Dreams of Ulysses

 By happenstance Jutta heard this piece on the radio while reading up on Inferno 26, the canto of Ulysses. It's a piece for viola by John Woolrich entitled Ulysses Awakes, based upon an aria from Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, performed by Maxim Rysanov.

With our reading and this piece, we have an Homeric figure that has been transformed by Dante, set to music by Monteverdi, and beautifully recomposed by a contemporary British composer. 

The motion of love: Francesca II

It's tempting to read the Inferno with a sort of "I told you so" persona. The structure lends itself, since the damned have a finality to their tales that has the imprimatur of divine judgement. And we have a pretty good indication, by virtue of location and contrapasso, what the Deity thought of each category of sin.

Dante the pilgrim is not quite so clear, however. In canto 5, his first encounter with the lost, he weeps, he pities, he faints. He is confused (smarrito). Are we? We readers might not wish to ignore the complications inherent in this canto, given its treatment of reading.

The pilgrim seems very troubled at the vision of the great literary (and one historical) lovers, and even more so after encountering Francesca. It's one thing to feel confusion about love in general, seeing Paris, Helen, and Cleopatra driven down the wind; it's another thing to encounter a woman who quotes your love poetry to you in support of her allegation that Love led to her death and damnation.

"Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,
     prese costui de la bella persona
     che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
     mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
     Caina attende chi a vita ci spense."

"Love, which quickly kindles in noble hearts,        100
     Seized him for that fair body which from me
     Was torn—what grief the manner still imparts!
Love, which makes each loved one pay love’s fee,
     So seized me with the beauty of my friend
     That yet it does not leave me, as you see.
Love led us both to one death in the end.
     Caïna waits for him who quenched our lives above.”*

Francesca's address is remarkable not only because it cites the tenets of Courtly Love and echoes the ancient sense of Eros as the god whose power even other gods cannot control. It also echoes Dante's own imagination of Love from Vita Nova, making it personal as well as universal:

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa
Love and the gentle heart are one thing

Francesca mostly sounds like the stilnovisti - the poets whose sweet new style garnered fame and literary honors for Guido Guinizelli, whom Dante will meet in Purgatorio 26, and Dante himself, among others. She sounds like them because she's not only nearly quoting them verbatim, she is also pontificating. She sounds like an expert, one who knows what Love is.

Where does that knowledge come from? It would either be from experience, or from books. Francesca, like Mme Bovary, may have read about love; what did she understand?

Collaborative Commentary: Cyropaideia

This is entirely unrelated to Dante, but quite related to our mode of reading him. The first online collaborative commentary on a classical text is here, and it's quite wonderful.

Here's a link to the Cyropaideia - be sure to explore "Content" and "Comments" - this is a fine effort to read with others - not unlike Classics in Sarasota!"

The motion of love: Francesca I

The first damned soul Dante meets in hell is a woman so alluring that to this day, her love affair and its violent end command a fan base larger than many soap operas.

What does it mean that before we come face to face with souls whose evil cannot be denied, we along with the pilgrim first encounter an attractive woman whose affecting tale of love and death turns upon an act of reading?

What makes Francesca both so memorable and so enchanting?

Before he meets her, the pilgrim is already in some confusion:

Poscia ch'io ebbi il mio dottore udito
     Nomar le donne antiche e' cavalieri,
     Pieta me giunse, and fui quasi smarrito.

No sooner had I heard my teacher name
    the ancient ladies and the knights, than pity
    seized me, and I was like a man astray. 

It should be worth asking why he's "smarrito" - the same word the poet uses in the poem's first tercet:

Che la diritta via era smarrita 

because the direct path was lost.

This is the first of two, or perhaps three, moments of strong confusion the pilgrim experiences in this same canto. Oddly though, the canto's readers never seem confused. Indeed of all the cantos of the Inferno, it's this one that seems to often draw out a certain penchant for scolding. If only those two hadn't been reading per diletto (for pleasure)! They should have chosen a more uplifting book! Et cetera.

