Homage from Longfellow

A sonnet on the Purgatorio:

With snow-white veil and garments as of flame,

She stands before thee, who so long ago

Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe

From which thy song and all its splendors came;

And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,

The ice about thy heart melts as the snow

On mountain heights, and in swift overflow

Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.

Thou makest full confession; and a gleam,

As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,

Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;

Lethe and Eunoë -- the remembered dream

And the forgotten sorrow -- bring at last

That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.

One of six sonnets about The Comedy composed by H.W. Longfellow -- he was translating the entire poem at the time.

Numerical Concinnity

Shaw shares a link to this interesting look at number in the Comedy:

The Divine Comedy and Kabala
Dante Alighieri
1265 - 1321

About reading

A writer and a teacher of literature who happens to be a friend offered some thoughts about reading -- how it might be taught through the event of reading in the classroom:

Am I interested, excited, moved by what I have read, enough to think it is important for my students to understand it?

Really? Sincerely?

Can I locate the source of my excitement, of what is important, of what has meaning in what I and these students just read?

Can I explain it to my students so that they understand something of what it means, of why it is important, why it moves me?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, do not teach.

If the answer to all of these is yes, here is how you teach your students to read:

You select for discussion a passage or a text that you care about, that you see as important, and you talk about it truthfully, candidly, thoughtfully, and you show them how you got what you got out of it. If they follow you, they will get more out of it than you gave them, because they will learn from and make use of your example of how to read. Oh, and by the way that means you have to know your way around the text.

You ask open-ended questions, none of that "Socratic Dialogue" bullshit.

You encourage students to try to form their own questions about what they read -- to define their own problems n their own words. You don't tell them this necessarily, but defining the problem you are having with a text can solve about 80 percent of it. And then you answer their questions.

You don't judge their words. You respond to them with thoughtfulnes, care, and respect, establishing a lucid relationship between their question and the text. Because when they tell you they don't understand, that is the frontier of the humanitiies.

If you make this conversation interesting and rich, if you give a sense that the material has untapped riches and **that they have as much of a right to get at in their way as anybody else**, they will learn to read.

Give them permission to skim over the hard parts if they must, and urge them to make note of anything interesting -- page number, phrase, written out passage, comment on it, just so they can find it if they need to talk about it or write about it. In discussion, keep referring the conversation back to the text: as in "Well, let's see again what XXX actually says." Because it's good to remember that the actual text is different from your idea of it at any given moment.

Honestly I do not think it is necessary to do more. If you don't believe you can teach the material on the merits of its inherent interest you just should find something you can care about or get out of teaching.

Everything else just gets people tangled up in all the apparatus and then they feel even more cut off from the author and his/her material. All you are doing is giving it to them as a gift, not even as a gift, as something they already own.

Reading is experience, it is an activity like thinking; it isn't a method. There is no system for getting it, just reading one thing after another.

Purgatorio 31-33: Masque and Mystery

As we find ourselves in the dark wood of the final cantos of Purgatorio, several have related the triumphal procession, the sacred army, the griffin and the dumbshow of canto 32 to masques and mystery plays.

In an email, Mussy offers the thought that these forms of "entertainment" are

important for a study of Dante because embedded in this masque are many of the ideas Dante has been working toward not to be dismissed as silly childlike entertainment to convey surface churchy notions, though in a way it does that too. He counted on the masque form as a familiar experience of his time I believe.

We should pause to consider why, upon the culmination of the long journey ending in the Earthly Paradise and the "unmediated" vision of the face of Beatrice, Dante chooses to present these final cantos in a mode reminiscent of animal fable and other popular forms.

Mussy also offers this citation:

