01/18/2024
Dante’s Characters: Part Four, Brunetto Latini
A monologue on Dante’s unflattering (and unjustified) portrait of his teacher, Brunetto Latini. This episode wraps up the first season of Robert Harrison’s series on “Dante’s Characters.” Songs in this episode: “La nuit du rat” by La Féline and “Preludio” by Dolce Acqua.
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[ Music ]
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Dante's Inferno 7th Circle.
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It's the Circle of Violence.
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The Circle of Violence has three sub-sircles or rings which punish three different types
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of violence.
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Violence against others.
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Violence against self.
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Violence against nature.
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Which ring has its own dismal landscape?
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Those who in life were violent against others or immersed to varying degrees in a river
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of seething blood.
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Those who committed violence against self by suicide have become twigs, shrubs, and trees
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in the second ring somber thicket.
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Those who offended nature and therefore got himself, find themselves in an open pit of combustible
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sand exposed to flakes of fire that rain down on them from above.
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Ain't too cool.
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This third ring, in turn, divides into three different types of violence against God and nature.
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Blast for me, sodomy and usury.
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Hmm, I wonder who's down there in that scorching pit.
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Stay tuned friends, part four of our series on Dante's characters coming up.
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Is that how I'm comfortable down?
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The character at the center of today's show was a historical person and well known citizen
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of Florence.
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He's located in the second zone of the third ring of the seventh circle among the sodomites.
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Before we turn to him, some historical and biographical background will help us make sense
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of Dante's willingness to place in hell some of the most respected Florentines of his time.
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It has a lot to do with Dante's involvement in the turbulent factionalism of late 13th
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century Florence.
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The politics of medieval Italy was dominated by two main parties, the Guelphs and the
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Gibba Leans.
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The Guelphs supported the papacy in its power struggle with the Holy Roman Empire.
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The Gibba Leans supported the empire.
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After soundly defeating the Gibba Leans in 1266, the Guelph party in Florence split
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into two factions, the whites and the blacks.
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The blacks continued to support the Pope while the whites opposed papal interference in
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the self-governing Florentine Republic, and they were especially wary of Pope Boniface
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VIII, who had aggressive interventionist political ambitions.
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Dante's family belonged to the white party and when the black Guelphs seized power in
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Florence in November, 1301, through a coup d'etat backed by Boniface.
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Their first order of business was to liquidate their political enemies among the white
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Guelphs.
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Dante Aligieri, who was away on a diplomatic mission at the time, was one of those enemies.
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On January 27, 1302, Dante was found guilty of corruption, extortion and misuse of public
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funds during his two-month term in the year 1300 as one of the city's seven priors, the highest
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office in Florentine government.
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After failing to comply with, or challenge, the court order against him, Dante was condemned
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in absentia to permanent exile.
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The transcripts of the court proceeding state that Dante was prosecuted, paid equisetes
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on him, or what we would call a juridical inquest.
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It was initiated after so-called public reports about his crimes, had, I'm quoting, reached
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the ears and notice of the court.
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The indictment was politically motivated, without any doubt, and the charges against him
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were probably trumped up, yet the court that sentence Dante had followed legal protocol, and
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in Dante's time, criminal convictions were far more difficult to nullify than political
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banishments.
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As a result, Dante never set foot in Florence again.
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We should always remember when reading the divine comedy that the poem was written by a man
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who had lost just about everything a person in that era could lose.
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His citizenship, his homeland, his property, and his social identity.
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In the letters and works that he wrote after 1302, Dante complained bitterly about the
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hardships of poverty, vagrancy, and the loss of civic status.
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In Patadizo, for example, written a decade and a half after his banishment, he writes
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of coming to know how "salti" tastes the bread of others, "comisadisale la lopane la
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lthrui," "salti because of the bitterness of having to ask for bread from others, and
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because of the tears that drench it."
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Salty also, because in Dante's time, as in ours, Tuscanae was one of the only places
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in Italy that did not salt its bread.
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And in the same passage of Patadizo, Dante also refers to the indignity of having to,
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I quote him, "decent and mount by another's stairs."
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We're dissent implies that one's request for hospitality has been denied.
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The injury of exile, however, went deeper than hardships and the loss of citizenship,
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which Dante chairs more than any other earthly blessing.