Gentle sighs, pallor, all the signs of affection, desire, and love, are evoked in a narrative that leads not simply to death of the body, but far worse, to the "second death" of the soul. The poet Dante had written in Vita Nova,

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa
Love and the gentle heart are the same thing.

Dante is moved to pity as he sees vast crowds, the flotsam and jetsam of Love, buffeted up, down, every which way without pause. How could this nourishing delight, this civilizing, gentle Love, bring violence to lovers and conduct them to hell? This puzzling contradiction gives him pause; he is smarrito.

The pilgrim then calls to Francesca and Paolo and asks them ever so politely to speak with him, in the name of the love that leads them. Or rather, that's what Virgil tells him to do. Virgil says,

          e tu allor li priega
per quello amor che i mena . . . 

and then you may appeal to them
by that love which impels them . . .

What the pilgrim actually says is:

                      O animae affanate, 

Venite a noi parlar, s'altri nol niega.

                     “O battered souls,
If One does not forbid it, speak with us.”*

Let's assume the poet is precise here. He doesn't beg them to come by invoking Amor, the Love that Francesca is about to blame for all her woe. He alludes to an unnamed One (altri can also be "other" or "another") who is only conspicuous by not being present: s'altri nol niega means "if another doesn't forbid it." The Love that controls this wind, that moves the Sun and other stars, here allows the lovers to pause and speak, simply by not impeding them from doing so. So we have a difference here that doesn't seem trivial: the difference between a Love that overwhelms with irresistible force, and a Love that, by absenting itself from controlling things, allows the souls the freedom to choose their own course of action.

Paolo and Francesco choose to come to speak with Dante. There's so much to talk about that we'll pass over the simile of the flight of the doves, only pausing to note its beauty, and that their destination is their nido, their nest.

This seems a good place to pause.

*Allen Mandelbaum's translation

The figure of reading in the Inferno

It would be a sign of something about our attention to close reading if we did not at least acknowledge how the Inferno early on foregrounds the act of reading.

There is, of course, the gate of hell in Canto 3: a gaping mouth whose inscription we meet and read precisely as Dante and Virgil do. The gate states that it is the first text, marking the moment that mutability, temporality and death entered Creation:

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
     Se non etterne, ed io etterna duro.

A further irony (also noted here) is built into this threshold for those condemned to cross it: For them, time and change, development and movement toward salvation, now come to an end -- the damned are fixed, frozen for all time in the contrapassi of their perdition. The gate is a grave marker; for lost souls, it's the terminus ad quem of the temporal order of which it also was the initial instance, thanks to the villainy of the original lost soul.

Reading is also implicit in the structure of the Inferno from the beginning.

Palace of Minos

Here's Minos in book 6 of the Aeneid:

Nor far from these,
The throng of dead by unjust judgment slain.
Not without judge or law these realms abide:
Wise Minos there the urn of justice moves,
And holds assembly of the silent shades,
Hearing the stories of their lives and deeds.

hos iuxta falso damnati crimine mortis. 430
Nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes:
quaesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentum
conciliumque vocat vitasque et crimina discit.

Here's Minos in canto 5 of the Inferno:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
Examines the offenders that come in,
Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
Approaching him, confesses all its past;
And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,
Then wraps his tail around himself to show
How many circles down he wants it cast.

Minos by Dore

When Dante the pilgrim encounters Virgil in canto 1, he meets a classical author whom he has read. That Virgil comes to him at all is an interesting result of Dante's having friends, including Beatrice, in high places. But to make the guide to the Christian afterlife a Roman pagan poet -- one whose text is both a model of classical epic and a work whose many pagan errors undergo heavy editorial correction in the Commedia -- is to construct a narrative that both is about reading Classical works and about critical discernment of their virtues and their errors.

