Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery

Dante’s Journey

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

This aphorism from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (1274) crystallizes a perception of reality shared by many of the great thinkers of the Medieval period. It comes from a world in which a scientific explanation for our existence wasn’t possible. Before geology and astronomy had shown us where we are (in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a cluster of galaxies, etc.) and before evolution and DNA had shown us how we got to be what we are (highly-evolved animals), it’s not surprising that people discarded objective explanations, as if they were categorically inferior to revelation. In such a world Aquinas felt it possible to write a Summa Theologica, that is, a work that sums up the design and meaning of God's universe. 

This is also the world in which Dante presented a poetic panoply of the universe, complete with the meanings of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. In Domenico di Michelino’s 1465 fresco (below), Dante is opening the text of his long poem, The Divine Comedy (1320). The text he’s reading explores the subterranean, terrestrial, and etherial realms we see in the fresco. 

This is the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise through which Dante is guided, first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by the Florentine woman who Dante loved platonically all his life, Beatrice Portinari. En route, Dante explains the meaning of everything, from the depths of the earth where Satan is jammed in his icy lake, to the farthest reaches of the sky, where a Blessed Rose of angelic spirits circles the ineffable presence of God.  

✯ Wood engravings by Gustave Doré, 1866-7 ✯

Dante supplies us with perhaps the finest and most powerful vision of the Medieval afterlife. The poem starts with the famous lines, In the middle of our life’s road / I found myself in a dark wood, / the straight path being lost to me. (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita). He then takes a dangerous journey into Hell and up the Mountain of Purgatory. From the top of the divine mountain he ascends to Heaven, with a warning to any who would follow him:

O you in a small boat who desire to hear and follow closely my singing ship, turn back to look again upon the shore; don’t put out to sea, because if you lose me you’ll be lost. The water that I sail on has never been sailed before … 

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, tornate a riveder li vostri liti: non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse, perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti. L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse …  (Paradiso, 2.1-7)

Dante’s use of nautical imagery is striking in that it describes his flight to Heaven as if he were sailing in a boat. To me, this detail not only indicates the debt Dante openly paid to the Classical writers Homer and Virgil, but also the debt that the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition didn’t pay to the Ancient world — to Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria. This debt may not seem like a problem on the surface, given that later cultures always borrow from earlier ones. Yet this debt is one that has wide-ranging implications for the ability of the Medieval view of the universe to effectively explain both where we are and who we are. This unacknowledged debt to Sumer and Akkad will crop up again and again in the following pages and sections. It involves us in the archaeology of intellectual and religious history, and it lies beneath what we thought we invented, what we thought we knew. It might be seen as the cultural companion piece to the harder, more biological theory of evolution: just as Darwin’s theory upended all sorts of fantastic scenarios describing how we got to be who we are, so the philological knowledge of Gilgamesh and of Mesopotamian writing and laws upended the notion that the Bible is an original and culturally independent record of God’s relation with the world.

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Dante’s use of nautical imagery to describe a flight toward Paradise seems odd on the surface. Yet it makes poetic sense in that it echoes the ocean journeys described in Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. In Homer’s epic, Odysseus is directed by the sorceress Circe to sail to a western river, where he communes with the sunken dead (Achilles, Tiresias, his mother, etc.) and then sails back to his wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca. In Virgil’s epic, Aeneas sails from the ruins of Troy to Carthage, where he falls in love with Dido. Then, fated to found Rome, he sails to Sicily, leaving Dido on her suicidal pyre, marriage bed and all. Aeneas is then guided by the famous prophetess of Cumae to an Underworld, which is a more developed version of the one in the Odyssey.

The idea of a journey to the afterlife, especially when combined with the Graeco-Roman figure of the boatman Charon (above), reverberates in a distant, uncanny way with the earliest work of world literature, Gilgamesh. Originating in the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations of the third and second millennia BC, Gilgamesh recounts the exploits of a king who probably existed in the early 3rd millennium BC. In this story, Gilgamesh sails to Dilmun, guided by the boatman Urshanabi. When they get to Dilmun, Gilgamesh interviews Utnapishtim, the only human who has been granted immortality.

The reason Utnapishtim gets to live eternally (unlike Gilgamesh or anyone else) is perhaps the most surprising bit of literary archaeology to confront the Judeo-Christian world: Utnapishtim built an ark and saved all life on earth. This occurred after the earth was flooded because a god was angry.

If Utnapishtim is the pagan original for Noah (and the details of the two stories strongly suggest this, as I discuss in The Currents of Sumer) and if Dante’s journey to the afterlife is prefigured numerous times and in numerous ways in pagan literature, it becomes more difficult to believe the Italian poet when he says that his journey is original:

The watery path I take has never been taken; / Minerva breathes [into the sails], Apollo guides me, and the nine Muses show me [the constellation of] the Bear.  

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse; / Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, / e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. (Paradiso, 2.7-9)

One could argue that Dante’s journey is original in the sense that the pagans of the Ancient and Classical world never imagined sailing to a Heaven full of Grace (by contrast, the pagan afterlife was a downward, dark, and pessimistic one, like that of the early Hebrews). One could also argue that Dante simply does to literature what Augustine did to Christianity: he blends Classical and Christian, always asserting that the latter is superior to the former. Like Milton after him, he uses and refers to Classical pagan models, but he turns them into Christian ones.

Yet there’s at least one enormous problem with this: key aspects of Dante’s story go back 4000 years to civilizations whose overall view of the universe had nothing to do with monotheism or Jesus, and even less to do with the certainties of Medieval Italy. Those who believe in the sanctity of the Bible believe it to be an inspired and true version of events both cosmic and human. Yet if the very framework of a key story is borrowed, then it’s likely to be fiction, and it clearly isn’t an original account of the past. The result of all of this is that the Medieval view of such things as the afterlife and the Flood are parts of a monotheistic certainty that’s undermined by the very components of its construction.

I’ll return to this narrative archaeology in ♒️ The Currents of Sumer. Here I want to continue fleshing out the Medieval view of the universe, by contrasting Aquinas and Dante to Boccaccio and Chaucer (Don’t Forget the Miller) and by suggesting a way that Dante’s vision might be seen in terms of agnosticism (Primum Mobile).

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Next: 🔬Don't Forget the Miller

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