miracle play or mystery play,form of medieval drama that came from dramatization of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. It developed from the 10th to the 16th cent., reaching its height in the 15th cent. The simple lyric character of the early texts, as shown in the Quem Quœritis, was enlarged by the addition of dialogue and dramatic action. Eventually the performance was moved to the churchyard and the marketplace. Rendered in Latin, the play was preceded by a prologue or by a herald who gave a synopsis and was closed by a herald's salute. When a papal edict in 1210 forbade the clergy to act on a public stage, supervision and control of presenting the plays passed into the hands of the town guilds, and various changes ensued. The vernacular language replaced Latin, and scenes were inserted that were not from the Bible. The acting became more dramatic as characterization and detail became more important. Based on the Scriptures from the creation to the Second Coming and on the lives of the saints, the plays were arranged into cycles and were given on church festival days, particularly the feast of Corpus Christi, lasting from sunrise to sunset. Each guild was responsible for the production of a different episode. With simple costumes and props, guild members, who were paid actors, performed on stages equipped with wheels (see pageant); each scene was given at one public square and drawn on to its next performance at another, while a different stage succeeded it. Named after the towns in which they were performed, the principal English cycles are the York Plays (1430–40), the longest, containing 48 plays; the Towneley or Wakefield Plays (c.1450, in Yorkshire); the Coventry Plays (1468); and the Chester Plays (1475–1500). The Passion play is the chief modern example of the miracle play. The French mystère distinguished those plays containing biblical stories from those about the lives of the saints. The auto, the medieval religious drama in Spain, was acted concurrently with the secular drama throughout the Golden Age and into the 18th cent. Calderón was the greatest composer of the auto sacramental, which dealt with the mystery of the Mass in allegory. In Italy the laudi were basically choral in form and so distinguished from the later sacre rappresentazioni, which became lavish artistic productions comparable to the French mystère.

See K. Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (2 vol., 1933); and anthologies ed. by A. W. Pollard (8th ed. 1927) and V. F. Hopper and G. B. Lahey (1962).

Purgatorio 29-31

John D. Sinclair notes an underlying relation within Purgatorio 29 - 31:

The twenty-ninth canto is occupied with revelation; . . . it is all public and impersonal. The next two cantos are the most intimately personal in the Divine Comedy. The pageant . . . is as if forgotten during the interview between Beatrice and Dante. Yet the thirtieth and thirty-first cantos are not only relevant but essential to the matter of the twenty-ninth. Revelation is not revelation unless it reveals a man to himself . . ..

One might quibble with some of Sinclair's terms, but his general point seems worth bearing in mind: the divine pageant, Scripture, enters the sacred wood, bringing light, seeming to reenact, in its Veni, sponsa de Libano and Benedictus qui venit, three moments of Biblical history: the prophetic promises of the Old Testament, the entrance of Christ in Jerusalem, and the Second Coming. For men who read the Word in the dark wood of the world, these are separate moments turning around the central fact of the junction of man and God, the marriage of Heaven and Earth. But from the perspective Beatrice brings sub specie aeternitate -- a point that underlies Augustine's confession of time, of history, and of Scripture -- these three epochs of human history, past, present and future -- are one indivisible moment.

For Dante the individual, Beatrice played a role not unlike that of Christ: she appears to him in the flesh, igniting an ardent love and devotion; she dies - the central fact that Dante misread, mistaking her change of form for the termination of her being; she returns, shows him his error, and the roots of his error in his soul, and in that recognition he begins his journey across Lethe to see the face of Beatrice, in whose eyes can be seen the reflected image of the Gryphon.


How far have we come from the union of Ouranos and Gaia in Hesiod's Theogony?

Some online resources for the Spring♠

Not an exhaustive list, but some links to some of the readings we are considering for the Spring. Not all of these are worthwhile translations.

Ethics: Philosophers, Poets, Prophets

Epictetus

• Enchiridion
• Not on the list, but possibly of interest to supplement: Discourses

Epicurus -

• Principal doctrines
• Letter to Menoeceus

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Diogenes of Sinope

Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics – wikipedia

Nicomachean Ethics – text 350 BC

Plato -

• Apology
• Republic – Jowett Translation

Plutarch - Lives of the Greeks and Romans – Dryden translation

Horace - Select Satires

Juvenal -Satires 1, 2, 3 ; Satire 3 Bilingual

Pentimento

A♦t the beginning of Purg. 29, Matilda sang the psalm

Beati quorum tecta sunt peccata!

Blessed are those whose sins are covered.

Purg. 30-31 are clearly cantos of repentence, which in Italian is pentimento.

Readers of Lillian Hellman know that pentimento acquired another meaning, much later on:

pen·ti·men·to

Pronunciation:

\ˌpen-tə-ˈmen-(ˌ)tō\

Function:

noun

Inflected Form(s):

plural pen·ti·men·ti \-(ˌ)tē\

Etymology:

Italian, literally, repentance, correction, from pentire to repent, from Latin paenitēre — more at penitent

Date:

1853

: a reappearance in a painting of a design which has been painted over

More at the Britannica: pentimento

Was Shakespeare a Catholic?