In the Commedia, Virgil is both the literal Roman poet of history and literature, and the figure of Dante's reading of that poet's works. True to the archaic notion of allegory -- alienum eloquium -- the Roman poet is his literal text even as that text undergoes revision by something alien to it: a reading rooted in the authority of the Scriptural Word has caused that text to bear another, allegorical dimension.

Dante exhibits admiration for Virgil even as the Roman poet's text is radically transformed by Dante's own text, as the two Minoses make clear. The commanding power of ancient classical texts -- their auctoritas -- is essential to Christian education for Dante: it is the peak of human attainment sans Revelation. But Virgil and all classical works are also errant texts, which need a third eye, as it were, to gloss their purported truth with the truth revealed in Scripture.

From the beginning, then, Dante's dark wood is even more obscure than it seemed. The selva oscura of canto 1 returns in Canto 4 as the selva . . .di spiriti spessi -- a wood thick with the noble spirits of Limbo, including Virgil. These spirits are wise and useful, yet remain a selva in which one can lose oneself.

Dante makes the act of reading both explicitly and implicitly central to his poem. This is dramatized even more in Canto 5, where reading a romance leads lovers astray. Reading has consequences. We'll look at Francesca's scene in another post.

Reading Biagio's Troy

As we think about Dante as harbinger of a return to or rebirth of Classical education, consider that one hundred years later, painters like the Florentine artist featured here were depicting scenes from the Iliad in ways that reflect certain medieval characteristics.

Writer Anna Judson notes a few wonderful aspects of these works by Biagio d'Antonio (her post is part of a fun series of Museum Favorites). First, they offer contemporaneity - the dress, the style of armor, the architecture, all are 15th century Italy.

Then, Judson notes that far from being realistic representations of Troy, Biago has selected numerous famous buildings and monuments found in several cities in Italy, including the Tower of Pisa, and grouped them to compose "Troy":

The Death of Hektor

Similarly the painter depicts a sequence of events, rather than a single moment. For example, says Judson:

The Wooden Horse panel similarly depicts not just the Trojans bringing in the horse, but also the Greek army’s attack, and the kindling of the fire that will burn the city – but here the events are shown not sequentially but simultaneously, interwoven with each other, so that cause and effect, the Trojans’ celebration and destruction, become inseparable.

While this insouciance with respect to place and time might violate our sense of "realism,"  it should remind us that, as Judson says, these works fall outside the realm of strict visual mimesis. They are meant to be read. Bringing the tale of Troy into the world of his own day, offering a succession of scenes that we need to compose in order to understand the image - these are useful reminders that a depiction of Troy is, first of all, a depiction of a text by Homer, and next, is itself a text requiring us to attend to the painting as a grouping of signs that have permission to diverge substantially from Homer. It's our task to order them that they might yield a richer sense.

We will want to remember this as we look at Dante's classical figures and how he employs the image of reading.

The imagination of lust in Inferno 5

 
Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,
    prese costui de la bella persona
    che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
    mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
    che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
    Caina attende chi a vita ci spense».
    Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

Love, which quickly kindles in noble hearts,        100
    Seized him for that fair body which from me
    Was torn—what grief the manner still imparts!
Love, which makes each loved one pay love’s fee,
    So seized me with the beauty of my friend
    That yet it does not leave me, as you see.
Love led us both to one death in the end.
    Caïna waits for him who quenched our lives above.”
    Thus did these words from them to us descend.*

In Inferno 5, Francesca speaks of Amor as if ironclad rules - like those of courtly love - applied at all times. That is, Amor is not merely a human experience, but it has the force of law, of science, of a system. Her fate is the inevitable result of an inescapable logic before which one -- especially one of the refined sort -- helpless.


The crowds of lovers Dante sees as he enters the circle of Lust are compared to starlings driven by a hurricane:

That hellish tempest roars incessantly;
    It grasps and draws the spirits in its train,
    Spinning and thrashing souls in agony.