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But her tanta the most was the infamy of his conviction, based as it was on hearsay evidence
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that resulted in a defamation of his character.
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Alluding to the way many Florentines simply assumed he was guilty as charged, and unleashed
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a public outcry against him, Dante would later write about wandering all around Italy,
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quote, "displaying against my will the wound of fortune for which the wounded one is often
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unjustly accustomed to be held accountable."
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The shame and indignation Dante felt at being chased from his nest by his fellow citizens
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never diminished with time.
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At the end of his life, the wound remained as raw in his psyche as when disaster first struck
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in 1301.
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The divine comedy was incubated and completed within the dark, lacerated depths of a pain
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that Dante transmuted into a poetic rage against the machine.
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The malfunctioning machine of secular justice that had unjustly condemned him.
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The scholar Justin Steinberg in a book called Dante and the Limits of the Law makes
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an important point when he claims that the divine comedy was meant to rectify Dante's damaged
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reputation by highlighting the unreliability of public opinion regarding a person's character.
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Dante shocked and knew that he would shock his fellow Florentines by placing some of the
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most respected citizens of the city in hell.
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Sir characters like Vadinata de Lubetti, Tagayo Aldo Brandini, Yakoboru Stikuchi and others.
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These were all names that Dante himself considered among the most worthy.
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By the same token, Dante saves various souls who had been publicly condemned or excommunicated by
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the church. The souls of people who most Florentines would have assumed were damned.
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By dramatizing the discrepancy between public reputation and posthumous fate,
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Dante of course is casting doubt on the accepted court practice of using public opinion as
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a basis for legal judgments. In Padizo 20, when Dante's wayfarer expresses amazement
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that the pagan rifius, the minor character and Virgil's Aniad, is in heaven,
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The souls in the six heaven of Jupiter declared to him, "You mortals hold back from judging for even
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we who see God do not yet know all the elect."
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"Hold back from judging. Fair enough. But where does that leave the divine comedy,
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which is a prolonged act of judging and deciding who is damned and who is saved?"
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So either we believe that heaven set its hand on the poem as Dante claims in Padizo 25,
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and that its vision represents God's true moral order,
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or else we believe that Dante Aligaid, either historical individual,
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authored its representations of hell, purgatory and heaven. In which case, we must assume that Dante,
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not God, was the arbiter who saved or dammed the souls that his wayfarer meets on his journey through
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the afterlife. If we believe the latter, then a question arises as to whether Dante was in fact guilty
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of the partial, prejudicial, and precipitous judgments that he censors in his divine comedy.
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After all, not all of his damnation flew in the face of public opinion. Many were based on the
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prevalent perceptions, reputations, or rumors surrounding the historical characters in question.
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How much hard evidence did Dante have for his damnation? Precious little. How much did he have
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for that matter in the case of late repentance, like Prince Manfred or Bonconte de Monte
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Velthro who, by Dante's account, repented of their sins just instance before they died?
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These are not idle questions because Dante's divine comedy has in fact had a considerable impact,
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at least in Italy, but not only on the posthumous reputations of various historical individuals
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whom he placed in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise. Consider a famous scene in Inferno 15, where we find the
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main character of today's episode. Dante and Virgil have arrived at the third section of the third
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ring of the Circle of Violence. They're walking along the elevated ledge of the sand pit,
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protected from the fire that rains down on the sinner's beneath them.
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Dante describes the scene as follows. We had already come so far from the wood that I would not have
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seen where it was even if I had turned back when we encountered a band of souls coming along the
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barrier and each was gazing at us as in the evening people gaze at one another under the new moon,
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and they sharpen their brows toward us as the old tailor does at the eye of the needle.
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Looked over in this way by such a company, I was recognized by one who seized me by the hem and cried,
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"What a marvel."
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Let's pause here for a moment. The sin punished in this region of Hell is never explicitly named,
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neither of the words "sadami," nor the word "sadamites" appears in the divine comedy,
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maybe because even back then homosexuality was the love that dares not speak its name.
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Yet Dante leaves little doubt that we are among the sadamites. In the first torset I just read,
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he mentions that he did not turn back, recalling the destruction of sadam and lots wife,
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who although warned by the angel not to look back, did in fact look back, and was turned into a
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statue of salt. The imagery of the sinners quote gazing at us as in the evening people gaze at one
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another under the new moon, conjures a scene of cruising to use a modern term for what frequently
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took place outside the walls of Florence on darker nights with men checking each other out in the
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dimness of the new moon. The last torset I cited is particularly telling, suggesting that
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Dante knew exactly what it felt like to be leered at by cruisers. Looked over in this way by such a
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company I was recognized by one who seized me by the hem and cried, "What a marvel."
