Books: A Man for the Ages

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The mother of Dante Alighieri, not long before his birth, had a dream in which her son, having eaten the berries of a laurel tree, grew up and was miraculously transformed into a shimmering peacock.

The portent was fulfilled in a blaze of genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet's descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him "the most universal of poets in the modern languages," and added: "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth. They divide the modern world between them; there is no third."

Most readers remain unconvinced. Floundering through turgid translations, they begin to wonder uneasily: is Dante really great—or even interesting?

A Colossal Crystal. Last week, in connection with the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth, the world was taking a fresh look at the man and the artist, and making a sharp reappraisal of his nature and his relevance. From Berlin to Buenos Aires, eminent dantisti were promulgating treatises and tributes. In Rome, Pope Paul was preparing an encyclical in Dante's honor. And in the U.S., Yale's Thomas G. Bergin produced the best general introduction to Dante ever written in English (Dante; Orion Press; $6.50).

After reading it, and reading selectively in any of the six superior translations of La Commedia available in the U.S.,* no reasonable man can deny that Dante was indeed a titanic personality and that La Commedia is a masterpiece: a colossal but exquisite crystal in which the total experience of human being is reconstituted in radiance. At one level, La Commedia is a spiritual autobiography; at another, a parable of the progress of the soul; at a third, one of the noblest love stories ever told. Incidentally it is a manual of mysticism and an encyclopedia of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Scholastic learning. Fundamentally it is both a fearful reprise of Apocalypse and the gospel of a rising religion of individuality that still moves and shakes the Western world. And spiritually, because it so profoundly agitates the great continuing questions of man's essence and existence, it is a work that can still tell a wondering human being who he is and what his life is all about.

A Turbulent Life. Professor Bergin begins his book with vivid chapters on Dante's century and Dante's life. It was the century of Cimabue and Giotto, of St. Francis, St. Dominic and St. Thomas: an epoch of religious renascence that brought forth two major religious orders and the last great golden flower of Scholastic philosophy. But it was also the age of Marco Polo, Charles of Valois and Roger Bacon: an epoch of magnificent secular energy that propelled the rise of the middle classes and the independent city states, divided Italy between the party of the Pope (Guelph) and the party of the Emperor (Ghibelline) and embroiled Italians in a century-long civil war that concluded with the collapse of the empire and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.