As these victims of Love are carried past the ruina - the place where the structure of Limbo was broken by the advent of Christ, they curse:

Each time that they whirl past the ruined terrain,
    Loud shrieks and moans and lamentations spill
    From them—it’s there they curse God’s might in vain.

Quando giungon davanti a la ruina,
    quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento;
    bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.

Now it's one thing to be "carried away" by an overpowering force; it's another to choose, at a certain moment, to curse divine power. Yes, it's a repetitive process - they utter their imprecations every time they pass the ruina - but to curse requires an act of speech, a decision, a judgment and act of will, quite unlike what it takes for a human body to be propelled by cyclonic winds.

What's more, they are cursing the evidence of a power greater than the forces of nature - a power that liberated certain souls from nature and endless desire, in fact from death. These lovers are cursing the traces of a Love strong enough to break the ultimate rule, the final law, a Love that might have saved them had they not bowed to an ideology that defines mortals as the slaves and playthings of inescapable Love.

One can easily multiply examples of this, irony, this comical disjunction. Essentially the ideology of inescapable Love relies on a model of mechanics. All is determined by measurable forces that cause predictable effects. The very first lines of the canto summon a mathematical relation:

From the first circle I thus went below
    Into the second, which girds a smaller round
   And so much greater grief that stings to woe.

This might well be the most uninspired opening of any canto in the poem - so obviously so that it's best to assume it was deliberate. Numbering, inverse proportionality, going from up to down, it's a dull way to introduce the realm of love and lust. It's mechanical, and the mechanicality gets cruder right away as we encounter the judge:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
    Examines the offenders that come in,
    Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
    Approaching him, confesses all its past;
    And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,          10
    Then wraps his tail around himself to show
    How many circles down he wants it cast.

As a parody of confession, the scene is rich enough - instead of leading to absolution, the Confessor listens, gets an interesting sort of erection, which in turn produces a number indicating where the soul is to be thrown.

Dante and Virgil have just left some of the greatest judges and minds of all time - supple intellects who would have listened, judged with nuance, and invoked insightful reason in the service of justice. But no such luck after Limbo: every soul beyond this point - including Francesca - got treated to the same robotic reflex, the same absence of meditation, the same catapult.

Canto 5 is rich in exempla of a sort of Hobbesian world in which desire simply rules. There is no stopping it, as the souls there know - because for them, desire demands instant capitulation. There is no suspension of cause and effect that would allow understanding, will, and resolve to enter in.

The imagination of Lust will be turned on its head on the Mount of Purgatory -- no time to get into that here. But it's worth a quick look. Compare the lovers buffeted by the whirlwind of Inferno 5 with the newborn soul described in Purgatorio 25 -- the Terrace, not by chance, of the Lustful who are regaining their freedom.

We find a circling there, but one not driven by any natural force outside itself. Statius describes for Dante the new soul, which has just been breathed joyously into life:

                      . . . un alma sola,
che vive e sente e se in se rigira.            74-75

                                 . . . a single soul
that lives and feels and itself revolves upon itself.

However one ultimately chooses to see this model of the psyche, it is not going to be found in Hobbes. Comedy in Dante derives in part from the ironies it finds and probes within the fallen world. As the voyage progresses, it springs more from the delights that come with leaving that world behind.

*All tranlations from Inferno are from an unpublished version by Peter D'Epiro. Purgatorio is from John D. Sinclair's prose edition.