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In his confessions, St. Augustine uses that image of lovers tucking at his hem, holding him back
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from converting to Christianity. "My lovers of old held me back, they plucked at my fleshy garment
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and they whispered, 'Do you cast us off?' And from that moment we shall no longer be with you forever and ever.'
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So, a sinner down in the pit tugs at Dante's hem and explains what a marvel. Now back to the text,
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I continue, and I, by Dante, when he stretched out his arm toward me, penetrated with my eye,
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his baked appearance, so that his scorched face did not prevent my intellect from recognizing him,
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and reaching my hand down toward his face I replied,
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"Siete voi qui se brunette, though. Are you here se brunette, though?"
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That's a line that T. S. Eliot reprises in little gidding by the way.
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"Sé brunette, though, who is se brunette de latini?"
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We can be sure that Dante's contemporary readers were as flabbergasted as Dante's wafer
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seems to be in this scene. If we go by Dante's account in Inferno 15,
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brunette de latini, who was born in 1220 and died in 1294, had been Dante's beloved teacher and
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mentor. He was far more than that, however, brunette was a Florentine statesman, a civic hero,
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and one of the most revered citizens of Florence. He was also one of the great
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humans of the 13th century, having authored a very important book called the Tezoretto or
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my treasure, which had a profound impact on Dante himself and from which Dante borrows liberally
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in constructing his divine comedy. The whole opening conto of Inferno has a significant debt
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to brunette de tésoretto. So what is brunette doing among the sodomites? Scholars have searched
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long and hard for evidence outside of Dante's poem that brunette, though, the father of several
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children who condemned homosexuality in two of his books, was gay. They've come up empty-handed.
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Most of them assume that if Dante put him among the sodomites, brunette those inclinations must
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have been well-known in Florence, and some scholars have speculated that brunette
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though might have made passes at Dante when Dante was a young student. Both hypotheses are
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belied by Dante's shock at finding his teacher in this zone of hell.
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Something here doesn't add up, and that's why some scholars are intent on interpreting
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brunette de sodomy in non-sexual terms as linguistic perversion, for example,
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since brunette had written his leifre du Tezore in French rather than in Latin or Italian.
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Or brunette those so-called unnatural political affiliations, a natural from Dante's point of view,
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since brunette was opposed to empire, while Dante was definitely in favor of empire.
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I have a different take on it, which I'll get to shortly, but first, let me emphasize a degree to
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which when it comes to brunette de Latinis place and Dante's inferno of everything,
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becomes murky and even contradictory. We can't even be sure that brunette was ever
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Dante's teacher, at least not in the affectionate way, Dante represents that encounter in Inferno 15,
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where brunette of flatter's Dante about the glorious future that awaits him, and where
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Dante treats brunette the with great respect and affection, declaring to him that in life,
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quote, "You used to teach me how man makes himself eternal and how grateful I am for that,
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as long as I live must be discerned in my language."
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Dante refers to, I quote again, "The dear kind paternal image of you,"
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and brunette the twice refers to Dante as "sun." Ironic to say the least in the context of
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sodomy or non-procreative sex. There's a universal consensus among scholars that Dante had a
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genuine love and reverence for brunette, though, and that he is genuinely distressed to discover him
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among the damned. Yet I've always found that to be an absurd assumption.
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Dante doesn't discover brunette to inhale, Dante put him in hell. Not only that, he
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incidiously undermines brunette to an Inferno 15, if you consider the choreography of the scene.
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Dante may bow his head downward in a gesture of reverence as he walks along the ledge, with his beloved
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teacher. Yet the teacher walks beneath him, his head at the level of Dante's feet.
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Even more pathetic, from my point of view, is the fact that Dante uses his encounter with
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brunette to secure a blessing for himself from one of the great humanists of the age.
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Oh, son, brunette to tell him, if you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.
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Your fortune holds so much honor and store for you that both sides will hunger for you.
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Meanwhile, brunette to his in hell, and Dante is destined for heaven.
