capital of Scripture.

Try telling this story to a disinterested bystander and see if she or he says "giusto!".  Nothing about this odd and seemingly squint-eyed view of the historic record seems just. If we don't find this asymmetry puzzling, we might be missing the neck-snapping vision of Justice at work here.

As Justinian tells his tale, beginning with the death of Pallas and marking key moments by citing predatory rapes (the Sabine women, Lucretia), the eagle emerges as the emblematic figure that winds through 1600 years of Roman power. Justinian calls it the uccel di Dio, the bird of God. If we regard its sordid history, the god in question seems more like Zeus, who carried off Ganymede --

- or the eagle said to be crafted by Hephaistos, at the bidding of his father, to devour Prometheus's liver:

When Julius Caesar is seen briefly in Inferno 4, he is described as having occhi grifagni -- a raptor's eyes. The eagle that subjugated the known world to the Imperium Romanum seems closer in spirit to Caesar than to the Holy Spirit.

The more we look at the astonishing abbreviation of Roman history in canto 6, the harder it is to justify any more beneficent view of the eagle or its accomplishments. Yet the one telling the tale is the emperor who devoted his reign to removing the troppo e'l vano from the body of Roman law, a vast undertaking that imposed order upon that corpus that became the template for human justice after the fall of Rome. If anyone understood something about justice, it's Justinian. It just doesn't fit.

If we wrestle with this a bit, there is one thing we can say about Justinian: he does justice to the complexity of justice in human history. Nothing is minimized or glossed over. If he'd given us a tale of noble rulers who never told a lie, whose greatness is a monument to themselves, in whose giant shadows we stand, or roost, like tourists, or pigeons, we'd sense the lie and likely turn away. Even Augustus, credited by all historians with achieving the Pax Romana, is not named -- he's simply the baiulo -- a porter bearing the segno.*

Dante's Justinian puts no lipstick on the pig; his history is a tale of sound and fury, error and compulsion, violence, vendetta and vengeance, following blindly in the wake of the eagle. It is the sign that moves history along -- those who follow it have no idea of the purpose, the sacred murder, toward which it moves.

Paradiso 7 will return to this enigma -- because Dante, like us, has doubt. The tale of Roman history provokes doubt just as did Beatrice's tale of the vows of Piccarda and Costanza in canto 5. As the pilgrim noted there, doubt, uncertainty, and the perception of things that do not fit spur the intellect to further understanding.

Paradiso 6 doesn't rest here - it tells the tale of Romeo, a figure that clearly has allegorical dimensions, pointing, at least, to the historical reality of Dante Alighieri. In this tale of a good and just man who is treated as if he were the opposite, a man who served his master well only to be rewarded with exile and penury, we may sense the heartbreak of the poet. Perhaps we should sense as well the heartbreak of another. One who made a very fine creature, called it Adam, to whom he gave all his creation. And watched as Adam fell into the insane turbulence of human history.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. 

       -- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, IX.

*The root, bājŭlus, does not convey dignity, and extends to mean "day laborer." Also, interestingly:

A. A bearer at a funeral, Amm. 14, 7, 17; Sid. Ep. 3, 12; Aug. Ep. 19 ad Hier. 2; cf.: “vespillones dicti sunt bajuli,” Fulg. Expos. Serm. p. 558. —
B. A letter-carrier, Hier. Ep. 6 ad Julian. 1; Cod. Th. 2, 27, 1, § 2; cf.: “boni nuntii,” Vulg. 2 Reg. 18, 22.