Punishing irony: Virgil's witness in Inferno 4

In Canto 4 of the Inferno, Dante turns to Virgil and asks him a veiled (coperto) question:

“Now tell me, master, tell me this alone,”
I said to him, wishing to be assured
Of that faith by which all doubt is overthrown,
“Have any gone from here and then secured
Salvation, by their own or Another’s fee?”*

Virgil replies:

And he, who understood my covert word,
Said, “This condition was still new to me
When I beheld a Mighty One appear,
Who was crowned with a sign of victory.
He took our first begetter’s shade from here,
With Abel, Noah, and Moses, who did show
The laws to man and how to hold them dear;
King David and Abraham of long ago;
Israel with his father and his seed,
And Rachel, for whose sake he labored so;
And many more, and made them blest indeed.
And I would have you know I can attest
That, before these, no human souls were freed.”*

This exchange is of interest for several reasons. For one, it's the witness of a lost soul to the harrowing of hell and liberation of a select few. Virgil, who had died about 50 years earlier than this event, attests first-hand to the act of a "Mighty One."

ci vidi venire un possente

The event became one of the articles of the Christian creed, but Virgil recounts it  in the words of an honorable Roman. Un possente is a generic term for anyone of power, and, while accurate as far as it goes, it is blank with regard to the unique identity of the Mighty One: the martyred Son of the God of Abraham, fresh from his trial and crucifixion.

Virgil speaks of what he sees. His natural light of human reason can and does report and support the faith Dante and all Christians practice, flowing from Scripture. What Virgil "sees" is veiled to him - the facts are reported, but their full and unique implications are not.

What we as readers find here is something I think Dante the poet does throughout his Comedìa-- a poetic enactment of the profound discontinuity between the light of reason, art and science on one hand, and revelation via the Book, on the other.

In a sense, what the moment does is reproduce Dante's reading of Virgil. In the moment that Virgil voices and demonstrates his authority as teacher, guide, prophet, poet and witness, we find a blindness, a falling short -- the irony of an inescapable ignorance. It is a punishing irony, consigning him to hopeless finality in a half-lit suspense of endless desire, and more ironic because in its helplessness (vis a vis Virgil), it helps Dante overcome doubt.

Dante dramatizes the reality that obtains in a world where human genius, nobility of spirit and incorrigible honor just are not enough. For Virgil and the rest of those in Limbo, what the mind and sense and soul can see, and what the imagination or inspiration can intimate, is merely the outward appearance of a unique event whose full import -- the breaking not of rocks alone, but of the rule of death -- remains "coperto." Another word for that might be "illegible."

We'll want to be on the lookout for further examples of this mode of poetic acting out in the Comedìa. With Revelation comes a shattering literacy.

*From an unpublished translation of the Inferno by Peter D'Epiro.

Invocations Infernal and Purgatorial

Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta of Yale speaks of reading the Comedia "horizontally," that is, with attention to the interaction between similar moments across the three canticles.

If we look for example at the invocations that the poet employs in the three poems, suggestive differences among them can be noted. Each invocation addresses a distinct source of inspiration, from which other potentially significant differences flow in turn. The poem is telling us something about how it is to be read. The invocations of the three canticles can be found here.

The shortest invocation, in the Inferno, addresses the Muses as alto ingenio - this can mean high genius, but ingenium was an ancient Latin term for one's own innate character or nature. From there it extended to the idea of natural capacity, talent, or genius, evolving into a rich and complex sense (see, for example, here and here.)

Dante moves quickly to address mente -- a faculty that scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi -- wrote that which I saw -- hence a form of memory, of notation, faithful to the pilgrim's experience. The poetry of Inferno will be faithful to what the pilgrim saw and heard -- poetry in the mode of representation, mimesis, but thanks to alto ingenio, one that will show its nobilitate.

By contrast, the invocation of Purgatorio invokes the sante Muse, who are asked to let poetry, which is dead, rise again (risurga). This already is more than natural. What's on offer here is not merely recording, but transformative action:

And let here Calliope rise up for a while

and accompany my song with that strain

which smote the ears of the wretched magpies

so that they despaired of pardon.

Calliope, the Muse of Epic, is called upon in particular to rise up alquanto -- perhaps not just for a while, but to an extent, somewhat. Calliope is needed to smite the daughters of Pierus, a "crowd of foolish sisters" who, according to Ovid, were turned to magpies after inanely challenging and losing a competition with the Muses. To accomplish this, it seems, Calliope needs not rise to the highest level of style. That will be sought and needed in Paradiso.