At least one Roman Catholic scholar thinks so:

The Rev. David Beauregard, a Roman Catholic priest who teaches Shakespeare at the seminary of St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine in the Back Bay, argues in his new book, "Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays" (University of Delaware Press), that Shakespeare was Catholic.

Among the evidence:

He'll remind you that in "Hamlet," the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father tells his son that he is in purgatory, a Catholic concept.

Purg. 30: The admiral

"Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada,
non pianger anco, non piangere ancora;
ché pianger ti conven per altra spada".

Quasi ammiraglio che in poppa e in prora
viene a veder la gente che ministra
per li altri legni, e a ben far l'incora;

in su la sponda del carro sinistra,
quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio,
che di necessità qui si registra,

in su la sponda del carro sinistra,
quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio,
che di necessità qui si registra,

vidi la donna che pria m'appario
velata sotto l'angelica festa,
drizzar li occhi ver' me di qua dal rio.

Quasi ammiraglio… Singleton finds strain in the simile – the oddness of likening a beloved woman, not seen since her death ten years earlier, to a busy, officious admiral pacing the deck of his ship.

"Dante, though Virgil's leaving you, do not
yet weep, do not weep yet; you'll need your tears
for what another sword must yet inflict."

Just like an admiral who goes to stern
and prow to see the officers who guide
the other ships, encouraging their tasks; 60

so, on the left side of the chariot
(I'd turned around when I had heard my name-
which, of necessity, I transcribe here),

I saw the lady who had first appeared
to me beneath the veils of the angelic
flowers look at me across the stream.

The moment Beatrice finally speaks to Dante would, in another sort of poem, be a rich, romantic, dreamlike moment -- but not here. Likening Beatrice to an admiral derails romance, and summons up an entirely different order -- a mariner, a leader, charged with responsibility for untold numbers of men and ships -- the fleet entrusted to his care.

What does this striking simile do in this context, and why might it, once one gets past the oddly jarring daring of the analogy, be appropriate and necessary at this moment of the Purgatorio?

More on the Hollander Paradiso

A recent New York Times review of the Hollander version of the Paradiso can be found here. A snippet:

From that time on my power of sight exceeded
that of speech, which fails at such a vision,
as memory fails at such abundance.
Just as the dreamer, after he awakens,
still stirred by feelings that the dream evoked,
cannot bring the rest of it to mind,
such am I, my vision almost faded from my mind,
while in my heart there still endures
the sweetness that was born of it.
Thus the sun unseals an imprint in the snow.
Thus the Sibyl’s oracles, on weightless leaves,
lifted by the wind, were swept away.

Here, remarkably, Dante offers three similes in a row: he can express the inexpressible only by descending repeatedly into the physical world — the world where dreamers awaken, where snow melts in sunlight, where the Sibyl’s prophecies are scattered by wind.

Purg. 30: Gryphon

Here be more Griffins. And more about them here.

Purg. 30:1-12 Constellation

Quando il settentrïon del primo cielo,
che né occaso mai seppe né orto
né d'altra nebbia che di colpa velo,

e che faceva lì ciascuno accorto
di suo dover, come 'l più basso face
qual temon gira per venire a porto,

fermo s'affisse: la gente verace,
venuta prima tra 'l grifone ed esso,
al carro volse sé come a sua pace;

e un di loro, quasi da ciel messo,
'Veni, sponsa, de Libano' cantando
gridò tre volte, e tutti li altri appresso.

Dante begins with the settentrïon - the Little Dipper of the Northern sky, in which is found the North Star. For a relatively contemporary account of the heavens by a medieval astronomer, have a look at the Sphere of Sacrobosco:

It is to be noted that the pole which always is visible to us is called "septentrional," "arctic," or "boreal." "Septentrional" is from septentrio, that is, from Ursa Minor, which is derived from septem and trion, meaning "ox," because the seven stars in Ursa move slowly, since they are near the pole. Or those seven stars are called septentriones as if septem teriones, because they tread the parts about the pole.

The seven stars of the little dipper were also associated with the Hesperides, the daughters of Atlas who guarded the golden apples of Hera on a paradisal island at the western edge of the world. The apples were said to have been given to Hera as a wedding present by Gaia when the goddess accepted Zeus's hand in marriage.