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This fact essentially undercuts the sincerity of Dante's declaration that brunette taught him
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how man makes himself eternal. As I mentioned earlier, brunette was the author of a magnus opus
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called "treasure." And his last words to Dante are, "Let my treasure be commended to you in which
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I still live and I ask no more." The problem here is that Dante had a very different idea about
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how one becomes eternal than the idea that one lives on in one's work.
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Dante believed in Christian salvation, making oneself eternal for Dante meant finding one's way
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into the eternal presence of the divine. If we take this difference into account,
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then maybe his decision to place brunette to among the sodomites was his way of impugning
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what Dante, from his Christian viewpoint, saw as the sterility of brunette those humanism,
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where sterility means a secular ideology that does not lead to genuine transcendence.
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If this is indeed by Dante puts brunette to in such company, that's an invidious way to take issue
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with his beloved teacher's humanism. Stay tuned, more on Inferno 15 coming up.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Along with brunette, Dante places three other highly respected citizens of Florence among the sodomites,
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citizens whom Dante admired and whom he treats with the same respect as he treats his former
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teacher in Inferno 16. I understand Dante's desire to stress the unreliability of public opinion
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as a basis for adjudicating a person's guilt or innocence, yet at what cost. In the end,
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Dante be smurched his teacher's reputation for centuries to come on no justifiable basis whatsoever.
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to this day, but Rentalatini is remembered more as a sodomite than as a great humanist,
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thanks to Dante's portrait of him in Inferno 15. This hijacking of a person's posthumous reputation
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is egregious to say the least when you think about it, especially in the case of someone like
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brunette though who in life assiduously curated his future fame.
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I love Dante as much as anyone, yet he was no paragon of moral virtue. Yes, he had been defamed,
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or so he believed, but that makes it all the more troublesome that he was willing to defame
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brunette while feigning to be so fond and respectful of him. In Inferno 15 remains a baffling
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Kanto from other points of view as well. Sottami, for example, how are we to understand it?
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No one really knows. In Inferno, Sottami is punished in lower hell as a form of violence against
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nature, but in Pudgatorio the second Kantoical, fully half of the penitence on the terrace of lust,
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which is the least grave of the deadly sins, are homosexual. As Dante puts it,
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they "committed the offense for which Caesar, in his triumph once heard himself reproach as queen,
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therefore they depart crying Sodom."
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Why, in his Inferno, does Dante put sodomites in the circle of violence rather than the circle of
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lust? If Sottami is merely a term for homosexuality, why is it a form of violence in the Inferno?
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An incontinence in Pudgatorio.
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The answer may lie with another defamatory gesture on Dante's part. In Inferno 15,
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Brunette remarks in passing that "Prison is also in the pit."
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Prischen, who was Prischen, or Priscianus. He was a Latin grammarian of the 6th century AD,
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who authored the Istitutcianus Gramatica, or Institutes of Grammar, which was the primary textbook of
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medieval pedagogy. We know next to nothing about Prischen's life, let alone his sexual proclivities,
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and Dante knew even less than we do. What Dante did know was that those medieval schools that
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used Prischen's Institute of Grammar as their manual were hotbeds of what we today would call child
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abuse or sexual violence against boys. The only reason I can think of of why Dante would place
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Prischen among the sodomites is to indict by association the whole institution of medieval pedagogy,
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which gave teachers absolute power over the bodies, minds, and souls of their students,
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a power that they systematically abused.
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Pédagogus et goso domitequeous, a teacher therefore a sodomite to quote a maxim of the times.
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We may applaud Dante's indictment of sexual violence against children, yet on no account
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can this indictment justify Dante's defamation of his teacher Brunetto Latini or the Latin
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Grammarian Pédagianus, Chisera lienzis.
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To make matters even more perplexing in the Inferno 16, Dante seems to suggest that he himself,
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in fact, had homosexual leanings or temptations, and that it was only fear of damnation
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that prevented him from acting on them. Here is how he describes his encounter with the
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normal Florentines in the ring of sodomy. Already I was in a place where one heard the thundering
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of water falling into the next circle when three shades came running together out of a herd,
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| 00:27:31.920 |
passing by beneath the harsh punishments burning rain, and on reaching us they made a wheel of
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themselves all three, and here the language becomes graphically homoerotic.