The tale of the battle of songs, taken from Metamorphoses 5, stages the competition, and the contrast between the two performances couldn't be more marked. Calliope, singing of the Rape of Persephone, wins. The judges were the nymphs of Helicon; Athena heard the whole story of how the daughters of Pierus were turned into mimicking magpies.

The invocation of Purgatorio enlists the Muses in a struggle. This is poetry with an active purpose in this world, and it means business. Actually, it means unfinished business, as Purgatorio takes place in time, in the realm of human desire, engagement, choice. Unlike Inferno, things on this mountain are not settled by any means, nor are they fixed in stone. All is in motion. The Purgatorio is quite simply a poem of metamorphosis, like that whose tale of the magpies inspired its invocation.

We'll leave the invocation of the Paradiso for a later moment, for it again calls upon a different source, calling forth yet another mode -- other than pure mimesis or performance - to actualize itself.

Invocations for three canticles

Inferno 2. 7-9

O muse, O alto ingegno, or m'aiutate; 

O mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi, 

qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.

O Muses, O lofty genius, aid me now!

O memory that noted what I saw,

here shall be shown thy worth!

Botticelli: Dante's Inferno

Purgatorio 1. 7-12

Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, 

o sante Muse, poi che vostro sono;

e qui Caliopè alquanto surga, 

seguitando il mio canto con quel suono 

di cui le Piche misere sentiro 

lo colpo tal, che disperar perdono.

But here let poetry rise again from the dead,

O holy Muses, since I am yours;

And let here Calliope rise up for a while

and accompany my song with that strain

which smote the ears of the wretched magpies

so that they despaired of pardon.

Botticelli: Mountain of Purgatory


Paradiso 1. 13-27

O buono Appollo, a l'ultimo lavoro
fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
come dimandi a dar l'amato alloro.
Infino a qui l'un giogo di Parnaso
assai mi fu; ma or con amendue
m'è uopo intrar ne l'aringo rimaso.
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sì come quando Marsia traesti
de la vagina de le membra sue.
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
tanto che l'ombra del beato regno
segnata nel mio capo io manifesti,
vedra'mi al piè del tuo diletto legno
venire, e coronarmi de le foglie
che la materia e tu mi farai degno.

O good Apollo, for this final task

Make of me such a vessel of your power

As you require for your beloved laurel.

Up to this point, one summit of Parnassus

Has served me well, but now I need them both,

Entering on the arena that remains.

Come into my breast and, there within me, breathe,

As once, on that occasion when you drew

Marsyas from the scabbard of his limbs.

O power divine, but grant me of yourself

So much that I may figure forth the shadow

Of the blest realm imprinted in my mind,

And you shall see me come to your chosen tree

And crown myself beneath it with those leaves

Of which my theme and you will make me worthy.

Peter D'Epiro's translation

Inaugural letters: Inferno 3

Inferno 3 brings us to letters that inscribe the speaking threshold of hell. It foregrounds a curious fact: The first act of those taking up their abode here is the act of reading. What does it mean that the first non-eternal thing built by the Creator was a text?

Per me si va ne la citta` dolente,
   per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
   per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore:
   fecemi la divina podestate,
   la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
   se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
   Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. 

Queste parole di colore oscuro
  vid'io scritte al sommo d'una porta;
  per ch'io: "Maestro, il senso lor m'e` duro."

Ed elli a me, come persona accorta:
  "Qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto;
  ogne vilta` convien che qui sia morta." 

                                             Inferno 3: 1-15

Gustave Dore

Among other resonances, the reading evokes, via its poetics as well as its dense, enigmatic statement, a moment in 2 Corinthians:

3 Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? 2 You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. 3 You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 

4 Such confidence we have through Christ before God. 5 Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. 6 He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. 