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As is the custom of wrestlers naked and oiled, spying out their holes and their advantage before
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they come to blows and wounds, so they wheeled, and each kept his face toward me,
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| 00:27:59.760 |
so their necks made a constant motion contrary to their feet.
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After the shades reveal who they are, there are in fact three of the most worthy Florentine
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| 00:28:12.640 |
citizens of their time. Dante writes, "If I had been protected from the fire, I would have thrown
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| 00:28:19.200 |
myself down there among them, but because I would have burned and cooked myself, fear,
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| 00:28:26.000 |
vanquished the goodwill that made me greedy to embrace them."
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The word for greedy here is guot-duh, which an Italian has overtones of sexual order,
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| 00:28:38.880 |
and I don't think it's pushing things too far to say that this passage contains a discrete
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confession that had it not been for his fear of burning in hell, not they might well have been
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down there in the pit with them. Stay tuned, wrapping up this fourth episode of our series on
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Dante's characters right after this.
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[Music]
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Dante's character is a real human being.
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Dante's character is a real human being.
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Dante's character is a real human being.
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Dante's character is a real human being.
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when age, where everything is relative, where on the one hand means, on the other hand,
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| 00:29:48.640 |
and where uncertainty is our only certainty, there is something compelling as well as liberating
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| 00:29:54.980 |
about the moral clarity of Dante's vision of Gooden Evil.
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| 00:30:01.960 |
Dante may have overstepped himself when he presumed to save or damn certain individuals.
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| 00:30:07.480 |
Yet in the final analysis, we are moved by what I would call the comedy's cry.
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| 00:30:14.480 |
It's the cry of a wrong disenfranchised individual who was outraged at the
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| 00:30:19.940 |
turpitude and political corruption of his world, a world in which popes were
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| 00:30:25.240 |
scoundrels, power was unscrupulous, and the laws of justice were systematically
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| 00:30:31.040 |
produced, abused, or ignored. I borrow the term cry from Dante's ancestor,
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| 00:30:38.720 |
Kachagweida, whom the wayfarer meets in the central cantos of Patadizo.
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| 00:30:44.800 |
Kachagweida foretells the exile that awaits his descendant shortly after his return to earth.
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| 00:30:51.800 |
Dante wrote the comedy in exile, yet the journey is set in the year 1300, two years before
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| 00:30:59.640 |
his banishment. In his speech, Kachagweida uses the word giddido or cry twice.
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| 00:31:06.640 |
Once in reference to the public outcry against Dante after his conviction, the cry
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| 00:31:15.680 |
of blame will follow the party harmed, he warns. And then again in reference to the divine
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| 00:31:22.400 |
comedy in itself, which Kachagweida instructs Dante to write, even though the high and mighty
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| 00:31:28.920 |
will take onbridge at his denunciations.
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Voting again, this cry of yours will be like a wind that strikes hardest the highest peaks,
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| 00:31:39.560 |
and this is no small claim to honor. Every reader of Dante's comedia, however naive, or
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| 00:31:49.600 |
learned, hears the cry of this poem loudly and clearly. Its idiom may be medieval, yet
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| 00:31:56.920 |
its clamor as the universal accent of an offended individual shouting back at the world, a world
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| 00:32:03.920 |
that has the power to crush him, but not to silence him.
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| 00:32:10.680 |
There is in each of us a stifled, potential, or inarticulate cry of this sort. The reason
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| 00:32:17.160 |
we read the comedy so many centuries later is because no one, in the history of literature,
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| 00:32:23.000 |
has given that cry such a cosmic reach inarticulation. The cry moves to the degree that
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| 00:32:30.000 |
it comes from a flawed, and yes, a very human individual. Dante may have judged others
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| 00:32:38.320 |
harshly, and in a few cases unjustly, yet the Inferno also tells a story of Dante's recognition
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| 00:32:45.400 |
within himself of an inner disposition toward many of the sins punished there. His discrete
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| 00:32:52.680 |
confession among the sodomizes just one of many instances in the poem. The comedy would be
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| 00:32:59.680 |
unreadable if Dante presumed even the slightest moral superiority over his readers.
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| 00:33:07.040 |
The only virtue he claims for himself in abundance is hope, and that's good enough for me.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, and this episode wraps up the first installment
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| 00:33:19.920 |
of our series on Dante's characters. To all of you who made it this far, thanks for listening.
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[Music]
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