7 Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, 8 will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? 9 If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! 10 For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. 11 And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts! 

12 Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. 13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were made dull,for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. 15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. 

Tuscan doesn't measure up: Dante on his native dialect in the De Vulgari

Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia is his treatise composed in Latin that defended the use of Italian in poetry and prose. In that time, writing for posterity in the spoken tongue of the living was not a self-evident thing to do, especially as regards works of literary aspiration.

The treatise was never completed - he originally envisioned four books, with the last to treat of comedy. We don't know why he dropped the project, but his sole mention of the comic comes in Book II.4, in contrast with the tragic mode:

By 'tragic' I mean the higher style, by 'comic' the lower, and by 'elegiac' that of the unhappy. If it seems appropriate to use the tragic style, then the illustrious vernacular must be employed, and so you will need to bind together a canzone. If, on the other hand, the comic style is called for, then sometimes the middle level of the vernacular can be used, and sometimes the lowly; and I shall explain the distinction in Book Four.

In an earlier section (Book I.13) we get a bit of the sardonic sensibility of the poet, writing about his own Tuscan dialect in the mouths of his fellow men:

After this, we come to the Tuscans, who, rendered senseless by some aberration of their own, seem to lay claim to the honour of possessing the illustrious vernacular. And it is not only the common people who lose their heads in this fashion, for we find that a number of famous men have believed as much: like Guittone d'Arezzo, who never even aimed at a vernacular worthy of the court, or Bonagiunta da Lucca, or Gallo of Pisa, or Mino Mocato of Siena, or Brunetto the Florentine, all of whose poetry, if there were space to study it closely here, we would find to be fitted not for a court but at best for a city council. Now, since the Tuscans are the most notorious victims of this mental intoxication, it seems both appropriate and useful to examine the vernaculars of the cities of Tuscany one by one, and thus to burst the bubble of their pride. When the Florentines speak, they say things like: 'Manichiamo, introcque che noi non facciamo altro' [Let's eat, since there's nothing else to do]. The Pisans: 'Bene andonno li fatti de Fiorensa per Pisa' [The business at Florence went well for Pisa]. The people of Lucca: 'Fo voto a Dio ke ingrassarra eie lo comuno de Lucca' [I swear to God, the city of Lucca is really in the pink]. The Sienese: 'Onche renegata avess'io Siena. Chée chesto?' [If only I'd left Siena for good! What's up now?]. The people of Arezzo: 'Vuo' tu venire ovelle?' [Do you want to go somewhere?]. I have no intention of dealing with Perugia, Orvieto, Viterbo, or Città di Castello, because of their inhabitants' affinity with the Romans and the people of Spoleto. However, though almost all Tuscans are steeped in their own foul jargon, there are a few, I feel, who have understood the excellence of the vernacular: these include Guido, Lapo, and one other, all from Florence, and Cino, from Pistoia, whom I place unworthily here at the end, moved by a consideration that is far from unworthy. Therefore, if we study the languages spoken in Tuscany, and if we think what kind of distinguished individuals have avoided the use of their own, there can be no doubt that the vernacular we seek is something other than that which the people of Tuscany can attain. If there is anyone who thinks that what I have just said about the Tuscans could not be applied to the Genoese, let him consider only that if, through forgetfulness, the people of Genoa lost the use of the letter z, they would either have to fall silent for ever or invent a new language for themselves. For z forms the greater part of their vernacular, and it is, of course, a letter that cannot be pronounced without considerable harshness.

Ultimately, Dante pointed to a form of Italian found in no specific city or province, but rather cultivated by the best authors in their poetry and prose:

This is the language used by the illustrious authors who have written vernacular poetry in Italy, whether they came from Sicily, Apulia, Tuscany Romagna, Lombardy, or either of the Marches. And since my intention, as I promised at the beginning of this work, is to teach a theory of the effective use of the vernacular, I have begun with this form of it, as being the most excellent;